A Review of 'Determined: Life Without Free Will' by Robert Sapolsky

Written by Tom Knight

In Determined: Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky states his aim unequivocally: an almost evangelical plea that we reject the idea of freewill and look to the ills of society that this falsehood has caused.

“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.” (Sapolsky, 2023)

Imagine for a moment a demon, able to know the precise position and state of all matter and energy in the universe. Suppose thanks to some transcendental jiggery-pokery, this demon, witness D if you will, were to testify in a high-profile fraud trial, involving perhaps former president Donald J. Trump. Our trans-dimensional being takes the stand and delivers a testimony to end all testimonies and Donald Trump’s best alibi yet. It goes something like this. If witness D could know the precise state of matter and energy in the universe at a given moment, then it follows that the demon could predict the state of matter and energy in the universe at any given point in the future, or indeed at any point in time. So argued French thinker Pierre Simon Laplace. Furthermore, if through some feat of universal 3D modelling, this demon were able to recreate any moment in the history with the same accuracy, then the future unfolding from that moment would be identical. This is determinism. Everything that has and will happen in the universe was, is, and will be determined by what has gone before. Trump, it follows, cannot be held responsible for any of his actions as he did nothing of his own free will. Our demonic witness has just given the testimony to end them all. What’s true of former presidents is true of everyone.

Things get worse for prosecutors, not to mention free will, with advances in technology and the experiments of our second witness, Benjamin Libet. Neuroscientist Libet was able to demonstrate that decisions are made in our brains before we are conscious of them. Libet’s discovery at the University of California in 1983 has been replicated and refined by multiple scientists, showing that time and time again, neurons in our brains responsible for decision making will fire before we are conscious of our intentions. (Baggini, 2015) From philandering spouses to mass murderers, are we all off the hook?

It might seem odd then that Sapolsky should devote so much of the first part of his book to painstakingly explaining and then demolishing both arguments summarised above. Sapolsky’s polemic is, after all, an attempt to liberate us from the notion that what we do is a result of free will. But this is Sapolsky’s modus operandi and the backbone of his book. He systematically bench-tests arguments both for and against free will until they fall apart. This insistence on dismantling arguments from all quarters seems to be Sapolsky’s way of ensuring that no gap, even at a quantum level, remains in which free will can exist.

“Let me state this most broadly… …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.” (Sapolsky, 2023)

The breadth and indeed depth of Sapolsky’s argument is dizzying. One might expect to be wowed by his examination of neuroscience and possibly genetics, but the span of this book is one that deals with the science of Chaos Theory, Emergent Complexity and Quantum Indeterminacy to name a few. Sapolsky explains each in turn in (almost) layman’s terms before explaining in even greater detail why they do not allow space for free will.

“All we are is the history of our biology, over which we had no control, and of its interaction with environments, over which we also had no control, creating who we are in the moment… Why did that behaviour occur? Because of biological and environmental interactions, all the way down.” (Sapolsky, 2023)

It is on the implications of this lack of control that Sapolsky becomes most impassioned. Why should we congratulate the successful Ivy League graduate and ignore the ground staff who clear up after the ceremony when their respective roles in proceedings are merely determined by an accident of birth? Why, when a person’s exposure to alcohol or drugs in the womb has predisposed them to poor self-regulation, reactive aggression, and drug abuse in adulthood, do we punish them for committing violent crime? Sapolsky is explicit in his contempt for America’s pseudo-meritocracy and its brutal penal system.

Sapolsky’s discussion is painstaking; much of it does not fit in his body text and overflows into extensive, sometimes tangential, footnotes. These litter the book and, in some cases, squeeze the body matter to a quarter of a page. This constant redirection to the bottom of the page can become a distraction, but it belies an urgency on the part of Sapolsky to explain, and then explain some more. One can imagine rapidly ageing editors with clumps of hair in their grasp as the author, like a naughty undergraduate, tries to finagle the word count. Sapolsky uses these addenda so prolifically it is hard to keep up. They range from apologising in advance for perceived ad hominin attacks, “None of my criticisms are meant to be personal” to out and out attacks on historical characters, “I have to go through the same thinking process that this book is about to arrive at any feelings about Bettelheim other than that he was a sick, sadistic fuck.”

Determined is the work of a polymath and, as such, it attempts to deal not just with neuroscience but with fundamental questions of human existence and morality. What Sapolsky offers is an opportunity to rethink our very existence and its purpose. Whether he will be regarded by history as a genius and a prophet or just another eccentric academic is of course, according to the man himself, a foregone conclusion.

References

BAGGINI, Julian. 2015. Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will. London: Granta.

SAPOLSKY, Robert M. 2023. Determined: Life without Free Will. London: The Bodley Head.

Edited by Nico Horton