Illusion

 

Jordan Peterson this fall (2023) interviewed prominent primatologist Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology. I will watch that two-hour video, take notes on it, and comment on what I record. Sapolsky, an atheist, denies that humans have free will, and I want to understand his thinking.

 

I recall that  Peterson did a video some years ago, and he said the evidence indicates that people, in their social interactions, treat each other as if they all have free will, so our having free will might be a fact that is recognized by all, and that rings true to me.

 

My own theory of free will is that we are born with it and use it from the first day of life through the last day of life.

 

I think there are two kinds of free will: the one--just mentioned above, the freedom to decide between choices--manifests itself as the agent self-determines his choices.

 

The other kind of free will is an accurate moral assessment of the will: a will is free if the agent is spiritually and morally (Spiritual and moral goodness are the same and one cannot be one without being the other, so a noble atheist would have a spiritual aura of goodness about him even though he is a physicalist.) very good (rare but possible for anyone to earn). The will is not free is the person is Satan-drenched, almost pure wickedness in the flesh.

 

The saint mentioned above would have a most noble and admirable soul, and still, each choice she made, would be a free choice. Every noble, agent in every decision, no matter her age or degree of self-determining, exercises some free will when deciding, sometimes more than 50% self-determining.

 

The sinner mentioned above would have a wretched, twisted, angry soul; still, each choice he made would be free. Every corrupt agent, in every decision, no matter his age or degree of self-determining, exercises some free will when deciding, sometimes more than 50% self-determing.

 

Most people run in packs, group-live, nonindividuated and live by altruist-collectivist ethics. What this means is that their free willing as self-determination may be less than 50%, or as low as 40% self-determining, that their basic fell natures, their genetics, and all the collective forces externally bearing down on them relegates many and often most of the decisions they make to be other-determined. These people’s wills are not free wills or are barely self-determining.

 

As we begin to come alive, to seek our telos, our end of self-realizing as called by the Good Spirits to do, that free will, as self-determining what choices to make, increasingly becomes self-determining and less other-determined, perhaps the individuators are self-determining 70% of the time.

 

As the will becomes more than 50% self-determining, the now awake, educated, smart, rational, intuitive, wise agent will choose to be good more than bad with each choice, in most instances, simply because she knows doing wrong gets her in trouble with God—in this world and the next, hurts herself and others, and makes her feel guilty, none of which she wants anymore.

 

Those who are 40 years old and still non-individuators, their free wills may only be 46% self-determining because they know right from wrong on some rudimentary level, but do not foresee how they should act and what are the consequences for them in this world and the next. Their vision, their ocular moral compass, cannot see through the fog of illusions, public opinion, lies, self-deceit, cherished fantasies, and popular rationalizations.

 

They are morally foolish and deceived and ignorant, so they will choose evil elections more than good elections, but I do not know to what degree they are responsible for the majority of their actions being sinful, because they are other-determined, more than self-determined.

 

Only God can judge a soul, and God takes all of this into account.

 

It could be that a saint has such a good free will that their free will as self-determining is 92% free choosing, and choosing to make a moral rather than an immoral choice, would occur for them 92% of the time. Freedom of the will as choosing and freedom of the will as being a spiritually and morally good will, in the soul and psyche of a saintly great soul, become one and the same.

 

Inversely, a very evil person like Hitler or a serial killer, possess such a bad will spiritually and morally, that his choice of actions picked, good or bad, would be sinful choices 92% of the time, and his bad will, 92% cruel and dark, would merge with his free-wiling choice selecting type of free will.

 

Let me return to Sapolsky. He was interviewed not too long ag by Steven Levitt (1/23/23). I took some notes on their 40-minute talk and will comment on the.

 

 He is the world expert on baboons. He has done expert work on stress and gene therapy. This neuroscientist asserts that free will is an illusion.

 

It could be that handling stress determines the social rank of a baboon or human. It has to do with how healthy you are. We get stressed for psychological reasons and get sick if we are not careful. He notes that baboons are sullen, violent, backstabbing animals, just awful to each other.

 

He suggests that 2^nd rank male baboons have much less stress than higher ranking baboons that see threats and provocations everywhere.

He said he has studied the brain, genetics, and hormones in humans to see if we can find a way to reduce violence.

 

He does not think humans have much free will, in fact, we don’t have any free will. We are the sheer random outcomes of biological good and bad luck, that each of us have stumbled into in that regard.

 

My response: my take of free will requires me to disagree with him, but, he is an expert on human motivation from a primatologist vantage point, and there is much about us that seems to be our free choice, when, in fact, motives from within, and forces from without direct us in the choices we make, much more than we realize, but Robert is too pessimistic about human free willing.

 

Robert: We should abolish the criminal justice system. The newest part of human brains, the frontal cortex, is larger in humans than in other animals. The frontal cortex makes you do the harder things to do when that is the right thing to do—things like gratitude postponement, long-term planning, impulse control and emotional regulation.

 

My response: he is offering an rationale for why some people are violent criminals—their frontal cortex is damaged by trauma, underdeveloped, or perhaps was stunted by disease or malnutrition.

 

Robert: These delinquents have lousy frontal cortexes, so they are going to make the wrong decisions. Criminals on death row—25% of them have damaged frontal cortexes. They made horrible decisions, not that they are bad persons, or had poor ethical values.

 

We are biological organisms, so we respond to reward and punishment to shape behavior. Praise and reward and criticism and punishment do help, but when the chips are down, there is no free will, just damn luck.

 

My response: I am not buying his line, but he is insightful, and we are not as free as we think we are.

 

I would suggest that criminal kids with damaged cortexes, would be morally handicapped, not much different than other kinds of disableism. My theory is that if each child is trained to maverize—and all have the equal capacity to maverize, though their degree of talent differs, then the criminally-bent child, who will have to work harder than morally able children, can still overcome his moral disability and lead a beautiful, productive, law-abiding life.

 

Like an autistic kid, his journey is longer and more difficult, but a committed individuators can overcome just about any condition he is born with or comes with, and his disability is what makes his stronger, and his suffering to overcome himself, will give him a unique insight into the meaning of life that his philosophy, his inventing, his dabbling at mathematical theorems, that what he produces will be remarkable and original, to his credit and for the benefit of all.

 

The more any youngster self-realizes, the more his unnatural, acquired, self-developed, self-fabricated self, overlaying the bestial self with all of its disabilities and drawbacks, is able to transcend uncivilized, lawless, goldbricking, empty living, a wasted life built on successive poor choices made.