Modern life depends on causality. You stomp on your car’s brake pedal and through a series of mechanical, hydraulic and electrical links your car rapidly slows. The chain of events began long before your foot touches the brake pedal. Perhaps millions of years before.
Professor Robert M. Sapolsky cites voluminous research linking neuron behavior in the human brain to DNA, human development, injury, training, socialization, culture, … back to the origin of time thoroughly eliminating opportunity for independent uncaused actions or what many understand as Free Will (a decision or action independent of external forces). Even the idea of stomping on the brakes at a particular moment, perhaps to avoid hitting a pedestrian is part of a complex system with only causal links. Society conditions drivers to recognize a ball bouncing into the street as a warning that it might be followed by a child and that striking that possible child would cause great harm to the community and possibly punishment for the driver.
The complexity of human existence has so many moving parts culture invented Free Will or various spirits to rationalize actions within or beyond our control. Imagine attempting to explain how modern anti-lock brakes work to someone in the 18th century. Society also uses Free Will to lay blame on for a crime or to give credit for an achievement ignoring the thousands, perhaps millions of people who provided information and helped to form that individual.
In the first half of Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will Professor Sapolsky carefully and thoroughly demonstrates how neurobiology can now explain how diet and especially alcohol consumption affects prenatal development of the brain. How blows to the head by explosions or tackle football can cause lasting brain injury that affects personality and judgment. How particular cultures shape decision making. After carefully explaining neurobiology, chaos theory, emergent complexity, random events and quantum mechanics he concludes there is no Free Will. “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to ‘Why?’ beyond ‘ This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.’ … We are not captains of our ships; our ships never had captains.” (p. 386)
Sapolsky commends quarantining individuals who might cause further harm to themselves or others. For example denying driving privileges from those with uncontrolled epilepsy or alcoholism. Denying a business license to those who have demonstrated fraud. He also cites historic examples of retributive justice showing that humanity can be weaned from the pleasure of seeing an offender punished.
For those without training in science, understanding Determined may be difficult but not impossible. This volume includes primers on neurobiology, chaos theory, and quantum mechanics (Okay. Very Difficult.). Sapolsky carefully backs every fact with research and cites that research in the copious end-notes. His footnotes throughout provide helpful insights and humorous personal commentary. The implications for eliminating Free Will from society may necessitate a slow reading and perhaps, as I experienced, a second reading.
Sapolsky briefly considers Free Will as a useful illusion. He prefers truth.
Because events tend to be chaotic rather than random, they are likely to amplify prior events rather than cancel them. Consider for example a pair of identical twins. Because capillary development is chaotic, one is likely to have a better blood supply, giving that fetus a slight edge. Once they are born one of the twins dominates the other. Slowly their personalities diverge. One might learn it can endure punishments, the other learns to evade the punishments meted to its sibling. The hundreds of small events combine to give an illusion of differences in free will but are the result of environmental and cultural conditioning.
What remains is developing and implementing language steeped in neurobiology and cultural conditioning to describe motivation for doing difficult task. For example: reading Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky, Penguin Press, 2023.