096 - Chains of Perception

Philosophers as a general category seem to be absolutely terrible at applying the lessons of Sun Tzu.

After hearing so much about the philosophers' battle between Determinism, Compatibilism, and Free Will, particularly in relation to Sapolsky's recent book, it was easy to spot Cognitive Bias in the more vocal and popular adversaries of Determinism.

However, it was equally trivial to spot the giant gaping flaw in Sapolsky's argument, which all of those assailing his fortified position seem to neglect. Even being only a couple of hours into the book he has repeated a particular critical fallacy as part of his central thesis ad nauseum. He argues that humans shouldn't be held responsible for their actions merely because they are deterministic.

The exact opposite is true. There can be no argument against holding every human fully accountable for their actions in a deterministic domain. The fallacy he invokes imposes his own moral belief system and biases of personal heuristic experience onto Determinism. He pities people who have had hard lives and fallen into hard times, making poor decisions, and that cloud over his judgment rains on Determinism. He makes this bias abundantly clear even early on in the book.

Sapolsky has demonstrated cognitive dissonance in book format, as many philosophers are prone to do, and that process has mixed the coffee of his thesis with the raw sewage of his personal biases. Keep in mind, this in no way detracts from Determinism's ground to stand on, only from Sapolsky's. "Argument from Fallacy" is a cognitive bias to beware of in this case, as it tempts people to dismiss Determinism merely because someone foolishly attempted to tie a fallacy onto it.

Morals are a subjective and arbitrary construct, which can change how a deterministic system is perceived, or if it is conscious of how it perceives, built from collectively selected cognitive biases shaped into norms and culture. Morals have precisely nothing to do with Determinism. Likewise, legal systems have nothing to do with Determinism, and very little to do with morals, as they are Frankensteins made from a larger number of progressively botched experiments.

If you wanted something that can connect with Determinism, then you'd need Ethics, not Morals, defined as being the hypothetical point where bias has been removed from moral systems.

Fortunately for all parties, there is precisely zero chance of Sapolsky's hypothetical world where humans aren't held accountable for their actions ever existing, as humans aren't built to operate like that, as any ethical system would never allow that, and as humanity will go extinct absent ethical systems.

His argument for that hypothetical world is itself a distraction intended to invoke cognitive biases, which he is well aware of. The emotional response to his proposal is predictably elevated and negative across humans and animal species alike, both of which he has studied.

He has played his opponents like a fiddle.