Posted: Aug 14, 2017 9:07 am
romansh wrote:I have started reading Sapolsky's tome called Behave. Anyway he tackles free will somewhere around page 540. But he is not a believer. Based on the little I have read Sapolsky is highly qualified to speak about neurobiology and resultant behaviour. At least quite a bit more than us weekend warriors. Anyway here is a interview with him on free will.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbqw ... -free-will
Also the video on the address he gives to Stanford graduates on behavioral similarities and differences between humans and other primates is excellent. Well worth watching.
There’s another 2017 interview with Robert Sapolsky on free will here, with the same message, that we have no free will and that we need to adjust our social behaviour accordingly. In particular, we need to stop blaming and punishing people, according to Sapolsky (if I’m reading him correctly).
I think Sapolsky is being irresponsible and claiming authority while speaking outside his subject, so he’s doing what he criticizes others for. OK, he’s a brilliant interdisciplinary neuroscientist and researcher in animal behaviour, but he has no expertise in criminal law or in the theory of government of humans by humans. He has spent decades at the cutting edge of research into the behaviour of baboons and the mechanisms of our brains, not grappling with the ethical and practical problems of keeping human societies (consisting overwhelmingly of normal people without major mental health issues) ticking over in the here and now, not in some future world when we know exactly how brains work.
For one thing, he gives the impression of supposing that human brains are fixable by surgery in our current state of knowledge, going by his comment in the link you give:
Robert Sapolsky in interview wrote:The analogy I always use, which is so difficult for people to swallow when it comes to the criminal justice system, is that if a car has faulty brakes, you fix the brakes. If the brakes are not fixable, you put the car in the garage for the rest of the time, and your primary responsibility is to make sure this car with the faulty brakes doesn't hurt anybody. But nobody is saying you're punishing the car. Nobody is accusing your car of having a moral failing. Somehow, we have to reach that mindset.
So if someone commits a criminal act, for example by driving a car with dangerous brakes, then that person needs their brain fixing by surgery???? Or alternatively, they should be locked away in a mental health ward until their brains get surgically fixed?? This is probably not a person with a major mental health problem, most of us have skirted with similar misdemeanours. So far, we simply don’t know how to fix that kind of antisocial behaviour by surgery (and that’s disregarding all the ethical issues involved). What we do know is that hauling that person into court, and fining them and/or taking away their driving licence for a time, does, usually, work. That person is likely to be more careful about their car brakes in future, and other people reading the report of the punishment in the paper are suitably influenced to keep their cars well-maintained. If you are caught driving a car with faulty brakes, would you prefer to have surgery/be locked up, as Sapolsky appears to be recommending, or to pay a fine/be prevented from driving for a time, i.e. to be punished, as happens at present? Why is he saying our current system is radically wrong? His ideas look much worse to me.
We don’t yet know how brains work in anything like the kind of detail needed to fix them in the way that we fix cars. So saying that we ought to have the same emotional response to people as to cars is not necessarily the best way to go. Our evolved system of using punishment for antisocial behaviour works better than anything Sapolsky has to offer, as far as I can tell. If all he’s saying is that people with serious mental health problems should have more resources than at present, then I could agree. But he’s going very much further, he’s saying we need radical change in the way we respond to normal people when (as most of us do fairly frequently) they behave in antisocial ways, and at that point I disagree strongly with him.
In the future, when much more is known about neuroscience, then we may (or may not) start treating people like cars. Meanwhile, in my view, it’s not a good idea to attempt to treat people like cars, our evolved systems of reward and punishment, so far, are doing a better job than that.