I watch a lot of Sapolsky’s stuff, but this one was fun and Neil asked some questions that I’ve wanted to ask him.
They go over the usual, like the hungry Judge, Quantum Physics, then Neil digs into how this should change society, more than most interviews I’ve seen. And they make if fun, so got that going for them.
At 30, Neil, asks if this means we have to change everything from reward and punishing to a matter of nurturing and understanding. Sapolksy thinks it could take 600 years. He suggests an experiment on yourself, if you can’t have compassion for how Trump came to be who he is, then you aren’t accepting his ideas about how to create change in a world without free will. Robert admits how hard it is to do, but points how far we’ve come. He doesn’t believe witches bring thunderstorms and moms don’t cause their children to be schizophrenic. He remembers how kids used to be called lazy or slow when really they had dyslexia. Learning that someone has a condition changes the biology of person who learns it, how they relate to the differently abled person.
Use the links if you want to get to 35: “How Do Change a Culture if There’s No Free Will?” In a couple of minutes Neil sorts out the question very well. He suggests we change the culture, since we can’t change the biology. Robert puts biology back into culture, where it belongs, and puts it into proper historical perspective. Neil challenges him, but Robert is ready to demonstrate that we’ve figured out how to deal with dangerous people, we shouldn’t forgive them and release them into the culture. He uses the example that we don’t consider someone a bad person because they have a cold, but we do quarantine them. We subtract the responsibility out of it because we now know the biology of colds. We can do the same with someone who has become a damaging person and focus on how they became that instead of blaming them and punishing them.
Another example he gives at 40:00 is how we applied the new science of brain scans in the 80s and saw how different brains are what causes schizophrenia. It didn’t impact psychiatry until Phil Donahue showed it on his talk show and caused a cultural shift.
Neil tries to give him a paradoxical question in the end. It’s good for a laugh, but Robert doesn’t go for it.
