Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Such a harnessing scenario has at least three limitations, of increasing significance: —A child has fallen into an icy river, and your consideration generator produces three possibilities to choose among: leap in and save the child; shout for help; pretend you didn’t see and scurry away. Choose. But since we’re dealing with quantum indeterminacy, what if the first three possibilities are: tango in the absence of a partner; confess to cheating on your taxes; make squawking sounds while jumping backward like the dolphins at Sea World? Perfectly plausible, if superpositioned electron waves are the wellsprings from which your moral decisions flow. —To avoid having only tangoing, confessing, and dolphining as options, determine that you need to indeterminately generate every random possibility. But now you have to spend a lifetime evaluating and comparing each before choosing which is best. You need to have an impossibly efficient search algorithm.[*],[25] —So, phew, generate enough options so that they aren’t all silly, figure out how to efficiently evaluate them all, and then use your criteria to filter out all but the winner. But where does that filter, reflecting your values, ethics, and character, come from? It’s chapter 3. And where does intent come from? How is it that one person’s filter filters out every random possibility other than “Rob the bank,” while another’s goes for “Wish the bank teller a good day”? And where do the values and criteria come from in even first ...