True, they're big assumptions. They're lumping everyone into what works for most. But you can't conduct everything on a case by case, person by person basis. Think about when phsycologists were mapping out personality charts. Why use a 16 type chart when you can get down in the minutia and create 164 types? Because... it's unmanageable. Because 80% of people are below average, you need a system that the below average person can follow, and even manage. And a system that neurodivergent people can follow, and even manage. It has to be All Inclusive. Well, as best we can get, anyway. There are, however, systems for individuals who have the Most Common neurodivergant minds. And those accomodate as many other types as they can manage. It's just not feesable to have an institute for every divergancy. I mean, you can't even get doctors to diagnose them properly, anyway. The specialities need to be done at home. I recommend creating an environment and a learning style that suits your individual need, then publishing it so other people that are close to your style can utilize in the future. If everyone did that, there would be more styles to choose from... in your online library of learning and lifestyle types.

Love that! I fancy myself a bit of a polymath, albeit an amateur one

People respond differently to the survival terms of different occupations, structures or places but the human brain is basically the same indifferent of person. The objective measure is that everyone has a niche but the environment doesnt correspond to every person, which is the source of social darwinism.

develop a better system then

I think people who suffered most from colonialism will be more likely to feel depression (maybe even especially if they live in white countries), and people who were beneficiaries of colonialism will have less depression. I also think that people who benefited most from colonialism would try to link depression to genetics as opposed to history, as a way to manage a guilt complex that comes from identifying themselves with criminals that existed a long time ago.

Yeah, how are you so convinced about EMDR? Just because it refers to something complicated doesn't mean it works. Going further since it's suppose to work on this complicated mechanism it's nearly impossible for it to be so simple

Explain where the free will comes in. It becomes more of an instrument of "natural selection" more than anything else.

I appreciate that you explained this phenomena in very clear language, it's almost as if weakness has become a virtue. and strength a vice.

You should check out the santa fe institute

I feel that when you look at something like plum village and thich nhat hanh, that is currently the most effective form of psychology. If we consider empirical evidence to be important. Why is it that all my peers are being prescribed ritalin but have never been advised to meditate? References - Cranson, R. W., Orme-Johnson, D. W., Gackenbach, J., Dillbeck, M. C., Jones, C. H., & Alexander, C. N. (1991). Transcendental Meditation and Improved Performance on Intelligence-related Measures: A Longitudinal Study. *Personality and Individual Differences, 12*(10), 1105-1116. - Hjelle, L. A. (1974). Transcendental Meditation and Psychological Health. *Journal of Counseling Psychology, 21*(3), 184-187. - Kryscio, R. J., Abbot, R. D., & Pankratz, V. S. (2008). Blood Pressure Response to Transcendental Meditation: A Meta-analysis. *American Journal of Hypertension, 21*(3), 310-316. - Nidich, S. I., Rainforth, M. V., Haaga, D. A., Hagelin, J. S., Salerno, J. W., Travis, F., & Schneider, R. H. (2011). A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Transcendental Meditation on Quality of Life in Older Breast Cancer Patients. *Integrative Cancer Therapies, 8*(3), 228-234. - Nidich, S. I., Mills, P. J., Rainforth, M. V., Heppner, P., & Schneider, R. H. (2024). Clinical Nurse Well-being Improved through Transcendental Meditation. *Journal of Nursing Administration, 54*(1), 34-41. - DeSantis, A. D., Noar, S. M., & Webb, E. M. (2008). Nonmedical ADHD Stimulant Use in Fraternities. *Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 69*(6), 998-1004. - Lakhan, S. E., & Kirchgessner, A. (2012). Prescription Stimulants in Individuals with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Misuse, Cognitive Impact, and Adverse Effects. *Brain and Behavior, 2*(5), 661-677. - Walton, K. G., Schneider, R. H., & Nidich, S. I. (2002). Review of Controlled Research on the Transcendental Meditation Program and Cardiovascular Disease. *Risk Reduction and Prevention, 26*(3), 299-309.

We should bring back some of the spartan ideals

what Sapolsky reveals can be demoralizing or liberating. It is easy for me to envision my hippocampus, amygdala and cortex developing in my past environment (the abuse & nurture mix) and viewing it as a matter of fact (give up all hope of having a diffent past). One will naturally strive, but if the brain mechanisms are less than ideal (outer areas of bell curve) then it may be easier to accept use of meds as grease for worn gears. A diabetic also will wonder about reversing the condition via diet and exercise, but if it doesn't work, meds are accepted. Meditating is good for contemplating one's logotherapy. So let us stop brutalizing baby brain via violent hazing in infancy (when what agency there is, is at its minimum, but development at its maximim). #intactivism Edit-1) you say "happened to have" mentors to help upon death of a parent. Yes, happenstance is the greateast of all gods. 2) the anti-woke person who says to pull oneself up by their bootstraps is as likely to be wearing a mask just the same as the deterministic person who sees the die as cast, and accepts to travel 'well' in their molded form. PS-I'm just having thoughts as i hear your thinking. You do very good videos, imho. I like the suggestion of psychadelics or month long retreat. They seem to have a much bigger fulcrum and lever effect.

Hmm "28:54"... Here is where I lost tangent.. A rat cant change the environment as humans can and as differences in accumulated "life probonos" start to emerge or capacity to keep up with eachother or "group" makes our mind deteriorate... I dont know what Ableism is..

I think viewing this as a interplay of survival inclinication is the best choice. People who get to much of themselves negated by the environment end up weak and succeptible to a variety of internal/autoimmune conditions, such as depression seems to be/do..!

It seems depression is a spectrum that is hard to nail down. We all feel it from time to time. That doesn't mean we all need to be drugged :) Pfizer would love that :)

Agree a therapy session would not be a good time to tell someone they have no free will. 😅 In fact, it once came up with my old psychologist and I joked that I was surprised to hear it from them. If conciousness does not simply arise from the physical matter of the brain then is there space for our free will to exist that is not affected by cause and effect relating to physical matter? Also I think its relevant that many of the examples given, such as SES, are not truly deterministic but are probabilistically causal. My mind keeps thinking about the experiment that measured that people were already on their way to push the button before they reported deciding to push it. Its caused me to wonder if my mind isnt just constantly story telling, after the fact, about everything that happens to my physical body. My next question is whether the story telling is deterministic or not. It certainly feels like I can influence the future and illusion or not maybe that's good enough!

you hava a master of explaining and clearing this all up for you and others....which is why i imagine you are posting this? to help others? ....but you give the guy about 18 seconds of your 6 minute one-sided therapy session. why are you really videotaping yourself doing this? for healing and clarity but you're doing all the talking and almost no listening.

One of the books that absolutely changed the way I read is (ironically) "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler (who also has an excellent book called "How to Speak, How to Listen"). It all comes down to figuring out to actively engage with what we are trying to do (an interesting paradox to play with).

I really appreciate the insights you shared here. I spent entirely too much time trying to craft a reply, so I 'll just say that this video is nutrient dense and that we obviously shop at similar grocery stores.

I like to think of myself as a lotus... 🪷 ❤️ 😊

I enjoyed this. Thank you.

There are plenty of strong arguments against the existence of a self so what could have free will or work on itself to seek improvement? And yet ideas seem to be grist to some kind of mill. Once they’re heard they are incorporated somehow into a web of beliefs and they add their influence to what happens subsequently. Reading, education and justice all seem to affect outcomes. For me, all of Sapolsky’s arguments are very persuasive but his best are the ones that promote a combination of practical ‘justice’ and compassion.

Assuming AI can become conscious assumes that consciousness is reducible to/explainable in terms of some functional thing/some physical parameter. More likely (imo) it's necessarily a brute fact at some level that "consciousness is associated specifically with arrangement X but not arrangement Y or Z and that's all we can say," whatever that actually ends up being. This follows from Kastrup's idealism, which claims that all matter is an encoded representation of some mental process (belonging to an individual or not). The relationship between a code and the thing it represents is necessarily arbitrary, and also the thing being represented ought not to have more than one possible representation (a car doesn't need two speedometers, for example). I'll also mention that Kastrup would be the first to point out that intelligence and consciousness are two different things. Intelligence is a definable and (in principle) measurable thing because it's ultimately just a question of behavior (structure and function to use Chalmer's terms). Intelligent behaviors can certainly be simulated/instantiated, but it's not at all clear what simulating consciousness would mean since the problematic aspect of consciousness is that it's specifically NOT reducible to structure or function.

I don’t know much about Kastrup’s later work but read all of his early books up to Brief Peeks Beyond and talked with him a lot back then. I went on to study non-duality. So I’m not sure whether it’s you or I who has his view slightly wrong when I disagree with the statement that, “Kastrup's Model insists that intelligence and consciousness permeate all things …”. It might be a semantic mistake on my part so I’ll argue from my own viewpoint which is that there is nothing to all of those things but the intelligence and consciousness we see. And those things include the experience of being a human being in a body. Whatever is intelligent and conscious is not human or personal but it’s an easy mistake to make. From the inference that we are human we infer that other humans in our experience share our experience (theory of mind). We make an association between the complexity of behaviour we observe and consciousness and use this as a criterion to infer what’s going on inside other objects from rocks and silicon chips to cats and crows. In truth, we only infer conscious interiority because we think that we’re experiencing from inside a human being. Whether this implies solipsism is a matter for debate. The single mind implied by solipsism could not belong to a human since the human is only a part of a single dream experience. In any case, we find the idea of solipsism distasteful and we can imagine alternatives where a single mind could experience the same dream from multiple points of experience. Even if it is solipsism, we are all of it whether the experience seems to be inside or outside and I agree with you that it is better to be kind, considerate and grateful. Why not?

There is an important difference between agency and free will, one that needs to be realized. Psychotherapy puts in motion what was already possible

Sapolsky is a 14 year old trapped in a old man's body

I like your T-shirt. I just bought the same one for my 7 year old son.

Sapolski is talking about determinism in the same way that we're just an insignificant cell in the one immortal living thing. He's not technically wrong. Niether was the supreme court about Roe v. Wade, yet in both cases, it's perfect ammo for whack-job religious nutbags, who are the folks that are most verdantly promoting this. You also can't ever touch anything, and are made of 99% empty space. Its a technical assertion that doesn't practically matter.

as a Buddhist I hear value in what you are saying; we talk of the 2 truths: emptiness-interdependence, and karma-self-agency...

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

Yes, we are all connected according to Bernardo And, yes, there's a gap in the reasoming you gave -- but it's not bernardo's reasoning Also, yes, calculators are better at math... Think theyre conscious? Thank them?

,lol.. what? Ai cant do paint throwing style art...?

For me the questions is surrounded by the central piece of "can we create reality"..

The math is what gives you "things" outside of spacetime Really they are more like "essences"

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

🎉

Willpower, but free is a stretch

🎉

Cool 😎

yeah.... appreciate your effort. wouldn't go back to youthful paddaling for a quadtrillion bucks.

I find the balance between "humanism vs determinism" based on the preference for "feelings vs things", which simply means that either you're a people-person or a things-person? Both have evil at the extremes because beyond the limits is psychosis and the absence of recognition of ones actions.. My question would be "What is the central force that motivates a person from a humanistic vs deterministic vs balance" and what the meaningful word behind each motivation is?

His descent into anger and confusion has been so painful to watch. For a while he was helping a lot of people, myself among them. Looking back, he was always fragile. When he felt he was in control, he was fine. But he was never as coherent as he sounded, and he was never evidence based (at all). So I don't expect him to have a pulse on problems as complex as homelessness and community mental health. I honestly think the fame, mixed with sycophantic support from the alt-right have really broken him down, reducing him to a nexus of fear, hatred, and judgement. It really is heart breaking. In the same way as watching Kanye's decent into delusion...

Sapolsky is a quack. In the interview with alex o connor he said he decided at age 14 that there was no "free will" in other words his philosophy is a reflection of his personality, rather than have any root in reality. His arguments are weak and inconclusive. Just another bum dying for fame towards the end of his years.

I don't even see psychotherapy needing free will to work. Once a person is fed with the information, skills and experience to understand himself better this can lead to completely deterministic improvements in the person since he was a person that is able to benefit from those.

Keep telling ppl to agree with you if that makes you happy, if you know everything you're probably right.

Apologies for the tome, but I just couldn't help myself... And for context, this is from a normal, neurodivergent, everyday person who is not academic, just thinks way too much about this stuff. I haven't read Sapolsky, but the book is already ordered. This response is made in good faith. I have no intention of arguing with anyone or changing anyone's mind... I see a lot of the arguments against determinism paralleling the arguments against atheism: -Without a god there is no morality = without free will there is no incentive to try -Without a god the universe is meaningless = without free will life is purposeless -Without a creator god we are no different than apes = without free will I am no different than a computer -Without a god how can we explain the universe = without free will how can I understand my actions From my view, the similarities stem from the same fear- the fear that we are not special in terms of our place in the cosmos; fear of what happens when we face the strong possibility that one of our dearest beliefs, a belief that we've integrated with our identity, might be altogether a fiction; a fear of who am I without this belief? Camus showed us that we don't have to despair in the death of the gods, that in fact, it actually frees us to find our own answers, to create our own meanings. At the time, that was a radical thought. And in many ways, the question of free will is just one of the many stops along the roads of Existentialism. The way I see it, I can't expect to be able understand myself fully if I'm not being intellectually honest with myself. And like the evidence for any god, there is none for free will. In fact, the idea of free will just complicates things unnecessarily. It's at the root of the american justice system- criminals, addicts etc aren't humans who are responding to a series of traumas coupled with epi/genetics that further antagonize their struggles. No, they are moral beings who chose to do what they did and should be punished, not rehabilitated. For me, having an internalized understanding of my deterministic operations in no way changes the sense of agency that still have. I can't help but act as if I have free will. Even in times of deep depression, in prolonged ADHD side missions, or when I was in active addiction, I always felt as though I had choices and acted accordingly. But understanding that I don't have free will changes how I approach my life. I know that I am physically, emotionally, and psychologically unhealthy when I eat poorly, when I don't sleep 7-9 hours every night, when I isolate, when I keep toxic people in my life, when I feed myself toxic media. When I let go of the insistence I have free will (and, in addition, that there is no "me" to have, let alone exert, free will) I open myself up to the processes and properties of emergence. I avail myself to the resources of the world, understanding that my actions don't perform in a vacuum, they are all contextual. I am not separate from everything around me, I am a part of everything, seamlessly integrated, like a bubble in the ocean. This allows me to look at the evidence for what does change behavior and mental states. I am not Depression, I am not ADHD, I am not addiction. I do have those traits, and because they have been so well studied, I can look at the evidence for what's worked for other people and find ways to manage those parts that interfere with the life I want for myself. That same approach also informs my sense of justice and morality. The better I can understand someone's context, the better I can respond to them appropriately. The belief in free will just muddies all those waters. It easy to focus, even obsess, over what we think we will lose or have lost. It's harder to to envision what we may gain when invest in a different future. Change is always already happening, but what part do I play in it? There. I said it. I said too much. Feel free to never invite me back. It may be wise.

Quick question: Neurodivergence is bounded to diagnostic? Related to that: How do you view autistic identity in ex-asperguers? Now autistics.

Therapy is teaching the person how to play with the cards they are dealt, despite the urge to fold, and the natural pity believing the other players are blessed with unlimited chips

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