According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[Ruth Harris]

Gift link to NYT article.

This was an interesting read, but I disagree completely with his reasoning. If this was actually the case, humans would be no different from animals which live on instinct. I firmly believe that we have something within us that makes us separate from typical animals; call it a “soul” or whatever you want.

There are statements of his views in one paragraph that I absolutely reject:

There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. Dr. Sapolsky sees this as “liberating” for most people, for whom “life has been about being blamed and punished and deprived and ignored for things they have no control over.”

If this is the case, we have no basis for punishment of criminal behavior. I suspect that when it comes to his personal life, he would expect anyone who harmed him to be punished for that behavior.

Ruth

 

[bilby]

If this is the case, we have no basis for punishment of criminal behavior.

On the contrary; The punishment that occurs is, for the exact same reasons, unavoidable and was fated since the beginning of time.

If it's unfair to imprison a person for a crime they were fated to commit, then it's equally unfair to lambast the legal system for imposing a punishment that they were fated to impose.

Goose sauce is Gander sauce.

 

[DBT]

Gift link to NYT article.

This was an interesting read, but I disagree completely with his reasoning. If this was actually the case, humans would be no different from animals which live on instinct. I firmly believe that we have something within us that makes us separate from typical animals; call it a “soul” or whatever you want.

There are statements of his views in one paragraph that I absolutely reject:

There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. Dr. Sapolsky sees this as “liberating” for most people, for whom “life has been about being blamed and punished and deprived and ignored for things they have no control over.”

If this is the case, we have no basis for punishment of criminal behavior. I suspect that when it comes to his personal life, he would expect anyone who harmed him to be punished for that behavior.

Ruth

Punishment is used to discourage misbehavior, misbehavior determines the need for punishment. We live in a complex deterministic world.

 

[rousseau]

Being a New York Times article, it's likely more click-bait than anything.

I have my own opinions on free will that are a little unorthodox, but I've found that everyone has their own opinion on this subject and doesn't budge, so I don't bother outlining my thoughts much anymore. Needless to say, if you told 99% of people that they 'didn't have free will' they'd just wonder what the hell you were talking about, and carry on with their day.

The whole conversation on free will is outdated and broken.

 

[Ruth Harris]

I read a sample of his newest book "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will" (link here) and found that he is coming from a place that I can never understand or accept; everything we think or do has to be sourced from biological occurrences. There is nothing outside of that. So he is promoting the idea that mankind does not have a “soul” (or whatever you want to call it).

He states this principle in a transcript I found from a podcast, “Great Simplification with Nate Hagens” (link here). This is the relevant quotation, from page 17:

We are nothing more or less than the biology which brought us to this moment over which we had no control and its interactions with environment that brought us to this moment over which we had no control.

Very intelligent and interesting man, but I don’t agree with his basic premises.

Ruth

 

[pood]

Very poor article, not worthy of Times standards. First, the article claims that this guy “refutes” the biological and philosophical argument for free will. He does no such thing, as a matter of simple definition. He rebuts those arguments, yes, but unconvincingly.


Sapolsky and the article fail to specify which definition of free will, if any, he is addressing. Libertarian? Compatibilist? Neo-Humean? Something else?


Without quoting Sapolsky, the article claims he says no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. Of course they should! Even without free will, if you held up that bank, you are the one who did it therefore you are responsible! Perhaps you are not morally responsible for your act, if you lack free will. but you are responsible nonetheless because you did it.

It does look as if he is taking aim at libertarian free will when he writes:

Something has just happened; somebody pulled the trigger. They understood the consequences and knew that alternative behaviors were available.


But that doesn’t remotely begin to touch it, because you’ve got to ask: Where did that intent come from? That’s what happened a minute before, in the years before, and everything in between.


For that sort of free will to exist, it would have to function on a biological level completely independently of the history of that organism. You would be able to identify the neurons that caused a particular behavior, and it wouldn’t matter what any other neuron in the brain was doing, what the environment was, what the person’s hormone levels were, what culture they were brought up in. Show me that those neurons would do the exact same thing with all these other things changed, and you’ve proven free will to me.

None of this is a problem for compatibilism, which does not demand the above sort of contra-causal agency.

 

[pood]

I read a sample of his newest book "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will" (link here) and found that he is coming from a place that I can never understand or accept; everything we think or do has to be sourced from biological occurrences. There is nothing outside of that. So he is promoting the idea that mankind does not have a “soul” (or whatever you want to call it).

He states this principle in a transcript I found from a podcast, “Great Simplification with Nate Hagens” (link here). This is the relevant quotation, from page 17:

We are nothing more or less than the biology which brought us to this moment over which we had no control and its interactions with environment that brought us to this moment over which we had no control.

Very intelligent and interesting man, but I don’t agree with his basic premises.

Ruth

OK, I read the opening, about the turtles and all that.

Compatibilist free will is perfectly OK with “turtles all the way down.” If he fails somewhere in the book to contend with compatibilism, the book is a waste of time.

 

[Jarhyn]

Gift link to NYT article.

This was an interesting read, but I disagree completely with his reasoning. If this was actually the case, humans would be no different from animals which live on instinct. I firmly believe that we have something within us that makes us separate from typical animals; call it a “soul” or whatever you want.

There are statements of his views in one paragraph that I absolutely reject:

There are major implications, he notes: Absent free will, no one should be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. Dr. Sapolsky sees this as “liberating” for most people, for whom “life has been about being blamed and punished and deprived and ignored for things they have no control over.”

If this is the case, we have no basis for punishment of criminal behavior. I suspect that when it comes to his personal life, he would expect anyone who harmed him to be punished for that behavior.

Ruth

Yet again, an author does it dirty by completely ignoring the compatibilist framework of free will, and even well meaning atheists swallow the codswallop.

First, animals have wills, and responsibility for the wills they create and hold even as animals. Look at "The Ghost and The Darkness". Clearly there was a will to murder, and a responsibility borne for it, and once the responsibility was enforced, the killings stopped happening.

What makes US people and what makes "the animals" not is the preposition that we are more than our DNA and mere accidents of our development: we are also the personal reification of a great deal of socially borne information that infects and finds a home in the substrate of the human brain.

While animals could indeed encode and be carriers for this wide sea of super-personal information, they don't care. They are held into solipsism by the mere fact that they cannot access the language that allows us to offload, preserve, grow, and share what we are with each other. As such they also have no reason to be ethical at all beyond perhaps some latent and weak benefit only available to the most social of nonhuman species. Darwinistic evolution as a result has different concerns of survival than our more Lamarckian strategies enabled by society.

But regardless it is true that responding to animals can cause change therefore the animals are "responsible" when their "wills" to do awful shit happen to be left "free".

 

[bilby]

is coming from a place that I can never understand or accept; everything we think or do has to be sourced from biological occurrences. There is nothing outside of that. So he is promoting the idea that mankind does not have a “soul” (or whatever you want to call it).

I both understand and accept this premise, which is an unavoidable consequence of what is known about biology, chemistry and physics.

I find it completely bizarre that it's not obvious to everyone that "soul" isn't a real thing. It's a label we attach to processes that are too complex to model in detail, but it's not something that actually exists. What exists at human scales is fully understood, and the only missing information is (a very large amount of) detail.

To accept that dualism is real, is to reject a very large body of strong evidence collected over the past two or three centuries, in favour of a vague feeling that has zero evidential basis whatsoever.

Given that the demonstrably false notion of a "soul" is completely irrelevant to the question of whether we have freedom of will (for at least several definitions of that rather wooly phrase), I see little value in worrying over it in this context. I have freedom, and a will, and no "soul", and that's perfectly okay.

 

[DBT]

I read a sample of his newest book "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will" (link here) and found that he is coming from a place that I can never understand or accept; everything we think or do has to be sourced from biological occurrences. There is nothing outside of that. So he is promoting the idea that mankind does not have a “soul” (or whatever you want to call it).

He states this principle in a transcript I found from a podcast, “Great Simplification with Nate Hagens” (link here). This is the relevant quotation, from page 17:

We are nothing more or less than the biology which brought us to this moment over which we had no control and its interactions with environment that brought us to this moment over which we had no control.

Very intelligent and interesting man, but I don’t agree with his basic premises.

Ruth

Disagreeing doesn't change how cognition works, how the brain functions or the means and mechanisms of how thoughts, decisions and actions are made and carried out.

 

[pood]

I read a sample of his newest book "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will" (link here) and found that he is coming from a place that I can never understand or accept; everything we think or do has to be sourced from biological occurrences. There is nothing outside of that. So he is promoting the idea that mankind does not have a “soul” (or whatever you want to call it).

He states this principle in a transcript I found from a podcast, “Great Simplification with Nate Hagens” (link here). This is the relevant quotation, from page 17:

We are nothing more or less than the biology which brought us to this moment over which we had no control and its interactions with environment that brought us to this moment over which we had no control.

Very intelligent and interesting man, but I don’t agree with his basic premises.

Ruth

I skimmed through parts of the transcript. There’s an old cliche that if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I guess if you’re a biologist, as the author is, everything looks like biology.

So he seems to be making a case that we are entirely biologically determined, and hence have no free will. As I say, I’ve just skimmed so far, but I’m interested in whether he ever acknowledges that biology is just chemistry, and chemistry is just physics. If so, we get back to the original hard deterministic argument — we are just a determined product of physics, governed by the “laws” of nature and coercive determinism.

But since there are no “laws” of nature and determinism is not a coercive agent or an agent at all, this argument against free will does not go through. We went all over this in a long thread from a year or so ago. I wouldn’t mind going over it again if anyone is interested.

But it certainly is true that we have no “soul,” except in the metaphorical sense. There is no evidence of a soul, a homunculus, a widget, a little app or man in the brain that countermands determinism and makes us “free.” The point is, there does not need to be any of these things for us to have perfectly robust free will and free agency in the perfectly adequate compatiblist sense.

 

[DBT]

Determinism is not coercive, yet the evolution of events within the system eliminate alternate actions in any given instance of decision making. Consequently, decisions are neither a matter of choice (no alternate action possible) or free will, but necessitation.

 

[pood]

Determinism is not coercive, yet the evolution of events within the system eliminate alternate actions in any given instance of decision making. Consequently, decisions are neither a matter of choice (no alternate action possible) or free will, but necessitation.

We went over this in the other thread. You’re claiming that all true statements about the world are necessarily true.

This morning, John has a choice between putting on a blue shirt and a red shirt. He puts on a blue shirt. So the statement, “John puts on a blue shirt” is true.

This morning, John thinks he has a choice between drawing a triangle with three sides and drawing a triangle with four sides. In fact, he has no choice. If he draws a triangle, it must have three sides.

“John puts on a blue shirt” is a contingent truth about the world — true at some possible worlds, false at others. It could have been otherwise. “Triangles have three sides” is a necessary truth about the world — true at all possible worlds. It could not and cannot be otherwise.

Hence, this morning, John had a choice about what shirt to put on, but not about how to construct a triangle.

Let D stand for “puts on a blue shirt.” It may indeed be true that given deterministic antecedents A, B, and C, D will always follow — John will always put on a blue shirt given the determined antecedents. The key word here is “will” — he will put on a blue shirt, not must.

Moreover, if John does D, he requires it to be the case that D is preceded by A, B, and C. If it were not, John would have no basis for his decision; and moreover, no way to know if what he decides will in fact take place. A world at the macro level without determinism would be one in which free will is impossible. Free will requires determinism at the macro level to be true, or approximately true.

Sapolsky goes on and on about how we are “biologically determined” and hence have no free will. He says we are products not just of our conscious mind but of our subconscious, our neurons firing, our upbringing, our genes, etc. All that’s true. So what? If his aim is directed against libertarian free will, his aim is true. But what he needs to happen is for the gestalt switch to go off and realize that all these things — our conscious and subconscious, our bodies, our neurons, our upbringing, our genes — ARE us! All those things, collectively, are making choices in a deterministic macro world, in which all of us are part of the deterministic stream. He seems to want, for there to be free will, a switch in the head that would countermand what we (conscious, subconscious, bodies, neurons, upbringing, genes) — decide. If we had such a switch, THAT would be a lack of free will — the switch would override our choices!

Determinism, biological or otherwise, does not threaten free will, it makes free will possible in the first place. What would a world look like, in which determinism thwarted free will? Like this: John moves to put on a blue shirt this morning, but Determinism stays his hand, guiding it to the red shirt instead, even as John protests that he would prefer blue. Anyone ever see that, or anything like it, ever happen?

No.

 

[DBT]

Determinism is not coercive, yet the evolution of events within the system eliminate alternate actions in any given instance of decision making. Consequently, decisions are neither a matter of choice (no alternate action possible) or free will, but necessitation.

We went over this in the other thread.

We did. Yet, apparently those arguing for compatibilism failed to understand what was pointed out.

You’re claiming that all true statements about the world are necessarily true.

That's not it. Not at all. The terms and conditions of determinism is used as given by Compatibilism. A standard definition. Not disputed.

It's the definition of free will as given by Compatibilsts that is problematic for the given reasons, up to and including the means and mechanisms by which decisions and and actions are generated.

There lies the problem, where the means of thought, decision making and action is more of a restriction than coercion, which is the point that many neuroscientists have pointed out.

This morning, John has a choice between putting on a blue shirt and a red shirt. He puts on a blue shirt. So the statement, “John puts on a blue shirt” is true.

This morning, John thinks he has a choice between drawing a triangle with three sides and drawing a triangle with four sides. In fact, he has no choice. If he draws a triangle, it must have three sides.

“John puts on a blue shirt” is a contingent truth about the world — true at some possible worlds, false at others. It could have been otherwise. “Triangles have three sides” is a necessary truth about the world — true at all possible worlds. It could not and cannot be otherwise.

Hence, this morning, John had a choice about what shirt to put on, but not about how to construct a triangle.

Let D stand for “puts on a blue shirt.” It may indeed be true that given deterministic antecedents A, B, and C, D will always follow — John will always put on a blue shirt given the determined antecedents. The key word here is “will” — he will put on a blue shirt, not must.

Moreover, if John does D, he requires it to be the case that D is preceded by A, B, and C. If it were not, John would have no basis for his decision; and moreover, no way to know if what he decides will in fact take place. A world at the macro level without determinism would be one in which free will is impossible. Free will requires determinism at the macro level to be true, or approximately true.

Sapolsky goes on and on about how we are “biologically determined” and hence have no free will. He says we are products not just of our conscious mind but of our subconscious, our neurons firing, our upbringing, our genes, etc. All that’s true. So what? If his aim is directed against libertarian free will, his aim is true. But what he needs to happen is for the gestalt switch to go off and realize that all these things — our conscious and subconscious, our bodies, our neurons, our upbringing, our genes — ARE us! All those things, collectively, are making choices in a deterministic macro world, in which all of us are part of the deterministic stream. He seems to want, for there to be free will, a switch in the head that would countermand what we (conscious, subconscious, bodies, neurons, upbringing, genes) — decide. If we had such a switch, THAT would be a lack of free will — the switch would override our choices!

Determinism, biological or otherwise, does not threaten free will, it makes free will possible in the first place. What would a world look like, in which determinism thwarted free will? Like this: John moves to put on a blue shirt this morning, but Determinism stays his hand, guiding it to the red shirt instead, even as John protests that he would prefer blue. Anyone ever see that, or anything like it, ever happen?

No.

Sapolski, for reasons that have been gone into at length in several threads on free will, is absolutely correct.

Again;


''To a determinist, all choice is illusory. The literal meaning of choice is that there are multiple options, and the person selects one of them. Thus, choice requires multiple possible outcomes, which is a no-no to determinism. To the determinist, the march of causality will make one outcome inevitable, and so it is wrong to believe that anything else was possible. The chooser does not yet know which option he or she is going to choose, hence the subjective experience of choice. Thus, the subjective choosing is simply a matter of one's own ignorance - ignorance that those other outcomes are not really possibilities at all.

To illustrate: When you sit in the restaurant looking at the menu, it may seem that there are many things that you might order: the fish, the chicken, the steak, the onion soup. Eventually you will make a selection and eat it. To a determinist, causal processes dictated that what you ordered was inevitable. When you entered the restaurant you may not have known, yet, that you would end up ordering the chicken, but that simply reflects your ignorance of what was happening in your unconscious mind. To a determinist, there was never any chance at all that you could have ordered the fish. Maybe you saw it on the menu and were tempted to get it, and maybe you even started to order it and then changed your mind. No matter. It was never remotely possible. The causal processes that ended up making you order the chicken were in motion. Your belief that you could have ordered the chicken was mistaken.''


Compatibilists are of course determinists who define free will in their own special way.

 

[pood]

Determinism is not coercive, yet the evolution of events within the system eliminate alternate actions in any given instance of decision making. Consequently, decisions are neither a matter of choice (no alternate action possible) or free will, but necessitation.

We went over this in the other thread.

We did. Yet, apparently those arguing for compatibilism failed to understand what was pointed out.

You’re claiming that all true statements about the world are necessarily true.

That's not it. Not at all. The terms and conditions of determinism is used as given by Compatibilism. A standard definition. Not disputed.

It's the definition of free will as given by Compatibilsts that is problematic for the given reasons, up to and including the means and mechanisms by which decisions and and actions are generated.

There lies the problem, where the means of thought, decision making and action is more of a restriction than coercion, which is the point that many neuroscientists have pointed out.

This morning, John has a choice between putting on a blue shirt and a red shirt. He puts on a blue shirt. So the statement, “John puts on a blue shirt” is true.

This morning, John thinks he has a choice between drawing a triangle with three sides and drawing a triangle with four sides. In fact, he has no choice. If he draws a triangle, it must have three sides.

“John puts on a blue shirt” is a contingent truth about the world — true at some possible worlds, false at others. It could have been otherwise. “Triangles have three sides” is a necessary truth about the world — true at all possible worlds. It could not and cannot be otherwise.

Hence, this morning, John had a choice about what shirt to put on, but not about how to construct a triangle.

Let D stand for “puts on a blue shirt.” It may indeed be true that given deterministic antecedents A, B, and C, D will always follow — John will always put on a blue shirt given the determined antecedents. The key word here is “will” — he will put on a blue shirt, not must.

Moreover, if John does D, he requires it to be the case that D is preceded by A, B, and C. If it were not, John would have no basis for his decision; and moreover, no way to know if what he decides will in fact take place. A world at the macro level without determinism would be one in which free will is impossible. Free will requires determinism at the macro level to be true, or approximately true.

Sapolsky goes on and on about how we are “biologically determined” and hence have no free will. He says we are products not just of our conscious mind but of our subconscious, our neurons firing, our upbringing, our genes, etc. All that’s true. So what? If his aim is directed against libertarian free will, his aim is true. But what he needs to happen is for the gestalt switch to go off and realize that all these things — our conscious and subconscious, our bodies, our neurons, our upbringing, our genes — ARE us! All those things, collectively, are making choices in a deterministic macro world, in which all of us are part of the deterministic stream. He seems to want, for there to be free will, a switch in the head that would countermand what we (conscious, subconscious, bodies, neurons, upbringing, genes) — decide. If we had such a switch, THAT would be a lack of free will — the switch would override our choices!

Determinism, biological or otherwise, does not threaten free will, it makes free will possible in the first place. What would a world look like, in which determinism thwarted free will? Like this: John moves to put on a blue shirt this morning, but Determinism stays his hand, guiding it to the red shirt instead, even as John protests that he would prefer blue. Anyone ever see that, or anything like it, ever happen?

No.

Sapolski, for reasons that have been gone into at length in several threads on free will, is absolutely correct.

Again;


''To a determinist, all choice is illusory. The literal meaning of choice is that there are multiple options, and the person selects one of them. Thus, choice requires multiple possible outcomes, which is a no-no to determinism. To the determinist, the march of causality will make one outcome inevitable, and so it is wrong to believe that anything else was possible. The chooser does not yet know which option he or she is going to choose, hence the subjective experience of choice. Thus, the subjective choosing is simply a matter of one's own ignorance - ignorance that those other outcomes are not really possibilities at all.

To illustrate: When you sit in the restaurant looking at the menu, it may seem that there are many things that you might order: the fish, the chicken, the steak, the onion soup. Eventually you will make a selection and eat it. To a determinist, causal processes dictated that what you ordered was inevitable. When you entered the restaurant you may not have known, yet, that you would end up ordering the chicken, but that simply reflects your ignorance of what was happening in your unconscious mind. To a determinist, there was never any chance at all that you could have ordered the fish. Maybe you saw it on the menu and were tempted to get it, and maybe you even started to order it and then changed your mind. No matter. It was never remotely possible. The causal processes that ended up making you order the chicken were in motion. Your belief that you could have ordered the chicken was mistaken.''


Compatibilists are of course determinists who define free will in their own special way.

You know, it’s funny. You do this again and again. You cherry pick a quote to support your position (almost always I support my position with my own words.). Then you give a link whence the quote comes. I click on the link and discover, lo and behold, that the article from which you quoted goes on to rebut the bit you quoted. How could you not notice that?

iow, the article goes on to show why the quote above is wrong.

 

[Bronzeage]

It is no great intellectual feat to create a model of the universe in which every event is predicated on every event which occurred before, with an argument of "Why not?"

It is the ultimate untestable hypothesis and ultimately, it doesn't matter. Like a lot of philosophical discussions which question the nature of existence, we aren't going to change anything about the way we live, no matter how convincing the argument the argument that we can't change anything, even if we wanted to.

 

[pood]

Determinism is not coercive, yet the evolution of events within the system eliminate alternate actions in any given instance of decision making. Consequently, decisions are neither a matter of choice (no alternate action possible) or free will, but necessitation.

We went over this in the other thread.

We did. Yet, apparently those arguing for compatibilism failed to understand what was pointed out.

You‘d be more intresting to talk to if you would accept the possibiity that people DO understand what you say, and simply disagree with it, and also give reasons for their disagreement.

That's not it. Not at all.

That’s exactly it. You use the word ”necessitated.” If something is necessary, it cannot be otherwise, on pain of logical contradiction — like a four-sided triangle. Even though at a restaurant I may order fish, ordering chicken was a live possibility because doing so would bring about no logical contradiction. You are illicitly importing the modal concept of necessity into a realm where it does not and cannot apply.

The terms and conditions of determinism is used as given by Compatibilism. A standard definition. Not disputed.

It's the definition of free will as given by Compatibilsts that is problematic for the given reasons, up to and including the means and mechanisms by which decisions and and actions are generated.

There lies the problem, where the means of thought, decision making and action is more of a restriction than coercion, which is the point that many neuroscientists have pointed out.

Determinism is not a restriction on our actions. It is the REASON for them. If I order chicken at the restaurant instead of fish, presumably I have a REASON for doing so. One reason might be that I am alllergic to fish. Yes, I had no choice over whether I have that allergy, but having the allergy gives me a reason to order chicken or something else instead of fish. If I had no reason for anything that I do, THEN I would lack free will.

Sapolski, for reasons that have been gone into at length in several threads on free will, is absolutely correct.

As I pointed out, and you ingored, he is correct if his target is libertarianism. I gave my reasons why his analysis is no problem for compatibilists, but you failed to respond to a single thing I said in that regard, other than to effectively say “nyuh-huh!”

Compatibilists are of course determinists who define free will in their own special way.

Correct. Compatibilists are also called soft detereminists.

 

[rousseau]

@pood @Jarhyn

Is there any reading you'd recommend on Compatibilism, or related approaches?

 

[Jarhyn]

I read a sample of his newest book "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will" (link here) and found that he is coming from a place that I can never understand or accept; everything we think or do has to be sourced from biological occurrences. There is nothing outside of that. So he is promoting the idea that mankind does not have a “soul” (or whatever you want to call it).

He states this principle in a transcript I found from a podcast, “Great Simplification with Nate Hagens” (link here). This is the relevant quotation, from page 17:

We are nothing more or less than the biology which brought us to this moment over which we had no control and its interactions with environment that brought us to this moment over which we had no control.

Very intelligent and interesting man, but I don’t agree with his basic premises.

Ruth

I skimmed through parts of the transcript. There’s an old cliche that if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I guess if you’re a biologist, as the author is, everything looks like biology.

So he seems to be making a case that we are entirely biologically determined, and hence have no free will. As I say, I’ve just skimmed so far, but I’m interested in whether he ever acknowledges that biology is just chemistry, and chemistry is just physics. If so, we get back to the original hard deterministic argument — we are just a determined product of physics, governed by the “laws” of nature and coercive determinism.

But since there are no “laws” of nature and determinism is not a coercive agent or an agent at all, this argument against free will does not go through. We went all over this in a long thread from a year or so ago. I wouldn’t mind going over it again if anyone is interested.

But it certainly is true that we have no “soul,” except in the metaphorical sense. There is no evidence of a soul, a homunculus, a widget, a little app or man in the brain that countermands determinism and makes us “free.” The point is, there does not need to be any of these things for us to have perfectly robust free will and free agency in the perfectly adequate compatiblist sense.

I would argue a few things about "souls".

Rather, the idea of "soul" is one intrinsically related to the concept of "source code", "schematic", "process description", and "image" in computational science and mathematics.

Let's assume I have a 3d printed part. On this 3d printed part are instructions consumable by a 3d printer to print the part, to include the instructions themselves.

I've made stuff like this before. Mostly, I've made it in virtual environments where such "recursively described objects" are more easy to construct.

What can be said is "if I wish to construct an object whose phenomenological experiences are similar in nature to some object, I need some information".

I wage that this information, in the presence of a system that will consummate that information, constitutes the basic idea behind "soul". Namely, it is the image of something which is necessary to reproduce the function and thus the phenomenological behavior and experience of that system.

In this way, a soul only exists in the way a software program does: if there is nothing to interpret it into an output, it's not really much of anything at all.

In this way, while the soul is a type of thing that is "imaginary" as per the imaginary component of voltage in a circuit with capacitance, this "imaginaryness" does not make it any less a part of reality.

 

[pood]

It is no great intellectual feat to create a model of the universe in which every event is predicated on every event which occurred before, with an argument of "Why not?"

It is the ultimate untestable hypothesis and ultimately, it doesn't matter. Like a lot of philosophical discussions which question the nature of existence, we aren't going to change anything about the way we live, no matter how convincing the argument the argument that we can't change anything, even if we wanted to.

It’s true you can’t test these claims. They‘re unempircal. I suppose that’s why a lot of scientists get exasparated with philosophers.

Suppose, again, ”D” stands for ”John puts on a blue shirt.” We observe antecedents A,B,C, and note that we get D.

The hard determinist wants to say that given A,B,C, we MUST get D — that John MUST put on a blue shirt.

The compatibilist merely says, much more parsimoniously, that given A,B,C, we WILL get D — John WILL put on a blue shirt, but he does not HAVE TO do that.

How are we to decide who is right? We can’t. The notions are underdetermined by the available data.

However, the compatibilist has logic on his side — he notes that contingent behaviors (“puts on blue shirt”) can never be necessarily true (triangle has three sides).

Regardless, if we were somehow able to “back up” the universe, and replay it again and again, the compatibilist has no problem in saying that the result will always be the same — given A,B, and C, we will get D. He will simply continue to deny, appropriately so, that D is a necessary outcome of A,B,C.

We deal all the time in counterfactuals, so effortlessly that we hardly notice them. And yet I think counterfactuals are the key to understanding the compatibilist account.

I may say this morning, “I’m skipping breakfast, because last night I had a big dinner.” So last night’s big dinner determines my choice this morning to skip breakfast.

But I might also put it this way: “I’m skipping breakfast, because last night I had a big dinner. If I had NOT had a big dinner last night, I’d eat breakfast this morning.”

So there is a possible world at which I eat breakfast, but at that world the antecedents are counterfactally different. This is called a possible nonactual world.

Antecedents A,B,and C don’t FORCE John to put on a blue shirt, they give him a REASON to do so, just like my having a big dinner last night gives me a REASON to skip breakfast this morning. Different antecedents, different reasons, and then different outcomes.