EP. 117: LIVING WELL WITHOUT FREE WILL

Jun 19

WITH ROBERT SAPOLSKY, PHD

A leading neuroscientist shares why he believes free will does not exist, how society would be a more just and humane place without free will, and what human happiness and flourishing would mean in this world.

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Episode Summary

Most of us take free will for granted — from the biggest of life decisions to choosing an ice cream flavor, we are generally capable of freely deciding how to think and how to behave without outside influence. But Robert Sapolsky believes our decisions cannot be disentangled from our genetics, environment, and neurobiology. In other words, to him, free will does not exist.

Dr. Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University, is a leading thinker on the biology of stress, human behavior, neurodegenerative diseases, and the science of free will and determinism. He is the author of multiple bestselling books, including Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers (1994), Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017), and Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). His works have been featured widely in the popular press, from National Geographic to The New York Times.

Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Sapolsky presents his arguments against free will, along the way making detours through chaos and complexity theory, philosophy, ethics, and neuroscience. He shows how subtracting free will from the way culture thinks about crime, mental health, and human development have resulted in more humane health, justice, and educational systems. Finally, we contemplate together what human flourishing even means in the context of a life without free will.

His ideas have profound implications not just on our society, but also on our understanding of human nature, challenging our perceptions and provoking deep reflection on how we navigate the choices in our lives.

Robert Sapolsky, PhD is John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research Museums of Kenya. Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist, has focused his research on issues of stress and neuron degeneration.
At the same time, he has been called "one of the best scientist-writers of our time" by Oliver Sacks and "one of the finest natural history writers around" by The New York Times. Dr. Sapolsky has authored, in addition to numerous scientific papers, books for broader audiences, including Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: Stress Disease and Coping, (1994), A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons (2002), Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017), and Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). Sapolsky has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience.
In this episode, you will hear about:
• 3:08 - How Dr. Sapolsky chose a career straddling both neuroscience and primatology
• 5:04 - The moment when Dr. Sapolsky realized he did not believe humans have free will
• 16:16 - How society becomes more humane when free will is factored out
• 23:29 - The deep implications that free will and determinism could have on criminology
• 34:13 - How a belief in a lack of free will can negatively affect motivation on a societal scale
• 43:11 - What does human flourishing look like in a world without free will?
• 48:07 - The best moments in life in which to utilize this understanding of free will
Henry Bair: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:02] And I'm Tyler Johnson.
Henry Bair: [00:00:04] And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered what makes medicine meaningful. Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:27] In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and healthcare executives those who have collected a career's worth of hard earned wisdom probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging and enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.
Henry Bair: [00:01:02] Most of us take free will for granted. From the biggest of life decisions to choosing an ice cream flavor, we are generally capable of freely deciding how to think and how to behave without outside influence, or what some might call fate. But Robert Sapolsky believes our decisions cannot be disentangled from our genetics, our environment and neurobiology. In other words, to him, free will does not exist. Doctor Sapolsky, who is a neuroscientist and primatologist at Stanford University, is a leading thinker on the biology of stress, human behavior, neurodegenerative diseases, and the science of free will and determinism. He is the author of multiple best selling books, including 1994 Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. 2017 Behave The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, and 2023 determined a Science of Life Without Free Will. His works have been featured widely in the popular press, from National Geographic to The New York Times. Over the course of this conversation, Doctor Sapolsky presents his arguments against free will along the way making pit stops and detours through chaos and complexity theory, philosophy, ethics, and neuroscience. He shows how subtracting free will from how culture thinks about crime, mental health disorders and human development have resulted in more humane health, justice and educational systems. Finally, we contemplate together what human flourishing even means in the context of a life without free will. The implications of his ideas have profound implications, not just on our society, but also our understanding of human nature, challenging our perceptions and provoking deep reflection on how we navigate the choices in our lives. Of note, Robert is joining us today from his home, and so periodically you may hear the sound of his dog in the background. With that, Robert, thank you for taking the time and welcome to the show.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:03:07] Oh, thanks for having me on.
Tyler Johnson: [00:03:08] We always like to start by hearing a person's origin story. So can you. Can you walk us through how you decided to go into the studies that you did, and what brought you up to where you are today?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:03:21] Okay, well, I, uh oh, I don't know. First generation Russian grew up in New York City, and around age 8 or 9, I decided I wanted to be a primatologist. This was as a result of, like, as close to living inside the Museum of Natural History in New York as possible. And something happened where I imprinted on the primates there, rather than the geckos or the dinosaur Pelvises or some such. So I was intent on that. By high school, I was writing fan letters to primatologists. I, uh, convinced the school to let me have a self-taught Swahili course. Um, I was going to go do field work in East Africa, went in college to study at the feet of the god of baboon field work or whatever, who had a mild heart attack my freshman year. He was fine. He lived another 40 years, but he canceled all his classes, including the ones I was going to take and somewhat at a loss of what to do with myself, I took an introductory neuroscience class, which blew me away, and I've now ever since, had this sort of conflict of am I a neurobiologist or am I primatologist? And I looked out enormously and have been able to sort of do both over the years and spent 33 summers away from the lab studying a population of wild baboons in East Africa. So I have lucked out tremendously in that realm and have gotten away with being on very thin, dilettantish ice in both professions.
Henry Bair: [00:05:04] So a lot of your early work revolved around primates and how the neurological and endocrine processes govern animal behavior and consequently, human behavior and society. Sadly, given our limited time here, we won't go into all of that fascinating work, though I'd encourage listeners to check out the books you've written and the podcasts you've appeared on to discuss those findings. What caught our eye, specifically as it pertains to our show is your most recent book, determined, which delves into free will or the lack thereof. At what point in your life and career did you start thinking about the question or the problem of free will?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:05:47] Well, I kind of did it backwards in that I was 14 when I decided there's no free will whatsoever.
Tyler Johnson: [00:05:57] As most 14 year olds are want to do.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:06:02] Well, I was wrestling with a religious crisis that had a lot to do with. Did we have agency or not? And it was all very confusing. And I, I had this one night where I still don't quite understand what the hell was going on in my sleeping brain, but I woke up at about two in the morning and said, oh, I get it, there's no God. And then about 10s later, I said, oh, and there's no free will, and about 10s after that. Oh, and the universe is this empty, meaningless, indifferent place. And that's kind of where I've been at ever since. So, I don't know, somehow the neuroscience I was pulled to was rather than on a no motor pathways or neurological disorders, but the neurobiological bases of behavior and social behavior and the neurobiological lack of free will. And I've kind of been exploring that ever since. So I came to neuroscience already having my not so hidden agenda.
Henry Bair: [00:07:13] Well, you know, curious listeners can explore more of your perspectives and arguments in the book, which I must say, you know, it is it is very intimidating and it's length, but I think is written with a disarmingly casual and often humorous tone. So I found that to be a very interesting experience reading it. So it is quite approachable despite its hefty subject matter. So assuming that most of our listeners are unfamiliar with the arguments that you posit in the book, I'm wondering if you could, just so that we have a shared understanding with which to proceed with the rest of this conversation. Can you give us, like, the brief take home points from your book? Because, like, what are the main reasons why you believe there is no free will?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:07:57] Well, when we do something, when a behavior happens and we reasonably ask, oh, why did that person do what they just did? It's this whole hierarchy of answers because of what went on in their brain a second ago, because of the environmental stimuli that triggered the brain to do that in the previous minute, because of this morning's hormone levels, because of last year's trauma, because of adolescence and childhood and fetal life and genes and culture, because the culture your ancestors were inventing and the ecosystems that made that happen shaped how your mother mothered you within minutes of birth. And I think the whole point is, it's not just if we want to understand our behavior, we've got to look at a bunch of different disciplines. It's all one discipline after a while. If you're talking about genes and behavior, by definition, you're talking about millions of years of evolution of genes. You're also talking about fetal life and epigenetic programing your brain, and you're talking about the proteins you made in your brain this morning as a result of genes. And when you see, like it's this seamless arc of biology over which we had no control, interacting with environment over which we had no control, there's not a crack in the edifice there in which you could shoehorn free will, free will as defined by we just did something independent of our history. Our brain just decided to become an uncaused cause, and you simply could not show anything coming out of the brain.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:09:40] That was not the result of everything that came before over which we had no control. So that's my basic song and dance with that. And then I try to sort of dissect circumstances where it sure feels like we have free will, where you sit there and you make a choice as to whether you're putting on your red socks or blue socks today or some such thing. And you just there's a moment ness where you just feel as if you're making a decision there and you really are not because you're acting with intent. There are alternatives available to you. You're not being forced to coerced your conscious of your intent. All of that. So that sure feels like you are being a free agent. But the question has to become, so how did you become the sort of person who would have that intent at that moment? And the answer is because of one second ago and an hour ago and all the way back. And we can't successfully intend to intend something different than what we intend. We can't wish to wish for things different from what we wish for. We can't will ourselves to have more will power. So the moment ness of decision making is indeed built around a world in which there's like multiple possible futures, blah blah. But once we are there, the only question to ask is how did you wind up being who you are at that moment? And we had no choice over that.
Tyler Johnson: [00:11:11] So I just want to make sure, you know, we maybe six months or so ago, we had Alan Lightman on the program and we discussed some similar ideas with him. And, you know, when we had a discussion. So one term with which listeners may not be particularly familiar, although I think we referenced it briefly here a moment ago, is the idea of determinism. Right. And we discussed determinism with Alan Lightman. And I don't want to mischaracterize his position, but I think that it would be fair to say. And, Henry, you can critique me if you think I'm off base here, but I think that he would say that he largely buys into determinism, but he could never seem to quite get all the way to saying that everything in the universe is entirely deterministic, in other words. So he, you know, posits this thought experiment, right? That if you could literally tag and measure every input into a system like, let's say, the human brain, that eventually you could just know with absolute certainty what the outcome of that brain acting apparently with intention or it thinks with intention would be in every circumstance. Right. And and he seems to never quite be able to get himself to that point. But if I understand what you're saying correctly, you're saying that is the point. If you could really know every whatever biological, evolutionary, neurohormonal, cultural, etc., if you could know all of the inputs into a given person's life, then you could predict with absolute certainty and precision all of their words and actions throughout their life. Do I understand the degree of your confidence in determinism correctly?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:12:55] Um, no. No. Actually, that's where I diverge from. I don't know what would be a predetermined view. Um, yes. At any given moment, the future is not already written out. This is Lightman, whose writings I love is sort of alluding to Laplace. This, I don't know, 18th century smart guy, enlightenment philosopher who first stated, you know, if we knew the position of every particle go back at time, we could predict exactly how we got here today and where we'll be in the future. And the reason why it doesn't work that way is because even though this is a deterministic world, it's also a non-linear, unpredictable one. Because if chaotic system and systems, because of sensitive dependance on initial conditions, things of that sort, there's all sorts of chaotic system that makes predictability formally impossible in lots of settings, which is to say in all the interesting settings, but where people then get into trouble and saying, aha! Chaos theory proves there's free will is there's a universe of difference between something being unpredictable, no matter how much science you learn, and no matter how big of a magnifying glass you look at any phenomenon with, and in what detail it is formally unpredictable, but unpredictable doesn't mean undetermined. Um, we don't have like, a space to suddenly slip in there in the same way there's people who give me apoplexy, who argue that free will is based in quantum indeterminacy, and which makes me want to scream.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:14:37] Well, for one thing, the majority of physicists agree that sort of the Standard Model now is way down at the subatomic level. Stuff really does happen for no reason at all. And freedom of that Brownian motion as well, at a different scale, but somehow pulling free will out of that hat doesn't work, because it requires an unthinkable number of quantum events to all synchronize at once to influence like the workings of one neuron. And it doesn't work that way. And if it did, all you were coming up with is an explanation for random behavior. And we're really not trying to explain, like our moral compass with randomness. If that's your basis of your free will, you got some problems. And every model out there by which people can supposedly, at some emergent macro level, take quantum randomness and harness it for your own, you know, pleasure and free will. Agency and stuff is basically built on gibberish, and it's usually some highly dubious New Age thinkers that are going for that. So the future is not predictable because of all this non-linearity stuff in the universe. All we are is the three body problem, like out the wazoo, magnified a gazillion times. So the future is unpredictable, but once it happens, you will be able to see where the determinism came from. Once will be as was. You can see the pathway that led to that.
Henry Bair: [00:16:16] So there are so many interesting philosophical, ethical and moral implications of what you've just, you know, told us. I also, as I was reading your book, I thought about this short story writer, the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He wrote this story called What's Expected of Us. It's like two page short stories, not even really a story. It's like an ad, basically, he describes this toy. I forget what it's called a predictor or something like that, which has a simple button and a light. And in the context of the story, when the button is pressed, the light flashes one second before the action, which suggests that the device knows the user's decision before they make it. And in the story again, this leads to like a widespread existential crisis as people struggle with the implications of their actions being predetermined. Right. The story implies that a knowledge of predetermination, or at least a sense of that causes fundamental changes in human behavior. It causes decreases in motivation and a sense of inevitability about one's choices. So that's sort of what I thought about. And I'm curious in your worldview, and especially since it sounds like from an early age you came upon this realization, how does that affect how you've moved through life?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:17:28] Well, the easy answer is it is influenced me way, way too little. By the way, that's a great story, and I love the detail at the end, like a third of humanity is institutionalized and have to be force fed because why bother eating? Or it's like a great parable. It's like Kafka, sort of like nature of like meaninglessness. But okay, so if you really follow through, there's no free will if you really, really believe. Leave that and were nothing more or less than biology and environment over which we had no. If you really believe that, not only does it make no intellectual sense, it makes no ethical sense either, to ever think it is justified in and of itself for blame or punishment, or for praise or reward, or for anyone to feel as if they have earned anything. They deserve anything. They are entitled to anything. And that, like hating somebody, makes as little sense as like hating a hurricane or hating, you know, a virus that's good at getting into your lungs. And that's the only thing you could come to if there's no free will. That's the only. And I've been thinking that way since I was 14. And about once every three months I can actually, like, function that way for about 2.5 minutes, because it's incredibly difficult, and it's incredibly difficult to separate the notion of punishment and reward occasionally as good instrumental tools from them being virtues in and of themselves.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:19:08] It's like hard to not get infuriated with people and instead say, how do they become that sort of person? And it's much harder than that when someone says like, oh, nice shirt, nice lecture or whatever to, like, feel pleased with the sort of organism you turned out to be and decide that somehow you had something to do with it, and thus you somehow are entitled to like being able to cut in in the front of the line when something essential is being handed out. If you really believe this stuff, none of that is admissible. And you know, how in hell are we supposed to function with that? And again, every now and then I can do that. And when sort of I sit there and piece through it what that means just is like a trivial byproduct of this thinking is the criminal justice system makes no sense whatsoever and has to be jettisoned. It also means meritocracies make no sense whatsoever and have to be trashed just as well. And getting rid of criminal justice seems a whole lot easier to me than getting rid of, uh, meritocracy. Exactly because of the motivation problem you bring up and oh my God, but we can do it.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:20:23] We can do it because we've done it over and over and over. Historically, we figured out at some point that there's no such thing as witches who have the free will to control the weather and like thus, it doesn't make any philosophical sense to burn old ladies at the stake. And we figured that out. We subtracted free will out of our notion of like, weather and that humans could cause it. And the world became better. We figured out that epileptic seizures were not a sign of people being in bed with Satan, and instead was a neurological problem. So stopped, like, appropriately burning them at the stake. We figured out mothers don't cause schizophrenia because they unconsciously hate their child and some sort of Freudian bile. We figured out, you know, in my lifetime, when I was a kid, if the kid said sitting next to me in school wasn't learning how to read, I and the teacher and the guidance counselors and their parents and all of that would have just a free will laden interpretation. They're not motivated. They're not. They're lazy. They're not paying attention. They're stupid, whatever. And then whoa, we discovered like cortical malformations and this thing we call dyslexia and oh, it's not because they're lazy. They had no control over that. And as soon as we figured that one out, learning how to read today, if you have dyslexia is in a hell of a lot more humane world than when I was a kid, because we figured out, oh, you subtract, uh, free will out of it.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:22:02] It's just like biology with a hiccup and sort of your cortical cytoarchitecture kind of. And at every when we figure out that, like, morbid obesity can be due to a mutation and a receptor for leptin when... No, it's not that they have no self-discipline and secretly hate themselves. Each one of these, we've managed to subtract these out. And in some cases we've subtracted it out so effectively that like, it doesn't even occur to us that we don't burn witches at the stake because we figured out, oh, humans cannot freely control the weather. That's not a realm where humans have that. Yeah. Oh, I guess we figured that out four centuries ago. We don't even recognize the realms in which we figured out there's no free will. And every time we've done it and subtracted it out, the world becomes a more humane place. And then it just seems intuitively obvious. Oh, some kids just like flip, you know, closed loop letters around. And that's why they have trouble learning. It's intuitively obvious. Oh, it's a neurodevelopmental disorder. And it immediately becomes invisible and possible for us to say, oh, that's an area where we subtracted free will out of the equation. So all we have to do is keep doing the exact same thing for the next 400 years. And like the world will become much more humane.
Tyler Johnson: [00:23:29] So I when I think about, I think a sort of a similar I don't want to read necessarily motives or a particular way of understanding this into this group of people, but I still think that example is powerful. You know, there was this episode, maybe 20 or so years ago, where this troubled young man went into an Amish community and shot a bunch of children in the Amish community and the sort of, you know, traditional, I think, American response to such a clearly a tragedy. But I think the traditional response to this would be a demand for justice, right? A thirst that he be held accountable and that everyone who you know, had, even who had influenced him, be held accountable. And yet, the first thing that this Amish community did was to with, I mean, their children laying in caskets in the community was to reach out to the boys parents in love and compassion and say, oh my gosh, we are so sorry. And we are here in solidarity with you. And we could say a lot of things about that, but I think that at least part of what is going on in that exchange is this very bone deep understanding that this is not the fault of you, the parents. This is not that you didn't love your child or didn't raise him or didn't. It is, you know, whatever complicated combination of neural circuitry and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And that resonates with me at a deeply intuitive sense. I think for a lot of the same reasons that you're talking about with dyslexia and morbid obesity and, you know, quote unquote witches and whatever, all these other things.
Tyler Johnson: [00:25:06] However, at the same time, and I completely agree with you that, I mean, you don't even have to go to full on determinism if you go anywhere in that direction within a football field of that, then the current criminal justice system doesn't make any sense. And a lot of the way that we think about, you know, culpability and all of that doesn't make any sense. However, at the same time, it also seems true to me, and you alluded to this earlier, but if you go all the way there, then it seems to me that, for example, the idea of heroism becomes meaningless, right? I mean, I don't you could think about heroism in a lot of different ways, but in my mind, the way I would define heroism is something like your culture and your upbringing and your biological wiring and all of the things that would predispose you to choose a thing that is lesser, predispose you to choose the thing that is lesser. And yet some you call it an uncaused cause, but some part of you, some deeper thing inside of you, chooses something better than what you would have been predisposed to choose because of all of those reasons. But if everything is predetermined, then that very idea, I think unless there's a way out of this that I'm not seeing, but strikes me as irrational. Similarly, the idea of choosing anything for any reason other than this is just what's going to happen. Like the entire architecture of. I guess motivation is one way to think about it, but of heroism or moral nobility or courage or any of those things seems to fall apart. Do I overstate that case?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:26:43] Uh, no. That's exactly the case. Um, and, you know, all of us, like, in our privileged, accomplished world of achievement, we sort of know somewhere in there that we didn't earn our prestigious university degrees and we really didn't deserve to be a CEO. It wasn't because of our efforts in the corner office and all those versions, but the one where, you know, side by side with heroism is an issue is we don't deserve to be like loved for kindness, for being kind like forget, for being heroic, for being kind, for being empathic, for being compassionate. You know, that doesn't work either. And none of those things were earned. And if you really believe that, you have to go one step further than the Amish in that case, and not only tend to the emotional needs and the pain of the parents of the shooter, but to the shooter as well. Whoa. Like how many people died at Columbine? Was it the 20 students or so who were shot, or was it the 22, the two of the shooters who killed themselves after? Your word. And you see there's some ways of getting around this after, like the Charleston church massacre, back when Dylann Roof killed a whole bunch of black parishioners. They're like this appalling white supremacist. Within days, some of the family members were saying, we are praying for your soul. God loves you. And if God can do that, we should be able to do that as well.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:28:22] Okay, so that's one version of getting there after there was like another massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh some years ago. And the aftermath, like one of the people most affected by it saying, you know, when you look at this guy closely, he's not very smart. And he was easily manipulated by ideologues and different ways of getting to if you really think this stuff, the shooter is no different than the shooter or any of those. And that's where just our moral intuitions become so tough because like, no, they had no control over how they became who they are either. So that's sort of the philosophical extension of it. But where people freak out at that point long before they freak out over, every time they try to press the button, the bell rings. Long before that, it's the oh my God, if people started believing that way, we all just run amok. And there's actually a science by now showing that people will not run amok if they've thought long and hard about like, the world and the nature of meaning, and arrived at the conclusion that there's no free will, you don't run amok. You find just as ethical of behavior as the people who have thought equally long and hard, and concluded that we are responsible for our actions and should be held culpable and all of that.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:29:47] The next thing people freak out over is, oh my God, if everything is determined, don't bother doing anything because nothing can change. And that's the difference between determined and predetermined. We are determined and things can change. We do not choose to change though. We're changed by circumstance as a function of the sort of person we turned out to be when we experience that circumstance. But then the next one is, oh my God, so you're going to have murderers running around on the streets? No, obviously not. Like just because they had nothing to do with the fact that they turned out to be dangerous. You still got to protect society from them. And, you know, you got a car whose brakes don't work anymore, and it's dangerous. You can't let it out on the street. And what you do is you put it in the garage and you don't drive it. You don't go in every morning with a sledgehammer and slam the hood, because the car has a rotten soul and, like, hurts somebody that way. You simply quarantine it. You quarantine the absolute minimum needed to make it safe and not one inch more. And you don't moralize to the car's engine while you're doing that. And you try to, like, research root causes as to why brakes stop working now and then. And anyone who sits there and says, oh my God, this is so dehumanizing to mechanize us into being a bunch of machines. That's a hell of a lot better than sermonizing us into being sinners.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:31:19] And you know, that's the direction needs to go. And the best people thinking about, uh, sort of criminology, criminal justice is incompatible with us as being nothing more or less than the outcome of our prior luck, blah, blah. What they arrive at quarantine models that are explicitly modeled on public health models of quarantine, and whoa, that seems inconceivable. Except again, we do it all the time. Like your five year old kid is sneezing and you impose a quarantine model. You don't send them to kindergarten the next day because they're going to sneeze on all the other kids and make them sick. And the rule is, please, if your child has a cold, keep them home so they don't get everyone else sick. You protect society from your incredibly dangerous child, but you don't tell them it's their fault. They can still play with their toys when they're at home that day. You try to understand like the root causes of nose colds, and that's great. And we don't even realize free will has nothing to do with it. We've managed to not think that way. But a couple of centuries ago, illness was a manifestation of moral turpitude. And God made you sick because of your sins or the ones you were born with or the sins of your parents.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:32:41] And that explains kids born with down syndrome or like illness was sin. External beauty and internal beauty go hand in hand. Oh, and at some point we figured out, no, your kid doesn't have a nose cold because God is cursing them. More for what you did. And I don't know, it's called whatever the hell rhinoviruses do to you and you use a quarantine model, and we do that all the time in society without even realizing we subtracted free will out of that one. You get a pilot with hay fever, and during hay fever season, persons taking antihistamines and they're drowsy. And the rule is you can't fly for a few days after you've taken antihistamines because you're dangerous, not because you want to crash the plane. Oh, we subtracted, like, volition out of the fact that you're feeling drowsy and you're going to crash the plane after you take this medication. No, you just quarantine the person. It's not their fault. You try to, like, fund hay fever research or like how you get better antihistamines. And we've done that over and over, and we have done it so effectively, we don't even recognize that this was something which in the past, people would have no trouble attributing agency to, and rotten motives and deservedness of censure or ostracizing or something. And now we figured out, no, that's got nothing to do with it.
Henry Bair: [00:34:13] So I'm curious, because I'm hearing these examples and they all make a lot of sense. And the way that we I think nowhere in medicine is this more apparent in the realm of psychiatry. But the thing is, when I hear these examples, you're you've mentioned to us and in the realm of psychiatry, when we talk about subtracting free will leading to a more humane approach, we've been talking about negative things. We've been talking about pathologies. Essentially, when you're talking about dyslexia, when you're talking about ADHD or schizophrenia. But when it comes to like the more positive things, I think that's where people are a lot more uncomfortable with it. When I think about this, for example, I'm currently a medical resident. Life is really hard. I have 24 hour shifts. I don't want to go and half the time and by the end of it I'm so impatient. I want to leave. And when I think about I don't have free will, it kind of makes me just want to not go in. It's like, well, what's going to happen is going to happen. It's determined. And, uh, I should just not care anymore. But then it doesn't take me that long. A few seconds, really, when I realized, no, I'm going to choose to go in, I have to I can't I can't just sit back and do nothing. Right. So earlier during this conversation, you said that you're able to sit with the notion of lack of free will for, I don't know, a few minutes at a time for every few months. So and then before you sort of go on living your life, so am I in denial? Essentially, when you are not in those few minutes every few months, are you moving through life in denial of the lack of free will?
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:35:44] Of course, because, um, in many regards it's this huge existential drag. And, you know, a number of evolutionary biologists have thought about the fact that essentially, you could not have evolved into a species like we are to know at some point, every one of your loved ones is going to die and you're going to die as well, without having evolved a spectacular capacity for self-deception and denial and rationalization. And that's how we function. And I think one of the like wisest definitions of what clinical depression is, it's a pathological failure, the capacity to deny reality. Um, and in those cases, yeah, absolutely. And it particularly becomes problematic when going to damn, you're on call and you got to stay awake. And this is a drag and you're exhausted and you got to still function. Getting rid of a system of like punitive judgment, getting rid of criminal justice stuff and getting rid of jails and just having quarantine models. You know, that's easy. That's only going to take 3 or 4 centuries to pull off the much harder end. Is Henry exactly what you're alluding to? You got to get rid of Meritocracies also. Except then you got a danger, because just as you need to protect society from dangerous people running around on the streets, you got to protect society from like an incompetent person who was randomly plucked off the street taking out your glioblastoma tomorrow.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:37:23] You need people who are really, really good at stuff and that takes a lot of training. Subtracting out free will is fine for the damaged people who become damaging you just keep them from being damaging. You constrain them. But at the meritocracy end, whoa. It takes a hell of a lot of work for people to be good at difficult things that society needs, as opposed to people like who are no financial managers. I mean stuff that really helps other humans. It takes a lot of work. And like, you got to spend a lot of Saturday nights dealing with a roommate who's going out to party and get falling down drunk, and you're still sitting there studying and like, we're of the world, we're that's our version of, uh, sort of something that needs to be settled. And I don't know the solution for that one. The easy stuff is, ooh, let's all hold hands and not have, you know, CEOs have a thousand times the salaries of their workers. And let's get rid of inequality and all that sort of thing. And let's decide that just because you got a fancy degree, that doesn't mean you should get to be the first ones to have whatever, and to feel as if, because you are technically skilled at doing whatever you do, that that is somehow compatible with feeling a sense of more moral worth or that kind.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:38:50] Yeah, we got to do that. But the biggest problem with that is like, how are you going to motivate people to work really, really, really hard to get good at something? If it's a system where out the other end, they shouldn't feel good about themselves, they shouldn't feel as if they are intrinsically more worthy than other people because they just work their asses off to become good at what they do. I don't know the solution for that one. I mean, thank God, probably familiar. In our worlds, there's a subset of people where you don't need to solve that problem, because those are the lunatics who would pay you for the chance to do 24 hour shifts, or pay you for the chance to spend 50 years trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, or studying geckos or whatever they've just done for decades. And, you know, they're they're somehow the meritocratic world equivalents of sociopaths. They're they're immune to positive or negative feedback. All they want to do is to be left alone and just do their thing. But we know that's a small subset. We want instead to be chief residents or have 14 NIH grants grants instead of just 13 of them. Or what have I done recently and all of that motivational stuff? I don't know the solution to that. I mean, filling, you know, the dorm rooms, when you're having to stay there and study really hard, fill them with like, you know, posters, socialist realist posters of people muscled people carrying cows into factories and stuff.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:40:22] And for the common good, that's not going to do it. That's not going to be motivating enough. And it is sort of an astounding Buddhist ask to get people to a point where they could be outside observers, just feeling a sense of gratitude for how they turned out to be the sort of person through no doing of their own, who could do good. And, you know, it is a very, very rare concert pianist who could just sit there and say, whoa, that's amazing that I turned out to have fingers that just can do stuff here that makes people in an audience just transcend their cares or whatever. Whoa. I am so grateful that it turned out that way. You know, that's that's a tough one. Also. That's not that's not going to get you very far because that's a very rare mindset. Maybe the building block of it is somehow a transition from people saying to you, I'm so grateful for your kindness. I'm so grateful you're a competence that just solved my medical mystery. I'm so grateful for your compassion, all of that. I'm so grateful that you happened to turn out to be the sort of person who is kind, and who turned out to be in a position where you could be kind to me, or how you turned out to be the sort of person who could figure out why my electrolytes are fucked up and solved that problem.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:41:54] Maybe if everyone shifts to doing that, I'm so grateful you turned out to be the sort of person who maybe that's kind of a stepping stone for us, really beginning to think, wow, I'm grateful that for no reasons I had anything to do with I turned out to be good at like, tenant law and like helping out people being screwed over by landlords. I turned out to be a good sociologist. I turned out to be a good, you know, whatever version of that, and somehow turning somebody else's gratitude that you turned out to be who you are into somehow feeling it yourself while somehow stepping back from a sense that as a result of that, you're more morally worthy human. So yeah, that one is going to be 5 or 6 centuries and like some sort of like Buddhist unselfing about which I know absolutely zero and I am as unspiritual. As an organism can be, but that one's going to be so much harder than just keep dangerous people off the streets. But don't tell them that they're rotten people. They just crappy luck. That one's easy.
Henry Bair: [00:43:11] You know, absent of any clear solution here, strong solution, then let me ask you this question, which is in this context, now that you've thought so much about free will or the lack of free will, and you actually genuinely, you know, believe this, what then to you, does it mean to live well? What does human flourishing look like in a world without free will? Does it even exist? Does it even mean anything to live well?
Tyler Johnson: [00:43:35] Okay. Yeah, that that's the thing I was going to say. Is that the thing I mean, you open your book talking about turtles all the way down and the I think the, the sort of like turtle at the base of everything is that, I mean, there's probably a way that I'm not seeing that it does, but the, the very idea of ethics, the very idea of should like the imperative sense doesn't make any sense. In a fully deterministic world, there is no should because there just is.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:44:04] And there certainly isn't a shouldn't because alongside there not being free will, there's not free won't either. Like, okay, that's like an incredibly rude, dirty trick to ask me. Like, so where do you get meaning out of this when we only have a few minutes left? Um, so maybe let's, let's run over a bit because I can, I can get a little bit late to this next thing. Oh, my God, like the existential void. Why bother? Why do anything? And, you know, I spent five years fussing over this book, writing it, and I realized at least like four and a half years of it was just procrastinating over. So what's the punchline at the end? If the punchline is tough luck, this is how the world works. Suck it up. You really didn't earn your degree. Okay, that's really a fun ending. That's like, as palatable. As, like.
Tyler Johnson: [00:45:00] Hotcakes.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:45:01] Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, I can't end with that. And then it finally struck me that by definition, if we're sitting here bummed out by the possibilities that we did not earn, the things that we take pleasure and meaning from, if the people who would listen to something like this would reach the same conclusion, if the people who would read philosophical tracks reach that same conclusion. If you're bummed out by the fact that there's no free will, by definition it means that you're one of the lucky ones. Because another way of stating that is you're one of the ones for reasons you had no control over whatsoever, wound up being treated better than average by life. And for most people, finding out there's no free will is whoa, that's great. I'm not the cause of my child's schizophrenia. That's great. I got born into a country where being born in poverty virtually guarantees I would still be in poverty as an adult. It's not my fault that by society's standards, I didn't have the ability to pull myself up by my bootstraps. And like for most people, the notion that there's no free will is like, liberating. We're this like hothouse variety, delicate plants of privilege. If lack of free will is making us bummed out because it's mostly saying, um, we didn't earn the things that we're treating being treated better than average for.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:46:34] So like, that's kind of something we gotta deal with because we're the lucky ones in that regard. But still, that doesn't get to like at the bottom of the whole thing. Christ, we're biological machines. We're nothing more or less like, what do we do with that one? And near the end of the book, there's like one paragraph that I think in retrospect, I've now spent about 50 years writing, which was, yeah, we're biological machines. We're weird ones because we're the only biological machines that could know we're biological machines and know that there are just buttons and levers, but we're biological machines. And even though it is just intellectually bankrupt to believe that anything good or bad can ever happen to a machine, it's preferable when good things happen to us machines. And like that's all I've gotten to. And that stands up for about 2.5 seconds to like intellectual dissection. And it's like the only irrationality that can sustain me, which is that makes no sense at all to try to be kind to other machines, but nonetheless, somehow or other, it's capable for machines to be treated better than worse and for that to matter. That's it for insight. And that's sure as hell doesn't sustain me.
Tyler Johnson: [00:48:07] There's a part of me that feels like we've spent this conversation, and you've spent your life. If you're in the proverbial cave, it's like you've stepped out of the cave and seen what life is like outside of the cave, and then have decided that all of us, either by necessity or by, well, not decision, but that somehow it's almost better to be in the cave most of the time. But to be aware enough of what's going on outside of the cave to keep things in the cave running in a way that is more humane, because the full life of embracing what's outside of the cave is almost inconceivable, right? Like because you're talking about this like even, as you said, even that sort of flimsy read of it's better for the biological machines to be overall in a state of enjoyment rather than a state of suffering. Everything. It's just all turtles, right at some point. But the idea of what it actually means, if it's all turtles, is almost incomprehensible, or at least unworkable in any sort of day to day. I need to go live my life sense.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:49:14] Yep. I mean, if nothing else, Henry wouldn't show up for work. Um, and like, where would that get us? And him and his patience and all? Yeah.
Tyler Johnson: [00:49:25] The next time he doesn't want to show up, I'm going to have him send you an email and get you to write a note to his program director that says, actually, this is why he didn't show up today.
Henry Bair: [00:49:37] He had a momentary lapse in his denial of being a volitional slave to his genetics, neurobiology and environment. Yes, and was thus paralyzed with a mix of existential dread and ennui.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:49:47] Yes. So he's sitting amid despair and existential freedom and the freedom of despair. Yeah. Like it's. You can't do this much at the time. You can't just the tiny percentage. So save it for when it matters. Like save it for when you feel like you are confident. You understand why somebody just did what they did and were you going to judge them on that basis? Because almost certainly whatever you think was the cause of why they did that, you're wrong. And the answer is something that they actually had. No. Save it for where it matters. Save it for where you're being judgmental, or save it for when you're feeling as if you really earned the rights to be pretty damn impressed with yourself and entitled and like, you know, just like, try to push back against that now and then and just keep in mind, it's very, very easy for us by now to believe there's no such thing as witches like that. One's easy, like push against these ones, and these ones may become easy somewhere down the line also.
Tyler Johnson: [00:50:59] Well. We are so grateful for this conversation. I'm going to be spending the next week trying to figure out exactly what I'm really supposed to do with this.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:51:11] Well, call me up when you figure it out, because I sure don't know.
Speaker4: [00:51:16] Okay, well, this strikes me as a thing that even though it scares me, that it feels to me like it very quickly becomes something like nihilism. The paradox of it is that sort of like yeast in bread, even though that might be true, if that's all that you did was was live by this. It also strikes me that even just a little bit of this goes so much towards lending something that feels an awful lot like grace, both in terms of dissolving your own arrogance and in terms of fostering compassion towards the people who need it the most. And exactly what that paradox means. I honestly at this point have no idea, but it still feels very true.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:51:58] Yeah, it's this oxymoronic. Oh my God, what a radical change we need to have in our thinking. Yeah, do this revolutionary stuff one baby step at a time, because otherwise it's too hard, right? Yeah. And get little mini pitfalls of a sense of grace.
Speaker4: [00:52:18] That's right.
Tyler Johnson: [00:52:19] Well, thank you so much. That is something the world, heaven knows, needs much more of. And for that, we thank you.
Dr. Robert Sapolsky: [00:52:26] Oh, thanks.
Henry Bair: [00:52:31] Thank you for joining our conversation on this week's episode of The Doctor's Art. You can find program notes and transcripts of all episodes at the Doctor's Art.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, rate and review our show available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tyler Johnson: [00:52:49] We also encourage you to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy the program. And if you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.
Henry Bair: [00:53:03] I'm Henry Bair
Tyler Johnson: [00:53:05] and I'm Tyler Johnson. We hope you can join us next time. Until then, be well.