In this book, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that we have no free will and that such choices are determinThe science of spontaneity and freedom
In this book, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that we have no free will and that such choices are determined by factors that are beyond our control. We live in a deterministic universe where all events are determined by an initial state and laws of nature. The events of the remote past are not under our control, and the human brain registers a decision long before an individual consciously decides to do so. Many unconscious factors play a role in making free will non-existent.
The author makes a good argument for determinism which means everything in the universe is preordained. No matter how thinly you slice a particular situation or an event or an action, you will find that each unique biological state is caused by a unique state that preceded it. And if you want to understand things, you need to break these two states down to their component parts and figure out how each component comprising “Just-Before-Now” gave rise to each piece of “Now.” This is how the universe works. But what if that isn't the case? What if some moments aren't caused by anything preceding them? What if some unique “Now” can be caused by multiple, unique “Just-Before-Now events” The science of reductionism by breaking it down each state to its component parts is futile. Because in the world of chaos theory, emergent phenomenon, and quantum physics, indeterminacy is ever present, it defies reductionism. Hence, determinism is not compatible with free will, in essence a neuron has no apparent cause for an action of a free will. It turns out that we are at present through the scheme of biological evolution and have emerged to the current state. We had no control over our history.
The author presents his arguments well in the middle chapters, and the last two chapters focus more on the sociology of how the lack of free will affect humanity. It is interesting to read another book also published in 2023 is, “Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchel makes an opposite argument stating that we have free will and it is conferred by the transition of matter (non-life) to highly self-organized and self-regulating entities (life) during biological evolution.
The discussion of consciousness and free will involves neuroscience, physics, philosophy, history, and mathematics. It Do we create physical reality?
The discussion of consciousness and free will involves neuroscience, physics, philosophy, history, and mathematics. It is huge in scope and reaches the core of physical reality itself. This is not a neuroscience book per se but a philosophical one that combines all the relevant fields. Consciousness hinges on two characteristics: the extrinsic world that operates on the laws of physics, and the intrinsic world of life that is related to feelings, thoughts, and ideas. The presumption is that in this world cognition exists and evolves in mobile living beings in parallel with the evolution of life, and the cosmos we observe is real. It is hard to put the two perspectives together in a science of consciousness. Could these two perspectives be reconciled, or whether science will remain incomplete. This is the point at which where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet, that is ontology (what exists for one to know about) and epistemology (how knowledge is created and what is possible to know) becomes meaningful. When they begin to merge and breakdown in their distinctions, something dimensionless and unnamable is formed. This creates a structure that we call "experience” and the standard correlational approach of certain behavior with a part of brain becomes irrelevant. What makes someone or something conscious is described by the integrated information theory (IIT), and consciousness has a physical basis which can be mathematically measured. IIT proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.
Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant level of description for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states and they are computationally irreducible. The logical fatalism is a philosophical and abstract argument against free will because everything is predetermined in this world. The opposite is a universe where the future is not dependent on the past, not even randomly, as there is no probability distribution drawn from it, and therefore this looks unappealing. In either case, one must guess how recent and past states play a role in the emergence of free will.
The author’s use of bombastic phrases and technical jargon make reading a little challenging, but nevertheless he makes a valiant effort to address issues. My only gripe is that this is an open-ended book that does not draw any conclusions about the existence or nonexistence of free-will. ...more
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