Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

Consciousness is an irrelevant hiccup.

You wish to do something, intend to do it, and then successfully do so. But no matter how fervent, even desperate, you are, you can’t successfully wish to wish for a different intent. And you can’t meta your way out—you can’t successfully wish for the tools (say, more self-discipline) that will make you better at successfully wishing what you wish for. None of us can.

“free will” is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will.

We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we’ve chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons, that agency and volition dwell there. Our intuitions scream this, because we don’t know about, can’t imagine, the subterranean forces of our biological history that brought it about.

There are fifty-two countries in which atheism is punishable by death or prison.

Studies of quality of life and of health show that Scandinavians fare better (on measures such as happiness and well-being, life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and rates of death in childbirth); moreover, poverty rates are lower, and income inequality is tiny in comparison. And measures of the prevalence of antisocial behavior, crime rates, and rates of violence and damaging aggression—from warfare to criminal violence to school bullying to corporal punishment—are lower. And as for some indices of prosociality, Scandinavian countries’ per-capita expenditures on social services for their own citizens[*] and as aid for poor countries are greater.[28] Furthermore, these differences are not merely Scandinavians feasting on lutefisk versus sweaty, capitalistic Americans. Across a broad range of countries, lower average rates of religiosity predict higher rates of all these salubrious outcomes. Moreover, cross-nationally, lower average rates of religiosity in a country predict lower levels of corruption, more tolerance of racial and ethnic minorities, higher literacy rates, lower rates of overall crime and of homicide, and less frequent warfare.

Take one lone heroic rat that, for some reason, can save the world from disaster by developing a conditioned eyeblink response. And he screws up, doesn’t do it, lets the world down. Afterward, everyone is pissed at the rat, blaming him for not conditioning. To which he can say, “It’s not my fault—I didn’t get conditioned because, one second before, my interpositus nucleus wasn’t as responsive to the conditioned stimulus; because a few hours before, my stress hormone levels were elevated, which guaranteed that the interpositus would be particularly resistant to conditioning; because back in my childhood, my mother was taken from me, and this changed gene regulation in the interpositus, permanently increasing levels of a hormone receptor there; because back millions of years ago, my species evolved to be highly dependent on maternal care after birth, and the genes needed to make lifelong changes in circuitry if the mother is absent.”