Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Libet (1916-2007) was a neuroscientist who focused on human consciousness. He received his PhD in physiology from the University of Chicago, and throughout his career, he worked as a research fellow, professor, and lecturer (“Benjamin Libet.” Eindhoven University of Technology).

Libet’s experimentation, as well as subsequent Libetian-style studies, showed brain activity shortly before conscious awareness of that activity, indicating that the brain decides before the sense of free will emerges. Although Libetian studies support Sapolsky’s overall argument against free will, Sapolsky dismisses Libetian experiments as largely irrelevant. While the studies do show a lack of free will in the seconds leading up to an action, they ignore the more distant antecedent events. Despite the limited scope of Libet’s influence, Sapolsky uses him to demonstrate that finding empirical evidence against free will is possible and to show the importance of a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the topic of free will.

Dennett is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, professor, and author of numerous books and scholarly articles. He studied at Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford. He has taught at the University of California and Tufts University, among other institutions (“Daniel Dennett.” Tufts University).

Dennett is a compatibilist who proposed the idea that luck evens out over time. Sapolsky staunchly disagrees with Dennett, viewing Dennett’s stance as unethical and damaging, which is why he intentionally targets Dennett in Determined. Sapolsky counters by hypothesizing about the life path of a person who was born with an addiction; the person would also be more likely to experience neglect, abuse, and poverty and to not have access to safe areas or primary education:

You start out a marathon a few steps back from the rest of the pack in this world of ours. And counter to what Dennett says, a quarter mile in, because you’re still lagging conspicuously at the back of the pack, it’s your ankles that some rogue hyena nips (43).

Sapolsky makes it a point to refute Dennett’s perspective, which enhances the social message of Determined that free will skepticism would positively impact society by nullifying moral judgment of behavior.

Levy is a researcher, philosophy professor, and author with multiple publications. He holds two PhDs in continental philosophy and the metaphysics of free will. His philosophical interests include the intersection of philosophy of the mind and ethics, with particular attention to moral responsibility and free will (“Neil Levy.” University of Oxford).

Sapolsky invokes the work of Levy in his refutation of Dennett’s proposition that luck evens out. Sapolsky cites Levy’s book Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral Responsibility (2011), in which Levy demonstrates how luck negates free will. Levy recognizes two types of luck, present and constitutive, with the latter being more relevant to the topic of free will. People do not have control over their constitutive luck, or the various instances of luck that bring a person to the present moment; thus, people should not be held responsible for their behaviors. Sapolsky thus interprets Levy’s position as follows: “In his view, not only does it make no sense to hold us responsible for our actions; we also had no control over the formation of our beliefs about the rightness and consequences of that action or about the availability of alternatives” (82). Sapolsky uses Levy’s position as an expert in a different field to bolster his interdisciplinary argument against free will.

Tse is a cognitive neuroscientist whose work focuses on consciousness and its implications. He is a researcher as well as a professor and department chair of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College, and he is the author of the 2013 book The Neural Basis of Free Will (“Peter Ulric Tse.” Dartmouth).

Tse is a compatibilist who argues in favor of the existence of free will. His notion of second-order free will is presented in the Chapter 4 discussion on willpower. Sapolsky describes Tse’s position as the idea “that you may not have free will now about now, [but] you have free will now about who you are going to be in the future” (88). Tse proposes that this type of free will is unique to humans, who “bear a degree of responsibility for having chosen to become the kind of chooser who they now are” (89). Tse appears again in the discussion of quantum mechanics; he suggests that brains can harness and amplify quantum effects. The incorporation of Tse’s research and perspectives, along with the other experts Sapolsky disagrees with, helps demonstrate that Sapolsky’s research pulls from all sides of the free will argument, even those he disagrees with.

Caruso is a philosopher, professor, and author and is the editor in chief of the scholarly journal Science, Religion and Culture. He received his PhD in philosophy from the City University of New York. In 2012, he released his book Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will in which he refutes the existence of free will based on its incompatibility with determinism (“Gregg Caruso.” SUNY Corning Community College).

Sapolsky includes Caruso’s perspective both because Caruso is a well-respected philosopher whose position complements his own and because Caruso proposed using a quarantine model to replace imprisonment. As a philosopher, Caruso augments Sapolsky’s neuroscientific perspective.

Lorenz (1917-2008) was an American meteorologist and mathematician. He studied mathematics at both Dartmouth College and Harvard University before joining the United States Army and pursuing meteorological studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (O’Connor, J. J., and E. F. Robertson. “Edward Norton Lorenz.” University of St. Andrews).

Lorenz is referenced in Determined as the originator of chaos theory. Lorenz had been studying computerized weather prediction models and accidentally entered an erroneously rounded digit, which significantly impacted the model’s output. He found that the complex results were deterministic but unpredictable, and he named this newly discovered phenomenon chaos theory. Lorenz also inspired the expression “butterfly effect,” which is a colloquial term for the concept of chaoticism. Sapolsky includes a detailed description of Lorenz’s discovery of chaoticism to develop the history of the concept and to make the concept more accessible to lay readers. Lorenz and his chaoticism illustrate the delineation between determinism and predictability; while chaotic systems are unpredictable due to the complex interaction between the relevant factors, they are nonetheless deterministic, with each occurrence in the system dependent on what came before.