The Missing Literature In Sapolsky's Argument
Against Free Will
Professor Sapolsky,
I have truly loved your work since I first recommended "Stress: Portrait of a Killer" to everyone as a cogsci student president at UofT, and I've watched 5 of your spots for your new book and I have to disagree but you will see why and why it's not your fault you're wrong--that is, if you've been going off of what philosophers of mind can offer in the way of rebuttal, because their blind spot is your blind spot: political philosophy's take on freedom.
The ternary account of freedom provided by MacCallum in 1967 (which I first learned here) has not been widely digested, and only 286 articles both:
A) Mention "free will", and
B) Mention the OG MacCallum article:
This is an empirical measure of disciplinary segregation and why we can't have nice answers...the nice answer is not that free will does not exist, but that it is not absolute, or that it is absolutely free will that does not exist -- freedom is relative to how these other variables are filled in in MacCallum's account.
I have remarked in the past that it's ironic that Tony Blair wrote Isaiah Berlin on his deathbed (recounted in "The Trap" by Adam Curtis) to ask if maybe positive vs negative liberty was a false binary, seemingly unaware of MacCallum's work decades earlier... oh well, we can't hope for much in government, now can we? ;-)
--
adamgolding.ca
Also see:
""There's no God" or "I'm an Atheist" is short for "I vote against the standardization of metaphors on which God exists."
Vote against the standardization of these metaphors to weaken the political power of the church--that institution should not have the force of standard metaphors on their side as well--'science' needs all the help it can get there, and for the collective good.
In the debates I just went through about the paradox of the stone, it was sad to see the atheists (my team) fixate on whether the Christian god is logically possible rather than on which impossible god was a better role model, thereby de-literalizing the question."
from: https://www.facebook.com/adamgolding/posts/pfbid0MYYRTcNjESMA86K61re2D1c3o1ZdL4VKryki9nRcHMsU8n32t93cfaBxtacrHc7vl?__cft__[0]=AZUp48ZLaoyBtWsz5xwkPN41JC2J3Je5txOb-mJmQdOsARkiES52hf7vLtthxn6YM25sbsR3KfF_vGploj4tISmNicWkkVzUHJdFZBwrnABA4w_3PGhfVNDmEBtcrqoYCrQ1UzcLBDLIqfp6FnSmIn2wZBlNl0OsdcHlC8418bb0YQ&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R
"freedom is not absolute
the free will debate always avoids positive and negative liberty
and maccallum's ternary account
https://adamgolding.substack.com/p/the-missing-literature-in-sapolskys
Jux Jacy
I'm guessing the whole free will/determinism issue isn't relevant to a higher level framework
Adam Golding
jux yes
it's freedom from X to do Y
in this context absolutely free will becomes equivalent to omnipotence"