Chris Merola's Reviews > Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Sapolsky dovetails research and insight into a staggering refutation of free will.

And I feel kinda okay with this, especially given the conclusion - hatred and resentment are useless. Besides the dopamine hit, besides the in-group closeness fostered by out-group hatred, it does nothing for us as a human race to hate or resent those who wrong us, as people are not responsible for the people they are.

I've been groping my way to this conclusion my whole life. Little thoughts, like how the grenade that killed my great uncle led to my need to pop 10 mg lexapro daily through a multi-generational cycle of abuse and alcoholism. How I often feel driven by a machine, that there is nothing within my nature I can change, unless that desire to change was already implanted within my nature.

That luck determines all of life - pure, simple luck.

But - there's something Sapolsky doesn't fully explore in his conclusions. He implies at one point that minimizing human pain and maximizing pleasure is a good - no surprise, I agree. He also writes at length about how society has slowly evolved to become more just, how people can be positively impacted by their environments. So, why can't those of us who happened to be born/raised prosocial try and help change the world (and others) for the better?

My guess is Sapolsky doesn't want to look too much like a leftist to keep the book's potential audience wide, but this is disappointing - it's clear that organizing society to reduce the influence of chance/bias will help us. It's clear that there are things we can do to subtly change our neurochemistry and improve our behavior. And yes, of course one needs to be blessed with the right personality and upbringing to seek out that knowledge, but it doesn't mean we can't fight to provide that knowledge and those opportunities to everyone so that it becomes a part of their upbringing.

There are so, so many ethical implications to consider here. My mind is teeming. My heart is resting. I don't mind being driven by forces outside of my control. In a weird way, I feel reduced to the religion I was raised with - determinism feels eerily like my favorite old obsession, thinking about how God knows all things; where we came from, and what we will do.

POST SCRIPT - I'm still thinking about this book a month later, and I had some new insights that I wanted to mark down.

First, I think some delineation is in order - between the ability to choose what we want, and the ability to choose how we get it.

I concede that we cannot choose what we want. I will also concede that many circumstances outside of our control infringe upon our ability to freely choose how to get what we want.

However, we can't ignore our ability to affect certain bottom up processes from the top down. What I mean is, we as a society have discovered enough about human biology and psychology that can allow us to tangibly alter our neurochemistry via a combination of behavior and medication/therapy.

Sure, I may not choose to want to be healthier and happier, this drive may be innate/conditioned, but I absolutely have the ability to make decisions which alter my neurochemistry in directions that I want.

And sure, maybe in some turtles-all-the-way-down way, the very moment I decided to learn more about how to improve my life was not of my control, I still believe I've wrested some scrap of free will for myself in the ensuing years, given that I have gained more awareness of how my bottom up processes affect my consciousness, and I actively fight to amplify or suppress certain aspects of my biology in order to get closer to a life I want. That want is out of my control, but I believe the pursuit of that want is still more or less in my own hands.