by Peter Topolewski
Before the violence in the movie Bugonia moves center screen—and the narrative takes a not completely unexpected left turn—it’s made clear Teddy’s paranoia and consuming conspiracism and violent nature all have roots in childhood trauma. Things like child molestation and the hospitalization of his drug addled mother.
Oh gawd, you think, another movie explaining away awful behavior with a hellish upbringing. Seen it a million times, it’s boring already.
Boring in a movie, maybe, but that’s real life. Except it’s not only trauma that explains rotten behavior. Everything up to this moment in time explains everything about you, everything you’ve done, you’re about to do, and ever will do. This according to Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist and author of Determined. You have no free will, your actions are determined by your genes, your environment, and your experiences. You have control over none of them.
His book, a couple years old now, has been well reviewed and discussed right here on 3 Quarks Daily, and there’s no need to do so again. The book feels like a mess at times, but an enjoyable one. And the choices—yes choices—Sapolsky made while writing the book are fascinating, the details of the science both enlightening and staggering, his purpose for writing it never more vital. And the implications are a trip. There’s no reason to carry on with this, but I have no choice but to go on, no more choice than I had to stop reading Determined, no more choice than Sapolsky had writing it.
Did he write it?
It did not write itself, but neither did Sapolsky write it, not in the sense we’re used to, for he, like us, are not people in the sense we’re accustomed to. “We are nothing more or less than the sum of biology over which we had no control, and its interactions with the environmental circumstances over which we also had no control.”
An accumulation of influences, chemical reactions, experiences, and so on wrote the book. It would have been helpful if that accumulation, known as Sapolsky, had taken the time to develop and deploy a vocabulary in the book that would help readers keep this reality fixed in our attention while we read. The fact that “he” did not is one sign—but not the first sign—that when Sapolsky says we have no free will, “he” doesn’t mean it. Well, he means it, but he doesn’t 100% believe it.
What’s the first sign?
That comes early in the book: “This book has two goals. The first is to convince you that there is no free will, or at least that there is much less free will than generally assumed.”
Why didn’t he just go with that? That there’s much less free will than generally assumed, especially when he makes such a good case. Why the stretch, why say there is no free will?
Sounds like a marketing… decision?
Or could it be because—if we look back into accumulation of experiences and influences that constitute Sapolsky—at age fourteen he had an existential crisis and woke up at two in the morning and said “Aha, I get it. There’s no God, there’s no purpose, and there’s no free will.” Did Sapolsky dissect how that conclusion, plus all the related influences and experiences that both led up to and followed, colored and shaped and finally decided what got into the book?
Turns out, once we get past the marketing copy and the existential crisis, Sapolsky is talking about something very specific, something not necessarily what common folk think of when they think of free will. When he says we don’t have free will, what he means is that there is no biological proof that a decision you make causes a change—or shows up—in your brain.
The reality, in fact, is the opposite. Everything that happens in your brain can be traced to genes, chemicals, hormones and so on acting, evolving, and experiencing over time, from evolutionary time to time in the womb and right up to this to this second. Those activities manifest themselves in what you do. And you have no control over them.
Sapolsky makes a compelling, fascinating argument for this. “He” has compiled mind boggling examples of how environments (prenatal, home, work, natural) affect the brain, how neurotransmitters work, how neurons operate—and how humans share much of their biological and chemical intracellular machinery with, among others, sea slugs. Studying that slug, scientists have found that it changes adaptively to a changing environment—and none of them say it does so with free will.
In fact, the truth is that when we learn about the sea slug, our nervous system changes—without us deciding anything at all.
So here—and by here, we’re talking about most of the book—Sapolsky is on to something.
Which is why it doesn’t feel great when he both denies the existence of free will and peppers his prose with phrases like experts believe and I think I can predict above chance level and if you base your notion. Makes you wish for that new vocabulary he didn’t invent, for what does he mean by notion, or believe, or think?
But then he comes right out and says it: When we argue about whether our behavior is the product of our agency, we’re not interested in random behavior… We’re interested in the consistency of behavior that constitutes our moral character.
Why? Why say “we have no free will”, then fess up to what he actually means? Is it the marketing thing again? His childhood?
It’s because he has a case to make, a noble case: 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 as we as a human enterprise have done this, the world has gotten to be a better place.
To cite but one of his examples, no longer do we sterilize epileptics or burn them at the stake as witches. And our societies, never mind the epileptics themselves, are better for it.
Sapolsky’s great and admirable point in all this is that it is the events—almost all of which you have no clue about—stretching back one hundred millennia and right up to this moment that determine how your life unfolds. And thus, no matter who you look at, yourself included, 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.
By god that’s beautiful. And a wonderful guide to living well, to living right.
That is precisely what stokes Sapolsky to argue that not only are we not responsible for our accomplishments, we’re not responsible for our mistakes. Including our crimes. It’s why he has testified in court as an expert witness in defense of violent criminals. It is why he favors quarantine, not punishment, for the “guilty”. He’s pushing hard and against immense odds to make the world a better place.
Which is why so much of his book is frustrating. Over and over, he doesn’t help his cause.
He comes across as a humble guy, but where is his humility when he condemns the hubris of and harm from scientists of yore without acknowledging he’s taking the same I’m 1000% right attitude?
Would it kill him to say your life is a combination of nature/nurture to the best of our understanding and to such an extent you can’t be held responsible for many of your actions?
In a world where you have no responsibility, where you have no choice and therefore make no decisions, how can he call Nelson Mandella a moral giant? What does he mean by moral?
Sapolsky is trying to change behavior and/or morals, but like morals, what does try mean? Is he compelled to do this? Did he decide to? And what makes his vision of what’s right, well, right?
To his credit—well, as he’s said, he doesn’t deserve any praise—Sapolsky does own up to this problem.
It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something “good” can happen to a machine, he writes, here using “machine” in place of “person”. Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.
Illogical?
Maybe. Or maybe it’s what is called choice?
Sapolsky wrote about what we share with the sea slug Aplysia. And there’s plenty in the book about how slime and ants and bees and rats and primates function and learn and explore—and how, yes, we share a lot in common with them. Do those similarities preclude us doing any thing beyond what they can do?
As far as we know, have any of these other creatures asked why? Have they inquired about the nature of time or insisted on composing a song, even knowing no one will listen to it?
If not, is it conceivable that in our added capacity to ask such things, to plan, to create, we also have the ability to make decisions? Perhaps even achieved these feats because we can make decisions?
Sapolsky can’t find proof of free will in the brain. Maybe he hasn’t figured out what to look for. Meanwhile, there are of reems proof outside the brain showing we’re not anything like everything else in the discovered universe.
That doesn’t go only for our culture, our laws, our buildings, our science, our exploration, our questions. It also applies to our thoughts. Yes, there are other sentient creatures in this world, and some are said to have inner lives. But the difference is so vast as to be in kind, not degree.
Interestingly, our consciousness and our inner life—perhaps humanity’s secret sauce— doesn’t have to be an item cited strictly in favor of free will. Instead, it could be that those moments when we’re inspired to write or make art or music, when we access our muse, we’re accessing a small fraction of the processes inside and around us that take place beyond our free will. Perhaps in those moments, we become a conduit for that realm we don’t control, that vast realm Sapolsky describes.
Here you can be shaped by and acknowledge the wonders in and around us, be shaped and blown away by the human discovery of them. You can choose good. You can choose to contemplate yourself as a vector of the past, moving through the past to the now, with a potential in the future already circumscribed by a million things you have no idea about. You can ride that point forward, like an arrow through time, and feel the flow of the world happening to you, wonder what you’re going to do next.
You can wonder if you are but one more unit of evolution, a universe pumping out a billion times a billion combinations to try to get it right. Such a process, if that’s what we’re a part of, might explain in part the countless lives that ended in tragedy over human history, the squalor and injustice that remains today for too many on the planet.
It might also explain why we’re so different from the rest, why since the dinosaurs we are the largest and most dominant living creatures in the known universe. Unlike the dinosaurs, our fate isn’t set. In a fraction of the time they existed, we’ve evolved—progressed!—and perhaps that will continue with us overcoming and escaping some of the influences and environments and biological limitations that Sapolsky showed so deeply affect and direct our lives.
In the meantime, you can look at the characters in your favorite books and movies in a new way, as vessels of time, perhaps without choice. You can look at the folks huddled on the street corner, the next guy you see in handcuffs, you can look at those around you, friends and family, your child, and wonder what went right for them. What went wrong?
Maybe you’ll do that right now.
All you needed was to have read this.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.