Determined *
A Science of Life without Free Will
Two Main Takeaways
There is no free will, or there is much less free will than is generally assumed; we are heavily constrained by the “stimuli > response” nature of our behaviour.
How life would improve if we stopped believing in free will - prevents casting moralistic judgement and conjures more empathy and understanding towards others.
Though there is no universally agreed upon definition of free will, the essence is that every behaviour is a result of its past.
Four Common Beliefs About the Nature of Free Will
The world is deterministic and there is no free will - hard determinism/incompatibilism
The world is deterministic and there is free will - compatibilism
The world is not deterministic and there is no free will
The world is not deterministic and there is free will - libertarian incompatibilism
No Justifiable “Deserve”
Sapolsky falls into the first camp, and maintains that it is not just to hold people morally responsible for their actions.
His hard determinism takes absurdism to a new level: the universe is irrational and meaningless, and we are not free to make our own decisions. But due to consciousness, we are stuck with the illusion of agency, which is what we have associated our “will” with. We are simply observers.
But perhaps there is solice in that our wills and behaviours have created a sense of agency that is good enough, where it is helpful to act as if you have free will - to consider all your options deeply when you can, but not be too hard on yourself because it really could not have been any other way.
A heavy implication of this view is that retributive punishment - which naturally activates dopaminergic reward pathways - should be abandoned. Instead, we should opt for models analogous to medical quarantines, and address the social determinants of criminal behaviour.
There is no justifiable “deserve”, and no individual is more entitled to have their moral needs met than the next person. Hating a person for what they have done is no more absurd than hating the sky for raining. While we cannot always avoid it, we should recognize the absurdity of moralistic judgements of behaviour.
The Implications of Compatibilism
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.
Sapolsky really makes the heavy weight of the implications brought by compatibilism felt, and the moralistic judgement of behaviour
Dennett (compatibilist) describes in a marathon where one contestant starts way behind the starting line. Would this be unfair if it was a 100 meter sprint? Yes. What about a marathon? He argues not, because a relatively small initial advantage counts for nothing, since one can reliably expect luck to average out in the long run.
This is not what happens in society, if you’re born a crack baby, society doesn’t rush to ensure you are raised in affluence and help you overcome your neurodevelopment problems. You are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there, to be left neglected and abused, to live in a gang-riddled neighborhood with underfunded schools.
You start a marathon behind the pack, and at the first rehydration tent the water has mostly run out, 5 miles later you become dehydrated, twenty miles in people think the race is over and you have to avoid people sweeping the street on your way to the finish line.
All the while, that runner watches the receding backsides of the rest of the runners, each thinking that they’ve earned and are entitled to a decent shot at winning.
Luck does not average out over time, and we cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck. Our world almost guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified.
Dennett writes that a good runner who starts at the back of the pack, if he really is good enough to DESERVE winning, will probably have plenty of opportunity to overcome the initial disadvantage.
This is one step above believing that god invented poverty to punish sinners.
Dennett says one more thing that summarizes this moral stance - “if you don’t like the rules, don’t play the game; play some other game”.
Unfortunately, the crack baby doesn’t have the option of being offered a second chance to be born into an affluent and educated family of tech executives in Silicon Valley who pay for your ice skating lessons and cheer you on from the sidelines.
Thinking that it is sufficient to merely know about present intent is far worse than intellectual blindness. In a world such as we have, it is deeply ethically flawed.
