I don't think I've read anything by the author before. I heard him on Sam Harris' podcast. There doesn't seem to be anything philosophically new here (I wrote the same thing in an Anthropology blue book in 1972 and the TA gave me a D and wrote a vulgar comment.); macroscopic determinism excludes free will. But what I enjoyed so much was the author's careful development of his argument and the huge number of small neuroscientific, behavioral, psychological, and evolutionary facts that he uses. I liked his use of epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism, and obesity as examples of the progression of our understanding of these conditions (and I was reminded that tuberculosis was considered a disease of artists, wayward women, and Jews before the discovery of Mycobacteria, and that gastric ulcers were considered a stress-related illness common in white bankers before the re-discovery of Helicobacter pylori).

The second part of the book is Sapolsky's look at the consequences of living in a world in which the absence of free will was accepted. Although he shows that some changes might be possible, especially in his review of the Norwegian penal system, changing the view of other aspects of our life, e.g. Are we really ready to say that all of our personal achievements are due to chance?, are enormously challenging. To say nothing of the effect on Hollywood if revenge movies were seen as ridiculous. ( )

This is an amazing book; I don't think I have ever learned as much from one book as I did from this one. As a non-scientist, it was not an easy read, despite an eminently readable (and frequently very funny) prose style. It was well worth the effort, however. So much for the matter of the book, what about the conclusion? That is very challenging, as the author acknowledges. I find myself in the odd position of intellectually accepting his arguments, but emotionally ignoring them. I think the idea of no free will may take quite a while to move from my head to my heart, if it ever does. ( )

The first thing to say is that Sapolsky's book is wonderfully enjoyable. His ebullience is infectious. It's worth pursuing him in his podcasts to get the full savour of his book. There is a strange paradox here. In his enthusiastic promotion of determinism Sapolsky appears to be the living refutation of his thesis that he is a 'biological machine' without meaning or purpose. The paradox is pervasive. Sapolsky is hugely informative on the neurobiology he deploys in support of this thesis that science shows that determinism and free will are incompatible. But the thesis itself is is not sustained by his evidence.

Sapolsky’s title, 'Determined, Life without Free Will' is meant to convey two messages. The first is obvious. He argues that we have no free will because everything we do is determined by our biology and environmental interactions with the world. As individuals and as a species ‘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.’[4] The causal network that brought each of us to the present moment goes back to the beginning of time. There is no space in Sapolsky’s vision for free will, which he dismisses as an imaginary entity. He calls it ‘fairy dust’, arguing that free will and determinism are simply incompatible. His second message, advanced with far less assurance, is that we will be better off and that we will be better people, if we can learn to live in the world without free will. He concedes that it won’t be easy. Towards the end of his extended argument that the absence of free will precludes responsibility, praise, blame or punishment for the best or worst that human kind can do, Sapolsky steps back for a moment and reflects, ‘Perhaps when done with the writing, I should read this book.’[384] To persuade himself again, perhaps.

Similarly disarming asides, mostly in footnotes, provide an accompanying obbligato to the argument in the text. In an early example Sapolsky insists that he is ‘really, really, really trying not to sound like a combative jerk in the book’.[8] He anticipates opposition. His Introduction suggests that only 5-10% of people will agree with his stance of ‘hard incompatibilism”. Most philosophers and legal scholars, 90% of them he says, are compatibilists who accept determinism but consider it unnecessary to scrap free will. The philosopher Daniel Dennett serves as Sapolsky’s exemplary combatant throughout. They are well matched. In their recent televised debate, Dennett and Sapolsky, both abundantly hirsute, resemble a pair of contending prophets from the Old Testament.

My own view is that the issue between Sapolsky and Dennett is never joined. They do not mean the same thing when they refer to ‘free will’. Sapolsky indeed makes no serious attempt to explain what he means by it. His exhaustive compendium of the biological, neurological and environmental sources of human action, valuable in itself, is meant to leave no space in the mix for anything that could be called free will. It is ‘fairy dust’, invisible in any version of science-based reality. Daniel Dennett, on the other hand, argues that ‘free will’ is a product of our social and linguistic evolution and an essential element in the determinist mix that governs the conduct of our lives.

The Graduate and the Garbage Collector

Sapolsky tells a story at the beginning of the book to illustrate his argument with the compatibilists. He asks his readers to imagine a university graduation ceremony. Parents, siblings, relatives and friends are there to celebrate the graduates’ success as they clutch their parchment scrolls and wait their turn with the photographer. Their bright futures beckon. Now Sapolsky asks you to look beyond the cluster of approbation surrounding the graduates to a wall at the back of the auditorium where there are garbage bins and a man is filling the bins with debris from the afternoon celebrations. Pick a random graduate says Sapolsky and ‘do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate’s genes’, the same uterine environment as a fetus and every other cultural, familial and educational benefit that nurtured the graduate’s progress. And now, with the same magic wand, inflict the graduate with the garbage collector’s miserable childhood and impoverished physical and cultural environment. ‘Trade every factor over which they had no control and you will switch who will be in the graduation robe and who will be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism’.[17]

In Sapolsky’s world without free will, where outcomes are unavoidable, the graduate and the garbage collector are equally undeserving of their positions in the social pecking order. The difference between them is nothing but luck. So far as the graduates are concerned, the successful future that awaits them should be undercut by the deflating consciousness that their success now and in prospect is mere luck and completely undeserved. Their pleasurable consciousness of their success should be tempered by humility. Sapolsky’s brief evocation of the garbage collector at the back of the auditorium can be extended to provide a corresponding negative tale of deprivation that will culminate in disaster. After finishing his shift at the graduation ceremony, the garbage collector goes to a bar to drink. Towards the end of the night when he is very drunk, a random remark by a companion enrages him. He smashes his glass on zinc counter and jabs the sharp end into his companion’s neck several times, severing the carotid artery, so that he dies. The garbage conductor is charged with murder; in some American jurisdictions he will be a candidate for the death penalty.

Sapolsky is familiar with such cases; he is not infrequently called as an expert witness on the question of criminal fault in trials for murder. He will be asked to give his opinion on the question whether the garbage collector intended to cause death or serious injury. In a court of law the answer to that question will determine whether he garbage collector is guilty of murder. As an expert witness Sapolsky must play the lawyer’s game and do the best he can with the question of intention. In his world of reality-based science outside the courtroom however, there can be no rational ground for a finding of criminal responsibility or the punishment that will follow that finding. The garbage collector’s barroom attack, whatever his ‘intention’, was the ineluctable product of biological and environmental events that stretch into an immemorial past. There are no gaps for free will in the causal net that determined his fatal attack. Moral condemnation for killing his companion like praise for the graduates’ achievements is accordingly unjustified. In an interview he refers with rueful resignation that the evidence he has given in nine cases similar to the imaginary garbage collector has only once induced a jury to acquit of murder.

The current state of American criminal law, with its cruel and wasteful encouragement of vengeance, is the moral driver for much of Sapolsky’s polemic. In the second half of his book, where he argues the ethical case for a world without free will, the courts would have a preventive rather than punitive role; dangerous individuals would be quarantined until they could be safely released. As an alternative to American penal practice he discusses the case of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist who murdered 77 people in 2011 and now resides in spartan comfort in a secure three room complex with a small gymnasium, television, computer access for his university studies and three budgerigars. Breivik was sentenced to 21 years imprisonment, the maximum possible in Norwegian law. He will be released in 2033 unless he continues to be dangerous, a finding that would allow one or more extensions of his sentence. Breivik’s custodial containment is consistent with Sapolsky’s proposal for ‘quarantine’ to contain danger, rather than punishment for wrongdoing.

The excesses of American criminal law, ‘barbaric’ by comparison with Norwegian practice, play a central but distracting role in Sapolsky’s polemic. There are ample grounds for reform of American criminal law, punishment and penology without wholesale abandonment of the concept of criminal responsibility. It is, moreover, an argument unlikely to win support for reform, if one accepts Sapolsky’s concession that the great majority of lawyers and philosophers reject his hard incompatibilism. The case of Anders Breivik on which he places such reliance cuts the other way. Though Sapolsky tries to deflect the point by calling it ‘funishment’, Breivik is currently serving a penal sentence for an atrocious crime. His attempt to avoid criminal responsibility on the ground of insanity failed. He was convicted of mass murder and the penalty of 21 years for mass murder, served in moderate comfort with opportunities for recreation, represents the maximum punishment for his crime. Penal reform can proceed without embracing hard incompatibilism.

Determinism and the Architecture of Choice

Sapolsky’s constant recourse to the law of homicide and violent killers in making his case against free will is misleading in its focus. Most of our laws are not concerned with the regulation of individuals who may be biologically incapable of containing their violent impulses Consideration of the ordinary lives of ordinary people provides a more realistic appreciation of the nature of free will in a determinist universe.

Let’s return to Sapolsky’s thought experiment and ask what his graduate will do, after the ceremony. The graduate - call him Paul - applies for a junior lectureship at Sandstone College Inc. He does well in his interview and the corporation offers him an $80,000pa contract as a lecturer. He takes a chance and asks for something more. He wants a reduced teaching load with one day off, when he can take his share of childminding. After negotiation the corporation agrees with his request and renews its offer without reduction of his initial salary. There is a standard probation period with an option for renewal of his contract. With the assurance of employment Paul and his wife decide to buy a house and move out of rental accommodation. They compile a check list of desiderata and spend some weeks house-hunting. After several unsuccessful bids at auctions they find a house that matches their checklist and finances. Most other people in their street will have followed a similar trajectory in making their choices to settle there.

These events occur in a world composed predominantly in what John Searle called ‘institutional facts’. The contracts, the corporation, the $80,000 salary, the option to renew and the contract for the house and ownership title that Paul acquired are all real things. Institutional facts like these form part of an extensive architecture of choice enabling people to lead a conventionally happy life in an ordered society. If we could descend to the level of biology and electronics we would find these institutional facts – the contracts, corporations, options, property titles, salary entitlements - instantiated in computer codes and in the neuronal pathways of the individuals who negotiate their way through these legal structures. Institutional facts are different from what Searle calls ‘brute’ facts. Institutional facts only exist because our society collectively agrees that they exist and accepts their status and significance in a connected network of regulation. In Searle’s classic example, a dollar note only counts as negotiable currency because of our collective recognition of the monetary status of that palpable object, the dollar ‘note’ - polymer in Australia, paper or cotton fibre in other nations. In similar fashion, the 'corporation' with which Paul makes his contract is a ‘fictional person’, distinct from the human beings who fill its executive positions from time to time. It only exists because of our collective recognition that an organisation of people can count as a ‘legal person’. So also, with the contracts and other elements in Paul’s plan to pursue his academic career and family life. They constitute the institutional framework within which he will exercise his freedom of choice as he negotiates with personnel managers, agents and owners, drawing on whatever resources of rationality and self-assurance he can command. This is all compatible with determinism: there’s no ‘fairy dust’ here.

The architecture of choice that enables Paul to negotiate his contracts has evolved over centuries. It is embedded in his brain and in our brains together with the entirety of the past that has brought him to the negotiating table. The compatibilist accepts that Paul’s choices are completely determined by preceding events at the point where he signs each of his contracts.. If he is ordinarily fortunate and if he and his wife were sensible in setting their goals and recognising their constraints on expenditure and so on, they should find that they have done about as well as they could expect in achieving what they wanted. It is no objection to the compatibilist that their wants were determined by the entirety of their preceding lives and the lives of their ancestors. Unless something has gone wrong, and it usually doesn’t, these are exercises of free will that are embedded in their transactions. This is the modest essence of the compatibilist case for a freedom of will worth having.

The choices Paul made in the preceding sketch were all enabled by the civil law. But the same pattern of ordered opportunities for choice prevails in our more informal social engagements where the law is usually an indiscernible presence in the architecture of choice. There is no bright line between law and life. Outside formal contracts and the like, the potential applications of law are often uncertain and disputable. As, for example in the uncertain penumbra of laws that have a potential bearing on the ways in which individuals choose to express their sexuality.

And the garbage collector? Compared with Paul, it is less likely that he will achieve what most people would consider a good life. He might not be able to buy a house but settles instead for rental accommodation. Statistically, he is more likely to be charged with a serious criminal offence than Paul and more likely to be imprisoned. Paul’s children are more likely than his to receive schooling that will equip them to achieve the same modest level of social and economic success as Paul and his wife. The garbage collector’s access to the architecture of choice is more restricted and more biassed towards potentially criminal choices. But advocates for free will, whatever their stripe, do not claim the freedom to do whatever you want without constraint. The case against unjustifiable inequality is compelling, but it is not advanced by the elimination of free will.

Sapolsky’s Malaise

In an interview promoting 'Determinism' Sapolsky was asked if he would take a pill that would convert him to believe in free will. He said he would take it without hesitation. Believing the myth might relieve his lifelong depression. He thought that people who believe in some varieties of free will are generally more fun to be around. ‘Maybe some of their peace would rub off on me’.(8) His answer to the interviewer’s question will serve to introduce the strange set of paradoxes at the end of his book, when he presents a peculiarly American vision of a modern dystopia. I will quote liberally to give its flavour.

Sapolsky’s hard incompatibilism has brought him to the realisation that ‘there’s no place for meaning or purpose’ in our lives. Research has revealed that we are simply ‘biological machines’,[391-2] That’s a ‘bummer’, as he remarks in a footnote.(389) Whatever your achievements in your life, they are undeserved, your self-discipline is merely a consequence of the way ‘your cortex was constructed when you were a fetus’.(392).

If that realisation makes you feel deflated, you should take comfort says Sapolsky, ‘you are one of the lucky ones. You are privileged enough to have success in your life that was not of your own doing, and to cloak yourself with myths of freely willed choices. Heck, it probably means that you have both found love and have clean running water. That your town wasn’t once a prosperous place where people manufactured things but is now filled with shuttered factories and no jobs, that you didn’t grow up in the sort of neighbourhood where it was nearly impossible to “Just Say No” to drugs because there were so few healthy things to say yes too, that your mother wasn’t working three jobs and barely making the rent when she was pregnant with you, that the pounding on the door is not from US Customs and Immigration…’

If you are one of these lucky ones, one of those ‘benighted’ individuals who still believe in ‘myths of free willed choices’ and believe that they ‘deserve their superyacht’ then good luck to you: the ‘ultimate implications of this book don’t concern you’.

So – whose concerns are being addressed? They are the concerns of the ‘unwashed majority who need to be convinced that it’s not their fault’ that they fall somewhere below average as individual human beings who will never get to own a superyacht. Unhappily, as Sapolsky remarks in several interviews, this unwashed majority is unlikely to be educated to a level of literacy sufficient to read 'Determinism' and benefit from his reassuring message that their below average performances in life are really not their fault.

Sometimes Sapolsky does sound like a jerk ( )

By now Sapolsky is rightly regarded as one of the greatest communicators in modern science. Crucially he doesn't think that intelligent and complex prose need be obfuscatory or boring, and his wit lightens the load here as elsewhere. In this book he outlines the many ways in which who we are, and how we behave and think, is a result of our environment and biology, and after outlining the terrain one finds that it doesn't leave room to shoe-horn in a magical non-physical thing called 'free will'.

Even for those of us who know quite a bit about psychology this is a great read, including as it does some very recent research results. Sapolsky finds that his argument against free will leads to a view of seeing criminals as humans who need to be quarantined from the wider population to stop them hurting others, but not vilified as supernaturally 'evil' (they are acting in ways we would if we had their genes and brains and backgrounds, etc). This is the best science book of 2023 in my opinion: funny, powerful conclusions, and a hugely wide purvey surveying different domains of knowledge.

So, no free will, however like even the author of this book, I will continue to act and think in ways in which free will is assumed in human life - that's just how we're made and its hard to go through life thinking otherwise. On the other hand, when I am at a function and well paid people are sipping white wine and lowly paid waiters are picking up empty glasses, I won't think that those waiters should just show more 'grit' to get ahead and become the ones with the suits and the wine glasses. I won't think that the well heeled are extra deserving of their high salaries because of their free will and good choices. They were determined to be there, in that besuited position, and should stop gloating.

Thought provoking and mind expanding.
I am reminded on the statement I have heard attributed to Schopenhauer:” you may do as you will but you can’t will as you will. I wonder of rather than full determinism we should compare this to Feynman’s particles that follow a course set by probability. To some extent the author speaks to that idea. Still off one ours fortunate enough to have opportunities perhaps believing in free will incentivizes trying to be one’s best or as the marines say: be all you can be. “ ( )