Determined

 

On 10/23/23, Professor and Amoralist Hans-George Moeller interviewed Professor Robert Sopalsky; the title of this interview was: Determined: Robert Sopalsky on Life Without Free Will. Soplalsky is a well-regarded primatologist and neuroscientist. I took notes on this 55-minute interview and will comment on what I recorded.

 

Robert Sopalsky (R after this): “What we are right now is due to what came before: non-linear . . . this is a deterministic world, but the myth is gibberish that if the world is determined, nothing can change. Change occurs but in a non-linear, additive way.”

 

My response: R is saying that we are biological machines, with no free will. He is a hard-core determinist and incompatibilist. Still, he notes that change is constant, but it is not guided by free will, but by natural law.

 

Hans-Georg Moeller (H after this): “You go against the tide. Jordan Peterson is all about the sovereign individual and his free will.”

 

My response: Jordan Peterson is onto something here: human consciousness for me points out that the world is ontologically dualistic: that its two substances are matter and spirit, and humans are part biological machine and part spirit or soul or angel. That might make Peterson and me compatibilist, a roughly middle-of-the-road position between hard determinism and liberatariansim.

 

The soul is that spark of divine consciousness, ceded by the Divine Couple (the Ultimate, free-willing, free-wheeling Individuators that created and live within their universe of ordered liberty) to the sovereign individual and her will is free to make choices and creatively add to or rearrange the cosmic in some substantive, loving, meaningful way, and the way she does this is her choice.

 

H: “Robert here is a biologist, neurologist and anthropologist from Stanford University, and author of a new book about humans having no free will, and the book is called Determined. Human behavior and the intentions that inform it are based on biological and other environmental conditions, controlling the biological, sociological, and psychological realities emerging as complexity. “

 

R: “I argue that we are to understand reality as an emerging complexity not the reigning paradigm of free will. The book has 2 messages: First, people’s behavior is determined. In modern biology we believe humans have much less free will than we think. Indeed, we have no free will at all.”

 

My response: Biologists, usually atheists and monistic materialists, have to argue—Ayn Rand and Craig Biddle are the exception--that we are biological machines without agency. They believe that but they might be calling humans robots because most people, most of the time, keep their heads down, and shuffle along in their packs like herded robots. If you look, act, and talk like a robot, then you would appear to have no free will, but that is humans existing at a very low level of their potential.

 

All the determinists see are that the great majority of people are submissive, low-functioning, crowd creatures whose lives are centered upon group-living, group rights, group-identity: these non-individuating humans, most of whom are guided by altruist-collectivist ethos, are meek, compliant, sparkless conformists  taking baby steps  through their entire lives. These low-functioning, other-determined, conformist, and passive joiners sure look lifeless. Like they are without free will, so these scientists conclude that they are, based upon what they observe with most people every day.

 

But this lowest common-denominator performance by 94% of the population is not the entire human story: it is not our destiny, nor is it all that all people can do. Until we establish a Mavellonialist culture of God-centered self-actualizers with their resplendent, powerful, impressive, high-energy, personally customized, brilliant, original-thinking, novel, creative lives on full display, it could no longer be assumed that people have no agency for the social and cultural Renaissance on steroids will be too present and emergent for dour, pessimistic biologists to seem credible with their claim that we are only puppets, pure and simple.

 

If one is a believer in God and individualism, with the immaterial soul as the source of personal agency, then the people’s en masse display of higher human thinking, behaving, functioning and flourishing will dispel the theory that we lack agency.

 

R: “To believe the compatibilist view, the world is made of atoms or cells but due to magic stuff, we can still have free will though we are biological machines. All those views have fatal flaws when you know enough.

 

Here is the 2^nd meaning of determined: determined in dedicating yourself to a difficult task. But how do we live in a world where no one believes in free will?  Things will be better then, the world more humane if we all believe there is no free will.”

 

H: “Metaphorical turtles or premises all the way down built on a turtle floating in the air, and that is the free will concept, built on an uncaused cause . . .”

 

R; “If we go back a million years, what came before moderns—what we are today is a mechanistic theory.”

 

H: “What went before was not just a linear chain of cause but emerging complexities as you named it.”

 

R: “It was in the last 500 years that we came to know how something worked, breaking it down into its component parts. To understand nature, we sought to understand how the parts worked, then add it all together, and this is reductive knowledge.

 

The modern world view is that disease is no longer caused by demons. But what is going out there is not best understood at that reductive level of knowledge of component parts. If you put enough of these parts together, you get a chaotism. This means that big, complex outcomes provably unpredictable, and we get a cell, a person, a society that cannot be explained or explained by reductive parts theory. It is as deterministic world but not completely understandable at the reductive level.”

 

H: “It is a deterministic world with non-linear, not additive stuff coming out. We can see this emergent complexity or chaotism as where free will is coming out, but it is not. Determinism isn’t operating with predictability; there is determinism but unpredictability.”

 

My response: The unpredictability could be due to an ontological open-endedness consistent with indeterminism, or it will eventually prove deterministic and predictable with advance knowledge and AI technology. At this point both Sapolsky and Prager claim to have evidence of their correctness of their own views, but the case is still open.

 

R: “How will students turn out? We can’t predict their future as individuals, that is too complex to predict, but they are still determined. We can predict broad patterns, not individuals. The complex is unpredictable but not undetermined.”

 

H: “In the second half of the book, you talk about change. Being determined is not the same as no possibility to change.”

 

R: “There are three build blocks used by free-willers: A. If the world is determined nothing can change when one sees that how the world works is mechanistic.

B. If there is no free will, there are no consequences, so people will run amok. No one will be help responsible. Lawlessness will be rampant. There will be no working criminal justice system. If someone is dangerous, we can keep them off the streets without punishing or imprisoning them.

C. The world is made of atoms but there is still free will. This is a false dichotomy. We have attributes that are biological and traits that are not biological. Are these free will—to work hard, to have no natural gifts, to show self-discipline to squander your talents.”

 

H: “We need terminological questions defined. Under the second kind of Robert determinism is the future undetermined unpredictability. To use the word contingency as synonyms depends on previous conditions, but also implies open future from present stat, several possibilities.”

 

R: “Yes, contingency is chance and luck, not choice. Serotonin is triggered and leads to violence, but would only be triggered if the agent was abused as a child.”

 

H: The future is unpredictable with a multiplicity of causes. Turtles all the way down. But is really a tree of turtles, so we are not free through a linear, causal chain. We will not seek causal answers but use conditions to avoid the reductionistic model, use the contingency, conditional context.”

 

R: “ The convergence of two evolutionary lines which mode is convergent is not known but that does not prove it is not deterministic.”

 

H: “Emergent complexity: your model is not an Aristotelian chain of causes., but an autopoiesis.”

 

My response: An autopoiesis is a system that survives by making its own parts, and this does not sound like a linear chain of cause to effect to new cause.

 

H: “We live in different disciplines. Emergent systems or self-organizing stuff: everything is biology and some cultural stuff. Can sociology or psychology be emergent systems?”

 

R: “Jared Diamond describes how empires emerge and collapse, but not by chance. Ecology shapes empire. In southeast China, where in the old days rice farming was done, the village life was very collectivistic so the work got done.

 

In north China where they grow wheat, the farmers were more individualistic, more likely to file patents or get divorced. If you put an obstacle in their path they are more likely to break it then go around it.”

 

My response: Sapolsky is arguing that ecology determines if a people are more communal or individualistic, and note that the individualists are more activistic, creative, more inclined to change things.

 

H: “There is no reductionism here, only biology at the bottom or other causes that condition each other in a circle of influences. These feedback loops or recursive loops are both downstream and upstream.”

 

R: “There is no free will at work here even though there are 1,000 causes.”

 

H:  “Does all this apply to psychological causes—the source of free will?”

 

R: “Among these mutually conditioning causes or turtles are reason, thinking, psychology as causal at higher levels but still materially caused.”

 

My response: To be materially caused, consciousness has no soul, no free will beyond nomological determinist inputs into the agent.

 

H: “This free will you are arguing forcefully against is going against the Western tradition that the mind should be in control, or it is the condition that controls all these other conditions. You are stating the soul can’t be free and only cause because mind or consciousness is only of the these many constantly changing, coequal, emerging conditions conditioning each other. It is illusory to assume one of these conditions like mind can be in control or free like a free will.

 

The flaw of the free will theory is that the mind can do this. This is assuming that there is a spot where spirit, mind or free will can take control of the rest of what constitutes human experience or the person. Do you as a biologist deny that that nexus exists?”

 

R: “If I argue with free-willers and they use the word soul, we shut down. There is no sense talking.to them.’

 

H: “What is your attitude to all the scientific disciplines, each of which has a piece of the pie, and are against free will, but the free willers counter that the skeptic is just from a narrow, local search and so cannot refute the universal free claim.”

 

R: “All disciplines are one together, and will prove together, eventually, and scientifically, there is not free will. It’s all one and there is no where in that arc to shoehorn in a homunculus made of magic stuff.”

 

My response: I think of one’s personal self or identity as one’s brain and emotions, but also it is one’s free, immaterial soul working in the mind alongside the physical, biological brain. It is not magical or a homunculus but the self, the spiritual psyche; it exists, it is there, though we cannot explain how this spiritual psyche interacts with one’s biological brain and body, but the soul operates smoothly in the lives of each person, billions of us, day after day.

 

H: “Yet you argue for change while there is no nexus, no soul, no mental control agent. Thoughts affect social environment and affect biology. People have no free will but can think and that influences social conditions, biology, and influences other turtles. There is mutual conditioning, mutual control, no one way control.”

 

My response: Both Sapolsky and Moller seem to argue for several controlling sources in the mind to lend evidence to no free will, while a free-willing consciousness would be the single control of the self’s choosing which action to take.

 

R: “In the Hotel Rwanda movie the hero saves 1,000 lives during the Rwanda genocide atrocity. One person can make a difference.”

 

H: “A response that is unpredictable, unexpected, and emotional might seem like free will, but who told you that you are free, who conditioned that idea into you. Society favors belief in free will then you can believe it.

 

From the book: We are not captains of our own ship. Our ship never had a captain. There is no free will if not based in self-hood. Self-hood is a construct.”

 

My response: It seems like selfhood or the sense of individualism and agency are identical or synonymous, so the individualist believes in free will, but collectivists like Moeller and Sapolsky do not believe in selfhood or free will or individuality. Note that they seem like Progressives and Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager are conservatives advocating God, free will and individualism and selfhood.

 

R: “Selfhood is a myth. There is no blueprint; there is no blueprint maker. There is no homunculus blueprint maker in your mind. There is no omnipotent blueprint maker for the universe.

 

Ants are adaptive and optimal and pick new colony sites based on different scout reports. No ant has information about more than one place. No one is in charge to weigh the options and make an executive decision. The right answer or event or decision just emerges.

 

There is no answer for how your brain decides or gets wired—no decider, comparator or captain.”

 

H: “You are going against Western thinking and Jordan Peterson’s sovereign individuality—why even Progressives like free will.”

 

R: “I just did a 3-hour podcast with Peterson that was fun to talk to. Peterson is the epitome of not only do we have agency but even if we didn’t you should not tell people that we do not have agency, because the best we do is as captains, but the captain of our ships is a fantasy—there are not captains.”

 

H:  “You appeal to analytic philosophy but I am a German, continental philosopher . . . Chinese philosophy is not much on the sovereign individual.

 

I like Nietzsche; I would like to quote from the Twilight of The Idols: ‘I fear we won’t get rid of God as long as we believe in grammar.’

 

He is referring to the Subject-Object construct emphasized in Western grammar. This language emphasizes the subject, subjectivity, and agency.

 

For example, it rains is still a subject.

 

We will not get rid of the idea of agency and the concept of the sovereignty of the individual or free will as long as we speak English.”

 

My response: If we get rid of the English language, then we deprive Americans and Westerners of its most prominent language that emphasizes agency, free will and the sovereignty of individualism, all core moral and liberating, axiomatic principles.

 

It seems like Sapolsky and Moeller are anti-Westerners out to overthrow its basic philosophies values and cultures, but that will lead to nihilism and totalitarianism, not the bright utopian future which they anticipate.

 

R: “Very possibly. From Anthro-linguistics we know we think very differently in different languages. The Sapir-Whorf hypotheses has been praised and criticized. One language says a person is right in front of me versus a language that says that person is just down the hill from that tree.”

 

H: “The point I am trying to make is you are fighting an uphill battle. You are fighting the sovereign individual concept, and having to use the English language with words like caused and determined, suing a grammar always implying agency. “

 

R: “It is hard, but we can make the world better once science is accepted once free will and individualism disappear. We will use science to push collectivism.”