Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

The answer is that the behavior happened because something that preceded it caused it to happen. And why did that prior circumstance occur? Because something that preceded it caused it to happen. It’s antecedent causes all the way down, not a floating turtle or causeless cause to be found.

“Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.”[*]

To reiterate, when you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, and before that, all the way down.

And when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call “free will,” they have (a) failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking beneath the surface and/or (b) erroneously concluded that the rarefied aspects of the universe that do work indeterministically can explain your character, morals, and behavior.

we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

We can all agree on that; however, we’re heading into very different terrain, one that I suspect most readers will not agree with, which is deciding that we have no free will at all. Here would be some of the logical implications of that being the case: That there can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is indefensible—sure, keep dangerous people from damaging others, but do so as straightforwardly and nonjudgmentally as keeping a car with faulty brakes off the road.

And that it makes as little sense to hate someone as to hate a tornado because it supposedly decided to level your house, or to love a lilac because it supposedly decided to make a wonderful fragrance.

This book has two goals. The first is to convince you that there is no free will,[*] or at least that there is much less free will than generally assumed when it really matters.

put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.[*]

The world is deterministic and there’s no free will.

The world is deterministic and there is free will.

The world is not deterministic; there’s no free will.

The world is not deterministic; there is free will. These

There’s no free will, and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong.

There’s no free will, but it is okay to hold people morally responsible for their actions.

There’s free will, and people should be held morally responsible.

There’s free will, but moral responsibility isn’t justified.

Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will. The point of the first half of this book is to establish that this can’t be shown.

And where did that intent come from in the first place? This is so important because, as we will see, while it sure may seem at times that we are free do as we intend, we are never free to intend what we intend.

our world virtually guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified further.

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

low familial SES predicts stunted maturation of the frontal cortex in kindergarteners.[34]

First, it isn’t free will and responsibility just because, on the social level, everyone says it is—that’s

sociality, social interactions, organisms being social with each other, are as much an end product of biology interacting with environment as is the shape of your nose.[6]

“Deplete us not into temptation.”

PFC function and self-regulation go down the tubes if you’re terrified or in pain—the

Fatigue also depletes frontal resources.

In an immensely unsettling study of emergency room doctors, the more cognitively demanding the workday (as measured by patient load), the higher the levels of implicit racial bias by the end of the day.[27]

Appear before the judge soon after she’s had a meal, and there was a roughly 65 percent chance of parole; appear a few hours after a meal, and there was close to a 0 percent chance.[*],[28]

the more sluggish the dlPFC became during deliberating, the more likely subjects were to fall back on a habitual decision.[29]

So if you want to be better at doing the harder thing as an adult, make sure you pick the right adolescence.[41]

Childhood abuse produces an adult PFC that is smaller, thinner, and with less gray matter, altered PFC activity in response to emotional stimuli, altered levels of receptors for various neurotransmitters, weakened coupling between both the PFC and dopaminergic “reward” regions (predicting increased depression risk), and weakened coupling with the amygdala

at one month of age, PFC circuitry is already different in children whose mothers were abused in childhood.[44]

the socioeconomic status of a child’s family predicts the size, volume, and gray matter content of the PFC in kindergarteners.

With each increase in someone’s ACE score, there’s an increased likelihood of a hyperreactive amygdala that has expanded in size and a sluggish PFC that never fully developed.[49]

This chapter’s punchline is that it’s impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower.

determinism and predictability are very different things.

determinism allows you to explain why something happened, whereas predictability allows you to say what happens next.

Another is the difference between “determined” and “determinable”

In this view, “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.

There is something wrong if an instance of free will exists only until there is a decrease in our ignorance. As

Ruling out radical eliminative reductionism doesn’t prove indeterminism.

Why Free Will Is Real.

“Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons,”

Thus, undermine someone’s belief in free will and they feel less of a sense of agency, meaning, or self-knowledge, less gratitude for other people’s kindness.

the bulk of studies have failed to replicate the basic finding that people become less ethical in their behavior when their free-will belief is weakened.

the widespread belief that believing in a god is essential for morality,

People in most countries surveyed associate atheism with moral norm violations, such as serial murder, incest, or necrobestiality.

men are more than twice as likely as women to be atheists.

religious people are more concerned than atheists with maintaining a moral reputation,