You shouldn’t damn ’em. Don’t judge ’em. Just forgive ’em for they know not what they do.
Max Cady (Cape Fear, 1991)
Belief is a toxic and dangerous attitude toward reality.
Terrence McKenna
In Determined: Life without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky sets off on a generally thankless journey to convince us that there is no such thing as free will. Taking energetic, impressive leaps from chaos theory to criminology, he keeps returning to the same conclusion. He can’t find a neuron (or a brain) “who’s generation of behavior is independent of the sum of its biologically past.”1 In other words, he can’t demonstrate that free will could exist, at least not in an important way like we think it does.
Sapolsky urges us that seeing through the illusion of free-will can be liberating and in doing so, we could be more humble, forgiving, self-compassionate and grateful for whatever fate has served us. Sounds lovely. Yet, we wake up every morning faced with the urgent feeling that we have choices to make. And although these choices are causal states of the brain, they “lead to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world.”2
Personally, I recognize the long list of luck that I have enjoyed so far in my life. Yet, I feel to my core that things could go differently if I don’t make considered choices about how I eat, move my body and generally conduct myself. In other words, I deeply, deeply believe I am keeping my car in the lane and I’m responsible for keeping to the speed limit and not crashing into a brick wall or flying off a cliff. So if everything from our destructive emotions to our good intentions are ‘determined’ like Robert demonstrates to us, how should we live?
Sapolsky likes to use an example of a college graduate and a garbage collector to show how environment & genetics can deliver vastly different outcomes. Let’s look at a less extreme example – diet. We have two sisters, Fat Sally and Thin Sarah. Both are 20 years old, and live fairly idyllic if uneventful lives in a middle class home in Atlanta, Georgia. Very similar human beings. But they do differ in one important way. Sally eats a lot of junk food, and is twenty pounds overweight. In comparison, thin Sarah is careful and considered with her diet. She thinks it’s important to eat healthy, and has spent years developing habits and a level of discipline to maintain them. She has what Angela Duckworth would call grit. But no matter what values or judgement you place on either of these women, Robert Sapolsky argues persuasively that neither can be blamed or take credit for what’s on their plates.
Determinism is explained to both women. They learn how very small changes in their psychology and life experiences have led to differing attitudes, diets and waistlines. They had no important agency after all. Although they still feel like free agents, they agree that there’s no way things could be any other way than they turned out.
Their reactions are interesting. For as long as she can remember, Sally has felt like ‘the fat one’, and largely out of control when it comes to her eating choices. The idea that this was determined feels freeing and she stops blaming herself so harshly. With more self-compassion, she starts eating healthier and quickly drops her weight. Conversely, Sarah, who is proud of her ‘gritty’ character, feels her agency empty down the drain along with meaning in her life. She doesn’t know who she is anymore and slides into a depression. She gives up salads and instead binges on fried chicken and Netflix. Or maybe nothing changes at all. They shrug and continue doing what they were doing. Whatever the reaction, it was bound to happen.
And this is where talking about determinism leaves us every time. In a determined world, a response to a book that says that free-will isn’t possible is no different than responding to any other event that happens to us. In the same way that it’s a shame that someone’s mother drank alcohol while they were a fetus, it’s a shame that the persuasively argued concept of determinism might cause thin Sarah to give up her healthy habits.
Free will can’t be found in our brains because it’s a concept. And because it “emerges from felt experience”,2 it’s an especially salient concept, that’s not going anywhere. Like all the other concepts we’ve invented, free will can be useful, freeing, distracting or totally cast aside for us to live our lives the best we can.
Buddha Bike 