You have no free will at all | Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky

Everything on this topic has already been said by Schopenhauer: "You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want."

irony is that same people who say everything is predetermined by God and every thing is God's plan are the same people who think there's free will 😂

"You have to protect people from incompetent people" what a truth that is

The biggest problem with the intellectual society debating ‘free will’ is that they seldom talk about ‘what is free will’ actually is. If one has free will or not depends on the definition of free will.

The interviewer, Robert Chapman Smith, is excellent in this interview with Dr. Sapolsky. I had never seen one of his interviews, but I must congratulate him and Big Think on this video!

I watched many of his Stanford lectures one night on LSD and from there I went on a 3 week binge. The way he explains complex ideas is so excitable and concise. It reminds of all of my favorite teachers in high school and college.

This is actually very simple to follow but the ego will fight tooth and nail to deny it.

19:16 "Everytime you're making a decission about why someone just did something, including yourself, stop and question it and think about it a second time and fifth time and tenth time and as part of that decission because you can't imagine what the world is like for that person is part of that decission, because their face doesn't register with yours as much as in uses face does there. Just be sceptical and think again and again and especially when you're tired and wanna make a fast attribution." I wanna hug this man so much.

I have watched quite a few interviews with Robert Sapolsky, but this one was one of the best. You asked all the questions that I always wanted to ask him about free will, except you did it better. Very good interview

Worth remembering that in psychology there is a huge replicability crisis with many experiments. For example an experiment on delayed gratification involving leaving a child alone with a marshmallow seemed to indicate that poor children inherited less self control and couldn't delay gratification. However the experiment failed to control for the fact that the poor children were more likely to be hungry during the experiment. There are plenty of videos on this platform about the replicability crisis that are worth viewing.

Sapolsky does a lot of heavy lifting for Big Think. Class act.

The assumption of free will is the assumption that we are independent from the others. It's the assumption that there is a 'real me' making decisions, independent of outside factors.

I could listen professor Sapolsky forever and never get bored. He might be the coolest grandpa ever

Very interesting, when I was an A-Level student and studied Religious Studies which included modules on ethics and philosophy, I did a 360 flip from we all have free will to free will is just an illusion.  I'm now a teacher and I can say that I put more effort in the papers I mark first, we also tell the students, make it easy for the examer to mark, if they're tired, they're less likely to look for marks in ambiguous or messy work. Also I care about my students so I will spend a few minutes pouring over a question to see if I can give them at least one or two marks whereas an examiner in the GCSE will not be as invested in their grade.

Even the book he wrote was not his free will at all.

I've heard all of this before, but somehow this video puts its more succinctly than the others. Thank you to Big Think, and Dr. Sapolsky.

Fascinating. It seems as much an anthropological proposition as a neurological one if you start from that fact that when laypeople talk about free will, they're talking about a value, a meaning (independence) more than about a faculty. No wonder so many rush to defend it. To avoid falling into the usual feud that discussions of value lead to, we should be able to talk about the ability to choose without reference to value. Better yet, we need to talk about why that's such a high value for us and what self-identities we think it forms.

The notion of free will presents itself as a complex and multifaceted topic, often shrouded in ambiguity. It oscillates between moments of apparent mastery over our choices and times when everything seems to spiral into disarray beyond our control. However, an intriguing possibility emerges when we embrace an open-minded perspective, untethered from the influence of cultural norms, socio-economic pressures, political currents, and the effects of substances like food, drugs, or alcohol, as well as the weight of past memories. In this liberated state of mind, the decision-making process takes on a newfound clarity, resembling the exercise of free will. It feels as though we're navigating our lives with a greater sense of autonomy and purpose. Yet, amidst this semblance of freedom, there remains a poignant realization that our capacity for true free will is inherently limited. Despite our best efforts, certain aspects of our existence seem to elude our control, reminding us of the intricate interplay between choice and circumstance in shaping the trajectory of our lives.

I was convinced a few years ago that there is "no free will" by Sam Harris, after believing my whole life that there was. But after reconsidering everything I've heard since then, I have come back to my original position on this subject. I concluded that the whole argument is really nothing more than a semantic sleight of hand. We all make choices, that is something that is objectively true. Whether or not we could have made "another choice" for something we chose to do for me is irrelevant. Nobody else made that choice for us. Every choice we make is "optimized" for us based upon the best calculation we can make, weighing every option we can identify. Of course, it's easy and true to say that calculation is limited in scope, and if done 100 times the same resulting choice would occur. We still made it "freely", nobody chose for us. Free Will "deniers" counter that the choice is simply illusory, however, I don't think it's as simple as that. The brain compiles and processes a lot of data to arrive at its decisions. Comparisons of resulting potential outcomes are calculated, choices are made. Every system is "bounded" by its own inherent limitations, but I don't think that proves the lack of free will. What if your brain calculated that you should do "X", but then "overrode" that and made you choose "Y" instead. Could that be an example of "free will", or just shitty programming? This is a very deep rabbit hole, which is why we can't seem to come to a consensus. However, again, from a strictly practical standpoint, I think it's a semantic argument, and ultimately a fruitless one.

While watching his Stanford lectures i never got Spinoza out of my mind and his position on free will, it's crazy to think about. Thank you for the interview