Determined by Robert Sapolsky
Philip Badger questions Robert Sapolsky’s determinism.
Hard Compatibilism
If you claim, as the modern compatibilist does, that the world is governed by the laws of physical cause and effect and, yet at the same time, that I am responsible for my actions, then you need to find to find some crack in the armour of hard determinism for responsibility to emerge through.
Not really. Here all that seems required is that you sustain an assessment of the human brain up in the philosophical clouds.
Unless, perhaps, there is a philosopher among us able to demonstrate chemically and neurologically how the human brain functions to give us free will. Step by step as it were.
As Sapolsky demonstrates, that’s not an easy thing to do. For him, life is essentially about luck, in that who and what we are is the outcome of factors utterly outside of our control. Genetic factors may predispose us to psychopathy, depression, creativity, or compassion, but they do not do so in a vacuum, and environmental factors play a huge role in deciding which of our genetic predispositions are realised in the structure of our brain and the behaviours which follow.
Or utterly beyond our control because our brains do in fact compel us to think, feel, say and do only that which must unfold autonomically given the only possible reality. Then the part where philosophers explain step by step how matter came to exist and how it managed to evolve into biological matter evolving into mindful matter evolving into self-conscious mindful matter.
And then how it all fits into a universe -- a multiverse? -- of simply staggering proportions.
The part the preponderance of men and women around the globe still attribute to God.
To be specific, if I am well-nurtured, well-nourished, live a life in which others are not a constant source of threat, and don’t imbibe too many neurotoxins, I am likely to end up with good impulse control, because my prefrontal cortex is well-developed and well integrated with my limbic system (these are the areas of the brain which, respectively, think about our responses to the world, and which feel things emotionally). By contrast, poverty, pollution, racism, and other destructive conditions will make my genetic hand much harder to play (even this metaphor grants too much, with the idea that we might ‘choose’ how to play our hand).
As though there is absolutely no possibility whatsoever that this could preclude free will. And what does it really mean for all practical purposes to demonstrate it one way or the other?
In a brilliant passage, Sapolsky asks us to consider the difference between a Harvard Graduate and the guy at the back of the Harvard graduation hall charged with picking up the litter. He argues that in every respect, chance, and nothing but chance, makes the difference between those lives.
Then back to the part whereby, given a wholly determined universe as some necessarily encompass it, no passages can be any more or any less brilliant. Why? Because they are both written and read only as they ever could have been. Thus when compatibilists argue that moral responsibility is in sync with determinism that is only because they were never able to argue otherwise themselves.
It's just that I'm the first to acknowledge this could well be entirely wrong. In other words, I'm the first to acknowledge that I have no way in which to demonstrate that my own frame of mind "here and now" reflects what is really true. I merely suggest in turn that philosophers and scientists have been grappling with it now for thousands of years and have themselves failed to pin it down.
Well, to the best of my knowledge, anyway.