Determined Robert Sapolsky Quotes

we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, your fetal environment, your genes, whether your ancestors were farmers or herders. Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

Frontal competence even declines if it’s keeping you from being distracted by something positive—patients are more likely to die as a result of surgery if it is the surgeon’s birthday.

Sam Harris argues convincingly that it’s impossible to successfully think of what you’re going to think next. The takeaway from chapters 2 and 3 is that it’s impossible to successfully wish what you’re going to wish for. This chapter’s punchline is that it’s impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower. And that it isn’t a great idea to run the world on the belief that people can and should.

Thus, essentially every aspect of your childhood—good, bad, or in between—factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have

If that’s the case for some baboon, just imagine humans. We have to learn our culture’s rationalizations and hypocrisies—thou shalt not kill, unless it’s one of them, in which case here’s a medal. Don’t lie, except if there’s a huge payoff, or it’s a profoundly good act (“Nope, no refugees hiding in my attic, no siree”). Laws to be followed strictly, laws to be ignored, laws to be resisted. Reconciling acting as if each day is your last with today being the first day of the rest of your life.

There’s our nation with its cult of meritocracy that judges your worth by your IQ and your number of degrees. A nation that spews bilge about equal economic potential while, as of 2021, the top 1 percent has 32 percent of the wealth, and the bottom half less than 3 percent, where you can find an advice column headlined “It’s Not Your Fault if You Are Born Poor, but It’s Your Fault if You Die Poor,” which goes on to say that if that was your lamentable outcome, “I’ll say you’re a wasted sperm.”[18

As one finding that is beyond cool, Chinese from rice regions accommodate and avoid obstacles (in this case, walking around two chairs experimentally placed to block the way in Starbucks); people from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e., moving the chairs apart).[52]

take an average heterosexual male and expose him to a particular stimulus, and his PFC becomes more likely to decide that jaywalking is a good idea. What’s the stimulus? The proximity of an attractive woman. I know, pathetic.

In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.

it’s impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower. And that it isn’t a great idea to run the world on the belief that people can and should.

Another literature compares cultures of rain forest versus desert dwellers, where the former tend toward inventing polytheistic religions, the latter, monotheistic ones. This probably reflects ecological influences as well—life in the desert is a furnace-blasted, desiccated singular struggle for survival; rain forests teem with a multitude of species, biasing toward the invention of a multitude of gods. Moreover, monotheistic desert dwellers are more warlike and more effective conquerors than rain forest polytheists, explaining why roughly 55 percent of humans proclaim religions invented by Middle Eastern monotheistic shepherds.[53]

Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

sociality, social interactions, organisms being social with each other, are as much an end product of biology interacting with environment as is the shape of your nose.

Estrogen enhances executive function, working memory, and impulse control and makes people better at rapidly switching tasks when needed.

There is something wrong if an instance of free will exists only until there is a decrease in our ignorance.

Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.

To summarize this section, when you try to do the harder thing that’s better, the PFC you’re working with is going to be displaying the consequences of whatever the previous years have handed you.

What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.

This book has a goal—to get people to think differently about moral responsibility, blame and praise, and the notion of our being free agents. And to feel differently about those issues as well. And most of all, to change fundamental aspects of how we behave.

it’s going to be plenty hard to convince people that a remorseless murderer doesn’t deserve blame. But that’s going to be dwarfed by the difficulty of convincing people that they themselves don’t deserve to be praised if they’ve helped that old woman cross the street.[*

This is huge. Saying that a gene “decides” when it is transcribed is like saying that a recipe decides when a cake is baked. Thus transcription factors regulate genes. What regulates transcription factors? The answer devastates the concept of genetic determinism: the environment.

One would think that the adverse effects of, say, low socioeconomic status in childhood would occur as a result of brain development being delayed. Instead, the problem is that the early-life stress accelerates maturation of the brain, meaning that the window for brain construction being sculpted by experience closes earlier: U. Tooley, D. Bassett, and P. Mackay, “Environmental Influences on the Pace of Brain Development,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 22 (2021): 372.

I’m being diplomatic. Many readers will know of the “replication crisis” in psychology, where an alarming percentage of published findings, even some in textbooks, turn out to be hard or impossible for other scientists to independently replicate (including some findings, I admit ruefully, that wound up being cited in my 2017 book, where I should have been more discerning). Thus, this section considers only findings whose broad conclusions have been independently replicated.

Depression is often framed as a sufferer having a cognitively distorted sense of “learned helplessness,” where the reality of some loss in the past becomes mistakenly perceived as an inevitable future. In this study, though, it was not that depressed individuals were cognitively distorted, underestimating their actual control. Instead they were accurate compared with everyone else’s overestimates. Findings like these support the view that in some circumstances, depressed individuals are not distortive but are “sadder but wiser.” As such, depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality. And thus, perhaps, “we’re better off believing in it anyway.” Truth doesn’t always set you free; truth, mental health, and well-being have a complex relationship, something explored in an extensive literature on the psychology of stress.

Stick recording electrodes into numerous species’ amygdalaefn9 and see when neurons there have action potentials; this turns out to be when the animal is being aggressive.fn10 In a related approach, determine which brain regions consume extra oxygen or glucose, or synthesize certain activity-related proteins, during aggression—the amygdala tops the list.

Studies like these are nice validation of my decision as a fifteen-year-old to never drink or do drugs (and to stick with that resolution).

free will” is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive level yet,

What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond

about life is by having evolved a robust capacity for self-deception.

As some evolutionary biologists have pointed out, the only way humans have survived amid being able to understand truths

The implications of fetal environmental effects? Another route toward how lucky or unlucky you’re likely to be in the world that awaits you.

by age three, your average high-socioeconomic status kid has heard about thirty million more words at home than a poor kid,

socioeconomic status for a pregnant woman or her living in a high-crime neighborhood both predict less cortical development at the time of the baby’s birth.

Variation in the gene for one of the serotonin receptors (there are a lot) helps predict how good people are at impulse control.[*

A seamless arc of influences bringing your PFC to this moment, without a crevice for free will to lodge in.

In this view, the indeterminism of chaos means that, although it doesn’t help you prove that there is free will, it lets you prove that you can’t prove that there isn’t.

free will” is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will.

So if you want to be better at doing the harder thing as an adult, make sure you pick the right adolescence.[

Everywhere you look, there’s that pain and self-loathing, staining all of life, about traits that are manifestations of biology.

It’s not the case that while our natural attributes and aptitudes are made of sciencey stuff, our character, resilience, and backbone come packaged in a soul.

the socioeconomic status of a child’s family predicts the size, volume, and gray matter content of the PFC in kindergarteners. Same thing in toddlers. In six-month-olds. In four-week-olds.

Just to show the scale of epigenetic complexity, differences in mothering styles in monkeys cause epigenetic changes in more than a thousand genes expressed in the offspring’s frontal cortex.

This chapter’s punchline is that it’s impossible to successfully will yourself to have more willpower. And that it isn’t a great idea to run the world on the belief that people can and should.

humans have survived amid being able to understand truths about life is by having evolved a robust capacity for self-deception.[*] And this certainly includes a belief in free will.[4] Despite

what happened when the person I was speaking with fully grasped the implications of what a leptin mutation means? “It was the start of my no longer thinking of myself as a fat pig, of being my own worst bully.

having been abused as a child produces an adult with an increased likelihood of abusing their own child; at one month of age, PFC circuitry is already different in children whose mothers were abused in childhood.

We’re at loggerheads. There’s no such thing as free will, and blame and punishment are without any ethical justification. But we’ve evolved to find the right kind of punishment viscerally rewarding. This is hopeless.

Even after controlling for factors like self-reporting or demographic correlates of religiosity, and after considering broader definitions of prosociality, religious people still come through as being more prosocial than atheists in some experimental as well as real-world settings. Which leads us to a really crucial point: religious prosociality is mostly about religious people being nice to people like themselves. It’s mostly in-group.

Do atheists run amok? Most people sure believe that, and antiatheist prejudice runs wide and deep. There are fifty-two countries in which atheism is punishable by death or prison. Most Americans have negative perceptions

In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19] Where I Rest Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear. Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here.[*] It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.

This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.

The last chapter’s point was that while change happens, we do not freely choose to change; instead, we are changed by the world around us, and one consequence of that is that we are also changed as to what sources of subsequent change we seek.

No surprise, the socioeconomic status of a child’s family predicts the size, volume, and gray matter content of the PFC in kindergarteners. Same thing in toddlers. In six-month-olds. In four-week-olds. You want to scream at how unfair life can be.

U.S. postal workers were taking a stand against the presumed immorality of those atheistic shoemakers, making sure no God-fearin’ American might inadvertently walk a mile in those shoes. No such phenomenon was observed with shoes sent within Europe.[14]

the brain that led someone to drive without their meds is the end product of all the things beyond their control from one second, one minute, one millennium before. And likewise if your brain has been sculpted into one that makes you kind or smart or motivated.

Now to put in a flabbergasting real number: your average neuron has about ten thousand to fifty thousand dendritic spines and about the same number of axon terminals. Factor in a hundred billion neurons, and you see why brains, rather than kidneys, write good poetry.

if free will exists, show me a neuron(s) that just caused a behavior to occur in the complete absence of any influences coming from other neurons, from the neuron’s energy state, from hormones, from any environmental events stretching back through fetal life, from genes.

righteous judgment of others is okay because while life is tough and we’re unfairly gifted or cursed with our attributes, what we freely choose to do with them is the measure of our worth. These stances have fueled profound amounts of undeserved pain and unearned entitlement.

Fatigue also depletes frontal resources. As the workday progresses, doctors take the easier way out, ordering up fewer tests, being more likely to prescribe opiates (but not a nonproblematic drug like an anti-inflammatory, or physical therapy). Subjects are more likely to behave unethically and become less morally reflective as the day progresses, or after they’ve struggled with a cognitively challenging task. In an immensely unsettling study of emergency room doctors, the more cognitively demanding the workday (as measured by patient load), the higher the levels of implicit racial bias by the end of the day.[27

What if everyone started believing that there is no free will? How are we supposed to function? Why would we bother getting up in the morning if we’re just machines?” Hey, don’t ask me that; that’s too difficult to answer. The second half of this book is an attempt to provide some answers. 11 Will We Run Amok?

It takes a certain kind of audacity and indifference to look at findings like these and still insist that how readily someone does the harder things in life justifies blame, punishment, praise, or reward. Just ask those fetuses in the womb of a low-socioeconomic-status woman, already paying a neurobiological price.

whether you display admirable gumption, squander opportunity in a murk of self-indulgence, majestically stare down temptation or belly flop into it, these are all the outcome of the functioning of the PFC and the brain regions it connects to. And that PFC functioning is the outcome of the second before, minutes before, millennia before.

I recognize that I’m on the fringe here, fellow traveling with only a handful of scholars (e.g., Gregg Caruso, Sam Harris, Derk Pereboom, Galen Strawson). I’ll settle for merely significantly challenging someone’s free-will faith. Sufficiently so that they will reframe their thinking about both our everyday lives and our most consequential moments.

Will we ever get to the point where our behavior is entirely predictable, given the deterministic gears grinding underneath? Never—that’s one of the points of chaoticism. But the rate at which we are accruing new insights into those gears is boggling—nearly every fact in this book was discovered in the last fifty years, probably half in the last five.

Thus, if you’re trying to decide who is more likely to run amok with antisocial behaviors, atheists will look bad if the question is “How much of your money would you give to charity for the poor?” But if the question is “How much of your money would you pay in higher taxes for more social services for the poor?” you’ll reach a different conclusion.[27]

A universe away from the idea that if you’re a teenager cursed with a schizophrenogenic mother, a descent into schizophrenic madness is your escape. In other words, this is another domain where we have managed to subtract out the notion of blame from the disease (and, in the process, become vastly more effective at treating the disease than when mothers were being given scarlet letters).

Reductionism is great. It’s a whole lot better to take on a pandemic by sequencing the gene for a viral coat protein than by trying to appease a vengeful deity with sacrificial offerings of goat intestines. Nonetheless, it has its limits, and what the revolutions of chaoticism, emergent complexity, and quantum indeterminism show is that some of the most interesting things about us defy pure reductionism.

Work by psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University groups moral concerns into five domains—those related to obedience, loyalty, purity, fairness, and harm avoidance. His influential work has shown that political conservatives and highly religious people tilt in the direction of particularly valuing obedience, loyalty, and purity. The Left and the irreligious, in contrast, are more concerned with fairness and harm avoidance.

This is the bubbling-up problem in going from quantum indeterminacy at the subatomic level up to brains producing behavior—you’d need to have a staggeringly large number of such random events occurring at the same time, place, and direction. Instead, most experts conclude that the more likely scenario is that any given quantum event gets lost in the noise of a staggering number of other quantum events occurring at different times and directions

We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we’ve chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons, that agency and volition dwell there. Our intuitions scream this, because we don’t know about, can’t imagine, the subterranean forces of our biological history that brought it about. It is a huge challenge to overcome those intuitions when you still have to wait for science to be able to predict that behavior precisely.

When someone has had a first seizure, mobs of parasite-riddled yahoo peasants with pitchforks don’t gather to witness the ritualistic burning of the epileptic’s driver’s license. The heartbreak of a tragedy doesn’t get translated into a frenzy of retribution. We have been able to subtract blame and the myth of free will out of the entire subject and, nonetheless, have found minimally constraining ways of protecting people who suffer—directly or secondarily—from this terrible disease.

Unless the process of discovery in science grinds to a halt tonight at midnight, the vacuum of ignorance that we try to fill with a sense of agency will just keep shrinking. Which raises the question that motivates the second half of this book.[3] • • • I’m sitting at my desk during afternoon office hours; two students from my class are asking questions about topics from lectures; we wander into biological determinism, free will, the whole shebang, which is what the course is ultimately about.

tour of quantum mechanics. For our purposes, the main points are that in the view of most of the savants, the subatomic universe works on a level that is fundamentally indeterministic on both an ontic and epistemic level. Particles can be in multiple places at once, can communicate with each other over vast distances faster than the speed of light, making both space and time fundamentally suspect, and can tunnel through solid objects. As we’ll now see, that’s plenty enough for people to run wild when proclaiming free will.

The theme of the second half of this book is this: We’ve done it before. Over and over, in various domains, we’ve shown that we can subtract out a belief that actions are freely, willfully chosen, as we’ve become more knowledgeable, more reflective, more modern. And the roof has not caved in; society can function without our believing that people with epilepsy are in cahoots with Satan and that mothers of people with schizophrenia caused the disease by hating their child. But it will be hugely difficult to continue this arc,

And in the seconds to minutes before, those neurons were activated by a thought, a memory, an emotion, or sensory stimuli. And in the hours to days before that behavior occurred, the hormones in your circulation shaped those thoughts, memories, and emotions and altered how sensitive your brain was to particular environmental stimuli. And in the preceding months to years, experience and environment changed how those neurons function, causing some to sprout new connections and become more excitable, and causing the opposite in others.

Yup. I had a crisis of trying to make sense of theistic determinism. The Exodus story. Moses goes to Pharaoh and says, “Let my people go.” And Pharaoh says, “No way.” And Moses brings a plague upon Egypt. And Pharaoh says, “Okay, I give up. You can all go.” And then, at least in the version I was raised with, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart” and made him say, “I changed my mind, nobody’s going anywhere.” So now, in comes the second plague, and Pharaoh says, “I give up.” And God intervenes again, and at the end we’re asked not only to judge Pharaoh but, while we’re at it, kill all the firstborns and the horses and whatever poor schmucks have been forced to be in the army running those chariots across the Red Sea. And justice has been served. But wait a second—God interfered. But then God judged them, and that’s very confusing. And when I was thirteen, it became crystal clear. I remember one night waking up at two in the morning and thinking, “None of that makes sense. None of it’s for real. It’s nonsense.” And I’ve been incapable of a shred of spirituality or religiosity since then.

What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me. A whole field of psychology explores terror management theory, trying to make sense of the hodgepodge of coping mechanisms we resort to when facing the inevitability and unpredictability of death. As we know, those responses cover the range of humans at our best and worst—becoming closer to your intimates, identifying more with your cultural values (whether humanitarian or fascist in nature), making the world a better place, deciding to live well as the best revenge. And by now, in our age of existential crisis, the terror we feel when shadowed by death has a kid sibling in our terror when shadowed by meaninglessness. Shadowed by our being biological machines wobbling on top of turtles that go all the way down. We are not captains of our ships; our ships never had captains.[2] Fuck. That really blows.

I am put into a detached, professorial, eggheady sort of rage by the idea that you can assess someone’s behavior outside the context of what brought them to that moment of intent, that their history doesn’t matter. Or that even if a behavior seems determined, free will lurks wherever you’re not looking. And by the conclusion that righteous judgment of others is okay because while life is tough and we’re unfairly gifted or cursed with our attributes, what we freely choose to do with them is the measure of our worth. These stances have fueled profound amounts of undeserved pain and unearned entitlement.

takeaway from the first half of this book is that the biological determinants of our behavior stretch widely over space and time—responding to events in front of you this instant but also to events on the other side of the planet or that shaped your ancestors centuries back. And those influences are deep and subterranean, and our ignorance of the shaping forces beneath the surface leads us to fill in the vacuum with stories of agency. Just to restate that irritatingly-familiar-by-now notion, we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control—our biology, our environments, their interactions.

Instead, the most common alternative in these studies is for subjects to read a cogent discussion about our lack of free will. Studies have often used a passage from Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Scribner). Crick, of the Watson-and-Crick duo who identified the structure of DNA, grew fascinated with the brain and consciousness in his later years. A hard determinist as well as an elegant, clear writer, Crick summarizes the scientific argument for our being merely the sum of our biological components. “Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons,” he concludes.[3]

Note: I won’t be considering any theologically based Judeo-Christian views about these subjects beyond this broad summary here. As far as I can tell, most of the theological discussions center around omniscience—if God’s all-knowingness includes knowing the future, how can we ever freely, willingly choose between two options (let alone be judged for our choice)? Amid the numerous takes on this, one answer is that God is outside of time, such that past, present, and future are meaningless concepts (implying, among other things, that God could never relax by going to a movie and being pleasantly surprised by a plot turn—He always knows that the butler didn’t do it). Another answer is one of the limited God, something explored by Aquinas—God cannot sin, cannot make a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, cannot make a square circle (or, as another example that I’ve seen offered by a surprising number of male but not female theologians, even God cannot make a married bachelor). In other words, God cannot do everything, He can just do whatever is possible, and foreseeing whether someone will choose good or evil is not knowable, even for Him. Related to this all, Sam Harris mordantly notes that even if we each have a soul, we sure didn’t get to pick it.

Yes, all the interesting things in the world can be shot through with chaoticism, including a cell, an organ, an organism, a society. And as a result, there are really important things that can’t be predicted, that can never be predicted. But nonetheless, every step in the progression of a chaotic system is made of determinism, not whim. And yes, take a huge number of simple component parts that interact in simple ways, let them interact, and stunningly adaptive complexity emerges. But the component parts remain precisely as simple, and they can’t transcend their biological constraints to contain magical things like free will

Here is our vitally important reason for optimism, about how the sky won’t necessarily fall if people come to stop believing in free will. There are people who have thought long and hard about, say, what early-life privilege or adversity does to the development of the frontal cortex, and have concluded, “There’s no free will and here’s why.” They are a mirror of the people who have thought long and hard about the same and concluded, “There’s still free will and here’s why.” The similarities between the two are ultimately greater than the differences, and the real contrast is between them and those whose reaction to questions about the roots of our moral decency is “Whatever.

When you read between the lines, or sometimes even the lines themselves in their writing, a lot of these compatibilists are actually saying that there has to be free will because it would be a total downer otherwise, doing contortions to make an emotional stance seem like an intellectual one. Humans “descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known,” said the wife of an Anglican bishop in 1860, when told about Darwin’s novel theory of evolution.[*] One hundred fifty-six years later, Stephen Cave titled a much-discussed June 2016 article in The Atlantic “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will . . . but We’re Better Off Believing in It Anyway.”[*]

Here’s how unlikely a place antiatheist prejudice can pop up. Psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle of the University of Kentucky recount the story of a shoe company in Germany that was getting a lot of complaints from Americans—shoes bought online were greatly delayed or never delivered. The name of the company? Atheist Shoes. The owner did an experiment where half the shipments to America were sent without the company’s name on the label, half with. The former were delivered promptly; the latter were frequently delayed or lost. U.S. postal workers were taking a stand against the presumed immorality of those atheistic shoemakers, making sure no God-fearin’ American might inadvertently walk a mile in those shoes. No such phenomenon was observed with shoes sent within Europe.

The previous two chapters can basically be distilled to the following: —“Break it down to its component parts” reductionism doesn’t work for understanding some vastly interesting things about us. Instead, in such chaotic systems, minuscule differences in starting states amplify enormously in their consequences. —This nonlinearity makes for fundamental unpredictability, suggesting to many that there is an essentialism that defies reductive determinism, meaning that the “there can’t be free will because the world is deterministic” stance goes down the drain. —Nope. Unpredictable is not the same thing as undetermined; reductive determinism is not the only kind of determinism; chaotic systems are purely deterministic, shutting down that particular angle of proclaiming the existence of free will.

To reiterate, when you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, and before that, all the way down. The approach of this book is to show how that determinism works, to explore how the biology over which you had no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control, made you you. And when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call “free will,” they have (a) failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking beneath the surface and/or (b) erroneously concluded that the rarefied aspects of the universe that do work indeterministically can explain your character, morals, and behavior.

This should have stopped the schizophrenogenic voodoo right in its tracks. High blood pressure can be lessened with a drug that blocks a receptor for a different type of neurotransmitter, and you conclude that a core problem was too much of that neurotransmitter. But schizophrenic symptoms can be lessened with a drug that blocks dopamine receptors, and you still conclude that the core problem is toxic mothering. Remarkably, that’s what psychiatry’s psychoanalytic ruling class concluded. After fighting the introduction of the medications tooth and nail in America and eventually losing, they came up with an accommodation: neuroleptics weren’t doing anything to the core problems of schizophrenia; they just sedated patients enough so that it is easier to psychodynamically make progress with them about the scars from how they were mothered. The psychoanalytic scumbags even developed a sneering, pejorative term for families (i.e., mothers) of schizophrenic patients who tried to dodge responsibility by believing that it was a brain disease: dissociative-organic types. The influential 1958 book Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study (John Wiley), by the Viennese psychiatrist Frederick Redlich, who chaired Yale’s psychiatry department for seventeen years, and the Yale sociologist August Hollingshead, explained it all. Dissociative-organic types were typically lower-class, less educated people, for whom “It’s a biochemical disorder” was akin to still believing in the evil eye, an easy, erroneous explanation for those not intelligent enough to understand Freud. Schizophrenia was still caused by lousy parenting, and nothing was to change in the mainstream for decades.

Psychology studies also show how the sense of agency can be illusory. In one study, pushing a button would be followed immediately by a light going on . . . some of the time. The percentage of time the light would go on was varied; subjects were then asked how much control they felt they had over the light. People consistently overestimate how reliably the light occurs, feeling that they control it.[*] In another study, subjects believed they were voluntarily choosing which hand to use in pushing a button. Unbeknownst to them, hand choice was being controlled by transcranial magnetic stimulation[*] of their motor cortex; nonetheless, subjects perceived themselves as controlling their decisions. Meanwhile, other studies used manipulations straight out of the playbook of magicians and mentalists, with subjects claiming agency over events that were actually foregone and out of their control.

Neuroimaging studies show the PFC reining in more emotional brain regions in the name of doing (or thinking) the right thing. Stick a volunteer in a brain scanner and flash up pictures of faces. And in a depressing, well-replicated finding, flash up the face of someone of another race and in about 75 percent of subjects, there is activation of the amygdala, the brain region central to fear, anxiety, and aggression.[*] In under a tenth of a second.[*] And then the PFC does the harder thing. In most of those subjects, a few seconds after the amygdala activates, the PFC kicks in, turning off the amygdala. It’s a delayed frontocortical voice—“Don’t think that way. That’s not who I am.” And who are the folks in which the PFC doesn’t muzzle the amygdala? People whose racism is avowedly, unapologetically explicit—“That is who I am.”[13] In another experimental paradigm, a subject in a brain scanner plays an online game with two other people—each is represented by a symbol on the screen, forming a triangle. They toss a virtual ball around—the subject presses one of two buttons, determining which of the two symbols the ball is tossed to; the other two toss it to each other, toss it back to the subject. This goes on for a while, everyone having a fine time, and then, oh no, the other two people stop tossing the ball to the subject. It’s the middle-school nightmare: “They know I’m a dork.” The amygdala rapidly activates, along with the insular cortex, a region associated with disgust and distress. And then, after a delay, the PFC inhibits these other regions—“Get this in perspective; this is just a stupid game.” In a subset of individuals, however, the PFC doesn’t activate as much, and the amygdala and insular cortex just keep going, as the subject feels more subjective distress. Who are these impaired individuals? Teenagers—the PFC isn’t up to the task yet of dismissing social ostracism as meaningless. There you have it.[*]

Obviously, imposing these classifications on determinism, free will, and moral responsibility is wildly simplified. A key simplification is pretending that most people have clean “yes” or “no” answers as to whether these states exist; the absence of clear dichotomies leads to frothy philosophical concepts like partial free will, situational free will, free will in only a subset of us, free will only when it matters or only when it doesn’t. This raises the question of whether the edifice of free-will belief is crumbled by one flagrant, highly consequential exception and, conversely, whether free-will skepticism collapses when the opposite occurs. Focusing on gradations between yes and no is important, since interesting things in the biology of behavior are often on continua. As such, my fairly absolutist stance on these issues puts me way out in left field. Again, my goal isn’t to convince you that there’s no free will; it will suffice if you merely conclude that there’s so much less free will than you thought that you have to change your thinking about some truly important things.

There’s a related quartet of views concerning the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. The last word obviously carries a lot of baggage with it, and the sense in which it is used by people debating free will typically calls forth the concept of basic desert, where someone can deserve to be treated in a particular way, where the world is a morally acceptable place in its recognition that one person can deserve a particular reward, another a particular punishment. As such, these views are: There’s no free will, and thus holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong. Where I sit. (And as will be covered in chapter 14, this is completely separate from forward-looking issues of punishment for deterrent value.) There’s no free will, but it is okay to hold people morally responsible for their actions. This is another type of compatibilism—an absence of free will and moral responsibility coexist without invoking the supernatural. There’s free will, and people should be held morally responsible. This is probably the most common stance out there. There’s free will, but moral responsibility isn’t justified. This is a minority view; typically, when you look closely, the supposed free will exists in a very narrow sense and is certainly not worth executing people about.

There, I just decided to pick up this pen—are you telling me that was completely out of my control?” I don’t have the data to prove it, but I think I can predict above the chance level which of any given pair of students will be the one who picks up the pen. It’s more likely to be the student who skipped lunch and is hungry. It’s more likely to be the male, if it is a mixed-sex pair. It is especially more likely if it is a heterosexual male and the female is someone he wants to impress. It’s more likely to be the extrovert. It’s more likely to be the student who got way too little sleep last night and it’s now late afternoon. Or whose circulating androgen levels are higher than typical for them (independent of their sex). It’s more likely to be the student who, over the months of the class, has decided that I’m an irritating blowhard, just like their father. Marching further back, it’s more likely to be the one of the pair who is from a wealthy family, rather than on a full scholarship, who is the umpteenth generation of their family to attend a prestigious university, rather than the first member of their immigrant family to finish high school. It’s more likely if they’re not a firstborn son. It’s more likely if their immigrant parents chose to come to the U.S. for economic gain as opposed to having fled their native land as refugees from persecution, more likely if their ancestry is from an individualist culture rather than a collectivist one.

Here’s how I’ve always pictured mitigated free will: There’s the brain—neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, receptors, brainspecific transcription factors, epigenetic effects, gene transpositions during neurogenesis. Aspects of brain function can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, when they had breakfast. It’s the whole shebang, all of this book. And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or agendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel. The homunculus is made of a mixture of nanochips, old vacuum tubes, crinkly ancient parchment, stalactites of your mother’s admonishing voice, streaks of brimstone, rivets made out of gumption. In other words, not squishy biological brain yuck. And the homunculus sits there controlling behavior. There are some things outside its purview—seizures blow the homunculus’s fuses, requiring it to reboot the system and check for damaged files. Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock. There are domains where the homunculus and that brain biology stuff have worked out a détente—for example, biology is usually automatically regulating your respiration, unless you must take a deep breath before singing an aria, in which case the homunculus briefly overrides the automatic pilot. But other than that, the homunculus makes decisions. Sure, it takes careful note of all the inputs and information from the brain, checks your hormone levels, skims the neurobiology journals, takes it all under advisement, and then, after reflecting and deliberating, decides what you do. A homunculus in your brain, but not of it, operating independently of the material rules of the universe that constitute modern science. That’s what mitigated free will is about. I see incredibly smart people recoil from this and attempt to argue against the extremity of this picture rather than accept its basic validity: “You’re setting up a straw homunculus, suggesting that I think that other than the likes of seizures or brain injuries, we are making all our decisions freely. No, no, my free will is much softer and lurks around the edges of biology, like when I freely decide which socks to wear.” But the frequency or significance with which free will exerts itself doesn’t matter. Even if 99.99 percent of your actions are biologically determined (in the broadest sense of this book), and it is only once a decade that you claim to have chosen out of “free will” to floss your teeth from left to right instead of the reverse, you’ve tacitly invoked a homunculus operating outside the rules of science. This is how most people accommodate the supposed coexistence of free will and biological influences on behavior. For them, nearly all discussions come down to figuring what our putative homunculus should and shouldn’t be expected to be capable of.

I’m going to be discussing some of the common attitudes held by people writing about free will. These come in four basic flavors: The world is deterministic and there’s no free will. In this view, if the former is the case, the latter has to be as well; determinism and free will are not compatible. I am coming from this perspective of “hard incompatibilism.” The world is deterministic and there is free will. These folks are emphatic that the world is made of stuff like atoms, and life, in the elegant words of psychologist Roy Baumeister (currently at the University of Queensland in Australia), “is based on the immutability and relentlessness of the laws of nature.” No magic or fairy dust involved, no substance dualism, the view where brain and mind are separate entities. Instead, this deterministic world is viewed as compatible with free will. This is roughly 90 percent of philosophers and legal scholars, and the book will most often be taking on these “compatibilists.” The world is not deterministic; there’s no free will. This is an oddball view that everything important in the world runs on randomness, a supposed basis of free will. We’ll get to this in chapters 9 and 10. The world is not deterministic; there is free will. These are folks who believe, like I do, that a deterministic world is not compatible with free will—however, no problem, the world isn’t deterministic in their view, opening a door for free-will belief. These “libertarian incompatibilists” are a rarity, and I’ll only occasionally touch on their views.

For example, highly religious and highly secular people score the same on tests of conscientiousness, coming out higher than those in the third group. In experimental studies of obedience (usually variants on the classic research of Stanley Milgram examining how willing subjects are to obey an order to shock someone), the greatest rates of compliance came from religious “moderates,” whereas “extreme believers” and “extreme nonbelievers” were equally resistant. In another study, doctors who had chosen to care for the underserved at the cost of personal income were disproportionately highly religious or highly irreligious. Moreover, classic studies of the people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust documented that these people who could not look the other way were disproportionately likely to be either highly religious or highly irreligious.[38] Here is our vitally important reason for optimism, about how the sky won’t necessarily fall if people come to stop believing in free will. There are people who have thought long and hard about, say, what early-life privilege or adversity does to the development of the frontal cortex, and have concluded, “There’s no free will and here’s why.” They are a mirror of the people who have thought long and hard about the same and concluded, “There’s still free will and here’s why.” The similarities between the two are ultimately greater than the differences, and the real contrast is between them and those whose reaction to questions about the roots of our moral decency is “Whatever.

As implied in Levy’s quote, the process of freely choosing what sort of person you become, despite whatever bad constitutive luck you’ve had, is usually framed as a gradual, usually maturational process. In a debate with Dennett, incompatibilist Gregg Caruso outlined chapter 3’s essence—we have no control over either the biology or the environment thrown at us. Dennett’s response was “So what? The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc.” This is a logical outcome of Dennett’s claim that bad and good luck average out over time: Come on, get your act together. You’ve had enough time to take responsibility, to choose to catch up to everyone else in the marathon.[2] A similar view comes from the distinguished philosopher Robert Kane, of the University of Texas: “Free will in my view involves more than merely free of action. It concerns self-formation. The relevant question for free will is this: How did you get to be the kind of person you now are?” Roskies and Shadlen write, “It is plausible to think that agents might be held morally responsible even for decisions that are not conscious, if those decisions are due to policy settings which are expressions of the agent [in other words, acts of free will in the past].”[3] Not all versions of this idea require gradual acquisition of past-tense free will. Kane believes that “choose what sort of person you’re going to be” happens at moments of crisis, at major forks in the road, at moments of what he calls “Self-Forming Actions” (and he proposes a mechanism by which this supposedly occurs, which we’ll touch on briefly in chapter 10). In contrast, psychiatrist Sean Spence, of the University of Sheffield, believes that those I-had-free-will-back-then moments happen when life is at its optimal, rather than in crisis.

For millennia, sages have proclaimed how outer beauty reflects inner goodness. While we may no longer openly claim that, beauty-is-good still holds sway unconsciously; attractive people are judged to be more honest, intelligent, and competent; are more likely to be elected or hired, and with higher salaries; are less likely to be convicted of crimes, then getting shorter sentences. Jeez, can’t the brain distinguish beauty from goodness? Not especially. In three different studies, subjects in brain scanners alternated between rating the beauty of something (e.g., faces) or the goodness of some behavior. Both types of assessments activated the same region (the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC); the more beautiful or good, the more OFC activation (and the less insula activation). It’s as if irrelevant emotions about beauty gum up cerebral contemplation of the scales of justice. Which was shown in another study—moral judgments were no longer colored by aesthetics after temporary inhibition of a part of the PFC that funnels information about emotions into the frontal cortex.[*] “Interesting,” the subject is told. “Last week, you sent that other person to prison for life. But just now, when looking at this other person who had done the same thing, you voted for them for Congress—how come?” And the answer isn’t “Murder is definitely bad, but OMG, those eyes are like deep, limpid pools.” Where did the intent behind the decision come from? The fact that the brain hasn’t had enough time yet to evolve separate circuits for evaluating morality and aesthetics.[6] Next, want to make someone more likely to choose to clean their hands? Have them describe something crummy and unethical they’ve done. Afterward, they’re more likely to wash their hands or reach for hand sanitizer than if they’d been recounting something ethically neutral they’d done. Subjects instructed to lie about something rate cleansing (but not noncleansing) products as more desirable than do those instructed to be honest. Another study showed remarkable somatic specificity, where lying orally (via voice mail) increased the desire for mouthwash, while lying by hand (via email) made hand sanitizers more desirable. One neuroimaging study showed that when lying by voice mail boosts preference for mouthwash, a different part of the sensory cortex activates than when lying by email boosts the appeal of hand sanitizers. Neurons believing, literally, that your mouth or hand, respectively, is dirty.