Close Menu
Ztoog
    What's Hot
    Gadgets

    Abysmal revenue stats of 30K mobile apps show why devs keep pushing for subs

    Mobile

    Apple might replace the leather cases with woven ones for the iPhone 15 series

    Mobile

    Latest Galaxy S24 leak shows off the flagship in four colors

    Important Pages:
    • About Us
    • Contact us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms & Conditions
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    Ztoog
    • Home
    • The Future

      JD Vance and President Trump’s Sons Hype Bitcoin at Las Vegas Conference

      AI may already be shrinking entry-level jobs in tech, new research suggests

      Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answer and Help for May 26 #449

      LiberNovo Omni: The World’s First Dynamic Ergonomic Chair

      Common Security Mistakes Made By Businesses and How to Avoid Them

    • Technology

      Gemini in Google Drive can now help you skip watching that painfully long Zoom meeting

      Apple iPhone exports from China to the US fall 76% as India output surges

      Today’s NYT Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for May 26, #1437

      5 Skills Kids (and Adults) Need in an AI World – O’Reilly

      How To Come Back After A Layoff

    • Gadgets

      8 Best Vegan Meal Delivery Services and Kits (2025), Tested and Reviewed

      Google Home is getting deeper Gemini integration and a new widget

      Google Announces AI Ultra Subscription Plan With Premium Features

      Google shows off Android XR-based glasses, announces Warby Parker team-up

      The market’s down, but this OpenAI for the stock market can help you trade up

    • Mobile

      Microsoft is done being subtle – this new tool screams “upgrade now”

      Wallpaper Wednesday: Android wallpapers 2025-05-28

      Google can make smart glasses accessible with Warby Parker, Gentle Monster deals

      vivo T4 Ultra specs leak

      Forget screens: more details emerge on the mysterious Jony Ive + OpenAI device

    • Science

      Do we have free will? Quantum experiments may soon reveal the answer

      Was Planet Nine exiled from the solar system as a baby?

      How farmers can help rescue water-loving birds

      A trip to the farm where loofahs grow on vines

      AI Is Eating Data Center Power Demand—and It’s Only Getting Worse

    • AI

      The AI Hype Index: College students are hooked on ChatGPT

      Learning how to predict rare kinds of failures | Ztoog

      Anthropic’s new hybrid AI model can work on tasks autonomously for hours at a time

      AI learns how vision and sound are connected, without human intervention | Ztoog

      How AI is introducing errors into courtrooms

    • Crypto

      GameStop bought $500 million of bitcoin

      CoinW Teams Up with Superteam Europe to Conclude Solana Hackathon and Accelerate Web3 Innovation in Europe

      Ethereum Net Flows Turn Negative As Bulls Push For $3,500

      Bitcoin’s Power Compared To Nuclear Reactor By Brazilian Business Leader

      Senate advances GENIUS Act after cloture vote passes

    Ztoog
    Home » Determinism vs. free will: A scientific showdown
    Technology

    Determinism vs. free will: A scientific showdown

    Facebook Twitter Pinterest WhatsApp
    Determinism vs. free will: A scientific showdown
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest WhatsApp

    The takeaway of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is principally the identical as that espoused by these Snickers commercials: You’re not you while you’re hungry. Except in keeping with Sapolsky, there is no such thing as a “you”—the starvation is what dictates your conduct, alongside together with your stress degree, whether or not or not you have been born with fetal alcohol syndrome or grew up in a tradition that valorizes particular person freedoms versus one which prioritizes communal accountability or in one which believes in an omniscient, all-powerful, vengeful deity.

    Hormones, neurotransmitters, and the way they’re affected by your present and historic circumstances—these are the one issues that decide how you’ll act and what choices you’ll make at these inflection factors while you’re known as upon to make impactful selections. And all of them are belongings you didn’t select and can’t management.

    Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, is just not averse to the notion of our having free will; it’s simply that he can’t discover it. And he’s seemed all over the place. He has studied—intensely—not solely neurobiology but in addition endocrinology, behavioral science, philosophy, primatology, criminology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, evolution, and historical past. Not a single one in all these disciplines precludes free will, however all of them collectively do. All there may be to us is biology and the best way that biology is affected by the environment. That’s it. We aren’t, as Yoda instructed, luminous beings; we’re solely crude matter.

    This is hard stuff for Americans, who’re virtually hooked on our meritocratic, rags-to-riches, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology. So in chapter 4, “The Myth of Grit,” Sapolsky offers with individuals who overcome their circumstances (together with their foils, those that “squander” their success). The secret of their success (and failure) all comes right down to their prefrontal cortex (PFC).

    The PFC is famously the final a part of the mind to mature; it isn’t totally constructed in people till we’re in our mid-20s. Not as a result of it is more durable to construct—it’s fabricated from the identical elements as the remainder of the mind, which has been largely useful for the previous couple of a long time. Rather, Sapolsky claims that it matures late particularly to allow it to turn out to be the mind area most affected by the experiences we have now in these first 20 years—to be taught from these experiences and have them form us. Grit, pluck, willpower, stick-to-it-iveness, and self-restraint are managed by the PFC and are formed by the setting we grew up in. And that’s an setting we don’t select or management.

    Advertisement

    “What the PFC is most about is making tough decisions in the face of temptation—gratification postponement, long-term planning, impulse control, emotional regulation,” he writes. “The PFC is essential for getting you to do the right thing when it is the harder thing to do.”

    Difficult choices take a ton of psychological vitality. That’s not a metaphor; the PFC consumes an immense quantity of mobile vitality. So a lot in order that should you’re hungry, drained, confused, or lack resilience since you have been born poor, which gave you chronically elevated glucocorticoid ranges, your PFC merely doesn’t have the juice to make good choices when it issues. Sapolsky factors out that “a substantial percentage of people incarcerated for violent crime have a history of concussive head trauma to the PFC.”

    An bold purpose

    “This book has a goal,” Sapolsky writes. “To get people to think differently about moral responsibility, blame, and praise.” Although the world is wholly deterministic, we will, and have, realized to alter our views and behaviors—each on the person and the societal ranges. We be taught and we modify when the environment modulates the identical molecules, genes, and neuronal pathways that managed our unique views and behaviors. Incidentally, these are the identical molecules, genes, and neuronal pathways modulated when a sea slug learns to keep away from being shocked by a researcher—i.e., not free will.

    Sapolsky’s acknowledged purpose of rethinking blame is exceedingly troublesome, even for him. He refers to Bettelheim, the self-hating Jew who insisted that autism in children is brought on by their chilly “refrigerator mothers” as “a sick, sadistic fuck.” He calls Anders Breivik, who carried out the most important terrorist assault in Norwegian historical past when he murdered 69 children at summer season camp in 2011, “a lump of narcissism and mediocrity” who “finally found his people among white supremacist troglodytes.”

    Yet he thinks that punishing them is as unjust as punishing somebody with diabetes. He promotes a public health-based strategy to prison justice: Criminals needs to be faraway from society so that they don’t additional hurt others, very like these with infectious illnesses needs to be quarantined so that they don’t hurt others. (Because that labored out effectively.)

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp

    Related Posts

    Technology

    Gemini in Google Drive can now help you skip watching that painfully long Zoom meeting

    Technology

    Apple iPhone exports from China to the US fall 76% as India output surges

    Technology

    Today’s NYT Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for May 26, #1437

    Technology

    5 Skills Kids (and Adults) Need in an AI World – O’Reilly

    Technology

    How To Come Back After A Layoff

    Technology

    Are Democrats fumbling a golden opportunity?

    Technology

    Crypto elite increasingly worried about their personal safety

    Technology

    Deep dive on the evolution of Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, from its $1B investment in 2019 through Copilot rollouts and ChatGPT's launch to present day (Bloomberg)

    Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

    Follow Us
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • Instagram
    Top Posts
    Technology

    Twitter rebrands to ‘X,’ hackers infect Call of Duty, and foreign visitors to China go cashless

    Hey, pals, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), Ztoog’s roundup of the week in tech…

    Crypto

    Traders’ Interest In XRP Remains Solid, Despite Price Decline

    The enduring attract of XRP, regardless of market volatility, could also be proof of its…

    AI

    An open-source gymnasium for machine learning assisted computer architecture design – Google Research Blog

    Posted by Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Research Scientist, and Vijay Janapa Reddi, Visiting Researcher, Google Research

    Science

    ‘Islands’ poking out of black holes may solve the information paradox

    Nothing escapes a black gap’s immense gravity, however it may nonetheless be doable to detect…

    Technology

    Video Friday: GR-1 – IEEE Spectrum

    Video Friday is your weekly collection of superior robotics movies, collected by your pals at…

    Our Picks
    AI

    MIT engineers develop a way to determine how the surfaces of materials behave | Ztoog

    Science

    Liquid physics: Inside the lab making black hole analogues on Earth

    Technology

    This Lockheed Martin Researcher’s Work on UAVs Saves Lives

    Categories
    • AI (1,492)
    • Crypto (1,753)
    • Gadgets (1,804)
    • Mobile (1,850)
    • Science (1,865)
    • Technology (1,801)
    • The Future (1,647)
    Most Popular
    Science

    Most newborn black holes spew gas so hard they almost stop spinning

    Crypto

    Dogecoin (DOGE) Engagement Fails To Impress

    Technology

    Bird loses its NYSE wings, Uber gets tight with taxis and Tesla gets sued again for racial discrimination

    Ztoog
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    • Home
    • About Us
    • Contact us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms & Conditions
    © 2025 Ztoog.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.