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Nicolai Gamulea's Reviews > Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will
Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will
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I'm a big fan of Sapolsky, but I fear he's about to publish a wrong thesis.
What he doesn't seem to get, imho, blinded as he is by physicalism, is that free will does exist - it's just that it exists not at a biological level of reality, but at a social one. It comes with the self-ownership of a person, as delimited by its social identity, not by its skin. Free will is a social construct, and it's a fundamental one for many other social constructs that our civilisation is made of.
What he doesn't seem to get, imho, blinded as he is by physicalism, is that free will does exist - it's just that it exists not at a biological level of reality, but at a social one. It comes with the self-ownership of a person, as delimited by its social identity, not by its skin. Free will is a social construct, and it's a fundamental one for many other social constructs that our civilisation is made of.
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October 25, 2022
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Maxime
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Jan 29, 2023 09:37AM
But how do you explain its existence? Where does it come from? If it's a social construct then it doesn't exist by itself? Lets imagine a world in which humans are not in society, then we wouldn't have free will, but by adhering to some sort of social contract we create it? That seems to me to be a very weird position.
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Why couldn’t he just have stuck to biology :(
If it’s a social contrast then it’s human made>> illusion
The sense of free will is a useful fiction woven by a conscious mind and a useful axiom of criminal law. I couldn't help from writing this.
The social dimension and its construct can not arise in isolation. You have to take into account the (un)free wills and their embedding into the environment it emerges out of.
You are defending a notion that is not the concept of "free will". I f you define free will as the existence of agents in a society, then you are right, but agents may operate as if they have free will, but without having it. From a standpoint of attaining a civilized society, you may do it on the basis of agents that seem to have free will, but you do not need the free will to begin with.
It doesn't matter if it's a social construct (I don't think it is either, it's a natural delusion we all possess as an adaptation). Social constructs still have predetermined material inputs, just incredibly complex ones. Look at God as an example, something that definitely isn't real but has clear reasons for why it exists and what it does
If free will were a social construct, we'd expect it to behave like other social constructs, which constantly mutate, schism, and vary widely with time and place. Consider how the social construct of English evolves. Go back 500 years and the English of the time is getting hard to read. Go back another 500 years and it's looking like a foreign language. Today there are hundreds of distinct English accents, making spoken English almost unintelligible if you're an American who just arrived in parts of Glasgow. As English spread around the world it replaced dozens of indigenous languages or became a second language alongside them, changing itself and them. The social constructs of religion, sports, music, cooking, monetary systems, and politics similarly demonstrate huge diversity and constant change. By some counts there are over 40,000 distinct conceptions of Christianity by now. Free will, in contrast, seems to come in roughly the same four or so flavors that have been around since at least the ancient Greeks. That's not like any other social construct I can (freely) think of.
