Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
Robert M. Sapolsky
One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences. Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: we may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at base of human behavior, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there's some separate self telling our biology what to do. more
528 pages, Hardcover
First published Penguin Press
4.29
Rating
1793
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334
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Robert M. Sapolsky
27 books 4152 followers
Robert Morris Sapolsky is an American neuroendocrinology researcher and author. He is currently a professor of biology, and professor of neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.Community reviews
In the 15th century, a person with epilepsy would have a high chance of being burned at stake for being a witch. At that time, seizures were viewed as a sign of the devil, and as such, epileptics (people with epilepsy) were very commonly accused of witchcraft and murdered for it. Particularly if they also happened to be female. At present, very few people would ascribe an epileptic seizure to moral or religious impropriety. We view epilepsy as a neurological condition and therefore well outside the individual’s freely enacted volition. more
This is a very technical book, yet Sapolsky made a considerable effort to break it down for the average reader. I have a bachelor's in Psychology and have read Dennett and some of the other authors Sapolsky mentioned, so many of the experiments mentioned were familiar to me already, and I have given a fair amount of thought to the free will debate in my personal life. He's good at timing his jokes to keep you interested when things get dense. Once, he even tells you to just skip an entire paragraph and come back to it later if you need it, which was great (I had no idea what that paragraph meant, anyway). I can't speak to the science of the book, as to its accuracy or the methodology of the experiments. more
The following is an updated version. The original one can be found below. This book is a misguided attempt at moral reasoning based on scientific facts. Lacking a philosophical framework that can establish connections between morality and science, the author relied on his own rather lenient intuition without realizing it. One might say that he is another victim who falls on false philosophical questions. more
This book is a real winner for me — not only pop science at its best, but also giving scientific credibility to something I have long believed: the idea that the great majority of our actions (the author would say all of our actions) are determined by A) who we are genetically and B) what our life experiences have been. The author’s conclusion is that there is no such thing as free will. Obviously this brings up some thorny issues, such as whether or not people who have achieved a lot in life deserve all their good fortune, and how punishment can be moral if people don’t truly have choices. (His answers: no and no, but the fact that punishment is not moral doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, because the rest of society still needs to be protected even if what the criminal does isn’t his fault. ) I’m not enough of a scientist to critique the science in the book, but I will say that everything he says supports everything that I’ve always thought. more
30 years ago, chaos theory was trying to tell us that a squirrel sneezing in the Midwest could cause a La Nina in the Pacific Northwest. Now this guy wants to tell us that whether we turn right or left has already been predetermined. I'm tired of this scientific extremism. The average person has less free will then he or she may think. Maybe he should explain that. more
Steps to concluding that free will doesn’t exist:1. Read about the current science of animal behavior (p. 1 - 125)2. Start to understand the ways in which we are shaped by a bunch of biological and environmental factors3. Realize that we didn’t have control over any of those influences4. more
I'm a big fan of Sapolsky, but I fear he's about to publish a wrong thesis. What he doesn't seem to get, imho, blinded as he is by physicalism, is that free will does exist - it's just that it exists not at a biological level of reality, but at a social one. It comes with the self-ownership of a person, as delimited by its social identity, not by its skin. Free will is a social construct, and it's a fundamental one for many other social constructs that our civilisation is made of. more
This book failed to change my mind about anything. Which is disappointing. I was expecting a solid argument because I have a high opinion of Robert Sapolsky. But I spent the whole book shouting to myself, "We don't even seem to agree on what free will is. " You can't even build and argument if we can't agree on what we're talking about. more
A compelling and timely book. At times, it delves deeply into technical details, discussing tables, cell membranes, and chemistry. But most of the time it is fun. From the 5th century BCE, Parmenides posited that the Earth wasn't flat, using the observation that the North Star appears lower in the sky when one travels south. Yet, it took millennia for the majority to acknowledge the Earth's roundness. more
تخيل حفل تخرج في الجامعة. على الرغم من التفاهات والتقليدية والأسلوب الهابط ، يوجد أيضا بعض السعادة، الفخر. العائلات التي تبدو تضحياتها الآن تستحق كل هذا العناء. الخريجون الذين كانوا أول من أنهى دراستهم الثانوية في أسرهم. أولئك الذين يجلس آباؤهم المهاجرون هناك متوهجين معلنين أن اعتزازهم بالحاضر ليس على حساب اعتزازهم بماضيهم. more
Wait. You're saying John Calvin was right. What the hell am I supposed to with that. I've commented on this book before reading because hearing lectures and interviews on YouTube piqued my interest. When some unrelated physicists pointed out that if you're a materialist it's the most sensible conclusion. more
350 years ago, Spinoza had it right. Mostly, at least. In some ways, he was a product of his time (for example, his gendered language, or asserting that suicide came as a result of a weak mind that has been overcome). However, in many ways, he was so ahead of his time that we, nearly four-hundred years later, have only now come to meet him. One respect in which Spinoza was spot-on was in his belief in, and arguments for, determinism. more
Determined is a book which manages to articulate and justify thoughts and ideas that I've been wrestling with for some time now. Having recently read Sam Harris' essay on free will, and now this book by Sapolsky, I somewhat uncomfortably now feel like my thoughts on the subject are proven correct, or as close as we're currently capable of at the moment. Here Sapolsky does an amazing job of going over the relevant science as well as discussing many of the major concerns regarding the implications of confronting the absence of free will. Coming to terms with incompatible determinism leads to some dark places and disturbing implications. I think that the truth is always worth promoting, especially if it's uncomfortable. more
When writing a review on Goodreads, it always amuses me to see the checkbox "My review has spoilers". That's because I could never imagine checking it off for a nonfiction book. What would be the point. Why hide a piece of knowledge that would make others' lives better. Well, now I get why it's there. more
I can’t stress enough how important Robert Sapolsky’s work is. He debunks all societally embedded concepts with properly controlled studies and without it sounding dry. I’ve read his Behave book at least twice and will definitely be rereading this book to really retain everything it has to offer . more
Tremendously complicated and complex topic. I just began, first by skimming the book, and now reading. ‘Determined’ is already groundbreaking. Sapolsky makes a convincing argument for an idea that will be unacceptable to most who encounter it, but liberating for those who find a way to wield it. How you’ll react to Sapolsky’s message is probably already determined. more
Comprehensive and well written, but also not really the conclusive or definitive statement on free will like the press tour has made it sound like. more
Disappointing. Not a great closing argument. Not sure if there are more straw-men or carefully curated datum points. more
Sapolsky dovetails research and insight into a staggering refutation of free will. And I feel kinda okay with this, especially given the conclusion - hatred and resentment are useless. Besides the dopamine hit, besides the in-group closeness fostered by out-group hatred, it does nothing for us as a human race to hate or resent those who wrong us, as people are not responsible for the people they are. I've been groping my way to this conclusion my whole life. Little thoughts, like how the grenade that killed my great uncle led to my need to pop 10 mg lexapro daily through a multi-generational cycle of abuse and alcoholism. more
What a fantastic book. The subject of ‘free will’ and the scope of what the book covered is too vast for me to attempt and succinctly explain in a few lines so I will skip. But I still have a few cents to spare so here you go. Absolutely loved the entertaining writing. Sapolsky’s sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek humour may come across as very opinionated and cocky. more
Номер едно книга в моята класация за 2023. Недостатък е, че бележките и източниците заемат половината съдържание на книгата, но това са рисковете на наистина научно базираната литература. Тъкмо когато очаквах още 50% от Робърт Саполски, книгата свърши. Авторът, в целия си цвят, разбива на пух и прах недетерминистичните шарлатани и политически коректните компатибилисти, типично с неговото невероятно увличащо обяснение на сложни процеси. Каквито в невробиологията има безброй. more
This easily became my favorite book by Robert Sapolsky. I’ve heard some mixed reviews about the book, but this was by far my favorite. His other books took me forever to read just because I’d get so bored, but I think I liked this one even more because it had a bunch of philosophy and psychology rather than biology. There is a chunk of the book dedicated to neuroscience that was a struggle to get through, but other than that, I read this big book pretty fast because I enjoyed it so much. Sapolsky argues on the side of determinism and that free will is mostly an illusion. more
This was a difficult read. Not only is it very technical, it takes a lot of processing power to overcome the intuition that the book refutes. Probably a better read when you’re prepared for it . more
DNF at 36% of this excruciatingly pedantic 17-hour audiobook experience. I reject the basic premise of the book, so listening for another nearly 11 hours is a task I'm freely deciding not to do. more
Let's start by saying that I am absolutely unable to contradict the author one way or the other, because I have not studied enough to do so. And now my strictly personal opinion empirically based on nothing: I liked the first part of the text very much, because in addition to building on several of the things I had already learned, it carries the whole thing forward by including a number of more modern research and uptodate critiques, that allowed me to understand the title of the book and some of the topics the author covered much better. Key phrase: "Unpredictable doesn't mean Undetermined. " The second part of the text, on the other hand, left me a bit more doubtful, but not so much because of the conclusions to which the author arrives at, but rather because of the premises and that is, the concept of morality itself, which seems to me, especially in comparison to that of Free Will discussed at length earlier, a bit too vague. That said, for which I take full responsibility, I wolfed this book down. more
It wasn’t much of a leap for me to strongly consider that Sapolsky is right in his claim that we do not have free will. The simple idea that D happened because of C before it and that C got there because of A and B and on and on to no end is a fundamental premise in his argument and not difficult for me to grasp. My major takeaway from his last book “Behave” was to not ask what a specific gene does, but how a specific gene is expressed in a specific environment. So building on that, from the micro to the macro there’s an equation where all possible things are considered and the result is what makes up our decisions, regardless of our ability to process (or grasp) the entirety of the equation. And that result lands where our free will would have. more
Surprised by Sapolsky taking on the topic of free will, I was eager to read it, hoping my intuitive belief in free will would come away unscathed. It did, luckily, but only to some extent. The mixed feelings I'm left with I'll try to describe. First of all, hats off for Sapolsky to venture out in this field that many academics dare to touch not even with a stick. It's insightful, entertaining and seriously thought provoking. more
I loved this book. Sapolsky's rigor is so above and beyond that I find reading his books incredibly relaxing for my skeptic brain, because he has demonstrated a strong commitment to two of the most important and weirdly rare principles for scientific thought: an emphasis on broadly replicated effects over one-off underpowered findings, and an active seeking and addressing of the opposing point of view. Side note about tone, I LOVE IT when scientists do their bit to bring down the classist tyranny of prescriptive grammar, tone, and style. If you believe rational and clear content matters more than showing you're able to adhere to sanctioned customs you'll probably be a far more interesting and innovative writer, and you've got my vote. Sapolsky uses slang, bad words, raw emotional content that he then introspects honestly and intelligently about, and personal opinion about very controversial topics placed in the context of the existing evidence on the matter. more
This book deeply changed me and my thoughts on the human condition. It’s changed how I think about my flaws, my virtues, my entire personality. It’s taught me why we need to emphasise with everyone – even the most despicable, repugnant people among us, such as Kansas City Chiefs fans. Sapolsky rocked my shit and I’m a better person for having read this book. more
It is an absolutely provocative, highly scientifically backed-up book that makes you reconsider almost every decision, thought, and judgement you’ve had and you’ll have in the future. Highly recommended. . more