#360, Moron Free Will, with Robert Sapolsky

Something about all of these podcasts on Free Will has been bugging me for years, though I haven't ever gotten worked up enough to dig deep and come up with what it is. Until today. Listening to these two guys marveling over how dumb must of us are for feeling like we are in control of our decisions, and how we do it mostly for egotistical reasons, just pushed the wrong button.

So here are 3 things I'd like to say to Sam:

1. Stop talking about quarks and billiard balls. In fact, stop citing physics at all. I did my phd on the collision of two leptons, and we were unable to describe even that simplest of all interactions completely. Physicists still can't derive a single atom from the laws of physics, and we certainly can't write any equation from fundamental principals that describes a brain. So quit pretending that's possible.

2. I have yet to hear a single testable hypothesis in any of these podcasts. Sure, they're full of gedanken experiments like, "Suppose we stopped the universe and replayed it to exactly where it was 5 minutes ago--then you'd helplessly do exactly all over again whatever it was you did." But this is impossible to actually test. You might as well be arguing about angels dancing on a pinhead. Give me a test that disproves the notion that we can freely decide something. A real proof, not a Dennett approximation.

3. If you are able to prove that we have only the illusion of agency, and that in fact we're each helplessly controlled by the chemical processes of our brains, I'd like to know what you expect us to do about it. Sure, you say "don't hate tornados" and "rehabilitate don't punish." But punishment still has to happen. I've met kids who grew up in a permissive household with no punishment, and they were sociopathic monsters. Or look what happened here in California when we decriminalized theft--it's been chaos. So regardless of whether our wills are free, punishment is still a necessary response that helps us learn to cooperate, no?

If after all this sturm und drang you are unable to point to a single policy change that has to happen because of your beliefs and all you can conclude is "don't hate, and don't believe in evil", well... you could have said all that without wasting our time on all this free will bullshit.