I don’t think any scientist, no matter how reasoned, could adequately answer this question – because it’ll boil down to semantics over the definition of “free will”, then devolve into solipsism. A better headline would be something like: “Renowned biologist argues his belief in lack of free will.”

it’s insane to me that someone could understand the ramifications of trauma on neurobiology and conclude that free will doesn’t exist

i feel like, without free will, no one would ever escape their trauma. without saying something shitty and uncompassionate like “you’re only held back by your trauma because you’re not strong willed enough”; that’s not true at all

but i think, at it’s core, healing from trauma requires two things: a person who you feel safe enough to trust, and the willingness to take the leap and trust again

if you don’t have one or the other, you’re going to really struggle

and that moment where you choose to trust, how can you see that as anything but free will? when everything about your past, your nerves, your biology is screaming at you to do otherwise?

i dunno. i don’t think any of us would have grown past our trauma at all without free will

that said, i think there’s also just too much going on in the brain to conclude there’s no free will for sure. i guess that’s not the same as saying it’s deterministic, which you can’t really say, because physics gets too fucking weird at low levels, right?

anyways, i guess we can never really definitively say whether free will exists or not. but i think you can still make very strong arguments for being compassionate to poor people / traumatized people / people with mental illness / etc without saying we all don’t have free will. it feels a lot like saying we’re all doomed to be what we were made to be and we can’t make a better life for ourselves

it just starts with convincing people, and believing, that we all deserve that

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I get what he’s saying, and in many ways I agree, but the choice of words is too strong for the hypotheses he’s presenting. For example, he uses the following to bolster his claim

Abundant evidence indicates that people who grew up in homes marked by chaos and deprivation will perceive the world differently and make different choices than people raised in safe, stable, resource-rich environments.

Yet he mentions himself that we are subject to our external environment. Some of these individuals do not make markedly different choices based on these external differences, not to mention their own internal ones (genetics, etc.).

To make the claim that we have no free will because we are the sum of our environment + upbringing ignores that we have a modicum of control over our environment, and it also ignores how our interactions provide that external environment. We pass laws to further human rights and create a better environment so that people in the future would hold them in higher esteem and be influenced by these choices we make. In short, there is a field of possibility that lies within the maybes - our genetics and upbringing set us up for how malleable we are on any decision. Some decisions simply won’t happen and some outcomes are likely inevitable, but most fall in the space where there is a likely but not predetermined outcome which is influenced by the environment. This is why perfect predetermination is impossible.

In fact, this very viewpoint is even reinforced in the most physical of sciences - physics. In quantum physics we can at best determine probable outcomes. While there are theorists who believe in superdeterminism, or the idea that we simply don’t have all the variables to determine everything perfectly yet, superdeterminism has gotten no closer to explaining bell tests, the slit experiment, or other quantum phenomenon in well over 50 years. Increasingly complicated mathematics repeatedly show that there is a fundamental randomness to the universe that we seem unable to capture.

And I think it makes sense, in the context of what we know of biology and evolution. Brains are constructed in a way where signals are created almost randomly, and then organized to make sense of the world. Evolution has played a part to refine this processing so that it ignores what’s not important to survival and proliferation. If this process weren’t generative and random in some sense, we would not evolve and there would be little to no purpose for diversity. The world is constantly changing and thus our biology must account for this, meaning that it must be malleable and open to changes by the environment. If it is open to changes by the environment, then we must be able to influence each other and thus a concept of free will must exist that at the very least is a representation of the sum of all that activity.

What would evidence of free will look like?

I think the only reason there is “debate” is that free will is so intuitive and needed to justify institutions like the church and the current state of the justice system.

If you parse a lay description of free will, it’s clear from a 1980s biology perspective, that free will is an illusion. “I chose to pick up the pen” is how our brain rationalize our actions. A better sentence would be “My brain decided to pick up the pen and it made sense to do so in retrospect and I passively observed this process”.

Like almost any concept, the argument over free will really becomes semantic (and pedantic) when pushed to academic extremes. At a certain point it shifts to “is there a difference between free will and the apparent ability to choose what we do in any given moment?”

This scientist claims that the inability to tease any choice from the infinite variables that affect that decision means that the decision isn’t ours. It is an equally valid conclusion that you don’t need to know every single thing that influences you in order to have agency among those influences.

Moore’s take on the Cartesian question of “how do we know we exist?” is similar. It points out that the debate actually has nothing to do with existence, but what it means to “know” something, and that “knowing,” like anything, can of course be made impossible with philosophical and academic contortions (e.g., arguments like “but what if this is a simulation and there is a “great deception” that only convinces you that you exist?”). It is not that some form of knowing cannot exist, it is that people are capable of imagining fantasies in which knowing cannot exist, and Moore denies that we should let the ability to conceptualize something beyond the intended context of our language (i.e., perceived reality) pervert our ability to see and accept something concrete.

Is Moore right? Who knows, but he gets at the point that the answers to questions of free will, existence, ontology, etc. have more to do with how the questions are framed academically and philosophically than with how the same concepts actually operate in real life. It will always be possibly to frame a question (or to define the words within a question) in a way that denies the possibility of knowing or agency. But the ability to do so doesn’t mean that other methods of asking or knowing are impossible.

Ultimately this a definition issue, and is philosophical more than scientific. I have no doubt he’s a great neuroscientist, but it’s really not a great take. I think that the whole idea of neurochemistry cascading into the decisions we make doesn’t mean we don’t have the ability to choose within our neurochemical makeup. I think it definitely pushing a good point in that the root causes of our behavior, especially anti-social behavior, is possibly addressable in how we support and raise our kids.

As most who have already commented here, I’m somewhat unimpressed (and would expect more analytical subtlety from a scientist). Wittgenstein already fully dissected the notion of “free will”, showing its semantic variety of meanings and how at some depth it becomes vague and unclear. And Nietzsche discussed why “punishment” is necessary and makes sense even in a completely deterministic world… Sad that such insights are forgotten by many scientists. Often unclear if some scientists want to deepen our understanding of things, or just want sensationalism. Maybe a bit of both…

Literally every week: We just did a study that proves free will doesn’t exist

Marx: For fuck sake.