Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Robert Sapolsky: Is Free Will An Illusion?

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Robert Sapolsky: Is Free Will An Illusion? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day, humans! Welcome to the Safe Space, dangerous ideas, and this is the most dangerous
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and earth-shattering and mind-boggling idea that any Hermasapian could count on us, which
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is, are we just machines? Are we just basically biological machines? Evolved from other animals,
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subject to the forces of physics and genetics and biology, there is no soul or spirit being
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injected into our consciousness that gives us the capacity to change what we want or
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to behave differently than we do. And even more bizarrely, is this actually not just
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kind of some weird philosophical argument that people in ivory towers and universities
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believe, but this is where the science takes us. Now, don't dismay, don't not listen to
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this conversation because you're afraid that you're going to be sapped of all your willpower
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and energy and vitality. That will all still be here. This is a great chat with one of the
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world's leading writers and thinkers about the brain, Robert Sapolsky. He is a huge deal,
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he's a professor of biology, neurology, the neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford
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University. So I'm sure he kind of knows what he's talking about. I first came across Robert
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with his book Behave, which is subtitled The Biology of Humans and Our Best and Worst, and his
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new book is Determined a Science of Life Without Free Will. He is a hardcore disbeliever in Free Will.
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It's absolutely fascinating to try to wrestle through all of the implications of that, and I hope
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you enjoy as much as I do this conversation with the one and only, Robert Sapolsky.
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I'm well. I am just wondering if I have any choice in being any other way than the way I am
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right now, and when we say things like how you feeling, is there any circumstance under which you
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could be feeling differently than the way that you're feeling now as you chat to me?
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No, absolutely not, but opening up a whole can of worms there.
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Yeah, dig into it. Okay, well, my basic song and dance is there's no free will.
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Not even who there's less free will than we used to think, and this may be having
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ramifications for the criminal justice system where things like that, there's no free will.
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When you look closely at the biology of how we become who we are and the environment with which
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the biology interacts, and all of these are things that we had no control over,
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the result is who you are right now in this moment is the outcome of nothing but stuff that came
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before that you could not control. And even if in the moment you make a choice where you were
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conscious of it, and you feel like you are an agent doing so and you know you could have done
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something else, and intuitively it feels like the most obvious thing on earth that you're exercising
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free will in making your choice acting on your intent. The whole issue is where did that intent
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come from from everything that came before that made you the kind of person who would have
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that intent at that moment? How certain of way that that's where the intent came from?
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Well, I'm completely certain 95% of philosophers according to most polls would disagree with me
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vehemently. Where would they say the intent came from? They would say intent is certainly influenced
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by what came before, but that there is an element in there of choice which is independent of your
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past. These are people, the 1995% of philosophers who think about this who were labeled as
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deterministic compatibilists, their determinist, they admit the world is made out of like science
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stuff and atoms and molecules and cells and things, yet somehow that is compatible with somewhere
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in there, there being decision-making processes in us that are free of everything that came before
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us. In a contrast, I am what would be called a hard incompatibleist which is once you see how
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the atoms and molecules and neurons and all of that work, it is completely incompatible
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with any version of making a choice that is free from what made you who you are right now
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over which you had no control. And is it true to say that the compatibilist thinks that there's
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intent that's being injected somewhere along the chain or is it because I was most familiar with
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and convinced by Dan Dennett who is the chief compatibilist or popularizer of compatibilism,
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until I started reading your book and hopefully you'll get a kick out of this because I always like
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hearing stories about people hearing my podcast or reading my work in weird places. I just landed
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in Portugal a few months ago and I was hung over and jet lagged and woke up in this little
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bed and breakfast in Porto and with this view over looking the river and I picked up this book and
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I thought, oh, I've got this huge big heavy book about philosophy and psychology to read. And it
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was wonderful. I loved it. I kept turning the pages and ordering more coffee and reading it.
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It's a good, so it's a good, that's the highest praise I can give out of it that I encourage.
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It's a great, it's a, with an interesting book and it strikes me that I can follow all of the
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threads and as you know, it's very hard for people to actually land at the conclusion
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intuitively that you're taking us to because the experience of being alive certainly seems as though
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I have agency over the things that I do. That's the subjective feeling that I have about my life.
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Wouldn't the compatibilist say, wouldn't there be compatibilist who would grant you? Okay,
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yeah, we're all, we're just made of stuff. That stuff is arranged in the ways that it's arranged
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because of the prior history of the universe. Maybe you can throw in some quantum randomness if you
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want to. Maybe we can get to that or not. Seems like a bit of a red herring. But the important thing
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is that my wishes are being fulfilled. I choose to order another coffee while I'm reading your book
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instead of getting up and going out to see the town. You can say, I have no free will in making
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that choice because it's all based on prior things that have happened in the universe. Can't the
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compatibilist say, well, who cares? That's kind of an academic, like how many fairies are dancing
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on the head of the pen question? The reality is that my experience is that I want to sit here and
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read the book and order another coffee. That desire is enacted to say, what would the world be like if
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I could have not wanted the thing that I want and that I'm trapped because I don't want the things
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that I don't want? Seems perverse. You know what I mean? It kind of seems self-evident,
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sort of responding to them on the egg-head-y academic level. You cannot successfully wish
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for something that you were going to wish for. You cannot will yourself to have more will power.
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You cannot think, I am going to think this thing next. These are all domains in which we do not have
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that power. Our wishes, our intense, our desires, our versions, etc. are coming from someplace else.
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Everything prior, all that sort of thing, but in response to them saying, well, yeah, who cares?
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This is this academic thing. I could not find any statement in the universe that I would disagree
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with more because this is exactly what's going on every time you're deciding, should you lock
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somebody up? They intended to commit that crime. Should you reward somebody? They decided to skip
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the party and study instead and got a great grade on the exam. We run the entire world on the notion
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that the intense we come up with come from out of nowhere and it's a just world in which you decide
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we get what we deserve because we're responsible for our intense and that's simply not the case.
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Let's deal with dessert here because I think that's a big one and it's hard to have a conversation
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about the philosophical minutia of a free will before we acknowledge that your broad points
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have arrived about the sheer contingency and good luck with which those of us who are not
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suffering terribly or who are not compelled to rape children or who are not compelled to shoot
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up schools or whatever it is, that we have a good fortune that we don't want to do those things.
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Right? And we can thank the structures in which we live, the cultures in which we live, the brain
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in which we were born with, the family into which we were born. So can we just sort of, can I just
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agree with you and concede that there is basically a monstrous injustice in ascribing to people far
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more autonomy than they have. And it's also possible that we are capable of bettering ourselves
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in some way that seems spooky and there are ways in which we can fall into traps of losing ourselves
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whether that's, if you've struggled with diction or if you've gone through periods where, you know,
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you've had therapy or you've done some Anthony Robbins course or something, you've had a period
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in which it certainly feels subjectively like I'm doing something now that is not a direct
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consequence of the mundane forces that have brought me up. Like there are, there seem
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subjectively to be interjection points in life. Even once we grant that the school shooter doesn't
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want to be a school shooter, if I was, if I'd been Hitler, I would have been Hitler and I would have
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done the same things that Hitler did. Like I, by definition, it's a technology, right? Of course,
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I could, you can't insert my brain and experience into the brains and experience of Hitler. That
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was Hitler and he did what he did because he was Hitler. But it still feels to me like that
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it's a bit cute to use that truth as a way of saying there was never a moment in Hitler's life
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where there could have been some force of internal will reflection. Doubt that could have changed
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his path and that that could have been generated by something that would have felt to him like a
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subjective epiphany. Sure. Except it can't work that way because at some point,
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well, just thanks before I'm called water on my beautiful slilically rub it.
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Just the dissecting of the things you said to paraphrase, I think you said something like,
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yeah, we'll admit that there's domains in which we have less choice than we might think.
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But there's this whole issue that we could change. First, we have no choice at all is my lunatic
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fringe argument, not just that we have less free will. We have none at all. And the second
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taps into what is one of the like reliable things that people panic about when you try to convince
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and there's no free will, they're saying, oh, great, are you saying because everything is determined
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that nothing can change? We shouldn't bother. And that's the furthest thing from the truth.
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Obviously, change happens enormously in individuals and societies, you know,
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wondrous examples, disastrous ones, blah blah, etc. But where the fallacy comes in is the notion
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that we sit there and we choose to change. What happens instead is we approach that moment
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being the person who we are as a result of everything that came before, parentheses over which we
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had no control. You approach that moment as the person you are. And as a result of that stimulus,
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whatever it is that's happened, your behavior changes. Let me give you an example. Okay,
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you go to the movies. And it's like some, I don't know, inspirational movie about some regular
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everyday guy who does something totally heroic and it's like great. And you come out of there saying,
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wow, that was so moving. That was so, it's amazing what one person can do.
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Tomorrow morning, I'm going to go volunteer to work for the homeless. And the person sitting next
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to you comes out and says, wow, that was such a great movie. The cinematography was amazing.
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First thing tomorrow morning, I'm going to go rent more movies by the cinematographer.
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And the third person comes out and says, wow, what a piece of crap movie. That was so
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emotionally manipulative and superficial. And first thing tomorrow morning, I'm going to burn
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all of my CDs made by this director. Okay, it all three cases, your behavior was changed.
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You changed. You became somebody who the next day was learning about the cinematographer
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or doing volunteer. You changed. But the question is, why did the three people in this change
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such different ways because of the people they were coming into it? And the people they were
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is the end product of everything that came before over which they had no control.
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Can I, so what do you make of the experiences that subjectively feel uncannily like will?
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So I'm not talking about, you know, can I choose between a chocolate ice cream or a vanilla ice cream?
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I'm talking about what you were sort of alluding to when you were talking about people who poo-poo
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determinism for depriving us of a sense of of capacity and agency and change, right? The, you know,
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the revolutionary is not very inspiring for Braveheart or Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King
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to stand on the hill and preach to people. Whatever is going to happen has already been decided.
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We are all but pawns following pre-existing narratives. But go forth and do all of the big,
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audacious, dangerous things that you are programmed like worker ants to have done my little robots.
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You know, you want to, there is a subjective experience of like, I was going to do this.
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Now I've had an experience that directs me to do otherwise. Of course I didn't choose to have
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that experience. I didn't choose to be standing, listening to Martin Luther King while he was
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giving that speech. I didn't choose to be the type of person for whom that would land and who
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would not instead say, oh, this guy's a hypocrite and he's full of it and I'm not going to bother.
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I didn't choose any of those things but nonetheless, there's this deep and profound experience of
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now I will do something that I would not otherwise have done and I'm mustering the capacity and agency
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to do that. And that, you know, that phenomenon, that kind of subjective
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phenomenon is not a reason to deny the rigor of your philosophical attack on free will.
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But where does it come from and be, isn't there a risk that it does get undermined if everybody
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yeah, believe you know, that's very well. Where does it come from? It's generally good for
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our mental health. A sense of agency is very good. There's a literature through the roof showing
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that psychological stress is built on a sense of lack of control, lack of predictability.
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And we thrive in many circumstances, maybe even most circumstances, on a sense of agency.
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And you could show wonderful sorts of studies that like you make somebody anxious about something
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experimentally and they will have a sense that the button they're pressing, which is followed a
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random number of seconds later by a bell or something, they will perceive them having been the
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agent to make that bell ring more than if you hadn't made them anxious. Because you look for
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agency there, you look for control. And given that we're this totally screwed up primate,
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who knows that like at some point, your heart is going to stop beating and there's not a damn
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thing you can do about it, that underlying terror makes a species that really has a very healthy
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respect for a sense of agency. Even if it's not there, even if it's never there. And the best
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ways to appreciate that are sort of to dissect that are twofold. One is manipulations where
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somebody does something where they think they are the agent of it. And in fact, they are not because
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you have done an experimental manipulation. But the other is where there was no manipulation.
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And you very consciously think through and you choose between these two options. And that feels
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incredibly agentive in that moment. But then you had to say, so where do you get the values
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from that made you choose this one? Even if that is a moment where you are choosing in the sense
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that we feel intuitively, why do you wind up being this sort of person who would prefer this choice
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over that choice? And that's where the compatibleist says that that's just asking for too much.
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You're saying that I should have the choice not to want the things that I want. But the reality is
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it becomes almost total logical, doesn't it? Of course I want to enact the change that I want to
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enact and I don't have the choice not to want to. It's like the alcoholic, the alcoholic doesn't
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want not to drink. The alcoholic wants to not want to drink. Yeah. Right. And we all understand
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that. Yeah. We all understand that lack of agency that we don't really get to choose our
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preferences. I don't get to choose the fact that I like toffee and butter scotch flavors more than
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I like vanilla and strawberry. Right. That's my experience. But where free will only really matters
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surely is when I'm actually at the ice cream counter or when I'm facing an alcoholic beverage,
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if I'm an alcoholic and I'm tempted. That's the moment at which most people would feel free
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will become as relevant. Not the construction of the wants and preferences in the first place,
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but the ability to either pursue or resist them. Which is absurd. Because how did you become
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that sort of person? Let's take a very realistic example. You go into an ice cream store and all
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they serve is vanilla or chocolate. And you choose vanilla. You don't want to get chocolate.
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Why is that? Maybe because the genetic makeup of your gustatory receptors in your tongue so that
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chocolate tastes like bitter battery acid. Or maybe when you were a kid, you were kidnapped by
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terrorists who from months on end tortured you, but only fed you chocolate ice cream. So now you
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kind of nice terrorists. If there is an option, I will take those terrorists. Well, they're terrible.
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Thank you. Or like, yeah, these don't come from nowhere. Like, I do these lectures occasionally for
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judges where they have to have continuing education stuff and teaching them about the brain where my
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theme is like you think you're being objective in your decision making, not a chance. You are not
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exercising free will there. So I sort of go through the whole thing. And this one time, this judge
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afterward turns out to be like this major pool bond, California Supreme Court justice thing. He says,
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okay, this just doesn't make any sense to me. Like the other week I had this case where it seemed
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cut and dried. It was this kind of case. And I know how I feel about it. And I was going to make
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this ruling was the end of the day. So I was going to make the ruling in the morning. And that night,
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I was sitting there. I said, you know, this particular defendant feels a little bit different from
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the more typical case. And what's the kind of world from his perspective? It's totally different
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from mine. And, you know, from his person. And I changed my mind and made a different decision.
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Are you telling me there was no free will? And I said, like, where in hell did you turn out to
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be the sort of person who respects reflecting on a decision? How did you turn out to be somebody
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secure enough that you were willing to say you made a mistake? How did you turn out to be somebody
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who values seribration enough that you did that that even instead of just watching a basketball
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game? How did you that didn't come from nowhere?
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Hmm. And it's also interesting that in that in that judge's example, he's actually giving an
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example of a scenario in which the conclusion that he arrived at was one in which he granted to
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the defendant less free will and more passion for it. He didn't flip the other way. He was like,
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I'm going to give this guy a break or this girl a break. And the reason why, no, that's exactly
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the irony there. I mean, the reason why it feels so hard like you, you take an exam today and
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like you're really having trouble concentrating and you can't quite remember the answers and you
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get a bad grade. And you want to come up with an attribution or a legitimate one that explains
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why this was out of your control. And the answer is just as you went into the test room,
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like a large lid, something fell down and mangled your foot. And you were being very distracted
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by that pain that whole time. That one's easy. Most people could say, yes, your free will was
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constrained to that circumstance because you were bleeding out on the edge of going into shock
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and in pain. And you couldn't remember this, you know, equation or what? Yeah, that's a case where
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we can grant free will was constrained or maybe even there was no free will at all. No wonder you
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got a bad result. That's easy because it's a single cause. It's a dramatic cause. It's a recent one
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and it's one that you can understand. Wow, my foot would hurt also. But instead, when we look at
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somebody who doesn't get quite so great grade on an exam, in 99% of the time is not because a
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sledgehammer came down. It's because of a 10,000 different tiny, thinned threads of influence
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is spreading back to when they were a fetus in thereafter and no single one makes the case.
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But all of them put together are just as determinative as I can't really concentrate on this test
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because I'm bleeding all over the floor here. But that one's easy. And Robert, what do we know about
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what's actually going on in the brain? And I want to talk about some experiments where we try to
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measure the difference between the subjective experience of our decision making and our ability to
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detect, you know, electrical signals going on in our neurology that could indicate that we're
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about to make a decision. Because I think most people will be with you so far, right? In the sense that
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there are a million different things that are going on all the time in our lives that are leading
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to the situation that we find ourselves in. We are not agents of our own destiny in the way that
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our culture tells us we are if we've been born poor or we're living with a disability or something,
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we would have a very different fate than the one that we do. So we should all be enormously blessed
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that we're in the situation that we're in and the decisions that we make throughout the day are
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shaped by all of the other things that are going on, the things that have happened.
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I think where most people who are skeptical of your determinism,
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find their skepticism is in nonetheless, once all of those inputs get into my skull,
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something a bit spooky happens, right? And maybe we can talk about religion at some point as well,
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because I think none of these problems really arise for the religious person. Do they ever do
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a great, like it becomes easy if you're religious, then you have a soul, the soul is doing the
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decision making, simply don't have to worry about it, or if you're, I mean, we all feel like
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we're dualists, meaning that we all feel, I think, subjectively, like there's a me that is not
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just the sum of the parts of the meat in my head. I don't feel like meat. I feel like something spooky.
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So talk about that spookiness and that interface and what we understand about what's actually
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happening neurologically in the brain as decisions feel like they're being made.
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Okay, that's great that you use the word spookiness, because that's exactly where I get
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sarcastic about the soul, because every single model where somebody admits the world is made out of
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stuff and their science, yet, yet, yet, they're still room for free will. Somewhere in their spookiness
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is the explanation that gets pulled in by the person. I very start,
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astically early in the book, say basically every paper ever written by a compatibles philosopher
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who knows anything about the brain could be reduced to three sentences.
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Sentence number one, wow, neuroscience is finding out all sorts of cool new stuff. Sentence number
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two, wow, some of that stuff challenges are a very sense of agency and who we are and will
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force us to rethink everything about praise and blame sentence number three. Nah, it's actually
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something spooky that explains all of it. And because you read the papers and they're usually
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incredibly high-falutin and agonizing because it's from a philosopher, but somewhere in there,
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ah, in those parentheses, that's where the spookiness got brought in there. That's how it happened.
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And, you know, it's just dissecting on like that, that ontological level, that's where it comes in.
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But you could see it in action as well. You could do one of the most amazing things out there,
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and I had this done to me once. There's this technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation.
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Like, the scientist puts a probe, a magnetic probe on some part of your head, and he could
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send out powerful magnetic waves that can get through your skull and go about an inch deep into
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your brain, which means it could affect things on your cortex. And if they pick the right spot,
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they can turn the button on and you will bend your finger. And you cannot stop it. And you will feel
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as if not only can't you stop it, but you chose to do that. It's the weirdest thing on earth.
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Wait, do you feel like you chose to do it? Yeah. Yeah. Because I've had like, I haven't had that,
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but I've had, you know, you put on one of those, I don't know, a belt that's supposed to get you
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hard abs by vibrating or something. I can't remember what circumstances I've had like some,
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when an electrical charge is making it muscle have a trigger reflex. And I found it quite unpleasant
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and disconcerting precisely because it didn't feel like I was choosing it. It felt like my muscle
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was spasming, but that's different if you do it directly into the brain.
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At least it was for me, but I suspect if one looked closely, I was doing a post-hawk
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deal on it in the sense of a second after it. Wow. But what's so tell, yes, yeah, right. So what
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about three hawk ones, though, where people have to press a button, you know, when they make a
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decision or, you know, you talk about bungee jumpers who have stuff strapped to their heads to
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measure their, you know, their brains before they make the decision to finally jump. What do we know
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about that? Okay. So before, before we switched to that, but staying in the same area,
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oh, wow, free will bending your finger. Give me a break. Let's see something interesting.
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And one of the most important papers in that field was you put that magnetic probe at a
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different part of the cortex and you could change the moral decisions that people make.
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You could turn someone into a utilitarian. Where you have a question for them,
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is it okay to kill this one person to save those five and buzz this particular part of the
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frontal cord? And you get a different moral decision from the person. And the way you do the
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experiment, right, is of course you're sticking this like distressing probe all over the place.
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And some of the time you're not passing any magnetic waves, that's your control. So the person
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is sitting there saying, oh, whoa, here's this weird thing going on to my head. They didn't know
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which one is actually doing it. So they give their opinion each time and then you switch the button
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and suddenly they give a philosophically completely opposite opinion. And you ask them, wow,
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that seems different from all those other answers you gave. What's different about this case?
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And they will like tell you about, you know, a manual prompt for the next hour and a half about how
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know is because something out of your control made your brain decide this is what counts as the
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good moral life. Instead of that counting is the good moral life. Most of what we're seeing as
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not only getting a sense of agency, but a structure for why it makes sense is post-hawk coming
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up with like, why did I do that? Wonderful work by a guy in New York University John Height
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where he will put people on brain scanners and they're making moral decisions. Is this okay to
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do or not? And you can see the quote emotional parts of the brain activate and make a decision
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and then your cortex gets told what the decision is and you the subject pressed this button
31:53
instead of that one. And after you ask the person, why do you choose that? And they will tell you
31:58
something about their moral reasoning when they had nothing to do with it. It was an emotional
32:03
that alone should put that to rest. Okay, but what would you bring up? Let me just pause and tell
32:08
people before you go there that if they haven't read Jonathan Height, they should. You can go back
32:13
and listen to Jonathan on this show as well. He's been on the show. And when he came out to
32:18
Australia and New Zealand, I moderated a bunch of events with Jonathan in Australia and New Zealand.
32:24
So go and find those conversations because it is fascinating. And just something to add about
32:30
that electrode changing your philosophical outlook, although it sounds weird initially,
32:37
it's not that weird because what is listening to a conversation or having a conversation or
32:43
listening to a tutor or reading a book other than
32:49
at creating inputs that are going to change what's going on in your brain, right? I mean,
32:54
sticking an electrode is just a crude way of doing something that we've all been doing
32:59
for thousands of years, which is trying to persuade other people of things.
33:04
Yeah, using a language or force or collusion or whatever it is for my pay.
33:10
And where the dualism in most people's minds come in is, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was an electrode
33:15
where a year, a caffeine, I wake up after caffeine, I guess that is a chemical thing or whatever.
33:22
But when someone says something to you that's persuasive, that's the me and they're that
33:28
just thought about it. If somebody says something to you that's persuasive or if they make barking
33:33
sounds like a porpoise or something in either case, something is going to change in your brain.
33:39
Like literally some ion channel is going to stay open a quarter second longer than it would
33:45
have otherwise. And most of the time it's beyond boring and every now and then it completely
33:50
changes who you are. But something in the nuts and bolts of your brain respond when somebody
33:56
gives you a convincing argument rather than put some magnetic electrode on your head.
34:01
It's the same thing. Okay, so all right, so let's loop back now to some of the experimentation
34:06
surrounding the experience of free will and what's going on
34:11
neurologically. This is, this is, this, this study gives me apoplexy. Like you go and you read any
34:19
like review paper and philosophy or science about free will and material bases of it and is
34:27
guaranteed by the second paragraph. This experiment is going to be mentioned. This was a guy named
34:32
Benjamin Libet, University of California, San Francisco, 1983. He did this earth shaking study
34:40
where you sit somebody down and you put electrodes all over their head so you can see what parts of
34:46
their brain are getting excited at what points. And there's a button in front of them and you say,
34:51
don't think about the button, but the second you get a whim to push the button, push the button.
34:57
And we're even going to put up all these electrodes on your arms to see when your muscle begins
35:02
to contract and all of that. And in addition, here's this gigantic clock in front of you
35:08
with a two-second sweep. So as soon as you decide to do it, look at the clock so you can tell us
35:14
exactly when you form that intent. And what turns out is like you form your intent in about
35:20
two-tenths of a second later, 200 milliseconds, your muscles start to contract. That makes perfect
35:26
sense. But what flattened everybody was that there would be this distinctive electrical wave
35:33
pattern in your motor cortex, the part of your brain telling those muscles to do that. That pattern
35:39
would appear about 300 milliseconds before you claim you just intended to do that. Your brain
35:49
knows before you do. Your brain decided and your conscious self is just saying after the fact,
35:56
oh, that's when I decided I felt like that. People have been like clawing each other's faces
36:03
apart at scientific conferences over that there was like a paper two years ago saying something
36:09
like the title was like Benjamin Libbit had his head up his rear or something or maybe that
36:14
wasn't quite the title. But like for people to get that worked up about a scientific finding
36:20
40 years after you publish it, most papers are forgotten within two years or so showing how much
36:26
he dominates. And people have been fighting ever since about is that actually the moment where you
36:33
intend to do that or is that the moment where you became aware that you intended to do that?
36:39
Is that electrical pattern when you choose to do something or is that when you were just getting
36:44
an urge to do that? And like people and fighting and what? And sorry Robert, what kind of time
36:50
differences are we talking about in the Liberty Study between the initiation of a detectable
36:56
phenomenon and the subjective experience of choice? Three tenths of a second. That was with
37:02
primitive electroencephalography in the 1980s and two contemporary brain-imbushing stuff and
37:09
other groups have shown you can get five, six seconds out beforehand and pick up the signature of
37:15
it. So like people have built their entire careers and I could not imagine for somebody interested
37:23
in the free will question something more boring than thinking about that study and all the fights
37:29
about it because it tells us exactly zero. What all of those studies and fist fights are about
37:37
is when exactly do we form an intent and when does that occur relative to when this or that happens
37:46
in your brain but that and the other thing has not yet happened and is awareness the same
37:52
thing is when you forehand all of that's about that and none of it asks the only relevant question
37:58
there which is where that intent comes from and the metaphor I news is that's like being asked
38:06
to review a movie where you only see the last three minutes of it. Where did everything that came
38:13
before? How did you turn out to be somebody who was fortunate enough for reasons completely out
38:19
of your control that you learned how to read and you didn't have horrible protein malnutrition
38:26
and there were opportunities and your parents had so enough money so you went to university and
38:31
how do you turn out to be the sort of person who would be interested in psychology and thus take
38:35
the intro psych class and be the kind of person who would sign up to be a volunteer in this study
38:40
and somebody who after signing up actually follows through on your commitment and how did you
38:46
want to be the sort of person who would sit there and actually sincerely follow their orders
38:51
instead of being some sort of you know contrary who says oh I know they're up to something and
38:56
I'm smarter than that I'm going to do exactly the opposite and why didn't you steal the grad
39:02
students laptop on the way out of the lab at the end? How did you become that sort of person?
39:09
And that's the only relevant question at that point who cares if these neurons set something
39:14
one tenth of a second before those neurons said something that's so irrelevant to how do you
39:20
become that sort of person who would be sitting there with those capabilities and interests and
39:26
capacity for regulating your impulses and all of that and there you are and you actually like
39:33
generated data point for these people just as they wanted.
39:37
I can imagine a compatibilist granting you all of those antecedent phenomena and nonetheless
39:47
still getting into the brain at that microsecond and feeling like there's a need to explain
39:54
why why why we're doing something before it feels like we're trying to do something
40:00
you know why there's an activity in our brain I mean I've always thought those the
40:05
libate studies are silly anyway even if you do believe in free will because it's entirely possible
40:11
that just as you know a few snowflakes are going to gather together into an avalanche before
40:18
you can see the avalanche it doesn't mean that the snowflakes aren't part of the avalanche and
40:21
you might not notice the avalanche until it's an avalanche but the initial snowflakes might be
40:27
detectable by sophisticated machinery that's better than us or the same with a wave forming on a
40:31
beach right the you know the particles water the doing things that we're not noticing so I didn't
40:36
think it's it I've never found it really a compelling challenge to free will either in this
40:42
sense that maybe the process of making a decision just starts with tiny things that I'm not quite
40:47
noticing yet and the point at which I press the button or look at the clock is the point at which
40:52
my decision-making has has coalesced enough or hardened enough to be noticeable to me but I
40:59
don't think it necessarily deprives me of the kind of free will that the compatibleist would want
41:03
even if it does start emerging in electrical impulses split second before I make the choice maybe
41:11
that's just a phenomenon of the way that I make choices yep and what they would seize on to is
41:17
something you said earlier where you said the compatibleists would say I'm going on about well
41:22
what sort of childhood and what sort of genes and what sort of morning breakfast did you have in
41:26
all of that and you said compatibleists would say that's asking for too much whereas my view is
41:33
that's the only thing you can ask for show me this and Iran or this part of the brain or this
41:40
entire brain that just did whatever it did and if it would do the exact same thing if you had
41:47
somebody else's genome and somebody else's childhood and someone else's fetal environment
41:54
and somebody else's good night sleep or terrible sleep and all of that and show me every single one
41:59
of those factors your hormone levels that dates that all of those could be changed and that brain
42:06
was still going to do the same thing for my money that brain is showing free will and you can't show
42:13
that and that's not asking for too much because that's all there is they can't show anything that
42:19
we recognize as behavior that could occur coming out of your brain independent of the brain's
42:26
history. My buddy Sam Harris makes the analogy about the the shooter who felt there was something
42:35
wrong with his brain asked for his brain to be donated to science can you remind us of this
42:39
this incident and he turned out they had a tumor on his brain and it reminds me a bit of the way
42:44
that you start the book talking about the odd line about it being turtles all the way down you
42:47
know the universe in the sense that it is sort of tumors all the way down you know whatever is
42:52
happening in our brain to launch very short the guy turned out you know the guy started having
42:57
homicidal feelings ended up being a you know committing a mass murder it was all top seed
43:04
it turned out he had a tumor pressing against the part of his brain that was responsible for
43:07
self-restraint or something yeah exactly right yeah yeah Sam's point is just yeah now so we
43:13
it's easy to blame the tumor but remove the tumor and we're all we all find ourselves in the
43:18
situation of this guy in the sense that there's something going on in our brain that's causing our
43:23
desires and our and the things that we do and whether you call it a tumor or you just call it your
43:27
brain it's it doesn't make much difference we're not authoring the neurological activity that we're
43:34
experiencing that's forming our subjective experience of life and therefore creating our behavior so
43:41
we will find ourselves in the position of that guy and he's he's implicitly making the same
43:48
point that I was before Sam is wonderful he we we are kindred spirits in this zero free will stuff
43:56
um again it's easy for us to figure out that why did this person shoot a bunch of people oh it
44:03
was the brain tumor why did this person get a much lower grade on the test and they normally
44:08
their foot was mangled just before they came in those are the easy ones and Sam is
44:15
implicitly making that same point that okay okay let's give rid of the cases where it's easy
44:21
there's a tumor there's an injury whatever all it is is just so much harder for us to recognize
44:29
that something as unchangeable and coercive as the tumor was or your mangled foot was
44:40
could instead be made out of an entire lifetimes worth of tiny little threads that are all put
44:46
together that's just so much harder in part because science is only discovering some of those
44:53
threads and they're in some really unexpected places but even more so we got a lot of trouble
45:00
remembering that like spider webs are stronger than any cable that humans could make per volume
45:08
and you put a whole bunch of them together and they will be tougher than steel but it's really
45:13
hard for us to accept that because they're just these little threads I'm tempted to talk about
45:19
retribution and the prison system and how we would reform criminal justice and I'm sure people
45:24
will have questions about that but I actually don't think it's the most interesting angle of all
45:29
of this I think people can read your book if they if they want to know about that but I mean can
45:34
you answer it in like 60 seconds or less is there a place for retribution in your world?
45:40
None whatsoever nor is there any place for blame or punishment
45:45
and just as logically there is no place for praise or reward meritocracies make no sense just
45:52
as criminal justice systems make no sense because in both cases we're treating some people way
45:59
better than average and other people way worse for reasons they had no control over but oh my god
46:05
does that mean we're gonna have murderers running around on the street absolutely not if a car's
46:10
brakes don't work and is dangerous and can kill somebody and you can't fix them you put the car
46:17
on the garage but you don't preach to it about how it has a rotten soul or you don't go in every
46:22
morning with a sledgehammer and bash it on the hood is retribution for the person that it hit
46:27
back when you don't moralize about it and you don't do one smidging more than just making sure
46:35
it can't get out and be dangerous and that's the quarantine model that is most like reasonable
46:42
for thinking about people whose behaviors are dangerous and we've got a great example of it
46:49
there's a circumstance where there's a certain type of human who is dangerous to the people
46:54
around them if they are not in some way constrained they will constitute a danger to innocent people
47:00
around them and we have figured out how to handle that without invoking responsibility or free will
47:07
or retro if your kid is sneezing a lot don't send them to kindergarten tomorrow because the
47:14
rule is if your kid has a nose cold keep them home because they get the other kids sick so you
47:19
keep your kid home you don't tell them they can't play with their toys because they need some
47:24
distributive like justice poured on them because they're sneezing you do the absolute minimum to
47:31
make them safe you don't do any more than that you don't moralize about it and when you've got
47:36
the time to catch your breath you devote research to figuring out where do those colds come from
47:43
and that's exactly how you would deal with the world of people who are sufficiently damaged
47:49
that they become damaging the tricky thing about that analogy robot is that of all of the causes
47:56
of nose colds one is not there isn't there's no way in which the person's beliefs about what is
48:05
possible for themselves in their life and what is acceptable in the broader culture influences
48:13
whether or not the nose cold flares up really but isn't part of our criminal justice system
48:21
about deterrence as well and again let's concede that it's way too barbaric it's way too punitive
48:26
maybe there's no role for punishment per se or retribution but as all of our brains do their thing
48:35
and we make decisions about you know even if those decisions are without our free will about
48:41
what we're going to do tomorrow if I live in a culture in which if someone steals they get taken
48:49
into the public square their hands get chopped off and people they get publicly whipped and then
48:55
burned alive that's a useful input to stop me from stealing except may not be a just society but
49:04
it's going to reduce the amount of fear after all well just to just to take a different type of
49:09
barbarity that I suspect your listeners are not subject to from their federal sort of largest but
49:16
here in the United States where we still put people in death for murders imposing the death
49:22
penalty in particular states has no effect whatsoever on the frequency of murders of passion
49:31
where somebody gets enraged it has an effect on premeditated murder where you hire somebody
49:37
and they spend four months like running up a big bill for you before they figure out how to kill
49:42
your ex kind of yeah it works and that it doesn't work on other things um you know our intuitions
49:50
about the effects of retribution can turn out to be very misplaced but in all of those like let's
49:57
go back to this like idiotic like your kid has a nose cold protect society from them but do it
50:03
without invoking um punitive judgment or whatever culture could come into it maybe your kid is
50:12
from a culture where there are the material means and the privilege for them to have a handkerchief
50:18
in their pocket and they have sufficiently sort of cognitively intact that you've been able to
50:24
teach them when you feel like you're going to sneeze quick pull out the handkerchief maybe
50:29
instead they're in a different culture where what you do culturally is if you sneeze you put your
50:33
right hand up to it and then you wipe off all the mucus with your right hand and you wipe it off
50:38
on your arm and then you shake somebody's hand or you're in a culture where sneezing is a size
50:46
of Satan so you pop your eardrums out by holding your nose and her even something like that is
50:52
subject to how do you become sort of person who would carry a handkerchief right but yes one
50:59
way to become a sort of person who carries a handkerchief to take this to it's at absurd
51:03
at absurdium would would be to beat children who did not uh blow the nose into handkerchiefs and
51:10
that punishment would encourage more children to use handkerchiefs I'm just trying to
51:17
show I like understand that even if we're mistaken about some of the consequences of deterrence
51:23
like the death penalty I don't think that a disbelief in free will gets us to a place where we're
51:30
merely treating criminals as broken cars that we don't want to punish because I think part of
51:36
the punishment is an attempt to create a climate of deterrence among other people and without that
51:43
climate of deterrence presumably even if we don't have free will we're going to commit more crimes
51:50
okay and that's totally legitimate there's two domains in which even if you get rid of the
51:57
criminal justice system you can't blame anyone for anything where it still might be a good idea
52:01
to like beat somebody senseless is if that in and of itself is an effective instrument and making
52:09
them less likely to do it in the future okay so that's okay at a circumstance sometimes you
52:15
need to do that and sometimes it has deterrence value but then you get into this whole utilitarian
52:21
thing of is it okay to take somebody who's perfectly innocent but you're going to burn them and
52:27
and you know pull their skin off and throw the whole town and that's going to decrease crime is
52:33
that okay to do how about if we just put them behind a wall and we do that to them so you can't
52:39
see it but you can hear them screaming how about we put them inside a building and we come out
52:43
afterward and say this is what we did whether or not you actually did it is it okay in those and
52:50
that's uh you know how utilitarian of a society do you want to have and what do you do with the fact
52:56
that people can get a great deal of pleasure from being righteously punitive and
53:02
that's like a challenge for making sense of this um but all of that is just in the sense of
53:08
is this a tool do we want to pretend as if this person has a soul and the soul deserves to be
53:17
punished because that's going to have a good effect on society that's going to make people help
53:22
all ladies cross the street more regularly okay is the kind of society we want or not that that's
53:28
you know let's all decide on that but that doesn't actually speak to whether there was free will
53:34
and whatever you say you're like torturing the person for so let's take the the positive flip side
53:41
of punishment which is encouragement I guess and I remember going to a seminar to a screenwriting
53:48
seminar when I was in my late teens or early 20s by Robert McKee who's this great screenwriting
53:53
legend and he gives these weekend seminars and at one point he was trying to disabuse all the young
54:00
aspiring writers of any sense that oh I wrote this brilliant thing and therefore why don't I get
54:05
it you know why don't I get a screenplay commissioned in Hollywood you know there are lots of bad
54:09
films getting made mine heaps better than those and he was like only go into this industry if you
54:15
are going to you know write the greatest thing you ever wrote and it will get knocked back a hundred
54:21
times and you'll pick yourself up and dust yourself off and write another brilliant thing that
54:25
people are going to shit on and piss on and he's going to never see the light of day and you're
54:30
going to then be just as enthusiastic about writing yet another thing you know everyone talks about
54:35
oh Stallone wrote Rocky in five days and then I got made you know that's not going to happen that
54:40
doesn't happen that's right that this is get real be a professional if you're a professional you're
54:45
going to have a hard slog it's going to be full of grit and pain and disappointment and if you can
54:51
deal with that then you're a writer that's all true and I walked out of that thing thinking
54:59
I'm not sure I'm in a headspace that is necessary to pour my love and my guts into writing the
55:11
screenplay that I love if that's what I'm expecting to happen and it may be the case that the people
55:18
who end up going through having that stamina and pursuing their dream that long would not have
55:25
done so had they not been laboring under an illusion that that first screenplay was going to get sold
55:31
maybe there are some necessary fictions to get us to struggle through this difficult life
55:37
and yeah maybe thinking you know in a polyanna way that I'm more capable and I am is necessary
55:45
to get me on the path of grueling success and I sort of remembered echoes of that when reading
55:51
your book about like maybe there just are fictions pragmatically that I need to believe about my
55:59
own capability of changing myself and changing the world that are conducive to a flourishing life
56:05
and a flourishing culture and a flourishing society and that the volume on those is turned down
56:12
by a philosophy like yours. Totally great valid questions and like a very insightful way of
56:24
seeing something that supports your point is the fact that you ask people to make estimates
56:30
of how likely this good thing is to happen or that good thing and people especially Americans
56:35
and most of the studies tend to overestimate the likelihood of a good outcome or pathologically
56:41
overly optimistic or but you get some people who are totally accurate at it. These are people
56:47
who are clinically depressed. People with clinical depression are more accurate assessors
56:54
of the likelihood of some thing happening to someone else and the sound bite in the field is
57:00
they're sadder but wiser. Okay so if you face reality, reality can be pretty awful and you
57:06
wind up being depressed and all of that. Yeah and what you've raised is absolutely one of the
57:11
dangers here. It's a sense that at this time this screenplay is the one that's good to do it. I
57:19
just know what this one is good. It's great because I'm poor and my eyes I've decided I've chosen
57:26
to pour myself into this one like no other um you know that could be a good thing to believe
57:32
that could absolutely be helpful in the way that you outline and just as in an instrumental sense
57:39
sometimes it's okay to bop somebody overhead with a big stick to make them less likely to do whatever
57:44
sometimes it's okay to tell somebody this one this is great that you just have to finish it
57:49
my god the draft of this to get them to do that yeah that's okay. The key thing is when it does
57:57
get accepted and you become world famous or whatever as a result don't decide that you really
58:05
earned that don't decide that you are now a better person than anyone else because you had to show
58:12
a lot of fortitude to do this not only were you not responsible for your writing skills you are
58:18
not responsible for the biology of your fortitude either so like the big danger is
58:27
not that like oh people are gonna get to be deterred from trying because after all I have nothing
58:32
to do that is because they're gonna come out feeling entitled or something and the equivalent is
58:39
oh my god if there's no free will you're gonna have just people running around murder or so
58:43
over the place no there's a way to strain that and keep them from being dangerous without
58:48
teaching them you're a rotten human the flip side is oh my god if people believe there's no free will
58:53
they're just gonna pick a random person off the street to take out your brain tumor
58:59
and the answer is no no no we can have a system we're only competent people wind up as neurosurgeons
59:06
but they don't they should not come out the other end feeling as if they are more worthy of a
59:12
human than other people are they should not come out the other end thinking that they should be
59:17
entitled to get the booster the covid booster before like other people do because well look at who I
59:23
am like that's yeah make make sure they're doing the surgery and not someone incompetent but don't
59:32
have them think they're a better person that they earned that sense and make sure a dangerous
59:37
person is not in danger in people but don't have them believe that it was their fault and
59:41
they're a rotten human and the same thing for the person who studies hard but just because they're
59:48
not quite smart enough in this domain they don't get a passing grade like they can absolutely
59:54
understand the nuts and bolts of determinism that made them somebody who turned out that way
1:00:01
and some of the time it may be a good instrumental stick to tell them if you study harder next time
1:00:08
you may have just like changed their contingency so that they'll do better next time
1:00:12
right you can use that as a tool for motivation but you don't want them to come out the other end
1:00:18
thinking I earned that better score and thus I am in some manner a more remarkable human and more
1:00:28
deserved I'll do you a deal Robert I'll do you a deal if I guarantee that I won't claim to be
1:00:35
better than other people if I haul my ass out of bed early tomorrow morning to work out and
1:00:42
meditate instead of sleeping in but I refuse to not feel like I'm a better person than I could
1:00:49
otherwise have been and that and that I don't get to pat myself on the back for my own grit even
1:00:57
though I know you hate the word grit and devote a whole chapter about grit in your book nonetheless
1:01:02
I think the fiction has has utility and I will remain hovering in this spooky unscientific place
1:01:10
of have my subjective experience of my own free well I want to ask you up lastly about and this
1:01:15
could be I mean in a whole other hour long conversation but we'll try to knock it out quickly just
1:01:19
about consciousness and and and why we have the experiences that we have and why it feels like
1:01:24
something to be me even beyond my own freedom but I want to do that for our premium subscribers so
1:01:31
if you've been listening to the free podcast thank you I hope you've enjoyed Robert Sapolsky you
1:01:35
can get the premium addition uncomfortable conversations dot sub stack dot com Robert why does
1:01:41
it feel like anything to be me in the first place why couldn't from an evolutionary point of view
1:01:45
we just have evolved to be doing the things that we're doing without the lights being on
1:01:49
to hear the rest of this conversation go to uncomfortable conversations dot sub stack dot com slash
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