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Free will exists, but by no means is it a miracle.We use “free will” to describe the more complex processes by which behavior is selected in the brain. These neurological steps taken to make decisions respect all laws of physics.”Free will wouldn’t be worth having or extolling, in moral discussions, if it didn’t respond to expectations of reward, punishment, praise, blame,” Pinker says.
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STEVEN PINKER
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
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TRANSCRIPT:
STEVEN PINKER: I do believe that there is such a thing as free will but by that I do not mean that there is some process that defies the laws of physical cause and effect. As my colleague Joshua Greene once put it, it is not the case that every time you make a decision a miracle occurs. So I don’t believe that. I believe that decisions are made by neurophysiological processes in the brain that respect all the laws of physics. On the other hand it is true that when I decide what to say next when I pick an item from a menu for dinner it’s not the same as when the doctor hits my kneecap with a hammer and my knee jerks. It’s just a different physiological process and one of them we use the word free will to characterize the more deliberative, slower, more complex process by which behavior is selected in the brain.
That process involves the aggregation of many diverse kinds of information – our memory, our goals, our current environment, our expectation of how other people will judge that action. Those are all information streams that affect that process. It’s not completely predictable in that there may be random or chaotic or nonlinear effects that mean that even if you put the same person in the same circumstance multiple times they won’t make the same choice every time. Identical twins who have almost identical upbringings, put them in the same chair, face them with the same choices. They may choose differently. Again, that’s not a miracle. That doesn’t mean that there is some ghost in the machine that is somehow pushing the neural impulses around. But it just means that the brain like other complex systems is subject to some degree of unpredictability. At the same time free will wouldn’t be worth having and certainly wouldn’t’ be worth extolling in world discussions if it didn’t respond to expectations of reward, punishment, praise, blame.
When we say that someone – we’re punishing or rewarding someone based on what they chose to do we do that in the hope that that person and other people who hear about what happens will factor in how their choices will be treated by others and therefore there’ll be more likely to do good things and less likely to do bad things in the expectation that if they choose beneficial actions better things will happen to them. So paradoxically one of the reasons that we want free will to exist is that it be determined by the consequences of those choices. And on average it does. People do obey the laws more often than not. They do things that curry favor more often than they bring proprium on their heads but not with 100 percent predictability. So that process is what we call free will. It’s different from many of the more reflexive and predictable behaviors that we can admit but it does not involve a miracle.
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Great thoughts… I think education is how you share secularism… Give them the internet…
Why does he compare reason with religion? What's the point of making that argument? Ideology?
ass
But is the US the "liberal democracy", or is it a republic? I know what it was supposed to have been.
you think you're smart, therefore you aren't, I just think, therefore I am
This guy doesn't believe what he himself is saying. Constantly shaking his head. Violence is sometimes reasonable, in self-defense, to protect, to euthanize, etc. Even a burglar has reason, not a good one, but he has one.
I really get where he is coming from
Life in it's origins was purpose BASED , purpose driven, with the arrival of the homo sapiens life, become REASON DRIVEN, we have no evolutionary purpose, because if every individual on this earth die, the life would continue as we have never existed, we have lost the evolutionary purpose, with or without us the life would just propagate as if nothing have happened. The question is, is there a another life or driving force ??, evolution is purpose driven, human life is reason driven, and maybe in a far far future if we still here , it will be assimilation driven, and if we are still around it may revert it's sel'f back to purpose driven evolution.
Far from wanting the spread of democracy, the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, says the US has prevented Democracy from spreading to other countries by overthrowing democratically elected leaders and installing our own puppet dictators. That's why so many people feel that Kissinger is a war criminal.
It is not self-contradictory to expect things from other people asymmetrically, without a premise of "equal rights". More generally, unless your moral claims are logical tautologies (which they are not), they are founded on premises for which you do not give reasons, which is to say, axioms you take on faith (by Dr. Pinker's definition). Thus, by engaging in moral argument (for non-tautologies) we implicitly buy in to both reason and faith — and moreover we assume our audience shares our faith in certain moral axioms (such as equal rights). In practice, arguments ad baculum are not the alternative to reason; they are the alternative to shared faith — even among reasonable people.
I take a bit of an exception to Steven Pinker's assertion, in the second to last section, that the United States reflects "the ideas of the enlightenment". It seems that we fall down in practicing these ideals such as tolerance towards minorities, science over religious dogma, elections fairly reflecting the will of the people. We are the only country in the world where the notion of climate change is routinely challenged by politicians and disbelieved by many people. We have the highest rate of gun violence and the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The rich individuals and corporations have bought out our elections and successfully lobby for their selfish advantages at the expense the general citizenry. Science in the form of evolution is expunged from some textbooks in favor of Bible-based "intelligent design". African Americans routinely suffer discrimination in many forms. Gay people are openly persecuted and discriminated against in many parts of the country. No one can be elected to office at a national level who does not claim to be Christian or some close variant like Jewish. 4 in 10 American adults believe we are living in "end times" (meaning Jesus will return to earth soon, not climate change destroying the planet). At best, all we can say is that we are closer to the enlightenment ideals than some other countries. A lot of our opinion about us reflecting the enlightenment is perhaps through cherry picked examples belied by the negative exceptions which we wish to exclude from our self assessment. We should work on ourselves to better reflect those values and through that we can bring the others along (except for the countries which are already ahead of us. Please feel free to disagree. I would love to be challenged so that I can further my thinking on this topic.
Satori is realizing that… uhm…
bullshit
America is NOT GREAT
too pacifistic, we are right, lets impose, ultimately it will be more beneficial for everyone
Faith is simply agreeing to accept a proposition without proof, as such a part of the reasoning process. The Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” Not that democracy is based on reason; it’s based on voting, and yet no society including the USA is a liberal democracy. Most decisions in America are made by bureaucrats and enforced by police who carry guns. We do elect officials who can instruct these bureaucrats. We have norms of limited government expected to honor certain individual rights, amid high levels of education and affluence which help reduce impulses to violence.
Yet these blessings depend on material conditions in the world, not on pure reason, and may predicate on other world peoples being deprived of those blessings as well, because security requires in part that one’s neighbors be weaker than oneself (two points on which Marx was correct.) The Golden Rule prescribes only the player’s first move in the game of Tit for Tat.
This reminds me of Philosophy professors in college (yes, I know Pinker teaches Psychology) who would rail against the Bible because it was a book "written thousands of years ago" and then assign readings from Plato and Socrates. Then never caught on.
Pinker is an idealist. He's up in the clouds. He thinks the driving force of social progress is some 'enlightenment' ideas which many people were 'persuaded' to follow. What he neglects due to his distorted capitalist ideology are the MATERIAL CONDITIONS AND INTERESTS of different CLASSES. For example building capital through rape, plunder, pillaging and conquest of indigenous people after which modern capitalist relations were formed and congealed.
Pinker does this because he's a shameless boot licking lackey of the ruling capitalist class. He derives his self worth through utter and complete subservience to the system in which he was BORN INTO privilege. That's why he doesn't mention the over 800 US military bases when he speaks of the third world and instead BLAMES THE VICTIMS of brutal capitalist imperialism for not being 'enlightened'. Fuck this guy. I hope he lives to see a mass general masses of people insurrection. The one's ge dehumanizes from his privileged comfortable position.
"Eat your pheasant, drink your wine, your days are numbered, Bourgeois Swine!"
The United States is great due to our Constitution. It is a unique document of liberty, rule of law and moral reasonable balance unlike any other document in the world. It just needs to be followed.
Could the Hobbesian idea of the Leviathan literally be putting a gun to someone's head and forcing them to lay down their rights? Is that coercion? I truly disbelieve that Hobbes gave to each citizen a decision they can individually and voluntarily lay down their rights to live under the Leviathan. If you don't live within his social contract, then on his terms you would potentially die. Is that (by extension) putting a gun to someone's head? Curious of your thoughts on the matter!
IRE,
Inclusion so everyone can agree because they're included,
Reason so everyone can reach agreement using observable and testable truth and Empathy, so we can see other people's view to understand their reasons and emotions, so that plans can be made to get them on board. And we need more memes like, "Please raise my IRE".
I think exactly like this but could never put this thought so well into words.
ISIS gave this a dislike.
he's talking empathy less reason
You are a boring man.
Cogent philosophy Sir.
anyone happy listening to atheists?
Steven Pinkerton could have played one hell of a joker in place of Heath Ledger R.I.P., they don't look alike but I think steve could not just play the part but on another level, maybe not Heath, maybe better, I will wonder till the end of time…..
Sir, I salute you. Furthermore, as a supernatural being I can guarantee you; if any of these pretend gods (jesus/ allah/ jaweh/ etc) try getting their grubby paws on you or what they unimaginatively call a 'soul', Woden the Allfather will fuck them up their arses for our amusement.
(3:11) :"Faith means believing something with no good reason."? Who are you to define it that way? How can you call yourself a scientist, if you have no faith in science? What a paradox. (6:36) "No entity is special by virtue of being that entity."? There's different degrees of that. Look at snowflakes. All snowflakes have a lot in common, and yet they are "special" in their individuality. People are likewise. America as a country recognizes this.
Steve Pinker doesn’t know what skepticism is.
I suppose all the objections to Pinker is from the same old left, in the 50s, 60s and 70s there was always a question mark after democratically elected. Our intelligence services made a morally ambiguous choice by supporting Right wing regimes. Regardless who ran their countries the people suffered under both. Communism was on the march and Kissenger, among others, chose to stop it. The people lost. In the end we one. Cest la guerre.
Really surprising! …are we committed to reason? Maybe, to some extent. It seems we are still very emotional beings though…
In less than a minute he explained why presuppositional argument for the existence of god is prue bullshit.
According to reason, that system must be virtual.
Aren't Faith & Reason inextricably linked together?
Any reasoned structure has an unreasoned foundation.
That is, the foundation is chosen.
This comes from basic logic going at least as far back as classical Greek times.
Any doctrinal system must have a pre-rational foundation.
I like Steven Pinker but to say that we are more advanced in terms of reason compared to the rest of the world is a bit much. What about the impact of colonialism? Also, if I'm not mistaken, intellectuals of the Enlightenment era were in fact inspired by other nations that are now part of what we call the global South
naive approach good for theory bad for real life