Determined by Robert M. Sapolsky
$7.99
Determined
- A Science of Life Without Free Will
- By: Robert M. Sapolsky
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 16 hrs and 39 mins
- Categories: Politics & Social Sciences
Publisher's summary
The instant New York Times bestseller “Excellent…Outstanding for its breadth of research, the liveliness of the writing, and the depth of humanity it conveys.” – Wall Street Journal
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 the 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 is some separate self telling our biology what to do.
Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody’s “fault”; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF containing Tables, Charts, and Diagrams from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2023 Robert M. Sapolsky (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Student-prime
Some interesting science, a lot of ideology
I’m sympathetic to Sapolsky’s view of free will, and agree that we probably don’t actually have it. I think this is an argument that fundamentally can be made in just a few sentences of logic, but I did enjoy the tour through the brain, chaos theory, complexity theory, quantum theory, and behavior that Sapolsky is well suited to talking about.
On the other hand, I find a lot of the way he argues about morals and norms to be fairly flat and not compelling.He’s very clearly motivated by what Jonathan Haidt would say is the classic liberal moral palate: essentially justice vs harm as being the only maxim of import. It rings loudest when he talks explicitly about things such as conservatives, or religions, but undergirds a lot of the social psychology research he cites and the way he believes things ought to be. He says that determinism completely antiquates the idea of morality, and then he goes on to describe a de facto system of morality (reducing harm at the expense of all else in the universe) that he presents as an unavoidable conclusion. I think this where he errs, and I find much of the second half of the book to be quite weak.
I am a psychiatrist and when I read his ramblings on schizophrenia and psychiatric illness it’s very apparent he is pretty out of his depth; it’s the speciousness of those kids on the high school debate or in the debate societies in college who are clearly smart and are apt to propose forceful arguments, but in offering an opinion on everything they come across they dunning-Kruger themselves into some pretty embarrassing positions. It’s very surprising how reductionistic he is with schizophrenia, how one sided he presents arguments, his self satisfaction of writing off psychodynamics as some sort of oppressive nonsense, and that everything has been solved by the idea of biology, and that this also has led to the best outcomes. He cites bad research, hyperbolizes, considers no other points of view, and most surprisingly given that he is a neuroscientist, he seems to neglect the idea of levels of analysis. In an example that is illustrative not of his points but of the “I’m an instant master” thought process, he doesn’t understand that tardive dyskinesia refers to a different phenotype and has different pathophysiology than Parkinson’s. Frankly, the way he talks about these things is quite embarrassing.
This sort of compulsion he has for his arguments about science to unadulterated goods I.e the social science research he cites is also suspect and neglects a lot of other research. The most important psychological factors for satisfied, happy people are senses of agency and gratitude, which dispelling free will is certain to do. Acknowledgement of this would not further his argument, so he must cite all the ways that free will just blames victims.
Religion, in its sweeping pronouncements and focus on the group and obedience, often leaves alternative individuals feeling ostracized. Someone like Sapolsky rightly points this out. But he also seems loathe to make that observation that dispelling religion is something that involves trade offs, where many will now be left without community, order, meaning, and constraining forces. And whether we are better off as a whole is not something determinism is equipped to answer.
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