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.
13 comments:
He's lying.
Witness that our treatment of drunk drivers would also be determined.
Mary, that is so observant, I am in awe. I bow in your general direction. ~:D
Absolutely. Because no choice is no choice.
Dude probably thinks he's being edgy and innovative. The whole "meat robot" thing goes backto the 90s, at minimum
Ironically, I just listened to over two hours of this guy on Dr. Peterson's podcast, and aside from his parting remark at the end, which was something line "we should get together again sometime soon so we can discuss my idea, which which I know you'll disagree, that we're don't have free will, but it might sometimes be better to act as it's we do," he came off as imminently reasonable.
They actually had a fascinating conversation, on which they rarely disagreed. He even mostly agreed with most of Dr. Peterson's restating and applications of his research. Of course, they were mostly discussing his previous book, not the current one.
Reading this after listening to that, I suspect he's actually a really smart, mostly honest guy who has this one self imposed blind spot, because it's excuse for having rejected the wisdom taught him in his youth, and he can't face reality without it.
NB, I also agree that his position is obviously self-refuting, since, if he didn't believe in free will, he wouldn't have tried to convince anyone otherwise, since what would be the point?
" 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."
The problem with determinism is that it applies to the person asserting it, thereby rendering his utterances not scientifically reasoned arguments but meaningless biological burps with no more cognitive content than a parrots squawkings.
In other words, this guy said nothing whatsoever and is properly treated as such.
Do you suppose he would accept the response of “I can’t buy the book because I am not programmed to buy it”, when he is shilling the book.
So his robot brain somehow produced that research? It just somehow came into existence as a result of what? Neurons firing in a meat computer? As FederalSailor points out, his argument is self-refuting.
This is not a new idea. It has been argued for, off and on, for a long time.
The base problem with it is that it doesn't matter, one way or the other.
If everyone is a "meat robot", we still need exactly the same rules of society to constrain bad behaviour. The "meat robot" still responds to those rules.
It's a philosophical argument, and it's not necessarily unfun to argue about it, but the *inherent* impact on the real world is essentially nil.... if you actually follow it all the way through.
Not so much self-refuting as, for lack of a better word, self-neutralizing. If all our thoughts and actions are wholly causally predetermined, including the thoughts we have of appearing to make choices, then by definition our actions will be indistinguishable from those we would have taken had we had the free will we thought we had, and thus for all intents and purposes we must be treated as having had that free will. If the Matrix is so perfect you can't tell if you're in it or not, you may as well treat it as real life.
Of all people, Robert E. Howard's Conan said it best: "This I know, that if life is an illusion, then I too am an illusion; and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I love, I laugh, I slay, and am content."
There is also the more brutal answer one could give: go find Saplosky, punch him in the face, and then tell him, "By your own arguments I had no choice about doing that."
(Of course, as Mary Catelli notes, he would then equally have no choice about calling the police and having me arrested. But if neither of us can tell the difference, what difference does it make?)
I seem to recall a story in one of the Star Trek books where some professor was expounding on this very concept. An alien spider walked up to him and stabbed him in the leg as a demonstration that his entire premise of the universe not existing was fraudulent.
Well, Stanford, amiright?
He could hardly publish enough to gain tenure with the premise “people are responsible for their decisions and the resulting consequences” - after all, his PhD. is premised on “original contribution to human knowledge”, and such would never pass the dissertation committee. Too derivative, religious even. Ewwww.
Come to think of it, his premise in the book appears to nullify his own PhD. After all, he’s just a meat robot - how could he possibly contribute anything original? So, poof, he just caused his PhD-at-The-Farm-authored book to vanish in a puff of logic, which is a pretty flower that smells bad.
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