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Alan Johnson's Reviews > Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
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Alan Johnson's review
bookshelves: a-rhe-reference, free-will-and-consciousness, stem, philosophy-scholars, a-rhg-reference, law-general, neuroscience-and-psychology, political-science-and-politics, psychology, reason-and-critical-thinking, social-sciences
Dec 16, 2023
bookshelves: a-rhe-reference, free-will-and-consciousness, stem, philosophy-scholars, a-rhg-reference, law-general, neuroscience-and-psychology, political-science-and-politics, psychology, reason-and-critical-thinking, social-sciences
I have posted a critical review of Robert M. Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science Of Life Without Free Will (New York: Penguin, 2023) at https://www.academia.edu/111595070/Cr....
Sapolsky's book argues for hard determinism, i.e., that "we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control--our biology, our environments, their interactions." My above-referenced review shows, inter alia, that Sapolsky's book does not prove his thesis and that there are scientific and philosophical grounds for some kind of free will.
Sapolsky's book argues for hard determinism, i.e., that "we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control--our biology, our environments, their interactions." My above-referenced review shows, inter alia, that Sapolsky's book does not prove his thesis and that there are scientific and philosophical grounds for some kind of free will.
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Reading Progress
October 17, 2023
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Started Reading
October 17, 2023
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October 17, 2023
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October 17, 2023
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a-rhe-reference
October 17, 2023
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free-will-and-consciousness
October 17, 2023
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stem
October 17, 2023
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philosophy-scholars
December 16, 2023
– Shelved as:
a-rhg-reference
December 16, 2023
– Shelved as:
law-general
December 16, 2023
– Shelved as:
neuroscience-and-psychology
December 16, 2023
– Shelved as:
political-science-and-politics
December 16, 2023
– Shelved as:
psychology
December 16, 2023
– Shelved as:
reason-and-critical-thinking
December 16, 2023
– Shelved as:
social-sciences
December 16, 2023
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Michael
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Dec 18, 2023 02:16PM
I had to laugh. Your critique contains the very fallacies of which you accuse Sapolsky, while simultaneously demonstrating that you may have read the book, but you most certainly didn’t understand it. The main problem with arguing for the existence of free will is the complete inability of those, promoting its existence, to show how it comes about. Moreover, you seem oblivious to Sapolsky’s argument that current scientific knowledge allows us to identify, at .least conceptually, the very real factors that do affect the working of neutrons in our brains….and it’s akin to astrophysics and the Big Bang. We have an apparently good, if imperfect, understanding of almost everything….there is a point, a minuscule amount of time post Big Bang where the math breaks down, but that isn’t a valid reason for insisting that ‘god did it’. Nor is there any valid reason, that you identified, for filling in any gaps in our understanding of neuroscience with ‘free will exists’. In short, you want to believe in free will despite being unable to articulate how it exists or works and so you reject any argument to the contrary (while, and I had to laugh, promoting your own book)
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It's also got circular reasoning and strawmanning less than 10 pages in, and he shows he's WAY over his head in the world of philosophy.
Riffing on your Academia piece, I'm fine with "randomness" as "Option 3" being part of the mix. I'm also VERY supportive of Dan Wegner's rejection of *conscious* free will. (Interesting that Sapolsky ONLY cites him briefly in re the Libet experiments and not at all his book.) I also, as a good linguistic philosopher, refuse to accept several of Sapolsky's definitional framings; a big one is that I refuse to call psychological "impingement" or "constraint" by the word "determinism."Your last paragraph is spot on. A Walter Kaufmann, within the world of philosophy, in what is in part a critique of John Rawls, has plenty to say about both retributive and distributive justice's problems from an ethics POV in "Without Guilt or Justice," and these ideas do indeed, since he was critiquing Rawls, spill over from philosophy into political science, etc.
