Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Book Review: 4/5 Impact On Me (Book By Robert Sapolsky)

Read more about the book here

I rate the impact of this book 4 out of 5 on me. I found it fascinating to understand the different factors that make you take any action. The analogy of the Earth on top of a turtle, which is on top of another, and so on, fits well. I would have laughed at that earlier, but now I get it: a turtle floating in the air is more absurd than turtles all the way down. The equivalent in neuroscience is that if one neuron fired, you can always find another neuron that fired just before it, and conditions that were created beforehand.

Take Blame And Praise

The author’s examples of diseases like schizophrenia and epilepsy, or differences in behavior like more or less willpower, obesity, or being gay, and explaining each through changes or differences in the brain, were enlightening. If you do not deserve the blame and something in your brain chemically leads you to one of those diseases or differences, then the same logic applies when you succeed in life. Schizophrenia is caused by excess dopamine in your neurons. That excess makes some neurons fire when they should not, which is what causes you to hear things when nothing is there.

Work With or Outside the System

On epilepsy and witch hunts in medieval times, the author mentioned two ideas. One is working within the system to reform it. For example, one physician in medieval Europe wrote a book saying that we can continue burning people if they are proven to be witches, but we should keep in mind that an old woman not crying can simply mean her tear glands do not work. On prison reform, the author gave examples of Norwegian society, where prison is more about rehabilitation and protecting victims, and people get time to come back and integrate into society. The book argues we need a similar shift in the American prison and justice system.

Chain Of Events

I like the point that the action you take now depended on the action or environment one second ago, one minute ago, one hour ago, one day ago, one week ago, even one million years ago, because our actions are also determined by the cultures we grow up in, the environment in our mother’s womb, and the environment from birth until today. I also like the example of seeing a bumper sticker that says “do random acts of kindness” and then, a few minutes later, giving space to a stranger to cut into your lane in traffic. Parts of the book overlapped with what I knew about psychological biases like priming and anchoring. The book also reinforced what I knew about oxytocin: it makes you like your in-group more but dislike out-group members more.

Morality

If you believe there is no free will and everything is determined, or that we are just biological automatons, you can still do morally right things. If you believe there is free will and you make all the decisions on your own, you can also do morally right things. But experiments showed that if you are unsure whether you believe in free will or not, you are pushed toward the side of believing there is no free will, and you are more likely to drop inhibitions and make antisocial or immoral choices.

Research Fallacies

The author mentioned early research on free will where you press a button and say when you will press it. There was always something happening in your mind just before you pressed the button. That makes it look like your mind independently decided to press the button, then checked the time, then pressed it. As I understand it, that research was very influential but looked at free will through a narrow lens. The author also laid out different kinds of people in terms of belief in free will: you believe everything you do is your free will and there should be consequences for all your actions, or you believe some things are out of your control but you still have free will in other areas. He gradually makes the case that believing in partial free will does not hold up. Many people say that today you may not have free will because your action was based on your environment and past decisions, but that past decision was your free will. He compares keeping a criminal off the streets to keeping a car with faulty brakes off the road: you protect both sides. Things may not be predictable, but that does not mean they are not determined; and if your behavior is not determined by you, there is no free will.

Self-Control

There is activation of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when you want to stop doing something that is easy to do but wrong, for example when you have lost a lot of money gambling at night and want to stop. Teenagers and kids need to activate more of their PFC to inhibit an action than adults do. When alcohol or drugs are involved, inhibition is harder.

Moral Luck

The book also touched on moral luck: the justice system may give a lighter sentence if you tried to kill someone but missed. Firing the first bullet could count as self-defense in some cases, but the second bullet onward often does not. I do not find that fully reasonable. Is it okay to start a race a few steps behind everyone else? People would say it is not fair in a 100-meter race, but in a marathon it might be okay because luck evens out and there are other chances for someone who deserves it to catch up. But luck does not really even out: a baby born with health problems is not necessarily born to rich parents; the baby may be born to poor parents in a bad neighborhood without good access to public transport, and the disadvantages compound. Moral luck also shows up in drunk driving: you drive drunk and no one gets hurt versus someone gets hurt.

Swarm Intelligence

I found the experiments striking: if you lay blocks with simple rules and thousands or billions of them next to each other, in their random motion they can form elegant structures even though no one designed them. Swarm intelligence in ants and bees finding good solutions to hard problems like the traveling salesman, and slime mold solving mazes, were striking. So was the fact that your blood capillaries stay within about three cells of all your cells. The book also stated that about 95% of your DNA is the on and off switches for your genes and about 5% is the genes themselves. Cultures that grew rice paddies became more collectivist; wheat-growing regions in the same country became more individualist. America is more individualist in part because it is a country of immigrants: to be an immigrant you left your community behind, so there was self-selection. Rainforest dwellers tended to have polytheistic religions; desert shepherds had monotheistic religions. Shepherds especially needed religion, moral codes, and honor systems because your herd could be stolen at night.