The case against free will

0:00:06 Support for this show comes from the Audible original, The Downloaded 2, Ghosts in the Machine.
0:00:15 Quantum computers, the next great frontier of technology, offering endless possibilities that stretch the human mind.
0:00:23 But for Roscoe Cadulian and the Phoenix Colony, quantum computing uploads the human mind with life-altering consequences.
0:00:34 Audible’s hit sci-fi thriller, The Downloaded, returns with Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, reprising his role as Roscoe Cadulian in The Downloaded 2, Ghosts in the Machine.
0:00:41 This thought-provoking sequel from Robert J. Sawyer takes listeners on a captivating sci-fi journey.
0:00:47 A mind-bending must-listen that asks, what are you willing to lose to save the ones you love?
0:00:53 The Downloaded 2, Ghosts in the Machine. Available now, only from Audible.
0:01:06 Support for this show comes from the Audible original, The Downloaded 2, Ghosts in the Machine.
0:01:09 The Earth only has a few days left.
0:01:15 Roscoe Cadulian and the rest of the Phoenix Colony have to re-upload their minds into the quantum computer.
0:01:20 But a new threat has arisen that could destroy their stored consciousness forever.
0:01:29 Listen to Oscar winner Brendan Fraser reprise his role as Roscoe Cadulian in this follow-up to the Audible original blockbuster, The Downloaded.
0:01:35 It’s a thought-provoking sci-fi journey where identity, memory, and morality collide.
0:01:40 Robert J. Sawyer does it again with this much-anticipated sequel that leaves you asking,
0:01:44 What are you willing to lose to save the ones you love?
0:01:50 The Downloaded 2, Ghosts in the Machine. Available now, only from Audible.
0:02:01 There are many ways to think about the history of humanity.
0:02:08 One of them is to say that humans have gradually lifted themselves out of ignorance
0:02:12 as we’ve learned more about ourselves and the natural world.
0:02:16 That’s a little crude, to be sure, but it’s true enough.
0:02:20 Most of us don’t believe in witchcraft anymore,
0:02:25 and most of us don’t believe that demons are the cause of diseases either.
0:02:30 But for a long, long time, these were commonly held beliefs.
0:02:32 That’s progress.
0:02:39 But that fact should prompt an obvious question.
0:02:44 When future humans look back on our time, what will they think?
0:02:50 What do we believe now that might, in retrospect, look absurd to them?
0:02:55 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:03:10 Today’s guest is Robert Sapolsky.
0:03:14 He’s a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford,
0:03:17 and the author of a monumental new book called
0:03:21 Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will.
0:03:25 The book makes a rather provocative claim,
0:03:27 which is that free will is an illusion.
0:03:31 We all have the subjective experience of feeling like
0:03:33 we’re the authors of our thoughts and actions,
0:03:36 but Sapolsky says that isn’t true,
0:03:40 and we know enough about the brain now to finally accept that.
0:03:46 If he’s right, the moral and legal implications are enormous.
0:03:50 The way we think of success and failure,
0:03:52 as well as blame and punishment,
0:03:53 will have to change.
0:03:58 The debate about free will goes back a long way,
0:04:01 and I doubt the debate will ever end,
0:04:02 no matter what we learn about the brain.
0:04:06 Sapolsky, to his credit, knows this.
0:04:09 And he knows that it’s almost impossible for us
0:04:12 to fully let go of belief in something like free will.
0:04:15 But he wrote the book anyway,
0:04:18 because he thinks that we can still transform
0:04:19 the way we treat each other
0:04:22 in light of what we now know.
0:04:27 Robert Sapolsky, welcome to The Gray Area.
0:04:29 Well, thanks for having me on.
0:04:31 You have a pretty broad academic background.
0:04:34 When people ask you what you do or what you study,
0:04:34 what’s your answer?
0:04:37 Well, I’m sort of a hybrid.
0:04:40 I’m kind of half of a neurobiologist
0:04:44 and in a lab and mucking around with neurons
0:04:46 and genes and such.
0:04:49 And my other sort of hat over the years
0:04:51 has been as a primatologist,
0:04:55 studying wild baboons in a national park in East Africa
0:04:58 and going back to the same animals
0:05:01 each summer for more than 30 years.
0:05:04 So I’ve kind of been oscillating back and forth.
0:05:06 So I’m a little bit of each.
0:05:08 Before we get into your arguments,
0:05:11 there are a few terms we should define.
0:05:14 So everyone has their bearings.
0:05:17 I mean, unless you’re a philosophy sicko,
0:05:19 most people aren’t spending a lot of time
0:05:20 with this discourse.
0:05:23 And no offense to philosophy sickos,
0:05:24 those are our people.
0:05:26 I just don’t want to take anything for granted.
0:05:28 So let me just start with the obvious one,
0:05:31 which is free will.
0:05:32 How do you define that?
0:05:35 Well, maybe the best place to start
0:05:38 is to point out how most people define it
0:05:42 because that immediately starts getting you into trouble.
0:05:46 And it’s probably best displayed in a courtroom.
0:05:50 You got some defendant sitting at the table there
0:05:52 and everybody agrees the guy did it.
0:05:55 And now there’s three questions
0:05:57 that strike everyone intuitively
0:06:00 as covering the entire universe of free will.
0:06:03 First off, did the guy intend to do what he did?
0:06:06 Did he understand what the outcome was likely to be?
0:06:09 And did he realize he didn’t have to do it?
0:06:11 There were alternatives available.
0:06:14 And if the answer is yes to all of those,
0:06:15 that’s it.
0:06:16 Culpability.
0:06:17 The guy’s responsible.
0:06:18 He knew what he was doing.
0:06:20 He exercised free will.
0:06:24 And this is what gives me sort of polite apoplexy
0:06:27 throughout this book
0:06:28 because in my view,
0:06:31 what you’re doing is
0:06:32 you’ve got a movie reviewer
0:06:34 and they’ve got to write a review of a movie
0:06:36 and all they’re allowed to see
0:06:38 is the last three minutes of the movie.
0:06:40 Why is that?
0:06:42 Because amid those,
0:06:43 did he intend?
0:06:45 Did he know he had alternatives?
0:06:45 All of that.
0:06:48 It’s not asking the only question
0:06:49 that now has to be asked,
0:06:50 which is,
0:06:53 how’d he wind up being the sort of person
0:06:55 who would intend to do that?
0:06:57 Where did that intend to come from?
0:06:59 And that’s where free will
0:07:01 sort of withers on the vine.
0:07:02 Isn’t one of the problems
0:07:04 that the answer to that question
0:07:06 is very, very complicated and long,
0:07:07 whereas the answers to the other questions
0:07:08 are yes or no?
0:07:10 Yes, exactly.
0:07:13 And I’ve sort of seen that contrast
0:07:15 over and over again.
0:07:15 Yeah.
0:07:18 I think the other two terms
0:07:19 we need to define here
0:07:20 before we go any further
0:07:23 are determinism and compatibilism.
0:07:25 Go ahead and unpack those however you like.
0:07:26 Okay.
0:07:30 Determinism is sort of among scientists,
0:07:32 philosophers, all of that.
0:07:34 It’s basically admitting that
0:07:37 the world is made out of science-y sort of stuff.
0:07:39 We’re made of cells.
0:07:41 Cells are made of molecules.
0:07:43 Nobody is invoking magic here.
0:07:46 And thus, we’re dealing with
0:07:48 like the loss of physical universe.
0:07:49 In my mind,
0:07:51 what determinism means
0:07:52 in the context of free will debate
0:07:55 is if you take two people
0:07:57 and one of them has had
0:08:00 the most outrageously successful life possible
0:08:02 and is a CEO of somewhere
0:08:03 and the other person is homeless,
0:08:06 if you switched their childhoods
0:08:08 and you switched their genes
0:08:10 and you switched their prenatal environments
0:08:13 and you switched what sort of neighborhood
0:08:14 they lived in as an adolescent,
0:08:16 so on and so forth,
0:08:18 the other one would be the CEO
0:08:20 and this would be the one who’s homeless.
0:08:22 That’s how I think of determinism
0:08:24 in an everyday sense
0:08:27 that how these people wound up
0:08:29 was completely sculpted
0:08:31 by all the things that came before
0:08:32 that they had no control over.
0:08:35 And how is compatibilism different from that?
0:08:37 Well, that’s kind of where
0:08:39 90% of philosophers are,
0:08:40 according to Poles,
0:08:42 which is, yeah,
0:08:45 they say the universe is indeed made up of atoms
0:08:46 and there’s like physical laws
0:08:50 and we’re just like a squishy brain thing
0:08:53 and yet, somehow, somehow,
0:08:56 there is still room to pull free will out of there.
0:08:59 These are folks who, definitionally,
0:09:01 are compatible with the notion
0:09:03 that this is a deterministic world,
0:09:05 yet somehow there’s free will
0:09:07 and somehow it’s okay
0:09:09 to hold people responsible for their actions.
0:09:11 Let me be clear about your camp here.
0:09:14 You call yourself a hard incompatibilist
0:09:16 or a hard determinist.
0:09:17 What does that mean exactly
0:09:18 and where do you fit
0:09:21 in between these two poles you just defined?
0:09:26 Well, so alongside those deterministic compatibilists,
0:09:28 there’s us incompatibilists who say
0:09:30 that makes no sense.
0:09:33 Every single explanation you come up with
0:09:36 for where free will comes from
0:09:38 amid us being made up of neurons
0:09:39 and all that sort of,
0:09:42 every explanation at some point,
0:09:44 even if very subtly,
0:09:47 invokes some kind of magic going on in there.
0:09:51 And I think I count as a hard incompatibilist
0:09:54 in that I’m extending that
0:09:55 not just to, you know,
0:09:57 when we’re making our most important decisions,
0:10:00 but when we’re picking strawberry ice cream
0:10:01 over chocolate.
0:10:06 In effect, that I think there’s no free will whatsoever,
0:10:09 which puts me way out at the extreme there,
0:10:11 even among the incompatibilists.
0:10:15 So if I rewound the movie of my life
0:10:19 and I held every little thing constant,
0:10:21 I mean, down to the breakfast I had every morning,
0:10:24 down to the amount of sleep I got every night,
0:10:26 could I have done otherwise
0:10:28 at any moment in my life?
0:10:30 Or do you believe everything would have unfolded
0:10:33 exactly as it did the first time around
0:10:35 because it couldn’t have unfolded otherwise?
0:10:37 In principle, exactly that.
0:10:38 And this was sort of an idea
0:10:40 put forward a couple of centuries ago,
0:10:43 this notion that rerun the tape
0:10:45 with everything held constant
0:10:48 and you’d always get the same exact outcome.
0:10:50 In reality, it doesn’t work that way
0:10:54 because there’s randomness thrown in,
0:10:55 Brownian motion,
0:10:58 so that you release a little bit more
0:10:59 of this neurotransmitter
0:11:01 rather than less collectively
0:11:04 at 15 gazillion synapses
0:11:05 that winds up making a difference,
0:11:07 randomness in other areas.
0:11:11 And the basic chaoticism of systems,
0:11:14 which mean that tiny, tiny differences
0:11:16 due to randomness get amplified,
0:11:18 the famous butterfly effect.
0:11:20 So in effect,
0:11:22 this makes this thought experiment impossible to do.
0:11:25 But if you could control
0:11:28 for all the random little molecular hiccups going on,
0:11:31 yeah, you’d get the same outcome
0:11:33 if everything else in the universe
0:11:34 was held constant also.
0:11:38 I’ve heard philosopher and neuroscientist types
0:11:40 make what I guess is a case
0:11:42 for some kind of compatibilism
0:11:44 by arguing that,
0:11:45 okay, look,
0:11:47 the same inputs in different individuals
0:11:50 don’t always produce identical outcomes.
0:11:52 It’s more like the world
0:11:54 and all these factors
0:11:56 impose parameters on us,
0:11:58 which is not quite deterministic
0:11:59 in a strict sense.
0:11:59 For you,
0:12:01 is this just an attempt
0:12:02 to kind of redefine free will
0:12:04 in order to salvage the concept?
0:12:06 Yeah, exactly.
0:12:08 It’s sort of like trying to get
0:12:09 a little bit of wiggle room there
0:12:10 saying,
0:12:10 okay, okay,
0:12:12 some stuff about us
0:12:13 is determined,
0:12:14 we’re willing to admit it,
0:12:16 but there’s a whole other domain
0:12:18 where it isn’t.
0:12:20 And the version of that
0:12:22 that is most seductive to people
0:12:25 is where most people will admit
0:12:26 there’s stuff about us
0:12:28 that we had no control over.
0:12:30 How tall we are,
0:12:32 what our memory span is like,
0:12:33 any, you know,
0:12:34 if you’re a runner,
0:12:36 whether the muscle fiber
0:12:37 makeup in your thighs
0:12:38 makes you a sprinter
0:12:40 or a marathon runner,
0:12:40 okay,
0:12:42 that’s all this biology stuff
0:12:43 and like people are willing
0:12:44 to admit that.
0:12:46 And where the free will
0:12:47 then comes in
0:12:49 is this like abyss
0:12:51 that people then fall into
0:12:51 which is saying,
0:12:52 yeah, yeah, yeah,
0:12:54 your attributes,
0:12:55 you had no control over,
0:12:58 but what you do with them,
0:12:59 that’s where you show
0:13:00 your free will.
0:13:02 Do you show tenacity?
0:13:03 Do you show backbone?
0:13:06 Are you instead self-indulgent?
0:13:08 Do you squander away your gifts?
0:13:10 And that’s this divide
0:13:12 that people have in their heads
0:13:14 and where you decide
0:13:15 you can judge the character
0:13:16 of someone
0:13:18 based on what they do
0:13:19 with what fate has handed them.
0:13:21 And the critical thing
0:13:24 is like how tall you are
0:13:25 and, you know,
0:13:26 what your neurons
0:13:27 are connected up with
0:13:29 is made of biology.
0:13:31 And what you do with it,
0:13:33 whether you show tenacity
0:13:34 or you squander
0:13:35 and everything in between,
0:13:37 is made of the exact same
0:13:38 sort of biology.
0:13:40 That’s not an area
0:13:42 where magically you’re free of that.
0:13:43 We are just as much
0:13:45 an outcome of determinism
0:13:46 when looking at
0:13:47 whether we can
0:13:50 make use of our gifts
0:13:51 or whether we can
0:13:53 overcome our adversities
0:13:54 the exact same extent
0:13:55 of biology
0:13:56 as to what color
0:13:57 our eyes are.
0:13:58 You used the word
0:13:59 tenacity, I think,
0:14:01 and one of the tropes,
0:14:03 I guess you would call it,
0:14:04 that comes up constantly
0:14:06 in these conversations
0:14:08 is someone will point
0:14:09 to people
0:14:11 who faced
0:14:11 equivalent
0:14:13 or near-equivalent
0:14:13 challenges
0:14:15 and life circumstances
0:14:17 and note that
0:14:18 some people overcome that
0:14:19 and flourish
0:14:21 in spite of those challenges
0:14:22 and other people don’t.
0:14:24 And this is supposed
0:14:25 to be an argument
0:14:26 in defense
0:14:28 of the power of will
0:14:29 and grit
0:14:31 and that sort of thing.
0:14:33 to that argument
0:14:34 you say what?
0:14:36 Because that’s a very,
0:14:37 very popular one.
0:14:39 It’s almost irresistible.
0:14:40 It is.
0:14:41 I fail to resist it
0:14:42 a lot of the time
0:14:43 because it’s so damn
0:14:44 inspirational.
0:14:46 Like, okay,
0:14:47 we’re endowed
0:14:48 with certain traits
0:14:49 we had no control over
0:14:49 and if you’re
0:14:50 seven foot four,
0:14:52 yeah, you’re in the NBA
0:14:53 and nobody’s
0:14:54 enormously surprised.
0:14:55 And then you get
0:14:56 this guy,
0:14:57 Muggsy Bogue,
0:14:59 who is five foot three
0:15:00 and played in the NBA
0:15:02 and he did that
0:15:03 out of nothing
0:15:04 but tenacity
0:15:05 and gumption
0:15:06 and Calvinist focus
0:15:08 and, like,
0:15:09 it’s so hard
0:15:10 not to be, like,
0:15:13 totally moved by that
0:15:14 at this display
0:15:15 of willfulness.
0:15:17 But there is no
0:15:18 willfulness
0:15:19 in the free will sense
0:15:20 going on there.
0:15:21 Okay,
0:15:22 you got a part
0:15:22 of the brain,
0:15:23 it’s called
0:15:24 the frontal cortex.
0:15:26 We’ve got more of it
0:15:27 than any other species.
0:15:28 it’s the most recently
0:15:29 evolved in us
0:15:31 and it does
0:15:33 exactly what puts you
0:15:34 in the world of gumption
0:15:36 or squandering your gifts.
0:15:38 What the frontal cortex does
0:15:39 is it makes you do
0:15:40 the hard thing
0:15:42 when that’s the right thing
0:15:42 to do.
0:15:44 Self-control,
0:15:45 discipline,
0:15:46 impulse control,
0:15:48 emotional regulation,
0:15:49 all that sort of stuff
0:15:51 and what kind
0:15:52 of frontal cortex
0:15:53 you have
0:15:54 is the outcome
0:15:55 of everything
0:15:56 that happened
0:15:57 in your life
0:15:57 beforehand.
0:15:58 Okay,
0:16:00 here’s one example
0:16:00 that should, like,
0:16:02 have people outraged.
0:16:04 Socioeconomic status.
0:16:05 By the time
0:16:06 a kid
0:16:08 is five years old,
0:16:10 the socioeconomic status
0:16:10 of the home
0:16:11 they came from
0:16:12 is already
0:16:14 a significant predictor
0:16:15 of how thick
0:16:16 their frontal cortex
0:16:17 is going to be,
0:16:19 what its metabolic rate is,
0:16:21 how well it works.
0:16:22 by age five already,
0:16:24 this is someone
0:16:26 who neurobiologically,
0:16:27 not because they don’t
0:16:28 have a great soul,
0:16:30 but neurobiologically,
0:16:31 is already going to be
0:16:32 lagging behind
0:16:33 at things like
0:16:34 impulse control
0:16:36 and long-term planning.
0:16:37 And people even know,
0:16:38 like,
0:16:39 the nuts and bolts
0:16:40 of how,
0:16:41 like,
0:16:42 the stress of poverty
0:16:44 turns into
0:16:45 chemical signals
0:16:46 that make
0:16:46 the frontal cortex
0:16:47 don’t develop as well.
0:16:50 And you look at that
0:16:53 and there’s no room
0:16:54 for magic dust in there.
0:16:56 It’s yet another part
0:16:57 of sort of
0:16:59 the biological stuff
0:17:00 that makes you up.
0:17:01 So you can take
0:17:02 two facts about me, right?
0:17:03 So I’m six feet tall
0:17:06 and I exercise
0:17:07 three or four times a week.
0:17:07 I’ve done that
0:17:08 for many, many years.
0:17:09 Now,
0:17:10 we would take
0:17:10 one of those facts,
0:17:11 my height,
0:17:11 and assume
0:17:12 that’s something
0:17:12 over which obviously
0:17:14 I have no control.
0:17:15 I’m just,
0:17:16 I’m as tall as I am.
0:17:17 But we would think
0:17:18 of my decision
0:17:19 to go to the gym
0:17:20 or run
0:17:21 that I’m making
0:17:22 a conscious decision.
0:17:23 I’ve disciplined myself
0:17:23 in that way.
0:17:25 There’s some agency there.
0:17:25 But for you,
0:17:26 those are almost
0:17:27 a meaningless distinction,
0:17:28 right?
0:17:29 I’m equally irresponsible
0:17:31 if you really drill down
0:17:32 for both of those facts
0:17:32 about me.
0:17:34 Okay,
0:17:35 so I’m not overstating that.
0:17:35 No.
0:17:37 And let’s unpack
0:17:38 the,
0:17:39 you exercise
0:17:40 regularly
0:17:41 for years and years.
0:17:42 Let’s see.
0:17:43 Just
0:17:44 plumbing
0:17:45 issues
0:17:46 in your biology.
0:17:47 Maybe you’re someone
0:17:48 who lucked out
0:17:49 and you get
0:17:50 an endorphin rise
0:17:52 earlier than the average
0:17:53 person during exercise.
0:17:54 So it doesn’t hurt
0:17:55 as much
0:17:56 and you feel
0:17:57 all gauzy
0:17:58 and pastel colored
0:18:00 and it all feels
0:18:00 wonderful
0:18:01 at a higher rate
0:18:02 than it does
0:18:03 in other people.
0:18:04 Maybe your muscles
0:18:06 make less lactic acid
0:18:08 so it doesn’t hurt
0:18:08 as much
0:18:08 in that realm.
0:18:09 Okay,
0:18:10 so this is
0:18:12 plumbing stuff
0:18:12 as I said.
0:18:13 But maybe,
0:18:15 I don’t know,
0:18:17 maybe when you were
0:18:17 a kid
0:18:19 you were unathletic
0:18:20 and
0:18:21 mocked for it.
0:18:22 Maybe you were
0:18:24 an overweight kid,
0:18:24 whatever,
0:18:25 and at some point
0:18:26 you decided,
0:18:27 screw them,
0:18:27 I’m going to show
0:18:28 the world
0:18:29 just how fit I can be
0:18:30 and that’s driving
0:18:31 your fury.
0:18:32 Maybe you had
0:18:33 a parent
0:18:35 who terrorized
0:18:36 you about
0:18:37 never becoming
0:18:38 lazy
0:18:39 and this is
0:18:39 a manifestation
0:18:40 of it.
0:18:41 Maybe you grew
0:18:42 up in a culture
0:18:43 that emphasizes
0:18:44 physical health
0:18:45 because culturally
0:18:46 it confuses
0:18:48 physical well-being
0:18:49 with moral well-being,
0:18:50 et cetera,
0:18:51 et cetera.
0:18:53 And that’s how
0:18:54 you wound up
0:18:54 being the person
0:18:55 you are.
0:18:56 Not only someone
0:18:57 who would value
0:18:59 exercising regularly,
0:19:00 but when you’re
0:19:01 tired as hell
0:19:02 and you want to
0:19:02 sit down
0:19:03 and eat something,
0:19:04 somehow you wound
0:19:05 up with a frontal
0:19:06 cortex that gets
0:19:07 you to exercise
0:19:08 even though you
0:19:09 don’t feel like it.
0:19:10 This is getting
0:19:10 too close to
0:19:12 psychoanalyzing me,
0:19:12 so let me steer
0:19:13 away here real quick.
0:19:15 So you’re not
0:19:15 just saying,
0:19:16 and this would be
0:19:17 a crude hearing
0:19:18 of what you’re saying,
0:19:19 you’re not just
0:19:20 saying we are
0:19:20 our genes,
0:19:21 you’re saying
0:19:23 we are our genes
0:19:24 and our brains
0:19:25 and our cultures
0:19:26 and our environments
0:19:27 and our histories
0:19:28 and the thing
0:19:29 that all of this
0:19:30 has in common
0:19:31 is that we don’t
0:19:32 really have much
0:19:32 control over it.
0:19:33 We don’t really
0:19:34 choose these things,
0:19:36 they just happen to us
0:19:37 and we are products
0:19:38 of all these things
0:19:39 interacting with each other.
0:19:39 Yeah,
0:19:41 and I’m glad
0:19:42 you started off
0:19:44 trashing sort of
0:19:45 the dominance
0:19:46 of genes a bit.
0:19:46 People,
0:19:47 when they think about
0:19:49 biological roots
0:19:49 of behavior,
0:19:51 often what they’re
0:19:51 thinking of
0:19:52 is the genetic
0:19:54 roots of behavior
0:19:55 because genes
0:19:56 control everything
0:19:57 and genes are
0:19:59 like witless,
0:20:00 idiotic influences
0:20:01 and all of this,
0:20:02 they’re a contributing
0:20:03 factor.
0:20:04 Genes don’t control
0:20:05 anything,
0:20:06 they interact with
0:20:06 environment,
0:20:07 all of that.
0:20:08 But yes,
0:20:09 in this larger sense,
0:20:10 not only isn’t the
0:20:11 whole world
0:20:12 run by your genes,
0:20:14 it’s not run by
0:20:15 your genes
0:20:16 plus your hormones
0:20:17 plus your brain
0:20:17 makeup,
0:20:19 and it’s run
0:20:20 by all of that
0:20:21 over which you
0:20:22 had no control,
0:20:23 interacting with
0:20:24 environment
0:20:24 over which you
0:20:26 had no control.
0:20:26 So yes,
0:20:27 absolutely.
0:20:28 You mentioned
0:20:28 that something
0:20:29 like 90%
0:20:30 of scientists
0:20:31 and philosophers,
0:20:32 people who think
0:20:32 about this,
0:20:33 still fall into
0:20:34 this compatibilist
0:20:35 camp,
0:20:35 but why do you
0:20:36 think so many
0:20:37 people who are
0:20:37 thinking about
0:20:38 this aren’t
0:20:40 seeing what
0:20:40 you’re seeing?
0:20:41 What’s motivating
0:20:42 that?
0:20:43 Well,
0:20:43 first,
0:20:44 a very,
0:20:44 very important
0:20:45 distinction there.
0:20:48 It’s about 95%
0:20:49 of philosophers.
0:20:50 When you take
0:20:51 people who spend
0:20:52 their time looking
0:20:52 at like how
0:20:54 brains work,
0:20:54 the percentage
0:20:55 of people who
0:20:56 are mighty
0:20:57 skeptical about
0:20:58 free will is
0:20:58 much,
0:20:59 much higher
0:20:59 there.
0:21:01 And it’s
0:21:01 simply because
0:21:02 you spend
0:21:03 your time
0:21:04 looking at
0:21:04 the gears,
0:21:06 looking at
0:21:07 the workings
0:21:07 of it,
0:21:08 and whether
0:21:09 you are a
0:21:10 neuroscience type
0:21:11 who’s trying
0:21:12 to understand
0:21:12 like why
0:21:14 people wind
0:21:14 up with
0:21:15 certainly
0:21:16 certain
0:21:16 propensities
0:21:17 for violence
0:21:18 and what it’s
0:21:18 got,
0:21:19 or if you’re
0:21:20 somebody who’s
0:21:20 like trying to
0:21:21 understand how
0:21:22 like lobsters
0:21:23 fall in love
0:21:24 with each
0:21:24 other or
0:21:25 whatever it is
0:21:25 they do,
0:21:26 you’re working
0:21:27 with a starting
0:21:28 premise that
0:21:29 underneath the
0:21:30 surface there’s
0:21:31 all these gears
0:21:33 and these gears
0:21:34 are what
0:21:35 determines what
0:21:35 comes out.
0:21:42 more of my
0:21:43 conversation with
0:21:44 Robert Sapolsky
0:21:45 after a quick
0:21:45 break.
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0:25:42 So let’s get into
0:25:43 what you think is
0:25:45 happening when most
0:25:46 of us believe we’re
0:25:48 exercising our free
0:25:48 will.
0:25:48 You know, one thing
0:25:50 I took from your
0:25:51 last book, which we
0:25:54 discussed, Behave, is
0:25:56 that humans are very
0:25:57 confused and weird
0:25:58 species.
0:25:59 we’re capable of
0:26:01 extraordinary goodness
0:26:03 and also unimaginable
0:26:03 evil.
0:26:05 Does all that
0:26:07 variability suggest
0:26:09 not only that context
0:26:09 matters, but that
0:26:11 there’s something like
0:26:13 free will involved, that
0:26:14 we’re able to choose in a
0:26:15 way that other animals
0:26:16 don’t, and that’s why
0:26:17 we’re so diverse, or at
0:26:18 least more diverse than
0:26:20 cockroaches or mice?
0:26:23 Well, actually, we’re
0:26:25 more diverse because
0:26:27 there’s all sorts of
0:26:28 mechanisms by which
0:26:30 genes make you free of
0:26:33 genetic influences, and
0:26:34 our genes do that more
0:26:35 than any.
0:26:36 The wiring of our
0:26:38 nervous system is more
0:26:39 sensitive to
0:26:40 environmental hiccups
0:26:41 than most any other
0:26:42 species out there.
0:26:44 We come out as
0:26:45 different people because
0:26:48 of different pasts,
0:26:49 and when you then
0:26:51 look at sort of the
0:26:52 case you bring up, this
0:26:53 is another one of those
0:26:55 irresistible things, people
0:26:56 saying, oh my god, are
0:26:57 you saying if there’s no
0:26:59 free will, nothing can
0:26:59 ever change?
0:27:02 Or conversely, if
0:27:03 somebody changes their
0:27:05 behavior dramatically,
0:27:07 you’re saying, like, free
0:27:08 will wasn’t involved in
0:27:09 it, and it wasn’t
0:27:10 involved in the
0:27:12 slightest, as long as
0:27:13 you change your wording
0:27:14 a little bit.
0:27:15 Like, you look at
0:27:18 someone who has, you
0:27:20 overcome an addiction, and
0:27:22 you say they chose to
0:27:24 tough it out, and what
0:27:25 you’re actually saying in
0:27:27 a case like that is all
0:27:28 the stuff they had no
0:27:30 control over turned them
0:27:31 into the sort of person so
0:27:34 that in this setting, this
0:27:35 would cause this change in
0:27:36 their behavior.
0:27:37 They didn’t choose to
0:27:38 change.
0:27:40 They were changed by
0:27:41 everything that came
0:27:41 before.
0:27:44 And here’s, like, an
0:27:44 example of it.
0:27:46 You go to some movie, some
0:27:48 inspirational movie about
0:27:50 someone who’s just a
0:27:52 regular person like
0:27:53 everyone else, and out of
0:27:54 nowhere they do something
0:27:57 amazing, and you walk out
0:27:58 of the movie changed.
0:28:00 You say, whoa, that’s
0:28:01 totally amazing.
0:28:03 I’m going to go volunteer
0:28:05 with, you know, Doctors
0:28:06 Without Borders tomorrow.
0:28:09 And meanwhile, the person who
0:28:10 sat next to you in the movie
0:28:12 comes out of there changed.
0:28:13 They say, oh, my God, that
0:28:15 cinematography was so
0:28:16 incredible.
0:28:17 I’m going to go look at the
0:28:18 other films this guy has
0:28:19 done.
0:28:21 And the person sitting next
0:28:22 to them come out and say,
0:28:24 oh, my God, that was the
0:28:26 most emotionally manipulative,
0:28:27 like, crude movie I’ve ever
0:28:29 seen, and, like, I’m not
0:28:30 going to see anything made
0:28:31 by this director anymore.
0:28:34 Wow, all three people were
0:28:36 changed by this, and why
0:28:37 were they changed in such
0:28:38 different ways?
0:28:40 because they went into the
0:28:41 movie being different
0:28:42 people.
0:28:43 And how did they become
0:28:44 those different people?
0:28:46 Because of everything that
0:28:47 came before.
0:28:50 They went into that, shaped
0:28:52 by all that added control
0:28:54 stuff before, so that they
0:28:55 were going to respond to a
0:28:57 stimulus by this, by saying,
0:28:58 oh, my God, that’s the most
0:29:00 like saccharine and manipulative
0:29:02 thing, or saying, wow, I feel
0:29:04 like I could make a difference
0:29:05 now, and I’m going to go out
0:29:06 and do that tomorrow.
0:29:08 And that’s what we call
0:29:11 choosing to change, and what
0:29:12 you are doing, in fact, is
0:29:15 being changed when the world
0:29:17 around you interacts with the
0:29:19 sort of person you turned out
0:29:19 to be.
0:29:22 It is very hard to not
0:29:24 associate determinism with the
0:29:26 idea that everything is
0:29:28 predetermined, but that’s not
0:29:29 what you’re saying.
0:29:31 I thought you made a helpful
0:29:31 distinction in the book.
0:29:33 You said something to the
0:29:34 effect of, we don’t really
0:29:34 change our minds, but our
0:29:37 minds are changed by the
0:29:38 circumstances around us.
0:29:39 And so there is room for
0:29:41 change, even though you hold
0:29:43 a deterministic model of the
0:29:43 world.
0:29:44 Yeah.
0:29:46 And this brings up this
0:29:47 distinction, determinism,
0:29:50 like scientific determinism is
0:29:51 what I’m talking about.
0:29:52 All you need to do is look at
0:29:54 the world, and there’s amazing
0:29:57 examples of people changing,
0:29:59 or there’s incredibly, like,
0:30:02 subtle, uninteresting ones, and
0:30:04 our values shift, our moral
0:30:06 anchoring shift, our tastes, our
0:30:09 idiosyncrasies, our quirks, all
0:30:11 of that, and it doesn’t come
0:30:14 from nowhere, and the instinct
0:30:16 everyone has as to where it
0:30:18 does come from is some sort of
0:30:21 me sitting inside your brain
0:30:23 that’s separate of all that, like,
0:30:25 brain yuck doing stuff around
0:30:27 you, and that’s the one that
0:30:29 decides, yeah, I’m not going to
0:30:31 go into that bar, I know this
0:30:32 is a danger for me, or
0:30:35 whatever, whereas what I would
0:30:39 say is that that’s you coming
0:30:42 out of a movie changed by what
0:30:44 went on and the sort of person
0:30:45 you were going into it.
0:30:47 Help me understand something
0:30:48 here, and maybe the audience, and
0:30:49 I’m not even disagreeing with
0:30:51 you, I just, I want to flesh this
0:30:51 out a little bit.
0:30:55 So if it’s true that humans
0:30:57 tend to increase the frequency
0:30:59 of behaviors when they’re
0:31:01 rewarded for them, and decrease
0:31:03 them when we’re punished, then
0:31:05 how would you characterize what’s
0:31:07 going on there if it’s not the
0:31:08 capacity to learn and will
0:31:10 ourselves into behaving
0:31:11 differently because of the
0:31:13 outcomes we’ve witnessed?
0:31:15 Well, for one thing, sort of a
0:31:17 stance of behaviorism like that,
0:31:19 it turns out to be there’s some
0:31:21 domains where when you reward
0:31:23 a behavior, it becomes more
0:31:25 likely in the future if you
0:31:26 punish it, all of that, but
0:31:28 there’s all sorts of areas where
0:31:30 it doesn’t work that way in the
0:31:32 slightest, and one like big
0:31:35 societal version is, you know,
0:31:37 imposing a death penalty has no
0:31:40 impact on violent crime that’s
0:31:42 impulsive, or in a much more
0:31:44 local way, you get people who
0:31:46 love the wrong person, and they
0:31:48 are abused their whole lives, and
0:31:50 they come back for more, and
0:31:52 like a brine shrimp being
0:31:54 conditioned to avoid a stimulus
0:31:56 that’s aversive would show more
0:31:58 success at mastering that than
0:31:59 someone who’s doing that, yeah.
0:32:02 So in some domains, reward and
0:32:03 punishment have those sorts of
0:32:06 effects, but in the bigger sense,
0:32:08 when they do have their effects,
0:32:12 change occurs, but it’s not, as
0:32:14 you said, that the person chose
0:32:15 to change.
0:32:17 They come out a different person
0:32:19 again, because they went in a
0:32:20 different way.
0:32:23 Like, a great example of this that I
0:32:25 sort of talk about towards the end of
0:32:27 my previous book that you mentioned,
0:32:30 it’s called Behave, the Biology of
0:32:33 Humans at Her Best and Worst, was this
0:32:36 like totally moving incident that
0:32:39 occurred some years ago, which was in
0:32:42 Hawaii on Pearl Harbor Day, and a
0:32:44 whole bunch of these now elderly
0:32:46 survivors of the attack on Pearl
0:32:49 Harbor gathered there for some sort
0:32:50 of playing of taps or who knows
0:32:52 what, and there was a crowd of
0:32:54 onlookers, and out of the crowd
0:32:58 comes this old man who comes up to
0:33:00 them, and he’s an elderly Japanese
0:33:04 man who said, I was one of the people
0:33:05 who bombed you at Pearl Harbor.
0:33:08 I was one of the lead pilots of
0:33:11 a squadron, and I did the wrong
0:33:13 thing, and I am sorry, and can you
0:33:13 forgive me?
0:33:17 Oh my God, that’s amazing, and some of
0:33:20 the guys said, no way in hell, and some
0:33:21 of them embraced him, and he became
0:33:24 very close with one of these survivors,
0:33:25 and they were close for the rest of
0:33:27 their lives, and it’s like totally
0:33:31 moving, and wow, this guy somehow sat
0:33:34 there and chose to think differently
0:33:36 about what went on during that attack
0:33:38 and chose to be a different, no, not
0:33:40 at all, because there were all sorts
0:33:42 of interesting predictors about him.
0:33:45 He was captured by Americans towards
0:33:48 the end of the war, and they treated
0:33:51 him decently, unlike some of his
0:33:53 colleagues who were captured by other
0:33:54 forces there.
0:33:57 He came out kind of liking Americans.
0:33:59 He worked for a corporation, a
0:34:01 multinational, for years and years that
0:34:04 was owned in America, and it involved
0:34:05 sort of making a lot of trips to
0:34:08 America, and he began to figure out
0:34:10 that sort of he liked the culture.
0:34:12 One of his kids moved to America for
0:34:15 college and married someone from there,
0:34:17 and all of this brought about changes, and
0:34:20 the most telling thing with this guy is
0:34:22 he also participated in the Japanese
0:34:26 Air Force during the invasion and
0:34:29 takeover of Manchuria and China, which
0:34:31 produced some of the largest atrocities
0:34:35 in history, and there’s no evidence he
0:34:37 ever went back and apologized to anybody
0:34:37 there.
0:34:41 His subsequent years turned out to be
0:34:43 ones that turned him into somebody who
0:34:46 kind of realized Americans were nice, or
0:34:48 at least the ones he encountered, and he
0:34:51 started feeling kind of badly that he had
0:34:53 killed a whole bunch of them back when in
0:34:54 a sneak attack.
0:34:57 And there comes massive change.
0:35:00 I’m trying to think of a very simple
0:35:02 example from my own life that would be
0:35:04 relatable so that we can kind of look at
0:35:06 what the mechanics of this actually is.
0:35:09 You know, like, here’s something I’ve
0:35:10 talked about on the show before, actually.
0:35:13 So one of my frustrations, a pretty
0:35:16 regular frustration, is this experience of
0:35:19 knowing what I should do and still not
0:35:20 being able to do it.
0:35:23 There are moments, for example, where, say,
0:35:26 I’m on the verge of an argument with my
0:35:27 wife.
0:35:27 It’s stupid.
0:35:30 There’s nothing good that can come from
0:35:30 it.
0:35:34 And I know the right thing to do is to
0:35:35 just let it go.
0:35:38 Because I’ve escalated before and had a
0:35:40 big fight, and then the next day I feel
0:35:42 like an absolute moron.
0:35:45 And yet often, I can’t help myself.
0:35:48 It really is like I’m a barely sentient
0:35:49 marionette.
0:35:53 Now, I want to believe, I want to believe
0:35:56 that when this happens, it’s just a failure
0:35:59 of willpower or something like that on my
0:35:59 part.
0:36:03 And I can eventually become more
0:36:03 enlightened.
0:36:05 Maybe I just need to meditate more or
0:36:07 whatever, do some kind of therapy.
0:36:10 I can then not act like a jackass.
0:36:11 But do you think that’s an illusion?
0:36:13 Am I just condemned to jackassery forever
0:36:15 because something in my brain is hardwired
0:36:17 for this response, and I’m just going to do
0:36:20 it as though something is pushing a button
0:36:21 in me or pulling a lever, and this is what
0:36:22 happens when they do.
0:36:25 No, this is not destiny for a second, because
0:36:28 like, yeah, you do something in one of those
0:36:32 circumstances, and you really, really, really
0:36:33 regret the outcome.
0:36:36 And thus, you have any sort of social tension
0:36:40 like that, leaving a very, very aversive
0:36:42 response in you, and you avoid it.
0:36:45 Or, you come out of that feeling really upset
0:36:47 with yourself because you knew I should have
0:36:50 avoided this, and you go and meditate a whole
0:36:53 lot, and as a result, your levels of stress
0:36:55 hormones in your bloodstream are lower.
0:36:58 Okay, God, what does that have to do with it?
0:37:02 Your stress hormones, when you are under stress,
0:37:04 get into your brain, and get into your frontal
0:37:07 cortex, and keep it from working as well as
0:37:07 usual.
0:37:11 When we are under stress, it makes it harder for
0:37:13 it to do the harder thing.
0:37:16 And what you see there is, like, that’s the
0:37:19 explanation for why when we’re exhausted or scared
0:37:23 or tired or resentful or any such thing, we do
0:37:26 incredibly God-awful stupid things that we regret
0:37:28 forever after.
0:37:31 And either they seemed like a fantastic idea at the
0:37:34 time, or they seemed like a terrible idea, and you’re
0:37:36 telling yourself, don’t do it, and then you’ve done
0:37:36 it.
0:37:40 Because in a very here’s-the-gears-underneath-the-hood
0:37:46 kind of way, oh, when people become better at stress
0:37:48 management, they secrete less stress hormones.
0:37:51 And stress hormones make the brain do all sorts of
0:37:52 inadvisable things.
0:37:55 And maybe that’s how that worked out.
0:37:59 And we can even tell you, like, my lab obsessed over
0:38:02 this sort of thing for years, like, what exactly those
0:38:06 hormones are doing to which genes, into which of your
0:38:09 neurons, and which part of the brain, and why they do
0:38:12 less of it after you’ve become a different sort of
0:38:12 person.
0:38:16 I suppose lab rats demonstrate similar behavior, but we
0:38:18 don’t really think of rats as moral agents.
0:38:21 We just think of them as creatures responding to stimuli.
0:38:24 And I guess you’re saying that’s more or less true of us,
0:38:27 however unflattering that thought might be.
0:38:29 And it is a tad unflattering, I have to say.
0:38:34 Yeah, and this is where I agitate people the most.
0:38:38 When you really think about it, what we’ve built our moral
0:38:43 systems on make no sense intellectually, because it’s
0:38:49 predicated on this crazy world where we have, where we treat
0:38:53 some people way better than average for things they had
0:38:57 nothing to do with, and some people way worse, likewise.
0:39:02 And then we tell them they actually deserve to have what
0:39:02 happened to them.
0:39:06 And we decide that we’re living in a world built on justice.
0:39:08 And it makes no sense at all.
0:39:14 When you see the factors that contribute to someone who commits
0:39:19 anti-social behavior or somebody who turns out to be Mother Teresa, you
0:39:25 realize words like blame and punishment and praise and reward make
0:39:30 no sense biologically because they’re treating you as if you had
0:39:35 control over the person that circumstances made you into.
0:39:38 I just want to hold on that for a second, because what you’re saying is
0:39:43 really quite radical if you take it on board, truly.
0:39:47 One thing I was going to ask at some point was at the societal level, what
0:39:51 would you say is the biggest consequence of accepting the reality that free
0:39:53 will is an illusion?
0:39:57 And maybe the answer to that, and it’s probably my answer, is that our whole
0:40:03 understanding of blame and the belief in punishment as retribution, if you’re
0:40:06 right, that makes absolutely no sense.
0:40:10 And not only is it nonsensical, it’s obscene to behave as though it does make
0:40:11 sense.
0:40:12 Yeah, exactly.
0:40:16 When you really think about it, it’s outrageous.
0:40:22 And it’s outrageous that we have a world in which five-year-olds already have their
0:40:28 brain development blunted by they picked the wrong family to get born into, and it
0:40:31 was low socioeconomic status and stressful.
0:40:33 Yeah, none of it makes any sense.
0:40:39 And none of it is, you know, makes for a decent world.
0:40:50 And all we do is pass out a huge amount of human misery and human inequality built on things
0:40:53 that simply aren’t true, which is that we get what we deserve.
0:40:59 Is there ever an intellectually coherent reason to hate another human being?
0:40:59 No.
0:41:01 Under no circumstances?
0:41:02 Not in the slightest.
0:41:09 Under no circumstances, because if you really, really follow the logic of this out, hating
0:41:15 somebody makes as little sense as hating an earthquake or hating a coronavirus or hating
0:41:21 the fact that, you know, predators are predatory out on the savannah there and killed this nice
0:41:25 impala kind of thing that, no, hate makes no sense.
0:41:29 You know, all of that said, I know I’m going on here with these absolutes.
0:41:34 You know, I’ve been thinking this way for like more than 50 years.
0:41:36 I was an adolescent when I decided there’s no free will.
0:41:38 I absolutely think this way.
0:41:43 I’m completely intellectually at peace with the notion that there’s no free will at all.
0:41:48 And I can act on those conclusions maybe 1% of the time.
0:41:48 Yeah.
0:41:51 Because, you know, it’s hard.
0:41:58 I get pissed off at people or I am pleased and feel somehow like I earned it.
0:42:03 If somebody says, wow, like nice shirt you’re wearing or something like that.
0:42:09 And, you know, I’m a person of my place and time and I recognize how hard this is because
0:42:11 I fail over and over and over.
0:42:13 So, yeah, none of this is easy.
0:42:17 I was almost relieved when I got to that part of your book where you were sort of admitting
0:42:21 that you find it practically impossible to really behave as though there’s no free will
0:42:26 because it can often lead to some, in your words, nutty conclusions.
0:42:31 You know, I mean, and I’ve heard these sorts of arguments against free will before and no
0:42:37 matter how much sense they make, like you, I find it nearly impossible to behave as though
0:42:38 I really believe it.
0:42:45 I still can’t help but feel moral outrage at a child rapist just as I can’t help screaming
0:42:48 at my dog every time she barks at the mail truck.
0:42:51 It just, even though it makes no sense, right?
0:42:54 That’s just, she’s just doing what she does.
0:43:00 But this stuff is so hardwired into us, it’s very difficult to change how we respond to
0:43:01 it or how we think about it.
0:43:08 Yeah, it seems unimaginably difficult until we reflect on something, which is we’ve already
0:43:11 done it time and time and time again.
0:43:18 You know, if you and I were exactly the people we are now and we were sitting around 500 years
0:43:23 ago and there was a horrible, like, lightning storm last night that destroyed all sorts of
0:43:29 crops and, like, this is a disaster and stuff, it would have made total intuitive sense to
0:43:35 us that we hope the authorities would track down whichever witch did that, which old woman
0:43:42 with no teeth and no family living on the edge of the hamlet was the one who obviously exercised
0:43:44 free will in causing that lightning storm.
0:43:49 And we would have thought justice was served when the person was burned at the stake because
0:43:54 it would have been inconceivable to us that, like, there’s no such things as witches and
0:43:56 that’s not what caused lightning storms.
0:43:58 And we changed.
0:44:00 And society changed.
0:44:07 And now what was intuitively obvious then, oh, this was caused by a witch, is intuitively
0:44:09 ridiculous to us now.
0:44:10 We’ve managed that one.
0:44:17 And our society has done that over and over in all sorts of realms, and all we have to
0:44:24 do is push against the things that seem intuitively obvious right now in terms of who deserves what.
0:44:29 Well, there’s a flip side to the question I asked about whether it ever makes sense to hate
0:44:29 someone.
0:44:36 For the same reasons, it would also be nonsensical to ever really congratulate someone on their
0:44:37 achievements.
0:44:41 And again, this is something, it’s just hard to imagine us never not doing that.
0:44:42 Yeah.
0:44:48 And when I, like, lecture about this stuff, and if, like, these are people coming out to, like,
0:44:53 hear a lecture on free will on some Tuesday night or whatever, this is not your random collection
0:44:53 of humans.
0:44:58 And when they’re initially saying, oh, my God, are you saying just murderers should be allowed
0:45:00 to run around the streets, all of that?
0:45:06 Yeah, we work through that, but then you realize the thing they’re really upset about is, oh,
0:45:09 my God, are you saying I don’t deserve my really good salary?
0:45:15 Are you saying that I should feel no sense of pride or entitlement because I did something
0:45:17 wonderful for somebody in need yesterday?
0:45:21 Yeah, that’s where it really sticks in our throats.
0:45:27 Because if all of this means, like, the criminal justice system is gibberish, it also means
0:45:29 that meritocracies are gibberish.
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0:48:49 It is maybe impossible to overstate how much accepting all this really does force a total ideological reckoning for so many people.
0:48:54 And I don’t want to imply that this is a conservative thing or just a liberal thing, because it’s so much broader than that.
0:48:57 I mean, the very idea of a meritocracy, as you’re saying.
0:49:02 The very idea that we can claim some kind of moral credit for our success.
0:49:04 This is so fundamental to our culture.
0:49:07 And if you look close enough, you discover that it may not make any sense.
0:49:11 And even worse, believing that it does blinkers our ethical intuitions.
0:49:15 Which is why this is much more than just an abstract academic debate.
0:49:17 The stakes are enormously high.
0:49:18 Yeah.
0:49:26 And to have those intuitions challenged that somehow we played a role in making us who we are.
0:49:43 Look at the great, socially conscious, really smart, wonderful people who fill my classrooms at Stanford and go across the tracks to, like, East Palo Alto and look at the 20-year-olds who are in the county jail there.
0:49:59 And it’s not by chance that if you had to guess which one of them suffered physical abuse as a child and which one of them had parents who sang to them and played board games with them, like, you’re going to be on pretty solid ground making those predictions.
0:50:02 It’s not by chance.
0:50:11 And it’s a world that says, if you’re one of the lucky ones, somehow it’s okay for you to feel entitled that you somehow earned it.
0:50:26 And if you were one of the lucky ones where what you were gifted outside your control was your ability to work your ass off and be really focused on a problem and not go to a party even though your roommate is because you need to get that stuff.
0:50:32 That doesn’t entitle you to anything more because you had no control over that either.
0:50:52 As you know, there are a lot of people who think about these issues, philosophers, theologians, even some scientists on this front, I think, who really believe that scrapping our belief in free will and moral responsibility would be very dangerous.
0:50:55 And to those sorts of objections, you say what?
0:51:00 Um, no, actually we would make things much better.
0:51:07 I mean, the first thing people do when you try to do the no free will on them is they say, Ooh, does that mean nothing could change?
0:51:09 And you sort of work your way through that.
0:51:17 And then they say, Ooh, were you saying when somebody works really hard to overcome their adversity, there was no like willfulness in there.
0:51:22 And you say, yeah, you can’t will yourself to have more willpower than you have, because that’s how the science works.
0:51:27 And then they come around to saying, Oh my God, people are just going to run amok.
0:51:43 And some research suggests that when you unconsciously prime people to believe less in free will, they start cheating on stuff afterward.
0:52:03 And instead of getting somebody where you have to psychologically manipulate them into feeling less belief in free will, get somebody in your study who shows up who already doesn’t believe in free will, who hasn’t believed in it in years and years.
0:52:14 And you look at someone like that, and they are exactly as ethical in their behavior as someone who says we need to be held responsible for every one of our actions.
0:52:25 It’s the exact parallel of when people look at atheists and usually get the, Oh my God, they’re going to be totally immoral because there’s no God to answer to.
0:52:49 And a massive amount of research has shown when you look at people who are very, very stridently and emotionally invested in atheism, they are exactly as ethical in their very high levels of ethics as people who have extremely strong beliefs in religiosity and moral imperatives coming from that.
0:52:50 What’s that about?
0:52:54 These are like totally opposite conclusions about the world.
0:53:02 They’re the same in a critical way, which is whatever outcome you came to, you thought hard about it.
0:53:05 You had to think about where good and evil comes from.
0:53:09 You had to think about what’s the source of meaning in life.
0:53:13 You had to think about what sort of person you want to be and what to make of your failings.
0:53:16 You’ve thought long and hard about it.
0:53:23 And if you’ve done enough of that and done enough of that where like some of that is painful and that sort of thing,
0:53:33 it really doesn’t matter if your conclusion is human goodness comes from us or human goodness comes from God, you’re going to be a better person.
0:53:35 And this is what the studies show.
0:53:43 I’ve always thought that argument in defense of God, that the idea that, you know, without God, we would all be cannibals is incredibly stupid.
0:53:45 Always has been, always will be.
0:53:50 But you can still believe in free will and moral responsibility while being an atheist.
0:54:06 And I think maybe what’s given me pause over the years when thinking about these sorts of things is, I guess maybe on some deep level, I do think our beliefs can act as a kind of motive force.
0:54:15 Believing that we have control over our actions, believing that we’re morally responsible might lead us to actually behave more responsibly.
0:54:21 And for the same reasons, believing that we don’t have any control might lead us to act more nihilistically.
0:54:23 But I may be completely wrong about all that.
0:54:25 I just know it’s always something that’s given me a real pause.
0:54:34 Yeah, people can be raised believing you should be held responsible for your actions and you’ve got a crummy soul if you do something awful.
0:54:41 And we don’t have a very good track record in terms of a society that’s overwhelmingly theistic.
0:54:47 I would argue that, you know, there’s absolutely no reason to think that people are all going to run amok.
0:54:49 But nonetheless, it’s true.
0:54:52 There’s still going to be some people who run amok.
0:54:56 And this is where people really panic with the notion that there’s no free will.
0:55:04 Wait, are you saying that you’re just going to let murderers run around on the streets because they’re not responsible for their actions?
0:55:07 What kind of madhouse will this be?
0:55:09 And the answer is, of course you don’t do that.
0:55:14 If you’ve got someone who’s dangerous, you protect people from them.
0:55:25 But you do it in a very different way than we do now because the current version is built on the notion of culpability and responsibility and free will.
0:55:35 The current version is built on the notion that sometimes punishment is a virtue in and of itself, that somebody can deserve retribution, all of that.
0:55:42 And instead, we all have an alternative model, which is like you’ve got a car and the brakes don’t work.
0:55:43 You don’t know how to fix it.
0:55:44 And the car is dangerous.
0:55:46 It’ll get out of control.
0:55:48 It’ll kill somebody on the street.
0:55:48 It’s dangerous.
0:55:52 And put it in the garage and don’t drive it.
0:56:05 But that doesn’t mean you should preach to the car that it’s got a rotten soul or tell it that it doesn’t deserve to be able to go into the park for a nice ride on a Sunday afternoon and go figure out why sometimes brakes stop working.
0:56:21 Belief in the illusion of free will is like belief in the illusion of the self in the sense that neither is really there, but the subjective experience of having it is so natural and overwhelming that we’ll probably never let it go entirely.
0:56:36 But I think you’re right that the important thing isn’t for all of us to accept this and change our personal beliefs, but it does matter a great deal that we treat people in a way that makes sense in light of these realities.
0:56:41 And you point to our treatment of epileptics as an example of this sort of shift.
0:56:44 And I’d love for you to say a bit about that because it is a very clarifying example.
0:57:01 Well, you go back 400 years and in virtually every like little town and hamlet in westernized Europe, if someone has an epileptic seizure, there was a very clear diagnosis of it, which is they were possessed by Satan.
0:57:09 And for a lot of that period, the treatment was burden at the stake and epilepsy was viewed as demonic possession.
0:57:15 And, you know, untold people suffered horribly as a result.
0:57:28 As early as the 20th century, the beginning of the 20th century, some of our more Neanderthal estates in this country still allowed involuntary sterilization of people with epilepsy.
0:57:33 At some point, people figured out that, no, it’s not demonic possession.
0:57:35 This is how it actually works.
0:57:42 And this is a world that is obviously vastly more humane now because we figured that out.
0:57:48 And not only didn’t the roof fall in on us, it became a better world.
0:58:01 You mentioned a similar observation with baby lab rats when they’re separated from their mothers for a while, deal with all these epigenetic changes in their brain that they can’t undo.
0:58:07 And it puts them at a huge disadvantage compared to other rats that weren’t separated from their mothers.
0:58:10 And humans are no different in that way.
0:58:17 And that’s the thing we don’t remember when we’re busy judging others for their shortcomings or failures or whatever.
0:58:19 Yeah, exactly.
0:58:24 Because, you know, not to get all jargony, but it’s complicated.
0:58:29 If you take a jury and they’re considering someone who’s done something awful and violent,
0:58:39 and when this person was 10 years old, they had a horrible car accident that destroyed the front part of their brain, including their frontal cortex,
0:58:46 and they were transformed by that and they were violent within months of that and have never been able to regulate it,
0:58:53 I don’t know, about half the juries in this country would be allowed to conclude this was organic impairment.
0:58:55 This was involutional.
0:59:02 The person can’t be held responsible because something happened to them biologically and this is who they are now.
0:59:08 And that’s relatively easy for us, because how did they become this sort of person?
0:59:16 They had this massive car accident and here’s a brain scan showing like a crater before of where the brain part used to be.
0:59:18 And that one’s easy for us.
0:59:27 But you sit there on a jury and instead of this person became this way because of this massive car accident and we can document it.
0:59:38 If the answer is instead, they became this way because of a thousand little threads of influences that started when they were first trimester fetus.
0:59:41 And that’s a lot harder to appreciate.
0:59:45 And that’s the picture that has made most of us who we are.
0:59:48 You look at the men on death row in this country and depending on the study,
0:59:54 25 to 75 percent of them have a history of concussive injury to the front part of their brain.
0:59:57 Whoa, that stops you in your track.
1:00:04 But instead, you know, how did this person wind up having a corner office and this person wound up being homeless?
1:00:12 And it’s got something to do with a billion threads that we can barely imagine, half of which haven’t been discovered yet.
1:00:17 The other half of which half of those were never consciously aware of.
1:00:27 And where that becomes as deterministic as that car accident that took out this guy’s frontal cortex, that’s a lot harder for us to deal with.
1:00:30 I have to say, Robert, I think you may be right.
1:00:33 And if you’re not, someone smarter than me will have to tell you why.
1:00:40 But I think maybe I just, in the end, have a hard time letting go of this notion that humans are more than matter in motion,
1:00:44 that there’s something immeasurable and maybe indescribable that makes us us.
1:00:48 And part of that is our freedom and our agency and our will.
1:00:51 But those are not empirical or even logical arguments.
1:00:54 I mean, it’s just, I don’t know, a humanist impulse.
1:00:59 Hell, maybe it’s really just religion, even though I’m not religious in any conventional sense.
1:01:02 But it’s just, it’s a notion I have a hard time letting go of.
1:01:08 But this book is an extraordinary piece of science, and I feel smarter after reading it,
1:01:10 and that’s about as high a compliment as I can offer.
1:01:12 So, I’ll offer it.
1:01:15 Well, thank you.
1:01:22 And, again, amid my saying, you know, this is the only logical conclusion about how we live our lives.
1:01:25 Again, it’s really, really hard.
1:01:30 I’m going to get off of this interview, and my wife is going to say, how was it?
1:01:32 And I would say, totally fun.
1:01:36 The guy asked great questions, really nice guy, totally smart questions.
1:01:40 And I’m attributing stuff to you there that you had no control.
1:01:48 I don’t know why you turned out to be a nice guy and ask questions and thought that this would be a good way to, like, spend your time or whatever.
1:01:54 But I’m going to show even I can’t think that way all the time because I’m going to say, yeah, nice guy.
1:01:59 I’d, like, watch his back during a mammoth hunt now as a result of that.
1:02:05 And, yeah, no one says it’s easy, but, like, do it where it really counts.
1:02:20 When you’re about to feel like you’re entitled to go to the front of the line for some reason, or when you’re entitled to judge somebody very harshly and decide they’re less worthy of care than you are.
1:02:21 That’s a good note to end on.
1:02:26 Once again, the book is called Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will.
1:02:28 Robert Sapolsky, thanks for coming in today.
1:02:29 I really appreciate it.
1:02:31 Thanks for having me.
1:02:31 Take care.
1:02:39 All right.
1:02:41 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
1:02:46 And if you didn’t, I assume it’s because you had no choice because free will is obviously an illusion.
1:02:50 But, as always, we want to know what you think.
1:02:53 So drop us a line at thegrayareaatvox.com.
1:02:59 Or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.
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1:03:07 Rob Byers engineered this episode, and it was edited by A.M. Hall.
1:03:09 Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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