Determined: Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky. He's a Stanford biologist/neuroscientist. You may have come across lectures from his class on Human Behavioral Biology which is on Youtube for free and highly recommended. The book basically lays out his argument that our actions are entirely the result of a deterministic combination of our genes, chemicals during fetal development, epigenetic factors during childhood and adolescence, brain trauma, diet, sleep, recent stress exposure, etc. Much of it motivated by his work as an expert witness in criminal trials, and concluding with his take on the "now what?" question on the moral/ethical implications of deciding that we don't really have as much (or any) control over our actions as we like to imagine.
If you found this perspective impactful I’d like to recommend taking a look at the teaching of Advaita (“not-two”), or nonduality.
Wayne Liquorman does free weekly satsang via zoom at Advaita.org.
A book I recommend is I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj - a transcript of his Advaita talks and also one of the most influential books for 2023 or any other year in my life.
An Advaita pointer (a question to sincerely investigate - which investigation brings realization) that has been productive for me, has been to observe my choices and see what caused them.
I have been doing this for years and still haven’t observed an independent force which one may call “free” will.
Wayne’s take on “authorship” vs “doership” introduces the concept of “false sense of authorship”.
Sapolsky's cartoonish mis-characterization of Schizophrenia and people afflicted with Schizophrenia is a joke and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. His widely-cited and (unfortunately) popular lecture on YouTube is proof positive that Sapolsky is an imposter and isn't truly interested in the rigors of scientific reasoning. If you want real cutting-edge Schizophrenia research it's best left to those on the front line in hospitals and Ivory Towers. Not armchair yahoos like Sapolsky who get a laugh off the backs of people suffering. He's done a great disservice to those who are afflicted with Schizophrenia. Much better than his rambling lecture is a TED talk given by Bethany Yeiser. Let's put a human face on Schizophrenia, shouldn't we?
It's less interesting with the knowledge that it's wrong. The universe has RNG in the form of quantum interference patterns. Events are not deterministic they are a series of possible chance that is within so much entropy you cannot isolate it at classical scale.
Have you read the book? He spends a whole chapter on this (and for the record, my background includes a Physics degree). The gist of his argument, which he does a reasonably good job backing up, is that quantum effects just don't scale up to the level to affect change to even a single neuron. The other thing, which he doesn't really explicitly call out but is how I think of it: when we talk about "determinism", there are two very different things. One is what his book is about, sort of the more moral philosophy version, which is whether there's really any sense of "free will" as some definable thing that is separate from all the factors that allows us to make decisions truly contrary to our environment. The other, which is more what I'm used to from physics is the idea that if you had a gigantic computer and input all the the state of the universe that you could calculate future states. On that one, I agree that the universe isn't deterministic (even with the hypothetical infinitely large computer, unless Heisenberg's wrong, you simply couldn't measure both the position and momentum of even a single particle to high enough precision, let alone the entire universe). Yes, you could come up with a thought experiment where, eg, Schrödinger's cat style, you make some single quantum event observable and produce a significant effect. That would make things non-deterministic in the sense that you couldn't pre-calculate the effects. But it doesn't really change anything wrt to the free will argument; a person is still effectively mechanically responding to the environment, which might include non-deterministic events.
Anyway, back to the question of whether you've read the book and are criticizing the arguments that it actually makes or are you just reacting reflexively to an imaginary argument based on the title and second-hand descriptions?
Quantum effects do scale. The randomness doesn't disappear it must have an effect. Either we haven't found it, have falsely attributed it to other effects, or can't measure it.
If you own the simulation then youre not limited in measurement. We are limited because we cannot measure without interaction.
Have you read the book's discussion of this? Again, I encourage you to engage the actual arguments that the book makes rather than an imagined straw man version of what Sapolsky might be saying.
idk, most of life is about a subtle dance between chaos and order, from DNA mutations to the flashes of activity inside brain to complex behaviour of ecosystems and human interactions.
somewhere in there there is a free will, that is neither order (things predetermined) nor chaos (things happening randomly) but a secret third thing.
thinking in any other way is myopic, in my point of view.
I think you'd like the book then if you like to have your views challenged. This is exactly the kind of argument that he engages with in extreme detail (and spends an entire 500 page book on, so I won't just repeat his arguments).
