There's No Free Will. What Now? - Robert Sapolsky

Robert Spolski, welcome to Within Reason. Thanks for having me on.

So, on a scale of 1 to 10, just how bored are you of people making jokes about free will to the effect of, "Whenever you do anything, they say, 'Hey, it's not your fault, you couldn't help it'?"

Oh, I don't know. I've been telling people for a long, long time that I don't think there's any free will, so I've been hearing that as a response for a long time. So by now, it has sort of a sentimental nostalgia. So that's good.

Sure. Well, I mean, although what we're talking about today really isn't any kind of joke, I can understand why to somebody who hasn't really thought about it before that much, it might sound like one. I mean, your most recent book, *Determined*, is essentially an attack, a philosophical attack, on what might be considered one of the most fundamental elements of being a human, of being alive, of being a conscious agent, and that is our ability to make choices.

It's something that I've spoken about on my YouTube channel before, so I think that people listening will probably have a vague idea of the argument surrounding the existence or non-existence of free will. But your book kind of takes two parts. There's the part one: "Here's the bad news." And then there's the part two: "Here's what we can do about it," or "Here's how we might respond to this realization that there is no freedom." So I think it would be worth going over the first part just a little bit, because everybody has a slightly different approach to arguing why there is no free will. There are lots of different ways to do it. But hopefully, we can jump into the second part fairly quickly.

So you can make an argument against free will from neuroscience, from physics about particles bumping into each other, from just abstract philosophy about the way that thinking works. What approach do you take, and why?

Well, I am pitifully unschooled in both philosophy and physics. So I'm coming at it from my profession, which is I'm a biologist. I'm mostly a neuroscientist, but the fact that I'm not entirely one, I think, is very pertinent to all of this. Because what I spend my time thinking about is when a human, a primate, when somebody does a behavior, we ask, "Why did they do that? Where did that come from? Why did that just occur?" And what is scientifically clear to me by now is that's a whole hierarchy of questions.

Why did that occur? You're asking which parts of the brain did or didn't do something in the last half-second. But you're also asking something about the sensory stimuli for that individual in the prior minutes. Were they terrified? Were they stressed? Were they aroused? Were they hungry? Sleepy? Whatever. Because that's going to affect how your brain is responding to stuff. But you're also asking, "What about your hormone levels this morning?" Because that's going to have been shaping how sensitive your brain was to various environmental stimuli. "What were your last years like?" In terms of trauma, finding love, finding God, whatever. Because as the backbone of this whole field, neuroplasticity, you will get major changes in brain function and structure in response to experience like that. And then you're off to your usual suspects: adolescence, childhood, fetal life, your genes. Amazingly, you also have to consider what kind of culture your ancestors came up with, parentheses, what kind of ecosystems they were living in, because that had a ton to do with it.

What does that have to do with any of this? Because within minutes of birth, the culture in which your mother was raised will influence her mothering style and you. So why did that person just do what they did? Because of everything from one second ago to millennia ago. All of these influences. And when you look at them, there are two key punchlines. The first one is, when you look at the amount of our behavior that all of those prior events encompass, what you conclude is we are nothing more than the sum of our biological luck, over which we had no control, and its interactions with the sum of our environmental luck, which we also had no control over.

The second key point with that, which really does in free will for me, is it's not a punchline here of, "Oh, you got to keep in mind a whole bunch of different scientific disciplines because maybe neuroscience doesn't disprove free will, but endocrinology does, or that doesn't disprove, but genetics, or physiological ecology, or any..." No. The key point is all of these different disciplinary approaches turn into the same thing. What do I mean by that? You're talking about genes and behavior. If you're doing that, by definition, you're talking about millions of years of evolution of your genes. And you're also talking about what your childhood was like, when experiences then were causing lifelong epigenetic changes in your gene regulation. And you're also talking about what proteins your brain was making on the direction of your genes 25 minutes ago. And when you look at how it forms this one continuous arc of influences, my two cents is there's not a crack anywhere in that edifice in which you could shoot born in free will.

Tell me about the hungry judge phenomenon.

Oh, I love this one. This one is in the realm of like, what's been going on in the previous hours. And this was this classic study published in a very prestigious journal, looking at all of the parole board decisions that were made in a particular country over the course of a year. And hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, I'm forgetting. And you know, at each juncture, a judge either let somebody go free or sent them back to jail. And the scientists were looking for what were their predictors of the decision. And they found, like, the single most powerful one was how many hours it had been since the judge had eaten a meal.

See, a judge right after they had lunch, you had about a 60% chance of parole. By three, four hours later, essentially a 0% chance.

Whoa.

What is that about? That's totally bizarre. That makes total biological sense. Because, like, the part of your brain that is required to think about the world from somebody else's perspective, to challenge your immediate snap judgments a second time, a fifth time, a tenth time, it's part of the brain, the frontal cortex, is the most expensive part of your brain metabolically. When it's been hours since you've eaten, your blood sugar levels are low. And what's one of the first parts of the brain that's beginning to get a little sluggish as a response? This part of the brain. And it's easier to default into a quick snap judgment. And, you know, the neurometabolism of that occurring is like pretty straightforward.

What's astounding to me is the knowledge that you take any one of those judges and say, "Whoa, this is interesting. Remember back right after lunch, you had a guy who had done X, and you paroled him? And just now, this person seemed to have done the exact same thing, but you sent them back to jail. What's the deal with that?" They're not going to say, "Because my frontal metabolism decreased." They're going to cite, right, some college course on Immanuel Kant or something that will fill in an attribution when it's metabolic.

Okay. It must be said that study got a lot of attention, and it got a few different groups challenging its statistics, its interpretation. It is totally, literally held up solid and has been effect replicated. You do not want to ask for a home mortgage loan at the bank if it's been hours since the person you're talking to has eaten a meal. All sorts of versions like that. When people are hungry, when they're sleep-deprived, they become less generous, they become less cooperative, they're more likely to stab you in the back if you're playing an economic game with them. So just on that level, wow. When you had lunch is going to have a major impact on whether or not, like, you're going to send this person back to jail or not.

Yeah. There's machinery humming underneath the surface all the time. And this, when you say this is the biggest predictor of the parole decision that the judge makes, is this bigger than political affiliation? Bigger than the kind of schooling that the judge has? This is really the biggest factor that we can use to determine or to take a guess at what their decision is going to be?

Well, it's after controlling for, like, the logical modulators. What is the person from the same in-group that you are? What's your, who appointed you? Things of that sort. It was, it was a Middle Eastern country, so some, some specifics to their sort of criminal justice system. But yeah, of the extraneous, this couldn't possibly have something to do with how judges make their decisions, list this was at the top of the list.

Fascinating. Because, well, especially because most people intuitively know this to some degree, right? If you're having an argument with somebody, you might think to yourself, "Gosh, maybe I'm just hungry or hangry. Maybe I'm tired. You say, 'Let's revisit this in the morning. I need to sleep on it.'" You know, people are already aware that, to some degree, there are moments in our lives where the decisions that we make seem to be out of accord with our own agency.

So when asking, you know, whether we have free will, everybody's going to agree that there are certain circumstances where we have less free will or more free will. There are certain times when our free will is diminished. And I suppose when the question is asked, "Well, where do we draw the line as to how far that can go? How far that free will can be removed?" Your answer seems to be that there is no line.

Yeah. These are, these are nice, liberal, reformist edge cases. "Oh, we all have free will, but some of the time, all of us have less of it. Other times, and some people really have way less than other people." My stance, and I'm way out on the lunatic fringe on this in terms of sort of neurosciences, is that there's no free will whatsoever. That there's all sorts of points where we think we're seeing it because we're looking in the wrong place. We're having a very strong emotional pull towards seeing it, but that there actually is none whatsoever. When you look at the cumulative ways in which you turned out to be who you are, and how what came before determined that, there is none. That's all we are. We are the outcome of the biological and environmental luck that started way back when, up to a second ago. And there's no "me" inside there, inside your brain, that's in your brain but not of your brain, and it's made of something separate, and that somehow is immune to things like your blood glucose levels, or your genes, or what culture you were brought up in, or whether you're worrying about paying the month's rent and that's like the main thing on your mind. That there is no separate "me" in there.

Now, people are going to want to separate out the micro from the macro here. You know, they're going to want to say, "Okay, if it gets cold, that will be a determining factor in me putting my coat on. I'll go and put a jacket on, and clearly, you know, that's somewhat out of my control because I don't control the temperature. But that's not going to determine whether I put my left arm through first or my right arm through first." You know, like those minute decisions that seem to be almost trivial. It's almost as if, even if you went looking for some kind of determinant factor as to why you the left arm rather than the right arm, it seems, it seems ridiculous to say that that decision might have something to do with, you know, your ancestors, or the, how recently you ate, or any of these kinds of factors. So what's a good way of explaining the loss of agency in the minute decisions like that, where there doesn't seem to be, even to the person, a sort of a rational or an obvious non-rational reason for one or the other?

Well, let's, let's unpack that a bit. So you get some college freshmen who have volunteered for a psych experiment. And they show up, and the experiment is: "Here's a button. And whenever you feel like it, push it. And you can push it with your right hand or your left hand. And just go for it." And thus, we're in this micro world.

So, first off, is this person left-handed or right-handed? That's a biological phenomenon. Does this person happen to have a sore shoulder on their right side, not their left? Whatever it is. But then you're sitting there, and this is a psych experiment. You're wondering, "Oh, what do they really want to know about this?" You start generating a hypothesis. "What is it that they're looking for?" You're having a meta-level of you're saying, "Well, I just did my left hand three times in a row. Is that indicative? Okay, let me do right next time." Then you're wondering if you saw and you thought you saw, like, a micro-expression of a smile on the researcher's face. "The 'aha!' their theory was just..." Are you a jerk at that point, saying, "Okay, I know what they're up to. I'm going to do just the opposite."

How do you turn out to be, first off, the sort of person who would be in university and sign up for a psych experiment? And the sort of person who would show up on time? And how do you be the sort of person who was or wasn't generating hypotheses as to what are they looking for here? And do I want to confirm that? Do they, do they, are they appealing? Am I going to try to do what I think they want me to do? Or am I going to do the opposite because I'd like to show them that I'm smarter than they are, because of my authority issues? And like, just unpacking even something as like trivial as that is going to have a little bit of this viscosity coming from everything that came before that made you you.

Well, people often like to ask me about, there's a French philosopher whose name I, I don't know if I pronounce correctly, but this concept of Buridan, is it Buridan? Buridan. But his donkey, or his ass. And this idea of a donkey stood behind two haystacks, and it's hungry, and it needs to eat from one or the other. But because the donkey has literally no reason to pick one haystack over the other, it stands in the middle and ends up starving to death. Because any reason to go for one or the other doesn't materialize. And yet, to go for one or the other, you need some reason.

And I had, I had someone ask me about this recently. I was speaking at a school, and this young guy comes up to me, and he asks me about this situation. And the way that I tried to explain it to him was to say, the two options you have are that either there is some determining factor that makes the donkey go for stack A or stack B, or there's literally no determining factor. Now, granting that the donkey probably does something, right? So let's say it goes for stack A. If there was some determining factor, then that's what we're talking about here. You have to ask, "What brought about that determining factor?" And it's probably outside of the donkey's control. But if even if it were the case that there really were zero determining factor, and the donkey genuinely randomly picks stack A, the definition of randomness entails that you're not in control of that either.

A lot of people like to think that the place you can shoehorn in free will is, as you say, by looking towards elements of randomness in the universe, perhaps at the quantum level. But often times, I think forgetting that randomness means that there's no determining factor, which means that you can't be the determining factor. So that must be outside of your control too. But I wonder how you would account for this situation of the donkey between the two haystacks, and what might be going on in his mind.

Well, randomness is a very tricky thing in all this. First off, is the, like, holy grail or like deepest hole into purgatory of any of this, which is quantum indeterminacy. And does that actually mean the whole universe is indeterministic? And is there a way to harness indeterminacy to get, like, free will? And all. And in the book, I spent two chapters on this, that essentially quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with any of this for three reasons.

The first is the subatomic scale. It's so many orders of magnitude that these effects would have to bubble upward and in such synchrony among all the different subatomic events going on in one molecule at a time, let alone one region of the brain, that it's beyond impossible for that to occur. The second one is exactly what you allude to, which is if by some chance it did bubble all the way up to affect the function of a neuron or a part of the brain or whatever, as you say, it's a prescription for randomness. And God help you if, say, you're attributing, say, your moral philosophy to randomness. And every free will believer and free will skeptic, except for a weird sort of subgroup, there, agree that randomness is not like the basis for free will. It's just as incompatible as as extreme determinism. The third one is then this sort of desperate Hail Mary that people often grab for at that point, which is somehow to harness that randomness in some way. Higher-level brain function. The "you" that's supposedly separate in there, in some way, is able to reach down a form of downward causality that philosophers basically think can't exist, in order to opportune that randomness for your own, like, free will pleasure and stuff. And there's no mechanism for it that works.

That said, when you look at the brain, neurons do random things. Neurons will randomly dump little packets of neurotransmitters. Neurons will randomly have action potentials now and then. And you ask the same question: Is this like the fodder for your, like, moral philosophy kind of thing? Very unlikely. And the randomness turns out not to be all that random. For example, so you got, you know, neurons. They talk to other neurons by way of these little fibrous end things called axon terminals that have little packets of neurotransmitters in them. And when the first neuron gets excited, it dumps those neurotransmitter packets out into the space, which floats over to the next neuron and gets it excited. And occasionally, you see neurons that will just spontaneously dump their neurotransmitters out of their little packets.

Whoa, randomness. All of that randomness, as in, well, there's the usual machinery for dumping neurotransmitter when you want to, and it's incredibly complicated, and it's produced a couple of Nobel Prizes. So, like, somebody is not looking at the control panel when they should be inside that neuron, and like something slips by, and you accidentally activate the dump neurotransmitter mechanism. Oh, it's just a hiccup in the system. No, it turns out spontaneous neurotransmitter release has a completely different mechanistic pathway for doing it. You evolved a capacity for spontaneous release. And then you look more closely, and it turns out there's certain times when these random events occur in your brain more often than others. Different physiological states. All, in other words, there are points where your brain determines it's time to be indeterministic for a bit. That, sure, is not free will. That's that's as much free will as, like, you take an improv theater class, and you sit there, and the teacher tells you, "Okay, so now we're going to start this scene. Go for it." That teacher has determined that you are going to be indeterministic now along some parameters. Even looking at that level, there's no actual randomness happening there. And there's no means by which true randomness is the way in which you turn out to be, you know, a fundamentalist Baptist, or a Tibetan Buddhist, or a nihilist, or whatever. It's just not the building blocks that you can use to generate that.

So no freedom, no agency, no ultimate control over our actions. That's the situation we find ourselves in. And I want to talk about how we should react to this. But just beforehand, one more example. Who's this guy that got the pole through his skull and it totally changed his behavioral traits?

Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage. Every neuroscientist, while they're still in the crib, is forced to hear the story of Phineas Gage, because it's like, it's ground zero for neuroscientists having something useful to say about free will. 1840s, Phineas Gage was working on a railroad construction line. Somebody screwed up something with some dynamite and did what they weren't supposed to do, and it blew a three-foot long, 13-pound metal rod when it exploded into Gage's eye and out the top of his head, his forehead. And in the process, landing 13 feet over from there. In the process, it also took out his frontal cortex, which was like nicely splattered all over the acreage there.

So Gage just had... it went all the way through and came out. Came out the other side.

Yes, yes. And if you ever find yourself at Harvard's medical school and go into their library, they have Phineas Gage's skull on display there, and you can see the entry point and the exit point, and the pole that's on display there also.

So Gage gets up, which is in and of itself... this thing went through at sufficiently high speed that it cauterized every blood vessel. And like, he stands there, and he, and some of his construction crew compatriots go into town where a doctor looks, and, you know, looks in the empty space there and diagnoses things, saying, "You, you have a hole in your brain there." And as epically described, Gage was no longer Gage. He had a massive transformation in his personality. He was the foreman of this railroad, of this railroad construction crew. He was the sober, God-fearing, church-attending, sober, reliable, self-disciplined guy. And overnight, literally overnight, he was turned into this foul-mouthed, profane, disinhibited guy who wasn't able to work for years and years afterward. Gage was no longer Gage.

And this was the first very unsettling example that material stuff inside your head is essential to what makes us us. And, you know, Gage is a simple case. Wow. Here's Gage, who like two years later is cursing loudly in church, blaspheming, all of that. Why did he do that? It's easy to see because there was a metal rod's worth of explanation because of that accident that happened to him. That's why. That one's easy for us to look at and say, "Oh, you know, he had no control over that. This part of the brain was damaged." Where we really have trouble is not when it is something as much of a sledgehammer as a metal rod, but having to deal with the fact that who each of us are, why did each of us just do what we did sitting there in church, or in any such? Why? Because of a million, zillion, gazillion microscopic little threads from the past that sculpted us into who we are. And the thing is, it's easy to see the single sledgehammer that made Gage Gage. And it's so much harder for us to accept that you put all those zillion microscopic threads of your past together, and it is going to be as powerful as a metal rod blasting through your head. It's just harder to see distributed causality. A lot of it we don't even know about yet how it works. A lot of it is just probabilistic. But put all those threads together, and there's nothing but the conclusion that you were nothing more than everything that came before that turned you into the sort of person that you are right now. And sometimes it's easy to see how that happened: a metal rod, childhood poverty, trauma, whatever. Being an enormous privilege. And sometimes it's these little threads going back to like your hunter-gatherer ancestors inventing their culture versus your agriculturalist ancestors, and everything in between.

Yeah, I mean, we know that the environment of our distant ancestors can affect our behavioral traits today. I mean, you can predict, there are studies to show this, if I'm not mistaken. You can predict how somebody will behave in a given scenario based on the kind of environment that their ancestors thousands of years ago were living in.

Absolutely. You see contrasts between, say, child-rearing practices in collectivist versus individualist cultures. You see completely different attitudes toward social norm violations in people who were raised in cultures of honor. Cultures of honor: your ancestors were cow people, or camel people, or goat people, people nomadic pastoralists where if somebody affronts you, you come back and you flatten them with 10 times the retribution, because if they take your camel today and you do nothing about it tomorrow, they're going to take the rest of your camels and your children as well, or something. And you see different physiology in people raised in cultures of honor going back generations, the last time that was relevant to how their folks were making a living. And that leaves imprints. People, people from rainforest cultures are far more likely to invent polytheistic religions. People from deserts are more likely than chance to invent monotheistic. So, whoa, that's part of it as well.

Yeah. Mothers who grew up in collectivist cultures, typically Southeast Asian rice-growing regions, versus individualist culture mothers, typically United States, sort of the poster child for that. On the average, they sing lullabies at different volumes. Individualist culture mothers, on the average, sing lullabies more loudly than collectivist. On the average, they wait a longer time to pick up their kid when their kid's crying than collectivist mothers. At what age is the kid weaned? At what age is the kid sleeping alone? All whoa, from minutes after birth, like that's already beginning to shape how your brain's being constructed. So you put all those pieces together, and this kind of taps into the domain where I think people make their most fundamental, most intuitive mistaken perception of free will. Which is, we make choices. We sit in some split in the road, and we form an intent to do X instead of Y. We form that intent, we know that we have that intent, we know what the outcome of that is likely to be. Most importantly, we know nobody's forcing us to do that. We've got alternatives available to us. And for most people who think about free will, and people in the criminal justice system who think about free will, is if you had a conscious intent, and you knew what the outcome was likely to be, and you knew you didn't have to do it, that's it. Case closed. Culpability, responsibility. We're done with our trial. And for me, this is 40 years of people fighting about the neurobiology of the milliseconds of intent. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the free will debate, because it doesn't ask the only question you can ask at that point, which is, "Oh yeah, how do you become the sort of person who would have that intent at that moment?" And you became that sort of person because of what was happening in your neurons a second ago, and what was happening a year ago, and what your ancestors and everything in between. And simply looking at from the moment you form an intent and then consciously choose to act on it is like trying to figure out what a book is about by only reading the last sentence of the entire book. All the important stuff is coming before. How did you become that sort of person? And you became that sort of person because biological and environmental factors, which collectively you had no control over, and that's why you became you.

Now, crucially, when we spoke about the Gage example with the pole through his head, and he shows up, and suddenly he is quite a nasty person, by all accounts. I think people would intuitively look at him and say, "Well, okay, yeah, he's turned into, you know, a bit of a jerk. But it's not his fault." There's kind of a sense in which you might feel sorry for him, because even though, yeah, he might say profane things about the God that you believe in now, and that he seemingly believed in at least yesterday, look, you know, he had a pole through his head. So let him off. Now, if you're right that all human behavior is a result of a similarly sort of a process that's similar in the sense that you don't have control over it, then this leads to quite a radical conclusion that we should probably adopt the same approach to essentially anybody doing anything, any of the time. Is that your position?

Exactly. That's the only logical extension. It's the only intellectually honest and ethically honest conclusion to reach, which is this completely nutty stance that blame and punishment as virtues in and of themselves, rather than as instrumental tools. Blame and punishment never make any sense whatsoever in any realm of human life. And holding a mirror up to that, likewise, praise and reward never make any sense whatsoever, because it is that's a circumstance in which some people are treated better than average for reasons they had nothing to do with, as opposed to the world of people being treated worse than average for reasons that... blame, punishment, reward, praise, a sense of entitlement, a sense that you have earned anything, a sense that hating a person is ever justified. None of those make any sense whatsoever. And in principle, you need to run the world without any of that stuff, which ain't a trivial task to take on.

Now, it sounds really nice when framed in terms of, "Look, if something goes wrong for you, it's not exactly your fault." If somebody, you know, has things better in life, it's, you know, we should take an egalitarian approach to recognizing that it's not necessarily due to merit. But we should be, sort of, considerate of the fact that, you know, "there go I, were for the grace of God." However, you can also frame it in terms of saying that, you know, when I achieve something, when I win a competition, when I'm nice to someone in the street, there's no sense in which I should be able to feel proud of myself if that's the case. And on a deeper level, getting rid of agency doesn't just get rid of this ability to feel, I suppose, proud, or to condemn other people morally speaking. It removes part of what I think many people think it means to be human. And so I get a lot of emails from people saying, "Look, it's really interesting, the stuff about free will. You've convinced me that there's no free will, but I don't really know what to do now." And I never quite know what to say to them. And I imagine that you're in a similar situation, where, you know, you're kind of asked, in a broad sense, does this kind of position just lead to a sort of nihilism? And if it does, should it?

Yeah, now we're getting into sort of the really problematic stuff. Because as you described, you tell somebody there's no free will, and you manage to sound convincing with that. And even before the nihilism, existential void, the usual reflexive stuff is, "Oh my God, you can't tell people that, they'll run amok." There's a whole science as to why that is very unlikely to happen. "Oh my God, we'll have no societal mechanisms to keep murderers off the street." That's absurd. Over and over and over, we are able to protect society from dangerous circumstances and subtract responsibility in the process. "Oh my God, where if you get rid of meritocracies, you get a brain tumor, and they're going to pick a random person off the street to do the brain surgery on you." Same thing. No, we can subtract praise and entitlement and meritocracy and still protect society from incompetent people doing important stuff. "Oh my God, are you saying nothing can ever change?" Not in the slightest. The whole universe of how change works is completely compatible with there being no free will.

So you get through all of those sources of panic, and then there's the, "Oh my God, the existential void." Are you telling me that, like, the ways in which I have worked hard, I have earned nothing from them? That had nothing to do with me? Are you telling me I love my wife? We've been married for 34 years now, to 2024. That's right. 34. And nonetheless, sitting there saying, "Oh my God, do I love her in part because of the type of oxytocin receptor genes I have, because of her pheromones, or things like that?" What does that do to love? What does that do to accomplishment? What does that do to any of this stuff? If you're a kind person, do you actually deserve no praise for that? And yeah, that's where the neologistic void suddenly beckons, and it's, you know, potentially depressing as hell.

And what took me forever to figure out is that that's not, at the end of the day, a problem, or a problem on the scale of the whole world. You're bummed out because if there's no free will, you didn't deserve your prestigious university degree, you didn't deserve your excellent salary, you're a corner office, you didn't deserve the fact that people love you and respect you, you didn't deserve the fact that you were able to help people out of kindness, you didn't deserve any of the praise for that, any of the sense of entitlement. All of that, bummer, bummer. And my critical point there is, if that's the stuff that there being no free will means to you, you're one of the lucky humans. Because you're trying to figure out what it means that you may not deserve to be the CEO of your corporation, or you may not really have earned love by being a kind person, or any of those. If that's your problem, you're one of the lucky ones. For the vast majority of people on this planet, the issue isn't, "Oh my God, maybe I don't deserve to have been treated better than average because I really wasn't responsible for the things that I'm like treated well for." For most people, the problem is that we have a world in which we're perfectly happy to treat people worse than average for reasons they had no control over. And for most people, like getting rid of free will is a wonderful thing. It makes the world more humane.

Here's one example that is like so obvious that it's hard to frame in terms of the free will issue. But like, at some point, 400 years ago, most Western cultures figured out that people don't have the free will, don't have the power to control the weather. And as such, if there's a horrible thunderstorm that destroys everyone's crops, it wasn't caused by the old lady with no teeth at the edge of the hamlet that nobody talks to. Witchcraft doesn't work. You can't do witchcraft to control the weather. They don't have responsibility over that. And as a result, there was a change in how we did criminal justice. You don't burn old ladies at the stake anymore when the weather turns bad because they didn't actually have control over that. And it's a much better world that we don't burn people at the stake now when the weather turns bad. It's a much better world that we figured out about two centuries ago that an epileptic seizure is a neurological disorder. It's not a sign that somebody is demonically possessed. It's a much better world that in the last 40 years or so, we figured out that say, schizophrenia is a neurogenetic disorder, rather than it is caused by psychodynamically toxic mothers who secretly hated their child and made them schizophrenic. It's a great thing we figured out that like some kids have trouble learning to read, not because they're lazy or unsmart, but they have like architectural abnormalities in one part of their cortex and they tend to reverse letters. They have dyslexia. It's a much better world in all those places that we have subtracted a perception of free will out where there is none, and it becomes a much nicer place to live in. And all we have to do is push harder against the next version of that. The fact that if you get a certain variant of the gene coding for the leptin receptor in your brain, no matter how self-disciplined you are, no matter how much you actually love yourself, or any, no matter what you do, you're going to be overweight because your brain doesn't get satiation signals. And when you look at sort of implicit biases in society these days, one of the only ones that has grown stronger in recent decades is implicit bias against people who are overweight, because we associate it with lack of self-discipline and self-indulgence, and they secretly don't love themselves. And all. And you get that gene variant, and you're screwed. You can't do anything about it. And it's going to be a much better world when we subtract free will out of that one. All that's going to happen is, while a subset of us, and I bet it's the subset of people who are like, have the, you know, privilege and opportunity to be interested in subjects like this and thus listen to something like this, but for most people who are not worrying about the moral relevance of their egregiously large salary, for most people, every single time we have subtracted free will out of our views of why people do what they do, the world has become a more humane place.

It's great news. I can see that being the case when we remove agency from the weather, we remove agency from, you know, certain kinds of performance at school or this kind of thing. But when we remove agency from the movement of the legs to get one out of bed in the morning, when we remove the agency from, you know, the decision to get up and go outside and get some sun on your face versus the decision to lay around in your bed all day. Now, I don't know what the research shows, if it's conclusive on what kind of effect the disbelief in free will actually has on human behavior. But a lot of people seem to predict that they're going to become less likely to make that decision to get out of bed and go and get some sun on their face, just because they've become aware that if they did make that decision, it wouldn't really be them that's in the driver's seat. So I think it sounds great up to a point. Now, given the fact that we both believe that this is true, that there actually is no agency, there's no option for us to just sort of stop at the nice bit to say, "Look how, look at all these sort of great societal motions that we've made, and look at some more that we could make, such as dealing with obesity." But we have to keep going and we have to sort of get into the sludge. And it seems much easier, much more difficult for me to paint this kind of thing in such a positive light.

It's incredibly hard. And all that said, I was 14 when I stopped believing in free will. And for more than half a century since, I've thought blame and punishment and reward and praise, and none of that stuff makes any sense whatsoever. And I totally, utterly am at intellectual peace with that. And despite that, I can actually act on those beliefs for about three minutes once every other month or so. Because this stuff's incredibly... somebody cuts me off in traffic, and I like hate their guts and think they're a rotten, foul human who should go to hell. Or at least for a few. Or someone says to me, "You know, nice lecture did just now." And unavoidably, for a few minutes afterward, I'm going to feel like I'm a better human than average because of that, and thus deserve to get, thus deserve to get to the front of the line for the next great vaccine that comes along. Yeah, it's incredibly hard. And you got to like, over and over, come back and say, "How did this person become who they are?" And what are the ways in which I can't understand that in the slightest? What are the ways in which I'm feeling entitled, where when you look at it closely, it's right. You got to do the hard work with it.

Amid that, though, a gigantic problem, which I cannot see easily solved, is the one of motivation, of ambition, and drive, and all of that. We can protect people from damaging individuals without invoking free will. All sorts of versions of quarantine models. And look at what the Scandinavian countries do in their criminal justice system. Or we could do it in, like, we can have a quarantine model for keeping people from being dangerous. Your kid is sneezing a lot. You don't send them to kindergarten tomorrow because they say, "Please, if your child has a nose cold, keep them home so they don't get everyone else sick." You could constrain their behavior, but you don't take their toys away while they're at home as punishment for their evil soul or something. Yeah, that's a realm in which we can protect society from one type of danger without having any sort of ethical attribution or whatever. That one we can solve. But how do you solve the one of get somebody to decide they really, really, really want to spend 14 years getting trained to be a cardiothoracic surgeon? Or they really, really want to go to this party, and their DM mates are doing it, but instead, they're going to study? Where does the motivation come from for that? And that one's a much harder one. I, that one's much less clear out of engineer society.

Rather than protecting people from dangerous, damaging individuals, how to engineer society so that motivation is in some way separated from attribution? That is free will written all over it. Yeah, I don't know. Anything I can come up with is like ridiculously utopian or whatever. Which is, you got to get people into some sort of mindset where somebody sits down at the piano, they're a concert pianist, and they play. And all of that to get into a mindset where what they will feel is wonder and gratitude that it turned out, just by chance, that they had hands that could do things on a keyboard that will cause people to have emotions they never knew they had. "Wow, how lucky am I that it turned out to be that way?" "How lucky?"

Yeah. Okay. How lucky am I that I turned out to be smart enough to be able to take out glioblastomas? Or that I turned out to have the capacity for empathy to do something nice for this homeless person? Yeah, that's a hard sell to turn all of that into just gratitude that randomness made you into that sort of person, and thus you're willing to work with your unearned gifts of intellect, and thus study for 47 years to be able to solve this problem or that. That one's a tough one. I don't have an easy answer for that. And little, little, this is cheating, but little echoes of meritocracy, really. I don't see a way around that one easily.

I've always answered this question in terms of thinking about what's actually changed. I mean, you know, yesterday, it still was the case that yesterday, when I believed in free will, the actual, in fact, reason why I got out of bed, went to get some food, was because I was hungry, and my brain sort of determined that my legs would move and go into the kitchen. And all of the deterministic factors were still there, still acting on me. The only thing that's changed is I now recognize that that's why it's happening. Now, in the same way that yesterday I was hungry, and then today I sit down with a biologist who explains to me in precise detail exactly why I feel hunger, how it works, how it's connected to the body. I still feel hungry, and I still go and get the food. I mean, sure, I can sort of, on a meta-level now, reflect more on what I'm doing here, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm hungry. So in the same way, whatever was motivating me yesterday to get out of bed is still motivating me to get out of bed today. The only difference is I recognize that I didn't control that motivation. I don't know where it came from. And sure, I can sit there and I can meditate and I can think, "Okay, well, noticing that motivation coming over me to get up..."

Maybe noticing that there is no motivation. Maybe I, that day, I feel depressed and I want to stay in bed all day. But it seems weird for me to say that the reason I'm going to stay in bed all day is because I recognize that whichever decision I make, whether to stay in bed or get up, is outside of my control. Because the very fact that it's outside of your control should mean that one of them's going to happen nonetheless.

And so I guess what I, what I ask, I mean, people often say to me is, well, you don't believe in free will, but, you know, you don't act like you don't believe in free will. You, you act like you believe in free will all the time. And you just alluded to that there. And in your book, you say, you know, I find it very difficult to live as if this is actually true. But what does it mean to, to live as if it's true? It might change the way that you morally assess people. But even then, does it really? I mean, you used the word rotten a moment ago. You said if someone cuts you off in traffic, you're tempted to say, well, what a rotten person. But what does the word rotten mean? It just means that it's sort of gone bad. I mean, an apple can go rotten, but that doesn't make you, you're making a moral assessment of it. It just means that you're looking at its behaviors and you're saying that in relation to what I want it to do for me, it's gone rotten.

And so, you know, what really has to change just by adopting, uh, belief in determinism and living as if that were true? Well, what we have to go for is, amid this being incredibly hard work to think that way and to respond that way and to feel that way, um, we have to save that effort for where it really counts. Um, almost certainly, if it was 400 years ago, you and I were both, both, you know, articulate and educated or whatever. And if we were us 400 years ago, almost certainly it would have seemed just intuitively obvious that there are such things as witches and they can cause lightning storms and you need to protect society from them. And there is a moral justice in punishing them. And 400 years later, it is intuitively obvious to you and me that that's gibberish. That makes no sense at all. We're people of our place and time. Now, in that, some of the things that are intuitively obvious to right now, to frame in an effortful free will kind of way, people are not going to believe at some point in the future.

Okay, so let's try to think about people 400 years from now. Let's think about how each of us, each of us has changed. When I was a kid, if the kid sitting next to me in school wasn't learning how to read, um, I would have agreed with the teacher and everybody else and, okay, some kids just aren't smart and they just don't work hard and all of that. And like here we are, some decades later. In the nature of knowledge in our world, that we now know there's this thing called dyslexia. Like, oh, we've been somewhere in the last 20 years or so in the United States, um, the majority of people went from being opposed to gay marriage to supporting gay marriage. That's changed during that period. Sometime during this period, people figured out that autism is not caused by mothers who are incapable of love. Autism is when there's something screwy and you get little islands of unconnected function in the cortex during fetal life. But these have happened in our own times. And what we see is the things that are so intuitively obviously free of free will now, it's so in obvious, we don't even see it anymore. Like, yeah, you don't, your kid doesn't get a nose cold because they have a rotten soul or because you have a rotten soul and their illness is God's punishment to you for that. Yeah, it's so obvious we can't even see anymore. We did it. We did that one. We subtracted that one out. And what it means is whichever one seem most difficult right now, when we're being pulled in that direction, it's not a to ly obvious yet that people who are kind are not intrinsically more deserving humans than people who were not, because neither had anything to do with it. Okay, that one's going to take some work. That one we're at that challenge at this point.

All save, save the effort for the important ones. I think that intuition of free will, actually, as well, and this might help people too, is is is one of the problems of of free will and one of the ways to to really get into discussing is to is to simply ask a person, well, what do you mean by free will? What this thing that you sort of intuitively have? Describe it to me. Because what we're talking about here is, you know, somebody who says, I feel nihilistic because I've realized that all of my actions are determined. And I say, okay, well, what, what's the alternative to that? So, so, so suppose that this action that you commit is is not determined by anything at all. That means it's random. You wouldn't be in control of that either. And if I, if I convinced you that you were just random events occurring all of the time and that's what you were, that's all you are as a person, wouldn't that instill a similar nihilistic crisis?

Okay, then maybe free will is kind of being sort of partly determined, partly not. Like, who, like, if you try to actually pin down the thing that you, that you claim to believe in, it actually becomes very difficult to do. And, and I would say, I mean, this would be my argument and probably yours too, that whatever you do land on is an idea of what free will could be, it usually ends up being either the self-contradictory, it doesn't make sense, impossible, or it's describing something that's not really free will. Like, I think we would say the compatibilists do, for example. And so I don't even know what this, this, this intuition really looks like. Like, what is it that you want if, if this is troubling you, you know?

Yeah, well, we we have this tremendous source of malaise in that, like every other organism out there, we're a biological machine. But unlike any other organism out there, we're the only one who could know our machine and be interested in its parameters and boundaries and who could be meta enough to try to understand where some of the levers and buttons are in the machine that we are. And machinists, you know, can leave a huge emotional gap there, um, when it comes to trying to understand like why we like sunsets or why where love came from or why it feels good to make the planet a better place. And, and the notion that we're just observing a machine in action is really challenging in some ways. That's the human predicament. We're smart enough to know our machine, this, and we have the cognitive and affective and cultural tools to try to deny that and construct very elaborate ways of saying that's not really the case. So it's a, it's not just a problem of free will, it's a problem of being human. Yeah.

Um, and, and, you know, challenging positions are just, uh, what we, what we like to do here on the Within Reason podcast. So, uh, Robert Sapolsky, thanks for, thanks for coming on and thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. Well, thanks for having me on. Total fun. And, uh, glad to see we think in such similar ways. If you enjoyed that conversation, you can watch more episodes of the Within Reason podcast by clicking just here. But remember, the show is also on streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don't forget to subscribe. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.