The Phantom Soapbox: October 2023

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Free will itself now under assault.

A while ago I created an imaginary alien civilization for my current book. I needed bad guys so evil that readers would cheer when the hero blew them up, so I created a civilization that told its citizens that nothing existed and nothing mattered. They did that so they could treat individual citizens as consumables. Like Communists, but worse. To my mind, that type of thing deserves a hearty blowing up.

Imagine my surprise to find some guy one-upped me, and my book isn't even published yet.

Dr. Robert Saplosky, not content with Postmodernism which states that the world doesn't objectively exist and that "reality" is created by human speech, has now decided that is not far enough. He has decreed that humans are nothing but meat robots. Every action a human takes is determined by heredity, environment and neurology. We decide nothing. And going even further, can therefore be blamed for nothing, no matter how heinous the act. "He din do nuffin" is now an existential truth.

After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, [Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.
This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

Yeah. Thomas Hobbes, with a new coat of paint. I'm rolling my eyes pretty hard.

But the extent to which this guy is full of shit doesn't become fully evident until you get alllll the way to the last bit at the bottom.

We are machines, Sapolsky argues, exceptional in our ability to perceive our own experiences and feel emotions about them. It is pointless to hate a machine for its failures.
There is only one last thread he can't resolve.
"It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something 'good' can happen to a machine," he writes. "Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness."

It's completely self-refuting. The ability to perceive -anything- requires consciousness. Without it, there is mere response to stimulus. That is what a toilet does when you flush it, the mechanism performs its designed motions when you push down on the lever. The toilet perceives nothing. A completely determined creature would also feel, perceive, nothing. Stimulus, response. That's it.

Consciousness is not mechanistic. Can't be. The human being knows himself, observes and perceives himself, and in the knowing, chooses his actions. That's why he thinks it is better for people to feel happiness than pain. Because he knows they FEEL it, which means they exist and are not mere robots acting out stimulus/response programs.

But he wrote the book anyway, because he appears to be some form of appalling asshole.

Another day, another socialist Ivory Tower dickhead paid with government money, chipping away at Western civilization.