Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will
Robert Sapolsky · 2023
"Every human action is the end product of an unbroken chain of prior causes — genes, hormones, childhood environment, immediate context, culture — stretching back before birth, which means free will in the sense most people believe in, the ability to have decided otherwise with all else being equal, does not exist."
Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, builds his case biologically rather than purely philosophically: he walks through the causal chain behind any single behavior, from what happened in your brain one second before the action, to hormones and sensory context in the preceding hours, to childhood and adolescent development in preceding years, to genes and prenatal environment before you were even born. His claim is that at no point in that chain is there a gap where an uncaused 'you,' separate from all these prior causes, steps in and freely decides; every link is explicable by what came before it.
The book is largely a rebuttal of what he calls 'the last two inches' arguments — accounts that concede most behavior is shaped by biology and environment but still carve out a small remaining space, willpower, conscious deliberation, moral effort, as genuinely free. Sapolsky argues neuroscience keeps shrinking that space rather than preserving it: even willpower and self-control show up as measurable, resource-limited brain processes shaped by the same prior causes as everything else, not an exception to the causal chain.
What is Sapolsky's central argument against free will in Determined?
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- Determined: A Science of Life Without Free WillPenguin Random House
- Determined: A Science of Life Without Free WillWikipedia
Galileo's Error
"Consciousness cannot be fully explained by physical science because physics, since Galileo, deliberately excluded qualitative experience from its domain to make nature mathematically tractable — so the fix isn't a better physical theory of consciousness, it's recognizing consciousness as a fundamental property of matter itself, present in some minimal form even at the level of basic particles."