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WillowOne's Positions

Video - Do We Have Freewill? - Daniel Dennett VS Robert Sapolsky

Media

https://youtu.be/aYzFH8xqhns

Overview

A How To Academy debate, livestreamed on 11 December 2023 and released in 2024, between Daniel C. Dennett and Robert Sapolsky, the first time the two had met. Sapolsky, whose Determined had just been published, argued that free will is an illusion, that every choice is the product of biology and circumstance stretching back before birth, and that the illusion is a dangerous one because it underwrites blame and desert. Dennett defended compatibilism: determinism is true, and free will, properly understood as the capacity of a competent agent to respond to reasons, is entirely consistent with it and is what the word has always meant. Dennett died four months later; this was among his last public debates.

Notes

  • I am with Sapolsky on the metaphysics and with Dennett on the practice, which is roughly my position in Freewill vs Determinism. There is no uncaused chooser; praise, blame and punishment are nonetheless justified by their effects, because they are among the causes.
  • Where I part from Dennett is the word. Compatibilism keeps "free will" by redefining it as something nobody was arguing about, and then announces that the thing everyone was arguing about is still there. It is a motte and bailey conducted in good faith. Sapolsky's complaint that this lets the retributive intuition survive under a new name is the strongest point of the evening.
  • Where I part from Sapolsky is the inference from "no free will" to "no responsibility". Responsibility is a social institution, not a metaphysical fact, and it does not need a ghost to run. Dennett's example of the person who is responsible in the sense that it is worth holding them responsible is the whole of what I mean by the word.
  • The two agree about far more than the title suggests, which is normal for this debate: the argument is almost always about what the words should be allowed to mean.

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