Jonathan “no Trump” Falk points to this press release and writes:
Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will. Does that include the decision to write a book about free will?
PS … A quick mention of the replication crisis to silence some doubters.
PPS: I couldn’t help sending this to you.
I replied with a link to this post from last year, which in turn linked to a post by Kevin Mitchell, who wrote:
Gotta hand it to Sapolsky here . . . it’s quite ballsy to uber-confidently assert we do not have “the slightest scrap of agency” and then support that with one discredited social psych study after another…
Sapolsky also wrote a book titled “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping” well after Barry Marshall had done the research which would win him a Nobel in Medicine for showing the actual cause of ulcers (bacteria).
I don’t know how much was in the first edition (definitely not all of it, looking at the dates of the references) but he did describe Marshall’s work in the 3rd edition (pub. 11 yrs later, in 2004). From p86-7:
> Marshall showed that the bacteria caused gastritis and ulcers in mice. That’s great, but mice work differently than humans, everyone said. So, in a heroic, soon-to-be-a-movie gesture, he swallowed some Helicobacter bilge and caused gastritis in himself. Still, they ignored Marshall. Eventually, some folks in the field got tired of hearing him go on about the damn bacteria at meetings, decided to do some experiments to prove him wrong, and found that he was absolutely right. […]
> Many of the details remain to be sorted out, but the greatest triumph for Marshall and Warren has been the demonstration that anti-microbial drugs, such as antibiotics, turn out to be the greatest things since sliced bread for dealing with duodenal ulcers […]
> The trouble is that one bacterium can’t be the whole story. For starters, up to 15 percent of duodenal ulcers form in people who aren’t infected with Helicobacter, or with any other known bacterium related to it. More damning, only about 10 percent of the people infected with the bacteria get ulcers. It’s got to be Helicobacter pylori plus something else. Sometimes, the something else is a lifestyle risk factor–alcohol, smoking, skipping breakfast habitually, taking a lot of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin. Maybe the something else is a genetic tendency to secrete a lot of acid or to make only minimal amounts of mucus to protect stomach linings from the acid. But one of the additional factors is stress.
This well-known fact is discussed in Sapolsky’s book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Why_Zebras_Don_t_Get_Ulcers/EI88oS_3fZEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=sapolsky+why+zebras+don%27t+get+ulcers+pylori&pg=PA87&printsec=frontcover
Just one anecdote, but my then 88 year old mother had to be hospitalized for a peptic ulcer the day after Donald Trump was elected. She had never had an ulcer before. She had grown up in Nazi Germany and was forced to become a Hitler youth. She listened to Hitler’s speeches on the radio and said listening to Trump brought it all back.
She survived and is now 95.
Free will is a great topic for the loquacious, and that’s about it.
The problem is that determinism is an iron cage. Even if we could perfectly track every neuron, and knew everything about someone’s history, we could neither prove it nor disprove it.
From the article:
“Sapolsky’s scientific defense of the cause [of determinism] is welcome.”
The preceding paragraph to which this refers:
“All of the friends were primed to respond as they did when they sat down to watch. Maybe one had heightened adrenaline from a close call with another car on the drive over; maybe another was in a new relationship and awash in oxytocin, the so-called love hormone. They had different levels of dopamine and serotonin in their brains, different cultural backgrounds, different sensitivities to sensory distractions in the theater. None chose how the stimulus of the film would affect them anymore than the sea slug “decided” to wince in response to a jolt.”
That doesn’t even smell like science. It is a classic example of a just-so story.
Since science has no power to illuminate here, we can only get insights about determinism from philosophers, and there is not so much available there either. I recommend William James, FWIW.
As to competing claims about whether we would be better off believing in determinism or not, the question at least hews a bit closer to what science can accomplish. I thought Kennon Sheldon’s book “Freely Determined” was pretty comprehensive and systematic on that subtopic.
I quite liked “Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting” by Daniel Dennett
This fundamental question has indeed been all over the place recently. Once again: as this is a political science blog, I just finished Arendt’s Human Condition, and while it was a small disappointment, I think she still had a lot to say about the subject matter; freedom and free will are essentially political concepts and thereby it is vita activa through which these ate realized (or something along these lines).
I used to insist there was no such thing as free will, but have come to believe that was fallacious reasoning. There is a perfectly good legal definition of it (as in, did you sign that contract of your own free will, or did somebody hold a gun to your head). It simply means you have a will (to survive, to have food, etc.), you have the ability to make decisions (and learn from their consequences), and the decisions you make, as to the best ways to achieve your will, are your own and you are responsible for them. Whether the laws of physics plus the initial conditions at the Big Bank could have predicted those decisions (probably not, but even if) does not change those facts.
So now I say determinism is what allows us to make decisions and what determines our responsibility for them (e.g., Putin is responsible for invading Ukraine). Without determinism, as I see it, there could be no meaningful decisions and so no free will. (Jack Vance wrote a short story long ago about a world without determinism.)
The most important requirement, aside from determinism, is the ability to apply it; to make reasoned decisions based on predicted consequences, which in turn requires the ability to learn from mistakes and adapt your behavior accordingly. Those less capable of doing so, such as children and the mentally ill, have less responsibility and less of what I consider to be free will. So there is a spectrum of it, with smart breeds of dogs having some.
Jimv:
Interesting. This reminds me in some way of the piranha principle.
Andrew–
A bit orthogonal to the OP, but I think you should rename the “piranha principle”. Piranhas, in general, do not eat each other. For captive piranhas, aquarists even recommend housing them in groups for a healthier social structure. A number of animals will resort to cannibalism if starved enough, but piranhas are not noted for this. Rats and mice are noted for it: it doesn’t take much to induce them to eat their young.
That there cannot be lots of factors all of large effect size acting independently is a good principle; it reminds me of the geneticist R.C. Lewontin’s dictum that organisms are the nexus of a large number of weak effects (which is what can make biology hard). But the word “piranha” didn’t help: only after reading your posts/papers did I realize what you meant; the name was not a useful clue or mnemonic for what your meaning.
Gregory:
Yeah, I think you’re right. Last time I was at the zoo I saw a tank full of piranhas swimming around. It may be too late to rename, though! Do you have any alternative suggestions?
Andrew–
Rats and mice already have too many associations with phrases (rats from a sinking ship, of mice and men, etc.) to be distinctive. My mind is drawn to human analogies. In what situations do people fight their ostensible colleagues till all are gone but one winner? TV suggests “The ‘Survivor’ Principle”, or perhaps “The ‘The Apprentice” Principle”? The latter suggests “The Primary Principle”, which would be apropos for the world of political science.
Gregory:
The Survivor principle isn’t bad, except that it has the implication that one of the contestants will survive.
Andrew–
I don’t watch “Survivor” and similar shows, but from it’s penetration into the general culture I gather that its “winners” are often not winners in any general human or social sense. Thus if the principle is “The ‘Survivor’ Principle”, with quotes or italics indicating reference to the the named TV show, it will be clear that there’s no implication that some worthy factor will emerge from the candidate effects being studied.
JimV:
How do we distinguish “less capable” people from less *willing* people? Can people use their free will to increase their capability, or is capability an intrinsic fixed property? If it’s possible to increase one’s capability through, say, training, like a fireman or a musician, what are we to make of people who don’t bother to increase their capability? How do we assess their responsibility for their own actions?
Jim,
What if free will is like a muscle: the more it is used, the stronger it becomes and the more capable becomes the person who wields it? It would be like a secret weapon: the people who have never used it could not be aware that it exists, much less access its power; while the people who use it frequently would have ever expanding power….
If Putin is responsible for invading Ukraine, then it must be that he could have done otherwise. That is, he was not determined.
Putin is responsible because it was his decision and nobody held a gun to his head to make him do it, and he has decision-making capability (all as far as I know). I hope we succeed in teaching him that it was a bad decision and should not be repeated.
Part of his determination of the decision was no doubt that he got away with it in Crimea. He may yet get away with it in Ukraine.
I never said we always determine good decisions. Just that we try to, as best we can, learning as we do. That is all free will means, legally and to me.
Jeez, I learned from my physician father that emotional and psychological stress can cause disease sometime around 1950. That was in terms of a fried of the family with tuberculosis.
Right, science has not disproved free will. If it had, where is that paper?
Sapolsky has some funny things to say about randomness.
From the phys.org article:
“We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”
Sorry, can’t stop. No free will!
Of course he can’t help asking us to stop, so we’re all good.
How did Sapolsky “show” a mental cause? Did he do an RCT?