California primatologist and neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky, wrote the book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. I will copy some text from an interview by The New York Times writer Hope Reese; the article is dated 10/16/23. The article is titled: “Robert Sapolsky Doesn’t Believe in Free Will (But Feel Free to Disagree.) Shedding the concept ‘completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy,’ the Stanford biologist and neuroscientist argue. It might also be liberating.”
My response: This brilliant scientist is talking gibberish, but Dennis Prager has already commented that college professors have not one ounce of wisdom, educated without God or morality. Shedding the concept of free will (Sapolsky's suggestion), not true but if accepted by most people, will strike completely at our sense of identity and autonomy: without free will, God and values, are shattered--we lose our sense of identity and autonomy. The nonfiction of free will axiom is useful, critical, and is core and central to our identity as children of God using our spiritual and moral free will to make good choices, and make the world better, to earn our reward in heaven. We are not self-directed or autonomous without free will. People will still have raw free will, but if they do not believe they do, we will live in a lawless world of barbarism and darkness run by gangs of overgrow child-thugs that are moral infants. This is not liberating; this is maximizing human suffering.
If Sapolsky knows what he is doing, he should be ashamed, and if he is another idealist with good intentions but, not realizing the consequences of extinguishing the concepts of individual free will and matters of personal action to choose good or evil ends, will end up with hell on earth.
Let me quote Reese: “There is no free will, according to Robert Sapolsky . . . Dr. Sapolsky confronts and refute the biological and philosophical arguments for free will. He contends that we are not free agents, but that biology, hormones, childhood, and life circumstances coalesce to produce actions that we merely feel were ours to choose.
My response: these external and internal forces and situations acting upon us do indicate that we do not wield pure, self-directed free will, but we wield some free will.
Reese: “It’s a provocative claim, he concedes, but he would be content if readers simply began to question the belief, which is embedded in our cultural conversation. Getting rid of free will ‘completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy and where we get meaning from,’ Dr. Sapolsky said, and this makes the idea particularly hard to shake.”
My response: His provocative claim is embedded in our cultural conversation because the ingrained, natural telos of each human life is to actualize our potential, and that cannot be done, let alone be done expertly unless the agent if free and an individual pursuing his own self-interest. We cannot help talking about it; we cannot help working at it; however we fumble at it, and we are only happy when to develop something that we made, did or created.
So many millions of people feel they are free and expect accountability for personal actions from others and themselves that is seems to defy credibility that all this near universal belief in free will by people living life is but a grand illusion, that all people believe they are free and can make meaningful choices for themselves, for their family and society’s gain. It is not credible that so many feel and think they are free that they could intuitively believe such a grand, universal lie. This evidence strikes me as enough to overwhelm Sapolsky’s empirical evidence that we are biological machines without free will.
If Sapolsky is right, and he is in part (That humans are determined, not free agents; I think we all are born with rudimentary, weak, undeveloped powers of agency, but as we mature and self-realize—if we choose to come alive and be mature and self-realize--then the freed will becomes much stronger, focused and ambitious; when biologists like Sapolsky see the vast majority, the groupist, undeveloped nonindividuators, so susceptible to being other-ruled and willing their fate to be so, it is easy to conclude from the common fate of man, being undeveloped, fatalistic, meek, zombie-ized followers, that people wield no agency.), or if I am right (I am more than not), then free will is the human condition, and implies the sovereignty of the individual and of the good deities, Individualists and Individuators.
Both Sapolsky and Stephen R. Hicks believe in only the material world, but Randians like Hicks see people as free-willers, and Sapolsky regards us as mere determined biological machines. God made us with free will, but let us say that atheists like Sapolsky and Hicks and Ayn Rand were correct—they are not—that God does not exist, why could not nature evolve from chance to create intelligent species that used reason, language and exercised free will? Why could not raw nature from chance invent superhuman races of sentient beings that are demi-gods or gods? Why could not self-created nature out of nothing, dust, raw atoms, primordial soup, create cosmos up to and including the existence of deities of free will?
Reese: “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 had no control over.’”
My response: Absent free will, no one be held responsible for their behavior, good or bad. How is it liberating to not hold people responsible for their actions, when they free chose to act a certain way? In this world, evil will ratchet up, and all will suffer and feel unneeded pain, when none needs to control himself. In the next world, it will not go so well so sinners not repenting their sins, let alone ever admitting that they have sinned.
Why would a just and reasonable God, or an efficient, law-driven cosmos waste enormous psychic energy feeding the delusion of free agency to billions of humans, when in fact they were but biological machines. It seems more straightforward, efficient, and workable to me that if billions of people, in their subjective lives, and in the reflections about commerce with others, conclude that all are free agents during these internal and communal interactions, feel and think they are free willers, they likely are free in the choices made.
Reese: “He spoke in a series of interviews about the challenges that free will presents and how he stays motivated without it. These conversation s were edited and condensed for clarity.”
Reese: Interviewer: “To most people, free will means being in charge of our actions. What’s wrong with that outlook?
Sapolsky: It is a completely useless definition. When most people think they are discerning free will, what they mean is someone intended to do as they did. Something has just happened: somebody pulled the trigger. They understand 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 certain 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 those other things changed, and you’ve proven free will to me.”
My response: What if the organism has biological neurons or brain or body triggers, not yet identified by science—if they ever could be—that are compatible with all the internal and external determinants driving the agent without his choice, and those biological or invisible spiritual neurons or triggers ignite or awaken agency in the person impacted, and these triggers are not yet sensed, measurable or observed by the standard 5 senses of perception. Then Sapolsky and all of his impressive evidence accrued objectively would still not be incompatible with free will, and his conclusion that free will does not exist, would be premature, unproved and false.
Reese—Interviewer: “So whether I wore a red or blue shirt today—are you saying I didn’t really choose that.
Sapolsky: Absolutely. It can play out in the seconds before. Studies show that if you’re sitting in a room with a terrible smell, people become more socially conservative. Some of it has to do with genetics: What’s the makeup of their olfactory receptors? With childhood: What conditioning do they have to particular smells? All of that affects outcome.”
My response: Yes, we are somewhat determined, and are biological machines, and this sharp neuroscientist has evidence and sense on his side. I imagine he will never be able to prove that we have no free will, and I will never be able to prove that we do. I cannot prove that God exists, and he cannot prove that God does not exist, so if billions of people intuit that they have agency, I suggest we act as if our agency is compatible with our being biological machines, no matter how messy that apparent participation appears to logicians and scientists, let us conclude that people wield free will as agents. It might be the best answer we can come up with.
Reese—Interviewer: “What about something bigger, like choosing to go to college?
Sapolsky: “You ask, ‘Why did you pick this one?’ And the person says, ‘I’ve learned that I do better in smaller classes.’ Or, ‘They have an amazing party scene.’ At any meaningful juncture, we’re making decisions based on our tastes and predilections and values and character. And you have to ask: Where did they come from?
Neuroscience is getting really good at two levels of stuff. One is understanding what a particular part of the brain does, based on techniques like neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
The other is at the level of tiny, reductive stuff. This variant of the gene interacts with this enzyme differently. So, we kind of understand what happens in one neuron. But how do 30 billion of them collectively make this a human cortex instead of a primate cortex? How do you scale up from understanding little component parts and getting some sense of the big emergent thing?
Say we figured that out. Have X happen 4,000 times per second in Y part of the brain, countered—as an opposing, inhibitory thing—2,123 times a second when the hormone levels are doing such-and-such. How does this big thing called a ‘behavior’ or a ‘personality’ or a ‘thought’ or a ‘mistake’ pop out at the macro level. We’re beginning to understand how you get from one level to the other, but it’s unbelievably difficult.”
My response: Truth is likely a combination of the coherent theory of truth--that one learns about what is going on by studying a person, thing or event as part of the whole—and the correspondence theory of truth, that studying people, things or events reductively by breaking them down to their smallest parts, understanding those, and then putting all the part together to gain a general picture; and Sapolsky and scientists are doing this, and it is unbelievably difficult.
I am not overjoyed that he is not yet able to come up with certain truth about humans, that his inability intellectually and technically at this point to explain definitively and finally if humans are determined or free or both.
Science has come a long way. Theists at least in among Jews and Christians believe in human agency. Scientists and theists need each other and can help each other, though the purists and totalists among the scientists, and the fundamentalists among the theist, categorically refute my dialetheist or moderate acceptance of both.
The good deities are scientists as well as spiritual actors and existers so finding the definitive and final, factual answer about human agency—if we have it some, none or all—requires the balanced invitation to Sapolsky and Jordan Peterson to help us answer this puzzling and challenging question, do any humans ever enjoy agency.
Reese—Interviewer: “If we’re not responsible for our actions, can we take ownership of them?
Sapolsky: Well, we can take ownership in a purely mechanical sense. My molecules knocked into the molecules making up that vase of flowers and knocked it over and broke it—that’s true. And we can keep ourselves going with myths of agency when it really doesn’t make a difference. If you want to believe that you freely choose to floss your upper teeth before your bottom teach today, that’s a benign myth to operate with.
Reese—Interviewer: But you’re saying the myth is not always benign. Fundamentally injurious things about our universe run on the notion that people get stuff that they didn’t earn or they didn’t deserve, and a huge amount of humanity’s misery is due to the myth of free will.
Most of the time, I get by without having to pay any attention whatsoever to how I think things work. Recognize how hard it is to do otherwise. Save that recognition for when it matters: when you’re on a jury; when you’re a schoolteacher assessing students. If you have myths about free will, keep it to how you’re flossing your teeth.
I want to wean people off of the knee-jerk reaction to the notion that without free will, we will run amok because we can’t be held responsible for things. That we have no societal mechanisms for having dangerous people not be dangerous, or for having gifted people do the things society needs to function. It’s not the case that in a deterministic world, nothing can change.”
My response: If we accept Sapolsky’s myth that there is no free will, we will have basically evil people not trained to build up their existent, natural, shrunken free will into a robust, self-restraining powerhouse with an active conscience and a whole set of wholesome moral values to prevent the self—and all humans have this same equal ability to do evil—from being a monster set loose by lazy, careless, inattentive parents to prey on and wreak havoc upon society.
Humanity’s misery is because not enough people choose God and moral goodness over Satan and sinning, so free will favors the father of darkness and wickedness on earth; that is what using free will positively to maverize, and live righteously lead to, and the harvest of all that chaos is excess, intentional crafter misery inflicted upon unfortunate humans on earth.
Change will occur whether due to deterministic push, to chance or to free will.
Reese—Interviewer: “How should privileged people think about their accomplishments?
Sapolsky: Every living organism is just a biological machine. But we’re the only ones that know that we’re biological machines; we are trying to make sense of the fact that we feel as if our feelings are real.”
My response: This is contradictory nonsense: once any species is self-aware, sufficiently rational to know that it could be a biological machine, or not, that species is able to generate problems, solutions and then act upon the solutions concluded and selected. This is free-willing, and the honest person knows when he feels are real and original and genuine or artificial and copied from his pack to curry favor with them.
Animals are biological machines controlled by their instincts, so they do not know they are machines or not. Our reason replaces their instincts, but our reason is not real or operational unless our will is free to make moral decisions in line with good behavior that instincts puppet-control in animals, actually pure biological machines.
Since we have free will, there are consequences in this world if there is only the material world, and if we have a soul, and we do, there are consequences in this world and in the next. That every people from the Cro-Magnon forward have had religious impulses is an indication that the world of matter and fact are not the entire human picture, nor satisfying if so presented.
Sapolsky: “At some point, it doesn’t make a difference whether your feelings are real or whether your feeling of feelings being real is the case. We still find things aversive enough as biological machines that it’s useful to call stuff like ‘pain’ or ‘sadness’ or ‘unhappiness.’ And even though it’s completely absurd to think that something good can happen to a machine, it’s good when the feeling of feeling pain is lessened.
That’s a level of which we have to function. Meanings feel real. Purpose feel real. Every now and then, our knowledge of the machine-ness should not get in the way of the fact that is is a weird machine that feels as if feelings are real.”
My response: I don’t buy this. Most humans are fairly honest, fairly in touch with reality, live in the real world, use common sense and know how they feel, and their thoughts and feelings are real and often appropriate responses to what reality sends them, and this is what a free-willing human would think and feel.
My sense of it is that scientists, atheists, secularists, and materialists like Sapolsky believe that contradictions are false and that contradictions are not real. That being the case, if they can argue that there is no free will, no soul, no afterlife, that we like every other creature, rock, computer, and molecule in the world are atomically-electrically-chemically or biologically mandated, then ontology matches biology and there are pure categories of true and false, and the monistic world is validated. Ontology drives Sapolsky’s need for a neat, clean biological account of a world of determinism being the universal law governing everything.
But both spirit and matter exist, so humans are not just biological machines, and God the Father and God the Mother made us in De’s image and likeness. We are not robots for robots do not grow good or new cosmos; but troubled, afflicted, corrupt humans, that get their act together, really do marvelous things when they will to make it a better world, and fulfill this objective.
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