According to Robert Sapolsky, human free will does not exist

[Jarhyn]

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.

Except it wasn't determined in advance. It was determined exactly in the moment the determination happened. The moment those preconditions hit the agent, such that the agent processed them into the actual jazz compositions, is the moment in which the determination happened.

It would not happen without the agent.

There is no "fate" involved there which has written 'he shall compose THIS' before the composition. The composition itself happens, and it happens as a result of the jazz musician making a decision.

Before the particles collide, they are not particles that have collided, they are particles that are going to collide. The collision doesn't happen until it happens, though, and the determination is a matter of course, but still is the moment in which decision happened even if the preconditions were fixed by their own preconditions and so on back in time. The event itself is the decision of the result.

 

[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.

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.

You obviously have not understood a word I’ve said, and you are only spoiling for a fight. I’ve no interest in engaging with someone who so egregiously misrepresents my clear position, and then labels the stupid straw man of what I said “obfuscating nonsense.” Bye.

 

[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.

You obviously have not understood a word I’ve said, and you are only spoiling for a fight.

Then explain it. Huffing out is not a rational argument. I have answered every question that you have put to me, why not extend the same favor?

 

[Politesse]

The moment those preconditions hit the agent, such that the agent processed them into the actual jazz compositions, is the moment in which the determination happened.

What would make this interaction look measurably different, in a fully deterministic world? How might we test whether we live in a deterministic universe?

No one is arguing that a rockfall can happen without the rock, only that with sufficient information, rockfalls can be predicted.

 

[bilby]

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

Indeed. And the former would eliminate libertarian free will, while the latter would eliminate compatibilist free will.

DBT consistently disproves libertarian free will, which nobody here seems to support in the first place; And for no reason that he has yet articulated, concludes that this also disproves compatibilist free will.

I suspect that the problem lies with the fact that the word "free" has completely different meanings in these two contexts.

DBT is arguing about "free will" which he falsely sees as a common attribute of "Compatibilist free will" and "Libertarian free will", While everyone else is trying to point out that the difference is in the type of "freedom", i.e. between "Compatibilist free will" and "Libertarian free will".

 

[bilby]

What would make this interaction look measurably different, in a fully deterministic world? How might we test whether we live in a deterministic universe?

Both incompatibilists and compatibilists assume, as a starting point, that we live in a deterministic universe. Those questions are therefore completely irrelevant to any disputes between these two positions.

The former says that we live in a deterministic universe and so are not responsible for any of our actions, as we cannot make choices. The latter says that we live in a deterministic universe, but are nevertheless responsible for our actions, because we do make choices.

 

[Jarhyn]

The moment those preconditions hit the agent, such that the agent processed them into the actual jazz compositions, is the moment in which the determination happened.

What would make this interaction look measurably different, in a fully deterministic world? How might we test whether we live in a deterministic universe?

No one is arguing that a rockfall can happen without the rock, only that with sufficient information, rockfalls can be predicted.

Excepting, of course, that the "prediction" is an imagination of what could happen, and will never be capable of constraining what does happen. You could easily take whatever prediction you have, add something to the state before the fact, and something different from the prediction would happen as a result.

Edit: if you were truly outside the system, say it was a system on a computer operating a fully deterministic computer program and you ran the program twice, you would still not be "predicting". You would instead be watching the same event happening in different times (from your perspective), not as a prediction but as the actual event itself.

You could then make a change to the system the second time, but then you would not be watching the same system, you would be watching the deterministic system where your "change" is part of the initial condition and even then you wouldn't know the result until you had watched it at least once... And yet again if you perfectly watched that happen, it wouldn't be prediction at all, just determination by course.

 

[Politesse]

What would make this interaction look measurably different, in a fully deterministic world? How might we test whether we live in a deterministic universe?

Both incompatibilists and compatibilists assume, as a starting point, that we live in a deterministic universe. Those questions are therefore completely irrelevant to any disputes between these two positions.

The former says that we live in a deterministic universe and so are not responsible for any of our actions, as we cannot make choices.

No one says that.

And scientists for our part do not object to "compatibilists" until or unless they start to abandon the scientific method in favor of theology. We may think them rather silly, but I've got no problem with people who want to say "free will" and mean a deterministic universe. I only object to people who insist that human behavior is unpredictable or somehow elevated beyond other similar physical phenomena, such that the social and medical sciences are invalidated. Insisting that a jazz solo is not predetermined by the existing conditions that preceded it? Is that. Of course the jazz performance did not originate solely within the musician. If you think some sort of "something extra" makes it uncertain in any way what a musician is about to create, then you're dabbling in "woo" whether or not you realize it. We do not act otherwise than as we do. It's irrelevant to question whether we could, but only dangerous if for some reason you think that the answer is yes, that uniformitarianism could somehow miraculously fail whenever the "choices" of a human being are involved.

 

[Politesse]

Excepting, of course, that the "prediction" is an imagination of what could happen, and will never be capable of constraining what does happen.

That's not how science works. It doesn't "constrain" anything. It simply observes, synthesizes, analyzes, and predicts "what does happen", noting its own successes and failures in doing so to refine the models with which we make our predictions. The "law" in scientific law is a metaphor, not the description of an actual legal system. No one will arrest you if you don't respond to this post. They don't need to. You will do so of your own accord, because you want to. That may be a choice in a way, but it is a trivial choice, as you will most certainly make it.

Perhaps you think that because you are arguing for "freedom" that your interlocutor must be arguing for "bondage"? If so, then truly I tell you, that both our "prison" and our "redeemer" were theological fictions to begin with, and neither concept is useful in accurately describing and predicting human actions.

 

[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.

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.

You obviously have not understood a word I’ve said, and you are only spoiling for a fight.

Then explain it. Huffing out is not a rational argument. I have answered every question that you have put to me, why not extend the same favor?

Because you are asking questions of a straw man of my position, so I have no answer to give.

 

[pood]

What would make this interaction look measurably different, in a fully deterministic world? How might we test whether we live in a deterministic universe?

Both incompatibilists and compatibilists assume, as a starting point, that we live in a deterministic universe. Those questions are therefore completely irrelevant to any disputes between these two positions.

The former says that we live in a deterministic universe and so are not responsible for any of our actions, as we cannot make choices.

No one says that.

That’s exactly what DBT is saying, and Jerry Coyne, too.

And scientists for our part do not object to "compatibilists" until or unless they start to abandon the scientific method in favor of theology.

And which compatibilist is doing that? It might also be worth noting that there is no such thing as THE scientific method.

We may think them rather silly, but I've got no problem with people who want to say "free will" and mean a deterministic universe. I only object to people who insist that human behavior is unpredictable or somehow elevated beyond other similar physical phenomena, such that the social abd medical sciences are invalidated.

Human behavior IS unpredictable, to a great degree. And no compatibilist that I know of insists such behavior is elevated beyond other physical phenomena, but of course it IS different. Humans make choices. Rocks rolling down hills don’t.

Insisting that a jazz solo is not predetermined by the existing conditions that preceded it? Is that.

You are mixing up determinism with PRE-determinism. They are not the same thing. If you wish to insist that they are, you are obliged to explain how a mindless process wrote a jazz score before the jazz musician even thought of it.

Of course the jazz performance did not originate solely within the musician.

Nobody says it did. I am contesting the claim that it did not come AT ALL from the jazz musician. That is clearly what Coyne wrote.

If you think some sort of "something extra" makes it uncertain in any way what a musician is about to create, then you're dabbling in "woo" whether or not you realize it.

Nothing “extra” makes it uncertain. It just IS uncertain, probably even to the composer until he does it.

We do not act otherwise than as we do.

Exactly! We do not act otherwise than we do. DBT and Coyne claim we CANNOT act other, than what we do.

It's irrelevant to question whether we could, but only dangerous if for some reason you think that the answer is yes, that uniformitarianism could somehow miraculously fail whenever the "choices" of a human being are involved.

I don’t know what you mean by “uniformitarianism” in this context. Acting other than as we do requires no miracles, merely a grade-school understanding of counterfactuals.

 

[bilby]

What would make this interaction look measurably different, in a fully deterministic world? How might we test whether we live in a deterministic universe?

Both incompatibilists and compatibilists assume, as a starting point, that we live in a deterministic universe. Those questions are therefore completely irrelevant to any disputes between these two positions.

The former says that we live in a deterministic universe and so are not responsible for any of our actions, as we cannot make choices.

No one says that.

I refer you to the hundreds of posts in this thread by DBT, who says exactly that.

And scientists for our part do not object to "compatibilists" until or unless they start to abandon the scientific method in favor of theology.

No, we don't.

We may think them rather silly, but I've got no problem with people who want to say "free will" and mean a deterministic universe.

There's nothing "silly" about it. Uess you are hung up on a pointlessly constrictive and absolutist definition of the word "free".

I only object to people who insist that human behavior is unpredictable or somehow elevated beyond other similar physical phenomena, such that the social and medical sciences are invalidated.

So do I. Indeed, I am not aware of anyone in this thread who doesn't.

 

[Jarhyn]

Rocks rolling down hills don’t

Well, I disagree. I think that, at least in terms of my own views on compatibilism, that rolling rocks on the hillside are responsible to some extent for something you could consider a "choice". The rock has momentum and a shape, and these are, ultimately, responsible for how it interacts with the surface of the hill.

It doesn't make a choice through the complex mechanisms something with a well-constructed well-ordered mind does, but it's shape experiences phenomena and translates those phenomena in some way.

Then, I'm somewhere in the vicinity of IIT and as such a pan-psychist, seeing all energy as "subject" and all interactions between forms of energy as "experienced". From this perspective it would be literally impossible for anything with relative locality in a system of change to be bereft of "subjective experience".

I just find the rigid simplicity of the rock to be far less interesting than the ordered but ultimately flexible minds of subjects such as "people".

 

[pood]

I think this guy gets it moslty right. I have quoted him before, here, and there is also here. I say “mostly” because I don’t like talk of “laws” of physics, physical laws, or laws of nature. I think all “laws” are merely descriptions, some of unvarying regularities (gravity, c in a vacuum), some of statistical regularities (thermodynamics, quantum processes) and some of largely unpredictable outcomes (what college a four-year-old will attend in the future). This is another place hard determinists get it wrong when they speak of humans “obeying physical laws,” when there are no such laws to obey. A subclass of compatibilists known as neo-Humeans stress this point, Norman Swartz perhaps being an exemplar of such.

Not sure why that second link goes to the middle of the blog post, but just scroll up.

 

[DBT]

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.

Meaning is derived from usage.

In relation to free will as compatibilists define it, I refer to word usage and word meaning as expressed by compatibilists.

That is the point.

It was the point from the beginning, and is still the point. The point has not changed.

Why is this so hard to grasp?

 

[DBT]

Coyne didn't say what you did, though.

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

I make no claims of my own. I refer to how compatibilists define determinism. Compatibilists are, by definition, determinists.

In order to understand the implications of how a deterministic system evolves, why not refer to your own definition of determinism?
.
''Just what I said it means, and what Hume said it means: Constant conjunction.'' - Pood

''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

Now, obviously this does not mean that the big bang itself composed Jazz in the first microseconds, or anytime soon after...so how do you think we have Jazz being composed now if the universe began with a Big Bang and is deterministic, that being, where event A is always followed by event B?

 

[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.

Meaning is derived from usage.

In relation to free will as compatibilists define it, I refer to word usage and word meaning as expressed by compatibilists.

That is the point.

It was the point from the beginning, and is still the point. The point has not changed.

Why is this so hard to grasp?

 

[Jarhyn]

I think this guy gets it moslty right. I have quoted him before, here, and there is also here. I say “mostly” because I don’t like talk of “laws” of physics, physical laws, or laws of nature. I think all “laws” are merely descriptions, some of unvarying regularities (gravity, c in a vacuum), some of statistical regularities (thermodynamics, quantum processes) and some of largely unpredictable outcomes (what college a four-year-old will attend in the future). This is another place hard determinists get it wrong when they speak of humans “obeying physical laws,” when there are no such laws to obey. A subclass of compatibilists known as neo-Humeans stress this point, Norman Swartz perhaps being an exemplar of such.

Not sure why that second link goes to the middle of the blog post, but just scroll up.

My thought on the idea of "physical law" is more akin to something like an instruction set on a CPU... It doesn't say much about the contents of the field(s) of its memory/state.

We can generally treat "what is" as a momentary and completely arbitrary coincidence, and ask ourselves "if this was computing on some arbitrary field, what would the computational result be?"

Even if it were an infinite field(s) hat contained every possible ordering at least once somewhere in it (so, normal), you could restate this as "what is the computation at (alternate location)?", so eben there being only one field means locality still gives us that power.

We often ask this in terms of states we can easily instantiate "if we choose to", so that we can determine which of those states we WILL choose to instantiate. There is an important question of "if I choose to, would this happen?" And when the answer is "no" we lack "free will" to do so, insofar as we have no will to do so that is unconstrained towards that result.

This is different from the usage of the term "free will" as respects whether our decisions come from "within" or "without". This second form of use addresses whether a specific will is determined to be "free" or "constrained": the will to maintain relative autonomy.

 

[pood]

Coyne didn't say what you did, though.

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

I make no claims of my own. I refer to how compatibilists define determinism. Compatibilists are, by definition, determinists.

In order to understand the implications of how a deterministic system evolves, why not refer to your own definition of determinism?
.
''Just what I said it means, and what Hume said it means: Constant conjunction.'' - Pood

''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

Now, obviously this does not mean that the big bang itself composed Jazz in the first microseconds, or anytime soon after...so how do you think we have Jazz being composed now if the universe began with a Big Bang and is deterministic, that being, where event A is always followed by event B?

Why do YOU think we do? The question is for you, not me — I’ve given my answer.

 

[Copernicus]

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.

Meaning is derived from usage.

In relation to free will as compatibilists define it, I refer to word usage and word meaning as expressed by compatibilists.

That is the point.

It was the point from the beginning, and is still the point. The point has not changed.

Why is this so hard to grasp?

Yep. It's very frustrating to deal with DBT's claim that he knows all about compatilists' definitions of free will when he repeatedly confuses them with libertarian free will. What else can you do but shrug? He isn't going to address the many attempts to disabuse him of his confusion.