Free Will
This is about two fairly thick wordy Neuro Books but they are not like banging your head against a wall reading completely un-understandable philosophy books about this subject...give this a shot?
I’ve sorta written about this paradox a few times before but this piece is really just a follow up blurb about “who’s fault is it, the individual, or the collective (society)?” mentioned in the semaglutide post.
So here is a tale of two cities….sorry, I mean two books. Both have recently been published. Both are written by smart neuroscientists. Both say sorta (gotta stop using this word…so say some of you) the same things but conclude the exact opposite about this free will issue. Free will is all about you having control of your own actions which is all about who is at fault and who is to be blamed and who is to be punished. Humans really like punishment.
The first book is by Robert who is somewhat of a YouTube Stanford lecture star in neurophysiology. He is one of the guys behind all that cortisol chronic stress research in African baboons. His parents were Russian Jews who came to NYC and he almost passes for a rabbi, even though he gave up all the god stuff in his teen years. I love the way this guy writes (and teaches).
The other guy, Kevin, is just as smart but not as well known as measured my the ubiquitous YouTube vid score. But he’s Irish…. so you gotta love him and his Irish lilt.
If guys like this (VERSUS WHAT WE HAVE NOW) ran for office the world would be a better place.
Robert’s Book
So according to Robert if you walk down the street and shoot a little old lady in the head, this is due ONLY to your biology….like, two seconds before you were super anxious and your big amygdala was primed for violence…two months before you had chronically elevated levels of cortisol because your were hungry and cold and financially ruined and you perceive a neutral face as threatening…..two decades before when you were in your mother’s womb and because mom was in a shit social position of being a single mother with no money and drug addicted you have poor impulse control….two millenium before you lived in a culture of honor killings that set you up for, again, more violence vs negotiation…….At least this is the premise of his previous amazing book, entitled Behave.
In this new masterpiece book he shows how reductionist science is having problems of uncertainty (as exemplified by chaos theory, emergence, and quantum mechanics) into which we try to wedge free will. He shoots this all down in a really, really understandable way (ala Richard Feynman).
His basic tenet is that humanity’s problems stem from blaming people and punishing them, or from worshiping people who just happen to be a little better at inheriting random luck.
Kevin’s Book
So according to Kevin, fundamental physics deals with energy but biology does things for purpose and meaning. He says that the only difference between the living and the non-living is the latter are more complicated. And biology got that way by evolution. Evolution gave us free will and consciousness to act for a reason, like finding food. The important thing is that Kevin does not go into the “Oh free will is something supranatural that is given to us by god” , or “conscious is the cosmic thing we are all connected to”. He remains firmly non-dualistic.
To my way of thinking, these two guys are saying the same thing but using different words.
So, science will continue to figure things out (explain them) which can only be good. When you look at the dualistic polarized views these day you might not be optimistic. There is an old John M. Barry expression that says, “When you mix politics and science, you get politics!”. Apropos for today.
Here are a few examples of how we are getting better….or at least getting a little less Old Testament(y)….the present day “kill everyone who isn’t one of us” jihadists not withstanding.
Take the case of Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter. He had an astrocytoma in his brain.
Take the case of a school teacher who became hypersexual due to a frontal lobe tumour. With a surgical resection he became normal. When he became abnormal again, the imaging revealed a recurrence.
Yeah these types of cases where we have a nice causative thing are rare as hen’s teeth but who knows what we’ll find out in the future. Pretty stupid, shoving people like this is a prison system with all its atrocities? I guess it is good for the prison guard unions.