Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

He implicitly takes this ahistorical stance and justifies it with a metaphor that comes up frequently in his writing and debates. For example, in Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, he asks us to imagine a footrace where one person starts off way behind the rest at the starting line. Would this be unfair? “Yes, if the race is a hundred-yard dash.” But it is fair if this is a marathon, because “in a marathon, such a relatively small initial advantage would count for nothing, since one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater effects.” As a succinct summary of this view, he writes, “After all, luck averages out in the long run.”

If that’s the case for some baboon, just imagine humans. We have to learn our culture’s rationalizations and hypocrisies—thou shalt not kill, unless it’s one of them, in which case here’s a medal. Don’t lie, except if there’s a huge payoff, or it’s a profoundly good act (“Nope, no refugees hiding in my attic, no siree”). Laws to be followed strictly, laws to be ignored, laws to be resisted. Reconciling acting as if each day is your last with today being the first day of the rest of your life.

As one finding that is beyond cool, Chinese from rice regions accommodate and avoid obstacles (in this case, walking around two chairs experimentally placed to block the way in Starbucks); people from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e., moving the chairs apart).[52]

Another literature compares cultures of rain forest versus desert dwellers, where the former tend toward inventing polytheistic religions, the latter, monotheistic ones. This probably reflects ecological influences as well—life in the desert is a furnace-blasted, desiccated singular struggle for survival; rain forests teem with a multitude of species, biasing toward the invention of a multitude of gods. Moreover, monotheistic desert dwellers are more warlike and more effective conquerors than rain forest polytheists, explaining why roughly 55 percent of humans proclaim religions invented by Middle Eastern monotheistic shepherds.[53]

In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.

Throw down the gauntlet from chapter 3—present me with the neuron, right here, right now, that caused that behavior, independent of any other current or historical biological influence. The answer can’t be “Well, we can’t, but that happened before.”

The bigger the average size of the social group in a primate species, the greater a percentage of the brain is devoted to the PFC; the bigger the size of some human’s texting network, the larger a particular subregion of the PFC and its connectivity with the limbic system.

Frontal competence even declines if it’s keeping you from being distracted by something positive—patients are more likely to die as a result of surgery if it is the surgeon’s birthday.

take an average heterosexual male and expose him to a particular stimulus, and his PFC becomes more likely to decide that jaywalking is a good idea. What’s the stimulus? The proximity of an attractive woman. I know, pathetic.

Sam Harris argues convincingly that it’s impossible to successfully think of what you’re going to think next. The takeaway from chapters 2 and 3 is that it’s impossible to successfully wish what you’re going to wish for. This chapter’s punchline is that it’s impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower. And that it isn’t a great idea to run the world on the belief that people can and should.

So a tiny difference in a starting state can magnify unpredictably over time.

In this view, “free will” is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive

Instead, the most common alternative in these studies is for subjects to read a cogent discussion about our lack of free will. Studies have often used a passage from Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Scribner). Crick, of the Watson-and-Crick duo who identified the structure of DNA, grew fascinated with the brain and consciousness in his later years. A hard determinist as well as an elegant, clear writer, Crick summarizes the scientific argument for our being merely the sum of our biological components. “Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons,” he concludes.[3]

Work by psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University groups moral concerns into five domains—those related to obedience, loyalty, purity, fairness, and harm avoidance. His influential work has shown that political conservatives and highly religious people tilt in the direction of particularly valuing obedience, loyalty, and purity. The Left and the irreligious, in contrast, are more concerned with fairness and harm avoidance.

What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond

“This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.

When you read between the lines, or sometimes even the lines themselves in their writing, a lot of these compatibilists are actually saying that there has to be free will because it would be a total downer otherwise, doing contortions to make an emotional stance seem like an intellectual one. Humans “descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known,” said the wife of an Anglican bishop in 1860, when told about Darwin’s novel theory of evolution.[*] One hundred fifty-six years later, Stephen Cave titled a much-discussed June 2016 article in The Atlantic “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will . . . but We’re Better Off Believing in It Anyway.”

As some evolutionary biologists have pointed out, the only way humans have survived amid being able to understand truths

about life is by having evolved a robust capacity for self-deception.

There’s our nation with its cult of meritocracy that judges your worth by your IQ and your number of degrees. A nation that spews bilge about equal economic potential while, as of 2021, the top 1 percent has 32 percent of the wealth, and the bottom half less than 3 percent, where you can find an advice column headlined “It’s Not Your Fault if You Are Born Poor, but It’s Your Fault if You Die Poor,” which goes on to say that if that was your lamentable outcome, “I’ll say you’re a wasted sperm.”

There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.

Now to put in a flabbergasting real number: your average neuron has about ten thousand to fifty thousand dendritic spines and about the same number of axon terminals. Factor in a hundred billion neurons, and you see why brains, rather than kidneys, write good poetry.