Good article, but I'm with Sapolsky. The only way to make sense of Shermer's position is for the "self" to manifest action out of thin air, that is, to act in a way that's to some degree freed from prior physical causes. Here's my article comparing Sapolsky and Mitchell on free will:
Critics of hard determinism make the same mistake over and over: we determinists don’t deny that we can exercise agency and change our characters by changing our habits. Rather, we’re saying that agency, deliberation, and will power don’t happen by magic. Everything in human behavior is ultimately caused by deterministic chemical reactions. So there isn’t any contradiction between what Shermer calls “pre-determination” and “post-determination.” Yes, you can change yourself through your own willpower, but it was predetermined that you would change yourself in that way. For more see here: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/determinism-is-not-fatalism?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
This exactly. There's no contradiction between agency being real and agency being determined. Shermer builds his entire argument defeating that contradiction, but Harris and Sapolsky never claimed the contradiction exists!
The hard determinist position isn't "emergence doesn't exist." It's: emergent properties are still fully determined by prior causes. Consciousness emerging from billions of neurons doesn't escape the causal chain....it IS the causal chain, expressed at a higher level of organization. The emergence of "choice" from neural complexity doesn't grant that choice freedom from prior causes any more than a hurricane's emergent structure grants it freedom from thermodynamic laws.
I like weather analogies here. When it rains, we can't predict which raindrop falls where, but we don't say the rain is free, we say it's complex. The unpredictability is epistemic, not ontological. The raindrop's path is fully determined; we just lack the information to compute it. "We don't know why a particular raindrop fell there" is not the same as "the raindrop chose where to fall." Epistemic opacity ≠ metaphysical freedom.
This is exactly Harris's point. The feeling of deliberation is like watching a storm and believing the clouds are deciding...the decision is real as an event, its freedom is the illusion.
Good article, but I'm with Sapolsky. The only way to make sense of Shermer's position is for the "self" to manifest action out of thin air, that is, to act in a way that's to some degree freed from prior physical causes. Here's my article comparing Sapolsky and Mitchell on free will:
https://open.substack.com/pub/ericrundquist/p/can-free-will-make-sense?r=7x18u&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Critics of hard determinism make the same mistake over and over: we determinists don’t deny that we can exercise agency and change our characters by changing our habits. Rather, we’re saying that agency, deliberation, and will power don’t happen by magic. Everything in human behavior is ultimately caused by deterministic chemical reactions. So there isn’t any contradiction between what Shermer calls “pre-determination” and “post-determination.” Yes, you can change yourself through your own willpower, but it was predetermined that you would change yourself in that way. For more see here: https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/determinism-is-not-fatalism?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
This exactly. There's no contradiction between agency being real and agency being determined. Shermer builds his entire argument defeating that contradiction, but Harris and Sapolsky never claimed the contradiction exists!
The hard determinist position isn't "emergence doesn't exist." It's: emergent properties are still fully determined by prior causes. Consciousness emerging from billions of neurons doesn't escape the causal chain....it IS the causal chain, expressed at a higher level of organization. The emergence of "choice" from neural complexity doesn't grant that choice freedom from prior causes any more than a hurricane's emergent structure grants it freedom from thermodynamic laws.
I like weather analogies here. When it rains, we can't predict which raindrop falls where, but we don't say the rain is free, we say it's complex. The unpredictability is epistemic, not ontological. The raindrop's path is fully determined; we just lack the information to compute it. "We don't know why a particular raindrop fell there" is not the same as "the raindrop chose where to fall." Epistemic opacity ≠ metaphysical freedom.
This is exactly Harris's point. The feeling of deliberation is like watching a storm and believing the clouds are deciding...the decision is real as an event, its freedom is the illusion.