Sapolsky was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn, the son of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Biology called to him early — by grade school he was writing fan letters to primatologists and lingering in front of the taxidermied gorillas at the American Museum of Natural History — but religion shaped life at home.
That all changed on a single night in his early teens, he says. While grappling with questions of faith and identity, he was struck by an epiphany that kept him awake until dawn and reshaped his future: God is not real, there is no free will, and we primates are pretty much on our own.
Oh, look - another person who has decided what they want the outcome to be, and formulates some kind of argument that results in that outcome.
Whatever, dude.
…decided what they want the outcome to be, and formulates some kind of argument that results in that outcome
You might say his results were…predetermined
Sure, but he was always going to say that
You just had to make that predictable comment, eh?
In my opinion, we either have free will, or we have something else that is effectively indistinguishable from free will. The whole debate is a waste of time, and a person should act as if they had free will regardless of the answer.
As scientists age, they begin exhibiting symptoms like takes on why other disciplines are totally doing it wrong, and how whole fields of study are bogus. Please take care of your scientist as they approach end of life. Particularly noticeable in Physicists, but found in most STEM fields.
“The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,” Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”
Kind of a weird to ask us to do/not do something in this context, isn’t it?
He had no choice but to ask, it’s not his fault that it’s weird.
i didn’t tell them but they finally got there, if they’d ask me they wouldn’t have needed decades of study.
I know I’m about 6 months late with this, but this is all I could think of when I saw this:
what was his falsifiable hypothesis? Where is the science?
So basically what Sam Harris said back in 2012?
Scientist concludes highly philosophical discussion years and years after it’s already been discussed in depth and studied at length.
But they’re a scientist! That means it’s news.
And Jesus Christ.
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.
Is this written by someone in high school?
