Nelson Zagalo's Reviews > Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Sapolsky decided, after the brilliant "Behave" (2017), to join Sam Harris, another neuroscientist, in defending the non-existence of Free Will, but what he actually did was return to his origins as a convinced behaviourist and follow in the footsteps of BF Skinner. Read "Walden Two" (1948). None of this comes as a surprise because there were already hints of this conviction in "Behave", but here Sapolsky simply drops the mask. It's a shame that, unlike Harris, Sapolsky dares to write an entire book on the subject without having carried out any study of the two thousand years of philosophical discussion on the subject, but even more shocking is that he does so in 2023, ignoring more than 70 years of cognitive psychology. The book, which has been five years in the making, ends up being even worse because it is divided into a first part discussing the most up-to-date knowledge of neuroscience which, according to Sapolsky, supports the idea, but then opens up a whole second part of socio-political-philosophical discussion for which the author clearly lacks expertise.

I'd give it 4 stars for the discussion of the first part, even though I don't agree, for everything it made me think, but then the second part is very bad, and shouldn't have been published in the same book, which ends up with 2 stars.

The review is much longer, but it's in Portuguese on Substack: https://experiencias.substack.com/p/d...

A discussão completa em português no Substack: hhttps://experiencianarrativa.wordpres...