Here; an excerpt with a couple of interspersed comments:
The view that causal determinism is true is not new, nor is the view that this entails no free will or moral responsibility, but Sapolsky collates and marshals the evidence (some of it recent and cutting-edge) as it bears on these issues. The cumulative effect of the discussions and Sapolsky’s analyses can be an overwhelming sense that we might be wrong about our very foundational beliefs in free will and moral responsibility, and even our selfhood. He writes, “…put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will” (8; emphasis in text) [footnote omitted]....
Surprisingly, in a book about free will, Sapolsky offers no definition of it (or, for that matter, determinism—or even moral responsibility!). He writes, “What is free will? Groan… I’ll do my best to mitigate the drag of this” (14). Although he does not present a full definition proper, it is clear that he holds that free will requires the falsity of determinism—by definition (not as a result of argumentation): "[To establish free will] [s]how me a neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense. …Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will." (15)
This is problematic in various ways. First, it claims that “being a causeless cause” or “independent of the sum of its biological past” would be sufficient for a choice/action’s being an instance of free will. This is however surely false; pure randomness is incompatible with the control involved in free will. (In his discussion of quantum indeterminacy, Sapolsky is aware of this.) More plausibly, we should interpret him (here and throughout the book) as contending that, as a matter of definition or “meaning,” indeterminism is a necessary condition of free will. Note that the indeterminism of “causeless cause” or “independent of the sum of its biological past” is a very strong kind of indeterminism, leaving out the more appealing idea of not being fully determined by antecedent causes. (Sapolsky elides the distinction between causation and deterministic causation and thus does not consider indeterministic causal accounts of free will).
One might ask why Fischer's alternative is "more appealing"? Presumably because it makes it easier to defend free will! Indeed, as Fischer notes later:
[Sapolsky] is not alone among neuroscientists in defining free will in this way, but this leads to serious confusions. Much unproductive debate has taken place between neuroscientists and philosophers due to this (often implicit) definition or assumption. The neuroscientists in question believe that establishing that the brain works deterministically implies (without further argumentation) that there is no free will. The philosophers deem this unacceptable, because it rules out compatibilism by definition.
As with Sapolsky, many neuroscientists use the spatial metaphor about “room in the brain.” They seem to think that determinism would entail no gaps, no space in the brain, as though free will has to occupy some gap or space. This is clearly misleading, and, at the least, tilts the discussion away from compatibilism right from the start.[2]
Defining free will in this way evidently begs the question against compatibilism about free will and causal determinism.
That is surely right, but it is an interesting question why indeterminist assumptions seem so obvious to neuroscientists. For one thing, the latter do not put much stock in "ordinary" practices of holding responsible, unlike many philosophers. Ordinary practices are, in the view of some philosophers (like Marx and Nietzsche, and this one here) not data points that constrain philosophical conclusions, but they play a crucial role in the compatibilist tradition.
From the conclusion:
From my perspective as a philosopher, it is jarring that a book on free will would not discuss free will. Sapolsky spends his energy seeking to establish the truth of causal determinism but does not investigate in any serious way how this would relate to free will and moral responsibility. Like many other neuroscientists who adopt a spatial metaphor and proclaim there is no room for free will in the brain (Sapolsky is late to the party), he assumes that causal determinism is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility, rather than arguing for this contention. Further, he believes that indeterministic sequences don’t underwrite free will either, but he never addresses a range of proposals on offer for indeterministic accounts of free will. His discussions of the putative problems with moral responsibility are shopworn, and he has certainly not established that our world would be better off if we “subtracted” moral responsibility. It is more plausible that it would be a desiccated world—a moral desert. This book, despite all the commotion over it, does not offer anything new or illuminating about free will or moral responsibility.
One does wish that those with knowledge of the empirical sciences would spend a bit more time reflecting carefully on the concepts they use, and the justification for them. That is one thing that the philosophers do well, and from which the scientists could learn.
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