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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Asklemmy
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Free will.
It's hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It's like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it's true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn't suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.
I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.
Robert Sapolsky agrees.
Sapolsky's perspective ignores reality to generate talking points.
Just because a person has a limited set of choices, mostly determined by upbringing does not mean that we can predict any future action based on previous actions.
At best you may be able produce a chaotic model that gives probabilities of potential actions in any situation.
That is all well and good.
I'm an engineer, so I look at this from a physical sciences point of view. The main problem with the "no free will" argument is it provides no predictive power, there is no model that can say person X will do Y (instead of A, B, C or D) in situation Z.
What is possible is giving probabilities of Y, A, B, C or D in experimental settings. But in the real world, there are too many variables interacting in a chaotic manner to even give reasonable probabilities; this is why we can only use population level statistics rather than individual level predictions.
I present, the Jim Twins:
Similar <> identical.
This story has little to add to the debate about free will. How many identical twins separated at birth didn't have similar lives?
It is anecdotal, but compelling. Determinism can’t be falsified, but neither can free will. The neuroscience is interesting, and shouldn’t be dismissed. Sapolsky’s debates are informative.
It only seems compelling, there is no base rate of non-similar twins separated at birth. Is this 1 in 2 sets end up like this, every one, 1 in 100,000?
The neuroscience is interesting, but it is not in any way predictive. It is all post-hoc rationalisations of what did happen.
As I said above, I'm an engineer and look at this from a physical sciences point of view. There is no model (as far as I'm aware) that can predict what will happen except in very specific psychological experiments.
Well, you’re an engineer, not a neuroscientist like Robert Sapolsky so his research carries more value than your opinion.