You may think you chose to read this, but Stanford scientist Robert Sapolsky would disagree.
He says virtually all human behavior is beyond our conscious control.I had no choice but to question this.
There are two arguments here, according to Sapolsky. One: that free will is absolute, or it’s absolutely an illusion. And, two (he states this one more explicitly in the article): we are all machines. Because: science.
Or rather: “blah blah blah science blah blah people are just machines.”
Now define “machine.” Starting with any other machine that acts under its own volition. Guns, we are told, “go off, “ even though no gun cock itself or pull its own trigger or load its own chamber. Robots can perform programmed and designed functions, but cannot display autonomous and new behaviors. No machine can model the range of human behaviors, or properly be said to be human at all. Self-driving cars (so far), can’t. But, sure, people are machines. It’s science-y!
Descartes argued that animals were machines (not an idea he originated), and people are animals, so, sure. Science!
Or something.
And if “free will” isn’t defined as “absolutely free to exhibit unfamiliar and unexpected and absolutely unprompted behavior under any and all circumstances,” then how does this argument lead to us all being automatons?
Definitions are so important. Like: what kind of machine is a human, exactly?*
Granted, this is a newspaper article, not a treatise. But I’d still like to know.
*I have a dear family member suffering from dementia. She can’t speak clearly, is sometimes wildly delusional and confused, and has to live in a care facility for her own safety. Granted this condition raises issues of her “free will,” but is the better course to treat her as a broken and irreparable machine? Isn’t that the failing of mental health care for too long? To treat patients like this as broken machines rather than afflicted human beings? In fact there is fundamental conflict here between Anglo-American philosophy and Continental philosophy. The latter is far more interested in phenomenology, the examination of the question of being. I know the term is not the term in the phrase “human being,” but can a human being be a machine? Doesn’t that mean the machine doesn’t have being?
Is this proposal by Sapolsky a step forward? Or a giant step backward?
All of our declarations of knowledge are more honestly declared to be a declaration of what we choose to believe, no one makes us believe anything starting with what we already believed before we were told one and one are two. If that's not a matter of choice but of material compulsion then there's no more truth value to that than one and one are fifty-six. Neuro-biology is among the most thoroughly ideological of fields of academic activity, it is entirely based on things that aren't demonstrated in reason or physical evidence but in promotion of many extremely tenuous, often entirely unconnectable ideological holdings that are called "science".
ReplyDeleteIn short, he chooses to believe what he believes and, like all fatalists and materialist-causationists, he doesn't much care about the consequences of widespread belief in that. It's certainly among the most destructive of ideas to anything like the popular election of governments and anything better than rule of the strongest and least moral. Is it any wonder we're in such trouble after academia has so thoroughly bought into atheist materialism? It's guys like this who convinced me that some kind of absolute fascist governance is entirely acceptable to them, in theory at least. No doubt they'd be the first to whine that they're liberals when liberalism requires free choice.