Do we have free will? Still no
Several weeks ago, in an article entitled Do we have free will? No, I threatened to read Robert Sapolsky’s splendid book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Well, I read it, and we still do not have free will.
As I said in my earlier article, I had myself argued that we lack free will in my book, No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe. My argument was kind of bare-bones, basically that we are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, which are deterministic (except perhaps for the occasional quantum fluctuation), so our actions must also be deterministic. Though my wording was not the best, I also argued that criminals should therefore be rehabilitated or quarantined and not punished. Sapolsky fleshes all this out in great (if not excruciating) detail.
Sapolsky thinks that it sounds “nuts” to claim that we have no free will. Not to me: it seems to me that the claim follows from first principles. But Sapolsky devotes several chapters to describing how neurons work, how they cause us to “pull the trigger,” and, more importantly, how they make us decide whether or not to pull the trigger. Early on he remarks,
Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you have demonstrated free will. The point of the first half of this book is to establish that this cannot be shown.
When Sapolsky says “free will,” he does not mean that your decision was not coerced; rather he means that, given free rein, you could have made no other decision than the one you did. For Sapolsky, the neuron that told you to tighten your muscle and pull some hypothetical trigger was influenced by another neuron that was itself chosen by one part of the brain telling it, “Go!” and another part of the brain telling it, “Whoa, slow down!” Which of those parts of the brain won out depended upon your own history, which itself depended on your prenatal environment, your environment growing up, your culture, and who knows what else? Where in this chain of events, asks Sapolsky, did something intervene between one neuron and the next, and tell you whether to pull the trigger or not? There is no room for such an intervention, though some compatiblists – those who agree that our brains are purely deterministic but that we have free will anyway – will argue otherwise.
In successive sections called “Seconds to minutes before [you pull the trigger],” “Minutes to days before,” “Weeks to years before,” and then “Back to adolescence,” “And childhood,” and so on, Sapolsky details how your history and even your culture’s history determine your actions and decisions. Ever steal something? Maybe not, if you were brought up wealthy. But what if you were brought up poor and had to steal a loaf of bread to survive? In the first case, assuming that you were tempted, the Whoa! part of your brain won out, whereas in the second case the Go! part of your brain won out. In each case, your response was purely biochemical, I am afraid, and the wealthy person who does not steal has nothing in particular to be proud of.
For Sapolsky, it is not turtles all the way down but rather neurons all the way to the beginning, or at least, I suppose, to the evolution of the neuron.
To go into a lot more detail would require a booklet, at least. But let me note, for example, that being exposed to a disgusting smell can change your attitudes toward what Sapolsky calls “purity violations.” How can that be? Evidently the processing of stimuli that we consider morally disgusting has co-opted part of the older brain region for processing physically disgusting things such as spoiled or rotting food, and there is crosstalk. Experimental subjects will not tell you, “Oh, that disgusting smell influenced my decision to punish that person”; rather, they will tell you that some “recent insight” influenced their decision. Now statistically changing people’s attitudes by exposing them to disgusting smells does not disprove free will, but it goes part way toward making the case, and of course Sapolsky goes into much greater depth.
Sapolsky treats us to chapters on chaos, emergence, and quantum mechanics. As briefly as possible, he notes that chaos is actually deterministic (except possibly for the occasional quantum fluctuation), but not calculable because we cannot calculate with sufficient precision. He takes to task several thinkers who have tied free will to chaos because they frankly do not understand the difference between being deterministic and being calculable – the weather, for example, is deterministic, but we cannot calculate it beyond a few days.
Emergent properties are properties which arise in complex systems made up of simple elements, when those simple elements combine in such a way as to create new properties that are not displayed in the simple elements themselves. One water molecule is not wet, but a sufficiently large collection of water molecules displays the property of wetness, and wetness is known as an emergent property. Another example, which Sapolsky particularly likes: certain kinds of ants (which have not the slightest understanding of bridge building and certainly no blueprints) use their bodies to build a bridge in order to span a gap in their path. That bridge is emergent.
If you think that free will may be an emergent property of a collection of neurons, then you need to show how free will may emerge. One way you may do so, incorrectly, is by misunderstanding the distinction between deterministic and calculable; see above. Or you may assume, as Sapolsky puts it, that once you have emergent states, they can “do whatever the hell they want.” And finally, you may think that, again in Sapolsky’s words, “… an emergent state can reach down and change the fundamental nature of the [building blocks] comprising it.” It is like saying that, once they have built the bridge, those ants no longer have to behave like ants. If you want more, get the book.
Sapolsky says he really did not want to write chapters on quantum indeterminacy. Not only does he not understand quantum indeterminacy; neither does anyone else. His description of the double-slit experiment is pretty good, except where he repeats a very common misconception: when you block one of the slits or attempt to measure which slit the electron passed through, it does not stop behaving like a wave. The double-slit pattern disappears, but we still see the diffraction pattern of a single slit.
I will not – cannot – go into much detail here, but I am firmly in agreement with Sapolsky when he says that if quantum indeterminacy were an important factor in governing our behavior, we would make decisions randomly, and that is not exactly my definition of free will. Mostly, we do not make decisions randomly, so the effect of quantum indeterminacy must obviously be small. Sapolsky explains why.
The second half of the book concerns crime and punishment or, perhaps more accurately, transgression and rehabilitation. Sapolsky asks the question, if everyone believed we had no free will, would we all run amok? I do not know the answer to that question, but I can reasonably assure you that neither Sapolsky nor I have ever run amok, and I daresay that we do not intend to. That said, Sapolsky cites some studies that show that you can
undermine someone's belief in free will and they feel less of a sense of agency…. And most important for our purposes, they become less ethical in their behavior, less helpful, and more aggressive.
Sapolsky wittily advises us to “burn this book before anyone else stumbles upon it and has their moral compass on board.” Fortunately, the effect was small, and a meta-analysis showed no consistent effects. Sapolsky searches for evidence that religious people are nicer than atheists and comes up with a statistic that religious people are, for example, more charitable than atheists. I think that statistic is fairly well known, but Sapolsky notes that their charity extends largely to their own group; in other words, they are largely charitable toward themselves. (Indeed, I have looked at my own charitable contributions and find that about 30 % go to my synagogue, though some of that is only temporary. Other monies, which I have not quantified, go to local agencies from which I may benefit. Charity may begin at home, but sometimes it also ends at home.)
Sapolsky pretty well establishes that atheists and those who do not believe in free will are no better or worse than religious people and those who believe in free will. That leaves the question, though, what do free-will deniers recommend that we do with transgressors, if we believe that they do not control their own actions? Punishment seems inappropriate, but they can inflict very real loss or pain. Sapolsky provides a long history showing in detail how much we have improved since the days when we used to draw and quarter people. Also, we have improved since the days when we thought, for example, that schizophrenia was a result of poor mothering, rather than the brain disease we now know it is.
What then to do with transgressors? Quarantine them, the way we quarantine people with various diseases (or should I say non-mental diseases?). When he says quarantine, however, he does not mean jail in the way the US as a practical matter applies the term. To the contrary, he says we must quarantine people in a way that constrains them the least, because in the last analysis their transgressions are not their fault. He points to Norway, where prisoners live in tiny apartments with televisions and various amenities, and yet the recidivism rate is one-quarter that of the US, where people can actually learn to be better criminals in jail.
The bulk of the book is 400 pages long, not counting notes. I thought it could have been a lot shorter. For example, the author spends a great deal of time on schizophrenia (not to mention drawing and quartering). In the middle of the last century, in the complete absence of evidence and sometimes in defiance of evidence, psychoanalysts blamed schizophrenia on mothers’ parenting. Even when schizophrenia was conclusively demonstrated to be a brain disease and treatable with drugs, psychoanalysts refused to give in. Sapolsky seems angry and heaps a great deal of well-deserved opprobrium – but according to his belief and mine, these mid-century psychoanalysts had no choice but to believe what they believed.
Reviewer’s last inch. I want to renew my complaint that the Kindle edition, which I may lease but not purchase, at $16.99 costs the same as the paperback and $4.15 less than the hardcover, both of which I may own and do whatever I want with. I read the Kindle edition, and I was less than satisfied with the figures. The book was long and there were many, many endnotes; I sometimes had the impression that the author had unearthed all this material and was, by God, going to get it in one way or another. Even on a Kindle the notes were annoying, and I skipped most of them; I imagine they would have become intolerable if you tried to read them all in the print edition. Finally, though I very much appreciated the informal style and occasional humor, and noticed very few spelling or other errors, I thought the editor should have cut out the more extreme cuss words.