According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[Politesse]

The 'decider' is the system as a whole. The world and the environment and us, where how events - if deterministic - evolve from past to present and future states of the system.

This is just a verbose way of saying "people are part of the universe".

It does not follow that the universe but not the person is the entity making a decision.

That’s the thing, and the question he keeps dodging, though he seems to imagine he answered it. What wrote the jazz score? What designed the great building? What wrote the great novel? The universe? the big bang? How did it do that? At last Jerry Coyne forthrightly said that the jazz score was not written by the jazz musician, and when he told him that, the musician got mad at him. And who can blame him?

That's not it at all. Not even close. Being a part of the universe does not equate to free will.

Acting according to one's will does not equate to free will. It does not equate to free will because will is related to action, where you may feel both the urge to indulge in something at the same time as the urge to refrain because it is harmful in some way.

What you guys dodge is that action production by a deterministic process is not a matter of free will.

That if the world is deterministic - and compatibilists are determinists - all actions are produced by deterministic processes, which includes everything that happens within a brain, where every thought decision and action is produced by a deterministic process that is not freely willed, therefore has nothing to do with free will.

That is the point at which compatibilism fails as an argument.

And yet you still can’t tell me where the jazz score came from.

What is mysterious about it?

 

[pood]

What is mysterious about it?

It isn’t mysterious under compatibilism. It’s inexplicable under hard determinism.

 

[Politesse]

It isn’t mysterious under compatibilism. It’s inexplicable under hard determinism.

I can see how that would be so. Compatibilists seem to place a lot of faith in the power of defining things.

 

[pood]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

 

[Politesse]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

 

[pood]

Sorry, don’t see the relevance of your comment. There’s no “spooky magic genius thing” in compatibilist free will. There is exactly that in hard determinism, as I’ve shown. I get the impression that Sapolsky’s target is libertarian free will, and he doesn’t even know it.

 

[DBT]

The 'decider' is the system as a whole. The world and the environment and us, where how events - if deterministic - evolve from past to present and future states of the system.

This is just a verbose way of saying "people are part of the universe".

It does not follow that the universe but not the person is the entity making a decision.

That’s the thing, and the question he keeps dodging, though he seems to imagine he answered it. What wrote the jazz score? What designed the great building? What wrote the great novel? The universe? the big bang? How did it do that? At last Jerry Coyne forthrightly said that the jazz score was not written by the jazz musician, and when he told him that, the musician got mad at him. And who can blame him?

That's not it at all. Not even close. Being a part of the universe does not equate to free will.

Acting according to one's will does not equate to free will. It does not equate to free will because will is related to action, where you may feel both the urge to indulge in something at the same time as the urge to refrain because it is harmful in some way.

What you guys dodge is that action production by a deterministic process is not a matter of free will.

That if the world is deterministic - and compatibilists are determinists - all actions are produced by deterministic processes, which includes everything that happens within a brain, where every thought decision and action is produced by a deterministic process that is not freely willed, therefore has nothing to do with free will.

That is the point at which compatibilism fails as an argument.

And yet you still can’t tell me where the jazz score came from.

I've already told you a number of times. Your error lies in ignoring the nature of a deterministic system (precisely as you defined it) and how the system evolves, where conditions on earth evolved to entail life, where life evolved complexity to the point where one species, us, has the capacity to write music, build rockets and explore other planets.

Where, if the world is deterministic, everything that has happened has inevitably brought us to this point.

That is entailed in your own definition.

''Just what I said it means, and what Hume said it means: ''constant conjunction.''

The implications;

''In philosophy, constant conjunction is a relationship between two events, where one event is invariably followed by the other: if the occurrence of A is always followed by B, A and B are said to be constantly conjoined.[1] - Wiki

 

[DBT]

That is not free will.

You state this as though it were fact. It's not. It's just your (and others') dogmatic belief.

It's not that I say it, but that the terms entail it. An action production by a deterministic process is clearly not willed. The process begins and the action is entailed long before consciousness and will is experienced.

Surely you must understand that this is related to determinism as it is defined, and not because I say so?

Word meaning doesn't work like this. Meanings are not determined according to personal preferences. Meanings are determined by usage.

Compatibilists define the terms and conditions of both determinism and their version of free will.

Why the argument fails is related to how these relate to each other.

Where a word or phrase has more than one common usage, no single use is either "right" or "wrong".

Surely you understand this?

Again, compatibilists give their terms, their conditions and word meanings. And the point at which their argument fails is related to how they define free will in relation to how they define determinism

Where external necessity is taken as a constraint to free will as they define it, yet internal necessity - also a constraint - is ignored.

Definition of freedom
1: the quality or state of being free: such as
a: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action - Merriam Webster

Internal necessity is not 'the absence of necessity,' but the very essence of it.

''Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity'' - Einstein.

Surely you understand this?

 

[Copernicus]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

Poli, the sentence "The volcano destroyed the town" is not a case of poetic anthropomorphization. The subject is an inanimate proximate cause of the destruction--like saying "The meteor destroyed the spaceship", "The sun melted the ice", or "A rock broke the window". It is possible to talk about causal acts that do not involve animate or sentient causers. Linguistically speaking, sentient agents have some unique linguistic properties that cannot be attributed to inanimate causers. For example, you wouldn't say that "The baseball bat broke the window with a softball", although it would be perfectly permissible to say that "The boy broke the window with a softball." For the baseball bat to be named as the cause of breakage, it would have to be considered a proximate cause, not a distant cause involved in a chain reaction of physical events.

 

[The AntiChris]

It's not that I say it, but that the terms entail it.

You either didn't read or didn't understand my post.

The "terms" don't entail anything. Words don't have innate, irrevocable meaning. Meaning is derived from usage.

 

[Politesse]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

Poli, the sentence "The volcano destroyed the town" is not a case of poetic anthropomorphization. The subject is an inanimate proximate cause of the destruction--like saying "The meteor destroyed the spaceship", "The sun melted the ice", or "A rock broke the window". It is possible to talk about causal acts that do not involve animate or sentient causers. Linguistically speaking, sentient agents have some unique linguistic properties that cannot be attributed to inanimate causers. For example, you wouldn't say that "The baseball bat broke the window with a softball", although it would be perfectly permissible to say that "The boy broke the window with a softball." For the baseball bat to be named as the cause of breakage, it would have to be considered a proximate cause, not a distant cause involved in a chain reaction of physical events.

In that light, why would anyone object to saying "Beethoven composed the Moonlight Sonata"? Magic is not necessary for this to be true.

 

[pood]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

Poli, the sentence "The volcano destroyed the town" is not a case of poetic anthropomorphization. The subject is an inanimate proximate cause of the destruction--like saying "The meteor destroyed the spaceship", "The sun melted the ice", or "A rock broke the window". It is possible to talk about causal acts that do not involve animate or sentient causers. Linguistically speaking, sentient agents have some unique linguistic properties that cannot be attributed to inanimate causers. For example, you wouldn't say that "The baseball bat broke the window with a softball", although it would be perfectly permissible to say that "The boy broke the window with a softball." For the baseball bat to be named as the cause of breakage, it would have to be considered a proximate cause, not a distant cause involved in a chain reaction of physical events.

In that light, why would anyone object to saying "Beethoven composed the Moonlight Sonata"? Magic is not necessary for this to be true.

See here, for example.

I’ve also described another scenario after I gave a talk called “You Don’t Have Free Will”. A very large jazz musician accosted me afterwards and asked me if I thought that the extemporaneous solos he played were actually determined in advance. When I said “yes,” he got really mad and I was afraid he was going to hit me. Fortunately, Richard Dawkins stepped in and, with his British politesse, defused the situation. These two incidents show you the strong feelings evoked by someone who espouses determinism.

So Jerry Coyne, a self-described hard determinist, thinks musical scores are not composed by composers, but magically composed “in advance”! And I’m asking, how does this miracle happen? And how far in advance? Did the Big Bang compose Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata? How? And does DBT agree with Coyne?

Note that under this bizarre scenario, the composer is merely the baseball bat, and the Big Bang is the boy waving it.

 

[Politesse]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

Poli, the sentence "The volcano destroyed the town" is not a case of poetic anthropomorphization. The subject is an inanimate proximate cause of the destruction--like saying "The meteor destroyed the spaceship", "The sun melted the ice", or "A rock broke the window". It is possible to talk about causal acts that do not involve animate or sentient causers. Linguistically speaking, sentient agents have some unique linguistic properties that cannot be attributed to inanimate causers. For example, you wouldn't say that "The baseball bat broke the window with a softball", although it would be perfectly permissible to say that "The boy broke the window with a softball." For the baseball bat to be named as the cause of breakage, it would have to be considered a proximate cause, not a distant cause involved in a chain reaction of physical events.

In that light, why would anyone object to saying "Beethoven composed the Moonlight Sonata"? Magic is not necessary for this to be true.

See here, for example.

I’ve also described another scenario after I gave a talk called “You Don’t Have Free Will”. A very large jazz musician accosted me afterwards and asked me if I thought that the extemporaneous solos he played were actually determined in advance. When I said “yes,” he got really mad and I was afraid he was going to hit me. Fortunately, Richard Dawkins stepped in and, with his British politesse, defused the situation. These two incidents show you the strong feelings evoked by someone who espouses determinism.

So Jerry Coyne, a self-described hard determinist, thinks musical scores are not composed by composers, but magically composed “in advance”! And I’m asking, how does this miracle happen? And how far in advance? Did the Big Bang compose Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata? How? And does DBT agree with Coyne?

Note that under this bizarre scenario, the composer is merely the baseball bat, and the Big Bang is the boy waving it.

To say that the universe is determinate is not the same thing as being unable to perceive proximate agency.

And there's nothing miraculous about cause and effect. Quite the opposite, the popular definition of "miracle" is apt to be something that breaks the natural chain of cause and effect in some way. Unless you're talking about cosmology, you don't need any supernatural intervention to explain why one action leads to the next, you need only observe that it predictably does.

 

[pood]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

Poli, the sentence "The volcano destroyed the town" is not a case of poetic anthropomorphization. The subject is an inanimate proximate cause of the destruction--like saying "The meteor destroyed the spaceship", "The sun melted the ice", or "A rock broke the window". It is possible to talk about causal acts that do not involve animate or sentient causers. Linguistically speaking, sentient agents have some unique linguistic properties that cannot be attributed to inanimate causers. For example, you wouldn't say that "The baseball bat broke the window with a softball", although it would be perfectly permissible to say that "The boy broke the window with a softball." For the baseball bat to be named as the cause of breakage, it would have to be considered a proximate cause, not a distant cause involved in a chain reaction of physical events.

In that light, why would anyone object to saying "Beethoven composed the Moonlight Sonata"? Magic is not necessary for this to be true.

See here, for example.

I’ve also described another scenario after I gave a talk called “You Don’t Have Free Will”. A very large jazz musician accosted me afterwards and asked me if I thought that the extemporaneous solos he played were actually determined in advance. When I said “yes,” he got really mad and I was afraid he was going to hit me. Fortunately, Richard Dawkins stepped in and, with his British politesse, defused the situation. These two incidents show you the strong feelings evoked by someone who espouses determinism.

So Jerry Coyne, a self-described hard determinist, thinks musical scores are not composed by composers, but magically composed “in advance”! And I’m asking, how does this miracle happen? And how far in advance? Did the Big Bang compose Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata? How? And does DBT agree with Coyne?

Note that under this bizarre scenario, the composer is merely the baseball bat, and the Big Bang is the boy waving it.

To say that the universe is determinate is not the same thing as being unable to perceive proximate agency.

Of course it isn’t! That is what I am saying — why compatibilism means free will is compatible with determinism! The composer is part of the deterministic stream, and not a meat puppet of the big bang. Coyne is obviously arguing otherwise, and so, it would seem, is DBT.

 

[Politesse]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

Poli, the sentence "The volcano destroyed the town" is not a case of poetic anthropomorphization. The subject is an inanimate proximate cause of the destruction--like saying "The meteor destroyed the spaceship", "The sun melted the ice", or "A rock broke the window". It is possible to talk about causal acts that do not involve animate or sentient causers. Linguistically speaking, sentient agents have some unique linguistic properties that cannot be attributed to inanimate causers. For example, you wouldn't say that "The baseball bat broke the window with a softball", although it would be perfectly permissible to say that "The boy broke the window with a softball." For the baseball bat to be named as the cause of breakage, it would have to be considered a proximate cause, not a distant cause involved in a chain reaction of physical events.

In that light, why would anyone object to saying "Beethoven composed the Moonlight Sonata"? Magic is not necessary for this to be true.

See here, for example.

I’ve also described another scenario after I gave a talk called “You Don’t Have Free Will”. A very large jazz musician accosted me afterwards and asked me if I thought that the extemporaneous solos he played were actually determined in advance. When I said “yes,” he got really mad and I was afraid he was going to hit me. Fortunately, Richard Dawkins stepped in and, with his British politesse, defused the situation. These two incidents show you the strong feelings evoked by someone who espouses determinism.

So Jerry Coyne, a self-described hard determinist, thinks musical scores are not composed by composers, but magically composed “in advance”! And I’m asking, how does this miracle happen? And how far in advance? Did the Big Bang compose Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata? How? And does DBT agree with Coyne?

Note that under this bizarre scenario, the composer is merely the baseball bat, and the Big Bang is the boy waving it.

To say that the universe is determinate is not the same thing as being unable to perceive proximate agency.

Of course it isn’t! That is what I am saying — why compatibilism means free will is compatible with determinism! The composer is part of the deterministic stream, and not a meat puppet of the big bang. Coyne is obviously arguing otherwise, and so, it would seem, is DBT.

Coyne didn't say what you did, though.

 

[Jarhyn]

There is no faith involved. It’s self-evident we make choices. A jazz score does not get written without a composer. He is part of the deterministic system.

Who says otherwise? Not Robert Sapolsky, certainly. It's the spooky magic genius thing that irks scientists. If you think it is reasonable to say "the volcano destroyed the town" or even " the angry fires of Vesu consumed the decadent villas of Rome's most affluent layabouts", that's fine, as long as you understand that the poetic anthropomorphization of a volcano is not the same thing as an igneous process observed and predicted.

Poli, the sentence "The volcano destroyed the town" is not a case of poetic anthropomorphization. The subject is an inanimate proximate cause of the destruction--like saying "The meteor destroyed the spaceship", "The sun melted the ice", or "A rock broke the window". It is possible to talk about causal acts that do not involve animate or sentient causers. Linguistically speaking, sentient agents have some unique linguistic properties that cannot be attributed to inanimate causers. For example, you wouldn't say that "The baseball bat broke the window with a softball", although it would be perfectly permissible to say that "The boy broke the window with a softball." For the baseball bat to be named as the cause of breakage, it would have to be considered a proximate cause, not a distant cause involved in a chain reaction of physical events.

In that light, why would anyone object to saying "Beethoven composed the Moonlight Sonata"? Magic is not necessary for this to be true.

See here, for example.

I’ve also described another scenario after I gave a talk called “You Don’t Have Free Will”. A very large jazz musician accosted me afterwards and asked me if I thought that the extemporaneous solos he played were actually determined in advance. When I said “yes,” he got really mad and I was afraid he was going to hit me. Fortunately, Richard Dawkins stepped in and, with his British politesse, defused the situation. These two incidents show you the strong feelings evoked by someone who espouses determinism.

So Jerry Coyne, a self-described hard determinist, thinks musical scores are not composed by composers, but magically composed “in advance”! And I’m asking, how does this miracle happen? And how far in advance? Did the Big Bang compose Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata? How? And does DBT agree with Coyne?

Note that under this bizarre scenario, the composer is merely the baseball bat, and the Big Bang is the boy waving it.

To say that the universe is determinate is not the same thing as being unable to perceive proximate agency.

Of course it isn’t! That is what I am saying — why compatibilism means free will is compatible with determinism! The composer is part of the deterministic stream, and not a meat puppet of the big bang. Coyne is obviously arguing otherwise, and so, it would seem, is DBT.

Calvinistic determinism by any other name still smells as religious.

 

[pood]

Coyne didn't say what you did, though.

He said the jazz composition was determined “in advance.”

 

[Politesse]

Coyne didn't say what you did, though.

He said the jazz composition was determined “in advance.”

Indeed. As it was. Jazz compositions are not produced ex nihilo. You wouldn't even be able to recognize it as "jazz", if it did not proceed sequentially from previous compositions and interpretations, that were also described as "jazz". Do you know why no one can tell you who composed the first jazz composition? Because there wasn't one. Over time, new musical genres come slowly into being, while others disappear or become one of many inspirations that led to the next. But that doesn't mean "the big bang composed it". If your belief is that a musical composition must have a single Author whose unique genius solely and exclusively composed it, the error is in your thinking, not in whom you ascribe that mystical superagency to. If you approached the musician in question in quieter times, when they weren't already thinking about free will, and simply asked them relevant questions about the ultimate composition of the work - when they first picked up their instrument, what it was like to learn it, who taught them to play, what artists inspired them, who wrote the original piece they are interepreting, who crafted their current instrument and why they chose it from the workshop, why their instrument plays in certain keys and not others or can achieve one type of transition and not another - they'd not only be capable of explaining some of the previous causal factors, but actually eager to do so. It was the assault to his ego that made the musician violently angry, not true ignorance as to the history of jazz. Everyone who plays knows that they are the next step in a long line of players.

None of that makes music somehow free of cause and effect, nor should we see it as taking away from the authorship of a given piece of music. Insisting that you are only the author of an interpretation if you effected a universe-breaking miracle in order to create it is setting the bar far, far too high. It's enough that he was the first player to produce that particular performance. You need no other reason to call him the author of that improvisation.

 

[pood]

I haven’t said any of the things you seem to be ascribing to me, nor have I said that music-making is free of cause and effect. I have said just the opposite.

 

[Politesse]

I haven’t said any of the things you seem to be ascribing to me, nor have I said that music-making is free of cause and effect. I have said just the opposite.

You've said a bunch of obfuscating nonsense, is what you've said. Try to think rationally: don't just tell me why you feel it is wrong, tell me why is it wrong to observe that the conditions which produced a piece of music must logically have preceded it? Don't tell me what you (inaccurately) think Coyne implied, tell me what you are concretely claiming about the universe when you object to his observation? No, no musician is the sole creator of a musical interpretation. No, this doesn't mean they aren't the composer of that particular piece of work. No, "free will" is not necessary or even helpful in explaining where musical interpretations come from.