Amber Lea's Reviews > Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

This book failed to change my mind about anything. Which is disappointing. I was expecting a solid argument because I have a high opinion of Robert Sapolsky. But I spent the whole book shouting to myself, "We don't even seem to agree on what free will is!" You can't even build and argument if we can't agree on what we're talking about.

The main issue is this book's logic is far too extreme. Robert apparently thinks "free will" is "behavior that happens out of thin air." Which is something I feel no reasonable person would claim. I would hope the majority of us can understand that we're all pushed toward certain actions by our past, our genetics, and our environments. That doesn't mean there is no free will at all. You don't have to do something for no reason for it to be free will. You just need to have a choice between two actions. That's it. This entire argument feels like an obvious straw man. He's attacking ideas I've never heard anyone share, and even if there are people out there who do say these things, I think most of us can accept those arguments as bad.

And I agree with most of Robert's ideas around crime and punishment. Like I think we should absolutely take into account everything that lead someone to do what they did, and we should act based on what needs to happen to protect people from criminals. I'm also very anti punishment. I think we should try to prevent future crime in the most unintrusive way possible. The point should be to get the outcome we want, not to inflict suffering on criminals. I think these are relatively popular ideas and I don't disagree. That should have been the real focus of this book because that would have been a much better book, and there's plenty here to support that argument.

It's a shame this book is so poorly argued because there is an excellent point to be made here about how little free will we really have. But he mucks that up by arguing that we have NONE. And then he spends tons of time giving example after example after example of scientific principals that supposedly show we're not in control. I nearly DNFed this book because it was putting me in a coma. It's all stuff you've heard before if you're the type of person with any scientific curiosity.

The book kind of recovers from being mind numbing when it stops talking about chaos theory and quantum mechanics (interesting topics but he goes on for way too long) and moves on to talking about social science. But it still feels like a big mess of ideas that aren't really strung together coherently. I think he relies more on making the reader feel stupid for believing in free will than actually convincing you it doesn't exist. It's like reading a book that tries to convince you god is real. It was a bad idea from the start, and not surprisingly, it does a bad job.

I feel like this could have been reedited into a much better book. There is a good book here, it just needs to drop the whole "free will isn't real" thing, because it my opinion it never gets there, and focus on what drives us to make the choices we do.