not so. We can change our environment to avoid triggers that spark desire, and learn more about our desires and what they will get us. I used to hate oatmeal and would rather eat Pizza and ice cream for breakfast. Then I learned more and gained experience and my desires changed to enjoy oatmeal for breakfast. If I don't want to want something, stay away from it, completely, or as much as possible, so that the triggers we face are small and few and our more mature desires can overpower our instinctive desires
@@christianlassen1577 You are using a desire, to justify a desire to not have a temptation. You want two things, and one want outweighed the other as an influence on your actions.
Have you ever heard of desire? The goal of life to test people Did they really want to be good even of that means doing what you don't like, same be patient and thinks out our control Happy life for you
Yeah, my parents dismissed me when I pointed out the flaw of that logic. Their god gives these laws such as thou shall not kill or thou shall not steal, that would allude to the idea of free will. But if everything is predetermined, some people are bound to steal and kill, making those rule’s meaningless if such people are doomed from the start
@@Robust-d7u Faith is what let's them turn off thinking about it any further. The moment they are presented with a contradiction in their beliefs they will fall back on faith internally to protect those beliefs.
@@christopherchilton-smith6482 I recognized this, because they were conditioned to uncritcally take in this knowledge of how the world works since childhood without considering alternatives (against free will) being such a pivitol part of their ego or identity that defines who they are as people and what they live for. Many in my family blast gospel music to cope with the negatives of life and fall deeper in their supposed worship and try to force those beliefs on me. As an observer, I'm aware of all of this, but knowing how they'd react, I can't do or say anything
Free will is the gift humankind has been given that allows each being to freely choose their ideas and what they wish to believe or not believe. Our ability, through the choices we make, "to create new circumstances and environment, relationships, achievements or failures, prosperity or poverty." There is no way that man may escape what he thinks, says or does [i.e., the fruits of his free will]-for he is born of the Divine Creative Consciousness power and is likewise creative in his imagination.
@@edgarmorales4476 Those are empty proclamations, there's little to substantiate them. The world is either determined or determined with some randomness thrown and that's just where science is right now. In either case your brain is first developed by the deterministic biological factors and then shaped by deterministic environmental factors. No amount of randomness thrown into the mix frees your will. Anyone can stand outside of science and proclaim anything just as you have done.
"there is nothing worse than ignorance in action" - Goethe. Unfortunately most ppl never past teenager stage of their life in the 70s and some of those ppl run countries - Bernardo Kastrup
So glad the YT algorithm put this in my feed. Watching Dr. Sapolsky's Stanford lectures was such great infotainment many years ago. I'd watch any interview or talk from this man.
ah so true, me as well! must have been 10 or 11 years ago on youtube. great great series. still unmatched to this day. and so compelling and interesting.
I watched many of his Stanford lectures one night on LSD and from there I went on a 3 week binge. The way he explains complex ideas is so excitable and concise. It reminds of all of my favorite teachers in high school and college.
His explanations are quite empty. He simply doesn't address better understandings of the phenomena. Determinism can say nothing of my decision to do anything. The upper boundary conditions of quantum reality are particles. Spin, momentum, mass, simply do not say anything about the level of organism-controlled action. There simply is no quantum story that can make sense of high level functioning. There is a reason Sapolsky can never demonstrate a deterministic chain from the level of quanta to the level of molecules (let alone to the level of volitional acts). He's a one trick pony. One trick is all that horse can do. Geezus, how many times is he going to post the same assertion video, there is no free will? It is almost comical.
The interviewer, Robert Chapman Smith, is excellent in this interview with Dr. Sapolsky. I had never seen one of his interviews, but I must congratulate him and Big Think on this video!
interesting, i had the complete opposite opinion. not that he did anything wrong, it just felt extremely unnatural and uncomfortable. it felt like he was reading from chatgpt.
The biggest problem with the intellectual society debating ‘free will’ is that they seldom talk about ‘what is free will’ actually is. If one has free will or not depends on the definition of free will.
I came to the comments to say this. It's so important we agree on or are at least aware of the definitions of the concepts central to what's being discussed.
exactly, the way he describes that we don't have free will says nothing about what constitutes free will or what would free will look like if it were possible. By the definition, it seems there is no such thing as free will as there is always something that happens before. Its all cause and effect...which to some degree seems accurate but i don't think either cause and effect or free will. There doesn't seem to be a reason why you can't have both at the same time.
It comes down to physics, atoms. Their theory is based on the idea that we are just atoms moving according to the laws of physics. It is probably correct. But it is disturbing to think of life that way. We should not do so.
The assumption of free will is the assumption that we are independent from the others. It's the assumption that there is a 'real me' making decisions, independent of outside factors.
It's really asking questions wrong. The concept of "making a choice" already assumed agency. But are we really "making the choice"? Or is it merely the outcome of a natural process (despite being highly complicated)?
This seems to agree with Alan Watts, who said “I know Alan Watts is just a big show” 😂 Seriously, the sense the world revolves around us from our vantage point is the impetus for I, and your name is just a personification (mask wearing) to differentiate your I from another’s. Crazy stuff …
Once upon a time, when a child misbehaved in a tribe or a village, the whole group accepted responsibility for the crafting of that individual. Clearly, that kid did not get some of their needs met, if they are misbehaving so badly. Everyone was responsible for the kid. It takes a village to raise a child. In modern Western society, individualism removes responsibility for others, and rejects the fact that others crafted each individual. It's all about "you". A kid turns 18 and declared "I" am me, and "I" made me, and "I" am independent. They don't credit the structures which rewarded them. No one is independent. People who are narcissistic or otherwise don't understand that their "self" was made by a socially collective environmental causation, tend to de-value society in favour of individualism. The individualism of neo-classical economics and the resulting culture, promotes the idea that if you are rich and powerful, you did that yourself, excluding the influences and circumstances other people produced to make you what you are. When the successful, the leadership, the wealthy, reject the idea that their success is built on a society, the society is denigrated, and discarded in thought and policy. Now we have ended up with a scenario where those who have not had their needs met by a system built by and for the successful, are taught to blame themselves for being inferiour. This suits the powerful. The individual blames themselves, for the lack of social support and belonging. Free will is tied up with religious concepts which don't make sense, and socio-economic systems built by and for the "winners" who fail to understand that they could not exist as they are, without the group which made them. Individualism is obtuse, and so is free will, and so is "independence". The "real me" is a product of all the factors which made me, not merely my experience of having agency.
19:16 "Everytime you're making a decission about why someone just did something, including yourself, stop and question it and think about it a second time and fifth time and tenth time and as part of that decission because you can't imagine what the world is like for that person is part of that decission, because their face doesn't register with yours as much as in uses face does there. Just be sceptical and think again and again and especially when you're tired and wanna make a fast attribution." I wanna hug this man so much.
Yeah it's the S1 versus S2 thinking of Kahneman... how the brain works... here's to hoping everyone has enough prefrontal cortex capacity to do this; because hey, we're all created equal (not) => hey!
Yeah, overthink every single aspect of life, every single action of you and others, that is a really solid advice if you're trying to speedrun suicide.
I have watched quite a few interviews with Robert Sapolsky, but this one was one of the best. You asked all the questions that I always wanted to ask him about free will, except you did it better. Very good interview
I humbly prefer mr Sapolsky's lectures over his interviews. Here on YT is a whole playlist of lectures on behavioral psychology and they're a work of art. Clearly refined over decades of teaching. They are very accessible and watch like documentaries rather than the dry lectures most of us are used to.
Worth remembering that in psychology there is a huge replicability crisis with many experiments. For example an experiment on delayed gratification involving leaving a child alone with a marshmallow seemed to indicate that poor children inherited less self control and couldn't delay gratification. However the experiment failed to control for the fact that the poor children were more likely to be hungry during the experiment. There are plenty of videos on this platform about the replicability crisis that are worth viewing.
people tend to look at psychology and sociology as branches of science that compare with biology, physics or chemistry, but the chasms of evidence are enormous. the big bang theory and evolution have far more evidence backing them up than literally any idea ever proposed in psych or soc. it's not even close.
It really doesn't matter much in regards to the experiments. The concept of free will never made any sense. It can't hold up to an ounce of scrutiny. People don't make choices in a vacuum (outside of nature and nurture). Behaviors are always traceable to biological factors and conditioning. If anything, free will needs to be tested for validjty, not the other way around. The burden of proof is on fantastical claims that have no logical precedent.
Even this comment and mine... 😅 Owing to super-determinism of quantum mechanics, this and everything before and after, and around was determined 13.8 billion years ago.
Fascinating. It seems as much an anthropological proposition as a neurological one if you start from that fact that when laypeople talk about free will, they're talking about a value, a meaning (independence) more than about a faculty. No wonder so many rush to defend it. To avoid falling into the usual feud that discussions of value lead to, we should be able to talk about the ability to choose without reference to value. Better yet, we need to talk about why that's such a high value for us and what self-identities we think it forms.
From my limited perspective, the human animal has two fundamental needs (before we get to Maslow's Hierarchy). The first need is agency. We need to feel we have control (see Matrix 1-3 movies - LOL) over our existence. The second need is the need for connection. When either of these needs is not met, then the trouble begins.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a determinist who did not believe in free will. He believed that specific causes must have specific, nonrandom effects, and that everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. Einstein once wrote, “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord”. He also believed that free will was an illusion.
You are conflating his comments on physics as a metaphysical statement. I would argue (having read much of his writings on sociological issues) that he would in fact assert the opposite.
@@FranzBiscuit More specifically, Einstein was addressing something very specific, which is the Copenhagen Interpretation in QM. And he definitely did not say what is claimed very inarticulately here, ever.
@@kakistocracyusa Precisely. His "God does not play dice" statement was a response to the assertion by the "Copenhagenists" that a given system is in a superposition of states which then "collapse" upon observation. Einstein understood the usefulness of the probabilistic aspect of the equations, he just didn't feel a need to introduce unnecessary "spooky" interpretations. And I whole-heartedly agree. To this day wave-function collapse has STILL not been verified. (Nor has the tech that depends on its existence, quantum computers, ever come into fruition.)
He's a typical physicalist/absolutist. His entire argument is: since our will isn't absolutely free, it's not even partially free. Which is both true, and not true. Nothing in the universe is free, and it can't be. Everything that exists, is subject to everything that exists. Our "free will" is literally dependent, and it is dependent upon various externalities that appear to be out of our control. It is dependent upon multiplicity. "Free will" is little more than the ability to form a subjective translation of the language of reality. Free will is dynamics..
@@dieselphiend Free will is not important. What is important is that we do not know the future; thus, we can think whatever we want about free will, which doesn't matter. It is like watching a movie you care about for the first time, it will keep you on the edge of your seat (or sanity), especially if you can die or suffer in it. Furthermore, the only way for free will to exist is for infinity to exist, and then nothing can be truly determined at the highest resolution.
@@dpactootle2522 It does not matter that we do not know the future. Does that stop us from tilling the soil? Does it stop you from learning? Does it stop you from attempting to predict it? Are you often not wrong? I predict the future all the time. Infinity has no choice but to "exist". It just beyond conception.
@@dieselphiend Here is a thought: if we knew it all we would be Gods capable of creating and destroying worlds at will. Do we want that kind of knowledge and power? If you knew it all, would you be bored to death already and would that be equivalent to eternal torture? If you knew it all you would probably create a new universe where it would be impossible to know it all, and only then you would have a purpose and something interesting to wake up to each day. If you were God, you would do that, you would create "infinity", which by definition is "unknowable".
If only he would stop talking about ants in this context. The average ant enters its life as specialized as possible and would therefore have the least imaginable benefit from anything even remotely resembling this so-called free will thing.
The professor seems to equate influence with cause. In that equation, you would have to be completely free of outside influences to have free will. Therefore, free will can not exist. The professor acknowledges that we can make choices and decisions. But, to say the things which influence those choices are actually causes of those choices is a bridge too far. It would seem more accurate to say that we all have free will but our free will is limited by our biology (we can not fly) and influenced by our environment.
@@jamesmillar5951 Why entertain the notion of driving when you are limited by the speed limit and the path of the road? Does a train not exist simply because it is limited to the tracks? Everything has limits. We shouldn't expect free will to be any different.
@@billmcleangunsmith because I'm not disputing things existing despite laws governing them. I'm disputing the idea that humans are somehow the one exception to determinism
The issue here is that a lot of people are stuck in black and white thinking. Freedom and structure are an interplay more like the yin yang concept. One cannot exist without the other. Several people have commented as if- if you are not 100 % unbound you must have no freedom at all, which is just black and white extreme thinking. If you were completely unbound (from time, space, having a body, etc.) you would not exist to experience freedom.
Great Video Professor Robert! Below are the Timestamped Summary using ChatWithPDF: - 00:00 🧠 Evolution sculpted the frontal cortex to be influenced by environment, not genetics, shaping behavior. | - 02:40 📚 Dr. Sapolsky discusses his book Determined to emphasize the lack of free will despite conscious choices. | - 05:25 🔄 Distributed causality explains how various factors influence decisions, from brain activity to environment. | - 07:58 🌐 Distributed causality encompasses a wide range of influences, from hormones to cultural ancestry. | - 10:54 🧠 Phineas Gage's case exemplifies how brain damage affects behavior, showcasing concentrated causality. | - 13:35 ⏳ Immediate factors like hunger, stress, and past trauma impact decision-making and perception in a fraction of a second. | - 16:11 🔄 Judges' parole decisions are influenced by factors like meal times, showcasing the impact of physiological states on judgments. | - 18:55 🌍 Cultures shape child-rearing practices, influencing brain development and societal values through generations. | - 21:23 🔄 Society plays a critical role in shaping individual brains to replicate cultural values and beliefs. | - 24:17 🔄 Emergence explains how simple elements collectively create complex behaviors and consciousness. | - 26:57 🧠 Emergence cannot account for free will as it requires individual components to function differently against their nature. | - 29:57 🔄 Emergence is a consequence of collective numbers and interactions, leading to emergent properties like conformity. | - 32:37 🌍 Cultural differences in child-rearing practices reflect societal values and influence neural patterns in children's brains. | - 35:08 🔄 Genetic and environmental factors influence brain development, with the frontal cortex evolving for delayed maturation to learn societal norms. | - 37:53 🌍 Cultural differences in child-rearing practices shape societal values and neural patterns, impacting behavior and decision-making. | - 40:20 🧠 Ancestral backgrounds influence cultural practices and societal norms, leading to diverse behaviors and belief systems. | - 42:56 🌍 Cultural practices, such as child-rearing methods, reflect societal values and impact brain development over generations. | - 45:45 🔄 Society plays a crucial role in wiring brains to replicate cultural values, beliefs, and behaviors through child-rearing practices. | - 48:33 🧠 Understanding distributed causality helps individuals recognize the influences behind their behaviors and decisions. | - 51:02 🔄 Quarantining dangerous individuals without blame or punishment protects society while addressing root causes of harmful behavior.
Good Girl! 👌 🐟 11. FREE-WILL Vs DETERMINISM: Just as the autonomous beating of one's heart is governed by one's genes (such as the presence of a congenital heart condition), and the present-life conditioning of the heart (such as myocardial infarction as a consequence of the consumption of excessive fats and oils, or heart palpitations due to severe emotional distress), each and EVERY thought and action is governed by our genes and environmental conditioning. This teaching is possibly the most difficult concept for humans to accept, because we refuse to believe that we are not the author of our thoughts and actions. From the appearance of the pseudo-ego (one’s inaccurate conception of oneself) at the age of approximately two and a half, we have been constantly conditioned by our parents, teachers, and society, to believe that we are solely responsible for our thoughts and deeds. This deeply-ingrained belief is EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult to abandon, which is possibly the main reason why there are very few persons extant who are spiritually-enlightened, or at least who are liberated from the five manifestations of mental suffering explained elsewhere in this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, since suffering (as opposed to pain) is predicated solely upon the erroneous belief in free-will. Free-will is usually defined as the ability for a person to make a conscious decision to do otherwise, that is to say, CHOOSE to have performed an action other than what one has already done, if one had been given the opportunity to do so. To make it perfectly clear, if one, for example, is handed a restaurant menu with several dishes listed, one could decide that one dish is equally-desirable as the next dish, and choose either option. If humans truly possessed freedom of will, then logically speaking, a person who adores cats and detests dogs, ought to be able to suddenly switch their preferences at any given point in time, or even voluntarily pause the beating of his or her own heart! So, in both of the aforementioned examples, there is a pre-existing preference (at a given point in time) for one particular dish or pet. Even if a person liked cats and dogs EQUALLY, and one was literally forced to choose one over the other, that choice isn’t made freely, but entirely based upon the person’s genetic code plus the individual's up-to-date conditioning. True equality is non-existent in the phenomenal sphere. The most common argument against determinism is that humans (unlike other animals) have the ability to choose what they can do, think or feel. First of all, many species of (higher) mammals also make choices. For instance, a cat can see two birds and choose which one to prey upon, or choose whether or not to play with a ball that is thrown its way, depending on its conditioning (e.g. its mood). That choices are made is indisputable, but those choices are dependent ENTIRELY upon one’s genes and conditioning. There is no third factor involved on the phenomenal plane. On the noumenal level, thoughts and deeds are in accordance with the preordained “Story of Life”. Read previous chapters of “F.I.S.H” to understand how life is merely a dream in the “mind of the Divine” and that human beings are, essentially, that Divinity in the form of dream characters. Chapter 08, specifically, explains how an action performed in the present is the result of a chain of causation, all the way back to the earliest-known event in our apparently-real universe (the so-called “Big Bang” singularity). At this point, it should be noted that according to reputable geneticists, it is possible for genes to mutate during the lifetime of any particular person. However, that phenomenon would be included under the “conditioning” aspect. The genes mutate according to whatever conditioning is imposed upon the human organism. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a person to use sheer force of will to change their own genetic code. Essentially, “conditioning” includes everything that acts upon a person from conception. University studies in recent years have demonstrated, by the use of hypnosis and complex experimentation, that CONSCIOUS volition is either unnecessary for a decision to be enacted upon or (in the case of hypnotic testing) that free-will choices are completely superfluous to actions. Because scientific research into free-will is a recent phenomenon, it is recommended that the reader search online for the latest findings. If any particular volitional act was not caused by the preceding thoughts and actions, then the only alternative explanation would be due to RANDOMNESS. Many quantum physicists claim that subatomic particles can randomly move in space, but true randomness cannot occur in a deterministic universe. Just as the typical person believes that two motor vehicles colliding together was the result of pure chance (therefore the term “accident”), quantum physicists are unable to see that the seeming randomness of quantum particles are, in fact, somehow determined by each and every preceding action which led-up to the act in question. It is a known scientific fact that a random number generator cannot exist, since no computational machine or software program is able to make the decision to generate a number at “random”. We did not choose which deoxyribonucleic acid our biological parents bequeathed to us, and most all the conditions to which we were exposed throughout our lives, yet we somehow believe that we are fully-autonomous beings, with the ability to feel, think and behave as we desire. The truth is, we cannot know for certain what even our next thought will be. Do we DECIDE to choose our thoughts and deeds? Not likely. Does an infant choose to learn how to walk or to begin speaking, or does it just happen automatically, according to nature? Obviously, the toddler begins to walk and to speak according to its genes (some children are far more intelligent and verbose, and more agile than others, depending on their genetic code) and according to all the conditions to which he or she has been exposed so far (some parents begin speaking to their kids even while they are in the womb, or expose their offspring to highly-intellectual dialogues whilst still in the cradle). Even those decisions/choices that we seem to make are entirely predicated upon our genes and conditioning, and cannot be free in any sense of the word. To claim that one is the ULTIMATE creator of one’s thoughts and actions is tantamount to believing that one created one’s very being. If a computer program or artificially-intelligent robot considered itself to be the cause of its activity, it would seem absurd to the average person. Yet, that is precisely what virtually every person who has ever lived mistakenly believes of their own thoughts and deeds. The IMPRESSION that we have free-will can be considered a “Gift of Life” or “God’s Grace”, otherwise, we may be resentful of our lack of free-will, since, unlike other creatures, we humans have the intelligence to comprehend our own existence. Even an enlightened sage, who has fully realized that he is not the author of his thoughts and actions, is not conscious of his lack of volition at every moment of his day. At best, he may recall his lack of freedom during those times where suffering (as opposed to mere pain) begins to creep-in to the mind or intellect. Many, if not most scientists, particularly academic philosophers and physicists, accept determinism to be the most logical and reasonable alternative to free-will, but it seems, at least anecdotally, that they rarely (if ever) live their lives conscious of the fact that their daily actions are fated. Cont...
@@THE_NEO_DAWN I find Dr. Ramani is quite interesting: narcissism, psychopathy and other anti-social behaviors. However, I think she could use some anthropology. Speaking of which 1972 quote from anthropology (translated from French) "we did not evolve to live in the societies we have erected. We evolved to live in tribes and cooperate for the whole tribe as those were most successful at adapting/surviving.
It’s good to be here to be part of this lucky community that are watching this. I’ve read some amazing comments that contributed greatly to my mental model. When we go one level higher than being an individual, having a positive impact on others starts to make much more sense. We can’t praise ourselves for supporting others when we think there is no free will but as a feeling when this is scaled it has a lot of real positive impact on the society and the environment. It’s like good and bad is fighting on a philosophical level and we are just small executioners.
I observed myself slowly being influenced by this presentation. I don’t have to dig too deeply to understand how I became the kind of person whose mind could be changed regarding this topic. Thank you for that fascinating journey of the mind.
The notion of free will presents itself as a complex and multifaceted topic, often shrouded in ambiguity. It oscillates between moments of apparent mastery over our choices and times when everything seems to spiral into disarray beyond our control. However, an intriguing possibility emerges when we embrace an open-minded perspective, untethered from the influence of cultural norms, socio-economic pressures, political currents, and the effects of substances like food, drugs, or alcohol, as well as the weight of past memories. In this liberated state of mind, the decision-making process takes on a newfound clarity, resembling the exercise of free will. It feels as though we're navigating our lives with a greater sense of autonomy and purpose. Yet, amidst this semblance of freedom, there remains a poignant realization that our capacity for true free will is inherently limited. Despite our best efforts, certain aspects of our existence seem to elude our control, reminding us of the intricate interplay between choice and circumstance in shaping the trajectory of our lives.
Well put. And we can certainly improve our awareness. Of both the external circumstances and internally, the subconscious. We will never escape these factors completely, either by nature or because they serve us. What we can do is keep our eyes open and not let them possess us. To walk this path is to walk the path of self discovery and growth.
For me, there's no freewill. For the past decade I've shifted from complete freedom into deterministic value. Life is Math doing it course. It's no use to interpret the equation, we just ride along with equation. Even psychology is rooted back to math. Wea re just numbers, and it gives me sense of Liberation through deterministic outlook. It's a Paradoxical world view, but when I see the world as deterministic equation, then I have no hustle to judge others anymore. Because they're also just a correspondent from previous correspondences.
While watching his Stanford lectures i never got Spinoza out of my mind and his position on free will, it's crazy to think about. Thank you for the interview
Having no control over anything and therefore no free will feels weirdly liberating. Be happy living your life controlling the small things you can when you can, appreciating being alive. ❤
The world is grasping onto victimhood more now than ever before. The idea that it is freeing you of guilt and giving it to others is a false one. Gaining the approval of others of like mind seems to give us freedom and innocence. That false idea is limiting us rather than setting us free. Being responsible is the way to joy.
@@robertdouglas8895 knowing there's no free Will liberales and also gives you a great deal of responsabilities, coz you know you can shape the will of others, and not even interacting with them, but just by being in the same environment
I agree that accepting lack of agency is liberating and it has also increased my gratitude for my life and empathy and sympathy for others. I am more humble and forgiving. This knowledge adds a whole new level of meaning to "walk a mile in my shoes". No free will does not mean no responsibility. Quite the opposite. Now I know how my actions affect others in ways that I was totally unaware of before. And I make sure I eat regularly. 😁
About 20 years ago I read an article in DER SPIEGEL (a German quality magazine) about what were then new research results in the field of neuroscience. A Japanese research team also used results of a study from the USA to help with their work. They eventually discovered a bias in it and contacted their colleagues in the USA. They met and found out: Before the so-called free will is registered in the neocortex, a kind of ignition takes place in the brain stem. In addition to a few important observations, it was the regularity that proved to be the decisive factor: the ignition from the "unconscious" could not be an uncorrelated coincidence. What was most astonishing for everyone was the fact about the time of the ignition or the time it took for the area in the neocortex to receive the message from the brain stem. It was not milliseconds. It took a full seven seconds. The researchers described the groundbreaking result as follows: Free will is an illusion - but a very useful one. ;-)
This caveman-level phenomenology is what the poor, dumb field of "Neuroscience" passes off as "science". It is clown-level. Only biologists are poorly-educated and delusional enough to think that this feeble experimentation describes consciousness. Sopolsky's narcissism allows grand pseudoscientific declarations that are based on hand-waving generalities. Hard science it aint.
Very interesting, when I was an A-Level student and studied Religious Studies which included modules on ethics and philosophy, I did a 360 flip from we all have free will to free will is just an illusion. I'm now a teacher and I can say that I put more effort in the papers I mark first, we also tell the students, make it easy for the examer to mark, if they're tired, they're less likely to look for marks in ambiguous or messy work. Also I care about my students so I will spend a few minutes pouring over a question to see if I can give them at least one or two marks whereas an examiner in the GCSE will not be as invested in their grade.
Why did you write your book? I imagined the answer ‘I have no free will, what do I say?’. Of course this was not the answer. Entertaining and engaging as always. Having read Prof Sapolsky’s books one thing that keeps striking me is how much we influence others. Robert Sapolsky even without free will has changed me radically. I often think, had I not met a certain person on a certain day, everything would have been different for my opinion, opportunities and so on.
I suggest that he wrote the book because realising that we have no free will we should change the way we behave in terms of apportioning blame and rewarding people. That is, he wants to influence (cause) others to think along those lines hoping for a positive reaction.
free will is the sensation that one could have done otherwise (regardless of if that is true). it is a feature that allows one to freeze and hold onto probability maps that we once considered (but didn't choose) and reference those maps against the results of the actual decision.
What his definition of free will? We never went over that. When he says we have options and choices but that's not free will I'm confused on his definition
His idea of free will is some part of the brain being able to make a spontaneous choice that wasn't pre-determined by all the previous events that led up to that choice, including your current mood (in his book he mentions a study of judges who on average would give parole much less often if it had been hours since their last meal), your environment, your social circle, your childhood traumas, the conditions of the womb you grew in, and all the genetics and evolution that went into giving you the brain that you currently have. Essentially his argument is that the subconscious part of the brain makes choices for us based on all of these factors and then we feel the illusion of making the choice ourselves. So to disprove his idea you would have to show a neuron firing that wasn't directly influenced by another neuron, and another neuron before that; because anything else wouldn't be free will, it'd be just another in a long series of pre-determined, predictable (with enough understanding of the brain; which we don't have yet) series of events.
@@whateverusername I agree our minds are constrained in ways we dont think about, but that's not the same as saying there is no free will. It seems closer to saying something like: thinking about teleporting wont make you teleport. So what? we already know there are constraints on free will. I dont see how individual neurons firing proves or disproves anything. Thinking involves billions of neurons in parallel. Nobody is arguing about whether a single nerve cell on its own has free will.
People who make these absolute conclusions are so full of ego and so limited in their thinking even though they sound intelligent the fact they arrived to that point. He can’t prove or disprove his theory, it’s the same argument he’s using to disprove it is the same as the one that disproves his own argument, correlation doesn’t equal causation. We don’t actually know for sure that’s how it works, we can’t know, it’s impossible
@IAmZanderStewart Like gravity? You know there's that pesky preponderance of supporting evidence coupled with the complete absence of contradictory evidence right?
An oldster now and it is crazy to come to the point where I no longer think free will is true. Oddly, it makes me feel more compassion for certain types of people. It then seems like the "I" is "just awareness" and then there all these thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions of which we are aware... or something.
Or the illusion of awareness as a conscious being. We fundamentally fear the fact that we are merely a mortal reactive machines that produce deterministic outcomes.
@@frankxu4795 That's the thing though. The experience of feelings still has to exists. The only thing anyone can know for truly certain, objectively, is that their own subjective experience exists as a real thing. For example, I know that the feeling of me seeing the color red exists, I can't prove it to anyone but myself, but the proof for me already happened in the moment I saw the color. Whatever the nature of the universe may be, it definitely has at least one series of complicated sets of different feelings in it.
I have loved Dr. Sapolsky’s work for years. But I was utterly impressed with the interviewer as well. This was great, thank you for making it available to us all. Although it seems you had no other choice. 🤔
On the TED Radio Hour, Sapolsky said: "I’m convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn’t been discovered yet." I'm paying attention to his wording -- that neuroscientists have not *yet* discovered biology that's friendly to free will. Maybe one day, that discovery will be made. And maybe that, in turn, is why Sapolsky ends his book, "Behave," by encouraging us to exercise wise choices, as if in some hidden crevice of the cranium, we really can tap the makings of free will.
What he's essentially saying is that because we don't have total freedom, we have no freedom at all. We have some choices where we can exercise our will, that's still freedom, like feeling anger but deciding not to react in anger. What makes some addicts go into recovery when others don't when they both have addictive brains? Choices. Whether free will "exists" is a moot point. It's whether you *believe* in free will that will influence your behavior and your worldview. People who believe they have choices tend to work on improving themselves. Those who don't tend to be more passive. They will attribute everything, good or bad, to their genetics, their ancestors, the weather.
What causes you to not react in anger when you feel angry? It's because you were conditioned by your mom/dad/teachers/society to do so. You had no part in that.
@@mugdays What if we climb the ladder of those supposed ancestors up until the one true ancestor who took that ultimate decisions of "not reacting to anger" and passed it to his siblings or contemporary or whatever, then where does the decision come from? What if his ancestors had no emotions and couldn't pass it to him? The world is vast and complex and your brain has to take A LOT of decision each time, and yes as you pointed some of it comes from parental figures or events that shaped you or society. Some of those pre-digested answers are useful and do not require modification but if you want to modify a behavior or a conclusion you have the ability of doing it. You have reason and critical thinking, you have the ability of gathering data if the ones you have are not enough. Free will seems to be more on a scale rather than a simple "yes" or "no" answer. I'll answer your question with another one : What if you are in an absolutely brand new situation where not a single answers from society or parental figures fits in this moment?
@@nicolasAT1991I think you are oversimplifying what is being presented here. It is not to say your decisions are based on your upbringing, genetics, or society. But also the factors in and before that situation, whether and what you ate that morning, whether someone cut you off in traffic that day, what time of day you make that decision, to say that all these factors brought in together determine the decision you will take. To say that if we had perfect information up to the nanosecond one could predict the decision you take with absolute accuracy.
No. That is not what he is saying. He is saying we have no freedom at all because we just do what our environment tells us. All the examples he is giving are not "parts where you don't have freedom but you might have freedom in other ways". All the examples he is giving are simply examples of where we once thought there was freedom but there is none. Every mystery ever solved turned out to be "not magic" and that is a good indicator of no magic existing. The same will be true for causes of behavior. Every cause of every behavior so far explained turned out to be "not free will" and that is a good indicator that no free will exists. And that is pretty logical, because free will can't exist. "People who believe they have choices tend to work on improving themselves. Those who don't tend to be more passive." Where you listening? He is saying that people do(!) make choices. The absence of free will is not the absence of choice. I haven't believed in free will since I was 14 years old and read Bas Harring, but why the hell would that stop me from working on improving myself? Not improving yourself just sounds like a dumb decision and totally irrelevant to the discussion about free will. "They will attribute everything, good or bad, to their genetics, their ancestors, the weather." Those are not the only 3 factors. The amount I improved myself is also(!) a factor (for example). That doesn't mean I have free will.
No, your brain does not yet understand what no free will means. You have no control over how your brain works and how it responds to stimuli. There is no free will. You are your brain. Your unconscious mind makes decisions based on the capacity of your brain. A story is created for your conscious awareness of why you made a decision. That's why people feel like they are in control.
absolutely. Looking at humanity's fringe cases gives us an insight that the people doing better, got it better and the people doing excellent just had it excellent. Hard work, resolve, focus, determination are talents themselves just like IQ.
Yep and childhood traumas, all influences you didn't choose that form your personality - personality is formed as relfection mirror of others - you don't have even choice about your personality. How could nothing chose between A and B without any pre-existing preferences before it was born???
You are influenced by who you choose to serve, if all you engage in is sin then evil spirits will manipulate you. But there are also generational curses which is a whole other topic. If you really want to know what’s going on, read the Bible.
I appreciate the part where he essentially says to think deeply and repetitiously before making a decision, and to reflect on how your feelings impact why you might decide one way vs. another. There are so many things we do that impact other people. That action of thinking before choosing, makes a huge difference. It can change outcomes. We often take for granted why we do things. This helps put it into perspective. There is this notion of inspiration that he delves into thats interesting (the movie theater example). There is often some stimuli that nudges you in one direction or another. Then it begs the question: what started this sustainable, renewable resource, called earth, that we have become part of? All interesting conversations that simply lead to more questions... And more conversations. I love that.
If you could retroactively change any condition in the casual change that lead to a decision without also making a different decision then you could say your decisions are free because you're litteraly freeing those decisions from the conditions that lead to them. That's what free will looks like, Sapolsky says something like this about free will when addressing why emergence isn't a route there.
Libertarian free will is an incoherent concept, it can't exist so it doesn't look like anything. It's like asking what a uniformly coloured blue red balls looks like. That is the entire point. There is no definition of free will that can exist that is a basis for moral fault judgement. People do exactly what their situation (nature, nurture, environment, quantum randomness influences, mood, etc) tells them to do, they can't do anything else. Free will would look like somebody doing something other than the thing reality forces them to do. It's impossible.
I understand he is explaining that environment and genetics are the largest factors that lead to the types of decisions we make. We may need to update how we colloquially speak of free will. I feel like that is to a certain degree fairly intuitive. I’m not sure how the experiments he described completely discount conscious thought as a factor. There are so many variables I feel like there is a lot of work to do to accurately describe how much causality we can attribute to conscious thought/free will, whatever those terms mean in practice. He kept turning to models as evidence but historically how accurate have similar models been? I feel like what he’s talking about is still in large part in the domain of philosophy and the science is still just barely starting to touch on it. The psychology and sociology and interpretations of the experiments done so far are exciting and interesting but I’m not sure how solid the evidence is yet.
I wrote an entirely different reply and erased it to leave this. Would this be considered "free will"? It's more of an existential sort of question anyway.
He is not saying conscious thought is not a factor. Of course conscious thought might influence your behaviour. But your conscious thoughts are caused by all those same factors. You simply think the concious thoughts that your situation/reality tells you to think. You can't think different thoughts than those.
All the factors present affect your pfc which is where you have conscious thought and that’s all deterministic. The minor events and factors shape the way you think causing you make the decision the level of complexity and modularity is just really high. Everything in the present time has a past dating back to the beginning of time, how anything go to where it is now is dependent on an incommensurable number of factors and that’s just the system we’re in. To have free will would be to never be subject to this system essentially existing externally from it.
@@inu4992don’t we to a certain degree remove ourselves from the “system”? Isn’t that basically what engineering, agriculture are? Conscious thought gives us the ability to observe the “system”. Are we to assume going against the “system” isn’t part of the “system”? That’s some love and rockets philosophy right there. No new tale to tell.
those concepts are just developed forms of very simple interactions between us and the environment which we barely “willed”. They date back far before our prefrontal cortex was even that advanced. Agriculture is just developed hunting/gathering and engineering is just the use of basic mechanical principals. All of which are developments we couldn’t have willed because we didn’t even think they’d turn out to be half of what they are today
No one is talking about the limitations of sense perception and the helplessness of infants, elders, and disabled individuals. Life and Death to me are direct indicators for not having free will. We don’t choose to live. We don’t choose the family and culture we were raised in. We don’t choose what happens to our lives nor how or when we will die. We have very limited control of our lives but that little control is significant enough to shape our experiences but not enough to manifest free will. If we do have free will, it is limited to our biological and environmental conditions.
I appreciate your points. On a lighter note, we didn't choose our parents because we didn't exist to make such a choice. May be it was our parents' exercise of free will that brought us into existence and so we are living now.
@@MandolinKasi We don't exist right now either. At least not in the way you're implying, since free will as most people think of it doesn't exist, the nature of the self making those choices is also completely different from popular opinion. The only quality of "I" in your experience is the fact of your consciousness and that - something is experiencing something. And you're one of those. The feeling of the self is a very successful survival mechanism that is attached to the choices that the system of our mind makes. Highly recommend Joshua Bach if you wanna learn more about this.
Free will has nothing to do with choices, that's why your so confused with life and death. Its not about choosing family, life or death. It's the free will to accept the family your you were given or not. To accept life and know there is death, free will.
Our biological and environmental conditions isn’t free will it is not in our control what sort of mind we have historically speaking, our genes hormones how our brain is built it’s chemistry and how it will see the world and perceive the experiences of others,it’s structure isn’t something we built.Environment again we did not choose our family what sort of people are our parents what we were provided with or not provided at all,whether they have loved us or they have not all out of our control.We are at the mercy of biology social and psychological consequences.
Has anybody thought free will is like our road system. We can decide to get off on different exits or if we move too fast and miss our exit we can decide to get off on the next exit and correct our path. But we cannot move off the road so my understanding of free will is we are limited to a carrier path but there's many minute minute paths that we can do within that path which is free will to me.
But the fundamental choice of which road to take is determined by factors you don’t control (based on your current brain activity). In reality, while it appears you can choose any road that you will, your brain state selects a road which you are forced to select despite the fact that it appears to you that you where the author of the decision.
Think about lightning, finding it path of least resistance... I think that statement is false, i think lightning is more like an opportunist who takes from where is available.
You night have the abilities that determine whether or not you have the forsight, insight, wisdom, whatever that is needed to get off that road quick enough or you might not, and that determines whether you take that road or not and that was already true before the choice was ever presented to you.
@@nonononononono8532 ok, this depiction would mean we're are just character in a prewritten story, we have no will, no choice, and therefore we are not technically responsible for our actions. Wouldn't this mean reality is an illusion, like a video game were the characters look and act real, and yet they are only light pulses on a screen controlled by outside forces?
Wow, I feel my brain is so slow having hard time to understand. Dr Robert is so sharp and fast, I will need to watch 10+times to really understand. But it’s worth it. ❤
In order for free will to exist there would have to be some real entity which was itself in no way determined by external factors which has the capacity to cause change to occur in physical reality. This would, however, violate the law of conservation of energy and momentum since the entity in question would have to be able to provide physical impetus to an object without being affected by that force itself, which is to our understanding impossible
If you want to believe in free will, you have to believe in some sort of supernatural phenomena, like God. Without that, there is no free will whatsoever.
Quantum mechanics. There's discussions emerging that our consciousness, which is the deciding factor in a possible freewill, is due to microtubules, which have observed quantum elements within them and are part of the cells in our body. Free will is real. It's more illusory than we like to admit for most and rather fragile in a life that tends towards disarray and material pull - but none the less there are non-deterministic parts of this reality, which I believe is where that spiritual dimension arises from.
This is so true, I am a caregiver and I noticed that patients are more nicer and rational after they have eaten a meal especially if they are taking daily medications.
@@jtbtdlkt2012 if the (after)exist only because of the (before) then only things ( vital ) would exist and nothing frivolous like this discussion would have been allowed
@fatcat8dog that sounds super deep, but break it down as if I'm simple Jack lol, I'm a bit slow on the uptake. Also, when you say "free will" are you defining it as autonomous/libertarian free will? Just an FYI, I believe that humans have a will but that it isn't autonomous or as free as one assumes. Obviously I'm coming at this from a theological perspective; I might add, a perspective that most of liberal theology in America seems to hate.
@@jtbtdlkt2012 you are not slow. This subject is a waste of 🧠 power.. I believe he is saying.. we have no control of anything . All events come from previous events.. predetermined. We have no influence of our destiny.. bunch of 💩💩
Stupid comment ! Him discussing this topic is based off his circumstances that led him into being interested in this topic ! Circumstances he had no control of meaning he had no will over it happen . In that case then random people who aren’t interested in this topic would just randomly be watching this hour video but if you go outside and ask average person about this topic they would have no interest because they life didn’t lead them to being interested in this topic
Interesting theory, but most likely not entirely true. A person sitting in an empty cubed room can think of and perform many random movements and actions that were never "predetermined". On the other hand a person who was bullied their entire life could be distrustful of other people, but that behavior was "predetermined" based on past experiences. Example 1 involves randomness, Example 2 involves cause and effect. Free will is most likely a spectrum of intensity. I always found this philosophical question silly because it really is just a semantics problem. With the word "Free Will" and what it means. People read "You have no free will at all" and take it literally as if every present action and future action is predetermined and can't be changed or altered. Some even interpret it as the supernatural belief that destiny is real and we are nothing but puppets on a string with zero control over what we do.
It's fascinating that we think so much about free will. I think if it more an extension of a rejection of a supposed opposite; the assertion of a lack of free will. People don't want to believe that they could be "not free." We are certainly free in one sense, but we are still ensnared by the confines of things like social conventions, cultural norms, and ultimately what makes sense to us. If it didn't make sense to do, then we wouldn't do it. The factors that govern our sense are parameters. Like a flow chart, we think automatically based on classical conditioning, and it forms learning parameters. Once you've been conditioned to a point where something seems logical, you're bound to make decisions along those lines. Give or take your current physiological conditions.
People are just confused thinking free will thinks infinite possibilities. We obviously live in a finite reality so you can't just spread your wings and fly. Free will within a finite reality.
You're not just ensnared by things like social conventions, everything you do dictated by the laws of physics. You feel like you "freely" will something, but actually you're just noticing in your conscience something that's the result of your neurons having a mechanistically determined behavior.
@2CSST2 free will simply means selecting an option while rejecting another option. Something determined doesnt evaluate another option, it selects exaclty what its preselected to. What you choose is not determined but its actually up to you. You are telling me you have no choice in what you choose to eat? That's nonsense
Exactly. There are countless factors that confine us. Yet, we enjoy the safety features on roller coasters and in cars. To be confined to parameters doesn't mean the death of free enjoyment.
The entire idea can be put in just one short quote from Bulgakov “Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it”.
The problem is "there is no free will" is purely analytic judgement. If we belive in such things as cause and effect, everything must be subject of some cause that exists within infinit causal chain, therefore "your actions are subject s for external or internal causes" is necessary true. And from analytic judgements we can't derive synthetic, that is, empirical judgements, not to mention any oughts. People fear that admitting that they have no "free will" is some new information that can potentially change our everyday life or conventional practices. But it clearly does not infer such things
god alone exist, and this is a movie being watched by god(he's your consciousness/the real you), this was revealed in my mystical experience when i thought i died as a human just to be shown that i am pure consciousness that exist nowhere and everywhere and it's all that exists
Free will, God willing. These 4 words -blew the mind of a preacher l said it to. We had been discussing free will & I just said it innocently.. But he reacted in a manner that led me to feel, it had blown his mind in that moment.... Coincidences loom in wait. They are either ...always at the ready to occur, or else they were always there ..in the pipeline. But surely the mystery of all wonder. ~
If there's no free will, what's the point of arguing about it? There's nothing anyone can do; and the person making the argument must've been compelled to do it.
@@bsckr4993 so something compelled you to respond to my comment in the way that you did and then for me to respond the way that I did; and these responses were dictated (preordained? determined?) from where, exactly? I just don't see the point of even arguing about 'free will.' It's like arguing about whether or not I have a foot- there it is.
Your brain learns from negative consequences. So the punishment you get for doing something that is not socially acceptable is to teach your brain to make different decisions.
Instead of punishment and retribution the law would focus solely on protecting order and safety. Countries that implement such systems actually have lower reoffending rates when criminals are released.
The ideas of praise and punishment become meaningless. Instead of baseless religious dogma guiding much of our laws we can use materialism and rehabilitation to get the best results for the community. Some other countries like Finland have much more humane justice systems and actually have less recidivism.
This fact has always been obvious to me becauae free will doesnt actually mean anything. It's a euphorism, a phrase that means nothing, but which makes someone FEEL good. What does it mean to have free will? To have actions not affected by cause and effect? So, your mind is completely random? Well not only is that not true at all, but how is that any more satisfying? But proponents of free will dont actually believe their thoughts are random, they dont know what free will means AT ALL, they simply dont LIKE the fact that their thoughts and feelings are determined, and they dont WANT to think of the implications if that were true. If I have a preference for X, how did i come to this decision, if free will is true? I chose to prefer X? Well, that implies that, when deciding what my preferences are, i already had a preference for X, otherwise, why did i choose it? It's an infinite regress. Whether that is being done by a completely material brain, or whether it's a spiritual cause. The ONLY other alternative is that there IS no cause to my preferences, and that's COMPLETELY meaningless AND apparenly false. And i was thinking about that stuff since 12 or younger... but we have adults sitting here saying free will, and cant even define it. It just makes them FEEL good.
freewill 1 of 2 adjective free·will ˈfrē-ˌwil Synonyms of freewill : VOLUNTARY, SPONTANEOUS free will 2 of 2 noun 1 : voluntary choice or decision I do this of my own free will 2 : freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention ("Determined" being the key word of contention for the actual thinking people here.) Hope that helps. 🙄
@@freedomisrising 🙄 not really, and yes I'm aware of what a dictionary is. Did you actually think I didn't look at one? Nobody talking about philosophical free will ever means it in some legalese sense where you swear or sign a paper saying you authorize something of your own free will, aka without duress or coercion. That's not what anyone is talking about here. People are referring to the 2nd definition, without prior cause or divine intervention, which is nonsense and means literally nothing. Everything anyone has ever thought or done has a prior cause. If their actions were not caused at all, they'd be even more random than a random cause, which again, is meaningless. If there's no cause, there's nothing to talk about, nothing communicates, there is literally no reason it happened at all. Which is nonsense. So, determinism is both true and accurate, as well as infinitely more meaningful.
What caused us to arrive at the individual philosophy we did early on that we can’t change for the rest of our lives can be found by carefully reflecting on the archic hermeneutic profile of the philosophy. So, we must ask four basic metaphysical questions: How is everything known? What is the way of everything? What is real? And where is everything going? This gentleman is objective in perspective, logistical in method, substratal in ontology and simple in his final cause. He is 100% materialist. But that archic profile is only 1 out of 144 possible archic profiles. We are, in fact, individually completely independent of the universe; but we are not aware of it if we don’t make the effort to reflect on what our individual philosophy is.
@@rebeckajain2316 That was a ruse. The point is not the number. Even if you have the same archic variables (same forms), the content is different; so, the philosophy is different. For example, you may have a Sophistical profile; but so does Donald Trump. Does that make you Trump? No, it doesn't. Because form needs matter to be a substance.
Yes, if we define "free" as existing outside of context then it doesn't exist because our experiences are contextual and do not exist in isolation from our environment. But when we talk about free will it is mostly about the ability to choose from available options or not to choose (which is a choice on its own too!) within the context of a situation. It's not about whether the choice is influenced or not but rather about the ability to choose and differentiate one option from another in a manner that is unique to a certain person because of their own beliefs, values, experiences etc.
What does that even mean.?..ofcourse, you gonna choose from the options available to you. What else are you gonna choose from?? The problem is you don't choose what options are going to be available to you and your choice among those options is also dermined by factors you don't control...hence, no free will. People just keep trying to twist and turn this simple notion to insert some sort of their own definition of free will into.
@@Enoynanone if there's more than just one available option for choice, even predetermined by circumstances of existence or previous choices, you have freedom (read free will) to choose the one that works best for you in that particular moment. We always have at least two options: to choose or not choose, but often there are more than two. And time wise, free will doesn't exist in the past or future, it only exists in the present moment, in the "now".
What you are describing is your will, NOT free will. You choose what you want but you can’t choose your want, you can only realise it. People always confuse their will with free will....that is just your WILL, Yes you have your will, it is just not free, it is either determined or it is random..there is no third option..third option isn't even possible.
@@Enoynanone what you are talking about is universal free will, and it is beyond the topic of this conversation. If everyone had it the world would be an out of any order mess. That's why our free will is limited to the freedom of choice in the realm that an individual can control and able to take responsibility for, not more. For some people it's hard to accept that you/your will is equal freedom/ free will because it's much easier to brush off the responsibility for the outcomes of the choices that were either made by the individual or on their behalf. Let go of control over things you can not control, take responsibility for things you can control and you'll find freedom.
@@TheElenarybalko 😂 I am not talking about any universal free will . I am talking about individual will of a person which is not free at all. IT just feels free to an individual, that's all. Your will is not free. Hence, it is not free will it's just will. Don't make it complicated it is so simple. And I am not searching for freedom. The truth is enough.
im interested in how survivors of extreme trauma/ abuse or people who did something to break a generational curse etc. might possibly muddy the waters of free will ? like, is this simply a product of natural evolution where each generation shifted something forward ? or is it more complex ?
If there is no free will how would it be possible for a person truly know this or anything at all? Would not all thought and knowledge be an illusory mirage generated by the brain's neurons and distributed causality?
Freedom from or freedom to? From/to what? Overly simplistic phrases have multiple possible interpretations and therefore carry very little information.
@@ЯсенЧапкъновthe meaning is deeper than you think. The quote questions the true meaning of what freedom is? Are we really born free in this nature? Do we have a will? When does a will start? Think deeply, Swami Vivekananda is talking from the perspective of advaita vedanta philosophy of Hinduism.
His fundamental argument is for determinism, but we know quantum systems don't work that way. He is arguing on the framework of a classical physics world... But we are not, in, a classical physics world. In order to prove free will does not exist, you have to prove you can absolutely predict outcomes of interactions. This, is an impossibility. I can't help but think that this philosophy is a form of rationalization.
Wether or not we have free will, we do not know what happens next. There is a concept called "computational irreducablity of the universe" where it says that we have no way to know how the universe will play out until it at the time it plays out. That is unless we build a computer much bigger than the universe.
Free will is the gift humankind has been given that allows each being to freely choose their ideas and what they wish to believe or not believe. Our ability, through the choices we make, "to create new circumstances and environment, relationships, achievements or failures, prosperity or poverty." There is no way that man may escape what he thinks, says or does [i.e., the fruits of his free will]-for he is born of the Divine Creative Consciousness power and is likewise creative in his imagination.
That's irrelevant for the free will discussion though. Whether the future can be predicted, does not mean you are "free" to choose anything. It just means you cannot predict the circumstances in which the choices are going to be made. But the point is, all the factors that will eventually determine the choices before that point, are all pre-determined.
Without a mindset-you have no life, no development, no evil and no good. Your TYPE of mindset determines the quality of your life. This is the very first TRUTH of EXISTENCE. Furthermore, for as long as you live-you carry your mindset with you wherever you go. There is no escaping it-and day after day-it will continue to create for you the type of existence you have experienced in the past. Most people go through their entire life believing they are unfortunate. They think that other people have been mean, unkind, ugly to them and have made their life thoroughly unhappy. They believe that "other people" quarrel with them and constantly make difficulties, while they are absolutely innocent of any provocation. On the contrary, "other people" are not to blame. It is the personal mindset that is attracting to them their negative conditions. Most people shy away from the suggestion that they alone are responsible for their troubles. It is more difficult for most people to face up to their inadequacies than it is for those who have the inner strength and self-confidence to look at themselves fairly and squarely. Sincere Prayer draws the "Father-Mother Creative Consciousness" into the mind-quietly and secretly-It cleanses the human consciousness of all that the individual no longer feels comfortable with. It is, of necessity, a very gradual process of inner cleansing and development.
Without a mindset-you have no life, no development, no evil and no good. Your TYPE of mindset determines the quality of your life. This is the very first TRUTH of EXISTENCE. Furthermore, for as long as you live-you carry your mindset with you wherever you go. There is no escaping it-and day after day-it will continue to create for you the type of existence you have experienced in the past. Most people go through their entire life believing they are unfortunate. They think that other people have been mean, unkind, ugly to them and have made their life thoroughly unhappy. They believe that "other people" quarrel with them and constantly make difficulties, while they are absolutely innocent of any provocation. On the contrary, "other people" are not to blame. It is the personal mindset that is attracting to them their negative conditions. Most people shy away from the suggestion that they alone are responsible for their troubles. It is more difficult for most people to face up to their inadequacies than it is for those who have the inner strength and self-confidence to look at themselves fairly and squarely. Sincere Prayer draws the "Father-Mother Creative Consciousness" into the mind-quietly and secretly-It cleanses the human consciousness of all that the individual no longer feels comfortable with. It is, of necessity, a very gradual process of inner cleansing and development.
Most people shy away from the suggestion that they alone are responsible for their troubles. It is more difficult for most people to face up to their inadequacies than it is for those who have the inner strength and self-confidence to look at themselves fairly and squarely. Nothing happens by chance! Everything is woven out of the inner threads of our personal consciousness-thoughts, expectations, beliefs in life, fate, "God." We live in a world of our own making! This is why children raised in the same environment turn out differently. Each one has their own individual mindset constructed according to inherent character traits. Most people go through their entire life believing they are unfortunate. They think that other people have been mean, unkind, ugly to them and have made their lives thoroughly unhappy. They believe that "other people" quarrel with them and constantly make difficulties, while they are absolutely innocent of any provocation. On the contrary, "other people" are not to blame. It is the personal mindset that is attracting to them their negative conditions.
You should feel no different because you can't perceive the lack of free will. You can understand it, similar to how you can understand quantum physics, but it's not perceptible to you without technology.
You can choose, but your choices are constrained by your genotype and environment. Besides, how would you recognize a "free will" if you saw it? How would you measure it?
The word "free" is ill defined for basically any concept. There is nothing that's "free" in the universe. Everything and anything are affected by the environment surrounding it and what makes it up.
The Scalar Relationship between Determinism and Free Will Few topics have provoked as much intellectual debate as the nature of determinism and free will. These concepts often appear diametrically opposed, with determinism suggesting a universe bound by causality and inevitability, and free will advocating for human autonomy and self-determination. However, when examined through the lens of modern science, philosophy, and the emerging understanding of quantum mechanics and consciousness, a more nuanced picture emerges. This short essay explores the scalar relationship between determinism and free will, suggesting that these are not binary opposites but exist along a continuum influenced by multiple layers of reality from the quantum to the cosmic. At its core, determinism posits that all events, including human actions, are the result of preceding causes. This view is rooted in classical physics, where the universe is seen as a grand clockwork operating according to precise laws. From this perspective, if one were to know all the conditions of a system at a given time, one could predict all future states of the system. This deterministic worldview reaches its apex in the concept of 'Laplace's Demon'-a hypothetical entity that could predict the future by knowing the location and momentum of every atom in the universe. The advent of quantum mechanics introduced a fundamental challenge to the classical deterministic perspective. Quantum indeterminacy suggests that at the microscopic level, particles do not have definite states until they are observed. Phenomena like superposition and entanglement imply that outcomes are probabilistic rather than deterministic. This quantum behaviour does not outright negate determinism but scales its application, confining it to macroscopic phenomena while admitting unpredictability at the microscopic scale. The role of consciousness in quantum mechanics further complicates the relationship between determinism and free will. The observer effect, where the act of measurement affects the state of what is being observed, suggests that consciousness itself can influence outcomes, injecting a form of indeterminacy into an otherwise deterministic equation. This has profound implications, hinting that human consciousness might not just passively navigate a deterministic universe but actively shape it at some level. As we scale up from the quantum to the macroscopic, emergent properties illustrate how new behaviours and unpredictabilities arise that are not apparent from simpler systems. For example, weather systems exhibit chaotic behaviour where small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes, known as the butterfly effect. In human systems, social dynamics, economics, and individual human behaviours display emergent properties that suggest a blend of deterministic rules and unpredictable outcomes. The concept of free will itself may be scalable, varying in its expression across different contexts and systems. At one level, biological determinism governs the basic functions of life through genetic and biochemical pathways. At another level, individual consciousness introduces variability, influenced by personal experiences, social interactions, and potentially, random quantum events. At a higher level, cultural and societal structures offer a different set of constraints and freedoms, shaping individual and collective behaviours. Thus, the relationship between determinism and free will should not be seen as a straightforward opposition but as a complex interplay that varies across different scales and contexts. This scalar relationship suggests that both free will and determinism are necessary constructs to understand the multifaceted nature of reality. By embracing this complexity, we can better appreciate the rich tapestry of factors that influence human behaviour and the universe at large, acknowledging that our capacity for choice operates within a framework of constraints that are themselves subject to different levels of predictability and influence.
Thank you for putting my thoughts on this together so well! To summarize what you said: people are products of their environment but they still have a choice to change.
So far everything we seem to truly find out about consciousness has completely matched with the Buddhism philosophies... that being said the more aware you are of your Ego (your thoughts) the more you are able to exert free will. Free will doesn't equal randomness but its very convenient to think so. As developer myself I just cannot unsee the possibility of having different parameters in functions which are our thoughts and acts. You have the input but you cant alter the function, so to say its way way more complex then having or not having free will. Everything is predetermined but it has many versions of it.
So glad I wasn't in the room with him when he made that argument. I felt objectified just by the recording. One is not free to not choose what is in their perceived best interest. That is what the will is. It is the movement towards one's greatest good. And sometimes people think this amounts to a lack of free will. But, to say you have no free will is to subversively say you are a blocked from your highest good. And then there are those who tell you you have free will and they are likely offering a lesser alternative to your highest good. The free will vs no free will debate is never mentioning the truth of the will. What we seek is freedom from lesser alternatives to our highest good and freedom for it. Because false free will (via 'options' and 'alternatives') and the "lack" of free will are both frustrations of the will, which is not free to not choose our greatest good. Because, once again, that is what the will is. The movement towards one's greatest good. One may be deceived. One may be frustrated. But one cannot not be. I am and God is good.
@@ThrillOfTheFight nothing is determined… even an asteroid can change the course of earth forever. None of it is determined beforehand because no God can exist.
This has always been self evident to me. There are zero reasons to think that we stand apart from the causal structure of the rest of the universe. I think it was Hegel who said freedom was a sense of being at home in the other. In other words, we feel “free” when our inner workings accord with the external environment. This sense of “freedom” is compatible with Sapolsky’s thesis.
I think we are missing something, that is when saying "You don't have free will." Who we are saying this to. Are we saying this to a person with brain or a person with consciousness. Now I know that yes most scientists suggest that consciousness is just an illusion but why did consciousness occur in the first place. According to NASA's definition on a living organism which is most agreed by scientists for atleast now, is that it is a biological system which prevents harm from environment and tries to sustain it's system and grow to do these things well so you have to take energy in the system. And it can reproduce also. So to implying this you must grant the system to have some predicting capabilities so that it can then be better at "living" rather than just be some spontaneous phenomena in between being alive and popping in existence and then popping out. So you must give the system the information about its surrounding in any way and also the processing capabilities to predict the future (Although for a single cellular organism it would be too much to ask). But then you have a competition in the environment with other organisms also so you have to keep getting better and better at predicting and having options to choose between in order to survive. So we now know that why do we have so many senses and the intelligence, thanks to evolution, but it isn't over here. We have to also be aware of our surroundings and have a sense of self inorder to take decisions by ourselves in our favour. So there you go and boom you have consciousness. But does consciousness come first or do you get alive first. Does the first cell became alive first or did it became conscious first. I thought about it very much and i don't know maybe i am wrong but i think that to be alive you must have to be aware of your existence. If you are aware of yourself then how could you be alive? Even if we make robot having all of our senses and give it human level intelligence. Can we truly say that it has become conscious of it's self. I think that's why AI is called AI artificial intelligence and not artificial consciousness. But then what does it take to become conscious. At which second does an embryo get conscious. Forget about it, saying that you don't have free will is completely ignoring the fact that why do we have consciousness in the first place, it is to be aware of our self but if we are only biological machines and maybe in future we can build technology that can also reproduce a body having the same structure and uploading the intelligence or maybe umm "DNA like information" Can we then tell that they are living that they are conscious. And yes then I agree that by serious complex calculations we can calculate every possible way the machine can act (assuming that by thay time science proves that complexities and probabilities are bs) and yes then they don't have an un caused causal control over their ability to take descisions. But can we really conclude that to ourselves. I think that begore making any conclusions, we must check time to time what are our definitions of the things that we are arguing on and find gaps that needs to be filled. Now this was just my opinion on free will just like Robert Sapolsky or any other scientist because with rationality it is only what we can do. That's the reason why we should keep improving our understanding of consciousness and... I mean everything before preaching our opinions to society. Because for society it causes a sudden anxiety(that isn't even there discipline to be anxious about, it's the scientists who should take these anxiety), the people cannot really do the research thing and give theories. And so what I will conclude is that improvement in the understanding of brain and consciousness is needed and with technological advancements it can be done but things or here, theories doesn't resolve any thing until it is proven by extensive scientific researches. And although I am unbiased for it but I still think for society, believing in free will is good Knowing that everyone has different thinking capacities and intelligence and options to make choices from so certainly we can bust many many myths and make reforms only by this fact. Okay at last i can give an argument weapon for "free will believers" (i shouldn't say that because i have to believe in it also) That if I don't have free will, are you telling that to about my intelligence or my consciousness If they say intelligence well then pull up the fact that it's consciousness what make us different from robots And if they say consciousness then baaammmm Define Consciousness and why it came to existence in the first place.
@@thenebbishroute assuming you’re starting at this very moment, planting yourself right in your given spot at petting anything and anyone having their way with you. Remember, you have no free will
17:02 So, free will is the brain’s choice to manage resources and not “my” choice? “Meh, distributed conversations aren’t choices. They are forced.” But each participant is a process. I don’t know how anyone can look at cortical layering and not see the complexity required for self-influence.
Hello. I'm not educated in neuroscience, could you please if possible elaborate on ''I don’t know how anyone can look at cortical layering and not see the complexity required for self-influence'' for a layman? I'd be very thankful.
Influence is totally irrelevant to free will. Even if your brain were the only thing that existed, it's running on its own. YOU are not a thing in terms of causal chains. Your consciousness observes, and the brain just does. What could you possibly do differently other than that which you actually do? The brain is governed by prior events the exact same way the rest of the universe physically does.
@@Zanuka Not trying to be dismissive. If you’re interested in cortical layers, then you should research it. There is far more than can be covered in a TH-cam comment.
@@bboyagua You do exist to your brain and your thoughts are part of the causal chains. They are a part of the feedback process. I like to liken our awareness to reading a filled out rubric. How that information is read and passed along matters a lot. Half of what we are is the choice of how we read those rubrics to ourselves. As we look at the repeated networks in our minds, we can see that rubric effect over and over - especially in the neocortex. That means not only do we have freewill, to some extent because real life isn’t a dream, but we have several levels of freewill which get repeated thousands and thousands of times. The trick is first defining freewill, then looking for it. If you think freewill is the ability to fly and shoot lasers from your eyes on command, then of course we don’t have it. If you think freewill means you have influence over the process, then it’s there and a lot of energy is put in to defend that influence.
I agree our minds are constrained in ways we dont think about, but that's not the same as saying there is no free will. I would love to know his guess for why minds evolved in the first place if they don't do anything.
Yeah. I suppose Sapolsky is a scientist so he might say that the mind evolved through natural selection. I think he is saying that everything the mind does can be explained in terms of chemical/electrical processes and external factors, so from a certain point of view it's almost like there is no "self" even though that "self" is central to our identity and everything we do and experience.
@@ProfoundFamiliarity he concedes that our minds make choices beyond the mechanical electrochemical processes afforded to say prokaryotes, but he is saying our minds are so constrained by our environment there is no real choice. i can imagine our environment constrains us in surprising ways, but concluding our choices cant change the environment whatsoever is bizarre. im not sure what point there is to even having a mind in his view.
If by mind, do you mean sense of self/ego? Because I don’t believe that is a product of evolution at all. I believe the sense of self/ego is an adaptation that occurs on an “individual” level in response to living in a way that is totally antithetical to how we evolved to live. If we lived as we have evolved to live, we would have no sense of self as separate from those around us. This is probably impossible to imagine for us, but the way I imagine it would be is that looking at another human would feel like we feel when we look in the mirror, only we’d probably feel even more connected to that other human than we do to ourselves when we look in the mirror. With ego/mind, everyone is a potential threat to us, so we can never feel genuinely safe.
@@katieandnick4113 this is how I imagine the hive mind of a bee or ant to be. I think we are social animals but that human minds do not usually extend beyond our own bodies. I think there is individualism in our society and a lot of value is placed on individual freedom. There’s a great documentary about that called The Century of the Self.
For consciousness to evolve it likely would have to confer some advantage. This indicates free will becasue consciousness would not have evolved if it did't have some evolutionary advantage over what could have been achieved through determinsitic non-conscious processes.
How does the presence of consciousness allow for free will? Free will is completely illusory and is a magical nonsensical concept. There is no real or imaginary world where it can exist. It literally makes no sense and is based entirely off of an illusory feeling that you are the thinker, the personality, and the decider.
This is where scientific thesis diverges from spiritual thesis. Dr Sapolsky's take is very humanistic. I believe in a soul/spirit, an inner being. I believe in it, because I AM that. I experience my human life with that knowing every day. I know I came to this planet with aspects that were totally imbued in my being before I took my first breath in this matrix.
@@estudiopersonal1020 Isn't the discussion more about the semantics of the expression "free will" though? Can't you choose to change your enviornment? And if you're anwser is "What influenced you to change into another enviornment was the previous one + you're life experiences", then yes, nothing is free will, because that's pretty much what shapes you as a person, nature + nurture. Personally, if you have more than one option and the liberty to choose one of them, that's "free will".
@@BlackiJ11 that would be more or less my answer yes, i understand what youre saying, but your way of chosing and your choices are still determined by something that is not you
@@estudiopersonal1020 Yes, and I get that. But I jus't can't understand why we would define it like that, because it's a given. It'd be like saying one has no financial freedom if they can't afford to live in the most expensive city in the world. Basically, "free will" could be defined in the sense of doing something voluntarilty, and not necesseraly independent of any external factors. I do agree that we are absolutely influenced and shaped by our biology and external factors
Sapolsky does not even bother to carefully define what he means by free will. Yes almost everything is not determined by our conscious self, but not every single thing.
@@DimitriTheBarbarian There is probably nothing after we die, there is zero proof of life after death. My point is its WAY too extreme to to say we have zero free will. We have a little least, but not much, and not zero.
Wow. It seems like people making consequential decisions should only be allowed to do so when glucose and hormone monitors report that they are in a right chemical state to do so.
I'll frequently delay decisions or actions to give myself some time to consider things as thoroughly and in as balanced a way as I can - often means I'll hold off on some big decision until after I've had something to eat. Lol - I'll also check to make sure my dentist has eaten, too! 😀
HA! Gotta start somewhere. But there already are control systems that are trying to factor in these fluctuations in the human part of a human-machine interface in the management of complex machines (sensor systems monitoring heartbeat, respiration, etc. for test pilots, for example). They're not intended to take away anyone's independence (i.e., "free will"-a dreadful 19th-century term). They're to help people make better decisions by alerting them to inner physical states that they'd probably deny out of embarrassment-like people who get behind the wheel when they're too tired or intoxicated to drive. A car that senses that human state can disable the starter (and even summon a ride-hailing service). That sensor data (and the processor interpreting it) seems like better grounds for a consequential decision than "free will" (i.e., no one can tell me what to do).
You obviously chose your parents, the country you were born in, your environment, every event that ever happened to you, you obviously know the state of your brain down to every neuron and neurotransmitter and moreover you can control every firing of every of your neurons to your liking to produce the conviction that metaphysics and free will is supposedly obvious.
Free will is an ambiguous term that covers 2 different factors (1) can we make choices (2) is the universe deterministic. So - clearly we make choices (you can choose what meal to have in a restaurant). Now, some people would say that choice is shaped by genetics, environment, previous decisions, so it is completely predictable i.e. there is no free will. HOWEVER, we do NOT make optimal choices.. we purposely experiment. If not, we would never try new meals. So, what we do is occasionally try something completely unusual, to benefit from learning new information (maybe the shrimp is the best menu choice, but we wouldn't know unless we try something unexpected or different). THUS our choices aren't as deterministic as we may think. As far as, is the universe deterministic.. maybe. The problem is, chaos (ie. that small events can result in large changes in outcome) does occur, so even if the universe is deterministic, it is impossible to accurately predict it.. collecting the data would not only be inhibitively difficult and time consuming to get a good prediction, it would also affect the outcome. The question then become, if the universe is deterministic but we cannot possibly predict the future, does it even matter if the universe is deterministic, because effectively it can't be accurately modeled i.e. deterministic or not, the universe is actually the same and so that concept has no value.
I always wanted to go to stanford, listening to behave was like getting a fabulous course there! now Im digesting "Determined" and this is great and helpful. These books have been so helpful and comforting! Myheart is full listening to your conversation, both of you such beautiful people. Thank you for doing this.
Everything on this topic has already been said by Schopenhauer: "You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want."
not so. We can change our environment to avoid triggers that spark desire, and learn more about our desires and what they will get us.
I used to hate oatmeal and would rather eat Pizza and ice cream for breakfast. Then I learned more and gained experience and my desires changed to enjoy oatmeal for breakfast.
If I don't want to want something, stay away from it, completely, or as much as possible, so that the triggers we face are small and few and our more mature desires can overpower our instinctive desires
@@christianlassen1577 You are using a desire, to justify a desire to not have a temptation. You want two things, and one want outweighed the other as an influence on your actions.
Schopenhauer is the only person I've ever connected with, truly. He understands. Slept on unfortunately and misunderstood.
Have you ever heard of desire?
The goal of life to test people
Did they really want to be good even of that means doing what you don't like, same be patient and thinks out our control
Happy life for you
Only partially true. I agree with the first commenter. You can acquire a taste. However, deeper desires like sex are harder to deny.
irony is that same people who say everything is predetermined by God and every thing is God's plan are the same people who think there's free will 😂
Yeah, my parents dismissed me when I pointed out the flaw of that logic. Their god gives these laws such as thou shall not kill or thou shall not steal, that would allude to the idea of free will. But if everything is predetermined, some people are bound to steal and kill, making those rule’s meaningless if such people are doomed from the start
@@Robust-d7u Faith is what let's them turn off thinking about it any further. The moment they are presented with a contradiction in their beliefs they will fall back on faith internally to protect those beliefs.
@@christopherchilton-smith6482 I recognized this, because they were conditioned to uncritcally take in this knowledge of how the world works since childhood without considering alternatives (against free will) being such a pivitol part of their ego or identity that defines who they are as people and what they live for. Many in my family blast gospel music to cope with the negatives of life and fall deeper in their supposed worship and try to force those beliefs on me. As an observer, I'm aware of all of this, but knowing how they'd react, I can't do or say anything
Free will is the gift humankind has been given that allows each being to freely choose their ideas and what they wish to believe or not believe.
Our ability, through the choices we make, "to create new circumstances and environment, relationships, achievements or failures, prosperity or poverty."
There is no way that man may escape what he thinks, says or does [i.e., the fruits of his free will]-for he is born of the Divine Creative Consciousness power and is likewise creative in his imagination.
@@edgarmorales4476 Those are empty proclamations, there's little to substantiate them.
The world is either determined or determined with some randomness thrown and that's just where science is right now. In either case your brain is first developed by the deterministic biological factors and then shaped by deterministic environmental factors.
No amount of randomness thrown into the mix frees your will.
Anyone can stand outside of science and proclaim anything just as you have done.
"You have to protect people from incompetent people" what a truth that is
Take away the vote
"there is nothing worse than ignorance in action" - Goethe. Unfortunately most ppl never past teenager stage of their life in the 70s and some of those ppl run countries - Bernardo Kastrup
That's a social function. When someone isn't up to a job, they should not get promoted. That's how we do it now.
It's because we live in a stratified class society instead of a meritocracy.
this sounds like an excuse for tyranny. he's not entirely wrong, but he's not entirely right either, and the half truths are often the most dangerous
So glad the YT algorithm put this in my feed. Watching Dr. Sapolsky's Stanford lectures was such great infotainment many years ago. I'd watch any interview or talk from this man.
ah so true, me as well!
must have been 10 or 11 years ago on youtube. great great series. still unmatched to this day.
and so compelling and interesting.
I watched many of his Stanford lectures one night on LSD and from there I went on a 3 week binge. The way he explains complex ideas is so excitable and concise. It reminds of all of my favorite teachers in high school and college.
yet no one talks about eternal torture if consciousness is infinite/can replicate forever in infinite universe/survives death!!!!
@@Mortepheusi think they meant binging on the lectures..
Same here.
@@Mortepheustwo days is in a row is a waste. I did a whole year macrodosing just to see what would happen. It was quite expensive.
His explanations are quite empty. He simply doesn't address better understandings of the phenomena. Determinism can say nothing of my decision to do anything. The upper boundary conditions of quantum reality are particles. Spin, momentum, mass, simply do not say anything about the level of organism-controlled action. There simply is no quantum story that can make sense of high level functioning. There is a reason Sapolsky can never demonstrate a deterministic chain from the level of quanta to the level of molecules (let alone to the level of volitional acts). He's a one trick pony. One trick is all that horse can do. Geezus, how many times is he going to post the same assertion video, there is no free will? It is almost comical.
The interviewer, Robert Chapman Smith, is excellent in this interview with Dr. Sapolsky. I had never seen one of his interviews, but I must congratulate him and Big Think on this video!
Agreed. I had never seen or heard of him before. He's great. and asked wonderful questions. But it's hard to go wrong with Sapolsky.
interesting, i had the complete opposite opinion. not that he did anything wrong, it just felt extremely unnatural and uncomfortable. it felt like he was reading from chatgpt.
The biggest problem with the intellectual society debating ‘free will’ is that they seldom talk about ‘what is free will’ actually is.
If one has free will or not depends on the definition of free will.
I came to the comments to say this. It's so important we agree on or are at least aware of the definitions of the concepts central to what's being discussed.
Underrated comment. The motivations that cause us to make certain decisions is, in fact, us. Our self, our will.
exactly, the way he describes that we don't have free will says nothing about what constitutes free will or what would free will look like if it were possible. By the definition, it seems there is no such thing as free will as there is always something that happens before. Its all cause and effect...which to some degree seems accurate but i don't think either cause and effect or free will. There doesn't seem to be a reason why you can't have both at the same time.
It comes down to physics, atoms. Their theory is based on the idea that we are just atoms moving according to the laws of physics. It is probably correct. But it is disturbing to think of life that way. We should not do so.
He did explain free will, he mentioned: it's about choice and having alternatives
The assumption of free will is the assumption that we are independent from the others. It's the assumption that there is a 'real me' making decisions, independent of outside factors.
👍👍👍
It's really asking questions wrong. The concept of "making a choice" already assumed agency. But are we really "making the choice"? Or is it merely the outcome of a natural process (despite being highly complicated)?
Well put
This seems to agree with Alan Watts, who said “I know Alan Watts is just a big show” 😂 Seriously, the sense the world revolves around us from our vantage point is the impetus for I, and your name is just a personification (mask wearing) to differentiate your I from another’s. Crazy stuff …
Once upon a time, when a child misbehaved in a tribe or a village, the whole group accepted responsibility for the crafting of that individual. Clearly, that kid did not get some of their needs met, if they are misbehaving so badly. Everyone was responsible for the kid. It takes a village to raise a child.
In modern Western society, individualism removes responsibility for others, and rejects the fact that others crafted each individual.
It's all about "you". A kid turns 18 and declared "I" am me, and "I" made me, and "I" am independent. They don't credit the structures which rewarded them.
No one is independent.
People who are narcissistic or otherwise don't understand that their "self" was made by a socially collective environmental causation, tend to de-value society in favour of individualism.
The individualism of neo-classical economics and the resulting culture, promotes the idea that if you are rich and powerful, you did that yourself, excluding the influences and circumstances other people produced to make you what you are.
When the successful, the leadership, the wealthy, reject the idea that their success is built on a society, the society is denigrated, and discarded in thought and policy.
Now we have ended up with a scenario where those who have not had their needs met by a system built by and for the successful, are taught to blame themselves for being inferiour. This suits the powerful. The individual blames themselves, for the lack of social support and belonging.
Free will is tied up with religious concepts which don't make sense, and socio-economic systems built by and for the "winners" who fail to understand that they could not exist as they are, without the group which made them.
Individualism is obtuse, and so is free will, and so is "independence".
The "real me" is a product of all the factors which made me, not merely my experience of having agency.
19:16 "Everytime you're making a decission about why someone just did something, including yourself, stop and question it and think about it a second time and fifth time and tenth time and as part of that decission because you can't imagine what the world is like for that person is part of that decission, because their face doesn't register with yours as much as in uses face does there. Just be sceptical and think again and again and especially when you're tired and wanna make a fast attribution."
I wanna hug this man so much.
I already overthink stuff, dnt need to do this at all. U won’t be able to find out the answer
Yeah it's the S1 versus S2 thinking of Kahneman... how the brain works... here's to hoping everyone has enough prefrontal cortex capacity to do this; because hey, we're all created equal (not) => hey!
Skeptical
Yeah, overthink every single aspect of life, every single action of you and others, that is a really solid advice if you're trying to speedrun suicide.
Except you have no free will to do any of that, right? 😂🙄
I have watched quite a few interviews with Robert Sapolsky, but this one was one of the best. You asked all the questions that I always wanted to ask him about free will, except you did it better.
Very good interview
I humbly prefer mr Sapolsky's lectures over his interviews. Here on YT is a whole playlist of lectures on behavioral psychology and they're a work of art. Clearly refined over decades of teaching. They are very accessible and watch like documentaries rather than the dry lectures most of us are used to.
Worth remembering that in psychology there is a huge replicability crisis with many experiments. For example an experiment on delayed gratification involving leaving a child alone with a marshmallow seemed to indicate that poor children inherited less self control and couldn't delay gratification. However the experiment failed to control for the fact that the poor children were more likely to be hungry during the experiment. There are plenty of videos on this platform about the replicability crisis that are worth viewing.
Indeed. Most "controlled" experiments are anything but. They never observe the full list of factors or biases due to subject selection.
people tend to look at psychology and sociology as branches of science that compare with biology, physics or chemistry, but the chasms of evidence are enormous. the big bang theory and evolution have far more evidence backing them up than literally any idea ever proposed in psych or soc. it's not even close.
So how does this work with free will then?
NUEROPSYCH not Psychology FYI.
It really doesn't matter much in regards to the experiments. The concept of free will never made any sense. It can't hold up to an ounce of scrutiny. People don't make choices in a vacuum (outside of nature and nurture). Behaviors are always traceable to biological factors and conditioning.
If anything, free will needs to be tested for validjty, not the other way around. The burden of proof is on fantastical claims that have no logical precedent.
Even the book he wrote was not his free will at all.
Even this comment and mine... 😅 Owing to super-determinism of quantum mechanics, this and everything before and after, and around was determined 13.8 billion years ago.
Because there was no need for it
lmao
Correct
He would agree.
Fascinating. It seems as much an anthropological proposition as a neurological one if you start from that fact that when laypeople talk about free will, they're talking about a value, a meaning (independence) more than about a faculty. No wonder so many rush to defend it. To avoid falling into the usual feud that discussions of value lead to, we should be able to talk about the ability to choose without reference to value. Better yet, we need to talk about why that's such a high value for us and what self-identities we think it forms.
From my limited perspective, the human animal has two fundamental needs (before we get to Maslow's Hierarchy). The first need is agency. We need to feel we have control (see Matrix 1-3 movies - LOL) over our existence. The second need is the need for connection. When either of these needs is not met, then the trouble begins.
@@AVADAMS1967Maslows pyramid has proofed to be wrong
@@florentin4061 the model is incomplete, not wrong. There's a difference.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a determinist who did not believe in free will. He believed that specific causes must have specific, nonrandom effects, and that everything is determined by forces over which we have no control. Einstein once wrote, “If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord”. He also believed that free will was an illusion.
Everyone likes to infer things that Einstein did not say.
You are conflating his comments on physics as a metaphysical statement. I would argue (having read much of his writings on sociological issues) that he would in fact assert the opposite.
@@FranzBiscuit More specifically, Einstein was addressing something very specific, which is the Copenhagen Interpretation in QM. And he definitely did not say what is claimed very inarticulately here, ever.
@@kakistocracyusa Precisely. His "God does not play dice" statement was a response to the assertion by the "Copenhagenists" that a given system is in a superposition of states which then "collapse" upon observation. Einstein understood the usefulness of the probabilistic aspect of the equations, he just didn't feel a need to introduce unnecessary "spooky" interpretations. And I whole-heartedly agree. To this day wave-function collapse has STILL not been verified. (Nor has the tech that depends on its existence, quantum computers, ever come into fruition.)
Ive loved Dr Sapolsky for a long time. His way of engagement during lectures/classes. Easily one of the best intellectuals of our time
He's a typical physicalist/absolutist. His entire argument is: since our will isn't absolutely free, it's not even partially free. Which is both true, and not true. Nothing in the universe is free, and it can't be. Everything that exists, is subject to everything that exists. Our "free will" is literally dependent, and it is dependent upon various externalities that appear to be out of our control. It is dependent upon multiplicity. "Free will" is little more than the ability to form a subjective translation of the language of reality. Free will is dynamics..
@@dieselphiend Free will is not important. What is important is that we do not know the future; thus, we can think whatever we want about free will, which doesn't matter. It is like watching a movie you care about for the first time, it will keep you on the edge of your seat (or sanity), especially if you can die or suffer in it. Furthermore, the only way for free will to exist is for infinity to exist, and then nothing can be truly determined at the highest resolution.
@@dpactootle2522 It does not matter that we do not know the future. Does that stop us from tilling the soil? Does it stop you from learning? Does it stop you from attempting to predict it? Are you often not wrong? I predict the future all the time. Infinity has no choice but to "exist". It just beyond conception.
@@dieselphiend Here is a thought: if we knew it all we would be Gods capable of creating and destroying worlds at will. Do we want that kind of knowledge and power? If you knew it all, would you be bored to death already and would that be equivalent to eternal torture? If you knew it all you would probably create a new universe where it would be impossible to know it all, and only then you would have a purpose and something interesting to wake up to each day. If you were God, you would do that, you would create "infinity", which by definition is "unknowable".
@@dpactootle2522 Yes. Continuity is probably an emergent property of duality. There's simply nothing to experience without multiplicity.
I could listen professor Sapolsky forever and never get bored. He might be the coolest grandpa ever
for real
Sapolsky is Archimedes and I am a fruit fly that will always watch whatever he says.
If only he would stop talking about ants in this context.
The average ant enters its life as specialized as possible and would therefore have the least imaginable benefit from anything even remotely resembling this so-called free will thing.
he was an uncle before being a grandpa, watch his earlier lessons (stanford classes)
He might be one of the smartest people alive. If you haven’t read “Behave”, I highly recommend it.
This is actually very simple to follow but the ego will fight tooth and nail to deny it.
I choose not to believe you! Ha, gotchu!!
So we must release all the criminals we convicted because they have no free will. Therefore, they are not guilty. Right? Wrong?
@@ron_peIn one sense that’s true of course we won’t do that because they’re still a threat to us but yeah, makes ya think.
@@ron_pe So you didn't watch the video.
@@Greg-xi8yx You didn't hear the part about "quarantining"?
The professor seems to equate influence with cause. In that equation, you would have to be completely free of outside influences to have free will. Therefore, free will can not exist. The professor acknowledges that we can make choices and decisions. But, to say the things which influence those choices are actually causes of those choices is a bridge too far. It would seem more accurate to say that we all have free will but our free will is limited by our biology (we can not fly) and influenced by our environment.
That's not very free then. If all our "choices" are limited by biology, physics etc, then why even entertain the concept?
@@jamesmillar5951 Why entertain the notion of driving when you are limited by the speed limit and the path of the road? Does a train not exist simply because it is limited to the tracks? Everything has limits. We shouldn't expect free will to be any different.
@@billmcleangunsmith because I'm not disputing things existing despite laws governing them. I'm disputing the idea that humans are somehow the one exception to determinism
The issue here is that a lot of people are stuck in black and white thinking. Freedom and structure are an interplay more like the yin yang concept. One cannot exist without the other. Several people have commented as if- if you are not 100 % unbound you must have no freedom at all, which is just black and white extreme thinking. If you were completely unbound (from time, space, having a body, etc.) you would not exist to experience freedom.
I happen to have attended his lectures on *Behavioral Science* while in college (I live in Kenya ) a few times. Great guy full of intellect
Great Video Professor Robert! Below are the Timestamped Summary using ChatWithPDF:
- 00:00 🧠 Evolution sculpted the frontal cortex to be influenced by environment, not genetics, shaping behavior.
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- 02:40 📚 Dr. Sapolsky discusses his book Determined to emphasize the lack of free will despite conscious choices.
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- 05:25 🔄 Distributed causality explains how various factors influence decisions, from brain activity to environment.
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- 07:58 🌐 Distributed causality encompasses a wide range of influences, from hormones to cultural ancestry.
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- 10:54 🧠 Phineas Gage's case exemplifies how brain damage affects behavior, showcasing concentrated causality.
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- 13:35 ⏳ Immediate factors like hunger, stress, and past trauma impact decision-making and perception in a fraction of a second.
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- 16:11 🔄 Judges' parole decisions are influenced by factors like meal times, showcasing the impact of physiological states on judgments.
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- 18:55 🌍 Cultures shape child-rearing practices, influencing brain development and societal values through generations.
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- 21:23 🔄 Society plays a critical role in shaping individual brains to replicate cultural values and beliefs.
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- 24:17 🔄 Emergence explains how simple elements collectively create complex behaviors and consciousness.
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- 26:57 🧠 Emergence cannot account for free will as it requires individual components to function differently against their nature.
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- 29:57 🔄 Emergence is a consequence of collective numbers and interactions, leading to emergent properties like conformity.
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- 32:37 🌍 Cultural differences in child-rearing practices reflect societal values and influence neural patterns in children's brains.
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- 35:08 🔄 Genetic and environmental factors influence brain development, with the frontal cortex evolving for delayed maturation to learn societal norms.
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- 37:53 🌍 Cultural differences in child-rearing practices shape societal values and neural patterns, impacting behavior and decision-making.
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- 40:20 🧠 Ancestral backgrounds influence cultural practices and societal norms, leading to diverse behaviors and belief systems.
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- 42:56 🌍 Cultural practices, such as child-rearing methods, reflect societal values and impact brain development over generations.
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- 45:45 🔄 Society plays a crucial role in wiring brains to replicate cultural values, beliefs, and behaviors through child-rearing practices.
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- 48:33 🧠 Understanding distributed causality helps individuals recognize the influences behind their behaviors and decisions.
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- 51:02 🔄 Quarantining dangerous individuals without blame or punishment protects society while addressing root causes of harmful behavior.
Good Girl! 👌
🐟 11. FREE-WILL Vs DETERMINISM:
Just as the autonomous beating of one's heart is governed by one's genes (such as the presence of a congenital heart condition), and the present-life conditioning of the heart (such as myocardial infarction as a consequence of the consumption of excessive fats and oils, or heart palpitations due to severe emotional distress), each and EVERY thought and action is governed by our genes and environmental conditioning.
This teaching is possibly the most difficult concept for humans to accept, because we refuse to believe that we are not the author of our thoughts and actions. From the appearance of the pseudo-ego (one’s inaccurate conception of oneself) at the age of approximately two and a half, we have been constantly conditioned by our parents, teachers, and society, to believe that we are solely responsible for our thoughts and deeds. This deeply-ingrained belief is EXCRUCIATINGLY difficult to abandon, which is possibly the main reason why there are very few persons extant who are spiritually-enlightened, or at least who are liberated from the five manifestations of mental suffering explained elsewhere in this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, since suffering (as opposed to pain) is predicated solely upon the erroneous belief in free-will.
Free-will is usually defined as the ability for a person to make a conscious decision to do otherwise, that is to say, CHOOSE to have performed an action other than what one has already done, if one had been given the opportunity to do so. To make it perfectly clear, if one, for example, is handed a restaurant menu with several dishes listed, one could decide that one dish is equally-desirable as the next dish, and choose either option. If humans truly possessed freedom of will, then logically speaking, a person who adores cats and detests dogs, ought to be able to suddenly switch their preferences at any given point in time, or even voluntarily pause the beating of his or her own heart!
So, in both of the aforementioned examples, there is a pre-existing preference (at a given point in time) for one particular dish or pet. Even if a person liked cats and dogs EQUALLY, and one was literally forced to choose one over the other, that choice isn’t made freely, but entirely based upon the person’s genetic code plus the individual's up-to-date conditioning. True equality is non-existent in the phenomenal sphere.
The most common argument against determinism is that humans (unlike other animals) have the ability to choose what they can do, think or feel. First of all, many species of (higher) mammals also make choices. For instance, a cat can see two birds and choose which one to prey upon, or choose whether or not to play with a ball that is thrown its way, depending on its conditioning (e.g. its mood). That choices are made is indisputable, but those choices are dependent ENTIRELY upon one’s genes and conditioning. There is no third factor involved on the phenomenal plane. On the noumenal level, thoughts and deeds are in accordance with the preordained “Story of Life”.
Read previous chapters of “F.I.S.H” to understand how life is merely a dream in the “mind of the Divine” and that human beings are, essentially, that Divinity in the form of dream characters. Chapter 08, specifically, explains how an action performed in the present is the result of a chain of causation, all the way back to the earliest-known event in our apparently-real universe (the so-called “Big Bang” singularity).
At this point, it should be noted that according to reputable geneticists, it is possible for genes to mutate during the lifetime of any particular person. However, that phenomenon would be included under the “conditioning” aspect. The genes mutate according to whatever conditioning is imposed upon the human organism. It is simply IMPOSSIBLE for a person to use sheer force of will to change their own genetic code. Essentially, “conditioning” includes everything that acts upon a person from conception.
University studies in recent years have demonstrated, by the use of hypnosis and complex experimentation, that CONSCIOUS volition is either unnecessary for a decision to be enacted upon or (in the case of hypnotic testing) that free-will choices are completely superfluous to actions. Because scientific research into free-will is a recent phenomenon, it is recommended that the reader search online for the latest findings.
If any particular volitional act was not caused by the preceding thoughts and actions, then the only alternative explanation would be due to RANDOMNESS. Many quantum physicists claim that subatomic particles can randomly move in space, but true randomness cannot occur in a deterministic universe. Just as the typical person believes that two motor vehicles colliding together was the result of pure chance (therefore the term “accident”), quantum physicists are unable to see that the seeming randomness of quantum particles are, in fact, somehow determined by each and every preceding action which led-up to the act in question. It is a known scientific fact that a random number generator cannot exist, since no computational machine or software program is able to make the decision to generate a number at “random”.
We did not choose which deoxyribonucleic acid our biological parents bequeathed to us, and most all the conditions to which we were exposed throughout our lives, yet we somehow believe that we are fully-autonomous beings, with the ability to feel, think and behave as we desire. The truth is, we cannot know for certain what even our next thought will be. Do we DECIDE to choose our thoughts and deeds? Not likely. Does an infant choose to learn how to walk or to begin speaking, or does it just happen automatically, according to nature? Obviously, the toddler begins to walk and to speak according to its genes (some children are far more intelligent and verbose, and more agile than others, depending on their genetic code) and according to all the conditions to which he or she has been exposed so far (some parents begin speaking to their kids even while they are in the womb, or expose their offspring to highly-intellectual dialogues whilst still in the cradle).
Even those decisions/choices that we seem to make are entirely predicated upon our genes and conditioning, and cannot be free in any sense of the word. To claim that one is the ULTIMATE creator of one’s thoughts and actions is tantamount to believing that one created one’s very being. If a computer program or artificially-intelligent robot considered itself to be the cause of its activity, it would seem absurd to the average person. Yet, that is precisely what virtually every person who has ever lived mistakenly believes of their own thoughts and deeds.
The IMPRESSION that we have free-will can be considered a “Gift of Life” or “God’s Grace”, otherwise, we may be resentful of our lack of free-will, since, unlike other creatures, we humans have the intelligence to comprehend our own existence. Even an enlightened sage, who has fully realized that he is not the author of his thoughts and actions, is not conscious of his lack of volition at every moment of his day. At best, he may recall his lack of freedom during those times where suffering (as opposed to mere pain) begins to creep-in to the mind or intellect. Many, if not most scientists, particularly academic philosophers and physicists, accept determinism to be the most logical and reasonable alternative to free-will, but it seems, at least anecdotally, that they rarely (if ever) live their lives conscious of the fact that their daily actions are fated.
Cont...
my god, thank you
THANK YOU SO MUCH
Thank you
Can you suggest me some more podcast on psychology
@@THE_NEO_DAWN I find Dr. Ramani is quite interesting: narcissism, psychopathy and other anti-social behaviors. However, I think she could use some anthropology.
Speaking of which
1972 quote from anthropology (translated from French) "we did not evolve to live in the societies we have erected.
We evolved to live in tribes and cooperate for the whole tribe as those were most successful at adapting/surviving.
It’s good to be here to be part of this lucky community that are watching this. I’ve read some amazing comments that contributed greatly to my mental model. When we go one level higher than being an individual, having a positive impact on others starts to make much more sense. We can’t praise ourselves for supporting others when we think there is no free will but as a feeling when this is scaled it has a lot of real positive impact on the society and the environment. It’s like good and bad is fighting on a philosophical level and we are just small executioners.
I observed myself slowly being influenced by this presentation. I don’t have to dig too deeply to understand how I became the kind of person whose mind could be changed regarding this topic. Thank you for that fascinating journey of the mind.
Wasn’t expecting the interviewer to be so informed and succinct. I’m pleasantly surprised.
Oh, you mean because he's black he can't be knowledgeable?
I mean, do you just ever look at someone and just immediately think they're stupid?
The notion of free will presents itself as a complex and multifaceted topic, often shrouded in ambiguity. It oscillates between moments of apparent mastery over our choices and times when everything seems to spiral into disarray beyond our control. However, an intriguing possibility emerges when we embrace an open-minded perspective, untethered from the influence of cultural norms, socio-economic pressures, political currents, and the effects of substances like food, drugs, or alcohol, as well as the weight of past memories. In this liberated state of mind, the decision-making process takes on a newfound clarity, resembling the exercise of free will. It feels as though we're navigating our lives with a greater sense of autonomy and purpose. Yet, amidst this semblance of freedom, there remains a poignant realization that our capacity for true free will is inherently limited. Despite our best efforts, certain aspects of our existence seem to elude our control, reminding us of the intricate interplay between choice and circumstance in shaping the trajectory of our lives.
Well put. And we can certainly improve our awareness. Of both the external circumstances and internally, the subconscious. We will never escape these factors completely, either by nature or because they serve us. What we can do is keep our eyes open and not let them possess us. To walk this path is to walk the path of self discovery and growth.
I know the guy who wrote it 😏
The truth is nuanced the why of anything is the most important to anyone
Cope
For me, there's no freewill. For the past decade I've shifted from complete freedom into deterministic value. Life is Math doing it course. It's no use to interpret the equation, we just ride along with equation. Even psychology is rooted back to math. Wea re just numbers, and it gives me sense of Liberation through deterministic outlook. It's a Paradoxical world view, but when I see the world as deterministic equation, then I have no hustle to judge others anymore. Because they're also just a correspondent from previous correspondences.
While watching his Stanford lectures i never got Spinoza out of my mind and his position on free will, it's crazy to think about. Thank you for the interview
Having no control over anything and therefore no free will feels weirdly liberating. Be happy living your life controlling the small things you can when you can, appreciating being alive. ❤
The world is grasping onto victimhood more now than ever before. The idea that it is freeing you of guilt and giving it to others is a false one. Gaining the approval of others of like mind seems to give us freedom and innocence. That false idea is limiting us rather than setting us free. Being responsible is the way to joy.
@@robertdouglas8895 knowing there's no free Will liberales and also gives you a great deal of responsabilities, coz you know you can shape the will of others, and not even interacting with them, but just by being in the same environment
@@estudiopersonal1020 All minds are connected. When we forgive others, all receive the freedom and joy of seeing everyone as free.
I wonder if that's bc humans were programmed with slave DNA
I agree that accepting lack of agency is liberating and it has also increased my gratitude for my life and empathy and sympathy for others. I am more humble and forgiving. This knowledge adds a whole new level of meaning to "walk a mile in my shoes". No free will does not mean no responsibility. Quite the opposite. Now I know how my actions affect others in ways that I was totally unaware of before. And I make sure I eat regularly. 😁
About 20 years ago I read an article in DER SPIEGEL (a German quality magazine) about what were then new research results in the field of neuroscience.
A Japanese research team also used results of a study from the USA to help with their work. They eventually discovered a bias in it and contacted their colleagues in the USA. They met and found out:
Before the so-called free will is registered in the neocortex, a kind of ignition takes place in the brain stem. In addition to a few important observations, it was the regularity that proved to be the decisive factor: the ignition from the "unconscious" could not be an uncorrelated coincidence.
What was most astonishing for everyone was the fact about the time of the ignition or the time it took for the area in the neocortex to receive the message from the brain stem.
It was not milliseconds. It took a full seven seconds.
The researchers described the groundbreaking result as follows:
Free will is an illusion - but a very useful one. ;-)
This caveman-level phenomenology is what the poor, dumb field of "Neuroscience" passes off as "science". It is clown-level. Only biologists are poorly-educated and delusional enough to think that this feeble experimentation describes consciousness. Sopolsky's narcissism allows grand pseudoscientific declarations that are based on hand-waving generalities. Hard science it aint.
Very interesting, when I was an A-Level student and studied Religious Studies which included modules on ethics and philosophy, I did a 360 flip from we all have free will to free will is just an illusion.
I'm now a teacher and I can say that I put more effort in the papers I mark first, we also tell the students, make it easy for the examer to mark, if they're tired, they're less likely to look for marks in ambiguous or messy work. Also I care about my students so I will spend a few minutes pouring over a question to see if I can give them at least one or two marks whereas an examiner in the GCSE will not be as invested in their grade.
360 means you landed where you srarted.
@@MblCJluTEJlb *180
Sapolsky does a lot of heavy lifting for Big Think. Class act.
Well, I suppose so. I guess you understand Family Guy this way. Gotta do the dance of life.
Why did you write your book? I imagined the answer ‘I have no free will, what do I say?’. Of course this was not the answer. Entertaining and engaging as always. Having read Prof Sapolsky’s books one thing that keeps striking me is how much we influence others. Robert Sapolsky even without free will has changed me radically. I often think, had I not met a certain person on a certain day, everything would have been different for my opinion, opportunities and so on.
Brilliant! I had to reply to your comment... I have NO free will. haha.
I suggest that he wrote the book because realising that we have no free will we should change the way we behave in terms of apportioning blame and rewarding people. That is, he wants to influence (cause) others to think along those lines hoping for a positive reaction.
@@sjoerd1239 Spot on. Now we can influence others and so one. I suppose it is about positive memes.
Butterfly effect
@@BobSacamano666 🦋 Try 'Interesting times' by Terry Pratchett. I think the audiobook is on you tube. It is one of my favorite books.
free will is the sensation that one could have done otherwise (regardless of if that is true). it is a feature that allows one to freeze and hold onto probability maps that we once considered (but didn't choose) and reference those maps against the results of the actual decision.
Very well put.
What his definition of free will? We never went over that. When he says we have options and choices but that's not free will I'm confused on his definition
Is everything you are and do a direct result of a choice you made
His idea of free will is some part of the brain being able to make a spontaneous choice that wasn't pre-determined by all the previous events that led up to that choice, including your current mood (in his book he mentions a study of judges who on average would give parole much less often if it had been hours since their last meal), your environment, your social circle, your childhood traumas, the conditions of the womb you grew in, and all the genetics and evolution that went into giving you the brain that you currently have. Essentially his argument is that the subconscious part of the brain makes choices for us based on all of these factors and then we feel the illusion of making the choice ourselves. So to disprove his idea you would have to show a neuron firing that wasn't directly influenced by another neuron, and another neuron before that; because anything else wouldn't be free will, it'd be just another in a long series of pre-determined, predictable (with enough understanding of the brain; which we don't have yet) series of events.
@@whateverusername I agree our minds are constrained in ways we dont think about, but that's not the same as saying there is no free will. It seems closer to saying something like: thinking about teleporting wont make you teleport. So what? we already know there are constraints on free will.
I dont see how individual neurons firing proves or disproves anything. Thinking involves billions of neurons in parallel. Nobody is arguing about whether a single nerve cell on its own has free will.
People who make these absolute conclusions are so full of ego and so limited in their thinking even though they sound intelligent the fact they arrived to that point. He can’t prove or disprove his theory, it’s the same argument he’s using to disprove it is the same as the one that disproves his own argument, correlation doesn’t equal causation. We don’t actually know for sure that’s how it works, we can’t know, it’s impossible
@IAmZanderStewart Like gravity? You know there's that pesky preponderance of supporting evidence coupled with the complete absence of contradictory evidence right?
An oldster now and it is crazy to come to the point where I no longer think free will is true. Oddly, it makes me feel more compassion for certain types of people. It then seems like the "I" is "just awareness" and then there all these thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions of which we are aware... or something.
Or the illusion of awareness as a conscious being. We fundamentally fear the fact that we are merely a mortal reactive machines that produce deterministic outcomes.
You type this comment as if you have a choice to feel bad for people
I think you nailed it and that's spot on
@@frankxu4795 That's the thing though. The experience of feelings still has to exists. The only thing anyone can know for truly certain, objectively, is that their own subjective experience exists as a real thing. For example, I know that the feeling of me seeing the color red exists, I can't prove it to anyone but myself, but the proof for me already happened in the moment I saw the color. Whatever the nature of the universe may be, it definitely has at least one series of complicated sets of different feelings in it.
Yes
I have loved Dr. Sapolsky’s work for years. But I was utterly impressed with the interviewer as well. This was great, thank you for making it available to us all. Although it seems you had no other choice. 🤔
😂funny 🎉greating from România 🇦🇩
On the TED Radio Hour, Sapolsky said: "I’m convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn’t been discovered yet." I'm paying attention to his wording -- that neuroscientists have not *yet* discovered biology that's friendly to free will. Maybe one day, that discovery will be made. And maybe that, in turn, is why Sapolsky ends his book, "Behave," by encouraging us to exercise wise choices, as if in some hidden crevice of the cranium, we really can tap the makings of free will.
What he's essentially saying is that because we don't have total freedom, we have no freedom at all. We have some choices where we can exercise our will, that's still freedom, like feeling anger but deciding not to react in anger. What makes some addicts go into recovery when others don't when they both have addictive brains? Choices. Whether free will "exists" is a moot point. It's whether you *believe* in free will that will influence your behavior and your worldview. People who believe they have choices tend to work on improving themselves. Those who don't tend to be more passive. They will attribute everything, good or bad, to their genetics, their ancestors, the weather.
What causes you to not react in anger when you feel angry? It's because you were conditioned by your mom/dad/teachers/society to do so. You had no part in that.
@@mugdays What if we climb the ladder of those supposed ancestors up until the one true ancestor who took that ultimate decisions of "not reacting to anger" and passed it to his siblings or contemporary or whatever, then where does the decision come from? What if his ancestors had no emotions and couldn't pass it to him? The world is vast and complex and your brain has to take A LOT of decision each time, and yes as you pointed some of it comes from parental figures or events that shaped you or society. Some of those pre-digested answers are useful and do not require modification but if you want to modify a behavior or a conclusion you have the ability of doing it. You have reason and critical thinking, you have the ability of gathering data if the ones you have are not enough. Free will seems to be more on a scale rather than a simple "yes" or "no" answer. I'll answer your question with another one : What if you are in an absolutely brand new situation where not a single answers from society or parental figures fits in this moment?
@@nicolasAT1991I think you are oversimplifying what is being presented here. It is not to say your decisions are based on your upbringing, genetics, or society. But also the factors in and before that situation, whether and what you ate that morning, whether someone cut you off in traffic that day, what time of day you make that decision, to say that all these factors brought in together determine the decision you will take.
To say that if we had perfect information up to the nanosecond one could predict the decision you take with absolute accuracy.
No. That is not what he is saying. He is saying we have no freedom at all because we just do what our environment tells us. All the examples he is giving are not "parts where you don't have freedom but you might have freedom in other ways". All the examples he is giving are simply examples of where we once thought there was freedom but there is none. Every mystery ever solved turned out to be "not magic" and that is a good indicator of no magic existing. The same will be true for causes of behavior. Every cause of every behavior so far explained turned out to be "not free will" and that is a good indicator that no free will exists.
And that is pretty logical, because free will can't exist.
"People who believe they have choices tend to work on improving themselves. Those who don't tend to be more passive." Where you listening? He is saying that people do(!) make choices. The absence of free will is not the absence of choice. I haven't believed in free will since I was 14 years old and read Bas Harring, but why the hell would that stop me from working on improving myself? Not improving yourself just sounds like a dumb decision and totally irrelevant to the discussion about free will.
"They will attribute everything, good or bad, to their genetics, their ancestors, the weather." Those are not the only 3 factors. The amount I improved myself is also(!) a factor (for example). That doesn't mean I have free will.
No, your brain does not yet understand what no free will means. You have no control over how your brain works and how it responds to stimuli. There is no free will. You are your brain. Your unconscious mind makes decisions based on the capacity of your brain. A story is created for your conscious awareness of why you made a decision. That's why people feel like they are in control.
Love listening to Prof Sapolsky. But kudos also to the presenter for asking some really great perceptive questions.
Anybody with a severe addiction or compulsive disorder can tell you how impossible it is to get out of that mindset.
absolutely. Looking at humanity's fringe cases gives us an insight that the people doing better, got it better and the people doing excellent just had it excellent. Hard work, resolve, focus, determination are talents themselves just like IQ.
@@kittuojhaexactly. But we often attribute "failure in life" to misuse of free will.
Yep and childhood traumas, all influences you didn't choose that form your personality - personality is formed as relfection mirror of others - you don't have even choice about your personality. How could nothing chose between A and B without any pre-existing preferences before it was born???
You are influenced by who you choose to serve, if all you engage in is sin then evil spirits will manipulate you. But there are also generational curses which is a whole other topic. If you really want to know what’s going on, read the Bible.
@shamisha10 shh adults are talking
I appreciate the part where he essentially says to think deeply and repetitiously before making a decision, and to reflect on how your feelings impact why you might decide one way vs. another.
There are so many things we do that impact other people. That action of thinking before choosing, makes a huge difference. It can change outcomes. We often take for granted why we do things. This helps put it into perspective.
There is this notion of inspiration that he delves into thats interesting (the movie theater example). There is often some stimuli that nudges you in one direction or another. Then it begs the question: what started this sustainable, renewable resource, called earth, that we have become part of?
All interesting conversations that simply lead to more questions... And more conversations. I love that.
If there is no free will, what does free will look like?
excellent
@@vervor :P
Great question! I’d love an answer on this from him
If you could retroactively change any condition in the casual change that lead to a decision without also making a different decision then you could say your decisions are free because you're litteraly freeing those decisions from the conditions that lead to them. That's what free will looks like, Sapolsky says something like this about free will when addressing why emergence isn't a route there.
Libertarian free will is an incoherent concept, it can't exist so it doesn't look like anything. It's like asking what a uniformly coloured blue red balls looks like.
That is the entire point. There is no definition of free will that can exist that is a basis for moral fault judgement. People do exactly what their situation (nature, nurture, environment, quantum randomness influences, mood, etc) tells them to do, they can't do anything else.
Free will would look like somebody doing something other than the thing reality forces them to do. It's impossible.
I understand he is explaining that environment and genetics are the largest factors that lead to the types of decisions we make. We may need to update how we colloquially speak of free will. I feel like that is to a certain degree fairly intuitive. I’m not sure how the experiments he described completely discount conscious thought as a factor. There are so many variables I feel like there is a lot of work to do to accurately describe how much causality we can attribute to conscious thought/free will, whatever those terms mean in practice. He kept turning to models as evidence but historically how accurate have similar models been? I feel like what he’s talking about is still in large part in the domain of philosophy and the science is still just barely starting to touch on it. The psychology and sociology and interpretations of the experiments done so far are exciting and interesting but I’m not sure how solid the evidence is yet.
I wrote an entirely different reply and erased it to leave this. Would this be considered "free will"? It's more of an existential sort of question anyway.
He is not saying conscious thought is not a factor. Of course conscious thought might influence your behaviour. But your conscious thoughts are caused by all those same factors. You simply think the concious thoughts that your situation/reality tells you to think. You can't think different thoughts than those.
All the factors present affect your pfc which is where you have conscious thought and that’s all deterministic. The minor events and factors shape the way you think causing you make the decision the level of complexity and modularity is just really high. Everything in the present time has a past dating back to the beginning of time, how anything go to where it is now is dependent on an incommensurable number of factors and that’s just the system we’re in. To have free will would be to never be subject to this system essentially existing externally from it.
@@inu4992don’t we to a certain degree remove ourselves from the “system”? Isn’t that basically what engineering, agriculture are? Conscious thought gives us the ability to observe the “system”. Are we to assume going against the “system” isn’t part of the “system”? That’s some love and rockets philosophy right there. No new tale to tell.
those concepts are just developed forms of very simple interactions between us and the environment which we barely “willed”. They date back far before our prefrontal cortex was even that advanced. Agriculture is just developed hunting/gathering and engineering is just the use of basic mechanical principals. All of which are developments we couldn’t have willed because we didn’t even think they’d turn out to be half of what they are today
I've heard all of this before, but somehow this video puts its more succinctly than the others. Thank you to Big Think, and Dr. Sapolsky.
No one is talking about the limitations of sense perception and the helplessness of infants, elders, and disabled individuals. Life and Death to me are direct indicators for not having free will. We don’t choose to live. We don’t choose the family and culture we were raised in. We don’t choose what happens to our lives nor how or when we will die. We have very limited control of our lives but that little control is significant enough to shape our experiences but not enough to manifest free will. If we do have free will, it is limited to our biological and environmental conditions.
I appreciate your points. On a lighter note, we didn't choose our parents because we didn't exist to make such a choice. May be it was our parents' exercise of free will that brought us into existence and so we are living now.
@@MandolinKasi We don't exist right now either. At least not in the way you're implying, since free will as most people think of it doesn't exist, the nature of the self making those choices is also completely different from popular opinion.
The only quality of "I" in your experience is the fact of your consciousness and that - something is experiencing something. And you're one of those.
The feeling of the self is a very successful survival mechanism that is attached to the choices that the system of our mind makes. Highly recommend Joshua Bach if you wanna learn more about this.
@@takeuchi5760 Thanks for your insight. Sure will check Joshua Bach thanks 🙏
Free will has nothing to do with choices, that's why your so confused with life and death. Its not about choosing family, life or death. It's the free will to accept the family your you were given or not. To accept life and know there is death, free will.
Our biological and environmental conditions isn’t free will it is not in our control what sort of mind we have historically speaking, our genes hormones how our brain is built it’s chemistry and how it will see the world and perceive the experiences of others,it’s structure isn’t something we built.Environment again we did not choose our family what sort of people are our parents what we were provided with or not provided at all,whether they have loved us or they have not all out of our control.We are at the mercy of biology social and psychological consequences.
When he was asked why did you write this book, I was sure he was going to say " Well several billion years ago there was this big bang..."
About 13.8 billion years ago
Has anybody thought free will is like our road system. We can decide to get off on different exits or if we move too fast and miss our exit we can decide to get off on the next exit and correct our path. But we cannot move off the road so my understanding of free will is we are limited to a carrier path but there's many minute minute paths that we can do within that path which is free will to me.
But the fundamental choice of which road to take is determined by factors you don’t control (based on your current brain activity). In reality, while it appears you can choose any road that you will, your brain state selects a road which you are forced to select despite the fact that it appears to you that you where the author of the decision.
have you seen the series "Devs"?
Think about lightning, finding it path of least resistance... I think that statement is false, i think lightning is more like an opportunist who takes from where is available.
You night have the abilities that determine whether or not you have the forsight, insight, wisdom, whatever that is needed to get off that road quick enough or you might not, and that determines whether you take that road or not and that was already true before the choice was ever presented to you.
@@nonononononono8532 ok, this depiction would mean we're are just character in a prewritten story, we have no will, no choice, and therefore we are not technically responsible for our actions. Wouldn't this mean reality is an illusion, like a video game were the characters look and act real, and yet they are only light pulses on a screen controlled by outside forces?
Wow, I feel my brain is so slow having hard time to understand. Dr Robert is so sharp and fast, I will need to watch 10+times to really understand. But it’s worth it. ❤
In order for free will to exist there would have to be some real entity which was itself in no way determined by external factors which has the capacity to cause change to occur in physical reality. This would, however, violate the law of conservation of energy and momentum since the entity in question would have to be able to provide physical impetus to an object without being affected by that force itself, which is to our understanding impossible
If you want to believe in free will, you have to believe in some sort of supernatural phenomena, like God. Without that, there is no free will whatsoever.
Quantum mechanics. There's discussions emerging that our consciousness, which is the deciding factor in a possible freewill, is due to microtubules, which have observed quantum elements within them and are part of the cells in our body.
Free will is real. It's more illusory than we like to admit for most and rather fragile in a life that tends towards disarray and material pull - but none the less there are non-deterministic parts of this reality, which I believe is where that spiritual dimension arises from.
This is so true, I am a caregiver and I noticed that patients are more nicer and rational after they have eaten a meal especially if they are taking daily medications.
Great questions, and one of the greatest people to ask.
Just discussing “free will “ proves the existence of it..
End of debate
Does it? How so?
@@jtbtdlkt2012 if the (after)exist only because of the (before) then only things ( vital ) would exist and nothing frivolous like this discussion would have been allowed
@fatcat8dog that sounds super deep, but break it down as if I'm simple Jack lol, I'm a bit slow on the uptake.
Also, when you say "free will" are you defining it as autonomous/libertarian free will?
Just an FYI, I believe that humans have a will but that it isn't autonomous or as free as one assumes. Obviously I'm coming at this from a theological perspective; I might add, a perspective that most of liberal theology in America seems to hate.
@@jtbtdlkt2012 you are not slow. This subject is a waste of 🧠 power..
I believe he is saying..
we have no control of anything . All events come from previous events.. predetermined. We have no influence of our destiny.. bunch of 💩💩
Stupid comment ! Him discussing this topic is based off his circumstances that led him into being interested in this topic ! Circumstances he had no control of meaning he had no will over it happen . In that case then random people who aren’t interested in this topic would just randomly be watching this hour video but if you go outside and ask average person about this topic they would have no interest because they life didn’t lead them to being interested in this topic
Interesting theory, but most likely not entirely true. A person sitting in an empty cubed room can think of and perform many random movements and actions that were never "predetermined". On the other hand a person who was bullied their entire life could be distrustful of other people, but that behavior was "predetermined" based on past experiences. Example 1 involves randomness, Example 2 involves cause and effect. Free will is most likely a spectrum of intensity. I always found this philosophical question silly because it really is just a semantics problem. With the word "Free Will" and what it means.
People read "You have no free will at all" and take it literally as if every present action and future action is predetermined and can't be changed or altered. Some even interpret it as the supernatural belief that destiny is real and we are nothing but puppets on a string with zero control over what we do.
It's fascinating that we think so much about free will. I think if it more an extension of a rejection of a supposed opposite; the assertion of a lack of free will. People don't want to believe that they could be "not free." We are certainly free in one sense, but we are still ensnared by the confines of things like social conventions, cultural norms, and ultimately what makes sense to us. If it didn't make sense to do, then we wouldn't do it. The factors that govern our sense are parameters. Like a flow chart, we think automatically based on classical conditioning, and it forms learning parameters. Once you've been conditioned to a point where something seems logical, you're bound to make decisions along those lines. Give or take your current physiological conditions.
People are just confused thinking free will thinks infinite possibilities. We obviously live in a finite reality so you can't just spread your wings and fly. Free will within a finite reality.
True story.
You're not just ensnared by things like social conventions, everything you do dictated by the laws of physics. You feel like you "freely" will something, but actually you're just noticing in your conscience something that's the result of your neurons having a mechanistically determined behavior.
@2CSST2 free will simply means selecting an option while rejecting another option. Something determined doesnt evaluate another option, it selects exaclty what its preselected to. What you choose is not determined but its actually up to you. You are telling me you have no choice in what you choose to eat? That's nonsense
Exactly. There are countless factors that confine us. Yet, we enjoy the safety features on roller coasters and in cars. To be confined to parameters doesn't mean the death of free enjoyment.
The entire idea can be put in just one short quote from Bulgakov “Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it”.
Niche reference there
Great questions from the interviewer, kudos
The problem is "there is no free will" is purely analytic judgement. If we belive in such things as cause and effect, everything must be subject of some cause that exists within infinit causal chain, therefore "your actions are subject s for external or internal causes" is necessary true. And from analytic judgements we can't derive synthetic, that is, empirical judgements, not to mention any oughts. People fear that admitting that they have no "free will" is some new information that can potentially change our everyday life or conventional practices. But it clearly does not infer such things
Whether he is right or wrong this man will always provoke your thinking
Free will is an illusion but will is not
god alone exist, and this is a movie being watched by god(he's your consciousness/the real you), this was revealed in my mystical experience when i thought i died as a human just to be shown that i am pure consciousness that exist nowhere and everywhere and it's all that exists
@@ayoubzahiri1918you can belief that yourselve, but dont force your Theories on to others
@@juriG10how is he forcing anyone
Quit trying to force people not to force their theories on others@@juriG10
Free will, God willing. These 4 words -blew the mind of a
preacher l said it to. We had
been discussing free will &
I just said it innocently.. But
he reacted in a manner that
led me to feel, it had blown his mind in that moment....
Coincidences loom in wait.
They are either ...always at
the ready to occur, or else
they were always there ..in
the pipeline. But surely the
mystery of all wonder. ~
If there's no free will, what's the point of arguing about it? There's nothing anyone can do; and the person making the argument must've been compelled to do it.
Because it is the destiny of some to fold their hands, and of others to argue.
Because there are people who think they have their own free will
@@bsckr4993 so something compelled you to respond to my comment in the way that you did and then for me to respond the way that I did; and these responses were dictated (preordained? determined?) from where, exactly? I just don't see the point of even arguing about 'free will.' It's like arguing about whether or not I have a foot- there it is.
@@PaulStringini I don't understand your point. Are you interested in clarifying?
@@ndannibait is dictated by hormonal reactions weather it's strees or not
The only free will we have is the free will to believe what we want.
It’s not free either it’s also determined what we believe lol
That's what u believe but I am free to believe that is not the case. Humans have shown to be capable of breaking free of preconditioned beliefs.
If we have no free will, how can we be found legally culpable?
Your brain learns from negative consequences. So the punishment you get for doing something that is not socially acceptable is to teach your brain to make different decisions.
you will not get punished. The body will
Instead of punishment and retribution the law would focus solely on protecting order and safety. Countries that implement such systems actually have lower reoffending rates when criminals are released.
The ideas of praise and punishment become meaningless. Instead of baseless religious dogma guiding much of our laws we can use materialism and rehabilitation to get the best results for the community. Some other countries like Finland have much more humane justice systems and actually have less recidivism.
This fact has always been obvious to me becauae free will doesnt actually mean anything. It's a euphorism, a phrase that means nothing, but which makes someone FEEL good.
What does it mean to have free will? To have actions not affected by cause and effect? So, your mind is completely random? Well not only is that not true at all, but how is that any more satisfying? But proponents of free will dont actually believe their thoughts are random, they dont know what free will means AT ALL, they simply dont LIKE the fact that their thoughts and feelings are determined, and they dont WANT to think of the implications if that were true.
If I have a preference for X, how did i come to this decision, if free will is true? I chose to prefer X? Well, that implies that, when deciding what my preferences are, i already had a preference for X, otherwise, why did i choose it? It's an infinite regress. Whether that is being done by a completely material brain, or whether it's a spiritual cause. The ONLY other alternative is that there IS no cause to my preferences, and that's COMPLETELY meaningless AND apparenly false.
And i was thinking about that stuff since 12 or younger... but we have adults sitting here saying free will, and cant even define it. It just makes them FEEL good.
It is what it is
freewill
1 of 2
adjective
free·will ˈfrē-ˌwil
Synonyms of freewill
: VOLUNTARY, SPONTANEOUS
free will
2 of 2
noun
1
: voluntary choice or decision
I do this of my own free will
2
: freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention
("Determined" being the key word of contention for the actual thinking people here.)
Hope that helps.
🙄
@@freedomisrising 🙄 not really, and yes I'm aware of what a dictionary is. Did you actually think I didn't look at one? Nobody talking about philosophical free will ever means it in some legalese sense where you swear or sign a paper saying you authorize something of your own free will, aka without duress or coercion. That's not what anyone is talking about here.
People are referring to the 2nd definition, without prior cause or divine intervention, which is nonsense and means literally nothing. Everything anyone has ever thought or done has a prior cause. If their actions were not caused at all, they'd be even more random than a random cause, which again, is meaningless. If there's no cause, there's nothing to talk about, nothing communicates, there is literally no reason it happened at all. Which is nonsense.
So, determinism is both true and accurate, as well as infinitely more meaningful.
Thank you sir for this lecture. I will definitely look more into your work.
What caused us to arrive at the individual philosophy we did early on that we can’t change for the rest of our lives can be found by carefully reflecting on the archic hermeneutic profile of the philosophy. So, we must ask four basic metaphysical questions: How is everything known? What is the way of everything? What is real? And where is everything going? This gentleman is objective in perspective, logistical in method, substratal in ontology and simple in his final cause. He is 100% materialist. But that archic profile is only 1 out of 144 possible archic profiles. We are, in fact, individually completely independent of the universe; but we are not aware of it if we don’t make the effort to reflect on what our individual philosophy is.
How did You know it is 144?
@@rebeckajain2316 That was a ruse. The point is not the number. Even if you have the same archic variables (same forms), the content is different; so, the philosophy is different. For example, you may have a Sophistical profile; but so does Donald Trump. Does that make you Trump? No, it doesn't. Because form needs matter to be a substance.
Yes, if we define "free" as existing outside of context then it doesn't exist because our experiences are contextual and do not exist in isolation from our environment. But when we talk about free will it is mostly about the ability to choose from available options or not to choose (which is a choice on its own too!) within the context of a situation. It's not about whether the choice is influenced or not but rather about the ability to choose and differentiate one option from another in a manner that is unique to a certain person because of their own beliefs, values, experiences etc.
What does that even mean.?..ofcourse, you gonna choose from the options available to you. What else are you gonna choose from?? The problem is you don't choose what options are going to be available to you and your choice among those options is also dermined by factors you don't control...hence, no free will. People just keep trying to twist and turn this simple notion to insert some sort of their own definition of free will into.
@@Enoynanone if there's more than just one available option for choice, even predetermined by circumstances of existence or previous choices, you have freedom (read free will) to choose the one that works best for you in that particular moment. We always have at least two options: to choose or not choose, but often there are more than two. And time wise, free will doesn't exist in the past or future, it only exists in the present moment, in the "now".
What you are describing is your will, NOT free will. You choose what you want but you can’t choose your want, you can only realise it. People always confuse their will with free will....that is just your WILL, Yes you have your will, it is just not free, it is either determined or it is random..there is no third option..third option isn't even possible.
@@Enoynanone what you are talking about is universal free will, and it is beyond the topic of this conversation. If everyone had it the world would be an out of any order mess. That's why our free will is limited to the freedom of choice in the realm that an individual can control and able to take responsibility for, not more. For some people it's hard to accept that you/your will is equal freedom/ free will because it's much easier to brush off the responsibility for the outcomes of the choices that were either made by the individual or on their behalf. Let go of control over things you can not control, take responsibility for things you can control and you'll find freedom.
@@TheElenarybalko 😂 I am not talking about any universal free will . I am talking about individual will of a person which is not free at all. IT just feels free to an individual, that's all. Your will is not free. Hence, it is not free will it's just will. Don't make it complicated it is so simple. And I am not searching for freedom. The truth is enough.
It’s great to see someone who can articulate these concepts so well! The paradigm can’t shift soon enough :)
im interested in how survivors of extreme trauma/ abuse or people who did something to break a generational curse etc. might possibly muddy the waters of free will ? like, is this simply a product of natural evolution where each generation shifted something forward ? or is it more complex ?
Kudos to the brilliant interviewer and his exceptional questions
My favorite living Neuroscientist.
"Free will is an oxymoron, where there's will there's no freedom and where there's freedom there's no will". - Swami Vivekananda
If there is no free will how would it be possible for a person truly know this or anything at all? Would not all thought and knowledge be an illusory mirage generated by the brain's neurons and distributed causality?
Might want to look up axiom of choice.
Freedom from or freedom to? From/to what? Overly simplistic phrases have multiple possible interpretations and therefore carry very little information.
"If there is no free will it is logically impossible to know if you have free will or not" - the laws of logic
@@ЯсенЧапкъновthe meaning is deeper than you think. The quote questions the true meaning of what freedom is? Are we really born free in this nature? Do we have a will? When does a will start? Think deeply, Swami Vivekananda is talking from the perspective of advaita vedanta philosophy of Hinduism.
So if a criminal says that they killed someone because they don’t have free will, how do you justify that?
His fundamental argument is for determinism, but we know quantum systems don't work that way.
He is arguing on the framework of a classical physics world...
But we are not, in, a classical physics world.
In order to prove free will does not exist, you have to prove you can absolutely predict outcomes of interactions. This, is an impossibility.
I can't help but think that this philosophy is a form of rationalization.
Projection 101
I agree, this is Physics and not Meta-Physics.
Great convo! Thanks.
Wether or not we have free will, we do not know what happens next. There is a concept called "computational irreducablity of the universe" where it says that we have no way to know how the universe will play out until it at the time it plays out. That is unless we build a computer much bigger than the universe.
Free will is the gift humankind has been given that allows each being to freely choose their ideas and what they wish to believe or not believe.
Our ability, through the choices we make, "to create new circumstances and environment, relationships, achievements or failures, prosperity or poverty."
There is no way that man may escape what he thinks, says or does [i.e., the fruits of his free will]-for he is born of the Divine Creative Consciousness power and is likewise creative in his imagination.
That's irrelevant for the free will discussion though. Whether the future can be predicted, does not mean you are "free" to choose anything. It just means you cannot predict the circumstances in which the choices are going to be made. But the point is, all the factors that will eventually determine the choices before that point, are all pre-determined.
Without a mindset-you have no life, no development, no evil and no good. Your TYPE of mindset determines the quality of your life. This is the very first TRUTH of EXISTENCE. Furthermore, for as long as you live-you carry your mindset with you wherever you go.
There is no escaping it-and day after day-it will continue to create for you the type of existence you have experienced in the past. Most people go through their entire life believing they are unfortunate. They think that other people have been mean, unkind, ugly to them and have made their life thoroughly unhappy.
They believe that "other people" quarrel with them and constantly make difficulties, while they are absolutely innocent of any provocation.
On the contrary, "other people" are not to blame. It is the personal mindset that is attracting to them their negative conditions.
Most people shy away from the suggestion that they alone are responsible for their troubles. It is more difficult for most people to face up to their inadequacies than it is for those who have the inner strength and self-confidence to look at themselves fairly and squarely.
Sincere Prayer draws the "Father-Mother Creative Consciousness" into the mind-quietly and secretly-It cleanses the human consciousness of all that the individual no longer feels comfortable with. It is, of necessity, a very gradual process of inner cleansing and development.
Without a mindset-you have no life, no development, no evil and no good. Your TYPE of mindset determines the quality of your life. This is the very first TRUTH of EXISTENCE. Furthermore, for as long as you live-you carry your mindset with you wherever you go.
There is no escaping it-and day after day-it will continue to create for you the type of existence you have experienced in the past. Most people go through their entire life believing they are unfortunate. They think that other people have been mean, unkind, ugly to them and have made their life thoroughly unhappy.
They believe that "other people" quarrel with them and constantly make difficulties, while they are absolutely innocent of any provocation.
On the contrary, "other people" are not to blame. It is the personal mindset that is attracting to them their negative conditions.
Most people shy away from the suggestion that they alone are responsible for their troubles. It is more difficult for most people to face up to their inadequacies than it is for those who have the inner strength and self-confidence to look at themselves fairly and squarely.
Sincere Prayer draws the "Father-Mother Creative Consciousness" into the mind-quietly and secretly-It cleanses the human consciousness of all that the individual no longer feels comfortable with. It is, of necessity, a very gradual process of inner cleansing and development.
Most people shy away from the suggestion that they alone are responsible for their troubles. It is more difficult for most people to face up to their inadequacies than it is for those who have the inner strength and self-confidence to look at themselves fairly and squarely.
Nothing happens by chance!
Everything is woven out of the inner threads of our personal consciousness-thoughts, expectations, beliefs in life, fate, "God."
We live in a world of our own making!
This is why children raised in the same environment turn out differently. Each one has their own individual mindset constructed according to inherent character traits.
Most people go through their entire life believing they are unfortunate. They think that other people have been mean, unkind, ugly to them and have made their lives thoroughly unhappy.
They believe that "other people" quarrel with them and constantly make difficulties, while they are absolutely innocent of any provocation.
On the contrary, "other people" are not to blame. It is the personal mindset that is attracting to them their negative conditions.
And that explains why he hasn't shaved his beard; he just doesn't have the free will to pick up a razor!
Should I feel good or bad if i have no free will?
You have no free will to decide about that as well
You have no choice how this will make you feel.
Doesn't matter. It's not up to you
Yes, you should.
You should feel no different because you can't perceive the lack of free will. You can understand it, similar to how you can understand quantum physics, but it's not perceptible to you without technology.
You can choose, but your choices are constrained by your genotype and environment.
Besides, how would you recognize a "free will" if you saw it? How would you measure it?
The word "free" is ill defined for basically any concept. There is nothing that's "free" in the universe. Everything and anything are affected by the environment surrounding it and what makes it up.
The Scalar Relationship between Determinism and Free Will
Few topics have provoked as much intellectual debate as the nature of determinism and free will. These concepts often appear diametrically opposed, with determinism suggesting a universe bound by causality and inevitability, and free will advocating for human autonomy and self-determination. However, when examined through the lens of modern science, philosophy, and the emerging understanding of quantum mechanics and consciousness, a more nuanced picture emerges. This short essay explores the scalar relationship between determinism and free will, suggesting that these are not binary opposites but exist along a continuum influenced by multiple layers of reality from the quantum to the cosmic.
At its core, determinism posits that all events, including human actions, are the result of preceding causes. This view is rooted in classical physics, where the universe is seen as a grand clockwork operating according to precise laws. From this perspective, if one were to know all the conditions of a system at a given time, one could predict all future states of the system. This deterministic worldview reaches its apex in the concept of 'Laplace's Demon'-a hypothetical entity that could predict the future by knowing the location and momentum of every atom in the universe.
The advent of quantum mechanics introduced a fundamental challenge to the classical deterministic perspective. Quantum indeterminacy suggests that at the microscopic level, particles do not have definite states until they are observed. Phenomena like superposition and entanglement imply that outcomes are probabilistic rather than deterministic. This quantum behaviour does not outright negate determinism but scales its application, confining it to macroscopic phenomena while admitting unpredictability at the microscopic scale.
The role of consciousness in quantum mechanics further complicates the relationship between determinism and free will. The observer effect, where the act of measurement affects the state of what is being observed, suggests that consciousness itself can influence outcomes, injecting a form of indeterminacy into an otherwise deterministic equation. This has profound implications, hinting that human consciousness might not just passively navigate a deterministic universe but actively shape it at some level.
As we scale up from the quantum to the macroscopic, emergent properties illustrate how new behaviours and unpredictabilities arise that are not apparent from simpler systems. For example, weather systems exhibit chaotic behaviour where small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes, known as the butterfly effect. In human systems, social dynamics, economics, and individual human behaviours display emergent properties that suggest a blend of deterministic rules and unpredictable outcomes.
The concept of free will itself may be scalable, varying in its expression across different contexts and systems. At one level, biological determinism governs the basic functions of life through genetic and biochemical pathways. At another level, individual consciousness introduces variability, influenced by personal experiences, social interactions, and potentially, random quantum events. At a higher level, cultural and societal structures offer a different set of constraints and freedoms, shaping individual and collective behaviours.
Thus, the relationship between determinism and free will should not be seen as a straightforward opposition but as a complex interplay that varies across different scales and contexts. This scalar relationship suggests that both free will and determinism are necessary constructs to understand the multifaceted nature of reality. By embracing this complexity, we can better appreciate the rich tapestry of factors that influence human behaviour and the universe at large, acknowledging that our capacity for choice operates within a framework of constraints that are themselves subject to different levels of predictability and influence.
Thank you for putting this out there.
Thank you for putting my thoughts on this together so well! To summarize what you said: people are products of their environment but they still have a choice to change.
ChatGPT nonsense.
@@dgcool Don't be a Luddite! It makes perfect sense to me. You are like a mathematician saying "Calculator nonsense"
@@dgcool The more determined something is, the less free will you have and vice versa. It's not one or the other.
So far everything we seem to truly find out about consciousness has completely matched with the Buddhism philosophies... that being said the more aware you are of your Ego (your thoughts) the more you are able to exert free will. Free will doesn't equal randomness but its very convenient to think so. As developer myself I just cannot unsee the possibility of having different parameters in functions which are our thoughts and acts. You have the input but you cant alter the function, so to say its way way more complex then having or not having free will. Everything is predetermined but it has many versions of it.
So glad I wasn't in the room with him when he made that argument. I felt objectified just by the recording. One is not free to not choose what is in their perceived best interest. That is what the will is. It is the movement towards one's greatest good. And sometimes people think this amounts to a lack of free will. But, to say you have no free will is to subversively say you are a blocked from your highest good. And then there are those who tell you you have free will and they are likely offering a lesser alternative to your highest good. The free will vs no free will debate is never mentioning the truth of the will. What we seek is freedom from lesser alternatives to our highest good and freedom for it. Because false free will (via 'options' and 'alternatives') and the "lack" of free will are both frustrations of the will, which is not free to not choose our greatest good. Because, once again, that is what the will is. The movement towards one's greatest good. One may be deceived. One may be frustrated. But one cannot not be. I am and God is good.
Well.. this guy unsuccessfully tried to disprove free will by employing his free will against his own free will. Fascinating.
Wrong
@@ThrillOfTheFight lol hey!! You used free will to tell me I’m wrong!! Way to go!!
@bradbecker8982 are you were predetermined to respond to me since the beginning of everything, well done
@@ThrillOfTheFight says who? People with free will to decide whether they think your claim is true or not? You silly ass
@@ThrillOfTheFight nothing is determined… even an asteroid can change the course of earth forever. None of it is determined beforehand because no God can exist.
The delusion of believing there’s no free-will is Free-Will itself. The irony. Humanity is still in its infancy.
This has always been self evident to me. There are zero reasons to think that we stand apart from the causal structure of the rest of the universe. I think it was Hegel who said freedom was a sense of being at home in the other. In other words, we feel “free” when our inner workings accord with the external environment. This sense of “freedom” is compatible with Sapolsky’s thesis.
I think we are missing something, that is when saying "You don't have free will." Who we are saying this to. Are we saying this to a person with brain or a person with consciousness. Now I know that yes most scientists suggest that consciousness is just an illusion but why did consciousness occur in the first place. According to NASA's definition on a living organism which is most agreed by scientists for atleast now, is that it is a biological system which prevents harm from environment and tries to sustain it's system and grow to do these things well so you have to take energy in the system. And it can reproduce also. So to implying this you must grant the system to have some predicting capabilities so that it can then be better at "living" rather than just be some spontaneous phenomena in between being alive and popping in existence and then popping out. So you must give the system the information about its surrounding in any way and also the processing capabilities to predict the future (Although for a single cellular organism it would be too much to ask). But then you have a competition in the environment with other organisms also so you have to keep getting better and better at predicting and having options to choose between in order to survive. So we now know that why do we have so many senses and the intelligence, thanks to evolution, but it isn't over here. We have to also be aware of our surroundings and have a sense of self inorder to take decisions by ourselves in our favour. So there you go and boom you have consciousness. But does consciousness come first or do you get alive first. Does the first cell became alive first or did it became conscious first. I thought about it very much and i don't know maybe i am wrong but i think that to be alive you must have to be aware of your existence. If you are aware of yourself then how could you be alive? Even if we make robot having all of our senses and give it human level intelligence. Can we truly say that it has become conscious of it's self. I think that's why AI is called AI artificial intelligence and not artificial consciousness. But then what does it take to become conscious. At which second does an embryo get conscious. Forget about it, saying that you don't have free will is completely ignoring the fact that why do we have consciousness in the first place, it is to be aware of our self but if we are only biological machines and maybe in future we can build technology that can also reproduce a body having the same structure and uploading the intelligence or maybe umm "DNA like information" Can we then tell that they are living that they are conscious. And yes then I agree that by serious complex calculations we can calculate every possible way the machine can act (assuming that by thay time science proves that complexities and probabilities are bs) and yes then they don't have an un caused causal control over their ability to take descisions. But can we really conclude that to ourselves. I think that begore making any conclusions, we must check time to time what are our definitions of the things that we are arguing on and find gaps that needs to be filled. Now this was just my opinion on free will just like Robert Sapolsky or any other scientist because with rationality it is only what we can do. That's the reason why we should keep improving our understanding of consciousness and... I mean everything before preaching our opinions to society. Because for society it causes a sudden anxiety(that isn't even there discipline to be anxious about, it's the scientists who should take these anxiety), the people cannot really do the research thing and give theories. And so what I will conclude is that improvement in the understanding of brain and consciousness is needed and with technological advancements it can be done but things or here, theories doesn't resolve any thing until it is proven by extensive scientific researches. And although I am unbiased for it but I still think for society, believing in free will is good
Knowing that everyone has different thinking capacities and intelligence and options to make choices from so certainly we can bust many many myths and make reforms only by this fact.
Okay at last i can give an argument weapon for "free will believers" (i shouldn't say that because i have to believe in it also)
That if I don't have free will, are you telling that to about my intelligence or my consciousness
If they say intelligence well then pull up the fact that it's consciousness what make us different from robots
And if they say consciousness then baaammmm
Define Consciousness and why it came to existence in the first place.
Not a single person who claims to believe this actually lives accordingly
No quantum physicist can act in accordance with particle physics, but how does that detract from its truth value?
What would be an example of living "accordingly"?
@@thepodunkpunks thanks for the nuclear grade autism
@@thenebbishroute assuming you’re starting at this very moment, planting yourself right in your given spot at petting anything and anyone having their way with you. Remember, you have no free will
1. doesn't this also mean we are not responsible for our mistakes? 2. doesn't this also mean that the future is already EXACTLY set in stone?
17:02 So, free will is the brain’s choice to manage resources and not “my” choice?
“Meh, distributed conversations aren’t choices. They are forced.” But each participant is a process. I don’t know how anyone can look at cortical layering and not see the complexity required for self-influence.
Hello. I'm not educated in neuroscience, could you please if possible elaborate on ''I don’t know how anyone can look at cortical layering and not see the complexity required for self-influence'' for a layman? I'd be very thankful.
Influence is totally irrelevant to free will. Even if your brain were the only thing that existed, it's running on its own. YOU are not a thing in terms of causal chains. Your consciousness observes, and the brain just does. What could you possibly do differently other than that which you actually do? The brain is governed by prior events the exact same way the rest of the universe physically does.
@@Zanuka Not trying to be dismissive. If you’re interested in cortical layers, then you should research it. There is far more than can be covered in a TH-cam comment.
@@bboyagua You do exist to your brain and your thoughts are part of the causal chains. They are a part of the feedback process. I like to liken our awareness to reading a filled out rubric. How that information is read and passed along matters a lot. Half of what we are is the choice of how we read those rubrics to ourselves. As we look at the repeated networks in our minds, we can see that rubric effect over and over - especially in the neocortex. That means not only do we have freewill, to some extent because real life isn’t a dream, but we have several levels of freewill which get repeated thousands and thousands of times.
The trick is first defining freewill, then looking for it. If you think freewill is the ability to fly and shoot lasers from your eyes on command, then of course we don’t have it. If you think freewill means you have influence over the process, then it’s there and a lot of energy is put in to defend that influence.
@@bboyagua exactly, everyone is simply the conscious experiencer of one human being/perspective.
I agree our minds are constrained in ways we dont think about, but that's not the same as saying there is no free will. I would love to know his guess for why minds evolved in the first place if they don't do anything.
Yeah. I suppose Sapolsky is a scientist so he might say that the mind evolved through natural selection. I think he is saying that everything the mind does can be explained in terms of chemical/electrical processes and external factors, so from a certain point of view it's almost like there is no "self" even though that "self" is central to our identity and everything we do and experience.
@@ProfoundFamiliarity he concedes that our minds make choices beyond the mechanical electrochemical processes afforded to say prokaryotes, but he is saying our minds are so constrained by our environment there is no real choice. i can imagine our environment constrains us in surprising ways, but concluding our choices cant change the environment whatsoever is bizarre. im not sure what point there is to even having a mind in his view.
If by mind, do you mean sense of self/ego? Because I don’t believe that is a product of evolution at all. I believe the sense of self/ego is an adaptation that occurs on an “individual” level in response to living in a way that is totally antithetical to how we evolved to live. If we lived as we have evolved to live, we would have no sense of self as separate from those around us. This is probably impossible to imagine for us, but the way I imagine it would be is that looking at another human would feel like we feel when we look in the mirror, only we’d probably feel even more connected to that other human than we do to ourselves when we look in the mirror. With ego/mind, everyone is a potential threat to us, so we can never feel genuinely safe.
@@katieandnick4113 this is how I imagine the hive mind of a bee or ant to be. I think we are social animals but that human minds do not usually extend beyond our own bodies.
I think there is individualism in our society and a lot of value is placed on individual freedom. There’s a great documentary about that called The Century of the Self.
For consciousness to evolve it likely would have to confer some advantage. This indicates free will becasue consciousness would not have evolved if it did't have some evolutionary advantage over what could have been achieved through determinsitic non-conscious processes.
How does the presence of consciousness allow for free will?
Free will is completely illusory and is a magical nonsensical concept. There is no real or imaginary world where it can exist. It literally makes no sense and is based entirely off of an illusory feeling that you are the thinker, the personality, and the decider.
This is where scientific thesis diverges from spiritual thesis. Dr Sapolsky's take is very humanistic. I believe in a soul/spirit, an inner being. I believe in it, because I AM that. I experience my human life with that knowing every day. I know I came to this planet with aspects that were totally imbued in my being before I took my first breath in this matrix.
If you are able to stop and think about your decision and change it that is certainly free will
You sure? Where the other options or choices that you're able to think about come from?
Little secret..those also come from your environment 😉
@@estudiopersonal1020 Isn't the discussion more about the semantics of the expression "free will" though?
Can't you choose to change your enviornment? And if you're anwser is "What influenced you to change into another enviornment was the previous one + you're life experiences", then yes, nothing is free will, because that's pretty much what shapes you as a person, nature + nurture.
Personally, if you have more than one option and the liberty to choose one of them, that's "free will".
@@BlackiJ11 that would be more or less my answer yes, i understand what youre saying, but your way of chosing and your choices are still determined by something that is not you
He literally explained that exactly and how it isn't free will.
But I suppose you can choose not to listen.. 😂
@@estudiopersonal1020 Yes, and I get that. But I jus't can't understand why we would define it like that, because it's a given.
It'd be like saying one has no financial freedom if they can't afford to live in the most expensive city in the world.
Basically, "free will" could be defined in the sense of doing something voluntarilty, and not necesseraly independent of any external factors.
I do agree that we are absolutely influenced and shaped by our biology and external factors
Sapolsky does not even bother to carefully define what he means by free will. Yes almost everything is not determined by our conscious self, but not every single thing.
He is clueless just like that crippled scientist guy who said that there is nothing after we die
@@DimitriTheBarbarian There is probably nothing after we die, there is zero proof of life after death. My point is its WAY too extreme to to say we have zero free will. We have a little least, but not much, and not zero.
Wow. It seems like people making consequential decisions should only be allowed to do so when glucose and hormone monitors report that they are in a right chemical state to do so.
I'll frequently delay decisions or actions to give myself some time to consider things as thoroughly and in as balanced a way as I can - often means I'll hold off on some big decision until after I've had something to eat. Lol - I'll also check to make sure my dentist has eaten, too! 😀
HA! Gotta start somewhere. But there already are control systems that are trying to factor in these fluctuations in the human part of a human-machine interface in the management of complex machines (sensor systems monitoring heartbeat, respiration, etc. for test pilots, for example). They're not intended to take away anyone's independence (i.e., "free will"-a dreadful 19th-century term). They're to help people make better decisions by alerting them to inner physical states that they'd probably deny out of embarrassment-like people who get behind the wheel when they're too tired or intoxicated to drive. A car that senses that human state can disable the starter (and even summon a ride-hailing service). That sensor data (and the processor interpreting it) seems like better grounds for a consequential decision than "free will" (i.e., no one can tell me what to do).
No human should be given sole power over another. Committees are better. Networks are better than hierarchies.
@@---Dana---- Agreed. Just make sure the morning bagel delivery is on time before the group comes to any decisions!
Except the Judge had no free will to make sure he wasn't hungry that day.
به کلاس های رابرت در دانشگاه استنفورد گوش میدادم و بسیاری چیزها یاد گرفتم! عالی بود!👍🏼
Obviously, we have free will, we decide our fate based on metaphysical, no determinism at work.
How do you define free will?
And how do you know you were not predetermined to say that?
You obviously chose your parents, the country you were born in, your environment, every event that ever happened to you, you obviously know the state of your brain down to every neuron and neurotransmitter and moreover you can control every firing of every of your neurons to your liking to produce the conviction that metaphysics and free will is supposedly obvious.
@@plotofland2928 free will is the capacity to decide over metaphysical choice, like, honor, diplomacy, politics, ethics, etc.
@@philosoraptor777 there is no evidence determinism works on metaphysical realm.
A contemporary Yogi.
More egghed stile tong jibber jabber tac tic. We laffing scienceman deny crater
Free will is an ambiguous term that covers 2 different factors (1) can we make choices (2) is the universe deterministic. So - clearly we make choices (you can choose what meal to have in a restaurant). Now, some people would say that choice is shaped by genetics, environment, previous decisions, so it is completely predictable i.e. there is no free will. HOWEVER, we do NOT make optimal choices.. we purposely experiment. If not, we would never try new meals. So, what we do is occasionally try something completely unusual, to benefit from learning new information (maybe the shrimp is the best menu choice, but we wouldn't know unless we try something unexpected or different). THUS our choices aren't as deterministic as we may think. As far as, is the universe deterministic.. maybe. The problem is, chaos (ie. that small events can result in large changes in outcome) does occur, so even if the universe is deterministic, it is impossible to accurately predict it.. collecting the data would not only be inhibitively difficult and time consuming to get a good prediction, it would also affect the outcome. The question then become, if the universe is deterministic but we cannot possibly predict the future, does it even matter if the universe is deterministic, because effectively it can't be accurately modeled i.e. deterministic or not, the universe is actually the same and so that concept has no value.
He is full of horse crap.
I always wanted to go to stanford, listening to behave was like getting a fabulous course there! now Im digesting "Determined" and this is great and helpful. These books have been so helpful and comforting! Myheart is full listening to your conversation, both of you such beautiful people. Thank you for doing this.