Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

As per Dostoyevsky, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.

Just to start off things off in an understated kind of way . .

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.

We are not captains of our ships; our ships never had captains.[2] Fuck. That really blows.

“There’s No Such Thing as Free Will . . . but We’re Better Off Believing in It Anyway.”[*]

If one could not have done otherwise, it cannot be the case that one ought to have done otherwise.”

It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. 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.

And we need to accept the absurdity of hating any person for anything they’ve done; ultimately, that hatred is sadder than hating the sky for storming, hating the earth when it quakes, hating a virus because it’s good at getting into lung cells. This is where the science has brought us as well.