I’ve read Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and it’s pretty good, making a material—in his view, neurological—case for determinism, though the book is a bit long and can be tedious in parts if you don’t want to plow through a lot of neurobiology. But I think that in the end he makes his case (of course, I’m a hardcore determinist so I’d agree!). If you don’t want to read 528 pages, there’s also Sam Harris’s Free Will or Gregg Caruso’s books on free will (he’s a determinist).
But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism. I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them, and was also kicked out of a friend’s house simply for calmly espousing and explaining determinism. As I always say, it’s harder for me to convince a creationist that evolution is true than to convince a “free willer” that determinism is true. And there are a lot more of the latter than the former!
But of all the reviews I’ve read of Sapolsky’s book, by far the worst just appeared in what was once a great venue, the New York Review of Books. (It went downhill fast when its wonderful editor Robert B. Silvers died in 2017.) The review is free to access (also archived here), and you can read by clicking on the headline below. It shows no understanding of the free-will controversy, or of science itself, and offers no alternative to determinism (it has to be some magical nonphysical agent that can affect material objects), though I suspect the author, because of her frequent references to God and theology, might believe that free will has a goddy supernatural origin. (Even if it doesn’t, libertarian free will has to rely on something supernatural.) Here’s the description of the author from the NYRB:
Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. She is currently writing a book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the history of evolutionary theory. (February 2025)
Although I’m usually loath to dwell on credentials, a historian, even of biology, is not the person to review Sapolsky’s book. Perhaps a philosopher or a neurologist, but I can explain the pervasive awfulness of Riskin’s review only by appealing to massive ignorance of the topic.
I really don’t want to go through this long review bit by bit, but I’ll highlight a few weird things.
Ignorance of science. Riskin doesn’t realize that getting evidence for phenomena (e.g., evolution) is very often a step-by step-process: you have an initial hypothesis, and then you either reinforce or reduce the likelihood of its being true with new data. This is a Bayesian approach, though often it’s implicit rather than specified using Bayes’s theorem. You don’t “prove” determinism or free will, you simply gather evidence that makes one of them more likely. I would note that determinism should have high priors simply because our brains and bodies and environments, the source of our behaviors, affect our behaviors materially–usually through neuronal wiring. (That’s why Sapolsky concentrates so much on neurons.) And material objects universally obey the laws of physics.
Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved, and says that Sapolsky doesn’t do it. But I say she’s put the bar too high, that Sapolsky makes a good case and that, combined with the presupposition that true libertarian free will must involve forces that we don’t know about—while the laws of physics appear to apply universally—should put Riskin on the defensive (which she is).
Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.) [JAC: it’s not ALL like that, so her comment is inaccurate.]
How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this. He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.” He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.
That might be a fair criticism of Sapolsky’s style, but I don’t remember him saying that this evidence is irrelevant (it’s been a while since I read the book). But I do think that predicting behaviors before one is conscious of performing them raises the priors of determinism, as do the many, many ways that you can trick people into thinking they have agency when they don’t (brain stimulation, effects of drugs, computer experiments) or thinking they are not doing something consciously when they are (Ouija boards). Sean Carroll’s essay “On Determinism” (with extensive quotes by Massimo Pigliucci) makes a good case that the universality of the laws of physics leaves no room for libertarian free will. (Sean is a compatibilist and, although a determinist, says we have “free will” in a different sense. Dan Dennett used to say the same thing.)
More waving away of the notion of proof:
Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds. Here’s another from Sapolsky’s final chapter: “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning.” This might sound like the opposite of saying that science shows there’s a divine intelligence behind the world-machine, but it’s the direct descendant of that earlier claim, and comes to the same evacuation of meaning and agency from the mortal world. This isn’t a scientific proposition. It remains what it has been from the beginning: a theology.
This is wrong. One can gather data for and against determinism. If, for example, we found out that people could move objects by thinking about them, that would suggest that there is some nonmaterial brain force that can actually influence events, buttressing (but not “proving”) the case for free will. And saying that determinism is “a theology” is also wrong, for theology in the West is involved in exegesis of the Bible and beliefs in a supernatural being.
What’s the alternative to determinism? Here Riskin is silent, though it looks from her frequent references to God and theology that she sees divine action as a possible counter to determinism and a buttressing of free will. (I can’t be sure of this, though, as Riskin doesn’t lay out what she sees as a viable alternative to determinism.) Riskin has described herself as a “Jewish atheist”, and given that she herself doesn’t see divine provenance out there, the onus on her is to admit that she is invoking some kind of supernatural but non-Goddy action.
Her only argument seem to be that because people look like they have “agency” (and they do in the trivial sense of being able to do things), this is evidence for free will. For example, this part seems deeply confused:
It’s because the many factors influencing behavior, Sapolsky thinks, place the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.” But why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence? Sapolsky doesn’t explain; he takes as given that to show any influence at all is to show a determining influence. Similarly, he writes that we have “no control” over our biology, culture, or environment. Sure, we don’t control these things, but there’s an important difference between not controlling something and having no effect on it, or at least so anyone with teenagers is inclined to hope. Biology isn’t insulated from behavior any more than behavior is from biology. As Sapolsky himself points out, virtually everything a person does has an effect on their physiology. And a wealth of empirical evidence from Aristotle to Oprah suggests that people can indeed have cultural influence.
What is the sweating reviewer trying to say here? That there is some free will? I cannot tell. In fact, her own confusion and incoherent arguments seem to be imputed to Sapolsky, as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve read the book, and I disagree. And “cultural influence” my tuchas! What does that have to do with refuting determinism?
Is there a god in this argument? The author makes the old “why is there something instead of nothing” argument:
Sapolsky’s turtles are of course metaphorical; they stand for deterministic causes, and by “a turtle floating in the air” he means a magical event. We must accept a strictly causal chain extending back to the beginning of time or acknowledge that we believe in miracles. But why are these our only choices? And are they really so different? Wouldn’t a chain of deterministic causes imply a miracle of some sort at the beginning—the old infinite regress problem rearing its domed shell again?
Yes, and we don’t know why there is something instead of nothing, though there have been some scientific suggestions that do NOT involve miracles. And obviously since Riskin is an atheist, she doesn’t believe in miracles. So what is her answer. She doesn’t tell us.
More touting of “agency:
Sapolsky tells the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a metal rod through the brain while working on a construction site in Vermont in 1848 and was never quite the same afterward. He offers Gage as evidence that people’s personalities depend on their “material brains,” which he thinks poses a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the idea of free will. But why should the fact that humans and their brains are made of material parts mean there’s no such thing as human agency? There’s a good answer, but it’s historical rather than scientific: because determinism retains crucial elements of the theology from which it arose, according to which the material world was a passive artifact lacking any agency of its own.
It would be nice if Riskin would tell us what she means by “agency”. Real “I could have made either choice” agency or simply the appearance of agency? The intimation that determinism is a form of theology again arises, but denial of free will in the world is simply not theology. It’s analogous to denial of a supernatural being, which Riskin presumably does in her atheism. Is this atheism theological?
I won’t go on here, as I don’t want to waste my time. I will simply say that Riskin sounds like she’s trying to be clever, but in so doing fails to confect a consistent argument against determinism. Her sniping at Sapolsky may occasionally hit home, but she comes nowhere close to dispelling determinism, simply because she doesn’t engage in the necessarily arguments. Read for yourself how she throws in lots of historical figures like Darwin and Paley and Laplace to show her erudition, but doesn’t deal with what libertarian free will would really entail.
This egregious review also goes to show how far the mighty New York Review of Books has fallen. Yes, it likes cleverness and erudition, but in the old days it also liked substantive arguments in its reviews. Riskin doesn’t provide any. But don’t take my word for it; if you’re interested in the topic, read the review and see if you can find any structure or coherence in it.
h/t: Barry
” “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them ”
100% agree.
All greats have licks or motifs they play. Also turns of expression. This is not a disparagement – you can tell Cannonball Adderly is playing right away. That’s their sound. You can also tell when a player is quoting or emulating another.
Just listen long enough.
Even Cecil Taylor. Sort of.
Note that one of Riskin’s points is that human behavior is far less predictable that we would have under determinism.
This is a bogus argument Riskin makes. Human behavior is indeed difficult to predict because enormous numbers of past and present variables effect current behavior. A person may not perform the same act in ‘identical’ circumstances because, in reality, in no two instances can all the variables be literally ‘identical’. So even though human behavior is difficult to predict, it is still determined. Actually, people have a narrower behavioral repertoire that they say they have. That is, people claim they are less predictable than they are.
Hmmm. I just read Riskin’s piece. It’s a nice stroll down the memory lane of history—she cited many well known players—but she did little to touch on Sapolsky’s argument. I used to subscribe to the venerable New York Review, but stopped when I realized that I couldn’t keep up with the many long articles. When an article turned out to be not very good (e.g., bad), I was especially disappointed. This one falls into that category. Probably OK on the history, but on the science not so much.
I’m pretty sure I heard Sapolsky interviewed in a podcast. If not him, someone like him who this year wrote a book proving we have no free will. He admitted that he can only live a few minutes a day as if his philosophical argument is true. He admitted he’s as judgmental as the rest of us.
I put the “no free will” people in the same basket as solipsist who prove only they exist. My answer is “so what?” An illogical but psychologically satisfying refutation of Berkeley’s claim that nothing exists outside our mind is when Samuel Johnson kicked a rock. I prefer the psychological truth over the logical truth.
Try to live as if there is no free will. Good luck. Try to live as a solipsist. Why even argue it since only you exist. And Bishop Berkeley’s proof that there is no existence outside my own mind? Fine, but I won’t step in front of that imaginary moving car even though it disappears when I close my eyes.
I think such philosophies as proposed by Sapolsky are full of sound and fury, but signify nothing.
I do! It’s very easy to live accepting the fact that there is no libertarian free will. The fact that our choices are indeed the result of the prior physical state (along with knowledge that that is indeed how the world works) causes me no problem in day-to-day life. Why would it?
Coel, I agree with you. I do not believe in free-will in the sense of an uncaused event. There may be uncaused events at the scale of quantum mechanics, but that creates a very poor version of free-will. Certainly not sufficient to send me to heaven or hell. Not that I believe in either.
But I don’t operate every day adjusting my behavior because I don’t have a classic belief in free-will, and I’m not sure I can. Or anyone can.
Too often I spill a little coffee in the morning because I’m a klutz. My wife, who I dearly love, gets frustrated with my klutziness. I tell her I’ll try to do better and ask forgiveness. She puts away the gun. We both feel better.
If I take this scenario and drop it in the determinism hopper, I don’t see value added in the result of that thought process. I spill the coffee – determined. I say I will do better – determined. I try to correct my behavior – also determined, but now “I try” gets fuzzy concerning agency. My wife puts away the gun – determined. I thank her because I want to create a cause so she’ll put away the gun. Determined. But wait, I am acting as if she has agency when I worry my planting a cause in her brain may not work. If I think I can plant causes in her brain, am I manipulating her in an unethical way? Should I respect her and let her decide to shoot or not shoot me only based on what is going on her own mind without me trying to plant a cause? A logical quagmire results, maybe a reduction to absurdiy or a reduction to an infinity of true propositions or circular reasoning. All things considered, I don’t want to think about it. I apologize (even though that may make no sense given a version of determinism) so I can live another day.
My strategy to not go down the free-will vs. determinism argument process during a life experience is successful so far as I’m alive to write this. If I spill more coffee tomorrow, who knows?
Please read the Roolz; I suggest posting no more than 10% of the comments on a thread.
Coel, the huge problem I have with actually living my belief in determinism is the consistent, sometimes overwhelming, subjective experiences of making conscious decisions. Although I do firmly believe it’s all a complex web of illusions, it’s stronger than I appear to be. I understand that some meditation and other practices can reduce the hold of what Hinduism and Buddhism call “maya”; do you have any practical tips?
Yes, we have a conscious experience of making decisions. But why is that incompatible with determinism?
In our brains there are 100 trillion neural connections and about 10 thousand trillion neural-connection signals every second. Whatever job our consciousness is doing, it would be overwhelmed if it was aware of all of that low-level processing; it needs to be oblivious to it. So decisions are “reported to” the consciousness. This is exactly what you’d expect if the whole process were indeed deterministic.
Oh I agree completely. My problem is the great difficulty of living in accord with these beliefs in the face of sometimes-overwhelming experiential “evidence” to the contrary.
Thanks for the insult. In fact, there are social policies that flow from determinism, most importantly how we deal with crime and punishment.
Really, have you read Da Roolz lately? (I see you’re a nOOb.) Are you unable to frame a criticism towards the host here without insulting him?
I did not mean to insult a person, just the philosophy. I think the philosophy is useless, even if proven true.
Determinism does not promote peace, love, or understanding. A diehard believer in killing everyone can claim no one can judge him (or her) because he had no choice. The electrons in his brain made him do it. I would try to stop him regardless and I’d claim my electrons made me do it. There is no difference in my behavior or his regardless of our belief in free will.
This is an empirical, not a philosophical argument, but the free-will vs. determinism debate has been going on for centuries. It does not change regardless of the source of determinism – be it God’s knowledge or the clock that God started with the big bang, or electrons in my head. Or all the above. The complexities of our society defy solution by pleading either side of the free-will vs. determinism debate. That is why I find it intellectually interesting but useless.
Again, my intention was not to insult anyone. I believe in completely open debate even though my initial comment did not indicated that.
It is clear that you do not understand hard determinism, and clearly havent read here, or Sapolskys book (sorry apostrophe key stuck) or any of those who seriously defend determinism. NONE OF THEM say that there should be no punishment or that you can get off killing people by saying that you couldnt help yourself. That is a puerile and incorrect characterization of determinism. HOWEVER, read Sapolsky or Harris or me on why there has to be punishment and reward. I suggest you bone up on your reading before you engage in open debate here on this topic, because I, for one, am tired of correcting people who mischaracterize determinism.
There are so many wrong things you have packed into your comment. Here is one more: the debate has changed since people found you can predict peoples (two-alternative) choices with significant accuracy BEFORe people are aware of having made those choices. That has put a whole new twist in the debate, with of course the Free Willies trying as hard as they can to get around that data.
Again, before you start making pronouncements on this site about free will, please acquaint yourself with the literature.
Finally, of course the debate has been going on for a long time because people FEEL they have free will. That does not mean it exists, any more than most people feeling that God exists proves there is a god. And the laws of physics are fairly recent phenomena. The priors, as I said, are on the side of determinism,
Oh and determinism can promote empathy, as I have argued before. .
People – or at least those who aren’t colorblind – feel they see the color red. Telling them it is just an illusion created by 650 nm electromagnetic energy interacting with their nervous system does not stop them appreciating and enjoying the experience of red and other colors. Likewise most non-brain-injured people feel they are “free” to think through how to respond to a problem or situation and come up with solutions that they “freely” chose. Their personal history of genetics, culture, upbringing, etc. of course are factors in those choices. Phineas Gage and other cases with damage to the prefrontal cortex often exhibit the “environmental dependency syndrome” described by French neurologist Lhermitte, interpreted as a “loss of free will” because their behavior has become determined by immediate stimuli that evoke conditioned responses – they lost the relative independence from the immediate environment that normal brains enjoy. Anyway this is my first comment here (though I’ve been following for a few years) and I should add I don’t believe in any nonphysical forces influencing the physical world. I just think this debate gets bogged down by conflating different things. Do red and other colors not really exist because they are determined by electromagnetic wavelengths?
Mike, if I try I can put a positive spin on your criticism. The older I get the more important it seems to me to acknowledge the constraints on our thinking, culture, and values that are imposed by the evolved nature of our brains. This is part of why the “trans” phenomenon is so interesting to me.
A close second is the acknowledgement that we have ~zero awareness of what goes on in the deep murky parts of our minds below the shallow clear layer of conscious thought and reflection. Why did I have that second cup of coffee? Why did I ask my wife to marry me? In both cases I turned the idea over in my conscious mind before acting, but idk where the idea came from in the first place, and I couldn’t say at the moment of decision why I chose to do what I did. Only in hindsight can I create an explanation (I like coffee, my wife is awesome).
The murky parts of the mind just present these things to the conscious mind, like a letter in the mailbox, but with no return address. I would be too embarrassed to say how old I was when I first thought about all that.
From that pov you’re right there are few practical consequences of admitting we have no libertarian free will because we can’t do much about most of our behaviours, even the ones that feel like willful choices or decisions. But I agree with our host there are some important areas of culture and values where it matters a lot, like punishment for crimes.
…and praise and blame more generally: plus more appreciation of luck, both good and bad. The answer to the “So what” question has practical limits to be sure, but within those limits is consequential.
Based on the quotations provided, I agree that Riskin is not logically persuasive. But this one in particular interested me:
Well, no, it wouldn’t imply a miracle. If the shape of spacetime is suitable, the Big Bang could be the beginning of time, which would be a physically natural (not miraculous) place for a first cause. After all, “cause” implies the earlier* of a physical-law-connected pair of events. (*I.e., lower entropy – h/t Sean Carroll.) Or with a different shape, spacetime could extend into the past forever.
Riskin seems to be substituting her intuitions for actual physics. But I’d accuse Sapolsky of the same sort of fallacy. Why does free will supposedly require a “turtle floating in the air”, i.e. an uncaused event? (Yes I know that’s the definition of “libertarian” free will, but why consider that definition authoritative?) Our actions have physical-law-connected later events, i.e. “effects”, indeed we usually do them to get the effects, and nobody considers that to be a problem for free will. Well, earlier events, our intuitions tell us, are things we cannot select. But our intuitions tell us this because we observe that macroscopic past events cannot be selected. However, actual physics tells us that deterministic processes typically depend on microscopic details. There is a gap in Sapolsky’s turtles-all-the-way-down argument (which should be called turtles-all-the-way-back). To wit:
There is an array of microscopic and macroscopic past facts that, by deterministic laws of nature, leads to your actions.
You cannot choose the macroscopic facts in your past.
You cannot choose the laws of nature.
Therefore??, You cannot choose your future actions.
Is there actually a question about why there is “something rather than nothing” ?
Nothingness is not a possible state so there is always “something”.
Why is nothingness not a possible state? Why couldn’t there be literally nothing anywhere? (Accepting that there also wouldn’t be an “anywhere” for there to be nothing.)
You answer your own question. It’s a contradiction by definition. Not just no “place” for that state to be, but no “time” to be in that state.
Is that a version of the Weak Anthropic Principle (basically, if there were nothing then we wouldn’t be having this discussion in the first place), or is it something else?
To me, it’s just a contradiction. The word “nothingness” is an abstract metaphysical idea, not a possible real state. Like “gods”.
If by prior definition any possible “real state” is not “nothing”, then clearly nothingness is not really possible. But that’s just a question-begging, no?
Yes. So, I consider it a meaningless scientific question.
“Nothing” is an abstract category that stands in contradistinction to “something”. So for me the question of “why is there something rather than nothing” seems nonsensical because the two go together and the universe as we perceive it encompasses both.
I agree, it’s a meaningless question. Nothingness is the absence of something, so you have to have something in the first place in order to have the concept of nothing.
I think one reason people have a hard time with determinism is they don’t realize it allows for learning. When I was a toddler I might’ve touched the hot stove, but after doing that one time I went forward with a different, re-wired brain and I didn’t do it again.
What’s never been shown to my satisfaction is how indeterminism – any exception to the reliable causal relations at multiple levels that Sapolsky, Sean Carroll, Jerry, and many other scientists cite when explaining human development and behavior – can make a choice more up to the agent and not less. Such relations, for instance those subserving our biological capacities of perception and cognition, are essential to effective agency. Wanting the capacity to somehow transcend them such that we might have done otherwise in an actual situation given who we were and what we wanted is irrational. Indeterminism in any significant degree would attenuate, not increase, the control we have over out behavior even if it means we might have done otherwise. So the rational stance is to be a pragmatic determinist: one who accepts that there might be indeterminism in nature (the jury is out on that) but that for all practical purposes we should assume that reliable causal relations exist.
Determinism only gets a bad rap because the libertarian, contra-causal conception of free will and effective agency dominates in our culture. I appreciate Jerry’s efforts to get a more rational conception of agency out there. It ain’t easy, but we persist: https://substack.com/inbox/post/153716883
I read Behave when it came out. I purchased a digital and audio version of Determined but have not yet read it. While this seems new, Lichtenberg (1742-1799) wrote, “Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism not withstanding, he believes he has free will.” He also wrote, “We should say it thinks, just we say it lightens.”
Sapolsky is not just talking “philosophy” it has very ethical and practical implications for the way we treat people.
I am indebted to Robert Sapolsky’s Stanford lectures which I viewed on YouTube during COVID. He has an engaging lecturing style, and I learnt a lot. I have read Behave, but not yet Determinism.