What Sapolsky's saying concerning crimes is to stop thinking in terms of punishment, that doesn't mean don't prevent people who committed a crime from doing it again. Prevention vs punishment.

Rather than predictive,I think the best use of this knowledge is in the dynamics of how we manufacture socioeconomic cultural relationships. The less inequality, it appears the less deception and violence at our cultural core.

After a series of horrible losses in my life, I started drinking more alcohol because the emotional pain was unbearable. I eventually developed alcohol use disorder. I tried for a long time to control it, but because of the thoughts about alcohol and cravings I had, I could not control it. My doctor suggested trying Naltrexone medication to reduce the cravings, which I did. Naltrexone is an opioid receptor blocker, and that means that it blocks some or all of the pleasurable feelings you get from taking opioids or in my case drinking alcohol. I was SHOCKED that almost right away, it not only eliminated my cravings but also eliminated my actual thoughts about the alcohol! I think that must mean that the chemistry in my brain was causing my thoughts and cravings about alcohol in the first place. That is just stunning, to me. I also note that not everyone who drinks more for a time develops alcohol use disorder. … I had heard Dr. Sapolsky’s assertion that we don’t have free will, and I thought about that right away when I experienced this drastic change in my thoughts and desires from just a change in my brain chemistry.

Read his book and it made me think to stop blaming myself for decisions I made when younger. It was genetics in many ways and the ways I was raised and born. I stopped blaming myself for many things. Made me feel better about myself. Thx!

I’m with Sapolsky on this

Thanks for the existential crisis, glad I stopped by.

The paradox alone is enough to drive you crazy. I appreciate that he acknowledges this innate paradox between lack of free will and the necessity of intervention

A movie I recommend that expands upon this theory is the Tollywood movie Bro(2023). It follows the story of Mark who dies in a car crash and meets the entity Time, who controls life, death, and fate. Mark makes a deal with Time to go back and help his family before he has say his final goodbye. Later in the story you find all of the choices Mark made prior culminated into the car crash, and his actions were following that of his past experiences. And, ultimately, no matter what he did, the same outcome would have happened regardless of his interventions or not. It expands upon the theory of fate and free will and how we relate to it. It's a very interesting watch and is one of my favorite films of all time.

Truly fascinating!

Why is Jason doing a podcast with Al Pacino?

Joseph Heinrichs hit on so much of what sculpts humanity in "the weirdest people in the world". I think that's the title. So insightful! Very open ended in some areas. Excellent book.

The way we respond to our experiences is determined by our set of preferences. In this way, our set of preferences is like a "psychological sail" that inescapably influences the direction we are pushed through life by the fundamentally indifferent flow of our own subjectivity. We have absolutely no hand in the construction or angling of these sails, as to have such a hand requires the direction provided ONLY by an already constructed and angled sail. As such, our sails must have been moulded and angled by the situation into which we emerged.

There are lectures on Stanford's KZfaq channel about human behavioural biology delivered by Sapolsky. They're insightful and entertaining (if you enjoy listening to him talk).

Big hitter, the Lama.

My bank has little baskets of lollipops at each teller's station.

he looks like George costanza I like this show it's funny .. I get a sense Costanza's in the house

Is that Al Pacino with George Costanza?

The guy on the right wouldn't let Jason get a word in edgewise!

Stunning kruger effect

Free will is the experience of doing something for a reason

Interestingly, the bible actually explicitly teaches that God's will is sovereign and rejects the notion that man has free will. And the logic of an Almighty God requires that there be no free will for man. So science and the "existence" of God lead to the same conclusion. Religion, however, is almost exclusively built on the idea of man's free will. It is possible to reject religion without rejecting God. Religion is essentially man's attempt to control others by co-opting the idea of a god by trying to get people to earn "salvation". Belief in an Almighty God leads to the same lack of condemnation or hubris, and space for compassion that Dr. S. describes. The value added by such a belief, though, is it adds hope, meaning and a sense of purpose to life. Faith is generally misconstrued: it's fundamentally nothing more than the capacity to accept as true without proof. Most of life is built of nothing but faith since we cannot be sure of or prove most of the things we assume to be true and then act on. After all, we really only "know" what we're currently experiencing or pure logic at the moment we're contemplating it. Everything else is faith in our memory or faith in our assumptions.

If you guys weren't convinced about free will, you should talk to a guy named Sam Harris.

You should get George Coztanzas take on this.

The argument against free will is that if you were able to replay your life in reverse and observe the sequence of events unfolding backwards, you would realize that everything follows a model of forced choices. You never chose when or where you were born, nor who your parents would be. As a result, everything is a matter of agency. And agency is where individuals really differ.

I read this too fast and thought it was asking about free WiFi.

A sure whole lot has happened for no one to have chosen to have done any of it. The guy would have done a service to define all the words in his arguments, right? ... all the way down to the word "choose". Prison ought to be about rehabilitation... within reason.

I saw Dr. Robert in "The Hobbit" film i think.....

Lmao why at 49:40 did he laugh at that

So the idea that we should predict behavior in certain people, and then segregate them. That was Dr. Sapolsky answer to the Minority Report question right?

Can anyone do something while simulataneously telling themselves they are not choosing to do it?

Free will isn’t even a coherent concept.

I appreciate his scientism and died in the whool atheism. I hope he never changes

Is it like we're acting out a story

This was a talk about determinism, Sapolsky's credentials lend themselves to go further into the human experience of that concept. Next time maybe. The idea of this "free will" you were talking about never seemed plausible to me. Why/how would it exist?

Do we have free WiFi? That is the question to be asking.

The big problem is his argument is always right. Everything is you did x because of your past experiences

Get a good look Costanza??? Sorry I had to say it

The Bible doesn't tell anyone to burn witches at the stake so I don't know where they got that practice.

Seinfeld meets Sapolsky. You have got to be kidding me! Guess George was always resigned to his fate hence no free will.

Sapolsky's free will conversation with a free will researcher: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/icqXqM12vMjJqIU.html&ab_channel=TheMiddleWay

I guess that when Jesus said to forgive 70x7 is right on it.

Some people say baboons and humans are different

When he talks about a cop shooting someone that goes for their cell phone and their perception can change based on what direction they look or where they grew up. I'm not a cop and I don't have a gun but I'm for guns and cops and there was a study done by a black professor that found that the number of black unarmed men being shot by a cop is very low I didn't remember the statistics but they were under 30 a year and they also showed that the number of unarmed white people that were shot by police was much higher but that's expected because there's more white people in the country. The professor that did the study said this must be wrong and he did the study again using different research assistants and came up with the same statistics. That being said. He needs to go to a police academy and do training with a gun and go through a scenario where he acts like a cop and he pulls someone over and see if he waits until the person pulls whatever it is the person has in his pocket out to make sure it's a gun because unless he's suicidal he will pull the trigger every time. I don't understand how you can expect police to put their life on the line and let someone shoot them because the person they pull over is black. If that's not racist I don't know what is. You think a black person's life is more valuable than a cop who may be black also? Nobody is saying there's not racist cops but they aren't paid well and they have to go into all situations and be able to assess what's going on in seconds and they have to make it home safe. My niece's husband is a cop and he told a story about what happened one night. He had a half hour to go on his shift and he had just got a sandwich and was going to eat it and someone ran a red light. He was going to let it go but he said if I don't go after them and they kill someone I can get in trouble. So he pulls them over and there was a girl driving and her boyfriend was in the passenger seat. My niece's husband asks the driver for her license and he was going to run it and if she didn't have any problems he was going to let her go. The boyfriend starts saying don't give him your license and the cop says something to him to calm him down I think he asked for his id but I'm not sure. The cop saw the light come on in the car so he told the boyfriend stay in the car. Then the boyfriend got out of the car and ran around the back of the car and into traffic and got hit by a car and died. He was white. My niece's husband didn't know why he ran. I think they checked his id and he didn't have anything wrong with his license and no warrants out for him. Not all police are evil and not all police are good. Nobody's perfect. I am white and I used to get nervous when I saw a cop driving behind me or next to me even though I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was taught to respect the police and if you get pulled over don't make sudden moves and don't talk back to them. Just let them ask for your license and give it to them. Let them check it and give it back and if they want to write a ticket let them and take the ticket and go. Maybe they don't have the right to see your license and if you want to make a big deal about it you can spend your time sitting in the side of the road or have them arrest you and get a lawyer or maybe they have too much power but it does no good to argue with them because they are enforcers not legislators. They have guns and they may be insane or you may have caught them at a bad time and your rights are important but they do you no good if you're in the grave because they're going through a divorce or they don't like your attitude. They're just people. They aren't super human. They don't have the ability to cut off their emotions any easier than you or me. There's some cops that think they're the arbiter of justice and there's some that just want to do the job and go home.

Free will exist within a frame work. Free will neednt and doesnt need to be vast, its the small decisions we make and it is this small amount of freewill that exist, that together make up the reason for us being here. If you are walking down the street, do you smile and say hello to a person walking by, or ignore them coldly? Thats free will, and these decisions make a HUGE rippling difference to this reality. When we shed the meatsuit aka die and go home and have a life review, its this giant collection of small free will decisions, and finally understanding their effects, that helps us grow and is part of the main reason we are here.

90% of compatibilists are wrong. It’s amazing how even philosophy refuses to see this

If we have no freewill at all, any time, the criminal had no choice in committing a crime. But the cop had no choice but to arrest the criminal. The jury had no freewill to not convict the criminal. I have no freewill to agree or not with Dr Sapolsky. It's an interesting question, but it can't make a practical difference in our lives.

I guess the hallmark of this podcast is chatty facetiousness. Sapolsky rose to the occasion, but I was surprised how on-point the questions turned out to be.

If there's no free will then everything we do must be pre determined and pre programmed and if it is then there must be a God that pre determined it unless you think everything came from nothing

If there's no free will then you can't blame people for being racist or shooting someone that's reaching for a phone. If there's no free will then psychiatry and crime and punishment and many other things are rendered useless.

God is a spirit you can't detect a spirit with your brain

The argument against free will is fundamentally flawed. Indeed, people have the ability to make choices regarding their actions. While genetic factors, environmental influences, and habitual behaviors can shape our decisions, we ultimately retain control over our actions. It is not always easy to make these choices, nor is there a lack of a path of least resistance. However, we have the capability to defy any innate preferences at any given moment. To claim otherwise is not only mentally debilitating-it amounts to a form of brainwashing-and represents a simplistic and erroneous interpretation of human responsibility and the human condition. This perspective seems to be nothing more than a dramatic revelation that the individual had at the age of 14, which he has since promoted in an attempt to appear intriguing and profound. His viewpoint aligns closely with nihilistic philosophy.

Free will? If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

Of course we have free will. We don't have a choice!