What Sapolsky's saying concerning crimes is to stop thinking in terms of punishment, that doesn't mean don't prevent people who committed a crime from doing it again. Prevention vs punishment.

@theofficialness578

Ай бұрын

After what has occurred, seemingly has always occurred and is likely to continue occur, intervention, prevention, confinement for the purpose of rehabilitation, and only when absolutely necessary non punitive confinement for life. Is the only path forward, because just saying don’t exist in the first place and a sense of justice has only made everything worse due to lack of knowledge. Whether there is absolute “free will” so called limited “free will” or no “free will” Noway has proven punishment accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t have to be done to the degree of Noway but absolutely needs to be reformed. I feel when it’s suggested an individual chooses to be “evil” that suggests everyone is in a “evil” state of mind and is just resisting using “free will”.

After a series of horrible losses in my life, I started drinking more alcohol because the emotional pain was unbearable. I eventually developed alcohol use disorder. I tried for a long time to control it, but because of the thoughts about alcohol and cravings I had, I could not control it. My doctor suggested trying Naltrexone medication to reduce the cravings, which I did. Naltrexone is an opioid receptor blocker, and that means that it blocks some or all of the pleasurable feelings you get from taking opioids or in my case drinking alcohol. I was SHOCKED that almost right away, it not only eliminated my cravings but also eliminated my actual thoughts about the alcohol! I think that must mean that the chemistry in my brain was causing my thoughts and cravings about alcohol in the first place. That is just stunning, to me. I also note that not everyone who drinks more for a time develops alcohol use disorder. … I had heard Dr. Sapolsky’s assertion that we don’t have free will, and I thought about that right away when I experienced this drastic change in my thoughts and desires from just a change in my brain chemistry.

@suraya1224

8 күн бұрын

"A change in brain chemistry"... have you ever wondered if it was the placebo effect? If you consider that we might all be possessed, in a spiritual sense, that might account for it, too. Our seeming " choices" in life may be guided by the inclination of one's soul. It may not have anything to do w/ the brain, but what occurs in the spaces between thoughts.

@SkysMomma

8 күн бұрын

@@suraya1224 Clinical trials were done with Naltrexone that showed that it worked for about 80% of participants, and those particular trials proved that it works independent of the placebo effect. Now, the placebo effect additionally might be possible, but I think you would have to set up an experiment in a different way to find out. I believe that life circumstances and personal choices of course play a role, but there is science-based proof that biology plays a large role. I’m still pondering Dr. Sapalosky’s opinion that we have no free will, including that we really have no control over our choices. It feels like we have free agency to make our own choices, but I’m considering and reading more about what science says about free will. It is very interesting to think about. If many of us decided we don’t have free will, maybe we would do more science to find out why people are the way they are and maybe that would lead to solutions to more of our problems.

Read his book and it made me think to stop blaming myself for decisions I made when younger. It was genetics in many ways and the ways I was raised and born. I stopped blaming myself for many things. Made me feel better about myself. Thx!

The paradox alone is enough to drive you crazy. I appreciate that he acknowledges this innate paradox between lack of free will and the necessity of intervention

Truly fascinating!

Rather than predictive,I think the best use of this knowledge is in the dynamics of how we manufacture socioeconomic cultural relationships. The less inequality, it appears the less deception and violence at our cultural core.

@suraya1224

8 күн бұрын

Sounds like a cop-out.

Thanks for the existential crisis, glad I stopped by.

@user-wr1hb9yr2s

Ай бұрын

“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” - Socrates

A movie I recommend that expands upon this theory is the Tollywood movie Bro(2023). It follows the story of Mark who dies in a car crash and meets the entity Time, who controls life, death, and fate. Mark makes a deal with Time to go back and help his family before he has say his final goodbye. Later in the story you find all of the choices Mark made prior culminated into the car crash, and his actions were following that of his past experiences. And, ultimately, no matter what he did, the same outcome would have happened regardless of his interventions or not. It expands upon the theory of fate and free will and how we relate to it. It's a very interesting watch and is one of my favorite films of all time.

Joseph Heinrichs hit on so much of what sculpts humanity in "the weirdest people in the world". I think that's the title. So insightful! Very open ended in some areas. Excellent book.

Big hitter, the Lama.

he looks like George costanza I like this show it's funny .. I get a sense Costanza's in the house

My bank has little baskets of lollipops at each teller's station.

The way we respond to our experiences is determined by our set of preferences. In this way, our set of preferences is like a "psychological sail" that inescapably influences the direction we are pushed through life by the fundamentally indifferent flow of our own subjectivity. We have absolutely no hand in the construction or angling of these sails, as to have such a hand requires the direction provided ONLY by an already constructed and angled sail. As such, our sails must have been moulded and angled by the situation into which we emerged.

I read this too fast and thought it was asking about free WiFi.

I’m with Sapolsky on this

@Cheesesteakfreak

24 күн бұрын

Yes, it is a scientific fact. Not up for debate.

Why is Jason doing a podcast with Al Pacino?

@markwyman6753

Ай бұрын

Woah where? Link?

@Ephesians-yn8ux

Ай бұрын

Whooo ahh.

@guidohavelton6280

Ай бұрын

😅

The guy on the right wouldn't let Jason get a word in edgewise!

Stunning kruger effect

@tincanstantheman

Ай бұрын

Stunning Kruger effect, now that's funny

So the idea that we should predict behavior in certain people, and then segregate them. That was Dr. Sapolsky answer to the Minority Report question right?

Sapolsky's free will conversation with a free will researcher: kzread.info/dash/bejne/hZib18x-h8XLqLQ.html&ab_channel=TheMiddleWay

Free will is the experience of doing something for a reason

@RyanJesseParsons

Ай бұрын

Every occurrence has a reason, even if we can’t perceive it, which is why free will is an illusion.

@KingJorman

Ай бұрын

@@RyanJesseParsons it doesn’t seem like you understood my point. I’m saying that the illusion of free will comes about when one associates an action with a conscious thought that references a reason for the action. Essentially, a conscious thought process correlated with an action looks like free will.

Is that Al Pacino with George Costanza?

I saw Dr. Robert in "The Hobbit" film i think.....

You should get George Coztanzas take on this.

@davidgrimberg4621

Ай бұрын

"It's not a lie if you couldn't have said otherwise."

@sourcedirect4467

Ай бұрын

@@davidgrimberg4621 Its not a lie if you bleive its true

Interestingly, the bible actually explicitly teaches that God's will is sovereign and rejects the notion that man has free will. And the logic of an Almighty God requires that there be no free will for man. So science and the "existence" of God lead to the same conclusion. Religion, however, is almost exclusively built on the idea of man's free will. It is possible to reject religion without rejecting God. Religion is essentially man's attempt to control others by co-opting the idea of a god by trying to get people to earn "salvation". Belief in an Almighty God leads to the same lack of condemnation or hubris, and space for compassion that Dr. S. describes. The value added by such a belief, though, is it adds hope, meaning and a sense of purpose to life. Faith is generally misconstrued: it's fundamentally nothing more than the capacity to accept as true without proof. Most of life is built of nothing but faith since we cannot be sure of or prove most of the things we assume to be true and then act on. After all, we really only "know" what we're currently experiencing or pure logic at the moment we're contemplating it. Everything else is faith in our memory or faith in our assumptions.

@johnschorr9988

Ай бұрын

do you believe in god?

@jacksonmartin8899

27 күн бұрын

@@johnschorr9988 I accept as true without objective "proof" that there is a supreme and almighty being, which I refer to as God. I do not believe in the god of most religions, and I do not believe in the god atheists don't believe in. You?

@suraya1224

8 күн бұрын

@jacksonmartin8: Well-said. Too many ppl blv the bible says we hv free will.

The argument against free will is that if you were able to replay your life in reverse and observe the sequence of events unfolding backwards, you would realize that everything follows a model of forced choices. You never chose when or where you were born, nor who your parents would be. As a result, everything is a matter of agency. And agency is where individuals really differ.

Do we have free WiFi? That is the question to be asking.

Of course we have free will. We don't have a choice!

Some people say baboons and humans are different

If you guys weren't convinced about free will, you should talk to a guy named Sam Harris.

@kazkk2321

Ай бұрын

Sam Harris is utterly insufferable. He a pain in the ass. He is wrong

@kazkk2321

Ай бұрын

Same Harris is not inherently right . He is emotionally reacting to the possibility of something he is afraid of. Him and jordan Peterson does the same under the guise of pseudo intellectual moralism

@robertpirsig5011

Ай бұрын

Sam Harris? Robert Sapolsky is in another league in terms of academic achievement. Sam Harris is more of political commentator

@user-wr1hb9yr2s

Ай бұрын

@@robertpirsig5011 Sam also has a PhD in neuroscience and a degree in philosophy so they intertwine quite well for his thoughts on free will. He is more interested in the philosophical side of free will as a opposed to the scientific side.

@yaongingyfmm1571

Ай бұрын

​@@robertpirsig5011Sam has been speaking about free will for more than a decade now, he also has a book about it named, well Free Will. Sam and Robert agree on the subject of free will 100%, so much so that Robert was on Sam's podcast a couple of months ago, the podcast is #360 on Making Sense with Sam Harris.

Is it like we're acting out a story

@Durmomo0

9 күн бұрын

I feel like its a very complex dominoes falling. Each thing influences the next but it was all set in motion based upon where we are and what happened in the past.

I appreciate his scientism and died in the whool atheism. I hope he never changes

@dukeallen432

28 күн бұрын

He can’t. :)

Get a good look Costanza??? Sorry I had to say it

@johnschorr9988

Ай бұрын

😂

This was a talk about determinism, Sapolsky's credentials lend themselves to go further into the human experience of that concept. Next time maybe. The idea of this "free will" you were talking about never seemed plausible to me. Why/how would it exist?

The big problem is his argument is always right. Everything is you did x because of your past experiences

@Erikmitk

Ай бұрын

It’s not always right. It’s only always right if, as you say, everything is depending on the past. You’d falsify his theory by showing a neuron or network of neurons that did something without connection to past experiences. That’s the essence of free will: doing something by itself, unshackled by previous contexts.

@matth7448

Ай бұрын

@@Erikmitk I disagree, thats nonsense. Thats how the brain works. But you can still make choices

@theofficialness578

Ай бұрын

@@matth7448 Those choices are conducted in the brain. That automatically absorbs everything it sees, automatically organizes that absorbed information in a multitude possibly an infinite number of ways based on the individual and that individuals unique past. A brain that is subject malformation and impairment even in a non-observable way. A brain that is mostly designed by nature for survival and selfishness. A brain that cannot know more than what it knows and reason how it reasons. All of these causes determine the sense of a choice.

@Erikmitk

Ай бұрын

@@matth7448 If you take a very close look at how the brain works you’ll see that the way it works is how it works. And in these mechanisms is no room for the free will argument. That’s what he’s saying. What you’re trying to argue is that the brain works how it works but nonetheless there’s an unexplained part that opens up the possibility of free decision making. You just haven’t looked closely enough to rule that out.

Seinfeld meets Sapolsky. You have got to be kidding me! Guess George was always resigned to his fate hence no free will.

"A nose-cold". "A gazillion subtle reasons, like culture, or fetal life, as causality. Too bad free will didn't lead to the choice to get a shave & a haircut, Sapolsky.

Free will isn’t even a coherent concept.

The Bible doesn't tell anyone to burn witches at the stake so I don't know where they got that practice.

90% of compatibilists are wrong. It’s amazing how even philosophy refuses to see this

When he talks about a cop shooting someone that goes for their cell phone and their perception can change based on what direction they look or where they grew up. I'm not a cop and I don't have a gun but I'm for guns and cops and there was a study done by a black professor that found that the number of black unarmed men being shot by a cop is very low I didn't remember the statistics but they were under 30 a year and they also showed that the number of unarmed white people that were shot by police was much higher but that's expected because there's more white people in the country. The professor that did the study said this must be wrong and he did the study again using different research assistants and came up with the same statistics. That being said. He needs to go to a police academy and do training with a gun and go through a scenario where he acts like a cop and he pulls someone over and see if he waits until the person pulls whatever it is the person has in his pocket out to make sure it's a gun because unless he's suicidal he will pull the trigger every time. I don't understand how you can expect police to put their life on the line and let someone shoot them because the person they pull over is black. If that's not racist I don't know what is. You think a black person's life is more valuable than a cop who may be black also? Nobody is saying there's not racist cops but they aren't paid well and they have to go into all situations and be able to assess what's going on in seconds and they have to make it home safe. My niece's husband is a cop and he told a story about what happened one night. He had a half hour to go on his shift and he had just got a sandwich and was going to eat it and someone ran a red light. He was going to let it go but he said if I don't go after them and they kill someone I can get in trouble. So he pulls them over and there was a girl driving and her boyfriend was in the passenger seat. My niece's husband asks the driver for her license and he was going to run it and if she didn't have any problems he was going to let her go. The boyfriend starts saying don't give him your license and the cop says something to him to calm him down I think he asked for his id but I'm not sure. The cop saw the light come on in the car so he told the boyfriend stay in the car. Then the boyfriend got out of the car and ran around the back of the car and into traffic and got hit by a car and died. He was white. My niece's husband didn't know why he ran. I think they checked his id and he didn't have anything wrong with his license and no warrants out for him. Not all police are evil and not all police are good. Nobody's perfect. I am white and I used to get nervous when I saw a cop driving behind me or next to me even though I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was taught to respect the police and if you get pulled over don't make sudden moves and don't talk back to them. Just let them ask for your license and give it to them. Let them check it and give it back and if they want to write a ticket let them and take the ticket and go. Maybe they don't have the right to see your license and if you want to make a big deal about it you can spend your time sitting in the side of the road or have them arrest you and get a lawyer or maybe they have too much power but it does no good to argue with them because they are enforcers not legislators. They have guns and they may be insane or you may have caught them at a bad time and your rights are important but they do you no good if you're in the grave because they're going through a divorce or they don't like your attitude. They're just people. They aren't super human. They don't have the ability to cut off their emotions any easier than you or me. There's some cops that think they're the arbiter of justice and there's some that just want to do the job and go home.

Free will exist within a frame work. Free will neednt and doesnt need to be vast, its the small decisions we make and it is this small amount of freewill that exist, that together make up the reason for us being here. If you are walking down the street, do you smile and say hello to a person walking by, or ignore them coldly? Thats free will, and these decisions make a HUGE rippling difference to this reality. When we shed the meatsuit aka die and go home and have a life review, its this giant collection of small free will decisions, and finally understanding their effects, that helps us grow and is part of the main reason we are here.

@8xnnr

Ай бұрын

No it doesn’t

@RyanJesseParsons

Ай бұрын

Wrong. You’re implying that there can be actions which act independently of all the causal actions which preceded it, and that’s just not true, inside or outside of our brains.

If we have no freewill at all, any time, the criminal had no choice in committing a crime. But the cop had no choice but to arrest the criminal. The jury had no freewill to not convict the criminal. I have no freewill to agree or not with Dr Sapolsky. It's an interesting question, but it can't make a practical difference in our lives.

@8xnnr

Ай бұрын

Knowing you don’t have free will has an effect. This isn’t practical for the majority of people but for the justice system it is.

@justinko

Ай бұрын

It is in fact true and correct and real, but we have no choice but to live as if it is not.

@karldunnegan2689

Ай бұрын

I don't think you listened very closely to Dr. Sapolsky. Maybe go watch another interview or two with him for some clarification.

@theofficialness578

Ай бұрын

Like always in this debate, determinism is so blatantly mistaken for fatalism.

@TMK1450

Ай бұрын

Strawmanning… how about steelmanning to get the neuroscience behind it?

If there's no free will then everything we do must be pre determined and pre programmed and if it is then there must be a God that pre determined it unless you think everything came from nothing

I guess the hallmark of this podcast is chatty facetiousness. Sapolsky rose to the occasion, but I was surprised how on-point the questions turned out to be.

If there's no free will then you can't blame people for being racist or shooting someone that's reaching for a phone. If there's no free will then psychiatry and crime and punishment and many other things are rendered useless.

@shjarks666

Ай бұрын

Consequences still exist

God is a spirit you can't detect a spirit with your brain

The argument against free will is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, people have the ability to make choices regarding their actions. While genetic factors, environmental influences, and habitual behaviors can shape our decisions, we ultimately retain control over our actions. It is not always easy to make these choices, nor is there a lack of a path of least resistance. However, we have the capability to defy any innate preferences at any given moment. To claim otherwise is not only mentally debilitating-it amounts to a form of brainwashing-and represents a simplistic and erroneous interpretation of human responsibility and the human condition. This perspective seems to be nothing more than a dramatic revelation that the individual had at the age of 14, which he has since promoted in an attempt to appear intriguing and profound. His viewpoint aligns closely with nihilistic philosophy.

@matthewstroud4294

Ай бұрын

Yes, the arguments against free will do not address any of the arguments that we do have free will. Or in other words, these guys always try to refute a free will position that no-one actually holds. The most obvious hole they never address is at the foundation of many philosophical arguments, and it can be stated in two ways: 1) the fallacy of self-exclusion and 2) reaffirmation by denial. For 1) they are mostly all determinists with a "billiard ball" view of causation, which means that ALL current and future states are completely determined by previous states, in a causal cascade from the beginning of time. This does however, mean their own thoughts are also determined and as such they are compelled to think the thoughts that they think. So, how could I take their argument seriously? They are compelled to think it. Hence, they forget to include their own brain in the determinist equation, never considering that if human minds could make mistakes, maybe theirs is too. During a free will debate they are implying that they are infallible and reasoning perfectly, whilst telling everyone else that our thoughts are compelled. For 2) To know that a concept is axiomatic and foundational, you can try to deny that the concept is true, but then find yourself using that concept in the refutation of itself. This would be incoherent nonsense, and is the basis of validating axioms via "reaffirmation by denial". Concepts like Existence, Identity and Consciousness are like this, as is Free Will - the ability to focus your mind and know that you are using reason in relation to reality, and that your knowledge is not arbitrary. Free will is a foundation of knowledge, reason, truth and the methodology we use to know what is true or false. You cannot use human reason to refute one of the axioms of reason itself. If there is a system of knowledge that permits compelled and/or arbitrary brain chemistry to make truth claims, then the product of that process is arbitrary too, and cannot be knowledge.

@kavorka8855

Ай бұрын

@@matthewstroud4294have you read either Behave or Determined by Sapolsky? No, of course not. In Matrix, the Oracle tells Neo: "You've already made the choice, now you have to understand it." At least read one of the books mentioned above to understand why you made the choice. It's much more complex than your simplistic argument.

@davidspencer343

Ай бұрын

Your point as been explained a thousand times over. If that's your problem you haven't honestly looked at the subject long enough

@matthewstroud4294

Ай бұрын

@@kavorka8855 My points are not simplistic, they are basic and fundamental. Whatever Sapolsky has said in his books is only applicable if he directly addressed the points I made - did he? As someone whom has read his books perhaps you could tell me where he refutes the basic axioms of objective reality. All I ever hear from his interviews is that he can't find free will in a petri dish. "Simplistic" is a smear, designed to imply that the opponent is of low intelligence or hasn't looked at the evidence or struggles to use abstract ideas. That kind of anti-concept should be avoided, if for no other reason than it demonstrates a willingness to try to intimidate rather than be honest.

@kavorka8855

Ай бұрын

@@matthewstroud4294 your points are simplistic and cliche, they're "language gone on holiday". Sapolsky's arguments aren't philosophical, they're biological, you have not read his books, you just think you're smart and his arguments must be philosophical determinism, no, they're not, they're biological determinism. He doesn't repeat the basic, simplistic arguments, he doesn't assume them either, he provides statistical data, hormonal evidence, and other scientific arguments.

Free will? If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

@shjarks666

Ай бұрын

Swing and miss