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- [00:07]
Paul Bloom
I think a suitably complicated AI, which nobody thinks has a soul and nobody thinks has free will in any interesting sense could still make choices by calculating options and making decisions based on options.
- [00:18]
Moderator
And aren't you making now a choice? Oh, I'm going to finish this sentence now.
- [00:22]
Paul Bloom
Absolutely. Even though since the Big Bang it is determined, I would have done that. Even though it's a purely physical brain, I'm making choices.
- [00:31]
Hilary Lawson
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. Today it's Avi here and Ed, and.
- [00:41]
Announcer
This is Freedom and Fate, which is a debate all about determinism versus free will. And we've got three different speakers on it today. They are Paul Bloom, a psychologist whose research primarily focuses on children and their behaviors. Lucy Allay, who is a analytic philosopher who loves a bit of Immanuel Kant. And to round it off, we have Robert Sapolsky, who wrote a book called Determined, so you can probably guess his position on the topic of free will.
- [01:08]
Hilary Lawson
The talk is hosted by Hilary Lawson. So without any further ado, we'll hand over to Hilary.
- [01:19]
Moderator
Thank you and welcome to this debate. An individual is responsible for everything he does, claims such. And from creative expression to criminal justice, free will and responsibility are central to our culture and personal lives. Yet many neuroscientists and materialist thinkers maintain freedom is an illusion. But there's no agreement about how this can be reconciled with our everyday experience and our need for responsibility. Many attempts have been made to argue that the two seemingly contradictory outlooks can be made compatible. But critics say these compatibilist arguments are unconvincing and are primarily driven by the goal of making materialism acceptable. Must we conclude that materialist scientific account of the world is flawed? Do we need instead to give up on free will? Or is there a way to maintain both? With me to debate this key puzzle in Western thought, we've got a headline panel. Paul Bloom is one of the world's leading psychologists, professor at Yale and Toronto. He's author of many key books in his field, and his latest work is a more popular one, the Human Mind, A Brief Tour of Everything We Know. Joining us from California, Robert Sapolsky is a distinguished neuroscientist, primatologist and author, best known for his research on stress and its impact on behavior and health. A professor at Stanford, his latest book, Determined A Science of Life Without Free Will, could not be more relevant to this debate. And Lucy Allis is a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Witwatersfund, renowned for her work on Immanuel Kant, and her research interests also include punishment, forgiveness, and bioethics. Now, I give in the usual fashion, our panel here just three minutes to respond to the core idea we're addressing here, which is most of us think that we have free will and our actions are not determined. Yet many scientists and philosophers argue that free will is an illusion. So what's the reason for this opposition and who's right?
- [03:33]
Paul Bloom
Paul, thank you. Some of my research is with young children and. And there's a lot of evidence that we come into the world with certain ways of making sense of things and making sense of ourselves. So one aspect of something is something you call common sense dualism, the idea that although the world contains material bodies and we possess material bodies, we ourselves are not bodies, we're immaterial souls. A second stance is a belief in free will. Other objects in the world move because of causal forces. We choose, and when we choose, we could have chosen otherwise. I think, like a lot of other psychologists and neuroscientists, that both views are mistaken. The proper theory is materialism that our mental life is a product of our physical brains, and determinism that things are our behaviors are the result of causal forces. But I don't think this carries the implications that some people think it does. So suppose we leave here and we're walking around, and all of a sudden I bump into you instead of you plummeting into a ditch. There's roughly two big possibilities here. One is, I did it by accident. I slipped. I had a tremor. The second one is I said, I want to do this. I think it out, I consciously plan it, and I do it on purpose. This is a very real difference in both cases, the physical brain. In both cases, it's determined, but it really matters. And the intentional action could be viewed properly as choice. Something I choose. As such, it's subject to moral approbation. You can say, you're such a jerk. Get me thrown out at a festival. And this makes sense because since it was an intentional conscious action, it's subject to incentives to praise and to blame. I think all sorts of questions remain if you accept this view. Like, there's some things that are hard to fit into either categories, like addictions, which seem a little bit chosen and a little bit involuntary. But still, I think the correct theory of human nature is determined, yet we possess the capacity to choose. Now, I guess this makes me a compatibilist. And I have been told that two things. One thing is this is the position most philosophers have. And it also makes me the most boring person on stage. My other two are going to have much more interesting and radical views. All I could say in defense of compatibilism is that it's probably true.
- [05:52]
Moderator
Thank you so much, Paul.
- [05:53]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Robert well, let's hate to be the.
- [05:56]
Robert Sapolsky
First person to say, I'm not quite sure I agree with you there, Paul, but I believe there's no free will whatsoever, which is putting me out in the lunatic fringe of determinism. And moreover, just to make it worse, I think if people rejected the notion of free will, this would count as a very good thing. The world would be a better place. Okay, so starting point. Why did this just happen? Because of what happened before.
- [06:25]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Why did that?
- [06:26]
Robert Sapolsky
That happened because of what happened before that. The realm of behavior, what we're often asking, is antecedent causes within a biological framework. Somebody does something, it's wonderful, it's appalling, it's ambiguous. And we ask the most common of questions. We say, why did they do that? And the answer is because a few milliseconds ago, certain parts of their brain.
- [06:52]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Neurons activated and caused that to occur. Why did that behavior happen? Because in the previous minute, environmental stimuli triggered those neurons to have that activity, and because in the previous hours, today's hormone levels made the brain more or less sensitive to those environmental stimuli. And with that, you're often running.
- [07:17]
Robert Sapolsky
What have the recent decades of your life been like? Have they been filled with depression, trauma, addiction, poverty? Have they been filled with purpose, with finding God, finding love, finding the right kind of exercise to keep you stimulated?
- [07:35]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
The brain you will have going into that morning's hormones, and the last minute stimuli will have been sculpted by all that. But you have to take it even further, back to the very special domain of adolescence, which is when your frontal cortex is doing its last maturation, which.
- [07:56]
Robert Sapolsky
Has a zillion things to do with.
- [07:59]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Why at every juncture in the road, some of us make the wrong choices and others resist. Back to childhood, when your brain is being constructed by every environmental action. Back to life, which is showing very dramatically that environment doesn't begin at work at birth, of course. Back to your genes. The only acceptable view, genes as influencing rather than deterministic genes is only making sense in the context of the environment with which they interact.
- [08:33]
Robert Sapolsky
But then you've got to do stuff like figure out what your ancestors were.
- [08:37]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Up to 400 years ago, because the cultures they invented had something to do with how you were mothered within minutes of birth.
- [08:45]
Robert Sapolsky
What ecology has to do with this.
- [08:47]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Sort of culture that are invented and of course at the bottom of the barrel, evolution. Why are we more monogamous than chimps but less monogamous than gibbon? Why did things turn out that way? So I would say maybe three points. When you look at some of the end arounds for getting sort of free will out of things like quantum indeterminism.
- [09:11]
Robert Sapolsky
Chaoticism, it simply doesn't hold up. Second, I'm not saying, ooh, when you look at all these multiple different disciplines.
- [09:20]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
There'S no room for free will. They're not different, they all merge into one. If you were talking about genes and.
- [09:26]
Robert Sapolsky
Behavior, you're talking about millions of years of the evolution of those genes and.
- [09:31]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
You'Re talking about how much of some protein a gene made during breakfast today.
- [09:36]
Robert Sapolsky
Finally, insofar as all of those form.
- [09:40]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
One arc, there are simply no cracks.
- [09:43]
Robert Sapolsky
In that edifice in which one can shoehorn in freedom. Freedom of how you came to be.
- [09:50]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
In that moment, independent of all that came before. And there are some very seductive moments that convince people they are seen free will and it's not actually there.
- [10:02]
Moderator
Thank you. Thank you, Robert. So, Lucy, Alice, all yours.
- [10:06]
Lucy Allis
Thanks so much, Hilary, and it's great to be here. So just in answer to your two questions, the first is that I think not all scientists deny free will and most philosophers don't. I think it is fundamentally a philosophical question. It's about the philosophical interpretation of science and how we think about agency. I think the things that drive the opposition, the apparent opposition between the way we think about science and free will are two main things. One is an unnecessarily reductivist view of the place of physics in the world. So we're extremely successful at explaining things by breaking them into little parts and explaining the properties of the parts, which is great. That's a great way of understanding things. It doesn't imply, but it doesn't follow from that that that's the only way of explaining things. Living things are understood in with whole part properties, and those are also legitimate and scientific explanations. The other thing I think plays a really strong role in driving the free will debate is the role of certain kinds of idealizations and abstractions in science. So idealizations and abstractions play a role in almost all sciences and they're useful and that's great. They enable us to have all sorts of explanations of things, but we are particularly mesmerized by them when it comes to fundamental physics. We somehow imagine that we've got these very accurate laws. So Then we have this picture of the universe as a closed system in which nothing other than the laws governing bosons and fermions explain why anything happens. But that idealization is not itself an empirical claim within the scientific theory. It's a metaphysical and an avoidable metaphysical interpretation of the science. I think that there's a perfectly empirically informed, naturalistic view of the world world that allows that the world is a complex place with lots of different kinds of structures and causal properties in it, and substances. There are whatever fundamental physics tells us that matter is made up of with bosons and fermions, and they combine to form atoms with different properties. And the atoms combine to form elements and chemicals and new kinds of structures. And at each of these levels there are new kinds of explanations of how the world is unfolding. And I think it's bizarre to think that these new structures have no properties other than the properties of bosons and fermions. Among the complex phenomena in the world are persisting dynamic self organized living systems that are explained by biologists, scientists, respectively. Scientific win whole pathways. And among the persisting dynamic self organizing structures are ones that have the capacity to sense themselves and the world and to move themselves as a whole in carrying out their goals and purposes. So I think here we have causal explanations and constraints in different directions. The laws governing bosons and fermions and molecules constrain what possibilities for life there are. And the things that self organizing living things are doing give us some explanation of some of what's happening to the bosons and fermions and molecules. So agency is thoroughly embodied, it's not magic. There are things happening in the body every time you move. That doesn't mean that the only explanation is what's happening to the bosons and fermions. So some of what's happening to the bosons and fermions is a function of what you're doing.
- [13:47]
Moderator
Thank you, Lucy. So some pretty fundamentally different outlooks on our panel here. So let me just begin with our first thing, which is to ask you, do you think, Lucy, that the denial of free will by some scientists and philosophers is driven by the desire to maintain that overall materialist account of the world? Is that what, what's really motivating it?
- [14:13]
Lucy Allis
I think that's one motivation, but I also think it's an equation of naturalism with materialism. So to think that the only kinds of respectively naturalistic explanations are the ones that fundamental physics gives, and I think there's just no reason to think that.
- [14:30]
Paul Bloom
That'S a clarification As I understand your view, you're saying there's causal explanations all the way up, not just physics, and all the way down and all the way down. But isn't free will a denial that we do have causal explanations for behavior?
- [14:47]
Lucy Allis
So firstly, it's not a denial that we have causal explanations of all the constraints where we're situated and all the abilities that we have, including features of your own motivational system. So it's not a denial of that. And then it's not a denial that every aspect of agency is embodied, but it's the assertion that. And it doesn't require. Robert says in his book that it requires that there are events with no causal antecedents or gaps in the laws of nature, or breaks in the laws of nature. I don't think it requires any of those things. It requires that there are natural systems with higher level properties to move themselves in ways that are compatible with constraints provided by the lower level laws. And that's a causal power that an agent has.
- [15:34]
Moderator
So Robert, do you see your position as being driven by a defense of materialism or physicalism? Is that what is motivating you, that there's just no alternative? You can't give any account of free will, and therefore because you can't give an account of free will within the scientific framework, you think that we have to then deny free will?
- [16:02]
Robert Sapolsky
Basically, I think by now the extent of scientific knowledge is such that it forms this matrix of explanation and that within that matrix it is a purely materialistic one. And every attempt to find free will.
- [16:20]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Lurking in there requires some sort of.
- [16:23]
Robert Sapolsky
Violation of how we know these matrices work. In that regard, I completely agree with Lucy that trying to make sense of human behavior by going down to bosons is absurd. The reductionism of that is the worst possible way to try to make sense of who we are. Simply because of emergent self organization, simply because of non linear chaoticism. Reductionism is a very tempting dead end in lots of ways, even if it runs an awful lot of what science does. That's not the level question. Whether or not we have free will is occurring.
- [17:03]
Moderator
But if we accept your thought, which is that there's no room, as it were, within the scientific framework to find a way to intervene in the necessary causality implied by the laws, isn't there still a question of. Well, you presumably have made a decision at some level to take part in this debate. You wrote a book trying to convince people of the idea that we should see free will as an illusion. And you were presumably doing that because you wanted to change their minds, but what was the point if they couldn't change their minds in the first place?
- [17:53]
Robert Sapolsky
Great. We see encased in that the two biggest seductive magnets that pull people towards thinking they're seeing free will when they're not. We have moments where we form an intent and we act on it. We make a choice and we choose at that moment. And that momentness is so palpable that we're convinced the question of free will has something to do with that moment instead of everything that led up to that moment. The other seductive conclusion is, oh, my God, if this is a deterministic world and there's no free will, nothing can change. Things change dramatically. Individuals, cultures, all of that. And it is absolutely worthwhile and efficacious to try to change others. The key thing is we do not choose to change. We are changed by circumstance and as.
- [18:50]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
A function of who we turned out to be at the moment of that circumstance. So I think trying to not only.
- [18:56]
Robert Sapolsky
Convince people, but get them to buy thousands of copies of one's book is completely compatible nonetheless with the notion of.
- [19:05]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
There not being any free will.
- [19:07]
Paul Bloom
Okay.
- [19:09]
Moderator
Do you think it's completely compatible? No.
- [19:14]
Lucy Allis
I think along with philosophers like Helen Stewart and John Dupree, who was here earlier in the festival, I think you can't even make sense of animal agency in a metaphysically determined world. I think there are complex, organized, conscious creatures in the world that have goals and purposes and that move their bodies in carrying out their goals and purposes. And what scientists give us and what Roberts book gives a beautiful account of, is an amazing amount of detail about how that happens. But as John Dupree says, causal understanding how the causal capacities of a system work are not the same as an explanation of why the causal capacities of a system were engaged at any particular moment. And neuroscience doesn't give us an account of that. Robert also, and I really like Robert's book, and I should say, actually an interesting thing, is that Robert's what philosophers call a hard determinist, which actually, my view of free will is in some ways closer to his than it is to Paul's, because Robert and I both reject the position called compatibilism. Paul presented compatibilism as a boring and moderate position, but in fact, he gave you this example of how he pushes you into a ditch on purpose with malicious intent. And you blame him for that. When you blame him for that, you think he could have not done that. I think it's literally incredible that you could blame him for that. At the Same time as thinking that what he did was set in place by the Big Bang, and he had, and his malicious intent could not have resulted in anything else. I think that's a literally incredible view. And I also think there's absolutely no naturalistic reason to accept it.
- [21:01]
Moderator
It's an incredible view for it.
- [21:04]
Paul Bloom
Better than being boring.
- [21:07]
Lucy Allis
Yeah, I agree.
- [21:07]
Moderator
Well, you've definitely won on that front.
- [21:12]
Paul Bloom
There's what philosophers call the reactive attitudes. Blame, guilt, anger, praise, gratitude, love. And I think Lucy's right, in a sense that can we. Is it coherent to have these views if we believe everybody's actions were set in place from the moment of the Big bang? Maybe it isn't, but that's not going to stop us. I will make a bet that everybody here who's like, who calls him or herself a hardcore determinist, still, when somebody cuts in front of the line, when getting in, when you think says, you asshole, and doesn't like the person when their child does something, they feel pride. When somebody gives them, they feel gratitude. These are things that have evolved through natural selection. I think they evolved through natural selection for instrumental reasons. Because when we make choices, and I call them choices, we're sensitive to these things. That's why revenge, anger, guilt come in. And the intellectual knowledge, oh, big bang, I'm a determinist, doesn't affect them.
- [22:07]
Moderator
What does? I mean, I think this is Lucy's point. What does we have a choice mean if we've got no choice about what we choose? I mean, what does that mean? Oh, yes, we have choices, but actually there's only one thing that can be the outcome. In what sense is that a choice?
- [22:23]
Paul Bloom
Well, here's the psychology of making a choice. You set up different options as all materialists as old as you weigh them, you calculate the cost benefits, you compare them, you imagine different outcomes and so on. And then you come up with the one that ranks the top. And you do that. Now, some people say that can't be choice because that's just a deterministic process. For somebody to count as choice, it has to be magic. I think it's a terminological issue. If you want to say what I just described doesn't count as choice, because to be choice, you can't be deterministic, it has to be magic. Then for you, there's no such thing as choices. But for the rest of the world, that's what we mean by making choices. You add up cost benefits. You compute, you calculate. So, for instance, and people might disagree with me, I think a suitably complicated AI, which nobody thinks has a soul and nobody thinks has free will in any interesting sense, could still make choices by calculating options and making decisions based on options.
- [23:16]
Moderator
And aren't you making now a choice? Oh, I'm going to finish this sentence now. I'm going to.
- [23:20]
Paul Bloom
Absolutely. Even though, since the Big Bang it is determined I would have done that. Even though it's a purely physical brain, I'm making choices. That's what you get when you talk to compatibilists. Too much agreement.
- [23:33]
Moderator
I'm not sure we'll have that much agreement on that particular frame. So let me move on to the next thing which is directly related to this, which is that does materialism threaten our notions of responsibility or not? I mean, is it a threat or not? Do I take it, Paul, that you're just saying, well, it's not a threat, there's no problem, we can have this materialism, we can have this. That was all given in the Big Bang, you know, block universe. Here we are. There was only one thing that was ever going to happen, and that's no threat to any notions of responsibility at all.
- [24:10]
Paul Bloom
No, I'm sympathetic to the point, which is that from, if you think it out from a philosophical point of view, it is a threat. You punish people for doing things, and Robert talks about this in his book, and in some sense they couldn't have done otherwise. So why are you punishing them? Why are you making them suffer? Yeah, but on the other hand, I think our impulse to suffer, to make people suffer, an impulse to blame, is incorrigible. We can't help ourselves from doing it and does some honest good in our world. So maybe in some way it's a valuable illusion. If we stopped holding people responsible for their actions, we wouldn't be. People wouldn't change based on their behavior and everything would dissolve into chaos. You don't think your child is doing something. Your child may run out into the road and you snatch them back and you yell at them. And the very fact that, oh, it's determined from the moment of the Big Bang doesn't make you any less wanting to get the kid to know he or she shouldn't do that.
- [25:04]
Moderator
So, Robert, as I understand it, you're saying that they are incompatible, that we can't have responsibility for things in this world without free will and we should just give up trying to punish people or do anything like that. Is that right?
- [25:25]
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah, basically, because I'm in complete agreement once again with Lucy in that the world was not determined two seconds after the big bang because of chaoticism, that simply is not possible. And I'm completely in agreement with Paul that our intuitions are to see agency all over the place and it's simply is not the case. We make a choice. Okay, Paul, you've become the stalking horse here. So you viciously knocked this person into the ditch.
- [25:59]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
You could have offered them your kidney.
- [26:01]
Robert Sapolsky
Instead you formed an intent at that moment and knocked them into the ditch. You were conscious of that choice, you knew there were alternatives. And that sure looks like free will. Except for the critical issue. How do you turn out to be the sort of person who at that moment would act in this anti social vicious manner instead of donating a kidney to them? How to end, that's where there was no control. And in that regard, if you really, really logically follow through the notion of there being no free will, blame and punishment makes no sense whatsoever. Praise and reward make no sense. A sense of entitlement, of having earned anything, of justice being served makes no sense. And precisely because of the intuitions that.
- [26:51]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Paul was talking about, that's going to.
- [26:54]
Robert Sapolsky
Be so hard to accept and work with. Except that historically we've managed to subtract out a sense of responsibility in situations over and over. And when that happens, not only does not the roof cave in, the world becomes a more humane place.
- [27:15]
Paul Bloom
Robert, you and I, and you probably know more about this than I do studied evolution of human behavior. And I think we could both appreciate why these impulses, why these punitive impulses have evolved. They've evolved because regardless of the facts of free will or not, they help. You know, if somebody assaults me and I punish them for doing it, they're less likely to do it. I think though, then you'd probably want to keep in punishment and reward, at least for instrumental reasons. Right. So what are you taking away? What do we lose?
- [27:49]
Robert Sapolsky
Oh, absolutely fine. For instrumental reasons. When for example, using punishment instrumentally, we should be suspicious because as you're saying, we like punishing people release dopamine, people get excitement out of that. Framed evolutionarily, third party punishment is one of the best ways to drive cooperation. And there's got to be a reward for doing that because it carries a cost to the third party individual in the way of prestige, reputation, trust, a sense of self, being able to sleep at night, knowing you like, who you are, all of that. Yes, that's absolutely the case. And these are fine tools, but be careful because punishment doesn't work as well as people think and it tempts you to give a Moral worth to it. And praise comes with all sorts of biased filters as to what earns praise from you. And that has its problems also, but both, nevertheless, perfectly fine as tools, not fine as moral ends in and of themselves.
- [29:00]
Paul Bloom
Could I ask one question? What else would you remove? So I'm thinking about love. And one reason why I love people is because of how they treat me and how they respond to me and everything like that. Does that go, too?
- [29:16]
Robert Sapolsky
No, because we can operate at two levels simultaneously. I love my wife, and I know it's got something to do with my olfactory receptors and my oxytocin variants.
- [29:29]
Paul Bloom
There's a Valentine's card.
- [29:35]
Robert Sapolsky
Oh, she keeps. I'm so sentimental.
- [29:37]
Paul Bloom
We.
- [29:38]
Robert Sapolsky
The fact that you could look at a gazelle doing something absolutely gorgeous, leaping, and feel a sense of gratitude that, like, you got to experience that in the world, and at the same time you could understand the biomechanics of how a gazelle pelvis makes that possible.
- [29:58]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
You can do both.
- [30:00]
Robert Sapolsky
And the fact that there is explanation underneath the surface should not for a moment, like, cure us of magic or cure us of mystery or awe. They're completely compatible, just two different levels.
- [30:17]
Moderator
What's going on for you, Robert, when. When we are weighing something up? I mean, you are trying to convince us at the moment, at least that's how we're interpreting it. It certainly feels like you're trying to convince us. You've got some, you know, powerful, powerful arguments on your side, but why are you trying to convince us? And what does it mean to convince somebody? I mean, how do you engage in any of that sort of vocabulary at all? Rather like Paul's question. Well, just how far does this go in terms of what we have to excise from our vocabulary in order to be able to carry through with your outlook?
- [31:03]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, why would I want to possibly be doing this? Because my parents traumatized me to the exact perfect degree.
- [31:13]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Because my genome has put on this.
- [31:17]
Robert Sapolsky
Sweater this morning and my left armpit.
- [31:19]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Is itching a little bit.
- [31:21]
Robert Sapolsky
And that's influenced because. Because all of those things. How did I wind up being the sort of person who wants to convince people there's no free will and blame.
- [31:31]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
And punishment make no sense.
- [31:33]
Moderator
Don't you want to stop people praising and punishing people? That sounds like a. Like a very specific intervention in the world of an outcome that you want to come, which is maybe not so obvious from all of those previous descriptions you've given of your background and so forth.
- [31:52]
Robert Sapolsky
Yes, and as a great example of it. Okay, because I turned out to be the sort of person I'm sitting here talking this morning, this evening. Some of you may leave this changed by this experience. Changed. You may come out of it and say, that guy is obliviating pain in.
- [32:10]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
The rear, and I'm never going to listen to it.
- [32:14]
Robert Sapolsky
Some of you may come out being convinced of otherwise. Some of you may come out saying, oh my God, the sound system was infuriating. Or some of you may come out saying, I AI that's kind of a cool logo.
- [32:28]
Moderator
I'm graduating.
- [32:31]
Robert Sapolsky
And it's going to vary as a function of who you turned out to be when sitting down in your seats. And. And that was the outcome of biology.
- [32:41]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Over which you had no control, and its interactions with environment over which you had no control.
- [32:47]
Robert Sapolsky
You will have been changed by circumstance, but as a function of who you were going into that moment.
- [32:54]
Moderator
Okay, Lucy, from your point of view, how, if we have freedom, and I understand you are saying that we do, how do we intervene in this causal story of physics? How do we get that change?
- [33:12]
Lucy Allis
I don't think we intervene in physics. I think physics, chemistry, all sorts of other sciences explain how it's possible for there to be life, how it's possible for there to be conscious embodied agents, including other animals. And other animals perceive the world, have subjectivity. We have an enormous understanding of how that works. And that explains how it's possible for there to be creatures that perceive the world and move themselves in pursuing their desires. We are creatures who, in addition to that, have complex metacognition that enables us to reflect on the choice worthiness of our goals and the fact there's an enormous amount of stuff that we're not responsible for about, you know, where and when we are in the world and how our physical bodies work and our entire background and our upbringing and all sorts of things that have shaped us in various ways. And yet we have things that we about which we choose. And how that is possible is whatever makes it possible to be. I'm not going to solve the mind body problem for you right now, But I think that consciousness is a real and natural, not supernatural, but a natural part of the world. Consciousness is an extraordinarily expensive evolutionary strategy. So I assume that it has a naturalistic role, including in other animals. And what it enables an animal to do is to sense the world and move itself in a centralized way, as opposed to just having parthole explanations that are sort of triggering different things that are bubbling up. And we have a particularly sophisticated way of doing that because we have Self consciousness and metacognition that enables us to reflect on the choice worthiness of our goals.
- [35:03]
Moderator
But those biological stories and accounts of things don't quite address today the notion that physics supposedly has a series of rules which determine what happens. And don't you have the problem of having to explain how a biological organism, humans, is able to intervene in this in such a way and seemingly break those rules?
- [35:32]
Lucy Allis
No, I don't think so. I don't think agency is magic and I don't think it requires breaking any rules. I think, as I said at the very beginning, I think all sciences use abstractions and idealizations. When it comes to physics, we're particularly mesmerized by the abstractions and idealizations. So we imagine that there's a complete account where physics is explaining everything. But you don't need to break the rules of physics to think that the laws of physics, of fundamental physics, govern the fundamental particles. But more than one thing can happen. You just need there to be more than one source of motion in the world. You need there to be sources of motion that are other than the fundamental laws of physics. But that doesn't require breaking the fundamental laws of physics. A moving wheel, it doesn't break the laws governing the molecular bonding that make up the steel in the wheel. So the molecular bonding that explains how steel is able to be shaped into a wheel. There are laws governing that. You don't need to break those laws to make a wheel. But those laws don't determine whether you're going to make a wheel or a sword or a gun or something else out of the steel. Neither do they determine where you're going to take the wheel, which is a good thing, because you want things to be able to get you in different directions. So I think the reason we imagine that free agency is this magical ability to break laws is that we think that somehow the world is causally closed under the laws of fundamental physics. But that's not an empirical claim and there's no a priori reason to believe it.
- [37:08]
Paul Bloom
So, Lucy, I mean, at some point I find myself agreeing with just about everything you're saying, which makes me think you're a compatibilist like me. So let me ask a question that will cleave us apart, where I agree with Robert and I want to see where you stand, which is like 30 seconds ago I took a sip of water. Now, what Robert would say, I'm well familiar with that. At that moment I reached for it. I could have done nothing else. All my physical law, but also My personal history, my genes, my hormones, I could have done nothing else. I chose to do to water, but I could not have chosen otherwise. Do you disagree?
- [37:41]
Lucy Allis
I do disagree. I think that throughout any active agency, actually, including animal agency, there are lots of different ways. I mean, I think you could have picked up the cup and, you know, you're controlling your body throughout the movement, and that's a thing that you have to do. So I think. I think we're mesmerized with these idealizations of physics, but we're also mesmerized with. With a particular kind of part, whole and past, present kind of explanation. But I think you, as a conscious person with metacognition, have the ability to control your body. And throughout the motion of picking up the glass, there are different things that could happen that you're in control of.
- [38:21]
Paul Bloom
So I could have chosen to do otherwise?
- [38:22]
Lucy Allis
I do think so, yes. I think you can. Well, you know, most of the time I think you could. There might be times where you couldn't choose to do otherwise, but I think there are things that we can do differently all the time. And I think to go back to your question about responsibility, too much is at stake to not believe that.
- [38:42]
Moderator
So it begins to look, of course, that from your point of view, there's too much at stake to give up freedom because you feel that this will be a threat to responsibility and the structure, no doubt, of our society and how we interact with each other. And of course, Robert feels that there's too much at stake to be able to accept freedom because he wants to make sure that he holds on to that materialist frame, which he believes is correct.
- [39:11]
Lucy Allis
So I also want to hold onto a naturalistic frame. And I think it's wonderful that neuroscientists explain so much about how the brain works and how we're able to move our bodies. And I also think that Robert has done incredibly important work on reflecting on the extent to which we are liable to blame people for more things than we should blame them for. So he's done incredibly important work, for example, on understanding how people's executive capacities are damaged by things that happened to them throughout their histories, and that we are, in many cases, too harsh on people who societies have. The structures of our societies affect the possibilities people have to develop good executive capacities. And so I think it's really important to scale back how harsh some of our judgments are and to understand how people are situated. But the fact that executive capacities can be damaged, every part of us can be damaged. All of our capacities can be damaged by things that happen to us developmentally. The fact that they can be damaged doesn't mean that they aren't real things that we have. It means that there's really a lot at stake in understanding what damages them.
- [40:27]
Moderator
So, Robert, there's a. A lot of stake in giving up, with giving up on free will. And. And you're obviously advocating that we do. And on the other hand, Lucy says we are mesmerized by the power of physics. And that's a mistake.
- [40:46]
Robert Sapolsky
That's a mistake I completely agree with.
- [40:49]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
It would be great if the word physics was never again said in a free will debate.
- [40:55]
Robert Sapolsky
Every attempt to squeeze free will out of quantum indeterminacy involves some sort of fairy dust at some point along the way. Yeah, it's got nothing to do with it. Lucy very strikingly emphasizes two words, reflect and goals. You have a moment where you have to make a choice and you've got metacognition. You reflect on it.
- [41:19]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
You reflect deeply, you reflect painfully.
- [41:23]
Robert Sapolsky
You assess your goals, your criteria, and then you make your decision. You pick vanilla ice cream over chocolate. And at that point, the question to ask, how did you wind up being somebody who reflect, who respects introspection? How did you wind up having the goals that you particularly had, the criteria that you had? How did you wind up in that.
- [41:48]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Moment of choice, making that choice?
- [41:51]
Robert Sapolsky
Now, in that regard, sort of how to think about all of this? I think when both Lucy and Paul.
- [42:00]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Allude to there's some circumstances where it's.
- [42:04]
Robert Sapolsky
Just obvious things were out of control for that person. The person's frontal cortex was destroyed in.
- [42:10]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
A car accident when they were a kid. We can see there that there is no agency.
- [42:17]
Robert Sapolsky
We can see these are edge cases. These are the easy ones to see because it's easy to see a singular event like a disastrous car accident destroying a brain region as an explanation for. That's how they became who they are. The challenge is for most of us who have instead a zillion different spider webs of history that have brought us to that moment, it's very hard to see those because science doesn't understand a lot of them and because there's a very, very deep, intuitive disbelief that when you put all those spider webs together that forms something as powerful, the sort of arch of steel that could be caused by a singular car accident. It's just harder to see. It just takes more work.
- [43:11]
Moderator
Well, for our final sort of theme here, I'd like to focus on what would be the consequences of giving up on either of these sides. So if, for example, Robert turns out to be successful and he gets everyone to agree that we should give up on free will and we should give up on seeking to punish or blame people, what do you think would be the outcome of that?
- [43:43]
Lucy Allis
I find it extremely hard to really imagine because I think it's almost impossible for us to fully give up the belief. So I think most hard determinists, and I'm not so most high determinists who are intellectually convinced that we don't have free will, as Paul said, will still feel angry or feel gratitude or. Paul was talking about reactive attitudes. There are negative reactive attitudes like blame or resentment, but also positive ones like gratitude. So when you feel gratitude to someone, you think that they did more than they had to. They didn't have to do that thing that they did for you, so again, could have done otherwise. It's part of the content of gratitude. And I think it's so deeply embedded in the way we see persons also, because I think it's actually true, but that I think we. I think it's almost impossible to understand how we could really give it up. I do think it's possible. Obviously, Robert has convinced as many people intellectually to give up the belief in free will. That's definitely possible. I worry about the consequences of that being undermining some of our sense of how much is at stake in our choices as we sit in this burning world and thinking about all the impacts of our choices on other people and little things we do for other people. And so I would. I worry about people giving up the belief in free will, but I actually don't think it's psychologically possible for people to stop responding to each other as if we all have free will. So it's lucky that we do.
- [45:21]
Moderator
And Robert, can I come to you? What do you think would be the consequence if we gave up on the idea that the laws of physics are a correct version of the world? They're just, as Stephen Hawking would have it, a model that we're operating with. And we don't have to think that they are things that might be, might be challenged.
- [45:47]
Robert Sapolsky
Well, once again, that what's interesting about us emerges at a level that's way, way detached from bosons, fermions, et cetera. But what I think we wind up having is a very difficult task. Paul is absolutely right. I haven't believed in free will since I was 14. And I can actually live my life as if there's no free will for about three minutes every other month.
- [46:13]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Or so.
- [46:14]
Robert Sapolsky
But what I have to do is work hard to do it at those times and expand it to three and a half minutes. And again, that sounds like absurd. Other than we've done it over and over, we've subtracted free will out of our notions of how weather is caused by. If there's a bad storm, we don't look for the old lady at the edge of the hamlet who obviously made a magic potion and caused it and burn her at the stake. Humans can't control the weather. We're 200 years into recognizing if somebody has an epileptic seizure. That doesn't mean they've been in bed with Beelzebub and should be burned. They have a neurological. Somebody has a, you know, dyslexia, really, it's not because they're lazy. It's because of just microarchitecture of the cortex is brewing at each one of those steps. We've gotten pretty good societally at being able to subtract that free will. And each time things get better, not worse, and we just have to keep pushing. And I think a critical word in there came from Lucy as to how to do it, but once the word is used in a different sense, instead of, I am so grateful that you just did this kind thing to me. What we have to think is, I am so grateful that you happen to turn out to be the sort of person who could do this kind thing for me. And we all have an everyday version of that. When we say something to someone who's just in something kind, we say, tell your mother she did a good job. All you have to do is multiply that a hundredfold. Tell evolution and epigenetics and everything that it did a good job. I am grateful that it so happened that you turned out to be this sort of person.
- [48:03]
Moderator
But is the fact that the scientific story, as it were, in each of these areas, whether in physics, in biology, or whatever level you want to go, is a very powerful story. It works in lots of ways. You can give an account of what's going on. Isn't there still a question that there are alternative frameworks that are useful for us in our interactions in culture generally? And so, for example, when you tell the story that as a teenager, you suddenly realize, oh, I realize God doesn't exist and I need to give up on free will. That sounds like that you had, like, epiphany. Oh, I realized that this was the case. But you're sort of telling us you didn't really realize because what does this word Realize mean you didn't realize it. It just happened to you. But you don't want to say it just happened to me. You want to say I was a teenager, I got to this point and I. And I just realized that God didn't exist.
- [49:06]
Robert Sapolsky
Which is exactly where one has to resist the temptation to decide there's anything to feel entitled about, as if you have accomplished something out of your own effort. No, that's exactly a juncture where it's tempting to say, oh my God, I've figured that out. What great moral worth. I think it is hard for us to accept that because of who we are, who we've lucked out to be. You know, I can see the back of the heads of people in the audience here. And as far as I can tell, nobody has any leprous scabs. Everybody's wearing clothing.
- [49:45]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
Everybody appears to be able to afford.
- [49:47]
Robert Sapolsky
To clothe themselves and sit and spend a Sunday evening doing something as arcane as this. We're the lucky ones. We're the lucky ones, which means that we have been treated better than average.
- [50:00]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
In life because of things we had nothing to do with.
- [50:04]
Robert Sapolsky
And thus we have a strong emotional incentive to hold on to a sense of agency for people who have turned out by chance to be treated worse than average in life because of reasons they had nothing to do with. All recognizing that free will is nonsense.
- [50:21]
Interjecting voice of Robert Sapolsky
All it is, is liberating for them.
- [50:24]
Robert Sapolsky
And we have jury to be depressed by the notion that we were not the agents of our success that allowed us to get clothes and avoid leprosy.
- [50:35]
Moderator
So, Paul, you. I assume that you think that both of these two options are not desirable, which is indeed why you're arguing in favor of compatibilism.
- [50:50]
Paul Bloom
So, two quick thoughts. I forget what the two options are.
- [50:53]
Moderator
Well, that we either give up on freedom or we give up on materialism.
- [50:59]
Paul Bloom
Yes, I am unhappy with both of them. My two points, one point. Losing entirely right. That we are in the. That in some way the three, the four of us are not that dangerous. We are not going to dissuade people, to stop blaming people, to stop crediting people. More than that, we not only aren't able to give up these reactions, we don't want to. When I asked Robert about love, he responds very sensibly. I'm not going to give up on love. I'm going to hold it. I'm going to accept the physical reality, evolution, but I'm going to keep love. And I think most of us feel the same, same way about praise and Gratitude and blame and shame and so on. But I'll also agree with Robert on an important point, which is there's these interesting edge cases which are very subtle, like unconscious racial bias. Should I be held responsible if I favor people of my own ethnicity? But I don't do it on purpose and say, yeah, because you should work harder to stop it. I'm gonna blame you even though it looks unconscious. What about addiction? Well, this is a case where people's views have changed a lot. We used to blame people with addictions. Now we somewhat do, but this gets complicated and some people say, no, it's a disease and it shouldn't be carried blame. And there's a lot of debate about that. So I guess I'm going to sort of contradict what I just said about we're stuck with it. Nothing's going to change by saying that. I agree with Robert that these edge cases, there is room to move one way or another, though people could disagree about what we should do about them.
- [52:22]
Moderator
So I'd like to thank all of you for coming this evening. It's been great to have you here. And a thank you for the panel who have been really fascinating in their responses.
- [52:36]
Hilary Lawson
Thank you for listening to philosophy for our times. What do you think? Is everything predetermined or are we free? Please don't hesitate to write to us and let us know in the email.
- [52:47]
Announcer
In the show Note, of course, whether you do or do not like and subscribe and send us emails and all that kind of stuff has already been determined. So I won't blame you if you don't.
- [52:58]
Lucy Allis
Ha ha ha.
- [53:01]
Hilary Lawson
And if you are predetermined to want more, don't hesitate to check out IAI TV where there is much, much more pre laid out there for you.
- [53:12]
Announcer
Bye bye.
- [53:13]
Hilary Lawson
Bye.