Sapolsky on free will
In this video Sapolsky speaks about what the aftermath of realising that the will is unfree will look like. His main point, brutally truncated for brevity, is that without free will nobody is responsible for anything and our methods for punishing criminals will become outdated in the light of this "new" data.
Given his notoriety in science and neurobiology, I assume that I probably misinterpret some or all of what he says, because I strongly disagree with almost all his arguments, on a very mechanical level.
Firstly, to clarify, I agree with the fact that there is no free will. Moreover, if there is some sort of quantum randomness inherent in matter, computational systems (such as brains and computers) are capable of operating predicably in spite of this randomness.
But my disagreement starts in regards to responsibility. I see responsibility as ownership of the consequence of a thing, process, or action. To be the identifiable cause of something makes you responsible for it. It is a subjective evaluation based on a percieved chain of cause and effects. As such, free will does not even affect the matter of responsibility.
If a stranger kicks me in the nuts, I hold that person responsible for the subsequent pain I experience from that action. It makes no difference if the kick was the produce of a magical otherworldly decision process (i.e. free will) or if it was a purely computational product. I want to punish the source of my scrotum pain.
Punishment and rewards still fill the same function in the abscense of free will. Nothing needs to change. A healthy system (i.e. a society or the human body) wants to either destroy, punish, or otherwise convert forces harmful to itself, which is what the legal system (somewhat unsuccessfully) attempts to do.
Reversly, if someone gives me a gift, I do not care if it was a pre-programmed action or not. I want to reward that (fatalistic) benevolent system as to encourage it to continue operate in that fashion. Just because a system had no control over the causes that led it to perform an action, does not mean that that future occurances of the same behaviour can not be manipulated by applying external force.
Indeed, responsibility is still a mental construct (again, regardless of will), a construct that represent a mechanical function that can and has been artificially reproduced. In what way does the realization of complete fatalism upheave these constructs? If anything, that the universe is deterministic affirm these constructs even more. Free will just introduces noise to the process of refining the operating principles of a system. That is to say, why does punishing somebody makes sense if they act on the bidding of some random ghost that can not be predicted? It completely devaluates the punishing act. The punishment itself is only effective if the system in question has the ability to take that punishement into consideration when making future decisions.
Sapolsky even mention this in passing himself, that we should still imprison "dangerous" people. So why would this matter have any practical implication at all? Sadly, I put Sapolsky in the same category of people that he so passionately likes to condemn; Many put some magic property to the will and call it free — Sapolsky attributes this magic property to responsibility instead.
Lastly, I object to that unfree will is a novel concept first proven by neurobiology. The idea of fate is old. Nietzsche rejects both free will and Sapolsky's "unfree will" in Beyond Good and Evil:
The causa sui is the best self-contradiction which has been thought up so far, a kind of logical rape and perversity. But the excessive pride of human beings has worked to entangle itself deeply and terribly with this very nonsense. The demand for "freedom of the will," in that superlative metaphysical sense, as it unfortunately still rules in the heads of the half-educated, the demand to bear the entire final responsibility for one's actions oneself and to relieve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society of responsibility for it, is naturally nothing less than this very causa sui and an attempt to pull oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by the hair, with more audacity than Munchhausen. Suppose someone in this way gets behind the boorish simplicity of this famous idea of the "free will" and erases it from his head, then I would invite him now to push his "enlightenment" still one step further and erase also the inverse of this incomprehensible idea of "free will" from his head: I refer to the "unfree will," which leads to an abuse of cause and effect. People should not mistakenly reify "cause" and "effect" the way those investigating nature do (and people like them who nowadays naturalize their thinking), in accordance with the ruling mechanistic foolishness which allows causes to push and shove until they "have an effect." People should use "cause" and "effect" merely as pure ideas, that is, as conventional fictions to indicate and communicate, not as an explanation. In the "in itself" there is no "causal connection," no "necessity," no "psychological unfreedom," no "effect following from the cause"; no "law" holds sway. We are the ones who have, on our own, made up causes, causal sequences, for-one-another, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, reason, and purpose, and when we fabricate this world of signs inside things as something "in itself," when we stir it into things, then we're once again acting as we have always done, namely, mythologically. The "unfree will" is a myth: in real life it's merely a matter of strong and weak wills.
Sapolsky attacks filosophers throught the video and claims to represent a scientific point view on the same subject. Indeed, free will is the spawn of highly unscientific (i.e. untestable) reasoning. But how is his musings of the effect of "unfree will" anything else than a naive and outdated version of ethics and moral philosophy?