Tag: determinism

Three Takeaways, Number Three: It’s All In The Cards

Posted on by Mike Bendzela

by Mike Bendzela

I was determined to have a good crop of onions this year, so I deserve no praise for it. (Photo by author)

From preface of Numbers One and Two: Anytime is a good time to take stock of what you think you know, or what you think you have actually learned, but once you have seen two-thirds to three-quarters of your life pass, it would seem rather high time to do so. [. . .] What would I say if, launched into the firmament and finding myself at Heaven’s Gate, St. Peter said to me, “What have you learned, sinner?” So, a few things I think I actually do know, in descending order of certitude, over the course of three articles: evolution, overshoot, determinism.

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I have always been something of a determinist, but I never consciously mulled the issue much. Now, Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will has pretty much dragged me out of the closet: I think it unlikely that we have anything like free will. I’ve only recently learned that the proper term is “incompatibilist,” which is the view that free will is incompatible with the notion of a determined universe, that is, a physical universe where everything has a cause. (But then what caused the universe? God? Which one? I short-circuit here.) That’s about as philosophical as I can stand to get. For me, the issue is simply, If the universe is determined, then human behavior, like that of the macaque, is determined as well. Some big-brained Apes don’t get to carve out a special exemption for themselves just because they like to imagine they exercise “free will” independent of everything else.

“In the cards” is a tired trope, I know, but it works well for this issue. I was surprised to learn that the expression “in the cards” doesn’t come from playing cards but from Tarot. I prefer to look at it in terms of playing cards, though, because a card game denotes being given a limited set of options which you then have to deal with, as it were. Besides, a Tarot-reading neighbor once “read my cards” for me and it struck me as wishy-washy bullshit. I used to really dig playing Euchre, though, years ago.

“Cards” is a vague enough term that any card can represent either genes or environment, nurture or biology, chance, serendipity, stupid luck. These I parcel out into the categories “conditions,” “constraints,” and “contingencies,” through which I’ll show how who I am is all in the cards. This essay, then, will be part book review, part memoir, part blind-ass speculation. Read more »

Friday, March 28, 2025

Moral Infohazards for Statistical Selves

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden
Early consequences of infohazards.

Twenty years after Steven Pinker argued that statistical generalizations fail at the individual level, our digital lives have become so thoroughly tracked that his defense of individuality faces a new crisis.

When I first picked up The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Steven Pinker, 2002), I was in my early twenties. The book was nearly a decade old, by then, but many of its arguments were new to me—arguments that, by now, I have seen thousands of times online, usually in much dumber forms.

In The Blank Slate, Pinker argued that humans are wired by evolution to make generalizations. These generalizations often lead us to recognize statistical differences among human subgroups—average variations between men and women, say, or among various races. Pinker showed that these population-level observations—these stereotypes—are often surprisingly accurate. This contradicted the widespread presumption at the time that stereotypes must be avoided mainly due to their inaccuracy. Instead, Pinker suggested that stereotypes often identify group tendencies correctly, but fail when applied to individuals. The argument against stereotyping, then, should be ethical rather than statistical, since any individual may happen not to mirror the groups that they represent.

Midway through reading The Blank Slate, I went to the theater to watch Up in the Air (2009), in which George Clooney portrayed a Gen-X corporate shark. At one point, Clooney advised his horrified Millennial coworker to follow Asians in lines at airports. “I’m like my mother,” he quipped. “I stereotype. It’s faster.”

This got a big laugh. We didn’t know, then, that Clooney—with his efficiently amoral approach to human sorting—represented our own algorithmic future.

Life in 2010 was still basically offline. But as members of my generation moved every aspect of our lives onto the servers, it became steadily easier to identify individuals by their various data tags. Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) (Christian Rudder, 2014) was assembled by one of the co-founders of the dating website OkCupid. It generalized wildly about differences among various racial groups, but no one could accuse the book of simple racism. Tech founders, after all, have large-number statistics to back up their claims—the very patterns that Pinker suggested were natural for humans to perceive, now amplified by enormous datasets and the sophisticated tools of data science. Read more »

Monday, May 13, 2024

“I wear the chain I forged in life”

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Marley’s Ghost by Lisa K. Weber

Robert Sapolsky claims there is no free will. Jacob Marley begs to differ. Let us consider their dispute. Sapolsky presents his case in Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will: everything has a cause, so all our actions are produced by the long causal chain of prior events—never freely willed—and no action warrants moral praise or blame. He supports this position with a great deal of science that was not available back when Marley was alive, though “alive” seems an awkward way to put it, since Marley is a fictional ghost, possibly even a dreamed fictional ghost (depending on your interpretation of A Christmas Carol), dreamed by fictional Ebenezer Scrooge. Marley’s standing to bring objections against Sapolsky seems pretty tenuous.

Nevertheless, Marley forthrightly rejects Sapolsky’s thesis: “‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.’” That there is a real dispute here is proven by Scrooge presenting a very Sapolskian argument against Marley’s right to bring a case at all: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” That is, only a chain of physico-chemical causes makes me, Scrooge, see you at all, let alone give any credence to your arguments about morality. If this rebuttal seems sophisticated for a fictional Victorian businessman, it at least reminds us that Sapolsky’s philosophical position is quite old and well known.

Unlike Scrooge, Sapolsky does not inhabit the same fictional realm as Marley’s ghost. He cannot argue that Marley’s sins were caused by prior conditions and events, because Marley’s sins and choices don’t really exist, not in the causal universe in which Sapolsky makes his argument. As he so emphatically puts it: “But—and this is the incredibly important point—put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.…Crucially, all these disciplines collectively negate free will because they are all interlinked, constituting the same ultimate body of knowledge” (8-9). Marley’s ghost, though, is not of that body—an “incredibly important point” indeed—and that’s precisely the reason to choose him as our spokes-“person.” Read more »

Monday, February 26, 2024

Free Will, Pragmatism, and the Things Best Left Unsaid

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

A few months ago, the Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky released Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. It’s a book whose thesis is as easy to state as it is hard to accept. Sapolsky argues that since our actions result from nothing more than one event following another, no one really deserves praise or blame for anything they do. Our actions are determined by physical events in the physical brain, tightly linked in a causal chain that none of us is able to control any more than anyone else. Our attitudes about all sorts of everyday issues, from financial compensation to prison sentencing, should be reformed in the light of this truth.

Sapolsky is a witty writer, but notions of agency are so deeply baked into our usual way of talking that he frequently has to catch himself. (From a footnote: “I have to try to go through the same thinking process that this whole book is about to arrive at any thoughts about [Bruno] Bettelheim other than that he was a sick, sadistic fuck.”) While one might turn to Determined for lively discussions about current debates in neuroscience, philosophers who have criticized the book point out that there’s nothing really new in his basic assertion, besides the new details.

Of course, filling in the details can be important for establishing plausibility. But the problem with determinism—at least for scientists since the time of Laplace—isn’t that the idea seems implausible. The problem is that even if determinism is plausible, it’s not clear what the consequences of this realization should be. Read more »

Monday, April 13, 2020

Determined To Be Free

Posted on by Thomas O'Dwyer

by Thomas O’Dwyer

With most of the planet under curfew, now might be a good time to ask, where’s my freedom of choice suddenly gone? Who (or what) determined, in some detail, how billions of us should act and behave for the foreseeable future? A troublesome ancient duo has returned – free will and its shady evil twin determinism. By coincidence, they came eerily embedded in a new Apple TV science-fiction series, Devs, of which more soon. I didn’t choose to be “cocooned” (and I’m sure I can’t opt to re-emerge as a pretty butterfly). However, I do choose to write this article and could equally decide not to. Or could I? The editor sent me a reminder that he was expecting it, so I can’t not write it. Why not?

calvin & hobbesWhat can I make of these decisions emerging out of the blue, which I appear to act upon “freely?” What are the consequences of how I choose to react to them? Although these are vague philosophical musings, let’s look instead at the science of it all. I’m a layman, neither scientist nor philosopher, but as we are rediscovering, scientists are a less fuzzy lot than philosophers. I’m more likely to ask the woman with the medical degree about the true meaning of my dry cough than to ask philosopher Slavoj Žižek to waffle incoherently about it for 20 minutes. Science observes events and facts and examines the connections between them. Certain phenomena seem to occur together in a sequence.

An hour ago I felt my reading glasses slip, tried to grab them, knocked over a cup which splashed coffee on the sleeping cat. Startled, it jumped to a shelf, dislodged an untidy pile of books which crashed to the floor and the cat fled from the study. It took a few seconds, and stasis returned – but the universe is forever changed. Each event in the sequence “caused” the other. This is a scientific fact easily grasped by the layperson, but such things give philosophers nightmares and more opportunities to tie themselves in convoluted knots. And theologians … no, let’s ignore them entirely. Read more »