Whatâs popular this week in Nautilus [View in browser](| [Join Nautilus]( EDITORS' CHOICE Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here.]( This Sunday, your FREE member newsletter includes one full story, by science journalist Dan Falk, below. Enjoy! [NEUROSCIENCE]( [Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not]( A volley of new insights reignites the debate over whether our choices are ever truly our own. BY DAN FALK Youâre thirsty so you reach for a glass of water. Itâs either a freely chosen action or the inevitable result of the laws of nature, depending on who you ask. Do we have free will? The question is ancientâand vexing. Everyone seems to have pondered it, and many seem quite certain of the answer, which is typically either âyesâ or âabsolutely not.â One scientist in the âabsolutely notâ camp is [Robert Sapolsky](. In his new book, [Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will](, the primatologist and Stanford professor of neurology spells out why we canât possibly have free will. Why do we behave one way and not another? Why do we choose Brand A over Brand B, or vote for Candidate X over Candidate Y? Not because we have free will, but because every act and thought are the product of âcumulative biological and environmental luck.â Sapolsky tells readers that the âbiology over which you had no control, interacting with the environment over which you had no control, made you you.â That is to say, âeverything in your childhood, starting with how you were mothered within minutes of birth, was influenced by culture, which means as well by the centuries of ecological factors that influenced what kind of culture your ancestors invented, and by the evolutionary pressures that molded the species you belong to.â NO, WE DONâT: Robert Sapolsky on free will: âI have spent forever trying to understand where behavior comes from. And what you see is thereâs absolutely no room for free will.â Photo courtesy of Christine Johnston. Sapolsky brings the same combination of earthy directness and literary flourish that marked his earlier books, including Why Zebras Donât Get Ulcers, about the biology of stress, to this latest work. To summarize his point of view in Determined, he writes, âOr as Maria sings in The Sound of Music, âNothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.ââ The affable, bushy-bearded Sapolsky is now in his mid 60s. During our recent interview over Zoom, I was on the lookout for any inconsistency; anything that might suggest that deep down he admits we really do make decisions, as many of us surely feel. But he was prepared and stuck to his guns. [Like the story? Join Nautilus today]( I had no issue with the first part of his argumentâthat cultural, genetic, and environmental factors influence our lives, and nudge us in certain directions. But how could those factors dictate what we say or do in each moment? He turned the question back on me. âWhy do you value that question?â he said. âWhy did you wind up being a person who would be interviewing somebody about this subject? That wouldnât have happened, for instance, if you had been raised with intestinal parasites in the middle of Niger.â Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before. To most people, Sapolsky said, free will is apparent in real time, for every action you perform. âYou ask, âDid you intend to do it? Did you realize you could have done something else? That you had options?â Most peopleâs intuitive sense is the answers are yes, and so you have demonstrated free will. But thatâs like trying to evaluate a movie by only seeing the last three minutes of it. When you ask, âWhere did intent come from?â, everything from one second to a million years before comes into play. That leads inevitably to the conclusion that thereâs no free will. Because no matter how much you try, you canât intend to intend something. You canât will yourself to have willpower. You canât think of what youâre going to think of next. Itâs simply not possible.â The way Sapolsky sees it, you canât escape the biological and cultural forces and environmental factors that preceded you and shaped you. âThereâs not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,â he said. âWhen you look at every contemporary argument for free will thatâs not invoking God or fairy dust or something, at some point, one must assume a step that bypasses the antecedent causes. But that violates the laws of how neurons work, atoms work, and universes work. Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.â [Start Your Weekend With a Bang]( Explore the cosmos with astrophysicist Dr. Ethan Siegel! From the origin of everything to the fate of the universe, Ethan and the Big Think [Starts With a Bang]( are here to answer your biggest questions. Let's unravel the great mysteries of the Universe, together. [SIGN UP]( Many scientists and philosophers [beg to differ](. Prominent among them is Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Trinity College in Dublin. In his new book, [Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will](, Mitchell argues that although weâre shaped by our biology, itâs that very biology that made us, over the course of billions of years of evolution, into free agents. Even the earliest and most primitive creatures had some capacity to control their destinies. When a single-celled organism moves toward a food source, or away from danger, it has entered, however meekly, into a new world of agency and freedom. Simple organisms, Mitchell writes, âinfer what is out in the worldâ and âmake holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions.â He adds: âThis represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe.â A dozen years younger than Sapolsky, and with a less voluminous beard, Mitchell was born near Philadelphia but grew up in Ireland; he then returned to the United States for grad school and a postdoc, before heading back to Dublin. That accounts for his âall over the placeâ accent, he told me. YES, WE DO: Kevin Mitchell on free will: âWe really are free agents. We make decisions, we choose, we actâwe are causal forces in the universe.â Photo courtesy of Maria Whelan. In a universe where the mindless laws of nature push bits of matter around, it might indeed seem miraculous that free willâagencyâcan emerge. As I made my way through Free Agents, I thought of a New Yorker cartoon where two scientists are at a blackboard filled with equations. In the middle, instead of an equation, the first scientist has written, âThen a miracle occurs.â The second guy says to him, âI think you should be more explicit here in step two.â But emerge it does, according to Mitchell, and heâs adamant that there is nothing miraculous about it. Rather, in living creatures like us, freedom is enabled by the underlying biology. But couldnât biology itself be beyond our control? In their books, both Sapolsky and Mitchell refer to the work of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. In the 1980s, Libet conducted a series of experiments that appeared to show that electrical activity in the brain could be detected several hundred milliseconds before the subject became aware of making a decisionâsuggesting, to some, that the brain itself must be doing the âdeciding,â with the conscious mind following along after the fact. Libetâs experiments were, and remain, [controversial](; even so, they left many people wondering if free will must be an illusion. Mitchell doesnât buy it. Yes, there are physical and chemical processes operating within the brainâhow could there not be?âbut that does nothing to take away our freedom, he says. âIt comes down to the idea that if we can find the machinery inside the brain that is active when weâre making a decision, then maybe decision making just is being done causally by that machinery,â he told me. âI donât think that view is right, because I think you can have a completely different view, which is, yes, there is some machinery that we use to make decisions; but itâs machinery we use to make decisions. Weâre making the decisions.â For Mitchell, decision-making did not start with human beings. Rather, it can be traced back to the first simple organisms that flourished hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. âI wanted to take an evolutionary approach to this problem,â he said. This represents a wholly different type of causation. Evolution, Mitchell said, favors organisms that have some ability to make their way in the world. âThey need to know whatâs out in the world, and what to do about it.â Creatures evolved the ability to sense, and the ability to act, based on those sensations. They were evaluating (in some primitive manner) which action was likely to prolong their survival. âEven bacteria do this,â Mitchell said. Humans merely do this in a more sophisticated manner. âWe see whatâs out in the world, gauge our internal stateâbacteria do that tooâand, given those things, given my beliefs about the world, and my own state at the moment, and my goals, we ask, âWhat should I do? Whatâs my range of options? How can I choose one of them and inhibit all the others?ââ Over the course of evolution, creatures with more sophisticated decision-making abilities appeared. âThose capacities got more elaborate, and more sophisticated, which led to organisms with greater and greater agency, with more control,â Mitchell said. âThey have a greater range of possible actions; they have more flexible behavior.â As creatures evolved more sophisticated ways to respond to their environments, they began to plan over longer time-scales. âThey have a cognitive horizon that gets broader and broader through evolution,â Mitchell said. âAnd that means that they have greater causal autonomy. Theyâre not pushed around by every immediate thing in the environment. They can think about things that havenât happened yet. And they can direct their actions toward things in the future, sometimes, for us, decades in the future.â No magic, no miraclesâjust a capacity for decision making passed down to us over the eons from much simpler creatures, thanks to natural selection.
Whatâs fascinating is Sapolsky and Mitchell have dived into essentially the same scientific and philosophical literature about free will and yet surfaced with opposing conclusions. Can one be declared more right than the other? To my mind, Mitchell seems to be on the right track. We really do make decisions, and that ability to make decisions has evolved over the eons. Simple creatures make simple decisions (âa possible food sourceâmust move in that direction!â) and complex creatures make complex decisions (âI donât like the candidateâs flat-tax proposal, but I like where he stands on offshore wind energyâ). A determinist might insist that whatever we do, we do because of what came before. For simple creatures, thatâs a fair position. A parameciumâs âdecisionsâ happen more or less on autopilot. But for complex creatures like us, our actions depend on conscious decisions; for Mitchell, we are in the driverâs seat. Mitchellâs view finds support in the work of physicist Jenann Ismael of Johns Hopkins University. Physicists, of course, have long debated how the laws of nature work, and whether those laws, right down to the behavior of elementary particles, do or do not allow for free will. In her 2016 book, How Physics Makes Us Free, Ismael lays out a position broadly aligned with Mitchellâs. Yes, the past paves the way for the present, which in turn shapes the futureâbut humans are not mere bystanders in this process. âItâs me that gets to decide, in the here and now, how the past bears on the future,â she told me in an interview. Ismael agrees that we are influenced by what has come beforeâbut as she sees it, those experiences inform rather than constrain our decisions. âFrom the noisy accidents of my life, Iâve extracted hopes, dreams, priorities, and visions,â she said. âWhen Iâm deciding what to do, I sort through those things and make decisions about which of those get to bear on the future.â Free will is the ultimate philosophical whack-a-mole. And yet some of Sapolskyâs arguments are also convincing. He, too, has physicists on his side. In her 2022 book Existential Physics, physicist [Sabine Hossenfelder]( writes that the idea of free will is incoherent. âFor your will to be free, it shouldnât be caused by anything else. But if it wasnât caused by anythingâif itâs an âuncaused cause,â as Frederich Nietzsche put itâthen it wasnât caused by you, regardless of just what you mean by you. As Nietzsche summed it up, itâs âthe best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far.â Iâm with Nietzsche.â For Sapolsky, recognizing that individuals are shaped by their past offers a blueprint for a more just society. Sapolsky believes we shouldnât praise people for accomplishments they achieved largely because of a string of advantages that helped them throughout their lives; and he arguesâcorrectly, I would sayâthat itâs wrong to condemn those who are struggling, merely because of the many disadvantages they have faced. Consider a neurosurgeon and a criminal. The neurosurgeon âis not a better human because circumstances produced someone with the capacity to be a competent neurosurgeon,â Sapolsky told me. âAnd the other person is not a worse human because circumstances produced someone who is going to be violently impulsive in certain circumstances.â At the same time, I canât help wondering: If individuals donât have the freedom to choose, how can courts or legislatures or whole societies have it? If freedom is an illusion, it might seem that an idea like âadvocating for judicial reformâ is rendered meaningless, too. How can one do anything other than what weâre supposedly determined to do? In Sapolskyâs view, although we canât change the world, we can be changed by the world. âThings change enormously!â Sapolsky said. âWe donât keep slaves anymore. We put on a sweater today because itâs cooler than it was yesterday. Someone who used to be a white supremacist now regrets it and works for tolerance. We get gummed up thinking weâre seeing free will. We have this incorrect belief that we have chosen to change ourselves. The white supremacist didnât wake up one day and say, âHey, itâs about time I stopped being a white supremacist.â He was changed by circumstances.â So how did these two very clever scholars end up with such different views? I think the answer is they targeted different facets of the free will puzzle. Sapolsky is worried we overestimate how much freedom we have by failing to take into account the biological, sociological, and environmental forces that have made us who we are. And heâs right: We should take those forces into account. But he may have pushed the argument to the extreme, imagining that these restrictions on free will leave no room for any freedom at all. Sure, the fact that my dad loved playing folk songs on the piano when I was growing up probably increased the odds that Iâd enjoy âHey Judeâ as an adultâbut did my past really dictate, down to the second, when I might reach for that glass of water? Mitchell, meanwhile, is focused on ârescuingâ free will from a seemingly deterministic universe. This rescue operation (which gets bogged down in physics) is not necessary; philosophers have long argued that we can have the sort of freedom that matters regardless of what our atoms and molecules are doing. At the end of the day, one canât pick a winner between Sapolsky and Mitchell any more than we can pick a winner between the New York Mets and the New York Rangersâtheyâre not playing the same game. Even though Sapolsky and Mitchell cover a lot of ground, questions remain. One might wonder how to quantify those biological and cultural forces that anchor Sapolskyâs thesis. How might one prove that they allow for no freedom at all? And for Mitchell, who struggles to reconcile the workings of complex creatures such as humans with the underlying physics: How, exactly, do things like minds and agency arise from inanimate matter? These two books show just how wide the problem of free will is. And because the problem can be approached in so many ways, we can be sure itâs not going away anytime soon. As Ismael told a lecture audience in Toronto recently, the puzzle of free will is the ultimate philosophical whack-a-mole. âWhen you tease out one thread of argument thatâs supposed to lead to the conclusion that there is no free will ⦠people say âNo, no, thatâs not what I meant by free will,â or, âthe problemâs not over there, itâs over here,â she told me. âAnd they give you a different argument, or they give you a different conception of free will. So every time you nail down one of them, you get something else coming up where people say, âno, no, the real argument is over here.ââ
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