Determinism vs. free will: A scientific showdown

The takeaway of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is basically the same as that espoused by those Snickers commercials: You’re not you when you’re hungry. Except according to Sapolsky, there is no “you”—the hunger is what dictates your behavior, along with your stress level, whether or not you were born with fetal alcohol syndrome or grew up in a culture that valorizes individual freedoms versus one that prioritizes communal responsibility or in one that believes in an omniscient, omnipotent, vengeful deity. Hormones, neurotransmitters, and how they are affected by your current and historical circumstances—these are the only things that determine how you will act and what decisions you will make at those inflection points when you're called upon to make impactful choices. And all of them are things you did not choose and cannot control. Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, is not averse to the notion of our having free will; it’s just that he can’t find it. And he’s looked everywhere. He has studied—intensely—not only neurobiology but also endocrinology, behavioral science, philosophy, primatology, criminology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, evolution, and history. Not a single one of these disciplines precludes free will, but all of them together do. All there is to us is biology and the way that biology is affected by our environment. That’s it. We are not, as Yoda suggested, luminous beings; we are only crude matter. This is tough stuff for Americans, who are practically addicted to our meritocratic, rags-to-riches, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mythology. So in chapter four, “The Myth of Grit,” Sapolsky deals with people who overcome their circumstances (along with their foils, those who “squander” their good fortune). The secret of their success (and failure) all comes down to their prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC is famously the last part of the brain to mature; it's not fully constructed in humans until we're in our mid-20s. Not because it's harder to build—it’s made of the same components as the rest of the brain, which has been largely functional for the past couple of decades. Rather, Sapolsky claims that it matures late specifically to enable it to become the brain region most influenced by the experiences we have in those first two decades—to learn from those experiences and have them shape us. Grit, pluck, willpower, stick-to-it-iveness, and self-restraint are controlled by the PFC and are shaped by the environment we grew up in. And that’s an environment we do not choose or control. “What the PFC is most about is making tough decisions in the face of temptation—gratification postponement, long-term planning, impulse control, emotional regulation,” he writes. “The PFC is essential for getting you to do the right thing when it is the harder thing to do.” Difficult decisions take a ton of mental energy. That’s not a metaphor; the PFC consumes an immense amount of cellular energy. So much so that if you're hungry, tired, stressed, or lack resilience because you were born poor, which gave you chronically elevated glucocorticoid levels, your PFC simply does not have the juice to make good decisions when it matters. Sapolsky points out that “a substantial percentage of people incarcerated for violent crime have a history of concussive head trauma to the PFC.”

An ambitious goal

“This book has a goal,” Sapolsky writes. “To get people to think differently about moral responsibility, blame, and praise.” Although the world is wholly deterministic, we can, and have, learned to change our views and behaviors—both on the individual and the societal levels. We learn and we change when our environment modulates the same molecules, genes, and neuronal pathways that controlled our original views and behaviors. Incidentally, these are the same molecules, genes, and neuronal pathways modulated when a sea slug learns to avoid being shocked by a researcher—i.e., not free will. Sapolsky’s stated goal of rethinking blame is exceedingly difficult, even for him. He refers to Bettelheim, the self-hating Jew who insisted that autism in kids is caused by their cold “refrigerator mothers” as “a sick, sadistic fuck.” He calls Anders Breivik, who carried out the largest terrorist attack in Norwegian history when he murdered 69 kids at summer camp in 2011, “a lump of narcissism and mediocrity” who “finally found his people among white supremacist troglodytes.” Yet he thinks that punishing them is as unjust as punishing someone with diabetes. He promotes a public health-based approach to criminal justice: Criminals should be removed from society so they don’t further harm others, much like those with infectious diseases should be quarantined so they don’t harm others. (Because that worked out well.) He extends the analogy by noting that a public health worker’s job upon discovering that farm workers exposed to pesticides are at an increased risk of certain ailments is not merely to treat the sick workers but to minimize their exposure to the agent that is sickening them. Likewise, since we know that growing up in poverty and oppression increases someone’s risk of making poor—perhaps criminal—decisions, all we need to do is reduce their exposures to those stimuli, and they will be at reduced risk. If we want fewer criminals, we just have to fix the world. Easy-peasy. Throughout the book are some self-deprecating footnotes that don’t really work. Statements like “oh, that philosophy is far too obtuse for me” don’t really fly from the guy who spent the past few chapters quite lucidly explaining neuroendocrinology, chaos theory, emergent complexity, and quantum indeterminacy. The only one that holds up is when he claims not to know anything about Buddhism. That one’s believable, given that some strains of Buddhism posit that there's a part of us that is distinct from our bodies. Also sprinkled throughout are references to musicals from Fiddler to Hamilton that do work to insert some levity; they’re there because Sapolsky’s wife chose to be a musical theater director. It is not hard to follow or understand or even agree with Sapolsky’s arguments. But they run so very counter to our lived experience that it's extremely difficult to feel them, to grok them, to actually believe them. Sapolsky knows this, since he experiences it, too, and he has a solution: pretend. Live as if we had free will, even though we don’t. (Except, of course, when condemning a wrong-doer; see previous paragraphs.) It is hardly the only delusion we need in order to get through this life.

Or maybe not?

Sapolsky sometimes gets a bit frustrated with free-will proponents. “Whatever that real you is composed of, it sure ain’t squishy biological brain yuck," he writes disparagingly of those who posit a “you who sits in a bunker in your brain but not of your brain.” Despite continuously maintaining that he is not a dualist, Kevin Mitchell seems to fall into this category. In his newest book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Mitchell explains that our free will comes from the holistic organization of our brains and bodies, driven by evolution, as agents with purpose. In some yet-to-be-determined way, our whole is more than the sum of our parts. Whereas Sapolsky interprets findings that lower-order organisms use the same molecular mechanisms in their brains as we do in ours to conclude that we don’t have free will, Mitchell interprets these findings to conclude that bacteria do have free will. The first cell formed when some genetic material got stuck inside a membrane and was therefore distinct from its surroundings and able to act upon them. Mitchell thinks that ever since then, living beings have done things for their own reasons (usually food or sex) and thus have agency and autonomy. Single-celled organisms act as they do because they have a goal (primarily survival), and so do we. Poof, free will. The crux of his argument is that, yes, our brains work through action potentials and neurotransmitters and other molecular phenomena. But our psychology can’t and shouldn’t be reduced to those aspects. He writes that the only reason that voltage changes across neuronal cell membranes are important is because of what they mean; they represent our goals, beliefs, intentions, choices, and desires. They are merely the physical instantiation of those causal mechanisms, which impose top-down constraints upon their behavior. As for this downward causation, Sapolsky writes, “it is truly difficult to understand what exactly is being suggested.” Mitchell accuses Sapolsky and his ilk of starting from their desired conclusion—criminal justice reform—and working backward from there. But he's the one who seems to be guilty of this. Mitchell writes, “We may need to question the philosophical bedrock of our scientific approach if we are to reconcile the clear existence of choice with the apparent determinism of the physical universe.” However, the (often quite unpopular) truths revealed by the scientific method—heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics—have often upended “the clear existence of” what came before. Determinism may be no different. And Mitchell loves italics. Almost every page has an italicized phrase; some even have several. Sometimes the italics denote jargon (cytoskeleton, quantum decoherence), but sometimes jargon gets packaged in quotes (“messenger RNA,” “entanglement”), and sometimes it's not delineated in any way (cilia, flagellum). But sometimes italics provide emphasis. (“It is the organism as a whole, not only the physical happenings inside it, that is the cause of things happening.” “The organism’s neural circuits are not deciding—the organism is deciding.” “Patterns of neural activity only have causal efficacy in the brain by virtue of what they mean.” “Thoughts are not just patterns of neural activity; they are patterns that mean something.”) But printing something in italics, even a lot of times, doesn’t make it so. Or perhaps I choose to believe it doesn’t.