this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
81 points (96.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43864 readers
1412 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sapolsky's perspective ignores reality to generate talking points.
Just because a person has a limited set of choices, mostly determined by upbringing does not mean that we can predict any future action based on previous actions.
At best you may be able produce a chaotic model that gives probabilities of potential actions in any situation.
That is all well and good.
I'm an engineer, so I look at this from a physical sciences point of view. The main problem with the "no free will" argument is it provides no predictive power, there is no model that can say person X will do Y (instead of A, B, C or D) in situation Z.
What is possible is giving probabilities of Y, A, B, C or D in experimental settings. But in the real world, there are too many variables interacting in a chaotic manner to even give reasonable probabilities; this is why we can only use population level statistics rather than individual level predictions.
I present, the Jim Twins:
Similar <> identical.
This story has little to add to the debate about free will. How many identical twins separated at birth didn't have similar lives?
It is anecdotal, but compelling. Determinism can’t be falsified, but neither can free will. The neuroscience is interesting, and shouldn’t be dismissed. Sapolsky’s debates are informative.
It only seems compelling, there is no base rate of non-similar twins separated at birth. Is this 1 in 2 sets end up like this, every one, 1 in 100,000?
The neuroscience is interesting, but it is not in any way predictive. It is all post-hoc rationalisations of what did happen.
As I said above, I'm an engineer and look at this from a physical sciences point of view. There is no model (as far as I'm aware) that can predict what will happen except in very specific psychological experiments.
Well, you’re an engineer, not a neuroscientist like Robert Sapolsky so his research carries more value than your opinion.