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Science & Medicine


STANFORD SCIENTIST, AFTER DECADES OF STUDY, CONCLUDES: WE DON’T HAVE FREE WILL

After studying humans and other primates for 40 years, Stanford neurobiologist
Robert Sapolsky has concluded that many factors beyond our control influence our
choices and behaviors, leaving free will to be negligible in any context.
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
By Corinne PurtillStaff Writer 
Oct. 17, 2023 3 AM PT
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Before epilepsy was understood to be a neurological condition, people believed
it was caused by the moon, or by phlegm in the brain. They condemned seizures as
evidence of witchcraft or demonic possession, and killed or castrated sufferers
to prevent them from passing tainted blood to a new generation.

Today we know epilepsy is a disease. By and large, it’s accepted that a person
who causes a fatal traffic accident while in the grip of a seizure should not be
charged with murder.

That’s good, says Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky. That’s
progress. But there’s still a long way to go.

After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, Sapolsky has
reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our
conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the
beating of our hearts.

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This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over
his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers
who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

“The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that
we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,”
Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t
there.”

> We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.

— Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky

Sapolsky, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an
out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some
degree of free will. So do most philosophers and the vast majority of the
general population. Free will is essential to how we see ourselves, fueling the
satisfaction of achievement or the shame of failing to do the right thing.

Saying that people have no free will is a great way to start an argument. This
is partly why Sapolsky, who describes himself as “majorly averse to
interpersonal conflict,” put off writing his new book “Determined: A Science of
Life Without Free Will.”

Sapolsky, 66, has a mild demeanor and a Jerry Garcia beard. For more than three
decades, he escaped the politics of academia to study baboons in rural Kenya for
a few months every year.

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Robert Sapolsky sits with a baboon while doing field research in the 1980s.
(Courtesy of Robert Sapolsky)

“I’m really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the
book,” he said. “I deal with human complexities by going and living in a tent.
So yeah, I’m not up for a lot of brawls about this.”

Analyzing human behavior through the lens of any single discipline leaves room
for the possibility that people choose their actions, he says. But after a long
cross-disciplinary career, he feels it’s intellectually dishonest to write
anything other than what he sees as the unavoidable conclusion: Free will is a
myth, and the sooner we accept that, the more just our society will be.

“Determined,” which comes out today, builds on Sapolsky’s 2017 bestseller
“Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,” which won the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize and a slew of other accolades.

The book breaks down the neurochemical influences that contribute to human
behaviors, analyzing the milliseconds to centuries preceding, say, the pulling
of a trigger or the suggestive touch on an arm.

Robert Sapolsky’s latest book is called “Determined: A Science of Life Without
Free Will.”
(Josh Edelson/ For The Times)

“Determined” goes a step further. If it’s impossible for any single neuron or
any single brain to act without influence from factors beyond its control,
Sapolsky argues, there can be no logical room for free will.

Many people with even a passing familiarity with human biology can comfortably
agree with this — up to a point.

We know we make worse decisions when hungry, stressed or scared. We know our
physical makeup is influenced by the genes inherited from distant ancestors and
by our mothers’ health during her pregnancy. Abundant evidence indicates that
people who grew up in homes marked by chaos and deprivation will perceive the
world differently and make different choices than people raised in safe, stable,
resource-rich environments. A lot of important things are beyond our control.

But, like — everything? We have no meaningful command over our choice of
careers, romantic partners or weekend plans? If you reach out right now and pick
up a pen, was even that insignificant action somehow preordained?

Yes, Sapolsky says, both in the book and to the countless students who have
asked the same question during his office hours. What the student experiences as
a decision to grab the pen is preceded by a jumble of competing impulses beyond
his or her conscious control. Maybe their pique is heightened because they
skipped lunch; maybe they’re subconsciously triggered by the professor’s
resemblance to an irritating relative.

Then look at the forces that brought them to the professor’s office, feeling
empowered to challenge a point. They’re more likely to have had parents who
themselves were college educated, more likely to hail from an individualistic
culture rather than a collective one. All of those influences subtly nudge
behavior in predictable ways.

You may have had the uncanny experience of talking about an upcoming camping
trip with a friend, only to find yourself served with ads for tents on social
media later. Your phone didn’t record your conversation, even if that’s what it
feels like. It’s just that the collective record of your likes, clicks, searches
and shares paints such a detailed picture of your preferences and
decision-making patterns that algorithms can predict — often with unsettling
accuracy — what you are going to do.

Something similar happens when you reach for that pen, Sapolsky says. So many
factors beyond your conscious awareness brought you to that pen that it’s hard
to say how much you “chose” to pick it up at all.

Science & Medicine

For Subscribers


WE FOUND 95 INSTANCES OF PLAGIARISM IN A USC SCIENTIST’S NEW BOOK. SALES HAVE
BEEN SUSPENDED

A forthcoming book by Dr. David Agus is rife with instances of plagiarism. After
being contacted by The Times, Agus and Simon & Schuster have halted publication.

March 6, 2023

Sapolsky was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in Brooklyn, the son of
immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Biology called to him early — by grade school he was writing fan letters to
primatologists and lingering in front of the taxidermied gorillas at the
American Museum of Natural History — but religion shaped life at home.

That all changed on a single night in his early teens, he says. While grappling
with questions of faith and identity, he was struck by an epiphany that kept him
awake until dawn and reshaped his future: God is not real, there is no free
will, and we primates are pretty much on our own.

“That was kind of a big day,” he said with a chuckle, “and it’s been tumultuous
since then.”

Skeptics could seize on this to rebut his arguments: If we aren’t free to choose
our actions or beliefs, how does a boy from a deeply religious conservative home
become a self-professed liberal atheist?

Change is always possible, he argues, but it comes from external stimuli. Sea
slugs can learn to reflexively retreat from an electrical shock. Through the
same biochemical pathways, humans are changed by exposure to external events in
ways we rarely see coming.

Imagine, he offers, a group of friends that goes to see a biopic about an
inspiring activist. One applies the next day to join the Peace Corps. One is
struck by the beautiful cinematography and signs up for a filmmaking course. The
rest are annoyed they didn’t see a Marvel film.

All of the friends were primed to respond as they did when they sat down to
watch. Maybe one had heightened adrenaline from a close call with another car on
the drive over; maybe another was in a new relationship and awash in oxytocin,
the so-called love hormone. They had different levels of dopamine and serotonin
in their brains, different cultural backgrounds, different sensitivities to
sensory distractions in the theater. None chose how the stimulus of the film
would affect them anymore than the sea slug “decided” to wince in response to a
jolt.

Robert Sapolsky understands that saying that people have no free will is a great
way to start an argument. This is partly why he put off writing his new book for
years.
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)

For fellow adherents of determinism — the belief that it’s impossible for a
person in any situation to have acted differently than they did — Sapolsky’s
scientific defense of the cause is welcome.

“Who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our
control and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in
the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame, punishment and
reward,” said Gregg Caruso, a philosopher at SUNY Corning who read early drafts
of the book. “I am in agreement with Sapolsky that life without belief in free
will is not only possible but preferable.”

Caruso is co-director of the Justice Without Retribution Network, which
advocates for an approach to criminal activity that prioritizes preventing
future harm rather than assigning blame. Focusing on the causes of violent or
antisocial behavior instead of fulfilling a desire for punishment, he said,
“will allow us to adopt more humane and effective practices and policies.”

Science & Medicine


Q&A: HOW THIS STANFORD FRESHMAN BROUGHT DOWN THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY

Meet Theo Baker, the freshman reporter whose stories about suspect research
kicked off a chain of events that led the president of Stanford to resign.

July 21, 2023

Theirs is very much a minority viewpoint.

Sapolsky is “a wonderful explainer of complex phenomena,” said Peter U. Tse, a
Dartmouth neuroscientist and author of the 2013 book “The Neural Basis of Free
Will.” “However, a person can be both brilliant and utterly wrong.”

Neural activity is highly variable, Tse said, with identical inputs often
resulting in non-identical responses in individuals and populations. It’s more
accurate to think of those inputs as imposing parameters rather than determining
specific outcomes. Even if the range of potential outcomes is limited, there’s
simply too much variability at play to think of our behavior as predetermined.

What’s more, he said, it’s harmful to do so.

“Those who push the idea that we are nothing but deterministic biochemical
puppets are responsible for enhancing psychological suffering and hopelessness
in this world,” Tse said.

Even those who believe biology limits our choices are wary of how openly we
should embrace that.

Saul Smilansky, a philosopher at the University of Haifa in Israel and author of
the book “Free Will and Illusion,” rejects the idea that we can will ourselves
to transcend all genetic and environmental constraints. But if we want to live
in a just society, we have to believe that we can.

“Losing all belief in free will and moral responsibility would likely be
catastrophic,” he said, and encouraging people to do so is “dangerous, even
irresponsible.”

A widely cited 2008 study found that people who read passages dismissing the
idea of free will were more likely to cheat on a subsequent test. Other studies
have found that people who feel less control over their actions care less about
making mistakes in their work, and that disbelief in free will leads to more
aggression and less helpfulness.

Sapolsky discusses such concerns in his book, ultimately concluding that the
effects seen in such experiments are too small and their lack of reproducibility
too great to support the idea that civilization will crumble if we think we
can’t control our fates.

The more compelling critique, he says, is eloquently articulated in the short
story “What’s Expected of Us,” by speculative fiction writer Ted Chiang. The
narrator describes a new technology that convinces users their choices are
predetermined, a discovery that saps them of their will to live.

“It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter,” the narrator
warns, “even though you know that they don’t.”

Climate & Environment


HOW CLIMATE SCIENTISTS FEEL ABOUT SEEING THEIR DIRE PREDICTIONS COME TRUE

Wildfires in Canada and Hawaii. Hurricane Hilary set to strike California.
Scientists have warned about worse storms and more frequent fires for years.

Aug. 18, 2023

The greatest risk of abandoning free will, Sapolsky concedes, isn’t that we’ll
want to do bad things. It’s that, without a sense of personal agency, we won’t
want to do anything.

“It may be dangerous to tell people that they don’t have free will,” Sapolsky
said. “The vast majority of the time, I really think it’s a hell of a lot more
humane.”

Sapolsky knows he won’t persuade most of his readers. It’s hard to convince
people who have been harmed that perpetrators deserve less blame because of
their history of poverty. It’s even harder to convince the well-off that their
accomplishments deserve less praise because of their history of privilege.

“If you have time to be bummed out by that, you’re one of the lucky ones,” he
said.

His true hope, he says, is to increase compassion. Maybe if people understand
how thoroughly an early history of trauma can rewire a brain, they’ll stop
lusting for harsh punishments. Maybe if someone realizes they have a brain
condition like depression or ADHD, they’ll stop hating themselves for struggling
with tasks that seem easier for others.

Just as previous generations thought seizures were brought on by witchcraft,
some of our current beliefs about personal responsibility may eventually be
undone by scientific discovery.

We are machines, Sapolsky argues, exceptional in our ability to perceive our own
experiences and feel emotions about them. It is pointless to hate a machine for
its failures.

There is only one last thread he can’t resolve.

“It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something
‘good’ can happen to a machine,” he writes. “Nonetheless, I am certain that it
is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.”

Robert Sapolsky’s fellow adherents of determinism — the belief that it’s
impossible for a person in any situation to have acted differently than they did
— have welcomed his scientific defense of their cause.
(Josh Edelson / For The Times)
Science & MedicineWorld & NationCalifornia
Corinne Purtill

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Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the
New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The
Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI)
and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She
is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.


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