I got a question about my view of Kevin J. Mitchell. I actually deleted a long paragraph about him from the essay because it was getting too long. Here it is:
I did not enjoy the recent book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell. In the chapter “Harnessing Indeterminacy,” it seems as though Mitchell might address one of the fundamental questions that critics have been posing to anti-determinism for decades: how might quantum processes get harnessed by our brains to create free will? But no such theory is forthcoming. Mitchell tells us that the brain is full of “noisy” and “random” processes. However, the meaning of these terms fluctuate, and Mitchell nowhere makes the case that these processes are genuinely non-deterministic as opposed to being merely unpredictable. He writes that neurotransmitters get released probabilistically, which seems to be an example of what he means by “noise,” and that this process is somehow influenced by “quantum indeterminacy.” But he comes up with no testable theory that would establish the relevance of quantum indeterminacy to decision making, nor does he try to distinguish among the different causes and effects of different types of noise. Later in the same chapter, he tells us that the behavior of animals is also often “random,” but it isn’t clear that random brain processes and random behavior have anything to do with each other. I find Mitchell's book a murky stew of ideas.
I was wondering whether Mitchell's book is worth reading. I assume he talks a lot about "agency", which as far as I can tell is a slippery substitute for free will. But maybe there's more to it than that? Or is that just more of the mumbo jumbo?
I did not find it an illuminating read, and I would recommend you look elsewhere. I review various good books about consciousness and neuroscience elsewhere on my site. Jablonka and Ginsburg's Evolution of the Sensitive Soul is excellent, but long and hard. Max Bennett's A Brief History of Intelligence is first-rate. And if you haven't read Sapolsky's Determined yet, start there!
Thanks! That’s a very good article! I read it a while ago, and the case for incompatibilism is very strong. I’ll see if I can drum up the energy to read some of the books. One question: you make it sound like determinism has well and truly won, and now it’s just an argument between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Is that right? Or is there still a serious camp pushing for “old-fashioned” free will?
> “hard determinism,” is that people are wholly and deterministically formed by biological and environmental forces beyond their control
If that's the definition, I think there's a problem right there that makes the discussion much less clear than it appears. Assuming physical materialism, who is the "they" in the phrase "beyond their control"? In this view, the person itself is none other than a set or pattern of collected physical patterns and forces, mostly stored in the physical configuration of their body. I'm not sure it even makes sense to say these forces are beyond their control when they literally *are* the person.
It only makes sense to say, for example, that the circulation of blood in my veins is "beyond my control" if we assume some kind of "me" that somehow matches the experiential feeling that I have, of an embodied consciousness which can voluntarily tell the arm to go up, but not the blood to go here or there. If physical materialism eliminates this very "me", the whole question goes up in flames.
Which could be a good reason why, when people try to bridge the gap and come up with theories about free will residing in such things as quantum indeterminacy, it comes out mostly as soothing nonsense.
It is an incoherent concept, meaning it is not even an illusion and not even wrong. If someone were to tell me, "Death is hiding in those bushes," then I may ask, "What do you mean? A dangerous person? A dangerous animal? Or is it something poetic?" He may answer, "No, I mean literally DEATH is hiding in those bushes!" And then we know that he just makes no sense at all. Someone who believes "free will" exists can't really tell you how anything would look different if free will did not exist. Conversely, someone who believes "free will" does not exist can't really tell you how anything would look different if free will exists. Much like death in the bushes.
I thought you might enjoy this quote by Nietzsche:
The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Munchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.
Noetzsche is an antidote to the obscurantism that has long haunted philosophy. His writing has perhaps an opposite problem. After I tease through the rhetorical flourish, hyperbole and varying metaphors, I remain uncertain of what his arguments be.
I think that’s true of virtually all free will defenses. Kant may be the best free will libertarian because he said that the soul exists in a reality that humans can’t understand, the noumenon.
I can imagine some kind of quantum process in the brain that randomized possibilities in some way and made us reconsider them. But it’s absurd to believe any such thing exists.
Perhaps the models of the universe before quantum physics were something like a lot of billiard balls bouncing off each other, and if you knew the positions and velocities of all the balls perfectly at an earliest state then you can calculate any later state. With quantum physics, it is not just billiard balls but also random dice rolls, and later states depend in part on how those dice land. Such randomness defeats pure determinism, but it doesn't make free will any more coherent. Quantum mechanics is still mechanics.
I'm very puzzled about what you think in this article or Sapolsky's book does much to refute free will. First of all, one could be a compatibilist, in which case they'd agree with determinism. This is, in fact, the majority view among philosophers. Second, while surely there are environmental effects on our actions--a fact that no one who believes in free will is ignorant of--that doesn't entail that our actions are wholly determined by environmental causes and not at all by our choosing.
I agree that many of the ways people try to get free will from quantum mechanics are woo, but there's nothing in physics that rules out strong emergence--whereby things at the higher levels have properties that aren't present at the lower levels. This is, in my view, how consciousness works https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-dogmatic-physicalism
Agree with you on the compatibilism point (I am a compatibilist), but not the strong emergence point. I don't think "strong emergence," in the way you're using it, is even a coherent concept. All facts about a high-level description of something are by definition entailed by facts about the low-level description. The properties of the high-level description aren't identical to the low-level description, but emergence isn't magic - it doesn't give a high-level description properties that are completely causally disconnected from the low-level description. If it did, that would imply that the low-level description is incomplete. It's logically impossible to have a system that's deterministic on the fundamental level but where a higher level description of that system is indeterministic even when the fundamental description is accounted for (higher-level states might not be determined by previous higher-level states, but they are determined by previous lower-level states).
“.A gene variant that produces aggressive behavior can result in someone’s becoming a murderer or a very competitive chess player depending on the environment that affects the gene’s expression.”
Not sure if this is your opinion or that of others you are quoting, but no such gene variants exist and if you make a case that it’s some nondescript collection of gene variants, that is more akin to astrology.
The exact quote from Sapolsky is: "Suppose someone has a gene variant related to aggression; depending on the environment, that can result in an increased likelihood of street brawling or of playing chess really aggressively." He does not give a reference for this sentence, but surely the overall point that a gene variant can have very different outcomes in different environments is non-controversial and not very much like astrology at all.
There aren’t gene variants related to being aggressive or being a good chess player. The current claims, because no such variants have been found for any “behavioral” trait is that there is a collection of gene variants that somehow “influence” a trait more commonly. This is almost exactly the way astrology works.
You should take that up with Sapolsky! Your opinion is very out of consensus. Geneticists have identified multiple genes that influence aggressive tendencies, including. These theories are the result of scientific testing, unlike those that come from astrology.
MAOA (monoamine oxidase A) - the "warrior gene"
Serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR)
Dopamine receptor genes (DRD1, DRD2, DRD4)
Genes related to stress response like CRHR1, AVPR1A/B
I’m sorry, but you are apparently unaware of the consensus. Behavioral geneticists abandoned the candidate gene era about 15 years ago. All, and I mean, all of these claims have been refuted or never confirmed. I can direct you to all manner of research on the subject.
Yes, if there are geneticists who deny that any known genes influence aggression, I would be interested in reading them. The paper that I link to was written in 2015, and those geneticists seem to disagree with you, so I'm not sure how you can consider your view to be the consensus of the last 15 years. I am not a geneticist, but I do know that Sapolsky is highly knowledgeable about research in this area, and he certainly believes that research in genetics establishes that some specific genes influence aggression. So I don't think what you're saying does in fact represent consensus. Also, do you deny the main point that the same gene can have very different expressions in different environments?
Yes, the original quote implied exactly that there were genetic variants that had a strong influence on a trait. The consensus (which you said wasn’t a consensus about 3 comments up) is that it isn’t the case. Sasha Gusev agrees. Just ask him. My original point is that GWAS make statistical assumptions akin to astrology. Whether these assumptions are valid is for you to decide.
I never said anything explicitly or implicitly about individual genes having strong influences on behavior. You seem determined to misunderstand and misrepresent my article and the state of the field of genetics, so I won’t be responding to any further comments from you.
So you realize that any ongoing research is not looking for specific genes with a large effect on a behavior. They have given up on the idea, including the examples Saplonsky cited.
No one said anything about a large effect. By the way, here's a critical review of the Turkheimer book from Sasha Gusev, so I guess what Turkheimer says is not consensus.
"I should say at this point that I am a card-carrying GWAS Guy. I think GWAS has expanded our understanding of the biology of many traits. In my lab, I run GWAS, develop methods for running GWAS, interpret GWAS, and arguably contribute to the stamp collecting effort that Turkheimer critiques. I put on my GWAS cologne in the morning and I sleep soundly in my GWAS sheets at night. Like any GWAS guy, I can rattle off a number of important genes that GWAS has discovered or re-discovered: PCSK9, LDLR, CACNA1C and C4A, TP53 and MYC. You wake me up in the middle of the night and I’ll tell you that “human genetic evidence doubles the success rate” of clinical trials, and cite the slew of papers that have demonstrated as much."
The “consensus” is not even something I agree with. You cite something from 10 years ago? I have a review on here of Turkheimer’s book that discusses this at length (read his book if you don’t want read my review). You are citing old science that behavioral geneticists have abandoned.
All I know is that research on genes for aggressive behavior is still ongoing, so it’s clear that Turkheimer’s view, if that really is what he’s saying, is not consensus. I think that even Turkheimer himself would see his work as being out of consensus. Also, you persist in refusing to address the Sapolsky’s main point. See here for another more recent example: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/15/8814
Agree with everything that's said here, except that it only applies to libertarian free will - the theory that free will is incompatible with determinism but exists anyway. This is an important distinction to make because the majority of philosophers are compatibilists (i.e., they believe free will and determinism are compatible). 59% of all philosophers are compatibilists, as are 78% of philosophers who believe in free will (based on the most recent PhilPapers survey: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4838), so clearly proving that brain activity is deterministic doesn't do much to disprove free will - it only disproves a thesis about free will that few philosophers believe in anyway. And it's sort of redundant in that respect because libertarian free will is incoherent to begin with (This is slightly alluded to in the article when you mention that quantum indeterminacy is random and therefore not freely willed. In fact, all indeterminacy is random - that's just the definition of random. Libertarian free will holds that freely willed actions are simultaneously determined by us and that they are not determined).
Discussions of free will need to stop ignoring the position that most philosophers think is right. Until then, they're just as intellectually bankrupt as the pseudoscience that libertarian free will believers use to justify their claims. We all agree that it's bad to misrepresent science, but misrepresenting philosophy is rarely called out.
I thought it was worthwhile to just take on the various scientifically based types of libertarianism out there. I should have mentioned compatibilism, it's true. I think that I'm a non-compatibilist, but the whole issue is a tough nut to crack, which is why I haven't gotten around to writing about it. I'm a fan of Gregg Caruso's arguments against compatibilism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral-responsibility/
"A given starting state will always give you the same end state if you apply the same rule to it"
But there is no "given starting state". Each time you repeat the exercise the starting state will be slightly different because of the uncertainty principle. One example given is billiards. After fifty ricochets it has become impossible to know where the ball will be no matter how exactly you specify the initial position and momentum. This is because it is impossible to *exactly* specify an object's position and momentum at the same time.
In a brain there are cascades of actions. Each one is impossible to exactly specify. This doesn't matter much for short strings of events, much as the initial path of the billiard ball is predictable. But as the chain of causation grows longer it will become harder and harder to predict what will happen.
This underlying unpredictability of some experiences is interpreted by your consciousness as free will. It like the saying about the duck. If it looks like free will, acts like free will and feels like free will, it's free will.
In a highly technical sense, sure it's deterministic. But chaos means that if you took the same person and ran them through their life a multiple times they would have different outcomes reflecting different choices they made. If one cannot predict what idiosyncratic choices a person will make the conscious experience will most usefully be described as free will, even though logic says there must be determinism there underneath it all.
It is like relativity, we know the theory is incomplete, but we will never actually experience any of the effects of its incompleteness, so it doesn't really matter.
The person's life would not be different if the starting conditions were exactly the same. It isn't a trivial point, as it means deterministic theories can be adequate to provide a total explanation of how we get to be who we are.
If the operation of our brains can be represented by systems non linear differential equations like many natural systems, and that system display chaotic behavior, such as those that which governs weather, then just as starting from the same standpoint you will get different weathers, you will get different brain behavior.
So no, just because a phenomenon is governed by a set of deterministic laws does *not* mean that on repeated runs you will get the same output. Chaotic systems "blow up" over time in that arbitrarily tiny deviations between starting conditions give wildly different outcomes. The uncertainty principle prevents an *exact* specification of initial conditions. This is not an *error* it's a fundamental property of reality.
Hence if you run it again from the same initial conditions you will get different outcomes every time. That is simply the way reality is.
Now you're switching to saying that quantum effects are the source of non-deterministic behavior. I also address this argument in the article. It's not that what you're saying is wrong but that I don't know how any of this would be relevant for real-world cognition and behavior.
I did not switch. All along I have said that chaos means that systems explainable by systems of nonlinear differential equation that "blow up" (i.e are extremely sensitive to small differences in initial conditions) will produce different results from the same staring conditions because the uncertainly principle puts a limit on "same".
It is relevant because you state that two genetically identical individuals who live through identical environments will be the same. Not so if they are governed by a chaotic system. This is because the concept of "identicalness" is fundamentally fuzzy because of the uncertainty principle.
I also find these deterministic claims about free will to be very unsatisfying. There's a logical leap being made here that's perhaps not justified: because the operation of neurons is thought to follow deterministic rules (although Roger Penrose's recent theories suggest otherwise), then all brain activity at all scales must itself be deterministic.
As others have pointed out (https://quillette.com/2023/11/06/robert-sapolsky-is-wrong/) it's not individual neurons doing the thinking, it's a massive network of neurons that are applying both discrete rules and probabilistic neural networks. The issue then is of scale and complexity - is there some other form of rule operating at this level?
A good avenue to approach this question is to consider the nature of cellular automata. These software programmes are structured with simple deterministic rules, then set on their way and can produce very complex dynamical systems that exhibit non-deterministic behaviour. This behaviour suggests that systems with simple, deterministic initial rules can exhibit non-deterministic behaviour, and so perhaps the same thing is occurring in our brains.
Science is the only way we have to truly not fool ourselves about the world, but there is still so much left to learn. Just as we have an apparently rock-solid standard model of physics, we still cannot explain the absence of antimatter in the universe, despite most physicists insisting that physical laws are deterministic. Similarly with free will, it very much feels as if science is actually fooling itself by making a logical leap to far.
This sounds like a Kantian argument. Kant believed that human experience was made possible by the mental categories that we impose on the world, including causality and quantity. He thought that outside of what we are able to perceive was an unseen world, or noumenon, where things like free will existed. Most philosophers no longer accept this vision in part because the notion of the noumenon can be eliminated by Occam's Razor: we don't need it to explain the reality that we experience, and parsimony is a theoretical virtue.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of metanarratives, but eliminative physicalism is a damned good one. It accounts for everything I can express in words or symbols, and that's literally really all I can ask for
One thing you say sounds a bit like the qualia debate. There is a way a thing appears to an actual human being that a scientific explanation cannot capture. So a scientific understanding of how an apple forms cannot capture what it's like to actually see and eat an apple. I'm persuaded by the qualia argument to some extent. But I think that the manifest and scientific images of an apple must be consistent, or the manifest image has to be wrong. It may appear to us that we have free will, but since that appearance is inconsistent with the scientific explanation of human behavior, it has to be wrong.
I got a question about my view of Kevin J. Mitchell. I actually deleted a long paragraph about him from the essay because it was getting too long. Here it is:
I did not enjoy the recent book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell. In the chapter “Harnessing Indeterminacy,” it seems as though Mitchell might address one of the fundamental questions that critics have been posing to anti-determinism for decades: how might quantum processes get harnessed by our brains to create free will? But no such theory is forthcoming. Mitchell tells us that the brain is full of “noisy” and “random” processes. However, the meaning of these terms fluctuate, and Mitchell nowhere makes the case that these processes are genuinely non-deterministic as opposed to being merely unpredictable. He writes that neurotransmitters get released probabilistically, which seems to be an example of what he means by “noise,” and that this process is somehow influenced by “quantum indeterminacy.” But he comes up with no testable theory that would establish the relevance of quantum indeterminacy to decision making, nor does he try to distinguish among the different causes and effects of different types of noise. Later in the same chapter, he tells us that the behavior of animals is also often “random,” but it isn’t clear that random brain processes and random behavior have anything to do with each other. I find Mitchell's book a murky stew of ideas.
I was wondering whether Mitchell's book is worth reading. I assume he talks a lot about "agency", which as far as I can tell is a slippery substitute for free will. But maybe there's more to it than that? Or is that just more of the mumbo jumbo?
I did not find it an illuminating read, and I would recommend you look elsewhere. I review various good books about consciousness and neuroscience elsewhere on my site. Jablonka and Ginsburg's Evolution of the Sensitive Soul is excellent, but long and hard. Max Bennett's A Brief History of Intelligence is first-rate. And if you haven't read Sapolsky's Determined yet, start there!
Thanks. Sapolsky's book does sound good, but in my case I think he'll be preaching to the converted. I'm after the best case for the opposition!
The best case for the opposition is compatibilism, which I deal with here: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/against-moral-responsibility-and?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
You could read Daniel Dennett’s books on free will for that, and I link to some others.
Thanks! That’s a very good article! I read it a while ago, and the case for incompatibilism is very strong. I’ll see if I can drum up the energy to read some of the books. One question: you make it sound like determinism has well and truly won, and now it’s just an argument between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Is that right? Or is there still a serious camp pushing for “old-fashioned” free will?
> “hard determinism,” is that people are wholly and deterministically formed by biological and environmental forces beyond their control
If that's the definition, I think there's a problem right there that makes the discussion much less clear than it appears. Assuming physical materialism, who is the "they" in the phrase "beyond their control"? In this view, the person itself is none other than a set or pattern of collected physical patterns and forces, mostly stored in the physical configuration of their body. I'm not sure it even makes sense to say these forces are beyond their control when they literally *are* the person.
It only makes sense to say, for example, that the circulation of blood in my veins is "beyond my control" if we assume some kind of "me" that somehow matches the experiential feeling that I have, of an embodied consciousness which can voluntarily tell the arm to go up, but not the blood to go here or there. If physical materialism eliminates this very "me", the whole question goes up in flames.
Which could be a good reason why, when people try to bridge the gap and come up with theories about free will residing in such things as quantum indeterminacy, it comes out mostly as soothing nonsense.
Are you saying that we should freely choose to "face the consequences of hard determinism for the theory and practice of morality and justice"?
Haha! No, I hope my article will be a force that deterministically causes you to do that!
Well the lack of success which these arguments have had over the last few centuries seems to indicate the opposite.
I do think determinists are battling human nature in a way. But science is on our side, so maybe things will go better for us in the future!
You are free when you do as you please, no matter how determined is what you want!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nY7oAdy5odfGqE7mQ/freedom-under-naturalistic-dualism
"If we are all formed by factors outside of our control, we can never be meaningfully responsible for our actions."
It always depends on what one means, of course, but the arguments for this are not usually v compelling.
https://calebontiveros.substack.com/p/why-we-are-authors-of-our-own-lives
It is an incoherent concept, meaning it is not even an illusion and not even wrong. If someone were to tell me, "Death is hiding in those bushes," then I may ask, "What do you mean? A dangerous person? A dangerous animal? Or is it something poetic?" He may answer, "No, I mean literally DEATH is hiding in those bushes!" And then we know that he just makes no sense at all. Someone who believes "free will" exists can't really tell you how anything would look different if free will did not exist. Conversely, someone who believes "free will" does not exist can't really tell you how anything would look different if free will exists. Much like death in the bushes.
I thought you might enjoy this quote by Nietzsche:
The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Munchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral-responsibility/
Noetzsche is an antidote to the obscurantism that has long haunted philosophy. His writing has perhaps an opposite problem. After I tease through the rhetorical flourish, hyperbole and varying metaphors, I remain uncertain of what his arguments be.
Do you think creationism and astrology are wrong then? How would they differ from free will?
Those systems of ideas have the advantage of coherence, so "wrong" is a bit of a compliment that they deserve. Free will is just plain incoherent.
I think that’s true of virtually all free will defenses. Kant may be the best free will libertarian because he said that the soul exists in a reality that humans can’t understand, the noumenon.
I can imagine some kind of quantum process in the brain that randomized possibilities in some way and made us reconsider them. But it’s absurd to believe any such thing exists.
Perhaps the models of the universe before quantum physics were something like a lot of billiard balls bouncing off each other, and if you knew the positions and velocities of all the balls perfectly at an earliest state then you can calculate any later state. With quantum physics, it is not just billiard balls but also random dice rolls, and later states depend in part on how those dice land. Such randomness defeats pure determinism, but it doesn't make free will any more coherent. Quantum mechanics is still mechanics.
This is wonderful. Will keep this filed away for when I get into another free will fight lol
I'm very puzzled about what you think in this article or Sapolsky's book does much to refute free will. First of all, one could be a compatibilist, in which case they'd agree with determinism. This is, in fact, the majority view among philosophers. Second, while surely there are environmental effects on our actions--a fact that no one who believes in free will is ignorant of--that doesn't entail that our actions are wholly determined by environmental causes and not at all by our choosing.
I agree that many of the ways people try to get free will from quantum mechanics are woo, but there's nothing in physics that rules out strong emergence--whereby things at the higher levels have properties that aren't present at the lower levels. This is, in my view, how consciousness works https://benthams.substack.com/p/against-dogmatic-physicalism
I address emergence in the essay. I never say that our actions are wholly determined by environmental causes.
Agree with you on the compatibilism point (I am a compatibilist), but not the strong emergence point. I don't think "strong emergence," in the way you're using it, is even a coherent concept. All facts about a high-level description of something are by definition entailed by facts about the low-level description. The properties of the high-level description aren't identical to the low-level description, but emergence isn't magic - it doesn't give a high-level description properties that are completely causally disconnected from the low-level description. If it did, that would imply that the low-level description is incomplete. It's logically impossible to have a system that's deterministic on the fundamental level but where a higher level description of that system is indeterministic even when the fundamental description is accounted for (higher-level states might not be determined by previous higher-level states, but they are determined by previous lower-level states).
Right, and that's a point that I address in the article.
“.A gene variant that produces aggressive behavior can result in someone’s becoming a murderer or a very competitive chess player depending on the environment that affects the gene’s expression.”
Not sure if this is your opinion or that of others you are quoting, but no such gene variants exist and if you make a case that it’s some nondescript collection of gene variants, that is more akin to astrology.
The exact quote from Sapolsky is: "Suppose someone has a gene variant related to aggression; depending on the environment, that can result in an increased likelihood of street brawling or of playing chess really aggressively." He does not give a reference for this sentence, but surely the overall point that a gene variant can have very different outcomes in different environments is non-controversial and not very much like astrology at all.
There aren’t gene variants related to being aggressive or being a good chess player. The current claims, because no such variants have been found for any “behavioral” trait is that there is a collection of gene variants that somehow “influence” a trait more commonly. This is almost exactly the way astrology works.
You should take that up with Sapolsky! Your opinion is very out of consensus. Geneticists have identified multiple genes that influence aggressive tendencies, including. These theories are the result of scientific testing, unlike those that come from astrology.
MAOA (monoamine oxidase A) - the "warrior gene"
Serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR)
Dopamine receptor genes (DRD1, DRD2, DRD4)
Genes related to stress response like CRHR1, AVPR1A/B
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ajmg.b.32388
I’m sorry, but you are apparently unaware of the consensus. Behavioral geneticists abandoned the candidate gene era about 15 years ago. All, and I mean, all of these claims have been refuted or never confirmed. I can direct you to all manner of research on the subject.
Yes, if there are geneticists who deny that any known genes influence aggression, I would be interested in reading them. The paper that I link to was written in 2015, and those geneticists seem to disagree with you, so I'm not sure how you can consider your view to be the consensus of the last 15 years. I am not a geneticist, but I do know that Sapolsky is highly knowledgeable about research in this area, and he certainly believes that research in genetics establishes that some specific genes influence aggression. So I don't think what you're saying does in fact represent consensus. Also, do you deny the main point that the same gene can have very different expressions in different environments?
Yes, the original quote implied exactly that there were genetic variants that had a strong influence on a trait. The consensus (which you said wasn’t a consensus about 3 comments up) is that it isn’t the case. Sasha Gusev agrees. Just ask him. My original point is that GWAS make statistical assumptions akin to astrology. Whether these assumptions are valid is for you to decide.
I never said anything explicitly or implicitly about individual genes having strong influences on behavior. You seem determined to misunderstand and misrepresent my article and the state of the field of genetics, so I won’t be responding to any further comments from you.
You did:
MAOA (monoamine oxidase A) - the "warrior gene"
Serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR)
Dopamine receptor genes (DRD1, DRD2, DRD4)
Genes related to stress response like CRHR1, AVPR1A/B
Every single one of these has been refuted. You are arguing I. Circles now.
So you realize that any ongoing research is not looking for specific genes with a large effect on a behavior. They have given up on the idea, including the examples Saplonsky cited.
No one said anything about a large effect. By the way, here's a critical review of the Turkheimer book from Sasha Gusev, so I guess what Turkheimer says is not consensus.
"I should say at this point that I am a card-carrying GWAS Guy. I think GWAS has expanded our understanding of the biology of many traits. In my lab, I run GWAS, develop methods for running GWAS, interpret GWAS, and arguably contribute to the stamp collecting effort that Turkheimer critiques. I put on my GWAS cologne in the morning and I sleep soundly in my GWAS sheets at night. Like any GWAS guy, I can rattle off a number of important genes that GWAS has discovered or re-discovered: PCSK9, LDLR, CACNA1C and C4A, TP53 and MYC. You wake me up in the middle of the night and I’ll tell you that “human genetic evidence doubles the success rate” of clinical trials, and cite the slew of papers that have demonstrated as much."
https://substack.com/@sashagusev/p-147482791
“All you know” is all you know. Sorry, but you don’t really know what the research being done entails. Do you know what a GWAS is?
https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/twin-studies-exaggerate-iq-heritability?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The “consensus” is not even something I agree with. You cite something from 10 years ago? I have a review on here of Turkheimer’s book that discusses this at length (read his book if you don’t want read my review). You are citing old science that behavioral geneticists have abandoned.
All I know is that research on genes for aggressive behavior is still ongoing, so it’s clear that Turkheimer’s view, if that really is what he’s saying, is not consensus. I think that even Turkheimer himself would see his work as being out of consensus. Also, you persist in refusing to address the Sapolsky’s main point. See here for another more recent example: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/15/8814
what about "mostly determinism", with latitude for free will at the level of the final decision?
How would that kind of free will happen? You would need to come up with a plausible model of how the brain could do that.
what for? If it isn't possible to come up with a model, how does that make free will not exist?
Agree with everything that's said here, except that it only applies to libertarian free will - the theory that free will is incompatible with determinism but exists anyway. This is an important distinction to make because the majority of philosophers are compatibilists (i.e., they believe free will and determinism are compatible). 59% of all philosophers are compatibilists, as are 78% of philosophers who believe in free will (based on the most recent PhilPapers survey: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4838), so clearly proving that brain activity is deterministic doesn't do much to disprove free will - it only disproves a thesis about free will that few philosophers believe in anyway. And it's sort of redundant in that respect because libertarian free will is incoherent to begin with (This is slightly alluded to in the article when you mention that quantum indeterminacy is random and therefore not freely willed. In fact, all indeterminacy is random - that's just the definition of random. Libertarian free will holds that freely willed actions are simultaneously determined by us and that they are not determined).
Discussions of free will need to stop ignoring the position that most philosophers think is right. Until then, they're just as intellectually bankrupt as the pseudoscience that libertarian free will believers use to justify their claims. We all agree that it's bad to misrepresent science, but misrepresenting philosophy is rarely called out.
I thought it was worthwhile to just take on the various scientifically based types of libertarianism out there. I should have mentioned compatibilism, it's true. I think that I'm a non-compatibilist, but the whole issue is a tough nut to crack, which is why I haven't gotten around to writing about it. I'm a fan of Gregg Caruso's arguments against compatibilism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral-responsibility/
"A given starting state will always give you the same end state if you apply the same rule to it"
But there is no "given starting state". Each time you repeat the exercise the starting state will be slightly different because of the uncertainty principle. One example given is billiards. After fifty ricochets it has become impossible to know where the ball will be no matter how exactly you specify the initial position and momentum. This is because it is impossible to *exactly* specify an object's position and momentum at the same time.
In a brain there are cascades of actions. Each one is impossible to exactly specify. This doesn't matter much for short strings of events, much as the initial path of the billiard ball is predictable. But as the chain of causation grows longer it will become harder and harder to predict what will happen.
This underlying unpredictability of some experiences is interpreted by your consciousness as free will. It like the saying about the duck. If it looks like free will, acts like free will and feels like free will, it's free will.
But all of those are deterministic processes. Unpredictable does not mean non-deterministic, as I discuss in the essay.
In a highly technical sense, sure it's deterministic. But chaos means that if you took the same person and ran them through their life a multiple times they would have different outcomes reflecting different choices they made. If one cannot predict what idiosyncratic choices a person will make the conscious experience will most usefully be described as free will, even though logic says there must be determinism there underneath it all.
It is like relativity, we know the theory is incomplete, but we will never actually experience any of the effects of its incompleteness, so it doesn't really matter.
The person's life would not be different if the starting conditions were exactly the same. It isn't a trivial point, as it means deterministic theories can be adequate to provide a total explanation of how we get to be who we are.
If the operation of our brains can be represented by systems non linear differential equations like many natural systems, and that system display chaotic behavior, such as those that which governs weather, then just as starting from the same standpoint you will get different weathers, you will get different brain behavior.
So no, just because a phenomenon is governed by a set of deterministic laws does *not* mean that on repeated runs you will get the same output. Chaotic systems "blow up" over time in that arbitrarily tiny deviations between starting conditions give wildly different outcomes. The uncertainty principle prevents an *exact* specification of initial conditions. This is not an *error* it's a fundamental property of reality.
Hence if you run it again from the same initial conditions you will get different outcomes every time. That is simply the way reality is.
Now you're switching to saying that quantum effects are the source of non-deterministic behavior. I also address this argument in the article. It's not that what you're saying is wrong but that I don't know how any of this would be relevant for real-world cognition and behavior.
I did not switch. All along I have said that chaos means that systems explainable by systems of nonlinear differential equation that "blow up" (i.e are extremely sensitive to small differences in initial conditions) will produce different results from the same staring conditions because the uncertainly principle puts a limit on "same".
It is relevant because you state that two genetically identical individuals who live through identical environments will be the same. Not so if they are governed by a chaotic system. This is because the concept of "identicalness" is fundamentally fuzzy because of the uncertainty principle.
This is a different thing than quantum effects.
I also find these deterministic claims about free will to be very unsatisfying. There's a logical leap being made here that's perhaps not justified: because the operation of neurons is thought to follow deterministic rules (although Roger Penrose's recent theories suggest otherwise), then all brain activity at all scales must itself be deterministic.
As others have pointed out (https://quillette.com/2023/11/06/robert-sapolsky-is-wrong/) it's not individual neurons doing the thinking, it's a massive network of neurons that are applying both discrete rules and probabilistic neural networks. The issue then is of scale and complexity - is there some other form of rule operating at this level?
A good avenue to approach this question is to consider the nature of cellular automata. These software programmes are structured with simple deterministic rules, then set on their way and can produce very complex dynamical systems that exhibit non-deterministic behaviour. This behaviour suggests that systems with simple, deterministic initial rules can exhibit non-deterministic behaviour, and so perhaps the same thing is occurring in our brains.
Science is the only way we have to truly not fool ourselves about the world, but there is still so much left to learn. Just as we have an apparently rock-solid standard model of physics, we still cannot explain the absence of antimatter in the universe, despite most physicists insisting that physical laws are deterministic. Similarly with free will, it very much feels as if science is actually fooling itself by making a logical leap to far.
This sounds like a Kantian argument. Kant believed that human experience was made possible by the mental categories that we impose on the world, including causality and quantity. He thought that outside of what we are able to perceive was an unseen world, or noumenon, where things like free will existed. Most philosophers no longer accept this vision in part because the notion of the noumenon can be eliminated by Occam's Razor: we don't need it to explain the reality that we experience, and parsimony is a theoretical virtue.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of metanarratives, but eliminative physicalism is a damned good one. It accounts for everything I can express in words or symbols, and that's literally really all I can ask for
One thing you say sounds a bit like the qualia debate. There is a way a thing appears to an actual human being that a scientific explanation cannot capture. So a scientific understanding of how an apple forms cannot capture what it's like to actually see and eat an apple. I'm persuaded by the qualia argument to some extent. But I think that the manifest and scientific images of an apple must be consistent, or the manifest image has to be wrong. It may appear to us that we have free will, but since that appearance is inconsistent with the scientific explanation of human behavior, it has to be wrong.