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.
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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."