Determined - A Science of Life Without Free Will

Written by Robert Sapolsky 2023

I've read too much of his work by now, not to mention sitting through all 72 hours of his Human Behavior 101 course at Stanford. So much so that I'm not the audience for this book because I already 1. Believe him, and 2. I know why I believe it. That being said, there are entire chapters in here about physics and randomness, and I am not a happy camper when I see a scientist of one discipline write about a different discipline. It's one thing if it comes up in conversation, but to use your platform, which you've earned by being an expert in your field, to talk about stuff beyond that field, not cool. I call it the Neil DeGrasse Tyson effect, because during the pandemic, when he was really at the peak of his public persona, he talked a lot about biology and epidemiology and even air quality on the platforms he had access to (television shows, podcasts, etc.) because of his recognition as a **physicist**. And an astrophysicist at that, which is about as far as physics gets from things biological. That pissed me off. Personally, because I was an industrial hygienist at the time, and if there's one thing that's "in the lane" of the IH, it's infectious aerosols and indoor air quality. But I was moreso pissed because it's deception, or at least an exploitation. I know it's tempting, when you're smart, and trusted as an authority, to answer basically any question that comes your way; you might even feel obligated. But it's not professional. And I get that Sapolsky needed a chapter on randomness to talk about free will, but I didn't buy this book to hear him talk about physics. For that I buy a book by a renowned physicist (just not Leonard Mlodinow, because his 2008 book The Drunkard's Walk sucked and was a total disappointment). The whole thing has an air of ... mental incest? Self-stimulation I guess is what you might call it if your were trying to be professional; there's a couple other phrases that come to mind, but they sound a bit adolescent so I'll avoid it. 

Image credit: Sapolsky in the Field circa 1990

Next, I swear he's got as much text in the footnotes as he does in the book proper. That's annoying, and makes it look like you didn't put enough thought into the book. Also makes me wonder how his editor and publisher let him get away with it.

Alas. All that being said, the way he introduces the book and his ideas is so good and so effortless, so amicable. This is a guy who knows how not to pick fights - he spent much of his life hanging out with baboons (and never once got eaten to death!).

• Right off the bat, he says explicitly he's not trying to pick fights, and not arguing on a personal level with anyone. A good way for any writer to start their book of arguments. 
• And the very next section is titled "Whom I Will Be Disagreeing With". The way he pre-emptively addresses his critics is so instructive, and likely the result of having written several books already, and experiencing the resulting maelstrom of highly informed, sometimes highly combative opinions. 

• "While we are free to do as we intend, we are not free to intend what we intend." p19
• Alien hand syndrome, and anarchic hand syndrome (Dr Strangelove and the unwanted Nazi salute)
• "Chronotheology" is what critics called Libet's experiments that seem to show that some part of your brain makes decisions before you're even aware of it. 
• "Turtleism" is "turtles all the way down" (and is strongly correlated with the "Always Has Been" astronaut shooting the other astronaut meme).
• I find these too hard to believe, but I will write them down: Lying by voicemail increased request for mouthwash, and lying by email for hand sanitizer. See The MacBeth Effect: C Zhang and K Lijenquist 2006; SW Lee and N Schwarz 2010; E Kalanthroff, C Aslan and R Dar 2017; Schnall, Benton, Harvey 2008; Kaspar, Krapp, Konig 2015
• After pointing out the human frontal cortex takes 12 more years after the rest of the primates to develop, "the genetic program of the human brain evolved to free the frontal cortex from genes as much as possible" (what I'd rather call cultural evolution and the arena of artificial selection)
• Rainforest vs Desert dwellers and why "55% of humans proclaim religions invented by Middle Eastern monotheistic shepherds". (Rainforest dwellers tend to have polytheistic religions.)
• The Hungry Judge (not easy to get to the bottom of this because for example the wikipedia page as of 2025 said it was disproven, but when you consider just the biases and motives of potential actors, you might want to err on the side of it being true?) This is in a footnote, not the text proper - "The finding was challenged by some critics who suggested that it was a statistical artifact of the way parole hearings were carried out; the authors reanalyzed their data to control for these possibilities, convincingly showing that the effect was still there. An additional study showed the identical pattern: subjects read job applicant profiles from out-group minority members; the longer it had been since a meal, the less time was spent on each application." p107
• On the "Initial Conditions" of the Butterfly Effect (inside joke) - he says that when Lorenz came up with his strange attractor theory, he tried to summarize it with a metaphor about seagulls, but a friend suggested something more picturesque, and by 1972 we have the title of the talk ... p133 ("What Could Be Worse Than the Butterfly Effect?" R Bishop in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2008)
• *** Some things were free will and now they're not, because we learned more. "In this view, "free will" is what we call the biology that we don't understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will." p150
• When lethal injection machines were invented, some states stipulated that there'd be two separate delivery routes, each with a syringe full of poison, two people would press each of two buttons, and a randomizer in the machine would infuse the poison from one syringe into the person and dump the contents of the other into a bucket. ... defusing the sense of responsibility. p152
• [This is where I stop reading entire chapters about physics by neurologists.]
• "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Scientific Bullshit" by Gordon Pennycock and wisdomofchopra.com
• ***Dan Dennett's Nefarious Neurosurgeon - a surgeon does a procedure on a patient and then lies and says she implanted a chip in their brain that robs them of their free will, and that she now controls them. Unburdened by responsibility for their actions, they become criminal. And that, Dennet says, is how neuroscientists rob people of their free will. p390
• ***In general, it's hard to convince people there's no free will, and hence nobody's actions are their fault, because then also their accomplishments aren't their's either, and they get no credit. Nobody's going for that. Saul Smilansky's Philosophical Illusionism comes to this conclusion. 

• To live through "free will colored glasses"
• In the epilogue he refutes meritocracy arguments - The issue isn't that so-called meritocracies reward un-qualified people, it's how qualified people come to be that way. The opportunities, not the standards, are unequal. p407