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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from 2023 Year End Review/Part 2
  • For some reason dug up some old flames of mine on a rightwing anti-evolution blog Telic Thoughts. Note this is exactly what I want to say about Determined, maybe I don't have to read and review it after all.
from Blamer
  • There is a big difference between this kind of anti-blame – which is in defense of personal agency, basically – and the agential nihilism of Determined,
from Weird Studies/Wise Blood
  • Makes me want to read the book. The Church Without Christ. A modernist religion. No sin, no morality, reminds me of Determined
from Choose your own review
  • The two books in question are Determined by Robert Sapolsky, a behavioral ecologist and Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist. Despite both having professional commitments to nature and naturalism, Sapolsky denies any notion of free will, while Mitchell is emphatically for it. That is interesting!
from Book Reading/2024
from 2023 Year End Review/Part 2
  • Seem to be drawn inexorably into commenting on Determined even though I am resisting. Writing a review No Blame

Determined

28 Nov 2023 - 29 Jun 2025
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    • A deeply irresponsible book. In fact, it denies that responsibility exists. Under hard determinism, there can be no such thing as moral responsibility, no blame, no desert. Stuff just happens, whether a person acts lawfully or not, or with good or evil intent – it was not up to them, like anything else in the universe, it was a function of all the material causation that went into constructing their minds and bodies.
    • In short, Sapolsky is an eliminativist with regards to agency, choice, responsibilty, anything like that (not clear whether he is a mental eliminativist, I suspect not). Those things aren't real and we should learn to get along without them (Sapolsky at least as frank about how it seems impossible to actually do that).
    • I agree that the Libet experiment is actually pretty dumb and shows nothing about free will. Unfortunately the same applies to all the other evidence marshalled for the obvious truth that biology influences our minds and decision making. The book is full of stories like this, eg how exposing people to disgust-inducing stimuli will make them more politically conservative, or somesuch. That stuff is all very fascinating, if a bit suspect as good science. But good science or bad, it proves nothing about free will (unless you really think free will means free of all influences, which is silly).
    • Note that the term "software" does not appear. "program", "computer", "artificial intelligence" barely appear.
    • Punishment section
      • Something especially kack-handed here, although I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's his bourgie perspective, he's writing from the standpoint of someone who is going to be doing the locking up (or not), not someone on the receiving end. Something totalitarian about it, underneath the liberal pieties.
      • Someone locked up under our actual system can protest that they were treated unjustly, either the law or the process treated them unfairly, they don't deserve their punishment. But under Sapokskyism, there is no deserve and no justice, people are locked up because The System deems them a hazard, and no appeal to justice is possible, a quarantine is a quarantine.
      • Also missing (I think) – the circular nature of punishment. If person A does a crime, punishing him might be unfair, since he could not help himself, but it still might well deter someone else. This is in fact the evolutionary logic of punishment, and he describes this at some length.
        • Somewhere along the line though, we decide to exempt ourselves from that logic. We are better than nature. We don't have to punish defectors any more.
      • I admit that my own thoughts on this topic are terribly conflicted and incoherent. As an anarchist {{sidenote an anarchist thought on what to do about 'bad people' }}, I hate the thought of prison; but there are terrible people who I want locked away, I don't want them roaming the world. There are people I want to hurt because they deserve it, but I also admire the Buddhist stance of universal compassion. I am confused at best, a hypocrite at worst.
        • But these confusions have nothing to do with any kind of metaphysical belief in free will. Did the Nazis have free will? I don't care, I want them stomped on in any case. What about serial killers? Same, I mean, come on, it's basic self-preservation. Ordinary murderers? I guess it depends on circumstances. But again, its not so much whether they were free or not as if punishing them is likely to reduce future murders.
          • Hm. That sounds awfully rational, a bit suspiciously so. Anger is not rational; this is me trying to justify anger, to sanctify it in some sense, to turn it from impotent rage into the sword of justice...
      • I'm not sure what fight I am trying to pick with this guy. We are basically on the same side, I think.
        • I do think at some level I'm executing some kind of primate dominance program. As is he.

    • Tagged notes

    • there can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is indefensible (p4)
      • desert (deserving) is equally illusory. See No Blame
    • the experience of love is made of the same building blocks that constitute wildebeests or asteroids.
      • Huh. That is an obvious consequence of his physicalism, but I don't think he gets very far into this line of thought. Also, not sure what the consequences are supposed to be. He doesn't exactly say this, but the implication is that love is illusory, like blame or responsibility, because it is made out of physical causation like everything else.
    • even I think it's crazy to take seriously all the implications of there being no free will. And despite that, the goal of the second half of the book is to do precisely that... (p9)
      • This is a central paradox of this book, and the author at least tries to confront it honestly. But in fact it makes the whole thing a gigantic waste of time.
        • For some reason this book makes me unreasonably angry. I'm not sure why. I'm guessing it is complicated by my feelings about Marvin Minsky, another hard determinist. Which means me being angry at Sapolsky is entirely unreasonable, but an apology would violate the central canon of the book, which is that nobody is responsible for anything.
    • Here's the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man's brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. (p 14, argument repeated on p89)
      • This is a very standard argument against free will, and it seems to me to be purposefully dense. Free will does not mean neurons firing off for no reason (that is randomness, not will of any sort). It means collective patterns of neurons organizing themselves around reasons. Whether that can involve freedom or choice can be debated, but you have to have a semi-reasonable theory of the relationship between physical and mental events. My impression is that Sapolsky does not actually have much of a theory here.
    • p88 some stuff on how we are free to construct ourselves (self-formation). He is dismissive of such theories, but I don't think he really understands them (he just makes the magic-neuron argument over again). Self-construction is a kind of freedom, even given our mechanical nature. A weird kind of freedom, because we are not free to abstain from doing it. We are always making something of ourselves.
    • p105 grit, willpower, strong morality are all products of the PFC; the PFC is make of biological stuff; your PFC is a product of its interactions with the rest of the organism and environment.
      • This is so stupid. Everything I think and feel is a product of neurons, but so what? The interesting questions are how are the physical and mental related? That is the cybernetic question; the eliminativist takes the above to prove that willpower etc does not exist. Which, if you took it seriously, would cripple you, but even Sapolsky doesn't take his ideas seriously.
    • p152 Interesting, did not know that the courts had ruled in 1927 in favor of the concept of fractional guilt
    • p239 acknowledges liberating potential of complexity, group dynamics, quantum indeterminacy.
      • This rejection of reductionism carries all sorts of subversive, liberating implications. That bottom-up collectivity built on neighbor-neighbor interactions and random encounters can potentially crush top-down authoritarian control. That in such circumstances, generalists, rather than specialists, are most valuable. That what appears to be a norm, on closer examination, is never actually reached; instead, it is reality oscillating strangely, aperiodically, around a Platonic ideal. That this business about norms applies to being normal, no matter what the cool kids say; there are no actual forms of perfection that we fail to reach—normal is a not-quite- accurate descriptor, certainly not a prescription. And that, as a point I emphasize to my students with ham-hocked unsubtlety, if you can explain something of breathtaking complexity, adaptiveness, and even beauty without invoking a blueprint, you don’t have to invoke a blueprint maker either.
      • But goes on to say this doesn't change his fundamentally mechanical-causation-only view of the universe.
    • the biological determinants of our behavior stretch widely over space and time—responding to events in front of you this instant but also to events on the other side of the planet or that shaped your ancestors centuries back. And those influences are deep and subterranean, and our ignorance of the shaping forces beneath the surface leads us to fill in the vacuum with stories of agency. (p240, emph added)
      • Yeah OK. My view is that we can't really operate without these stories, they aren't mere fictions, they are the fictions that make up our actual lives.
    • This book has a goal—to get people to think differently about moral responsibility, blame and praise, and the notion of our being free agents. And to feel differently about those issues as well. And most of all, to change fundamental aspects of how we behave. (p268)
      • One might assume that in the absence of will, goals do not make sense along with the rest of it. But no, we can have a theory of goals, bootstrapped by evolution. OK.
    • OK here (p269) is a perfect example of idiot reductionism:
      • To do so, we’re going to look at how behavior changes in organisms far simpler than humans, down on the level of molecules and genes. This will segue to considering behavioral change in us. Hopefully, this will make clear an immensely important point: When our behavior changes, it doesn’t involve biology with some themes and motifs similar to ones seen in these simpler organisms. It involves the same molecules, genes, and mechanisms of neuronal function. When you begin to be biased against some alien group of people because their customs differ from your own, the biology underlying your change in behavior is the same as when a sea slug learns to avoid a shock administered by a researcher. And that sea slug sure isn’t displaying free will when that change occurs.
      • I think there is a valid point in here, which is that aversion is a very low-level biological process and its quite likely that some of the same machinery is involved in a sea slug and a human racist. But that doesn't make them the same! The sea slug does not have the means to reflect on its actions; the human does.
    • What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. (p387)
      • That is not what science teaches. Or it shouldn't be. It isn't even true! That is to say, there are such things as meanings (purposes, morals, etc) in the world, they are very important to us and to call them mere illusions is just wrong (wrong in fact and harmful in consequences).
    • Evolution, chaos, emergence, have taken the most unexpected turns in us, producing biological machines that can know our machine-ness, and whose emotional responses to that knowledge feel real. Are real. Pain is painful. Happiness makes life frabjous. I try to ruthlessly hold myself to the implications of all this turtling, and sometimes I even succeed. But there is one tiny foothold of illogic that I can’t overcome for even a millisecond, to my intellectual shame and personal gratitude. **It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something “good” can happen to a machine.** Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness. (p392, emph added)
      • What a weird hill to choose to die on. It's very easy to imagine good or bad things happening to machines! Hasn't your car ever hit a pothole? Maybe he means he can't see machines as moral agents; that's a little more understandable.
    • There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. ...And we need to accept the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done; ultimately, that hatred is sadder than hating the sky for storming, hating the earth when it quakes, hating a virus because it’s good at getting into lung cells. This is where the science has brought us as well.
      • So he is a hate-eliminationist also. That sounds a lot better than will- or love-eiliminationism. But I suspect it is equally misguided. I personally find hate to be pretty foundational; not something you can really live without (saints may try, but most of us are not saints and can't live that way). Oh well that is a separate topic.
      • Sapolsky, despite his eliminationist philosophy, is a pretty standard liberal humanist by inclination and wants good things for people. He wants his mechanist philosophy to be applied for the good, eg by eliminating retributive punishment. But I don't think his models of human mind and behavior are good enough for any of his ideas to be practical.