The other day I had the pleasure of catching up with a close friend whom I hadn’t seen in half a year. The catch? A three-hour commute each way. On the drive back, I had a rare opportunity to listen to an entire podcast in one sitting.
Recently, I’ve been digging more into Alex O’Connor, a brilliant young British podcaster. Alex has a dual degree in philosophy and theology from St. John’s College at the University of Oxford and has been uploading YouTube videos since he was an undergraduate. He’s remarkably sharp, thoughtful, and articulate; seeing a Gen-Z take on public intellectual heavyweights and renowned academics with such thorough argumentation is a terrific way to pass the time.
This time, I put on his podcast with Dr. Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky is an American neuroscientist, biologist, and author known for his work on stress and behavior. He’s a professor at Stanford University and has written several popular science books, the most recent of which is “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.” This was the topic of Alex’s conversation with Robert; both Robert and Alex reject free will. Their 90-minute conversation can be roughly split into two chunks. In the first half, they examine the various arguments against free will. Alex and Robert have very different academic backgrounds, which resulted in very different conceptual frameworks for free will. The second half was dedicated to exploring the implications of rejecting free will—in other words, what happens once we accept that we do not have free will?
I’d now like to quickly touch on the first half of their discussion. Alex and Robert laid out a number of interesting arguments, ranging from physics to philosophy to neuroscience. Although I hope to eventually explore all of these arguments, I’d like to briefly propose my own understanding of free will. Of course, I recognize that I haven’t engaged with almost any of the literature that has been published on this topic for (quite literally) thousands of years, so my understanding is most likely fairly naïve. But this perspective is by no means immutable; I’m constantly looking to update and challenge my beliefs (and if I’m wrong, I want to know).
First, I suppose it’s worth conceptualizing free will. Suppose we have some set of options, let us call it S. Say I choose option o in S. If I have free will, then I selected option o because I wanted to; my decision to select option o can be motivated mostly internally. With free will, we are able to freely navigate among the set of possible options and choose whichever one we please.
Most people on both sides of the debate would agree that external factors may influence your choice, but those in favor of free will argue that the decision can be made mostly or completely independent of any external factors. There’s often an argument people make that goes something like, “Well, I chose to drink tea, but I could have instead chosen to drink coffee.”
Well, no, you couldn’t have.
Suppose I just walked into my favorite fast-food restaurant and looked up at the menu. I’m deciding whether I want to order a burger or a chicken sandwich. I am presented with the option set consisting of a burger and a sandwich, and I make a choice. But am I intrinsically in control of the fact that I chose to, say, order a burger?
Let’s say I provided some sort of justification for why I chose the burger. For example, I claim I chose the burger because I had chicken for lunch today and didn’t want to have chicken again. There are two issues that pop up here. First, if I make such a claim, I’m assuming that this aversion to repetition is indeed why I ordered the burger. But there’s no reason to believe that the reason I think I do things is actually the reason I do them. There’s plenty of fascinating research on this—for example, the work of Nobel-prize-winning neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. Libet discovered that there was a consistent buildup of electrical activity in the brain, which he termed the “readiness potential,” beginning around half a second before the subjects consciously decided to act. His research suggests that unconscious processes might precede and potentially determine conscious decision-making.[1]
The second issue arises if we accept my justification. Let’s assume it was indeed the case that I had chicken for lunch and decided against doubling up on poultry. But all this does is push the fundamental question a layer back. Now we must ask, was I in control of my decision to eat poultry for lunch? Accepting my initial justification leads to an infinite (or, at the very least, a very, very, very large finite) recursion. One might reasonably object that infinite recursion doesn’t, at least in full probability, prove the absence of free will. But given that this infinite recursive process—for any arbitrary choice—leads us to a set of some initial conditions that were clearly out of our control (genetics, time and place of birth, parental environment, etc.), it seems very likely.
Furthermore, I claim that if we rewind the clock a thousand times and put me in the fast-food joint with the same conditions, I would have chosen to order a thousand burgers. This is what’s called determinism, and is why I reject the “I chose tea, but I could have chosen coffee” argument. Given the same prior state of the world, if you were put in an infinite loop, you would choose tea every time. Determinism is the philosophical concept that all events, including human actions and decisions, are ultimately determined by preceding causes and natural laws, making the future predictable based on these factors. As a quick aside, determinism is still a fiercely-debated topic in philosophy—I certainly hope to do some more writing in the future on why I believe determinism to be true.
Another fair question one might have at this point is, what if I had no justification for my choice? What if I just chose the burger at random? There are two things to say about this. First, the choice you make at any given moment is governed by the state of the world at the prior moment. In that sense, your choice is never truly “random.” Again, I still maintain that, given the same set of conditions, you will always make the same choice. Furthermore, there’s no free will in randomness. If the choice were truly random, it would be, by definition, fully out of your control, and you’d still have no free will at all! Rather, you’d be a slave to chaos.
Perhaps I’ll write more on arguments against the existence of free will in later posts, but for now, I’d like to move on to the latter half of Alex’s conversation with Robert. Suppose we don’t have free will. Now what?
A reasonable question to ask at this point is, if we don’t have free will, how can people be held morally responsible for their actions? Indeed, Sapolsky claims they can’t. I have no issue with this. One of the upshots here is that it becomes much easier to treat others with compassion and forgive people once you accept that they aren’t morally culpable. This is a fairly radical shift in perspective and it can be hard to internalize in full, but the illusion of moral responsibility seems to be the logical and intellectually honest consequence of rejecting free will. There’s plenty more to uncover here, but let’s table this for now.
What I want to focus on here is Sapolsky’s next set of claims. Once people accept the absence of free will, Robert tells Alex that they often feel as though all of the good things that have happened to them are undeserved—that their success story is a thin, fragile veneer. As examples, Robert discusses the realization that your years-long spousal affection is a product of pheromones, habituation, etc., rather than “true love,” or the conclusion that your promotion at work wasn’t something that you “earned,” since you weren’t ultimately in control of your actions.
What is Sapolsky’s response? He admits it took him a while to find a satisfactory answer. But if these are the things you’re worrying about, he claims, you’re one of the lucky ones. Most people, according to Sapolsky, have been made much better off as a result of rejecting free will. As an example, he points to the progress that society has made in understanding various psychological disorders like dyslexia. He maintains that we used to assume kids who had trouble reading were unfocused, lazy, or simply dull. Now, we realize it makes no sense to suggest these kids are somehow themselves at fault for their reading abilities. Rather, they have psychological abnormalities that result in learning disorders. Accepting that these children were not in control of their actions resulted in a better understanding and treatment of dyslexia.
Robert’s example is poignant, but I think there’s more here. Once you reject free will, as Sapolsky notes, you morally absolve everyone of both their virtues and their sins. All things considered, I’m certainly one of the lucky ones. But all the people who are unlucky are just that—unlucky.
And it is by no fault of their own. It may make them feel better that they couldn’t have done anything differently, but it doesn’t make them feel any better about the fact that—using Sapolsky’s verbiage—they’re still one of the unlucky ones. Sure, if my child had dyslexia, I’d hope that people wouldn’t fault them for struggling to read. But this just leaves me accepting that my child was unfortunate enough to be dyslexic in the first place. As Robert points out, this acceptance is a powerful and perhaps necessary step toward navigating and managing dyslexia. But even then, you need possess to the ability and the resources to address your unfortunate circumstances. If you are lacking these, then you’re really unlucky. This requires another layer of acceptance of your extra misfortune. You see where I’m going here—we run into a similar recursive pattern. The acceptance is most certainly empowering, but the path forward may still be quite difficult.
This leads me to the real punchline: gratitude. In my view, the absence of free will is inseparable from gratitude. Once you recognize that the good things that happened to you were a product of luck, it is impossible not to be grateful for how fortunate you truly are. If you’ve been one of the lucky ones, that seems to be a cause of celebration, not gloom. Once you acknowledge that there’s no room for notions of what’s “deserved” or “undeserved,” you can feel immense gratitude for the circumstances that have both enabled your success and shielded you from significant suffering. This isn’t an easy thing to do, by any means. I certainly struggle with it, at almost any given moment. It’s quite difficult not to be self-concerned; we’re practically all wallowing in our own suffering. Practicing gratitude is the antidote. At least, all the self-help gurus and self-proclaimed mindfulness experts seem to think so. Surely, they must know what’s best.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the lucky ones.
If you want to learn more from someone who has grappled with these ideas far longer than I have, check out Alex O’Connor on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. To me, it’s worth every minute.
[1] Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act. Brain, 106(3), 623-642.