Monday Dispatch – 2024/04/01

On gamification and free will

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Just in case, this is not an April’s Fool post. Your inbox is probably crowded with them already, no need to add to the clutter. Besides, I lack the sense of humor to craft one in the first place.

On Gamification

On a recent Farewell episode, the panelists touched on the value of gamification in fitness.

Their conclusion resonated with me: If gamification is what you need to get out of the door, go for it. But treat it like a crutch; at some point, you should no longer need it.

If that doesn’t happen, your incentives and motivations might be off-kilter.

The conversation is a good complement to my reflection on gamification and being aware of what game you are actually playing from a few weeks ago.

As a quick aside, the advice on using gamification as a temporary crutch goes hand in hand with regularly exercising without data-collecting devices. The idea is that, as useful and fun as the data is, we need to remind ourselves that exercising is valuable in and of itself and stay in touch with our body and the signals it sends during it. But this is not a fitness newsletter, so I’ll move on.

On Free Will

The week I’m writing this, Sam Harris published an interview with Robert Sapolsky on free will based on Sapolsky’s latest book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.

The conversation was well articulated, but, as far as I’m concerned, it missed the mark. Their argument against free will is technically correct but practically useless.

Every time I come across the “free will does not exist” argument, especially when packaged in a well-produced format like Sam’s, I listen back to these

Brett Hall

pieces for a counterargument:

• Free Will Exists

• A diversion on Free Will and Artificial Intelligence

Brett’s angle also works as an intellectual cleanser. The chain of reasoning he applies, following in David Deutsch’s footsteps, is far solid and, crucially, leads to practically useful conclusions.

The foundation on which Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky build their argument against free will is that the more we learn about the brain and the body, the more we see how our decisions are affected, sometimes dictated, by lower-level processes.

Much goes into our choices that is outside our control. Our DNA affects our choices. Our past experiences affect our choices. Our luck, or lack thereof, affects our choices and the array of choices available to us.

In short, we don’t have free will because we are a product of our environment, genetics, and chance.

This reductionist argument seems profound on the surface but amounts to nothing more than saying that we obey the laws of physics and causality… like everything else in the Universe!

According to that model, I am currently typing these words because of electrical crackles in my brain initiated by a chain of events that we can trace back to the Big Bang. This is obviously true, but it doesn’t begin to explain why I’m typing these words.

And why is all that matters.