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
Previously : "when asked about free will:
1:37 AM
I suppose it's shameful to admit that I like peterson on free will lol
as incompetent as I found him on some other philosophical points
but this is what I say now when free will comes up:
free from what?
if you only get advice from one person they're free to control you with this advice
and you are not free to choose to heed someone else's advice
free will is an ideal that we should seek to maximize
abusive relationships do the opposite
often by creating an artificial scarcity of information sources
if you have 5 advisers but they all have only 1 [common] adviser, same problem plus another one that this may be a deliberate deception for the sake of coercive control
as diversity of inputs increases, the act of choosing to weigh one input in some way relative to another can make more of a difference
since advisers are like the personal reasons you have for doing things, on this view, a freer person is so because they are a more considerate person--they consider more options and thus engage in more choice
but if they are illusory alternatives like a fox news panel then you get the inner fox news panel of ideological possession
(there's the peterson coming through, lol)
except I'm attacking the right, haha
put another way, on a starvation diet of information, it doesn't matter who you are, you'll make bad decisions, but as you have more of a diversity of inputs it matters more WHO you are i.e. what your character and will are like
no will is absolutely free but some wills are more free from certain influences than others
I wouldn't say that this is a determinist view"
source: https://www.facebook.com/adamgolding/posts/pfbid031eGjENujvzEnuccHAUdEqDbsDLWK3NwQqxNKs4t4W5A5fGuH7iTkGjxn5WKAnhecl