There is no free will
After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, scientist and author Robert Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behaviour is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.
This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.
“The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,” Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”
Analysing human behaviour through the lens of any single discipline leaves room for the possibility that people choose their actions, he says. But after a long cross-disciplinary career, he feels it’s intellectually dishonest to write anything other than what he sees as the unavoidable conclusion: Free will is a myth, and the sooner we accept that, the more just our society will be.
His book “Determined,” builds on Sapolsky’s 2017 bestseller “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,” which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
The book breaks down the neurochemical influences that contribute to human behaviours, analysing the milliseconds to centuries preceding, say, the pulling of a trigger or the suggestive touch on an arm.
“Determined” goes a step further. If it’s impossible for any single neuron or any single brain to act without influence from factors beyond its control, Sapolsky argues, there can be no logical room for free will.
“Who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame, punishment and reward,” said Gregg Caruso, a philosopher at SUNY Corning who read early drafts of the book. “I am in agreement with Sapolsky that life without belief in free will is not only possible but preferable.”
Saul Smilansky, a philosopher at the University of Haifa in Israel and author of the book “Free Will and Illusion,” rejects the idea that we can will ourselves to transcend all genetic and environmental constraints. But if we want to live in a just society, we have to believe that we can.
In the short story “What’s Expected of Us,” by speculative fiction writer Ted Chiang. The narrator describes a new technology that convinces users their choices are predetermined, a discovery that saps them of their will to live.
“It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter,” the narrator warns, “even though you know that they don’t.”
The greatest risk of abandoning free will, Sapolsky concedes, isn’t that we’ll want to do bad things. It’s that, without a sense of personal agency, we won’t want to do anything.
His true hope, he says, is to increase compassion. Maybe if people understand how thoroughly an early history of trauma can rewire a brain, they’ll stop lusting for harsh punishments. Maybe if someone realizes they have a brain condition like depression or ADHD, they’ll stop hating themselves for struggling with tasks that seem easier for others.
Just as previous generations thought seizures were brought on by witchcraft, some of our current beliefs about personal responsibility may eventually be undone by scientific discovery.
We are machines, Sapolsky argues, exceptional in our ability to perceive our own experiences and feel emotions about them. It is pointless to hate a machine for its failures.
There is only one last thread he can’t resolve.
“It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, and meaningless to believe that something ‘good’ can happen to a machine,” he writes. “Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.”