Robert Sapolsky - Determined - Life Without Free Will (The Bodley Head, 2023) ****½

After I read neurologist and biologist Robert Sapolsky's brilliant "Behave" some years ago about all the aspects that determine our behaviour, his new book "Determined - Life Without Free Will" presented itself to me. It got ordered and shipped to me. It was lying on the shelf for a few months, waiting to make me sufficiently interested and with sufficient time to start reading it, which happened when the holidays decided it was time to start. The book is a real sequel to "Behave", and the words, paragraphs and chapters filled my brain with their insights and facts. 

Did I at any point take a decision to buy or read this book? Not if you believe Sapolsky, who claims with an incredible amount of facts and study results that free will does not exist and that everything we do is the result of our neurons and other aspects of our brain, our body, our life, our culture, our history co-determining what we do and when we do it. Intuitively I could agree with him, in the sense that our body creates an illusion of self, which we call 'I', the agent that determines our choices and actions. If you accept this, then obviously 'free will' is also an illusion. Sapolsky reasons that the concept of 'free will' is by definition impossible, since there is no immaterial agent that intervenes in all the aspects of our behaviour, but the exact opposite, our hormones, neurons, determine the choices we make, and hence create the illusion of free will. 

He gives a lot - hundreds of studies - at each level of our possible influence. Here are two examples. 

 "Stick a volunteer in a brain scanner and flash up pictures of faces. And in a depressing, well-replicated finding, flash up the face of someone of another race and in about 75 percent of subjects, there is activation of the amygdala, the brain region central to fear, anxiety and aggression" (p.97)

or: 

"What happens when the dlPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) is silenced is really informative. This can be done experimentally with an immensely cool technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which a strong magnetic pulse to the scalp can temporarily activate or inactivate the small patch of cortex just below. Activate the dlPFC this way, and subjects become more utilitarian in deciding to sacrifice one to save many. Inactivate the dlPFC, and subjects become more impulsive: they rate a lousy offer in an economic game as unfair but lack the self-control needed to hold out for a better reward. This is all about sociality - manipulating the dlPFC has no effect if subjects think their opponent is a computer." (p. 101)

His arguments and evidence are more than convincing, but as a reader and human being, I often wondered whether this is all a matter of semantics? My illusion of the "I" helps me function in this world, and the decisions made by my neurons are made by "my" neurons, based on "my" experiences, and "my" physiology, and "my" education, and "my" culture. This broad base that I call "me", is also "me" for all practical purposes and dialogue, and all the decisions is the result of my will. 

In the last part of the book, Sapolsky takes his findings a step further, and implying that if there is no free will, people cannot be held moraly and legally responsible for the actions of their bodies. Again, he gives a lot of convincing arguments, and interesting case studies that shed an unexpected light on both judgment and punishment. 

Interestingly enough, at the very end of the book, Sapolsky gives a long explanation of his own personal abhorrence for antisemitism. 

"I was once asked if I would take on that role working on the case of a White supremacist who, a month after attempting to burn down a mosque, had invaded a synagogue and used an assault rifle to shoot four people, killing one. "Whoa," I thought. "WTF, I'm supposed to help out with this?" Members of my family died in Hitler's camps. When I was a kid, our synagogue was ar­soned; my father, an architect, rebuilt it, and I had to spend hours holding one end of a tape measure for him amid the scorched, acrid ruins while he railed on in a near-altered state about the history of anti-Semitism. When my wife directed a production of Cabaret, with me assisting, I had to ac­tively force myself to touch the swastika armbands when distributing cos­tumes. Given all that, I'm supposed to help out with this trial? I said yes-if I believed any of this shit I've been spouting, I had to. And then I subtly proved to myself how far I still had to go". (p. 383). 

I can accept that our "will" is the choices made by our body and brain based on everything we've been conditioned to do. I can accept that "I", my consciousness is an awareness of things that were decided microseconds before by my brain, and I can accept that despite the conditioning and determinisms, the word "free" means that you are entitled to your own thoughts and actions (as compared to being the robot in somebody else's power), and I do believe that the concept of "free will" is still for all practical purposes a useful term. Just like Sapolsky himself does in the excerpt above. Whether you want to or not, we humans are driven by emotions yet we have to accept that a huge number of elements come into play when our brains make decisions. 

The whole essential question revolves around the study by Benjamin Libet from 1983, in which study subjects only became aware of their choices after their brain gave the signal of their choice. I fully agree with Sapolsky that there is no immaterial agent at work. We are not passengers in our own bodies. But the question is whether our consciousness (an effect of our brain's activity) and our choices (an effect of our brain's activity) coincide, precede or follow each other. For sure, we do many things that we are not conscious of, and life would be unmanagable if we were, but it could still be that the neurons in our brain consciously weigh options before making a choice.

Things that I found missing in this book is the loop that is possible between different parts of our brain. Even if free will does not exist, our brain has the incredible capacity for self-reflection, improvement in thought processes, acquiring the skill to evaluate options based on increased knowledge and the like. How are the changes in our brain steered? 

Like Sam Harris's opinion about the absence of "free will", Sapolsky takes it a level further, less philosophical but more scientific. The subject is counter-intuitive yet there is much to say for their view. Even if you are not convinced, as I was when I started to read, I can only recommend that you read it too. The quality and the passion of the writing, the many real-life examples will at least make you think and will make you doubt. And that's possibly already a great achievement.