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Rick Repetti - Robert Sapolski is wrong, you are FREE. · Mahon McCann

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me today Rick.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you making time because I suppose as I was saying before I need your help in a sense.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're a philosopher, you've published books on free will and meditation, many papers, you did your thesis on it and there is a big popular movement at the moment of free will skepticism and this guy Robert Sapolski
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: who has been doing interviews every 10 minutes apparently in every major news outlet and kind of steamrolling people I suppose with a very incredibly simplistic argument that I tried to distill which seems to be just that things happened before and that's what happens now I don't know so I wondered maybe to start off with what what's your take on Sapolski's argument what do you think of it?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: well I confess that I actually quoted him in my dissertation I don't remember I have to go back and look it up but I remember thinking this was you know when did I finish that in 2005 so this is a while back so I don't remember exactly but I remember there was some arguments that he made that I am you know
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: used I appeal to some of his research to justify belief in free will back then so and this this turn of events with him now I'm a little surprised yeah it's difficult to distill his argument I forget how many hours I did the audiobook version of whatever that book is called determined something or other the science of
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: living without free will right off the bat that this way of just defining you know your title tells you something he's presupposing that science supports that we don't have free will that's number one and so he's just going to tell us how to live without it that seems a little premature to me you know people who specialize in free will
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: are still debating this matter he's a biologist he's not a philosopher it's okay you know some scientists can be quite gifted as philosophers naturally but yeah he throws in the kitchen sink about science and kind of there's an ellipsis there in his argument I don't know what it is but scientific determinism
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: premise therefore no free will and then he also has like maybe a footnote about well even indeterminism he's done a lot of the reading he references a lot of the you know key players in the area but he'll go on and on for hours about you know like
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: neurons firing and all this kind of thing and and it's as if because there is so much deterministic mechanistic explanation that's so successful in the sciences that seems to be his premise therefore there's no free will it's a simplistic view there's a lot missing in there and whenever he gets close to filling in an ellipsis
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: it doesn't work like one of the things if you try to say what's the premise what's the strongest premise that leads to this conclusion for him he's got some kind of idea that if you had a single neuron that wasn't determined then you could have free will I remember him making that argument at one point
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: and like what does that even mean but and then he also argues that you know indeterminism won't get you anywhere I can't make heads or tails out of his argument I mean another way of putting it maybe would be this he simply presupposes a kind of reductionism
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: and physicalism everything is physical anything that exists reduces to what's physical everything that's physical is deterministic footnote some things are indeterministic but they can't get you anywhere and this is a classical argument Paraboom and Caruso and others you know even Ted Hondrich I think years ago
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: made the argument that if there is genuine metaphysical indeterminacy at the quantum level, it's so infinitesimally small that it would cancel out before it ever arose to the level of a neuron.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that to me is also kind of premature empirically.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: We don't have the empirical evidence for that.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: number one number two chaos theory undermines that idea because you know the snowball rolling down the hill can cause a boulder which causes an avalanche and you know so like micro things can affect macro things no matter how small they are initially butterfly effect and all that so that's a kind of bluff but he doesn't even go into the arguments well about the fact that indeterminacy couldn't be sufficient for free will
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: you know one of the things that's missing one of the things that many people who make that argument tend to ignore and I'm now like putting more words into his mouth because I'm talking about what he ignores yeah I think we'll have to give him a bit more to be honest than he gives out because it's a broader position but he really doesn't justify the philosophy at all which is really weird
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: but I yeah because it's kind of this Newtonian causality that it's a billiard ball cause and effect just there's some unexplained cause at the start maybe the Big Bang this has just caused a kind of ripple effect of dominoes falling over and we're just somehow in that but it doesn't really explain how we could become aware of that and how becoming aware of that wouldn't afford us certain ways of changing it I mean I don't know surely if we were
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: by the end of the day
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: philosophically with the question of free will and you know materialism how we could have a soul or a spirit or um that kind of split philosophy in a way so i wonder do you do you see that is he just carrying on that legacy of like oh yeah this is true this is how it happened here's the consequences of that thinking yeah i think so yeah like like i said um a little earlier
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: you know maybe putting too much thought into his position but on analysis it seems to be very simple physicalism is true reduction reductive physicalism is also true ergo there's no free will everything is mechanical causation given the initial conditions and the laws of nature this is the consequence argument that van in wagon makes very clearly
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: given the initial conditions or at any time in the history of the universe given the conditions
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: you know the particular location and trajectory of every particle in the universe and the laws the next state is necessarily going to happen and the state after that and so on so given the past and the laws the present state which includes your freely chosen you know freely willed decision and so on
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was inevitable, it was unavoidable, there were never any alternatives, there's only one historical trajectory of the universe, like a series of dominoes, and so you couldn't have done otherwise.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, because the, and this is one of the, almost everything that I just said is, as you know, disputed by philosophers, but
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: If our kind of pre-philosophical conception about what it means to be a free agent is that I did X but I could have chosen not to do X, I could have done otherwise, right?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: That's, let's say, one of the libertarian conceptions of free will, the freedomist views.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: If that's what you mean by free will,
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: and determinism rules out all the alternatives but the one that's necessitated by the past and the laws then you couldn't have done otherwise if being able to do otherwise means you have free will you couldn't have done otherwise then you don't have free will but as you know there are many different conceptions of free will that's number one number two
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: when they have that footnote about indeterminism oh even if indeterminism was true a random choice isn't going to give you free will because you can't control the outcome of a random choice right well what that what they ignore when they focus on the argument that way is that even if one particle in the universe changed because of randomness out of compared to that
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: consequence argument modeling way past the laws one one trajectory well no things would change right so if there's indeterminism then that nightmarish vision of being locked into one future falls apart it collapses so indeterminism defeats the consequence argument and most philosophers don't really
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate that fact.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: Most philosophers who were free will skeptics, I should say, they focused attention on the fact that, okay, if we're going to let randomness into the system, it's almost like a straw man.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: We're only going to view randomness in the system as your choice was completely random.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, if it was completely random, then it wasn't up to you.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, sure.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: But randomness in the system defeats the consequence argument, and then the question is, well, on the basis of what did you choose?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: and there's so many different models of that and he doesn't really go into that at all he has a very simplistic conception I think he mostly has the conception of free will where you could have done otherwise nothing determined what you did and so look I've got tons of evidence about how all your neurons are determined from biology and science and whatnot and just hours and hours of him rehearsing the science as if
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: people are ignorant of the science and once they hear the science they'll go oh I guess I don't have free will yeah but this kind of Laplacian idea that like if we had if you could just figure out the
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: you are FREE and must be freer
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: 30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30-30
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there's a performative contradiction in this position Constantly, I mean, that's all they do Well, what's the model?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: Dennett, Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, 1984, excellent book, compatibilist He talks about, I forget what he calls it, but I'm calling it like a cosmic rewind thought experiment
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_02: where if you could rewind the universe if it's deterministic back to the beginning and press the play button again like on a DVD just like with a DVD every time you replay it you're going to see the exact same things happening so if determinism is true we're stuck in a cosmic DVD and if you rewind it and replay it a million times every single time the choice that you thought was sort of random sort of up to you will always come out exactly the same just like a DVD and that's that
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: terrifying vision of the consequence argument like I'm stuck right and then it makes a good analogy with a wasp
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: He nicknames Svex, has a longer Latin name.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you remember this experiment, this thought experiment.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: He says Svex digs a little burrow like an L-shaped burrow, stings its prey like a cricket or something with paralyzing poison that just disaffects its motor nervous system so it can't move, but it's alive so it stays fresh and it'll pull it to the edge of the burrow.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: It'll go down and look at the angle in the burrow to make sure there's no other predators in there.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: by the end of the day.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: www.mahonmettepetti.com
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: If you keep moving the bug a thousand times in a row, the prey, Svex will just pull it back, go check, pull it back, go check, pull it back, and now you go, oh, Svex is stuck in an algorithm.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: It has very simple stimulus response, it's programming, and then it says, when you look at the Cosmic Rewind thought experiment,
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: you realizing that you're like specs only you've got some more programming you've got more stimulus response programming and that's this terrifying vision right that we're robotic we're mechanical we have no control it's going to be one way and that's it
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: yeah i think that's the vision though that is that's the frightening vision he doesn't seem to differentiate between specs in this case and human beings like we're the same then it does then it does but supposedly doesn't know what supposedly doesn't yeah he seems that we're just these reflexive like it's all reflex all the way down there's no voluntary action
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: and that seems really strange when you think of the qualitative differences between a person and a wasp.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, as the compatibilist is saying that, well, look, we do have a lot more programming, we do have a lot more that evolution has given us, so even if we have a bunch of these algorithms built into our genes and whatnot, our culture and everything else,
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: there's so much of it that we're functionally equivalent to flex rather than specs we've got real we've got real alternatives and and then it makes a big point of saying that people miss identify or miss associate or they conflate determinism with inevitable ism and when we can anticipate an outcome that we don't want we can bring it about that that outcome doesn't happen
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: we can foresee the outcome of our choices we can foresee things coming and we can do things that will prevent that from happening even if the world is determined so Dennett is saying even if determinism is true we have enough going on that makes us functionally
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: it's almost as if we're the same as the libertarian agent even if determinism is true because we've got all this other all these other abilities we can pause we can reflect we can anticipate we can weigh our preferences we can up value something and down value something we can almost rewrite rewrite a lot of our own algorithms so to speak so we've got all this it's something like you can imagine how could you build a robot that had autonomy
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: you'd have to give it almost all the abilities that we have that's another way of thinking about it so we're biological robots but we still have this reflective ability we have options we can pause and this is something that in my work on meditation and agency I make a big deal out of so we are biologically and culturally conditioned
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: right we're genetically conditioned we're environmentally conditioned we're conditioned by all sorts of experiences to cultivate a kind of a set of these algorithmic responses that we have our conditioning but when we practice things like meditation we we kind of step back and study and reflect on
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: all the things that cause our behavior and we can decondition ourselves from various of them our attachments our beliefs our values we have the ability to completely reprogram ourselves well maybe not completely we have limitations like we can't fly at will but you know but given whatever the limitations are that we have we can still do a tremendous amount of rewriting of our own program so to speak
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: and you know one of the things that i'm jumping around a little bit because there's so much and and this this Sapolsky guy he kind of drives me crazy yeah well i think we're looking more at the positive side as well i i like moving into you and i are right now yeah of his his take a better one i think than he presents so i think moving into the sense of why that's not accurate uh is is where we're going um
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: at this point I think the meditation and the self conditioning is really something that in your work is so key and really yeah I suppose tell me a bit more about that and for people listening I'm sure that's welcome information yeah so what I often do to make this clear is to contrast it with Galen Strawson's impossibility argument as he calls it
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: and Strawson says, well first let me back up.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: Dennett is a compatibilist and Sapolski and others are incompatibilists so compatibilism or incompatibilism is traditionally and for the longer time historically was about whether or not free will is compatible with determinism but then with the quantum revolution
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Defenders of free will started thinking oh good you know death to the consequence argument if there's indeterminism and then the free will skeptics came back and said well no because if your choice is random it's not up to you the outcome is beyond your control you can't say you're the author of it so that's not going to help you okay so then that's called that's another kind of incompatibilism free will is incompatible with indeterminism and then some philosophers like Dirk Paraboom and Greg Caruso combined those two
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: right there's two kinds of incompatibilism it's incompatible with determinism it's incompatible with indeterminism we call that hard incompatibilism right so and the argument is very simple if determinism is true there are no alternatives alternatives are required for free will therefore there's no free will if indeterminism is true
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's totally random.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: You can't control the outcome of a random process.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, there's no free will.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Thus, either way, whether determinism or indeterminism is true, you have no free will.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's the hard and compatibilist argument.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: I call that the optimist's dilemma because the optimist about free will is someone who believes in free will.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: This is the dilemma that, you know, the critic poses.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: I flipped that argument.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: and I say well you know what there are entailments in both of them that are being ignored just like I said focusing on just one neuron not being determined you kind of create you're framing the salience of what seems to matter in a misrepresentative way you're ignoring important alternatives so I flip that and I come up with the pessimist dilemma and it goes something like this you know I flip the entailments so if determinism is true
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_02: then well see if indeterminism means that it can't be up to you then determinism means that it can be up to you right I have no control over the outcome if it's random that means if it's not random theoretically it's possible that I could control it if that doesn't make sense then the original argument doesn't make sense
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: It has to be that there's a contrast of meaning, like if there's something tall, there has to be something short, you know, this kind of thing.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I do the same thing with indeterminism.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: If determinism means that there are no alternatives and therefore no free will, indeterminism means that there are alternatives and therefore free will is possible.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: and therefore whether determinism or indeterminism was true either way free will is possible not that it's true but that it's possible because the first argument says that it's impossible either way and I say it's possible either way now Straussen this is a background now Straussen comes along
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_02: and says it doesn't matter whether the causes of your behavior are deterministic or indeterministic not because determinism leads to no alternatives and indeterminism leads to no control but because your choice is always a function of your mental state at the moment of choice or the moment just before your choice
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: what determined that your mental state was the way that it was doesn't matter if it's deterministic or indeterministic right your choice is always a function of the state of mind that you're in the moment that you make that choice and the moment before it which influenced it or conditioned it
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_02: and he says you can't be ultimately responsible for how you were in a given moment unless you could be responsible for how you were all the way back to the very beginning of your existence
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: and unless you could create yourself from nothing if you could create yourself ex nihilo you would be a kausa sui a self-caused being like a prime mover unmoved or something like that and unless you could do that you've been conditioned throughout your existence and the conditioning whether it's deterministic or indeterministic that's what's more responsible for the state of mind you're in when you make a decision
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: ultimate responsibility for yourself if you can't control how you became the way you are
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: and therefore you don't have ultimate responsibility for what you did this argument is against moral responsibility and the intuitions are strong about moral responsibility you know you think about a criminal and what are the conditions that led to his behavior and then judges you know compassion we have to take that into account and so there's this idea that unless you know unless you are 100% responsible for what you did it's not entirely your fault that you chose what you did right so that's the intuition
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_02: okay so he's kind of trying to bypass the version of the free will skepticism that rests on the inference from determinism or the inference from indeterminism and just do this more abstract generic thing about being conditioned and caused in any which way all right so and his conclusion is ultimate moral responsibility is is impossible and then
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: going back to Kant who made this very clear there's this very strong intuition that free will and moral responsibility are completely interdependent so if you lack moral responsibility you lack free will why because for you to be completely responsible you have to have had total free will that's the intuition some people challenge that intuition but we'll just hold it for now all right so in the same way that I flipped the argument against
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: The Hard Indeterminist I flip the argument against the impossible-ist, which is Strawson and I say, and that's when I appeal to meditation I'll also appeal to Cain, Robert Cain, who's a libertarian Yeah, I was going to mention, yeah, self-forming actions Yeah, Cain makes the argument that and this is a way of resisting hard indeterminism
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: hard indeterminism is the idea that indeterminism is incompatible with free will because you lack control over the random processes and everything but what Keynes argument is and one of the challenges against libertarians those are the ones who believe in the strong version of free will where I could have done otherwise that view
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Sapolski is wrong, you are FREE and must be freer Robert Sapolski is wrong, you are FREE and must be freer
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Sapolski is right.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: and from phenomenology I feel like a free agent I seem to be deliberating religion requires it the justice system and ethics require it etc etc etc but we don't have a working model what how what explains how those choices are actually free so Kane
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: is one of the first to come up with a good well good enough at least initially prima facie some plausibility to this model although critics say it's empirically implausible but the model goes something like this a young child at the first time that they face a torn decision
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: So like, I want to do X, but I know that's bad, but I really want to do it or whatever, right?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: Some kind of conflict like that.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: He says, in theory, it's possible that well, first of all, both of those desires are the agents.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: so even if there's some kind of coin flip going on in their psychology whether it's heads or tails heads and tails both of them are the agent's own desires so they are sourced properly they're sourced in the agent this is the source version of autonomy it has to come out of me right so they're both versions of me
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_02: the agent is struggling which me do I want to be right and the very first time that they make that choice that's the actual first expression of their real agency
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: they're creating the kind of self that they are and he calls it a self-forming action and he says empirically it might be the case that the brain is in some kind of Borden's ass type situation for people listening Borden's ass thought experiment says that like a donkey who was thirsty and hungry and was equally poised between water and hay
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: if it didn't have some kind of coin flipping function in its head it would starve and die of thirst because it would be immobilized in between the two things right so when we're when we're stuck and we have to pick a random choice so there's a good place where randomness might help you right there's a there's a spot where randomness is not a bad thing it's it's a feature not a bug if you have a randomness generating function in your psyche good for you you won't be burden's ass
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: So Cain taps into that idea too.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: So there's an element of randomness, perhaps, because it's not determined, but in the very act of picking one over the other, that's the expression of the agent's agency for the very first time.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: He calls it a self-forming act, SFA.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_02: and it's like what he says also about the empirical part is that it might very well be that the tension equalizes the quantum forces in the brain so that it might have been determined if one of those desires were stronger than the other
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: but because it's a torn decision they're equalized and so they kind of cancel out the deterministic force it's not the deterministic force of either one of them that led to the outcome because they're equalized so it's a kind of quantum indeterminacy in the brain and the agent is creating itself in the act of collapsing that wave function kind of thing between those two options right self-forming action now i say leave the empirical and the metaphysical
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: aspects of that aside for the purpose of my argument
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_02: you could take that or leave it included leave it aside I like to make reference to it for the following reason so we certainly engage in some kind of self-forming actions throughout our lives and whether or not only the first one matters or every single one of them matters right these are kind of empirical and metaphysical questions that are complex but what I say is
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: when you practice meditation you are looking at your own conditioning your attachment to your desires and your values your your beliefs your goals your self images and all that stuff and you're you're able to step back see the attachment and choose to detach okay those choices are made within a context of beliefs and values and desires also but they're more reflective but what you're doing is you're disentangling and
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_02: you're engaging in what i call self-unforming actions and every time you engage in a self-unforming action you're creating a new kind of self so they're both self-unforming and new self-forming and we engage in this sort of thing intentionally when we have a serious meditation practice but many of us engage in those kinds of decisions when we change and transform ourselves throughout our lives through any kind of activity right so
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: and it doesn't seem to matter whether determinism or indeterminism is the case right in the same way that Strawson says it doesn't matter
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_02: because your conditioning is causing it.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it doesn't matter if your conditioning was deterministically or indeterministically generated.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't matter equally if your unconditioning was deterministically or indeterministically generated.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: You're still deconditioning and unconditioning.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the kind of argument that I make.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: hard like hard determinism is the view that determinism and free will are incompatible soft determinism like Dennett is like no determinism is true but it's still compatible with free will hard indeterminism is the view like
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: Paraboom and Caruso and others that says if indeterminism is true because of randomness you don't have free will but soft indeterminism is libertarians like Kane who think even if indeterminism is true you could have free will so when you unite the two incompatibilisms that's called hard incompatibilism
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: right it's just the hard is the stronger scientifically minded you know the hard sciences that word does a lot of work psychologically I want to be someone who's not afraid to face the truth so I'll go hard you know I guess I'm a softy on some level because I unite soft determinism and soft indeterminism and I form soft compatibilism
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: that's just the name of my view that free will or agency is compatible with determinism or indeterminism it's compatible with conditioning deconditioning it's compatible even with manipulation with all sorts of things in theory so the manipulation argument also from Dirk Paraboom is also called the four case argument I think sometimes it's called the mind argument because it occurred in the journal mind and got a lot of
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: Are you familiar with that one?
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because that is tying into something which I'm thinking which is this kind of model of a dialogical self.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: The libertarian free will seems to have this kind of monadic self that's just like a homunculus that's deciding from above.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: by the end of the day
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: you have this short-term salience monster and then you have this social lion and that they're all trading off of each other they have different goals they have different motivations and it's through the balancing of these goals and motivations that we actually shape our actions and what we're doing it's there's that inner competition of motivations which is really an outer one i suppose to have an optimal grip on a changing environment
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: by the end of the year.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: and so I wonder what you think about that dialogical self and the kind of motivational and emotional competition that goes on inside of us being important for agency well that's that seems to be a kind of
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: empirical fact right that we are complex beings that we have all these different dimensions of ourselves there's no doubt about it yeah Plato was brilliant in that regard
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: this whole issue about what the self is that's that's another complicated topic so we're dialogical beings I would say for sure and whatever the self is that's a complex different question like what's the difference between a person and a self self is some kind of aspect of the person which is connected with its own identity and its agency and all that but
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: but regardless of the metaphysics I think you're on to something and it seems it rings true for me and in my model all of those aspects of one's being, one's self, one's agency, one's emotions, desires, beliefs, self-images, models of self and other all of those things are significantly interconnected causally
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: and shaped by and shaping each other and all of that and yet the model for deconditioning that I associate with on like say let's say the most effective level is this ability to step outside of and look at all of that and tinker with it and see how it works and what parts of you are
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: in harmony out of harmony competing with each other to self-defeating you know what processes are there are opponent processes there's things that are you know feedback loops that become negative that become positive or what is John for Vicki call them reciprocal opening versus reciprocal narrowing and so yeah like we're multiply complex beings
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: and to me and I think this is true in Buddhism even though ironically a largely popular narrative in Buddhism is that there is no self well I think maybe if you say there's no homunculus monad self
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: right if that's what the Buddhists mean then that makes a lot more sense than saying that the collection of these processes and this dynamic auto poetic system lacks any kind of integrity or agency that's a mistake and I don't I think that if Buddhism is saying that then well on some level that system is not owned by a monad okay
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: but that doesn't mean that the system itself doesn't have all these kind of abilities that we associate with agency
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I'm answering your question well because autopoiesis as well it seems to be so central because like a lot of the research I'm doing on attention involves attention as selection for action like so it's like the selectivity of attention is involved in the trade-offs between and I've heard Verveke say before that he identifies the self with wise attention
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: and what we're talking about meditation mindfulness this capacity to pay attention to how you're paying attention and to use that to change your patterns of attention affording you essentially agency and
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: and so i yeah i think the attention thing buddhism is a great example obviously because mindfulness is so important to it and um stoicism too stoicism as well yeah pro-soc pro-chiron this kind of again yeah attending to your attention and how you're framing situations as as the kind of foundation of building agency
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: which and I have no problem with that like that agency is something that can be developed like we might not have default as much agency as we could like right you know we can live very low agency lives but then by engaging with it we can make it better and Sapolski again doesn't seem to you know recognize any of that but um does that land with you in terms of like we can enhance our agency
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: absolutely you know look this is this is the I suppose the kernel of my argument in my work on Buddhism and free will or meditation and free will is that when you practice meditation one of the the two basic skills that you're practicing are one pointedness and open monitoring
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: and one pointedness is focusing on any subset within the total field of your awareness like your breath a sound whatever doesn't matter you bring your mind to a target this is a primary object that you choose to focus on your mind wanders you notice that it's wandered and you return it to the target
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: and every time that that happens, this is a rep, a meditation rep, like a weightlifting rep.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: You're building the ability to do selective focus, like what you said, the selective attentional focus.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's an exercise, it's very simple.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: and the other one and there are different ways within like meditative traditions to describe these two things so I'll make a nod in the direction of that I'll say a little bit more about it and then kind of set it aside because I don't think it anything I'm saying hinges on those disputes about how to understand these two things the other one open monitoring is when you are just attending to the entire field of awareness
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Sapolski is right
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: attentional skill looked at from a larger perspective so if you just use a metaphor of like a dartboard with the circles right the bullseye is the little dot in the center one pointedness is focusing there and your mind wanders out to another circle and you notice it and you bring it back in and those circles represent all the different aspects of the self that we were talking about the lion and whatnot whatever right the larger one
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: the outer circle on some level open monitoring is looking at the whole dartboard all the levels and wherever anything is happening anything that's appearing or disappearing now when you're trying to do the open monitoring you want to keep this kind of global attentiveness and then what happens is some local phenomenon pulls your attention into it and you get lost in a train of thought
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: Robert Sapolski is right.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: some people call open monitoring mindfulness some people will say oh mindfulness of breath which is really one pointedness if you're just focusing on the breath but then another another dimension of it another aspect of it that i'd like to bring in from the other ways in which other traditions talk about it is if you're focusing on that little circle in the middle the bullseye right that's one pointedness um if you're focusing narrowly on the bullseye let's just say
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: so you want to keep that range that you want to keep that circle as your focal range so that's a range control muscle that you're cultivating but within that range how bright is the light of attention
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_02: how luminous how lucid how present is your mind about what it is that you're looking at so you might want to think of like a flashlight that you could adjust the lens so that the circle of light on the wall is bigger or smaller but then how bright is the light
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_02: right if you have another knob that you could make it really bright right so mindfulness is a kind of total brightness that you cultivate the more that you practice this right so both of those just different ways of so but all of those skills they're all attentional skills attentional selective or non selective attentional focus right depending on how you want to phrase that the semantics make it seem like there are two different things but on some level they're not
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_02: narrow or broad narrow or broad it's still focal range right focal range control right and then attentiveness within the focal range and steadiness and so on so those are the like the key muscles of agency i think
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_02: those are central muscles of agency and the more you practice them the more all the other aspects of your agency can improve because even your perceptual focus you know determine what you're focusing on engaging in the in the world significantly engages you and feedback loop feedback loops with everything and triggers your emotions your desires and all the more awareness that you could have about every one of these aspects you can
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: you can extend those abilities into every aspect of the multiple faceted being that you are you know the animal the etc you know all the different dimensions that's the way that's what I think and what I say in my writing on Buddhism and free will is that the more you practice this over time your agency clearly
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_02: The Buddha claimed that he was so good at this that he could think any thought he wants to think or not think any thought he wants not to think.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: He can have any resolve he wants to have.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_02: or not have any resolve he doesn't want to have.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I would extend that to any emotion, desire, perception, you name it, to whatever the degree of possibility of volitional or voluntary control over us.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: And yogis cultivate parts of volitional control over somatic processes that ordinary people can't, like their heart rate, their brain waves, their galvanic skin response, the body temperature, you name it.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_02: There's so much more
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_02: in the system that's amenable to this kind of agential control through practice over time than the average person like you said and from the Buddhist point of view the average person is very low agency mostly determined by the conditions they find themselves in so for all intents and purposes it's as if they are hard determined but they always have the possibility of freedom because they have these capacities that just need to be cultivated and
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_02: first thing that the buddhists say is hearing the dharma by learning that you have these abilities then you notice them and then you can start to cultivate them so most of us are walking around as if we're hard determined
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_02: or somnambulists, right?
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_02: We're just kind of dreaming our way through conditions in life and that's why Buddha means awakened.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_02: He figured this out, he realized that.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: And so, although your agency can become almost titanic if you're a serious hardcore meditative yogi, you can cultivate all these almost titanic forms of agency, at the same time the conception of yourself as that monadic homunculus goes down.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_02: www.RickRepetti.com
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: so it's a kind of weird inverse relationship your agency improves but your sense of yourself as an agent kind of diminishes in some way you know
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's so many threads there.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: What you're saying about the two types of attention really maps onto this thing with having the task network and the default mode network that's one for goal-directed attention, the other for mind-wandering and that they're opponent processing with each other all the time and trading off and you're focusing for a long time and then bam, suddenly you're mind-wandering and then you're trying to refocus again.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: and Ian McGilchrist actually maps those on to the left and right hemisphere of the brain that was what drove the evolution of the two hemispheres he describes it as the problem that a bird has when it's foraging for berries but also having to simultaneously look out for predators so in one sense it's a bad case of patting your head and rubbing your tummy because
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: you're trying to focus very much on this narrow pursuit but also at the same time there's loads of other factors that you need to be aware of and it's it's like we've developed these traditions in order to optimize for that attention for the way of being able to develop attentional flexibility and like you were saying about the reps and there's also something there in the imaginary attention because this counterfactual processing
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: of attending to hypothesize future states imaginary states that we can then entrain motor responses to make actually happen is also attentional in a way it's like it's another layer of imagination or attending to imagination that becomes motor functions so i i really think this is the place where it's all happening
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_02: yeah that's all very interesting and I'm glad you brought up the imaginal and counterfactuals because in my dissertation I have a whole chapter where I talk about as primates
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: we simulate monkey see, monkey do there's gaze following so even human infants and other primate infants if you make eye contact with them and then you look to the side they will look to the side this obviously has evolutionary value because if one of our members of our species detected something over there
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_02: It could be food or it could be a predator, right?
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: So having that as a built-in thing, those organisms that have that live longer than ones that don't, right?
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_02: So, but those are like at the root of, what is it called, shared attention and shared intention, right?
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so, and those involve simulating other minds or folk theory of mind, you know, theory of mind, you know, simulating other minds.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, simulational skills are part of our primate heritage.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: and counterfactual reasoning is just a more advanced version of that taking your beliefs and desires offline and bringing online imaginal beliefs and desires of others including future versions of yourself and seeing what the system will generate if you input beliefs and desires into it that you don't actually have this is a way of you know simulating the future and whatnot and I argued in the book that a good part of deliberative
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: agency is this counterfactual imagining if I do X this might happen this will be the consequences and you know being able to anticipate a broad array of possible paths of action and weight them
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_02: based on likely outcomes not only externally but what kind of self I become what kind of reputation I'll develop what kind of habits I'm cultivating all of those things all the different paths when we do this counterfactual which is deliberating it comes quite naturally to us but we're engaging in all these simulational imaginal processes
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_02: and I forget the first name because there's a few philosophers named Bach, B.O.K.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's Cicela Bach and I forget which Bach it was but it's in my dissertation one of them says look it's not epiphenomenal the ones that we entertain and then we we deliberate and we pick the one that all things considered is the one that we want and then we act on that that's what enacts
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_02: even if determinism is true that's what brings it about that that's the path that I go down and when I'm engaged in this rational process you know I have genuine rational agency this is something that what's his name the biologist Sapolsky seems to be confused about and I one of the criticisms of him is that like
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_02: everything he's saying on his own account is just things like enzymes in his liver manifesting through speech like what does it mean to think that it makes sense to entertain propositions and say this one makes sense and that is that some kind of liver enzyme thing happening in the brain that has nothing to do with like plausibility rationality inference
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know like what what is the book supposed to be doing if it's true it's kind of self-refuting well it's also yeah because when you're reading the book you're simulating it in your mind in a way like it really is like we're using that ability to understand the words that he's written which kind of undermines it but that counterfactual thing because I think that really maps on to the ADHD literature which is really interesting because ADHD obviously is a deficiency of agency in a sense that you can't
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: you are FREE and must be freer
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: www.mahonmccannpodcast.com
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: so you know when you fall asleep your brainwaves slow down and something in the physiology triggers the shutting down of the motor system so that when you're dreaming that you're running your legs aren't kicking in your bed right so that kind of ability is related to what we're talking about with ADHD it's this ability to to toggle online offline
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_02: action sequence networks and stuff like that yeah and just like almost everything else I was talking about those are some of the any attention that you pay to how your systems are working will afford you some agency over it yeah and attentional deficit is totally related to
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean it's even in the name deficiency right so it's a weakness or a lower level of agency over these attentional skills and I think I don't know empirically that I know you're doing research on it so you could tell me but I think meditative practices would at least theoretically be good medicine for people with ADHD I've had
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_02: People come to me over the years with ADHD and I've prescribed and led certain meditative practices for them and it seems to be helping them, but I haven't done any real scientific research on that topic.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well I don't know but I assume that it would to be honest if you could get I suppose if they can engage in it in the first place but interestingly Barclay prescribes writing so he gets them to write down so you externalize all of your goals basically by writing them down to keep yourself accountable to coordinate your behavior across time because time is the other key thing here that they seem to think that we're stuck in this cause and effect kind of loop of time
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: The ability that's lacking in ADHD is to organize yourself across time because to consider future obligations to plan for them to be able to actually implement them when they have to.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: yeah prudential reasoning is prioritizing what's what's what's more important to do now and what's worth postponing to later right there's a weakness in that category right it's like everything simultaneously grabbing attention and
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: yeah that's i think that's what agency a huge part of agency is long longitudinal agency like it's that stuff that you know that's why we celebrate somebody that comes from nothing and does something really amazing and you know achieves this absurd goal and we go wow that's unbelievable like you were so against the odds here and you managed to somehow get to this place um yeah time is part of the odds there yeah how quickly something can be done yeah
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: well I think we've gone over time here Rick but I feel uh much more I feel okay now maybe I can I can go back to the Sapolski interviews and I won't get too upset because he's just been he's just flat out wrong yeah yeah I um I hope to argue with him in person one day or on zoom
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'll send a few emails.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make it happen.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: I would pay good money to see that.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, what's his name?
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_02: Kurt Chai Mungle, Theories of Everything.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_02: He's had him on and he invited me to come on with Greg Caruso in Debate Free Will.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I said to him, well, I'll be happy to do that.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_02: Greg and I are friends.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_02: fact we both got our dissertations around the same time we both had the same advisor at the CUNY Grad Center I was writing for free will he was writing against it and we had a free will circle that we used to meet every week and read chapters on free will and debate them with other professors would come and other students it was a lot of fun but I told Kurt
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like to also debate Sapolski if you could set that up and he said I'm working on it oh well I'm praying that happens right because that would be yeah I would that would set things in order and but thank you very much for coming on and where can people find you if they're interested in more your work where's the best place from the look yeah my name Rick Repetti calm that's my website yeah let's see let me let me say a couple of more things so I recently finished
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_02: The first part of a Philosophy of Meditation series that I co-hosted with John Fravechi.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: We had seven episodes.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_02: There's only one more, I think, that's about to be published with Mark Miller.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: But after that, I'm going to continue the series on my own.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_02: Occasionally, John will come if there's a guest that he wants to participate with.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_02: And Mark Miller and John and I decided in our last episode on that series
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_02: Mark wants to do a series with me also on his research and he invited John and John said he'd love to be a part of it so that's another series coming out also at appa.edu which is the American Philosophical Practitioners Association appa.edu this stuff of mine I'm teaching a course there that's going to be starting in a few weeks on
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_02: well we have two two new things going on there well three new things going on there one is an Academy which is just for ordinary folks for philosophy for everyday life that's new and I'll be teaching a course in that on Indian philosophy for wisdom in everyday life starting sometime in March there's also an APA Institute which is for professionals anybody who's got a professional degree so those are kind of
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_02: a higher level kind of content in those courses some of the courses are cross-listed right now Pierre Grimes one of the founders of Philosophical Midwifery is doing a course the first session just happened already at the APA Institute and the Academy but also another new thing is that we're doing an APA book club where once a month I'll be interviewing anybody in the philosophical practice space who has a book
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_02: oh yeah I forgot to mention that Friday mornings 9 a.m.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_02: Eastern Standard Time every week for since April I've been running a weekly meditation followed by a Q&A
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_02: those are accessible only to people who are patron supporters of John Vervaeke's Patreon Vervaeke Foundation thing at a low level of support but there's also Monday through Thursday 9 a.m.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_02: Eastern these half-hour drop-ins called SEOP Starter Ecology of Practices John Vervaeke is always advocating that we need an ecology of practices
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_02: so Monday through Thursday there's different practices every Monday it's authentic relating every Tuesday it's journaling every Wednesday it's some kind of mindfulness thing and every Thursday it's some kind of embodiment practice and I will there's a handful of us that are alternating doing them and taking turns so
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_02: and those are open to the general public you don't have to be a patron supporter if you want to if you don't have an ecology of practices it's a good way to kind of jumpstart one easy access to cultivating some kind of rounded set of practices and that the website for that is awaken2meaning.com
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_02: yeah so that those are nice and yeah i it doesn't say on the calendar who's teaching what so you never know which one of us you're going to get but that's another place where uh you might meet me fantastic we'll include that one as well rick um awaken to meaning.com definitely check it out thanks again for your time rick thank you thank you it was great