Transcript for #360 — We Really Don’t Have Free Will?

Welcome to the Make and Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Make and Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, I wasn't going to have much of a housekeeping, but just before turning on the mic, I learned that Danny Coniman has died. What a munch, he was. I didn't know him well. I really only hung out with him a few times. We did pick one blog interview a long time ago. I think 2011 or so. That's on my website somewhere. And episode 150 of this podcast is audio from an event we did in New York at the Beacon Theater. which I recall being a lot of fun Danny was 90 today when he died so he would have been about five years ago he would have been 85 just a beautiful mind and really good company and again I did not know him well I have people close to me who were very close to him and obviously I'm quite sorry for their loss life is short even if you make it to 90 So let's use the time wisely. And that's what I did earlier this week on a spoke with Robert Sapolsky. Robert is another extraordinary scientist. He is the author of several works of nonfiction, including a primates memoir, The Have, which was really a wonderful book. And most recently determined a science of life without free will. In addition to being one of the only scientists who has fully accepted the implications of science as we know it, on this topic, Robert is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurological sciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University. And the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation, quote, genius grant. And today we dig deep into the topic of free will. We speak about the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Denett, complexity and emergence, so-called downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism. We discuss the work of Benjamin LeBet, Or the bay, however that's pronounced, neither of us knows. The primacy of luck, historical change and attitudes about free will, the implications for ethics and criminal justice, the psychological satisfaction of punishing bad people, understanding evil, punishment and reward as tools, whether we have to give up on meritocracy, the consequences of physical beauty, the logic of reasoning, and other topics. As always, on the subject of free will, if at any time, you don't like the way you feel thinking about these things. If my conversation with Robert feels like it is literally driving you crazy, by all means, pick another podcast today. I have learned through experience that this topic really more than any other is destabilizing for some number of people. Some people appear vulnerable to having the notion of free will undermined. In any way, I can't say I understand that, but my inbox proves to me that it's true. So, if you're one of these people, or discover that you are over the course of this conversation, by all means, pull the brakes, and now I bring you Robert Sapolsky. I am here with Robert Sapolsky. Robert, thanks for joining me again.

So we attempted to record a conversation some months ago, and our robot overlords were not kind to us, and schedules being what they are. We have taken this long to get back to it. But as you've had a proper book tour in the meantime, and perhaps talk to yourself to death on the topic of free will. I'm going to drag you back to it because people want to hear us converge on that.

Yes. Well, I think that there might be something we disagree about here in terms of the, you know, how we live with the implications of what we agree about the erratically. So that could be interesting to uncover. But our mind people, the book is determined a science of life without free will. And it's a great book. It's a very large book. I like the book I wrote on free will, which is a effectively and long essay or a pamphlet. You have written the proper multi-hunter page book. And parts of it really are laugh out loud, funny. It's really, it's just a great read. And you review a lot of relevant neuroscience or just a lot of neuroscience, which in many cases may not be relevant. I think we both agree that it's a pretty simple argument that would put one end out of free will and not put one end out of just as existence, but that it's even a coherent concept. Let's take it from the top and perhaps we can start with a definition of free will. What do you think you're denying the existence of in your book?

Right. Right. And this is In the philosophical literature, there's a conception that is often derided as a belief in libertarian free will. The notion that one could have done otherwise, if you just re-wound the movie of your life to precisely the frame that you are in a few minutes ago, the idea is that If you, the conscious agent, decided to think or feel or do otherwise, you could have, you could have, you could have, you could change the movie of your life. And there are many people in philosophy who deny that that's the right notion of free will. That's not a type of free will worth having. And it's birth, this whole literature on, compatibleism, which, you know, I think you and I both feel that, compatibleists, like, denit, simply change the topic. Do you remember my analogy to Atlantis that I hit Dan with?

I mean, this may or may not fully cover it for you, but it sort of does for me. So I just I asked Dan to imagine that we lived in a world where more or less everyone believed in the lost kingdom of Atlantis. And what I see compatible is like Dan doing is coming along saying, you know, don't worry, Atlantis is real. It just happens to be the island of Sicily. And then they go on to argue Sicily answers to most of the claims that people have made through the ages about Atlantis. Now, it's just obvious how to glance that this isn't quite true because much of what people have said about Atlantis is really quite crazy and incompatible with any history of Sicily. In particular, they're an amort of the idea that there was an advanced civilization that disappeared under water, right? So people really are confused. And the notion of libertarian free will, while it is, in fact, indefensible, as well, you know, you know, go on to discuss. It really is what people feel they have most of the time. They really, they feel they have it, they feel they can decide to do other than they did, despite what you said about the deterministic implications of neurons. And they think they could have done otherwise not due to randomness. You know, that's not what anyone feels is governing their conscious acts of willing. And in addition to that, they want to hold other people accountable for their behavior in a way that it isn't just a matter of because it's a good way to influence the future behavior of other people, but because they really think people are the ultimate causes of how they behave. So this has ethical implications and legal implications. What has it been like for you to make your case, since you published the book? What collisions with people have become predictable and what arguments do you find? The least persuasive, the most frustrating. What does it like to be out there?

He's saying that, and he's also saying that it is politically and socially dangerous to push this argument too far, which is ironic. I mean, he's somebody who would be very quick to separate political concerns for many claims about truth, you know, philosophical or scientific in other contexts. But in this one, he really does tend to conflate them. He just says, this is bad for us to think this way. to rob people of their sense of that they are the true roots of their conscious agency. That is something undermining of personal and social projects that we really have to figure out how to shore up.

Well, we'll get into the these psychological and social implications of accepting this view and I do think that you and I might have a slightly different experience there and in a different set of intuitions, but before we do perhaps tell me why the common claim around complexity theory and free will being an emergent property thereof Why doesn't that knock you back on your heels and convince you that this is all just, it's just a matter of, are not having a completed science of the mind. If we did have one, we may well find a space for precisely the free will people think they have.

Yeah, well, let's linger on this point because you're introducing here a claim that you're dismissing us as spurious, and it's a claim that I've never quite understood, but I've heard serious people make it, or people at least who have real scientific and philosophical bone-of-feet days. They've made this claim of downward causation from, you know, higher level causation, you know, emergent properties that are not simply the sum, however, you know, bewildering in their complexity of their micro-level constituents. All right, so you take a brain and all of its parts and their various states, right? So you have a neurophysiological soup that has structure, right? You have all the connections between neurons and receptor densities and all of the respective charges at one moment in time. And as you just pointed out, this whole system becomes capable of things that no individual part is capable of on its own, and it wouldn't even make sense to talk about such a capacity in terms of a single unit, right? In the same way that you've just said by your analogy to water, there is no wetness of a single molecule because the grosser property of wetness, the emergent property of a system of water molecules, is simply their disposition to slide freely past one another when water is in its liquid state. And if you only have one molecule, It's not sliding freely past anything because it's just one of it. Yep. But it is still true to say that in the case of water, what that water does is still entirely a story of what all those individual molecules do as causal agents in relation to one another at their microscopic level, right? So it's like all the gross level phenomena, even the emergent phenomena that you can't conceptualize without reference to the whole, It is simply a story of what's happening at the bottom level. So the reductionism still runs through. And there's no downward causation of a higher level property influencing the behavior of its lower level constituents. And in the case of a brain, there's nothing that emerges on the basis of neuronal complexity that then exerts its effects downward on to simpler constituents, whether it's neurons or their behaviors, In any way other than simply being more of a story of all of those individual units doing what those individual units are doing all the while.

Well, let's linger on this analogy you just gave, for instance, you just gave, because it does pry at some of the intuitions here. So we have this experience of being minds, you know, where language using primates, but so much of our world and its influence upon us is a matter of ideas, it's a matter of talk, you know, with others and talk, you know, internalize talk to ourselves, our own thoughts. And so as you just pointed out, you know, you and I could each experience a mere sentence spoken in our direction or, you know, decoded from our computer screen, you know, we open our browser windows and we both look at the cover of the New York Times And if we saw on that cover a headline which read, there's been a nuclear bomb dropped on Manhattan and no communication coming from the city as of the moment, but millions are presumed dead. Those are just words. Simple sentence, and it would enter our minds again through our eyes or ears. It gets decoded through language circuits. If we can find no reason to resist its implications, which is to say no reason to doubt it. If it really is the New York Times, we didn't go to a fake website. It's not April 1st. We're not being punked. Our computer hasn't been hacked. etc., whatever we have to fight our way past to give these phonemes credibility. Once they have it, and we believe that this sentence is actually mapable onto the world, so we are engaged in this act of cognition, then the floodgates open, as you point out, in a downward way, I mean the full physiology of panic and horror, etc., would immediately change the way we feel and what we do next. And the temptation here, because given the richness of this experience, let's leave aside for a second that this cascade of effects offers absolutely no indication of free will, right? I mean, you and I would helplessly be moved by this stimulus, but leave that aside. People feel like the role of mind here, the sort of ethereal strata of what it's like, the qualitative character of our experience, simply can't be a bunch of complicated, billiard balls slamming into whatever's next in line. So this downward causation picture suggests that there's something more complicated and more ethereal and more abstract that has been born based on all the complexity. And now it moves downward and it's moving downward. It's in position. onto, you know, our mere physiology is something other than the microchoralists of mind, all the while buzzing, you know, merely physiological way all the time, you know, one domino hitting the next. And that's the thing that's never made sense to me. This turn about, you know, mysterious, you know, even magical way where mind is imagined, Many of these people seem to agree that mind on some level is what the brain is doing and yet this reversal of causality seems to invoke a kind of magic that is something other than what the brain is doing all the while as a physical system.

Well, because of course, the more abstract thing, even the most abstract thing that anyone can conceive, has at its level of neural representation, the same billiard ball characteristics. So if you and I can have a discussion about prime numbers, I say to you, there's been proven that there must be an infinite number of prime numbers. There's no final prime number. and you dust off your mathematics and you say, yeah, I agree with that strange, right? And that's pretty amazing. It's amazing that we think we know that. We have, you know, that we would bet a lot of money on that being true. Right. So what what the hell are we talking about? We're talking about something that has Yeah, obvious physical instantiation out in the real world. I just, here I'll give you a concept that will have representation somewhere in your brain. The prime number larger than the largest one, our species will ever find. Even if we live a trillion years, there's going to be a limit to the number of prime numbers we consciously find and articulate to one another. I'm now referencing the very next one, whatever that next one is. That's an intelligible concept that has some representation in our brains now, but that the representation is a state of our brains. It is we're talking about complicated billiard balls.

Hmm. Okay, so let's have a sidebar conversation here about what we're not denying because people here in any argument against free will, it kind of nullification of various distinctions they care about and I think are right to care about. And this is, this goes by denotes, compatibleist change of subject, the sorts of free will worth wanting, right? So we're not denying that there's a distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior, for instance, or the distinction between a person who's prefrontal cortex is perfectly intact and, you know, healthfully tuned and is a model citizen and one who can do none of those things because he's got brain damage and zero impulse control and has a variety of you know, syndromes that will, for which we now have clinical names. So maybe talk from a moment about what remains. Once you strip out this, the magic here, what is so important about us? I mean, what, what is the neural correlate of our humanness, right? I mean, where is civilization in the brain? Where is, where is being a mench in the brain? How would you, what, what, what don't you want to damage if you want to be, a person of high moral integrity and productivity and a good friend, a good husband, etc.

Because the general picture here is that we're claiming there is no space in the physics of things and the biology of things for the free will people think they have to be hiding. I would also say there's no space for the ego to be hiding, but let's leave that aside. I mean, I think it's really the obverse of the same coin, but so there's, you know, take the simplest description here. I mean, what people have are their genes, you know, their genomes, and the bodies and brains built upon that information. And everything the environment has done to that system, causally, from conception onward. So, you know, within uturo and once you are born and every moment thereafter, you are collisions with the world and with other people. have tuned your body and brain, then therefore body and mind to be in precisely the state it's in now, right? And there's no other stream of causes. I mean, I would just add that even if there were, that doesn't give scope for this freedom people think they have because even if you wanted to integrate a immortal soul into this clockwork, you didn't pick your soul. You didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes. You didn't pick the world into which you were born. you've got no responsibility for any of that and you also didn't pick your soul if you have one right and you can't I can't I love that point of yours that you've made it but we can even get to pick our souls that's right so you can't you can't account for why you didn't have the soul of Ted Bundy and presumably if you did you'd also be raping and killing women and making that your life project So talk about epigenetics for a second. I mean, I haven't some people argue that epigenetics offers an alibi here for freedom seekers.

So where does predictability come here into the picture here? So I think many of us have argued and it seems patently true that if if our behavior were totally predictable, like if I could have in advance shown you a transcript of everything we were going to say in this conversation, down to the last um, and uh, and chromatical error. That would prove that we were automaton in some sense, right? That, you know, this is just Laplace's demon applied us. See, it's all, it's all determined. Uh, it's just one domino hitting the next. But people put a lot of stock in the fact that we don't live in that sort of world. It's we're not perfectly predictable in part because even fully determined systems or fully deterministic ones are so complex that you know, we just you can never measure the the initial conditions such that you could predict foreign advance and again, like this, like predicting the weather. on 52's days from today, but there's also its thought contributions that are random, whether this is quantum indeterminacy or some other sort of randomness. Again, I've never understood why people imagine that gives scope to free will, because what you're introducing is some version of rolling the dice. If your behavior is pushed around by the rolls of the dice, I don't know why anyone feels like that confers greater responsibility to them. By exactly what I did talk about this variable of predictability versus unpredictability because to my eye unpredictability doesn't actually create space for free will it just creates the enduring mystery which I agree We have and live under which is we don't know what's going to happen next but you know I would extend that to you don't know what you're going to think next right and that for me that actually undermines the the lived experience of free will right so

If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.