Dries's Reviews > Determined

I agree with a lot of points professor Sapolsky raises about human behaviour being to a large extent dictated by our environment, upbringing, genetics, hormones etc. I agree with his overarching thesis about how this raises serious questions regarding both the desirability and the practicality of a true meritocracy, and how we as a society should strive to be more egalitarian and more understanding of other people's circumstances, especially with regard to things like crime and addiction. I agree with his contention that our legal system is too focused on punishing people (people who, more often than not, had very little control over the course of their lives), and not enough on addressing the circumstances that lead to people committing crimes in the first place. I wholeheartedly agree with his position that no one is innately entitled to being treated any better or worse than anyone else.

However, I don't believe he has in any meaningful sense disproven the existence of free will. Full disclosure: I am not a trained philosopher, and I am the furthest thing from a neuroscientist or an endocrinologist, but Sapolsky's argument, when you boil it down, seems to me to be little more than a cheeky game of semantics. For those who haven't read the book, Sapolsky's definition of free will is basically what theologians and Christian apologists refer to as an "uncaused cause": "Show me a neuron (or brain)", Sapolsky writes, "whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past" (p. 15). Essentially, for free will to exist by Sapolsky's standards, humans would have to be capable of acting independently of their hormonal history, sensory history, childhood history etc. When you put all of these histories together, Sapolsky argues, there is no room for what he calls "free will".

I'm sorry if this makes me sound pedantic, but this just sounds to me like defining free will out of existence. Of course, Sapolsky gives further arguments for his case, but they're all contingent on whether the reader accepts his definition of free will, and I'm not convinced we should. I just don't see why the concept of free will would necessitate the possibility of making choices in a biological and environmental vacuum, because that is, almost definitionally, an impossibility. Sapolsky's viewpoint strikes me as an almost comically simplistic zero-sum game: either we are all prime movers of the first degree, or we are just cosmic dominos with no control over where and how we fall. I'm sure Sapolsky would disagree with me on this, but to me, being free to react within a certain set of constraints and incentives (even ones as inescapable and all-encompassing as those Sapolsky lays out in his book) still seems like something that might conceivably be called "free will".

Sapolsky goes to great lengths to demonstrate the various ways in which human cognition is preconfigured by external factors over which we have no control: he repeats over and over again that people may be free to do as they intend, but they aren't free to intend what they intend. Crucially, however, he never delivers a definitive deathblow to the idea that whether or not we act on our intentions may be something over which we exert at least some amount of conscious control. In fact, the possibility of humans going against their own intentions ("overruling" their own intentions as it were) is something Sapolsky appears to allow room for in chapter 2, so I have to ask: if intentions don't necessarily lead to people acting on them, then regardless of where those intentions come from, and regardless of whether you decide to call this "free will" or not, in what sense can determinism be true? At best, I think Sapolsky's arguments show that human behaviour is highly predictable, that is to say: highly influenced by pre-existing conditions, which is 1) not the same as being predetermined (Sapolsky himself acknowledges this), and 2) something I already agreed with before I read this book.

I'm not even arguing that free will definitely exists; I'm not sure where I stand on the whole free will debate, precisely because I find it such a nebulous concept to pin down. Sapolsky, however, has no time for nuances, it seems: in his own introduction, he explicitly states that he is glossing over potential grey areas such as "partial free will" or "situational free will". I get that it makes sense to do so for simplicity's sake, but I think it makes the scope of his entire book somewhat inherently—to use a word Sapolsky himself seems to be fond of using—myopic. He even sidesteps the entire question of what role (if any) consciousness plays in free will because he "[doesn't] understand what consciousness is" (p. 31). I mean, fair enough: neither do I, but I'm not writing a book on free will, and if I were, I'd like to think I'd treat the topic of consciousness with a little more attention than just saying "Well, I don't really get what it is, but it's not relevant to my point anyway, trust me!"

Furthermore, I think Sapolsky grossly overestimates the extent to which the notion of not having free will (as he defines it) is upsetting to people. Speaking just for myself here, I honestly don't give much of a hoot whether I have free will by Sapolsky's standards or not; I know I have the appearance of free will, and that, to me, is good enough. Now, to be fair, this is of course a common retort to the kind of hard determinism Sapolsky advocates, and it's one he seems to have at least partially anticipated: for him, it is akin to saying that our intuitions are always right, when, of course, our intuitions are pretty regularly not right, but this is either a complete misunderstanding or a complete misrepresentation of the argument. I am not saying that I have the appearance of free will, therefore, I have free will; what I'm saying is that having the appearance of free will, for me at least, is as good (though not factually the same) as actually having free will.

Because even if I were to concede Sapolsky's entire argument, I don't see what difference it would make in the bigger picture, practically speaking. I don't think the question of free will is really as consequential as Sapolsky and many philosophers make it out to be, because even if it were true that we have no free will, I don't see how we can go about living our lives sans the underlying assumption that we are creatures with at least some degree of agency. This is where maybe I out myself as a de facto social constructionist when it comes to free will: the way I see it, free will (in our colloquial understanding of the term) is simply a fact of life, but if it was truly a fiction, then it would be a necessary fiction that our entire society relies on in order to function. If it is an illusion, I don't think it's one we can ever fully escape.

To be clear: I'm not talking about what Sapolsky describes as the danger of people "running amok" once they stop believing in free will; I'm saying that I literally can't conceive of going through life without believing in at least some version of free will. Sapolsky himself even states that he has tried to live most of his life in accordance with his belief that people have no free will, and has found it virtually impossible; indeed, it's part of the reason why he wrote this book in the first place: to provide some insights into how we might dispense with the notion of free will, both individually and societally. I'll admit: Sapolsky has definitely thought his ideas through, but I don't think he paints a very coherent picture of a society that has moved beyond free will belief. Nevertheless, I think this is the part of the book where most readers will truly raise an eyebrow.

My true disagreement with Sapolsky, I suspect, lies not so much in the (in my opinion largely semantic) debate over whether we have free will or not, but in what would and, more importantly, should follow from this question. Not only does Sapolsky not believe in free will, he, to his credit, takes his conclusions to their logical extremes: the concepts of blame and punishment make no sense to him, and neither do praise and reward, because none of us have earned anything we had any say in whatsoever, just like none of us have any control over the actions that would lead to us being punished. As I said, I am very sympathetic to Sapolsky's critique of punitive justice and meritocracy; I am less sympathetic to his proposed vision of an ideologically deterministic society where we just abandon the notions of personal and criminal accountability altogether.

I'm not trying to score a cheap moral victory here, but imagine telling the people of Gaza that the IDF soldiers and the Israeli government who have been massacring them for months, years and decades bear no responsibility whatsoever for their crimes against humanity because they were hormonally predestined to commit genocide. Imagine explaining to a former Auschwitz inmate that it makes no logical sense to blame the Nazis for the Holocaust because it was a complex mix of cosmic and genetic coincidences that caused them to shove people into concentration camps. Call me sentimental, but I don't think a society where we are all stoically aloof to the man-made horrors of the world is achievable nor desirable.

What I find most troublesome about Sapolsky's outlook is not so much that it would have us effectively exonerating war criminals and serial killers, but that he seems to put this on par with the way we as a society have moved past (or tried to move past) historic prejudices on the basis of race, gender, sexuality etc. I'm sorry, but even if I were to accept that you can't hold people responsible for their actions, I just fundamentally refuse to put the likes of Netanyahu or Mengele on the same level as the victims of pogroms or lynchings; I don't think moral accountability and bigotry are analogous in that way, even if neither of them makes rational sense. For what it's worth, Sapolsky is careful to note that you can still isolate dangerous individuals from society if they pose a threat, you just can't punish them or hold a grudge against them on moral grounds. I get what he's saying, and again: I agree that the purpose of justice, even in the most egregious cases, should be restorative rather than retributive. Nevertheless, I think the desire for moral accountability is a natural human inclination, and not one we should (or even could) discard so haphazardly.

I also find it interesting that Sapolsky himself occasionally appears to slip between two different positions: for most of the book, his stance seems to be that free will, categorically, does not exist, but every so often, he backpedals by saying that there is simply "much less free will than is generally assumed". I hesitate to accuse Sapolsky outright of pulling a motte-and-bailey, but he openly declares in his introduction that his goal "isn't to convince you [the reader] that there's no free will", but that it "will suffice if you conclude that there's so much less free will [...] that you have to change your thinking about some truly important things" (p. 12). Again: forgive me for being pedantic, but these are two very different claims, and you don't get to defend your position by defending an ostensibly related one. If Sapolsky is arguing for the second claim, then I think we essentially agree (apart from my aforementioned reservations about doing away with moral responsibility altogether); however, if he is truly arguing for the first claim, then I think either he is arguing a moot point, or I have genuinely misunderstood his entire argument. I don't think this was a deliberate piece of rhetorical trickery on Sapolsky's part, but I find it hard to take this as anything else than a subconscious admission that his definition of free will is so strict as to be basically useless for most intents and purposes. Whatever the case, I find this a pretty telling inconsistency.

Having said all of that, I think Sapolsky definitely makes a lot of points that are at the very least interesting to think about. There's probably a lot to learn from this book if you're interested in these topics, and Sapolsky's writing is often highly enjoyable to read: witty, engaging, concise, and maybe a little snide or dismissive occasionally, but never unnecessarily mean or caustic. Nevertheless, I can't help but question Sapolsky's judgement in writing a book like this at this particular point in history. I know, if Sapolsky is right, then he wouldn't really have had a choice in whether or not to write this book in the first place, but if you'll indulge me for a second: at a time when people are already feeling increasingly helpless and at the mercy of forces outside of their control, writing a book that might end up reinforcing their sense of fatalism just doesn't seem like a very—for lack of a better term—"responsible" thing to do. If Sapolsky had just written a book arguing that people's decisions are often not just a result of their own conscious choices and the implications this has for either restorative or retributive justice, I think he'd have more success in getting people on board with his message. As it stands, what Sapolsky is trying to accomplish with this book strikes me as the equivalent of using a nuke to squat a fly.

P.S. I didn't want to make this review any longer than it already is, but I believe I'm only a stone's throw away from the character limit anyway, so I figured I might as well jot down some final remarks in the space I have left:
-Sapolsky offers an explanation of how he accounts for the possibility of change in a deterministic universe, but I must admit: I find it thoroughly unconvincing. Or not even "unconvincing" necessarily, but beside the point: of course "change" can happen in a deterministic universe, but what's the point of even stipulating that if the course of any change is supposedly predetermined?
-On the subject of moral accountability: Sapolsky ends the book by positing that future generations will deem us "heartless" for holding people morally accountable, but—and I feel almost petty pointing this out—this is itself a moral judgement. If people can't be held accountable for their actions, they also can't be held accountable for holding people accountable, at least not in this hypothetical future society where everyone has been converted to Sapolskian determinism. Again, I can only take this as an inadvertent admission that we cannot escape the logic of moral accountability even when we consciously try to.
-Even if I were to grant all of Sapolsky's arguments about free will, I still don't think he would have proved determinism to be true. The onus still lies very much with the determinists in my view, and the particular brand of hard determinism Sapolsky describes in his book strikes me as bordering on unfalsifiability.
-I hope I've made it clear that I share Sapolsky's wish for a more egalitarian and compassionate society. Where I believe we differ is that I don't think the inequalities in our society stem purely from our societal belief that some people are just entitled to being better off than others, or that resolving those inequalities (or that sense of entitlement, for that matter) hinges solely or even principally on the question of free will. I believe there are other obstacles on the road to social equality, as well as different means of getting there than dispensing with free will belief. Resting the case for equality and justice entirely on a question of metaphysics seems reductive to me, if not counterproductive.
-I just want to end by noting that, based on his book and the few talks of his I've seen on YouTube, Sapolsky seems like a genuinely fun guy, and someone with whom you can have an honest, respectful disagreement. I think his heart is definitely in the right place, and I suspect our politics are probably pretty similar on most practical, short-term issues; my disagreement with him—much like the whole free will debate itself in my opinion—is entirely philosophical.