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DO WE HAVE FREE WILL?
Mitchell Versus Sapolsky Debate
Kevin Mitchell, Ph.D.
“Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will”
Associate Professor in Developmental Neurobiology, Genetics
Trinity College Dublin
Robert M. Sapolsky, Ph.D.
“Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will”
John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, & Neurosurgery
Stanford University
✒️ -> Scratch Notes
Talk
Sapolsky:
People make choices based on options. The justice system relies on us having free will.
Free will is not this.
- How did they become the person who would make their choice?
- What causes choice?
- Neurons firing
- Sensory stimuli
- Hormones
- Amygdala
- Size of adrenals from stress
- Epigenetics you have developed
Stress in youth => Enlarged amygdala => More reactive
monogamous gibbons and polygamous bonobos
Have to put all of these disciplines together to truly understand a person
- Biology, epigenetics, neuroscience, culture, past events, psychology, …
Together, they become a deterministic predictor of a person and their behavior
Mitchell
Real possibilities seem to ‘exist’
We seem to be able to make choices and control our behavior, based on our own reasons
Different types of entities or individuals hav ethis capacity of agency to different degrees
- People with psychocies, compulsive behavior for instance
Control must be ‘in biology’ but not ‘of biology’
Dualism - Coming from the brain vs coming from the self
Fatalism - At any moment we are just acting on…
- “All we are is the history of our biology, over which we had no control…” (p. 85)
- Mitchell says that this is circular, and too passive, people are not just floating down a river of happenings
A lot of talk about creating a decision from complicated and chaotic factors
- Mitchell says that this is circular, and too passive, people are not just floating down a river of happenings
- Even a bacterium has to make decisions to survive
- Only more factors weighed as organism gets larger and more intelligent
- People >> C. elegans >> bacterium
Back and forth
Sapolsky: People are constrained
Mitchell: So you want us to do things nonsensically? Eat the grass?
Sapolsky: Homonculus of the soul, of god. Influences on what we do. Things are magic until we understand them.
Mitchell: Yeah of course the past matters. But what would it take for free will? Behave free of all prior causes? Thats stupidity not free will.
- Neural noise too, experiments arent entirely reproduceable
Sapolsky: If one is relying on noise as willpower, life and thoughts aren’t entirely random.
Mitchell: Either the universe is deterministic, or it isnt and there is noise.
Sapolsky:
Q&A
Willed Attention:
Libett and all of his descendant, determinism, can you intend to do something. Difference between doing something and an urge to do something,
Randall O’reilly 💍 yuko munkata
Difference between no free will big bang determined everything, and more realistic free will with randomness and chaoticness, is our response to the unpredictability set in stone?
- If not determined, free will
- If determined, no free will
What would be free will? - Sapolsky response is you can’t have a falsifiable statement that there is no such thing as free will.
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