On YouTube, not only has this Sapolsky guy been interviewed several times recently, but also a lot of his lectures were published on the Stanford channel a while ago, a couple of which I had watched in the past (though I just made the connection now). I chose to watch the following recent video because the interviewer happens to be a German philosopher that I sometimes watch (he's the "profilicity" guy I mentioned in the SB).
So, this video mostly confirms what I guessed in my original post on this thread. Virtually nothing he says surprised me; he's very much entrenched in the materialism of the 20th century if not the late 19th century. My takeaways:
1. Sapolsky is a thoroughgoing physicalist who dismisses all "magical stuff" out of hand.
2. He's a determinist in the sense that he believes everything that happens incl human behavior is determined by causes both recent and ancient, not in the sense that we are able to make accurate predictions.
3. He's a "hard" determinist who maintains the incompatibility of free will with our deterministic reality.
4. He emphasizes that, while the workings of the human brain are obviously very complex and human behavior is impossible to predict in practice, the unpredictable complexity does NOT constitute a "playground" that allows us to speculate about free will existing within it.
5. QM was not discussed in the interview, which is perhaps not surprising, given that his field is biology.
6. He says very little about consciousness, except that every decade or so he checks the literature and notices that neurobiology still has made no good progress on explaining the "construct" of the conscious self.
I partly agree with (4). If you assume the universe is, at its root, a giant mindless deterministic machine and nothing else, then free will can't exist. However, by the same logic, consciousness also should not exist. But we do have consciousness. As I mentioned, I am not convinced that the universe is a machine in any case.
Sapolsky briefly talks about the ethical implications of his hard determinism, which entails that no wrong-doer should be told they have a "bad soul", (not only because souls don't exist but also) because no one actually chooses to do wrong. Apparently the criminal justice system should be radically reformed if not abolished. Sapolsky admits that a car with no brakes should not be on the road, but he does not make it clear what he thinks should replace criminal justice.
Apparently there are other ethical implications that come from his ideas, for example on race, that you can look up if you are interested. I am not interested.
In fairness to Sapolsky, I have not read his book. However, it is deeply weird to me that you could talk about ethical implications at all if you deny free will. If free will is to be regarded as non-existent, then so are ethical implications and also (of course) teleology. Consciousness SHOULD also be regarded as non-existent in that case. Problem is, we know that at least exists.
