Are we free or not?

I want to start with a thank you to Michael Little who encouraged me to read Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky. It is a book that is provocative in three distinct senses:

• it is a thought-provoking summary of evidence from neuroscience and beyond of the many things that influence our behaviour;
• it is an intentional moral provocation aimed at changing our view about human responsibility, criminal justice and punishment, and
• it is also—if read as a work of philosophy—highly provoking, careless and a totally inadequate discussion of the subject of Free Will.

 The least problematic part of this book is Sapolsky’s efforts to persuade us that our actions are determined by factors outside our control. As a neuroscientist he does this by explaining the way in which we can identify brain activity that causes actions, which is itself caused by other brain activity:

As such there is no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it (p. 46).

However he also recognises that it is almost impossible to predict our actions with certainty and that the reasons for any action lie, not just in brain events, but also in the many different factors that shape our brain: historical, cultural, developmental, familial, genetic, accidental and more. As he says it’s “turtles all the way down” (ie. all of history and multiple kinds of history underpin our brain activity, making it both complex, but nevertheless explicable in terms of many kinds of science).

The book is full of great examples. My favourite was the fact that parole board decisions are primarily influenced by how hungry the judges are—hungrier means less forgiving (p. 106). Obviously this example does not just imply that our decisions are often influenced by non-rational factors, but also that we can identify, and presumably reduce, habits that impair our rationality. I was reminded that the ancient Persians (as Herodotus explains) only made important decisions after being both drunk and sober; both judgements had to agree before they would commit to an action.

He also describes the profound impact that a damaged childhood can have on our lives and the high correlation between scores on the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scale and a range of negative life experiences, including anti-social behaviour (p. 66). This very much supports his assault on the fairness of the current criminal justice system. However, although it seems right that we do take these things into account while sentencing I am not sure that we want to be told that the answer to our damaged childhood is that we are not actually responsible for our actions. Sapolsky never discusses the fact that his analysis cuts both ways—if I am not responsible for any of the bad things I do then I am also not responsible for any of the good things I do. How we can bring up our children without a belief in responsibility is not clear to me.

Sapolsky is also very good at exploring the way in which cultural prejudices can turn into unconscious bias and he also outlines the many factors that make you more likely to be further conditioned by the kind of fascist rhetoric of someone like Donald Trump (p. 290). These factors include: experiencing stress through unemployment, if your testosterone levels have been soaring, if you were malnourished as a foetus and many more. Generally Sapolsky is clearly driven by a passionate commitment to human equality and his recognition of the grave injustices caused by prejudice, poverty and biological impairments. There are also really interesting explorations of how our views on autism, schizophrenia, homosexuality have changed as we’ve understood that important differences between us can be seen as natural—rather than as being matters of intentional choice.

After dismissing various scientific attempts to explain Free Will via complexity theory and quantum indeterminacy (interesting, but ultimately irrelevant chapters) he attempts to deploy his account of humanity without Free Will into the criminal justice system and the society that support it. He argues we are too prone to dismiss social and biological forces that shape our actions and too quick to enjoy forms of punishment that provide no useful purpose. But his only concrete suggestion for reforming the system is to replace punishment with preventative quarantine. This seems a very thoughtless response, for this was already exactly the logic of the mental institutions that he also criticises (p. 305) and, as Brodsky recognised, prison is much better than an institution:

Yes, because in prison at least you know where you stand. You have a sentence - till the whistle blows. Of course, they can always tack on another sentence, but they don't have to, and in principle you know that sooner or later they're going to let you out, right? Whereas in a mental institution you're totally dependent on the will of the doctors…

Brodsky in Volkov S (1998) Conversations with Joseph Brodsky. New York: The Free Press. p. 68

In general his discussion of punishment is rather undermined by this vagueness about what changes he’d really like to see. He even seems to criticise the extremely progressive Norwegian system of punishment because it is still a system of punishment that assumes we are responsible for our actions. But he doesn’t give any real thought to what an alternative would look like nor does he consider the immense consequences of moving to a system of social control based not on our actions, but upon our tendencies. Given what he describes as the social conditions that drive criminal behaviour it seems to me that his solution could be far more unjust than the current system—penalising the poor and disadvantaged and putting a new class of scientists in control. Who will police these areas of quarantines? Will all the inmates live together? How will we live outside the area of quarantine when it is not our actions, but our tendencies that can get us in trouble? All of this sounds closer to Brave New World and 1984 than to any sound theory of criminal justice.

Even more unsatisfactory is Sapolsky’s philosophical discussion of whether or not we possess Free Will. Like many enthusiasts for the value of natural science Sapolsky does tend to talk as if this is just some recent issue, not a question that philosophers and theologians have been discussing for centuries. Of course our detailed understanding of how the mechanisms of causality work keeps changing, but the idea that everything that happens is already pre-determined is common in theology and philosophy. For example determinism - the idea that the unfolding of reality is simply a series of events caused by prior events according to fixed laws over which we have no control - was described by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes:

That which I say necessitates and determinates every action is the sum of all those things which, being now existent, conduce and concur to the production of the action hereafter, whereof if any one thing were wanting, the effect could not be produced. This concourse of causes, whereof every one is determined to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called the decree of God.

Of Liberty and Necessity, 1654, § 11

Even more common, and certainly an essential feature of Aristotelian and Medieval thought is the awareness that we all have characters and that our actions are determined significantly by our characters and the conditions we find ourselves in. Dante explores this issue, including the moral questions it involves at several points in The Divine Comedy. Here for instance, he notes that our character can be dangerously out of kilter with our social role:

It cannot be that any nature, found

At odds with its environment, should thrive;

No seed does well in uncongenial ground.
If men on earth would bear in mind, and strive

To build on the foundation laid by nature,

They'd have fine folk, with virtues all alive.
But you distort the pattern of the creature;

You cloister him that's born to wield the sword,

And crown him king who ought to be preacher;
Thus from the path you wander all abroad

Dante Alighieri (1962) The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise (translated by Dorothy L Sayers). London: Penguin. Canto XVII p. 119

More recently Nadezhda Mandelstam, living in Stalinist hell, noted how history shapes our character and erodes our ability to resist evil:

Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behaviour, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him.

Mandelstam N (1999) Hope Against Hope. New York: The Modern Library. p. 93

But Sapolsky wants to go much further and to affirm an absolute lack of Free Will. We are for him biological machines and in fact it is not really clear that there is even a thing, a self, called “me”. All that really exists is the interplay of various forms of energy according to the rules of physics, some of which are understood as biological, but where life generates no freedom.

Sapolsky rejects compatibilism—the philosophical view that it is possible reconcile the existence of Free Will with determinism. (Hobbes was also a compatibilist.) But he doesn’t try to respect or articulate the case for compatibilism with any effort, and this failure to try and understand your opponent’s point of view is, for me, a grave philosophical sin. As I understand it a fairly straightforward argument for compatibilism is built on at least two key ideas:

• Our freedom requires that actions have reasonably predictable consequences, otherwise we’d be unable to make changes to the world through our actions. Hence determinism is necessary for freedom. Random behaviour with random results is not freedom.
• Our freedom exists when we do not face significant constraints on our ability to make choices or take action. We are still free even if our actions are somewhat predictable, even if our character was impacted by things that have happened to us in the past, even if our actions are influenced by social conditions and current circumstances.

Instead of addressing this pretty conventional philosophical argument Sapolsky just declares that the only acceptable kind of Free Will would be where some unaffected neuron (p. 82) acts “out of thin air” (p. 83). I think the reason for this rather large oversight is that Sapolsky believes in scientism—that is the metaphysical position that the only things that really exist are those things (and perhaps also scientific laws) that have been identified by science. (Or perhaps, as scientific understanding keeps changing, whatever ultimately may be unveiled by science in the long-run.)

Now, scientism is certainly a common prejudice, but it cannot be treated as an unargued starting point for the dismissal of Free Will. In particular, when we’re discussing the will it seems rather unscientific (and certainly unempirical) to rule out of consideration a whole range of things that we would normally think might be relevant to how we make decisions: the self, consciousness, mind, rational thought, justice, virtue, duty, guilt, goodness or meaning.

Another peculiarity of Sapolsky’s approach is the tendency to deploy the term ‘Free Will’ as if it didn’t have two component parts: freedom and the will. So let us try to approach the freedom of the will by starting with the will itself. If an ant walks across the ground, on a mission to discover food for its community we would certainly think that the ant was exercising its will. In fact the idea of will is arguably a feature of all life—as what distinguishes the animate from the inanimate—even a plant might be said to exercise its will in how it grows. Or, if that seems too fanciful, we can certainly claim that the existence of a will, providing somewhat unpredictable self-willed action, is a definitive feature of the higher forms of life.

There’s a good overview of the scientific debate about the problem of defining life here.

So what are we to make of Sapolsky's claim that we are only “biological machines” when life itself seems to be the opposite of a machine. We are not a mechanical device, made by some other being, for some definite purpose; we are living beings, born into existence, each with our own somewhat indefinite purpose. As I understand the scientific argument it seems like biology requires life to have some level of freedom just to get going as a distinct discipline. So even science seems committed to the will as some aspect of life itself.

However freedom of the will is not the same as the unpredictability of the will. Our central experience of free will is not objective, it is subjective. Our real experience of freedom in willing is experienced by the mind (an entity that Sapolsky simply does not consider). If we reflect on our own mental processes we are often aware of deciding to do things, and for many different reasons. But it is not only the plurality of possible reasons that makes us feel free, it is the fact that we are constrained by the Moral Law; so our greatest freedom is experienced by our ability to act against what we think is right. The paradox of the will is that we really only experience it as being real, because we understand that it should be in harmony with the Moral Law, but it often isn’t. The subjunctive ‘should’ here is key. We know we are free, as self-conscious creative beings, because we know that there are things we should do, but which we often choose not to do. Or as St Paul puts it:

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Romans 7:15

Sapolsky gives no consideration to any of our own experiences. All of this, the self, the mind, thought, rationality and morality are just illusions, not worth consideration. As he says (p. 392):

It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something “good” can happen to a machine. Nonetheless I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.

So he is caught in the trap of so many who have decided that they can confidently decide what is real (science) and what is not real (everything not defined by science). But he still cannot stop himself drawing moral conclusions, even though he has made morality an illusion. As Weil notes that this absurdity is common place in materialism:

Herein lies the inevitable absurdity of all materialism. If the materialist could set aside all concern for the good, he would be perfectly consistent. But he cannot. The very being of man is nothing else but a perpetual striving after an unknown good. And the materialist is a man. That is why he cannot prevent himself from ultimately regarding matter as a machine for manufacturing the good.

Weil S (2001) Oppression and Liberty. London: Routledge. p. 164

Sapolsky claims that the ongoing progress of science will ultimately undermine our faith in Free Will and all the other ideas that are connected to it. We will no longer see ourselves as beings with responsibilities, lives of meaning, subject to just laws or willing to sacrifice ourselves for others. I hope he’s wrong—although false beliefs like his can still be powerful and have powerful social consequences. This is exactly what we saw in the case of eugenics, where scientists promised to remove crime by eliminating the people who caused crime.

But rationally we have no reason to accept Sapolsky’s view that science eliminates freedom, truth or justice. In fact science itself is based upon our assumption that rationality is not the result of cause and effect, but that we can—at least to some degree—identify what is true. If truth is reduced to a series of signals, codes carried in bio-electrical machines, it can no longer be true—at best it is purely functional. It is not causality that make 2+2=4 true, it is logic.

We would do better, instead of limiting our vision to a reductive scientific account, to combine our understanding of what is real by paying attention to all the dimensions of our reality we experience: science certainly, but also reason, morality and beauty. There is no rational reason to pick one dimension of reality and seek to collapse everything back into that. We do not need to blind ourselves.

I do not know whether Sapolsky’s book will ‘cause’ a reduction in our faith in Free Will, but it shouldn’t. Hidden inside Sapolsky’s book is a much better book, one which that could help us think about how to think more fairly, how to address social problems at their root and how to make a better criminal justice system. However this book has been twisted out of shape by bad philosophical assumptions and a lack of intellectual rigour.

Why has such a smart and good man made so many critical errors?

One telling is slip is when he refers, in a book of universal relevance, to “our nation” (p. 401). In his mind Sapolsky is not thinking like a scientist or a philosopher; he is not addressing a general audience; he is thinking like an American, and like many citizens of the USA he is angry and dismayed at its grave political and social injustices, that seem to be so resistant to reform. Often it felt to me that his version of Free Will was not the philosophical concept but was instead the phantom of neoliberalism and the American Dream— the Mythic Individual—subject to nobody, able to pick itself up, dust itself down and take responsibility for all its own actions. Perhaps, if he had made the Mythic Individual, rather than Free Will, his target he might have written a better book.