Tag: Robert Sapolsky

Three Takeaways, Number Three: It’s All In The Cards

Posted on by Mike Bendzela

by Mike Bendzela

I was determined to have a good crop of onions this year, so I deserve no praise for it. (Photo by author)

From preface of Numbers One and Two: Anytime is a good time to take stock of what you think you know, or what you think you have actually learned, but once you have seen two-thirds to three-quarters of your life pass, it would seem rather high time to do so. [. . .] What would I say if, launched into the firmament and finding myself at Heaven’s Gate, St. Peter said to me, “What have you learned, sinner?” So, a few things I think I actually do know, in descending order of certitude, over the course of three articles: evolution, overshoot, determinism.

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I have always been something of a determinist, but I never consciously mulled the issue much. Now, Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will has pretty much dragged me out of the closet: I think it unlikely that we have anything like free will. I’ve only recently learned that the proper term is “incompatibilist,” which is the view that free will is incompatible with the notion of a determined universe, that is, a physical universe where everything has a cause. (But then what caused the universe? God? Which one? I short-circuit here.) That’s about as philosophical as I can stand to get. For me, the issue is simply, If the universe is determined, then human behavior, like that of the macaque, is determined as well. Some big-brained Apes don’t get to carve out a special exemption for themselves just because they like to imagine they exercise “free will” independent of everything else.

“In the cards” is a tired trope, I know, but it works well for this issue. I was surprised to learn that the expression “in the cards” doesn’t come from playing cards but from Tarot. I prefer to look at it in terms of playing cards, though, because a card game denotes being given a limited set of options which you then have to deal with, as it were. Besides, a Tarot-reading neighbor once “read my cards” for me and it struck me as wishy-washy bullshit. I used to really dig playing Euchre, though, years ago.

“Cards” is a vague enough term that any card can represent either genes or environment, nurture or biology, chance, serendipity, stupid luck. These I parcel out into the categories “conditions,” “constraints,” and “contingencies,” through which I’ll show how who I am is all in the cards. This essay, then, will be part book review, part memoir, part blind-ass speculation. Read more »

Friday, April 10, 2026

This Is What Happens

Posted on by Mike Bendzela

by Mike Bendzela

This is what happens when you revere the fancies of Iron Age sheep:

This is what happens when you christen a parcel of dust Holy Land:

This is what happens when you refuse to give up worship for Lent:

This is what happens when you litter North, South, East, West with prayers:

 

This is what happens when you ignore 3.8 billion years of organic evolution:

This is what happens when you fail to dismember the Great Chain of Being:

This is what happens when you think the word “ape” is an insult:

This is what happens when you no longer pine for a tail:

 

This is what happens when you try to burn your way to prosperity:

This is what happens when you can’t stop inhaling the exhaust fumes:

This is what happens when you become addicted to hypersonic speed:

This is what happens when you replace eyes with satellites, flesh with plastics, legs with wheels:

 

This is what happens when you deify the neoplasm:

This is what happens when you parse survival into fractions of billions:

This is what happens when your cornucopia takes root in the earth’s crust:

This is what happens when leverage, interest, derivatives become shibboleths: Read more »

Monday, May 13, 2024

“I wear the chain I forged in life”

Posted on by Jerry Cayford

by Jerry Cayford

Marley’s Ghost by Lisa K. Weber

Robert Sapolsky claims there is no free will. Jacob Marley begs to differ. Let us consider their dispute. Sapolsky presents his case in Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will: everything has a cause, so all our actions are produced by the long causal chain of prior events—never freely willed—and no action warrants moral praise or blame. He supports this position with a great deal of science that was not available back when Marley was alive, though “alive” seems an awkward way to put it, since Marley is a fictional ghost, possibly even a dreamed fictional ghost (depending on your interpretation of A Christmas Carol), dreamed by fictional Ebenezer Scrooge. Marley’s standing to bring objections against Sapolsky seems pretty tenuous.

Nevertheless, Marley forthrightly rejects Sapolsky’s thesis: “‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.’” That there is a real dispute here is proven by Scrooge presenting a very Sapolskian argument against Marley’s right to bring a case at all: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” That is, only a chain of physico-chemical causes makes me, Scrooge, see you at all, let alone give any credence to your arguments about morality. If this rebuttal seems sophisticated for a fictional Victorian businessman, it at least reminds us that Sapolsky’s philosophical position is quite old and well known.

Unlike Scrooge, Sapolsky does not inhabit the same fictional realm as Marley’s ghost. He cannot argue that Marley’s sins were caused by prior conditions and events, because Marley’s sins and choices don’t really exist, not in the causal universe in which Sapolsky makes his argument. As he so emphatically puts it: “But—and this is the incredibly important point—put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.…Crucially, all these disciplines collectively negate free will because they are all interlinked, constituting the same ultimate body of knowledge” (8-9). Marley’s ghost, though, is not of that body—an “incredibly important point” indeed—and that’s precisely the reason to choose him as our spokes-“person.” Read more »

Monday, February 26, 2024

Free Will, Pragmatism, and the Things Best Left Unsaid

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

A few months ago, the Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky released Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. It’s a book whose thesis is as easy to state as it is hard to accept. Sapolsky argues that since our actions result from nothing more than one event following another, no one really deserves praise or blame for anything they do. Our actions are determined by physical events in the physical brain, tightly linked in a causal chain that none of us is able to control any more than anyone else. Our attitudes about all sorts of everyday issues, from financial compensation to prison sentencing, should be reformed in the light of this truth.

Sapolsky is a witty writer, but notions of agency are so deeply baked into our usual way of talking that he frequently has to catch himself. (From a footnote: “I have to try to go through the same thinking process that this whole book is about to arrive at any thoughts about [Bruno] Bettelheim other than that he was a sick, sadistic fuck.”) While one might turn to Determined for lively discussions about current debates in neuroscience, philosophers who have criticized the book point out that there’s nothing really new in his basic assertion, besides the new details.

Of course, filling in the details can be important for establishing plausibility. But the problem with determinism—at least for scientists since the time of Laplace—isn’t that the idea seems implausible. The problem is that even if determinism is plausible, it’s not clear what the consequences of this realization should be. Read more »