#848 Robert Sapolsky - Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Center. I'm your host as always Ricardo Lobs. And today I'm joined for a third time by Doctor Robert Sapolsky. And today we're talking about his latest book, Determined The Science of Life without free will. And I'm also leaving the links to our first two interviews in the description of this one. So Doctor Sapolsky, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to everyone.

00:27 Robert Sapolsky: Well, likewise seeing you again and uh glad we're on the other side of the pandemic. A pleasure to be here.

00:36 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So in our first two interviews, we talked a lot about the science of human behavior and this time focusing on questions surrounding free will and determinism. Are there specific aspects of the science of human behavior that you would deem to be the most important here when considering these types of questions?

01:02 Robert Sapolsky: Well, um just as a preamble, my, my song and dance is that there's no free will. We have none whatsoever. Um WHICH puts me fairly far on the extreme of the continuum of people thinking about this. Um BUT that we have no free will at all. And this is relevant to everything about how we became, who became uh individually, all of that, why you just did what you did. Um But in terms of where that's most important, um just to focus on the very narrow area, which is anything but narrow. Um The biggest implication of that is none of us are entitled to anything. None of us have earned to be treated any differently than anyone else. Of course, we may need to be treated differently. Uh Like if you're uncontrollably violent, people have to be protected from you. Um If you have extremely good motor skills through no, you know, achievement of your own, uh Maybe you're a candidate to be a good neurosurgeon, but none of us have earned the right to have our needs be considered more important than anyone else's.

02:28 Ricardo Lopes: And so, uh it's one thing to try to answer the question of free will. I mean, if it exists or not, but another thing is why and when people believe in free will, I mean, are there specific cues that people pay attention to specific variables that play a role in how much free will people attribute to themselves or to someone else when evaluating a particular action?

03:02 Robert Sapolsky: Well, you're right and people almost universally uh believe that they are the agents of their action. Um Like 90% of philosophers fall into a camp uh called compatible list views of free will. These are people, they're not saying there's magic, they're not taking theological stances, whatever they say. Yeah, the world is made of atoms, we're made of cells like we believe in all that stuff. Yet, somehow here's how free will still like pops out of your brain and do a lot of hand waving at that point. Um So it's incredibly common view. Um Like all of our other features of our beliefs and temperaments, um It's kind of context dependent people really, really are more likely to believe in free will if someone's complimenting them and saying good job, they're really looking like to like, likely to under circumstances where things have come up short. I mean, there's, there's this classic dichotomy and sort of us, them thinking that with them, when thems do something awful, it's constitutional. That's what they're like. They've always been like, they'll always be like, and when one of us does something awful, it's situational. Yeah, you have to understand they were under a lot of stress, there were financial pressures, they had just been whatever, um, as to how stable our us this is and we're often being pretty nasty when we're attributing unchangeable them ness to them. Um, IN that regard, we're very, very malleable when it comes to how characteristically free we are. When things are going well, people believe in free will when things are not, there's a tendency to go in the other direction but not in a globalized. There's no free will whatsoever. Here's the extenuating circumstance that screwed me up just now that kept me from being the wondrous free, consistent person that I am. Yeah, something came up. But overall, overall we are the captains of our fate. Mhm

05:29 Ricardo Lopes: But uh let me ask you about one criticism that perhaps many people, scientists particularly would have of uh your position. So we have a, a good understanding or at least to some extent of the science of human behavior, the factors that play a role there uh from genetics to the environment and culture. But uh I mean, there's still lots and lots of details that we are missing. And it's really hard to be able to predict with a very high level of accuracy how people will behave in any particular point in time. So, the fact that there's still fairly low predictability, do you think that that's an argument against your position?

06:26 Robert Sapolsky: Um No, and that's, that's like a fantastic counter ment to bring up because it's very essential. It, it obviously is very essential. Um Like I, I have sort of a hobby by now that I uh help uh public defenders uh who are lawyers defending poor people who can't afford uh their own lawyers in murder cases for people who have a history of traumatic childhoods, uh concussive head trauma and such teaching juries about the brain. And what always happens is I get to do a two hour presentation and then the prosecuting attorney gets to cross examine me and they always nail me on exactly these lines. So, are you saying every single person with this type of brain damage would do what this guy did? I'd say, no, we can't say that. Could you have predicted this guy? No, we can't. Um Part of it, a fundamentally deep response is um when you look at uh chaotic systems, systems that run on chaotic system, like us, our brains, our cells, our molecules, our societies, um a critical thing about them is they are unpredictable. They're still deterministic and lots of people mistake sort of chaotic and the unpredictability of it as proof that somehow we could transcend our molecules. But on that level, in this very fundamental way, um systems that are entirely deterministic can nonetheless be completely unpredictable. A much more mundane answer is, well, yeah, we're still finding out stuff. And when you look at our knowledge about sort of the biology of human behavior, like 99% of what we've learned about it has been in the last century, 75% has been in the last 50 years, 51% has been in the last decade, 25% of it has been since like we started this broadcast or whatever, like the rate at which knowledge is pouring in is incredibly fast. So there, there's this sort of indirect cheating strategy that one can then say, which is OK if we're all going to accept that tonight. At midnight. That's it. Science is done. We're never gonna find out anything new again. This is everything we know at this point. The answer is, yeah. Nonetheless, we can't predict a whole lot about human behavior. Um But everything we know about the exponential increase in knowledge is over and over and over, we're gonna continue this pattern of saying, oh, I had no idea. Biology had something to do with that. And like you have a choice at this point, do you wanna be on the cutting edge of viewing that we are nothing more or less than biological machines or do you wanna be like the history of science example in a century of just the primitiveness of what people still believed at the time.

09:47 Ricardo Lopes: And so one of the things uh also that people bring to the table in discussions surrounding free will and that people use in law and in the courtroom has to do with intent. So, from a scientific perspective, what is intent exactly? And what do we know about it? And do you think that its intent in any way would make for a good case for free will in any way?

10:20 Robert Sapolsky: Yes. Let me, let me just be really uh sort of over the top here. Um As a scientist, my definition of intent as a subject to consider when thinking about free will. Um INTENT can be defined as boring as hell and totally irrelevant. Um OK. Why is that? Um THE entire legal system, as you said, runs on that. Um, WHEN somebody did something awful, did they intend to do it? And did they know that they had alternative options? Um And did they understand what the consequences were going to be? Um And if the answer to all of that is? Yeah, lock them up. They intended to do what they did and they knew there were alternatives. Um And in sort of the neuroscience world of free will where intent comes in is the most influential crazy making experiment of all time in the field. This is something that came in the early 19 eighties by a man named Benjamin Lit. And you read any paper about the biology of free will and like the person is almost required by law to mention lit by the second paragraph, these were these amazing studies. He took people and wired them up with sort of electroencephalograms, eegs to record brain activity in different areas. This was like Neanderthal era technology at the time, you couldn't do brain imaging then. But this very simple approach. Um HE said to people, OK, whenever you want, press this button and they had things to tell when the pressing process actually started by seeing when muscles started constricting in his arm. And they could see what was happening in the motor cortex, the part of the brain telling those muscles and they could see the parts of the brain that would tell another part to tell another part to tell the motor cortex to do that. And the earth shattering finding that he came up with was all of this playing out in about a half second or so. You could tell when the brain had decided it was time to press the button because before the person was conscious of their intention to do it by about 200 milliseconds, 2/10 of a second. And oh my God, your brain has decided before you were conscious of intending to do this. And everyone like went crazy over this because this is just proven there was no free will until like people started arguing about. When do you become aware of intention? And is that different from when you intend to do something? And, and you know, all this philosophical stuff of, is there a difference between intending to do something and intending to stop yourself from doing something? The difference between free will and free won't? And they're still fighting about this. This is 40 years later for a scientist, there was like a paper a couple of years ago entitled like Livid. Had no idea what he was talking about or, or something slightly more like formal than that for people to still be telling you that your science was wrong 40 years after you did it, this is like immortality for a scientist. They're still fighting about what this finding means. Does your brain know that you're intending to do something before you're consciously aware of it. And I scream every time I see yet another one of these studies because as I said, it's boring as hell and totally irrelevant. And in a courtroom as well, did this person intend to do that? Because none of it asks the only relevant question there is. Oh, yeah. Where did that intent come from? Where did it come from in the first place? Because to answer the question of, did the brain have intent before you did that's playing out in 2/10 of a second when you're asking, where did that intent come from? What does that have to do with what was going on in your brain one second ago? And what was happening in the environment one minute ago? And what hormone levels were like one day ago and how traumatic or stimulating the previous one year had been and what your adolescence was like in your childhood and your fetal life and your genes and the culture your ancestors invented because that influenced how your mother was raising you within a minute of birth. Where did that intent come from? And the metaphor I use in the book is deciding whether or not there's free will based on what's going on in that last half second and only knowing what the intent was is like deciding whether you like a movie or not by just having seen the final three minutes of it because you've missed everything. It doesn't matter if the person intended to or not. Where did that intent come from? And that's where the legal system falls apart in terms of their thinking about, you know, punishment and blame. And that's where most thinking about whether or not there's free will falls apart because everybody is just interested in their brain imaging studies telling you what happened in the last three milliseconds. And that tells you nothing because something about what happened to you this morning had something to do with it. Something about your fetal life had something to do with it. Something about the culture, your answer came up with 500 years ago, had something to do with it. And when you look at all those pieces from one second before to millennia before and you put all those pieces together, there's not a damn inch in there to shoehorn in an ocean of free will operating independent of all of that stuff.

16:31 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm So when it comes to behavioral science, we always hear about nature versus nurture genes, the environment does when it comes to free will specifically, does it matter at all if uh we're talking about uh for example, biological factors or environmental factors? I mean, do we have any more control, for example, over our environment and how it affects our behavior than we have over our gyms, for

17:10 Robert Sapolsky: example, zero in both cases in the fundamental ways. I mean, what one is obliged to do in my business at this point is saying, nature and nurture always interact and you can't pull them apart and asking which contributes more is like what's contributing more to the area of this rectangle, the length or the width they always interact and that sort of thing um within this realm. Um The summary I would get at is we are nothing more or less than the sum of our biology, which we had no control over and its interactions with the sum of our environment over which we had no control over. And they're completely inseparable. I mean, it's the simplest example of like, oh, how important was environment in this sort of case and its interaction with biology? Wow, what explains the fact that I'm sitting here right now and have a occupation that carries some prestige and westernized culture and all of that, what did environment have to do with it? Starting with environment prenatal environment. The fact that my, my mother was not suffering from malaria or Chagas disease or like any such thing and wasn't protein starved because she was a nomadic pastoralist in the Sahel, in Africa. And like, oh, like we're talking like at that level already. That's like what we're talking already at that level. That's part of the brain that you wound up being uh handed to you here in adulthood. Um All of that stuff matters and it's inseparable.

18:58 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm One very interesting thing that you talk about in the book is the Behavioral Science slash Biology of luck. What is that about

19:11 Robert Sapolsky: it? It's, that's ultimately everything, everything we're talking about here. Um Another way of saying, oh, the sum of our biology and this interaction with the sum of our environment is we are nothing more or less than the outcome of our luck and anyone who claims otherwise that they earned their good luck or that it makes sense to punish them for their bad luck. Um All we are is the outcome of biology, interacting with environment in the context of luck. And there's this whole thing like child development, um try to make sense of who turns out to be like the the violent adults and the drug addicts and all the, all the bad outcomes and like no surprise childhood has a huge amount to do with it and it's been formalized into this thing. Um At least in sort of uh United States called your ace score A ce the sum of your adverse childhood experiences. And there's this ace like questionnaire scoring system where you can get from 0 to 10 and zero is you had no adversity 10 is like you had all of the following 10 horrible things happen to you. Were you a witness to physical violence or psychological violence at home? Were you a victim of physical violence or psychological violence? Were you a victim of sexual abuse? Were you in a broken family? Was there a weapon at home when you was there, a family member who was incarcerated this whole list there going from 0 to 10. Um, AND what you see is for every single step, every point you add to somebody's ace score. Um, THERE'S about a 35% increased likelihood that they're going to be involved in violent antisocial behavior by the time they're adult. If they're a male, there's about a 35% increased chance that they're gonna have a teenage pregnancy. If they're female, about a 35% increased chance of either that they're gonna have substance abuse and addiction problems every step in the way. And this is one way of formalizing like this is the quantified science of shitty luck in childhood. And it has always struck me that at the same time. Instead of making it an adverse childhood experience score, you could make a ridiculously lucky childhood experience score. Did your parent or parents read books to you? Did you have a stable income? Um Did you never have to worry about food? Did you play games and laugh at home? Whatever? Come up with a score of that and it's gonna tell you forever. Each step in those, there's a 35% increase that you're gonna be working a prestigious white collar job someday and have an office and a secretary or who knows just a different way of explaining the same thing. Um Everything that we frame as morality is instead the outcome or of good or bad luck. And we have built a world in which we punish or reward people over the luck they had nothing to do with.

22:51 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. But, uh, as we go through, uh childhood adolescence, adulthood and our prefrontal cortices develop, we tend to gain or acquire more self-control, more impulse control. Does that not count at least as a few more degrees of rhythm?

23:15 Robert Sapolsky: Right. Let's look at the sentence you just said as we get older, don't we acquire more frontal cortical self control? What does acquire mean? It means you're lucky enough to be in an environment that would have taught you that it means you're lucky enough to have a brain at that point where you could learn from those experiences. It means that you're lucky enough that the counter examples every day when you finish school and went outside and there was the, your gang telling you let's go rob that liquor store. Um Let's do something impulsive that reinforces your frontal cortex not working very well. How many of those were going on at the end of the day? Do you go home and you're bullied by somebody at home and anything you heard during the day about like the wonderful path ahead of you? Thanks to self control goes out the window. Be Yeah, we learned. Oh, wow. Didn't you learn somewhere along the way that self control is a bad thing for you if you're a fetus and your mother is very stressed and secreting a lot of stress hormones. You're going to be born with a frontal cortex that's already less developed than average and newborns. Meaning 15 years later, you're getting great lessons in life about the importance of self control. And by the time you were a damn fetus, you were already less likely than average to be able to learn those lessons and benefit from them every step along the way. Where did that intent come from? Where did that learning come from? Where did the opportunity for that learning come from? And it's always, you know, all that stuff that brought you to this moment over which you had no control.

25:07 Ricardo Lopes: And when it comes to our psychological traits, we know, for example, from disciplines like behavior genetics that there's the role of genes and then the shared environment, the non shared environment, unique experiences we go through. Isn't there any space at all there for some, uh I mean, for us to have some sort of be, be able to play some active role in the kind of person that we're going to become?

25:41 Robert Sapolsky: Absolutely. Um And that's one of the ways in which uh people should avoid the hysteria of deciding genes, determine everything that genes are the most interesting things. If nothing else, you have this whole field of epigenetics, the ways in which experience can change how readily genes of yours are turned on or off. For the rest of your life in some cases. OK. So we're moved away from a genetic deterministic picture for a zillion reasons, uh both biological and environmental. Um But you're saying, can't we choose to take an action to take a conscious action which will change our destiny? And the answer is not in the slightest, you look at two people who were given an opportunity and one is this person who every single split in the road, they always take the wrong direction. They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity at everyone. You could have. They, they would have given you that job. They were offering you a scholarship. The guy said you didn't have to drive the car when they were going to do the robbery and oh my God, every time that person makes the wrong choice, every time they come up with the wrong intent and where did that come from? And when we seemingly have made a major decision on our part about something in life, are you going to rob the store? Are you going to study hard? Are you gonna propose marriage to this person or you? Who knows what? Um And that feels intent. Um Everything about the biology and this interaction with the environment that came before that is what brought you to that moment. Like from everything. Like if you're hungry, you're more likely to commit an antisocial violent act. If somebody smells good to you, their pheromones, you're more likely to find them. You claim that they are more vis visually physically attractive if you, you know all this stuff, what, what this, at the split in the road? Do you make the right decision or not? What this taps into is? I think the most pernicious way in which people hold on to. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. There's biology and we have brains and all of that and it just made a brain gunk. Um, BUT we have free will, we have free will. Is this dichotomy people bring in? You look at somebody who's 7 ft four and of course, they're a great basketball player or you look at somebody and they have particular ratio of slow twitch to fast twitch fibers in their leg muscles and of course they turn out to be a good marathoner or maybe even you understand enough about receptors for this or that neurotransmitter. And of course they have a good memory or good. Any of these. We're pretty good at accepting the biology of what our natural attributes are. Some people have lovely voices and others don't. And they're never gonna sing in an opera. Some people have, yes, there's these natural attributes. OK. Ok. Ok. Science biology has something to do with that. But oh, where free will comes in is what you do with your attributes? Do you squander them? Do you work hard to overcome your limitations? Do you, are you one of these people like you go on youtube and there's unbelievable examples of this, of like marathoners and like important races where they collapse 53 ft from the finish line and they crawl, they crawl to the very end. And you say, oh my God, this is amazing with what they did with what they were given. Or you find like somebody raised in poverty in a horrible neighborhood and all of that who somehow winds up like with their Nobel Prize at the other end, or somebody who grows up in great wealth and privilege and they're a junkie by the time they're 20 they've spent half their fortune. Oh, your attributes you have no control over. That's the biology. What do you do with the attributes? That's where we have a world of, oh, what a self indulgent squander. What an inspiring role model, how they worked to overcome. There's something in there that we believe that things like your memory or whether you have perfect pitch or things like that are made of biology and how hard you work and your self control and how indulgent you are and all of that somehow that's made of other stuff that's not made of biology. And when you look at it like what happened to you as a fetus is going to have something to do with the construction of your part of the brain that has something to do with whether it splits in the road, you always make the bad decision, you every step of this is biology as well. Um But there's this very strong emotional pull to differentiate between the two and willpower and backbone and fortitude and all of that, that's the stuff we admire because that's the true measure of who somebody is independent of their neurons and molecules of it's made of the same stuff.

31:40 Ricardo Lopes: And so um is there any space for an idea like meritocracy in this sort of deterministic world? I mean, if someone just so happens to have the psychological traits that tend to correlate with success, for example, in industrialized societies, like greed, conscientiousness, high intelligence and so on. Should we at from, from a scientific perspective? Of course, I'm not talking about uh philosophy, a philosophical perspective nor any of that. Does it make sense to attribute any personal merit to them?

32:21 Robert Sapolsky: Yeah. Um The only possible, scientifically acceptable and morally acceptable conclusion from all of this is there's no circumstance in which blame and punishment make moral sense or are uh are good things in and of themselves. And likewise, there's no circumstance in which praise and reward are virtues in and of themselves because nobody earned one or the other, that sort of thing. This comes with two provisos though um the first one is like every now and then it's useful to punish someone because it changes their behavior in an effective way or it's useful to praise somebody because in an instrumental sense. Um Praise and blame could be useful, not because of what somebody did in the past that this is retribute but for shaping their future behavior just in like a psychological engineering kind of way. Um So that's not saying it's not possible, it's never useful, but just as another way of influence the influencing the biological machine. Um The more fundamental level is when you say crazy stuff like I just did to people they say, oh, so you want just murderers running around the streets or? Oh, you just want it randomly picked who's going to do brain surgery to take out your tumor. No, of course not. Even if you get rid of the entire criminal justice system as it now appears. And as we should, because it's built on biological nonsense of the most destructive kind. Nonetheless, people who are uncontrollably dangerous and violent where you can't fix them, you gotta protect people from them. Um, A car whose brakes don't work. You don't let it out on the street, you put it in the garage and you like, don't drive it, but you don't preach to either that violent person or to the car whose brakes don't work that they have a crummy rotten soul and they don't deserve to be able to do this and what you have to do instead is use a term that's more and more in like this. People thinking this way is they have to be quarantined, quarantine them so that they're not dangerous to anyone and not an inch more. And not because there's anything about it that they deserve the brakes don't work on their car and then the flip side is exactly the same. Oh, my God. So, what, we should just have a random lottery as to who, who, like, does brain surgery on you. No, of course not. Just as you can't have dangerous people on the street, You need the most competent people out there doing the medicine, doing the legal stuff, writing whatever it is that takes um skill that matters, that's really important. But you just the same, you can't sit there and tell that person because they have a wonderful soul or a wonderful self discipline or whatever that they deserve to have this ridiculously large income. Like a world built around blaming people for their antisocial behavior makes no sense. And a world built around rewarding people for their prosocial behavior or their expertise makes no sense either. Um And is ultimately just as morally corrupt because if you say you are a brain surgeon and getting enormous societal prestige because you did something where you earned it, you deserve to do that and be in that position makes as little sense biologically as saying the brain, the uh the murderer with a history of frontal cortical damage deserves to be in prison all of that. Um Yeah, it's the flip side. A meritocracy makes no sense. A justice system built around retribution makes no sense either. But at the same time, dangerous people should not be allowed to damage people. And competent people should be more likely to be running the world than less competent people. But no one should feel shame or pride for which end of those Katina they wind up on.

37:12 Ricardo Lopes: But even if there's not really space for blame or praise or to consider or to think that someone is responsible for their own actions, do you think that it would still make sense to talk about punishment? At least as a deterrence measure or for example, blaming or praising someone just because we know scientifically that if we do that, we would be disincentivizing bad behavior, incentivizing good behavior and conditioning people to behave in better ways.

37:54 Robert Sapolsky: Absolutely. And it's the same biology that like you take a, a sea snail and it could learn that when you like bop it on the head with a pencil, it retracts its gill mechanism or some. Yeah, you can shape sea snails behavior, you could shape human behavior, you could shape human behavior to be more or less adaptive, blah, blah, all of that. And yeah. Yeah, sometimes it requires punishment and sometimes it requires praise and reward. Um But just because that's like another thing you can do, sometimes intervene with somebody who's got problems and make sure they uh they get enough calories in their diet and things will go better sometimes like you hit someone over the head and say they, they can't do this anymore and they'll stop doing some rotten behavior. Yes. But never with a sense that you are doing a moral good because that's completely irrelevant. It's just another realm in which we as biological machines can be shaped in our behavior.

39:10 Ricardo Lopes: And what do you think about, uh, the idea that some people put forth that, uh, ok, even if we know that free will does not exist that it doesn't make sense to talk about free will. People should still believe in free will because if they don't, they will be worse people. I mean, do you, or do you think on the other hand that, uh, telling people that, uh, they should abandon their belief in free will would actually improve their lives?

39:48 Robert Sapolsky: Ok. This is, this is ultimately like the most important question to ask whether or not we have free will. Should we all believe that we do? Um, ONE worry which you bring up is if we stop believing in free will, we're all gonna become murderers and cheats and liars and we will run amok. Um And this is the thing people worry about, uh, most instantly and there's a cruel experimental psychology literature showing that if you take like volunteer test subjects and you manipulate them into feeling like there is less free will than they thought there was 10 minutes later, they're more likely to cheat on a test, they're more likely to do something crummy to somebody else. When they're playing a game, morality and ethical behavior goes down. That's it. That's exactly what, like the problem is when you tell people, um, like you can't be held responsible for anything. They've run amok. Just like if you convince someone that there is no God and thus there's no punishment, they run amok also. And then you look closer at it and because there's this parallel literature, you have test subjects and you convince them, manipulate them into believing, lesson God and right afterward, they cheat more and they do the same crummy stuff. But now you do a different version of these studies, get someone who comes in and says, I haven't believed in free will for 10 years or I haven't believed in God since I was a teenager or any. You get people who have thought that way and felt that way for a long time who got there. Not because some like psychology professor is manipulating them in this environment. But you get people like that who've thought through this for a long time. And they are exactly as moral as the most religious people and the people with the strongest sense of belief in free will. And this fascinates me, like in terms of the God issue, you look at people who very, very strongly believe in God and the whole show that goes along with that or very, very strongly believes there is no God. And as I said, there's no difference in their levels of ethical behavior and it's very high in both cases who are the ones who are less ethical, the ones who are in between, the ones who say, oh, I don't know, I guess there's God and like, I make sure the kids learn something about it because it's good for them and like, the, the ho are good or say God, I don't, I don't actually care. Maybe there's not a God, but it's like, what does it have to do with me? The people who are like indifferently religious or apathetically atheistic, the ones in the middle, those are the ones who you readily manipulate their moral behavior, one direction or the other. If you've spent a hell of a long time sitting and thinking about the root of human goodness and evil and what we owe our fellow humans and is their purpose in life that transcends us. It doesn't really matter if your conclusion is there is a God or there is no God or we're free agents or we have no free will whatsoever. You're one of the ones who thought long and hard about it and both sets of conclusions you come out as being more ethically moral than your average person. Um So people are not going to run amok if they are raised from the very beginning to think this is not a world where it is fair. To blame anyone and I don't deserve to get this or that reward more than anyone else. They're going to be past the notion. Oh, no one's gonna hold me responsible. I can go and stab the old lady there with any luck to be past that by the time they're like, 20 years old.

44:05 Ricardo Lopes: And I was here hearing all the time people saying that hard determinist were all nihilists and atheists and they were all the time, uh, pillaging and raping and murdering people.

44:21 Robert Sapolsky: Exactly. Because that's, that's the logical first thing. Um, THE logical second thing that was also, went back in your question is when you get past, oh, should I run amok and do whatever I want all of that is, should I get depressed as hell? Because there's no purpose to any of this? There's this huge existential void out there. Should I like, is this terrible thing to have people believe in terms of their mental health and stuff? Um, AND a point, like, it took me five years to write this book and the 1st 4.5 years I was thinking the answer to that was gonna have to be. Yeah. And that sucks. And it's awful. But, you know, that's how things work and, like, come on, we need to be adults and face reality and it finally struck me the much more meaningful answer to it, which is, if you are convinced there's no free will and you get totally depressed and empty void because it means your accomplishments. You didn't really earn that. The people who loved you don't really love you for who you are. But for biological stuff that you helped this old woman cross the street just now. Not because you're a good person, but because that's how you function as machine. All that. Oh my God. This is so depressing. If that's your response, you're one of the lucky ones. You've got the luck and privilege to sit there and say, oh my God, maybe I really didn't earn my wonderful university degree. Oh my God. Maybe I didn't really deserve to be liked by people because of my personality. If you're someone who has spent your whole life paying the price of your parents, poverty or the fact that you don't have an attractive face or the fact that you have the genes that deep predispose you towards obesity and people recoil from overweight people. Or because you turned out not to be so smart or it turns out you can't control your behavior because of biology. All that getting rid of the free will concept does is be liberating. You don't have a shitty soul because your life has not turned out that well. And for most people, that's the much more important outcome to all of this than deciding, oh, I guess I really didn't earn my million dollars to be a millionaire. Um, FOR most people getting rid of the concept of free will is not gonna make us like crazy and nihilistic. Um It's gonna be liberating. Mhm

47:09 Ricardo Lopes: But uh going back just for a second to one of the initial points I brought to the table when it comes to the fact that we do not yet have a complete science of human behavior and we cannot 100% predict how someone will behave in a particular situation. Uh What if someone heard your arguments of behavioral scientist and said, oh OK, Dr Sapolsky, your arguments are great, the science is awesome. But since we still do not have a complete picture of human behavior, at least for the time being, I will refrain from making absolute claims, uh claims regarding free will. I will wait and see. I mean, basically what I'm asking you is do you think that the fact that we do not yet have a complete science of free will uh would make uh such a claim that we should reframe, refrain from making such absolute claims about free will uh make

48:16 Robert Sapolsky: sense, right? Um Two types of answers there. The first one is um yeah, it's gonna be so hard to subtract out thinking there's free will because we don't have the solid scientific facts yet. For centuries, all we've done over and over is figure out that responsibility turns out not to have something to do with our behavior. Turns out hailstorms are not caused by witches, it turns out people who have epileptic seizures are not possessed by Satan or even within the last 50 years or so. It turns out people come down with the disease. Schizophrenia, not because their mothers were psycho dynamically, monsters who hated them. And all that happened at each one of those points is you tell the mothers of, you know, hundreds of thousands of people with schizophrenia, it's not your fault. It's a neuro genetic disorder. All you've done is freed them all you've done when you figured out that this kid in your classroom where you're a teacher just can't learn to read and this kid is just lazy and un mot no, there's something in their cortex that could be identified by scientists so that they reverse letters in their mind. They have dyslexia, it's not their fault. We can't explain yet who gets dyslexia and who doesn't? We have only hints from prenatal environment, blah, blah, blah. But we know enough that it is both intellectually and morally bankrupt to decide that this child is lazy and unmotivated and to instead recognize we've identified their particular type of biological constraint and all that's going to happen in the future is more and more and more of those. And all we can be at this point is accepting that a whole lot of things that pulls out the ugliest in us in the way of judgment. We're gonna wind up saying, oh my God, I had no, I had no idea. It had something to do with that or framed a different way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we can't sit there and say somebody with this sort of upbringing, we can absolutely predict that they're gonna wind up going to a top university or wind up being a multiple murderer. Yeah, we can't predict that yet. The science isn't good enough. The science is good enough on a population level. Any time you could look at an entire population and say for every increased incidence of a horrible childhood experience, you've just increased 35% the likelihood that they're going to be arrested by the time they're 20 you got enough science. At that point, you've got enough science that you better know you have no leg to stand on. If you sit there and say this kid this 20 year old, what can I say? They're just plain evil. This kid, if you 35% for each step, there's enough science at this point, there's enough knowledge there. If you have, I don't know whatever percent predictability that if your mother was drinking heavily when you're a fetus, you've got this likelihood of having an IQ below this. And someday when you're failing classes, we know enough science already. In all these cases, we know enough science because we run an entire society on statistical guilt and statistical wonderful accomplishments. And we know enough now to know that those are not OK.

52:10 Ricardo Lopes: So I have one last question then what would it take for, for someone to convince you that you're wrong and actually free will exists?

52:25 Robert Sapolsky: OK? Here's, here's my pain in the ass response. And the philosophers are going to like, oh come on, give me a break. Um The version that they start off with is oh, come on, give me a break is you've just done something, you've pulled a trigger on a gun, you just did something consequential And here's the muscles that contract it. And here's the three motor neurons that just sent that command. And if you wanna convince us that free will actually exist, show us that those neurons just did what they did independent of what any other neuron in the brain was doing at that moment. If you could do that, you've just proven free will. And they say, oh come on, give us a break. That's ridiculous. A demand. I would demand a whole lot more than that. I would say. Show me that those three neurons just told you to pull that trigger, having nothing to do with what any other neuron was whispering to it at the time and having nothing to do with your hormone levels that morning and having nothing to do with your history of trauma and having nothing to do with your genes. So show me that if you had changed any of those, those neurons would still have done the exact same thing at that moment, then I'll believe in free will and you can't, you can't show that because nothing going on in you right now is anything but the outcome of all of that stuff that came beforehand, perhaps unpredictably, perhaps in some nonlinear, non additive cool way, perhaps in an emergent way that we can't even begin to mix. But that's all we are. Nothing more or less and show me a neuron that just decided to do what it did independent of everything that came before that millisecond. And if you could do that, I believe in free will and uh philosophers are gonna hate it. But what I think any biologist who knows this stuff would say is, yeah, that's kind of what you need to show. That's kind of the proof that is needed to show that there really is free will and that's pretty damn unlikely to be able to show that.

54:46 Ricardo Lopes: OK. So let's see if someone accepts the challenge. So, yeah, so the book is again, determined a science of life without free will. I'm leaving a link within the description box of this interview. Um Doctor Sapolsky, just before we go apart from the book, would you like to mention briefly where people can find you and your work on the internet?

55:13 Robert Sapolsky: Um Let's see, I'm I am a medieval peasant in that. Not only don't, I do Facebook, I don't know how to, don't, not only do I not do Instagram or any of these things that my kids say that I don't understand. So I have no presence there, but there's a bunch of my lectures that have been put up on youtube. Um I teach a class at Stanford every other year on the biology of human social behavior. That's basically the last hour stretched out over entire semester. And years ago, Stanford posted all of those lectures up there and one of these years I have to update them. So go to youtube. Uh You'll see I'm doing the exact same ranting and raving word for word and a number of those like talks that overlap, but that would be a good place.

56:10 Ricardo Lopes: Ok, great. So, Doctor Sapolsky, thank you again for coming on the show. It's always a great pleasure to talk to you. Well,

56:18 Robert Sapolsky: likewise, thank you for having me on and uh till next time this is fun.

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