> “The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,” Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”
I don't how much the reporter has embellished things but this seems really, really, really silly.
"People have no free will" does not mean that "incentives don't matter." Obviously, or we could simply prove that free will exists by noting that incentives do, in fact, matter.
Would more people create Ponzi schemes if they didn't have examples like Madoff and SBF of it all crashing down? Absolutely. Would more people steal if they knew they couldn't face punishment? Yes. Would more people drink and drive if there were no consequences for doing so? Yes. If Company A offers me more money than Company B, am I more likely to take the offer from Company A? Yes.
Given that incentives matter, it is absolutely fair and reasonable to "reward people and reward people" for their actions.
Even though I think the premise that people don't have free will is likely correct!
(It's also quite odd that Sapolsky would ask people to change their behavior, given his apparent beliefs...)
Incentives very much do matter, but that doesn't say anything about free will. Conversely, the existence or lack of free will doesn't say anything about how we should implement incentives.
If you accept the premise that a mass shooter has no more control than a heart attack victim, what should that change? It certainly doesn't imply that we should make mass shooting legal or be incentivized.
Having read some of his books and watched his lectures, it seems like the only moral point he raises from this is that criminal justice should be guided by maximizing benefit to the greater population (which includes setting an example or incentive) but not simple revenge.
However, this is only loosely connected to the topic of free will. You can arrive at the same conclusion from a utilitarian perspective, or even from Christian ideals of forgiveness.
His entire career has been researching and publishing the biological basis of behavior
Of course there is: Free will is the feeling you have when you become aware of a decision made by your subconscious mind, (which is deterministic).
Why did you order the salmon and not the steak? Sapolsky would identify all the factors, on various timescales, leading to the action that you took. You think that you chose freely, but you didn’t. You became aware of the subconscious decision, and that’s when you believe that you exercised free will and “decided”.
I'm sure Sapolsky can guess as to why some people are impulsive decision makers based on factors he has found in his research that correlate with impulsivity but I don't think that means such people have no free will. If you don't believe people can make free choices then that's equivalent to what I posted originally about biological automatons and admitting to being one.
Lack of free will does not remove accountability for one's actions. An individual is a good or bad actor by the nature of their actions and behavior.
Similarly, a lack of free will does not mean predetermination or predictability.
To build a 100% accurate predictive model, you would have to duplicate the world and play it forward in time. This mean the events would have to actually happen before you can predict them.
