Crazy Arguments about Free Will

The leading academic proponent of determinism says some crazy things:

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

This has now been repeated a lot, but it is completely false. Chess players do not burn calories like elite athletes.

Sapolsky is a big-shot Stanford professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery. He should know better. Or he should have corrected himself, when the error was pointed out. This should be obvious to a biologist.

I have criticized Sapolsky on free will several times.

Tim Palmer also believes in determinism, and even super-determinism, and posted a new paper:

A deterministic model of free will is developed, ...

It is concluded that humans have free will, determinism notwithstanding. The model is applied to study the foundational issue of free choice in quantum physics experiments: it is shown that violating the Measurement Independence assumption does not invalidate the free-will conclusion above.

He believes that we cannot choose parameters for an experiment, as they are all pre-determined to fool us about the outcome, but somehow we have an illusion of free will anyway.

This is just nuts.

Palmer even quotes Sapolsky:

To reiterate, when you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, all the way down…..And when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call ‘free will’, they have (a) failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking below the surface and/or (b) erroneously concluded that the rarefied aspects of the universe that do work indeterministically can explain your character, morals and behavior.

Palmer avoids this by saying that determinism only goes down to the Planck scale.