November 28, 2024 • 38 mins
One of our great behavioural scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, dives to the depths of the science and the philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences. After listening, ask yourself, what side are you on?
Are we indeed the masters of our fate, or is free will nothing more than an illusion? In this week’s episode, I sit down with renowned neuroscientist and Stanford professor Dr. Robert Sapolsky to explore the provocative ideas from his groundbreaking book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.
Sapolsky argues that our choices—from our morning coffee to major life decisions—are entirely shaped by biology and environment, leaving no room for free will. We dive into the science behind human behaviour, the randomness of life, and the implications of viewing ourselves as “biological machines.”
This thought-provoking conversation challenges everything we think we know about accountability, morality, and transformation. Can we truly change? How do we raise children in a world without free will? And could letting go of the notion of free will make the world a more compassionate place?
From personal anecdotes about Sapolsky’s early questioning of faith and free will to his fascinating insights into human biology and culture, this episode will leave you questioning whether you are truly in control—or just along for the ride.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Here it is. Instructions to fit in, have everybody like you, and always
be happy. Step 1. Where are we going? We know because we're being
spontaneous. Somebody help me. We're
being spontaneous. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.
Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A
prison for your mind. Okay. So what if I'm not real? So
(00:23):
what? Even if I'm not real, this moment
is right here, right now.
Imagine you're at your favorite coffee shop. You're ready to order.
The barista asks, do you want a latte or black coffee?
You pause, consider your options, and you confidently choose that
(00:45):
latte. Now ask yourself, was that
choice truly yours? We like to believe we're in control of our
decisions, that we make choices freely.
But what if I told you that my guest today believes that most of the
decisions you've ever made, from what you ate this morning to your career
path, were predetermined? What if the idea of free
(01:07):
will was in fact an illusion? This is the belief of doctor
Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, where he
holds positions in biology, neurology, and neurosurgery.
He's also known for his work in primate behavior. He's the author of the book
Determine, A Science of Life Without Free Will. By this
point, we know enough about the science of how you
(01:29):
came to be who you are that the owners of proof has
switched. Sapolsky argues that all our actions are governed by biological
and environmental factors, which leaves no room for true free
will. Proof to us show us a mechanism by
which a neuron, a brain, a person has
done something, and it is completely freed
(01:51):
from their biological history. And he has many fans.
Bill Gates called Sapolsky's book, Behave, one of the best books he read in
2017, outlining how Sapolsky masterfully explains
biology behind human behavior. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher, refers to Sapolsky as
one of the most interesting and eloquent scientists in the world. And Steve
Pinker, who's been on my show, commended Sapolsky for his
(02:14):
ability to merge biology and psychology,
praising his work for offering deep insights into human behavior and
decision making. Today, we'll unpack the question, do
we really have free will? Are we really in the driver's seat?
Is that steering wheel, our ability to accelerate or brake, even get out of the
way just an illusion? Are you in fact
(02:38):
meant to be? Hi.
It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented by
RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated.
Doctor Robert Sapolsky, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Well, thanks.
(02:59):
Thanks for having me on. I'll begin by just talking about your journey
into human behavior and the idea of free will. From what I
understand, it really happened at an early age. It was kind of 14 where you
started questioning what we're in charge of. So I'm I'm curious how
somebody that young, instead of being out in a baseball field or or, you know,
dealing with the hormones of puberty, had started having such big thinking.
(03:21):
Well, first off, I was a horrendous athlete. I was brought up
extremely religiously and believed all of it and was
highly ritualistic. And circumstances were
such, that I was having a religious crisis.
It turned out to have transiently
an illness for a few years, which turned out to be
(03:45):
condemned in the old testament. Hey. Wait a
second. God decrees that I have this
medical problem, and yet my having this medical
problem is viewed as some sort of insult, to
god? What what's up with that? And this was causing a great
deal of distress. One night, I woke up at 2
(04:07):
in the morning, and it suddenly all made sense.
There's no God. And as long as I was at it, just as
an addendum, I added on that, oh, and there's no free will.
And the universe is this huge empty,
indifferent place with no meaning. How did that play at the
dining room table with these? Not very well. And,
(04:30):
just as a measure of it, my
father went to his grave 20 years later
having no idea that I had changed anything in my thinking. So
And how did the whole animal fascination come in? Because the other thing that was
really interesting is this, that you started really understanding that within the
primate community, there was a lot of answers to that empty
(04:53):
universe of yours. It, took the form oh, it was sort of
the normal evolution in some ways. I I went
from the predictable every play everyday
obsession with dinosaurs to the
mummies and that whole arc. And somehow, by the time
I was about 10 or 11 and had settled down into primatology,
(05:16):
the notion of hanging out with mountain gorillas, which I never got to do,
unfortunately, but the notion of doing that seemed much preferable
to any other option in life. And your the diversity of your academic
background, maybe it made a lot of sense to you, but I read biology, anthropology,
psychology. As you started moving through life, did any
one triumph over the other? It's almost like rock, papers, and scissors, or was it
(05:38):
just this fusion of all 3 that kinda just continued to lead you
down this path? I was all set on primatology. I was
writing fan letters to primatologists when I was in
high school and stuff, and this one guy whose feet I
was gonna study, I actually wound up being able
to do that and was all set. I I studied
(06:00):
Swahili in high school because I knew I was gonna do field work in East
Africa someday. And I went off to college.
He had a a minor heart attack my freshman year. He was
fine. He lasted decades afterward, but he canceled his
classes. So suddenly having an open slot somewhat
arbitrarily, I took an intro neuroscience class
(06:22):
and was blown away by that, and that started
this, like, great divide. So am I a
lab scientist, or I'm supposed to be wearing hiking shoes every day for the rest
of my life? This lightning rod that you've attached to
yourself, this concept of free will, and you've even described it as a
lunatic fringe. How did that come about that you
(06:44):
decided that you're gonna stand against a lot of people
that would challenge you because you're just challenging the very essence of what humans think
they are that we're in control? How did that come about, and how did you
decide that you'd be, I mean, courageous enough to say, I'm gonna make this statement,
and I'm gonna continue to defend it? Thank you for using the word courageous.
It was just self evident. You look at enough
(07:07):
biology factoids, and I think maybe the
fact that I was straddling a number of different fields, the field
primatology. I was So also getting ecology and
physiological ecology and evolution stuff, and ultimately,
some of the baboon work I was doing had me talking a lot
to biological psychiatrists. Whereas the
(07:29):
lab work was like with molecular people
and eventually neurology types. And I think, sir, you collect
enough factoids from enough different areas and your
14 year old intuition that there's no free will, you you
suddenly feel like you could back it up. We're biological machines.
We're made of the same stuff as, like, squid are. We're
(07:51):
just a fancier version and you throw enough pieces of that stuff
together and out emerges some human attributes.
So in your book Determine, one of the things I I really smiled at is
you said focusing on intents, like reviewing a movie based on its final
minutes. Why did you feel that one of the easiest ways for people to at
least understand it is that they needed to consider the entire story
(08:13):
versus just the, the happy ending? Because the ending, when
you make one of those earth shattering choices as to whether or not you're gonna
have tea or coffee or whether or not send your
army over the border into the neighboring country. Like, in
that moment, it is so intuitively just
palpable that you there's a you in there.
(08:36):
There's a you in there that's somehow separate of that biology
yuck, and that you has formed an intent and is
acting on it. And the problem is that it
ignores the 99% of the book that
preceded that, which is so how do you turn out to be the sort
of person who would form that intent at that moment?
(08:59):
How do you wind up being someone with
your values, someone with your luxuries and privileges,
someone with your attitude, someone with your traumas.
So how do you wind up being that person? And when you
look at the nuts and bolts of it, it's entirely made
up of the biology that random luck handed
(09:22):
you over which you had no control. And it's interactions with
environment that random luck handed you. These paths you followed, at
least when I started researching it, there's some there's some randomness in it.
Do you think it's just this was just meant to unfold like dominoes that way?
Basically, yeah. And where one gets mistaken
as to thinking they're seeing free will is at some point you could reach in
(09:45):
and mess with the dominoes a bit and bias them in one direction or
another. And we confuse that with us just having had
agency because that's much easier than seeing,
oh, not only like have I become
in effect in reality a biological machine, but a
fancy one who has some insights into the buttons and
(10:07):
the levers on the biological machine. Society seems to try
to harness the masses by the give and take. You know, you go to a
church and the sunshine's coming through the, the, the stained glass window, everything
looks beautiful. You go over the other side, it's hell, risk and
reward. It's always trying to set up these boundaries to kind of herd
people like cattle. Is that a factor that factors into
(10:29):
this whole concept of determine that really society is just an
algorithm that's kind of set this up to streamline how we're born,
what's our biology and science tells us what we're gonna do. Basically, but in
a way where much of the time that's only one of
the players and often a fairly minor one. Something that
utterly fascinates me is the fact that different cultures
(10:51):
developed into the being the cultures they are not by accident.
What have been some of the ecological factors that influenced
who becomes polygamists and who becomes
polytheists and who becomes warrior class driven
societies and all that kind and that then immediately
determines what mom was doing with you within minutes of birth
(11:15):
as a mechanism for replicating those values in the next
generation. So, yeah, that's part of it, but, you know, there's lots of other
levels of it. The reality is that when you're
looking at when we carry out a behavior, one where
we may mistakenly think that there was a me in there
separate of of all the materialism and one that had
(11:37):
just acted with free intent, you ask where that
came from, and that came from whatever neurons hiccuped a
millisecond ago, and it came from whatever environmental
stimuli triggered those neurons in the previous minute.
And it came from this morning's hormone levels, and it came
from what trauma or stimulation or whatever changed the
(11:59):
structure of your brain in the previous months, which came
from your adolescence and your childhood and your fetal life and your
genes and then the culture that got handed
to you and you put all those pieces together, where'd that
behavior come from? And it's from everything that came
before. There's not a damn crack anywhere in that edifice that
(12:21):
you could shoehorn in the notion that every now and
then, your brain can do something completely free of
its history. Talk to me about when you shuffle the deck. I mean, you
talk about culture and how that certain cultures are wired a certain
way. What happens now as a society as we start merging the
tribes? Is that something that's gonna completely change the human race?
(12:43):
Yeah. You have all sorts of residues of these mixtures.
And by now, you know, walk around downtown
Manhattan or Tokyo or London
or Lagos, and you may perhaps be
seeing what's an admixture by now, but go to the more isolated
places, and you still see the very, very heavy imprint of the
(13:05):
singular culture. But if nothing else, 60,
70 percent of the humans on earth are believers in
some version of a religion that emerged
from the desert of the Middle East over the last
4000 years. How'd that turn out? Some
illiterate shepherds came up with different views about, like, what the
(13:27):
answers are to the unanswerable, and now most of
Earth celebrates, like, Christmas. Do you see yourself as one
of those shepherds, modern day shepherd that's just kinda trying to
figure how things are? Yeah. You know, we're all trying to figure out how
things work. And, my particular version I stumbled
into is it looks undeniable to me that we work
(13:49):
like biological machines. We're really
weird ones because we could know that we're biological
machines, and that generates all sorts of
ripples of neurosis and anxiety
and heroism and being part of
something bigger than yourself and all that stuff. But it's just
(14:10):
spin offs from the fact that, you know, you look at the building
blocks of a sea snail and you look at us and a sea snail
can learn how to do something. It could learn to retract
its gill if you bop it on the head repeatedly, and it
learns that that's like a scary thing so that each time
you you couple the bopping with some random signal, it now
(14:33):
retracts its gill. Oh, let's spend 30 years as
probably the best living neuroscientist did, taking that apart down
to the level of molecules. And it turns out it's the exact
same molecules in us when we learn to
be afraid of a type of people we never knew about
before. We use the same molecule. You can you can do
(14:54):
genetic engineering and stick some of our genes into a sea slug,
and it works in the same exact networks. We're made of the same
stuff. All that we've got going for us is quantity.
You put together, like, 80,000,000,000 neurons instead of, like,
the 100,000 in the sea slug, and
out pops theology and aesthetics
(15:17):
and economic viewpoints, and
who knows what else, an obsession with the Kardashians. How do you
deal with the sense that can can somebody transform? Can they
change their course in life? Can they become a better human being? Can they find
empathy and compassion if their biology and environment
hasn't set them up for that kind of success? You've touched on sort
(15:39):
of the second of what I've used, the 3 ways in
which people go off the rails and decide they're absolutely seeing
free will in action. The first one is when you very consciously make
a decision in that moment, it seems inconceivable that
there's not a you in there that's separate of all those neurons.
Second is when you look at somebody who's had lousy circumstances
(16:03):
and yet through, like, some incredible display
of tenacity and self discipline, they
come out, woah. They made themselves a self
made person. Pulling one up by one's bootstraps is
inherently a belief that there's a me in there that's separate of the
biology, and that one is really tempting. And the third one is
(16:24):
the one you bring up, which is stuff changes.
People change. Society's changed dramatically. I mean, there's
there's at least a handful of ex white supremacists
out there who pay money to painfully have their, like,
tattoo swastikas. Remove people change.
And where that seems to be free will
(16:48):
out the wazoo is the fact that in those circumstances,
people mistakenly believe that someone
chooses to change, and that simply
is not the case. What happens instead is we are
changed. We are changed by circumstance, and
the way in which we are changed by whatever circumstance gets thrown at
(17:10):
us is entirely a function of who we turned out to
be when we went in and experienced that change. In
an interview you did with Michael Shermer, you mentioned the concept of useful
fiction. Rather than there's no free will, that's how the world
works, it's kind of a drag, suck it up. My view
is actually rejecting free will is wonderfully liberating.
(17:33):
And throughout history, every time we figure it
out, here's a circumstance of human behavior
where, woah, it turns out they had no
control over it. It wasn't their fault that they were like this.
Every time we've done that, the world's become a more
humane place. For most people, jettisoning the
(17:55):
notion of free will is enormously liberating
because we got a world that works on the notion
that it's okay, that some people get treated way better
than average for stuff they had nothing to do with, and some people get treated
way worse. And getting rid of the notion that there's
anything other than just random stupid luck. I wouldn't
(18:18):
say the world's in a great place right now. Is there anything from what you've
studied that we can use as a society to
change for the better? You know, this is a world of a huge amount
of misery and inequality.
The the most pernicious thing about inequality is
when it's not only just permeating everywhere,
(18:41):
corroding everywhere, but you've managed to get societal
beliefs that there's somehow justice built
around inequality. People get what they deserve.
People wind up in a way that has to do with
justice and entitlement and
earning one's position in life and things of that sort. I would say
(19:04):
if I have to reduce all of these science
factoids, which collectively said we're just biological machines and that's
where behavior comes from, if you think you
understand why somebody just did what they did, the odds
are pretty good that you're wrong because you don't
really understand how it turned out that that's how they
(19:26):
function. Or maybe another way of stating it is any time
you're about to like judge someone, especially when it's harshly,
especially when it's moralistically, stop instead and figure
out how did they become that sort of machine.
And every time you think you deserve better treatment or
entitled to something, ask the exact same question and nowhere
(19:49):
in there is agency going to be the answer. But
what's the answer? Somebody is wired to be a pedophile,
that assaulting another human being is just within their DNA.
How do we address that as a society if we have to have the compassion
that that's just who they are, but at the same time, protect the rest of
society from who they are. We do it exactly
(20:11):
as we deal with 5 year olds with nose colds.
300 years ago, illness and moral
worth was intertwined in Europe and if you got sick
it was God punishing you for, or if a kid got sick it was
punishing the parents for their sins. And like, okay, we got a
different view of illness now. If your 5
(20:34):
year old gets a nose cold, that is not a moral failure on their part.
You do not preach at them. But nonetheless, sometimes you gotta protect
society from them, which is if your 5 year old is sneezing, you
keep them home from kindergarten tomorrow because they're
dangerous. They're a danger to society. And the kindergarten
teachers say, you know, if your kid has a cold, please keep them home so
(20:55):
they don't get everybody else sick, and you constrain their
behavior. You impose what is literally
a public health quarantine model, which is you make sure your
kid can't hurt, harm anybody else, but you don't do
an inch more than that. You don't tell them, and you can't play with your
toys today because you're sneezing and you're rotten and you don't preach to
(21:17):
them. And if that seems inconceivable to us that
we do that with, like, a vicious, affectless,
remorseless, sociopathic, and nightmare of a human,
we've done it before. When people figured out that, oh,
sociopathic, remorseless people don't control
(21:38):
the weather. And when there's a sudden hailstorm and your medieval
crops are destroyed, it's not the work of witches. And
it's a better world when we don't burn people at the stake anymore. It's a
better world when we figured out, you know,
airplane pilots with hay fever who've taken
an antihistamine and were drowsy. They can't
(22:00):
be pilot for the next 3 days until there's all these
ways in which you can impose, in
a sense, public health models, figure out how to
make this person not dangerous to people anymore,
and constrain them in that way. And don't do it an inch
beyond that, and don't moralize about it. And as long as
(22:22):
you're at it, put a lot of effort into understanding how people like that
turned out to be that way and get a root cause so that's less
likely to happen in the future. But what if someone like your with your
knowledge was in power instead of having the
empathy that you do, they said, listen. This person's never gonna change.
There's no redemption. Let's bring back the death penalty. Are we
(22:43):
not concerned that this knowledge in the wrong hands could be
abused beyond belief? It won't work or it sure as
hell shouldn't work. They had nothing to do
with how they turned out that way. And you know what? If they
have an itchy back and someone scratches it, they
feel better. It's a nicer life for them for 2 seconds
(23:05):
there. If they are still capable of
experiencing things and they do
not deserve because there's no such thing as deserve. There's
nothing earned. There's nothing entitled. They
have no more or less claim to having their
needs considered than that of any other random human who
(23:27):
turned out to be who they are. When
we return, more with doctor Robert Sapolsky, and we go
back and forth in this conversation of free will or lack thereof. We
even talk about how it could apply when raising a child,
and, of course, my 3 takeaways.
(23:47):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. You know, I thought this would be the perfect episode to
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(24:09):
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(24:29):
Enhancing the sustainability and accessibility of buildings, well that
matters to you, to me, and to RBC.
You make a choice. You choose something. You're choosing
flavor of ice cream. You're you form an intent, and you act on
it. For most people, that is necessary and sufficient to
(24:49):
decide you had free will. How did you turn out to
be the sort of person who would have that intent?
Where did that intent come from? My guest
today is doctor Robert Sapolsky. He's a renowned neuroscientist
at Stanford University. And we're talking about his book, Determined, A
Science of Life Without Free Will, and his argument that our free will
(25:11):
is just an illusion. It's shaped by biology and environment. And if
that's the case, that challenges traditional views of moral responsibility.
Be curious how you think at the end of this episode.
I'd love to see you in a debate with somebody. What's the best debate you've
been in, toe to toe, and at the end of it, you walked out
smiling, going, we both held our own, and we both
(25:34):
feel we've improved our position. What was the most
interesting one was when I had during the fall with the philosopher
Daniel Dennett. He was one of the most visible
strident atheists out there, but was a total
mess of a philosopher insofar as he
somehow saw there was still free will out there. People
(25:56):
turn out to be the way they are because there's a lot of
things that you earn. And if the picture is good, it's
because you're entitled to it and having
ridiculous statements in all of his writing to the effect not even
to the effect of this is, like, verbatim, luck evens
out over time. Good luck and bad luck even out over
(26:19):
time. And thus people shouldn't cite luck when complaining about
how things turned out not so great for them. And the reality is
that starting with like the most basic biology to the most basic
sociology, good luck is likely to amplify
over time, and bad luck is likely to amplify, and they diverge
further and further over the course of their life. So we had
(26:42):
a debate, which turned out to be remarkably
frustrating, because I think all he
was saying at the end is, damn. It just seems
so intuitively obvious that there's free will.
Wow. And when you dissected his arguments,
intuition is a really lousy
(27:04):
guideline for figuring out how things work because, consistently,
intuition kinda takes you up dead ends. So we had a
debate, and they did, like, the most, like, embarrassing
thing that beforehand, the moderator asked the audience to
vote on whether or not there was free will, and, like, 30% of
people thought there was no free will. And then afterward, he asked him
(27:26):
again, and now most of the people in the audience no longer believed in
free will and, woah, what a triumph and all of that. You know, it
was cool. It was very stimulating in the sense of seeing all the
ways in which his stance did not have much
more to it other than, damn, it's gonna be really
uncomfortable to admit that there's no free will. Are you ever
(27:49):
concerned that what you've uncovered, this gives
people with the wrong intention, the ability to
in fact manipulate society if they can in fact rewire
where we're meant to be? One of those like comforting
things is, you know, life is not only stranger than we
imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. Every time you
(28:12):
answer a question, you generate 10 new ones, and it's
a pretty complicated system. Nonetheless,
we have ways of modifying behavior with interventions.
We're not at the point of doing it with, like, CRISPR ing
somebody's genome into being different, and it is beyond
terrifying that that seems inevitable that that's gonna,
(28:35):
like, fester in various outposts. There's been one case of
it so far. But, you know, we do the same thing with
propaganda. We do the same thing with advertising. We do the same thing
when we convince people that they really need to change second
messenger pathways in their brain in the morning by
drinking coffee and having caffeine do that in order to be alert.
(28:58):
Every time scientists come up with something, there has
tragically been ideologues who were willing to seize it and run
with it. And some of the time, it's been scientists themselves who've decided
this time to put on a brown shirt and start goosestepping.
I think if the only
logical outcomes of saying there's no free will is
(29:21):
blame and punishment make no sense, praise and
reward make no sense, Feeling as if you are
more morally worthy than any other human makes no
sense, and that you've earned nothing and are entitled to nothing more than
anyone else. I don't know. I guess somebody could be
creative and produce a truly miserable dystopian
(29:44):
world out of that. But I think what it mostly does is
it's gotta make you realize, like,
you're nothing special. Nobody else is deserving of
negative judgment, of condemnation, and hating
someone makes as little sense as hating an earthquake. Dan
Ariely was on my show, and obviously his passion is behavioral economics.
(30:06):
You've gotta be violently opposed to the whole concept
that we can change someone's behavior by, you know,
nudges and, you know. Of course, he can. You know,
the the danger there is deciding that the
nudges and tools of behavior economics are
more powerful than they actually are, that they explain everything
(30:28):
because they don't, because neurochemistry doesn't explain
everything and endocrinology doesn't and
physiological ecology doesn't, and none of them do. You put all the pieces
together, but you could change somebody's
sociopolitical view by what the smell is
in the room they're sitting in. You could change the likelihood
(30:50):
of somebody being a conservative or liberal
depending on the stress hormone levels they were exposed to when they were a
fetus. You you know, all of these influences are
coming in. The the infectious disease
load that your ancestors were dealing with
400 years ago is a significant predictor today of
(31:12):
the levels of xenophobia in your culture. What
scientists tend to do for a living is overinflate the
importance of the particular sliver they've just spent their
entire lifetime on, but you put all
the pieces together. So, yeah, behavioral economics, that's
great. We're not rational decision making machines optimizing
(31:33):
whatever, and that's fascinating stuff. And that's great,
but that's, you know, one part of the whole thing. There's a
lot of parents that'll be listening to this and going, so how
do I parent my children? Is there anything I can do? Do I have any,
anything that I can impact or is in
fact, who I gave birth to is really who they
(31:55):
are? No, because you're influencing them
enormously depending on what culture you're in
within minutes of birth. Teach them if they
wanna judge somebody else, they should stop and think how
do they become that way and how do they become that way in ways that
I've never experienced and can't even imagine. You teach them
(32:17):
when they think that it's not fair, that they're not getting
something, that fair is not a relevant concept, and they
did not earn the good things they have. They're just damn
lucky, and they should keep that in mind. It doesn't make any sense to
hate anyone. And if someone comes up to you
and says something like, woah. I'm so grateful that you just
(32:40):
did that kind thing to me. They're not making any sense because what
they should be saying is, I'm so grateful that you happen
to turn out to be the sort of person who could be kind to me
just now. And if that's said to you enough times,
you no longer say, woah, I am so impressive that,
you wind up saying, woah, I guess I'm kind of grateful that I turned out
(33:02):
to be that sort of person also. If kids are brought
up that their basic view is they see someone
different and whatever the judgment is,
if their first thought is how that person turned out to be like
that, kids have to wind up being
adults who are less judgmental and less
(33:24):
entitled and all those good things. So Determines coming
out in paperback, somebody was to buy this book
and read it. If you could just say, there's one thing I'd love them to
think about at the end of it, would it be just about the sense of
judging and empathy, or would there be something even more than that?
Basically, I'd be happy with just that. That's, that's plenty.
(33:46):
You know, on a certain level, you study biology, and it has
to ultimately be a mechanism of
social justice. Because you see us and you
see squid and you see how all of it works, and you gotta reach
some conclusions, which taken to their logical extent has
to make the world more humane. And if you thought about the
(34:09):
human race, a 100 years, 500 years, a 1000 years from
now, does it continue? Or is it is just the way we're
wired that we have a certain life cycle on this planet like almost
every other living creature? You know, I would have predicted we're gonna
be a completely dystopian nightmare,
fairly soon. We seem to be holding that at bay. Global warming may
(34:31):
hand us that. Now if things work out,
people in the future will look back at us and be as
horrified at our ignorance and our
societal assumptions than we are when
we look back and see that, oh my god. People used to believe that
old ladies with no teeth at the edge of the hamlet could control the
(34:54):
weather. Hopefully, they're not gonna be too self congratulatory about the
fact that they've, like, managed to crawl their way a little bit more in
the direction of this being a more humane place to be a
a human. But, you know, we're we're moving in that
direction. If you ever found peace, whatever you were brought on this planet
for seems to be this insatiable appetite for knowledge
(35:16):
and curating and synthesizing and
digesting and do you ever have a chance to just
relax or is this constantly kind of being how you've been ordained?
Is this is this is who I am until I leave the planet?
I've got some pretty clear,
things that explain how I turned out, how I am. If if
(35:38):
nothing else, my my parents traumatized me to the
exact perfect extent so that I would, like, wind up being
able to be a successful academic, not an inch more or less.
But, you know, I see where some of that stuff comes from. I don't know.
I'm at the very least a lot mentally
healthier and happier once I met my wife about
(36:00):
35 years ago, and my life was transformed by that. And I
decided that, like, living alone in a tent with a bunch of baboons in East
Africa was no longer my model for sociality.
Everything that I took out of the 14 year old
conclusion about how things work was pretty grim.
(36:20):
It has settled much better in me since then,
focusing on the liberating aspects
of all this depressing knowledge and focusing
on, you know, we're biological machines, but
we're totally weird ones and that we're capable of thinking, we're
having emotions, and thus we're capable of having emotions.
(36:44):
That softens the blow a little bit over the years.
You know, Robert, I always end with my 3 takeaways and it's interesting
enough that as you talked about at the end of how your parents traumatized you,
but I think their their love and passion for religion that almost cost
you your life was a great gift because it did fuel
that brain at 14 to decide, you know, I I could let
(37:06):
puberty take over my body, but I'm actually gonna just come to some conclusions
that I think at a very early age, most of us wouldn't even factor
in. The you chased this in so many different ways, with so many different degrees,
in so many different parts of the world, is fascinating me because
maybe it wasn't your free will and this is how you ordained, but I do
believe that when somebody finds something in life, if they just
(37:28):
continue to chase it, it's an interesting roller coaster between highs
and lows. And it sounds like you've had many of those. But I think the
thing that I celebrate the most is just the fact that you do
believe in humans, that you do hope that
there's a way that we can be less judgmental,
less entitled, and much more empathetic about just
(37:49):
realizing that everybody is all part of one race. And maybe if we can
just think about it that way, we could have a better race to the future.
It's absolutely ridiculous to think that something
good or bad can never happen to a machine.
But nonetheless, it's a good thing when, like, pain
is lessened. Pain is painful even though we're
(38:11):
machines. Happiness
is fragile, is wonderful. Like, yeah, it's
a better world if there's less pain. Thanks for having me
on. Once again, a special thanks to RBC for
supporting Chatter That Matters. It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for
listening, and let's chat soon.
Here it is. Instructions to fit in, have everybody like you, and always
be happy. Step 1. Where are we going? We know because we're being
spontaneous. Somebody help me. We're
being spontaneous. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage.
Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A
prison for your mind. Okay. So what if I'm not real? So
(00:23):
what? Even if I'm not real, this moment
is right here, right now.
Imagine you're at your favorite coffee shop. You're ready to order.
The barista asks, do you want a latte or black coffee?
You pause, consider your options, and you confidently choose that
(00:45):
latte. Now ask yourself, was that
choice truly yours? We like to believe we're in control of our
decisions, that we make choices freely.
But what if I told you that my guest today believes that most of the
decisions you've ever made, from what you ate this morning to your career
path, were predetermined? What if the idea of free
(01:07):
will was in fact an illusion? This is the belief of doctor
Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University, where he
holds positions in biology, neurology, and neurosurgery.
He's also known for his work in primate behavior. He's the author of the book
Determine, A Science of Life Without Free Will. By this
point, we know enough about the science of how you
(01:29):
came to be who you are that the owners of proof has
switched. Sapolsky argues that all our actions are governed by biological
and environmental factors, which leaves no room for true free
will. Proof to us show us a mechanism by
which a neuron, a brain, a person has
done something, and it is completely freed
(01:51):
from their biological history. And he has many fans.
Bill Gates called Sapolsky's book, Behave, one of the best books he read in
2017, outlining how Sapolsky masterfully explains
biology behind human behavior. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and philosopher, refers to Sapolsky as
one of the most interesting and eloquent scientists in the world. And Steve
Pinker, who's been on my show, commended Sapolsky for his
(02:14):
ability to merge biology and psychology,
praising his work for offering deep insights into human behavior and
decision making. Today, we'll unpack the question, do
we really have free will? Are we really in the driver's seat?
Is that steering wheel, our ability to accelerate or brake, even get out of the
way just an illusion? Are you in fact
(02:38):
meant to be? Hi.
It's Tony Chapman. Thank you for listening to Chatter That Matters presented by
RBC. If you can, please subscribe to the podcast. And
ratings and reviews, well, they're always welcome, and they're always appreciated.
Doctor Robert Sapolsky, welcome to Chatter That Matters. Well, thanks.
(02:59):
Thanks for having me on. I'll begin by just talking about your journey
into human behavior and the idea of free will. From what I
understand, it really happened at an early age. It was kind of 14 where you
started questioning what we're in charge of. So I'm I'm curious how
somebody that young, instead of being out in a baseball field or or, you know,
dealing with the hormones of puberty, had started having such big thinking.
(03:21):
Well, first off, I was a horrendous athlete. I was brought up
extremely religiously and believed all of it and was
highly ritualistic. And circumstances were
such, that I was having a religious crisis.
It turned out to have transiently
an illness for a few years, which turned out to be
(03:45):
condemned in the old testament. Hey. Wait a
second. God decrees that I have this
medical problem, and yet my having this medical
problem is viewed as some sort of insult, to
god? What what's up with that? And this was causing a great
deal of distress. One night, I woke up at 2
(04:07):
in the morning, and it suddenly all made sense.
There's no God. And as long as I was at it, just as
an addendum, I added on that, oh, and there's no free will.
And the universe is this huge empty,
indifferent place with no meaning. How did that play at the
dining room table with these? Not very well. And,
(04:30):
just as a measure of it, my
father went to his grave 20 years later
having no idea that I had changed anything in my thinking. So
And how did the whole animal fascination come in? Because the other thing that was
really interesting is this, that you started really understanding that within the
primate community, there was a lot of answers to that empty
(04:53):
universe of yours. It, took the form oh, it was sort of
the normal evolution in some ways. I I went
from the predictable every play everyday
obsession with dinosaurs to the
mummies and that whole arc. And somehow, by the time
I was about 10 or 11 and had settled down into primatology,
(05:16):
the notion of hanging out with mountain gorillas, which I never got to do,
unfortunately, but the notion of doing that seemed much preferable
to any other option in life. And your the diversity of your academic
background, maybe it made a lot of sense to you, but I read biology, anthropology,
psychology. As you started moving through life, did any
one triumph over the other? It's almost like rock, papers, and scissors, or was it
(05:38):
just this fusion of all 3 that kinda just continued to lead you
down this path? I was all set on primatology. I was
writing fan letters to primatologists when I was in
high school and stuff, and this one guy whose feet I
was gonna study, I actually wound up being able
to do that and was all set. I I studied
(06:00):
Swahili in high school because I knew I was gonna do field work in East
Africa someday. And I went off to college.
He had a a minor heart attack my freshman year. He was
fine. He lasted decades afterward, but he canceled his
classes. So suddenly having an open slot somewhat
arbitrarily, I took an intro neuroscience class
(06:22):
and was blown away by that, and that started
this, like, great divide. So am I a
lab scientist, or I'm supposed to be wearing hiking shoes every day for the rest
of my life? This lightning rod that you've attached to
yourself, this concept of free will, and you've even described it as a
lunatic fringe. How did that come about that you
(06:44):
decided that you're gonna stand against a lot of people
that would challenge you because you're just challenging the very essence of what humans think
they are that we're in control? How did that come about, and how did you
decide that you'd be, I mean, courageous enough to say, I'm gonna make this statement,
and I'm gonna continue to defend it? Thank you for using the word courageous.
It was just self evident. You look at enough
(07:07):
biology factoids, and I think maybe the
fact that I was straddling a number of different fields, the field
primatology. I was So also getting ecology and
physiological ecology and evolution stuff, and ultimately,
some of the baboon work I was doing had me talking a lot
to biological psychiatrists. Whereas the
(07:29):
lab work was like with molecular people
and eventually neurology types. And I think, sir, you collect
enough factoids from enough different areas and your
14 year old intuition that there's no free will, you you
suddenly feel like you could back it up. We're biological machines.
We're made of the same stuff as, like, squid are. We're
(07:51):
just a fancier version and you throw enough pieces of that stuff
together and out emerges some human attributes.
So in your book Determine, one of the things I I really smiled at is
you said focusing on intents, like reviewing a movie based on its final
minutes. Why did you feel that one of the easiest ways for people to at
least understand it is that they needed to consider the entire story
(08:13):
versus just the, the happy ending? Because the ending, when
you make one of those earth shattering choices as to whether or not you're gonna
have tea or coffee or whether or not send your
army over the border into the neighboring country. Like, in
that moment, it is so intuitively just
palpable that you there's a you in there.
(08:36):
There's a you in there that's somehow separate of that biology
yuck, and that you has formed an intent and is
acting on it. And the problem is that it
ignores the 99% of the book that
preceded that, which is so how do you turn out to be the sort
of person who would form that intent at that moment?
(08:59):
How do you wind up being someone with
your values, someone with your luxuries and privileges,
someone with your attitude, someone with your traumas.
So how do you wind up being that person? And when you
look at the nuts and bolts of it, it's entirely made
up of the biology that random luck handed
(09:22):
you over which you had no control. And it's interactions with
environment that random luck handed you. These paths you followed, at
least when I started researching it, there's some there's some randomness in it.
Do you think it's just this was just meant to unfold like dominoes that way?
Basically, yeah. And where one gets mistaken
as to thinking they're seeing free will is at some point you could reach in
(09:45):
and mess with the dominoes a bit and bias them in one direction or
another. And we confuse that with us just having had
agency because that's much easier than seeing,
oh, not only like have I become
in effect in reality a biological machine, but a
fancy one who has some insights into the buttons and
(10:07):
the levers on the biological machine. Society seems to try
to harness the masses by the give and take. You know, you go to a
church and the sunshine's coming through the, the, the stained glass window, everything
looks beautiful. You go over the other side, it's hell, risk and
reward. It's always trying to set up these boundaries to kind of herd
people like cattle. Is that a factor that factors into
(10:29):
this whole concept of determine that really society is just an
algorithm that's kind of set this up to streamline how we're born,
what's our biology and science tells us what we're gonna do. Basically, but in
a way where much of the time that's only one of
the players and often a fairly minor one. Something that
utterly fascinates me is the fact that different cultures
(10:51):
developed into the being the cultures they are not by accident.
What have been some of the ecological factors that influenced
who becomes polygamists and who becomes
polytheists and who becomes warrior class driven
societies and all that kind and that then immediately
determines what mom was doing with you within minutes of birth
(11:15):
as a mechanism for replicating those values in the next
generation. So, yeah, that's part of it, but, you know, there's lots of other
levels of it. The reality is that when you're
looking at when we carry out a behavior, one where
we may mistakenly think that there was a me in there
separate of of all the materialism and one that had
(11:37):
just acted with free intent, you ask where that
came from, and that came from whatever neurons hiccuped a
millisecond ago, and it came from whatever environmental
stimuli triggered those neurons in the previous minute.
And it came from this morning's hormone levels, and it came
from what trauma or stimulation or whatever changed the
(11:59):
structure of your brain in the previous months, which came
from your adolescence and your childhood and your fetal life and your
genes and then the culture that got handed
to you and you put all those pieces together, where'd that
behavior come from? And it's from everything that came
before. There's not a damn crack anywhere in that edifice that
(12:21):
you could shoehorn in the notion that every now and
then, your brain can do something completely free of
its history. Talk to me about when you shuffle the deck. I mean, you
talk about culture and how that certain cultures are wired a certain
way. What happens now as a society as we start merging the
tribes? Is that something that's gonna completely change the human race?
(12:43):
Yeah. You have all sorts of residues of these mixtures.
And by now, you know, walk around downtown
Manhattan or Tokyo or London
or Lagos, and you may perhaps be
seeing what's an admixture by now, but go to the more isolated
places, and you still see the very, very heavy imprint of the
(13:05):
singular culture. But if nothing else, 60,
70 percent of the humans on earth are believers in
some version of a religion that emerged
from the desert of the Middle East over the last
4000 years. How'd that turn out? Some
illiterate shepherds came up with different views about, like, what the
(13:27):
answers are to the unanswerable, and now most of
Earth celebrates, like, Christmas. Do you see yourself as one
of those shepherds, modern day shepherd that's just kinda trying to
figure how things are? Yeah. You know, we're all trying to figure out how
things work. And, my particular version I stumbled
into is it looks undeniable to me that we work
(13:49):
like biological machines. We're really
weird ones because we could know that we're biological
machines, and that generates all sorts of
ripples of neurosis and anxiety
and heroism and being part of
something bigger than yourself and all that stuff. But it's just
(14:10):
spin offs from the fact that, you know, you look at the building
blocks of a sea snail and you look at us and a sea snail
can learn how to do something. It could learn to retract
its gill if you bop it on the head repeatedly, and it
learns that that's like a scary thing so that each time
you you couple the bopping with some random signal, it now
(14:33):
retracts its gill. Oh, let's spend 30 years as
probably the best living neuroscientist did, taking that apart down
to the level of molecules. And it turns out it's the exact
same molecules in us when we learn to
be afraid of a type of people we never knew about
before. We use the same molecule. You can you can do
(14:54):
genetic engineering and stick some of our genes into a sea slug,
and it works in the same exact networks. We're made of the same
stuff. All that we've got going for us is quantity.
You put together, like, 80,000,000,000 neurons instead of, like,
the 100,000 in the sea slug, and
out pops theology and aesthetics
(15:17):
and economic viewpoints, and
who knows what else, an obsession with the Kardashians. How do you
deal with the sense that can can somebody transform? Can they
change their course in life? Can they become a better human being? Can they find
empathy and compassion if their biology and environment
hasn't set them up for that kind of success? You've touched on sort
(15:39):
of the second of what I've used, the 3 ways in
which people go off the rails and decide they're absolutely seeing
free will in action. The first one is when you very consciously make
a decision in that moment, it seems inconceivable that
there's not a you in there that's separate of all those neurons.
Second is when you look at somebody who's had lousy circumstances
(16:03):
and yet through, like, some incredible display
of tenacity and self discipline, they
come out, woah. They made themselves a self
made person. Pulling one up by one's bootstraps is
inherently a belief that there's a me in there that's separate of the
biology, and that one is really tempting. And the third one is
(16:24):
the one you bring up, which is stuff changes.
People change. Society's changed dramatically. I mean, there's
there's at least a handful of ex white supremacists
out there who pay money to painfully have their, like,
tattoo swastikas. Remove people change.
And where that seems to be free will
(16:48):
out the wazoo is the fact that in those circumstances,
people mistakenly believe that someone
chooses to change, and that simply
is not the case. What happens instead is we are
changed. We are changed by circumstance, and
the way in which we are changed by whatever circumstance gets thrown at
(17:10):
us is entirely a function of who we turned out to
be when we went in and experienced that change. In
an interview you did with Michael Shermer, you mentioned the concept of useful
fiction. Rather than there's no free will, that's how the world
works, it's kind of a drag, suck it up. My view
is actually rejecting free will is wonderfully liberating.
(17:33):
And throughout history, every time we figure it
out, here's a circumstance of human behavior
where, woah, it turns out they had no
control over it. It wasn't their fault that they were like this.
Every time we've done that, the world's become a more
humane place. For most people, jettisoning the
(17:55):
notion of free will is enormously liberating
because we got a world that works on the notion
that it's okay, that some people get treated way better
than average for stuff they had nothing to do with, and some people get treated
way worse. And getting rid of the notion that there's
anything other than just random stupid luck. I wouldn't
(18:18):
say the world's in a great place right now. Is there anything from what you've
studied that we can use as a society to
change for the better? You know, this is a world of a huge amount
of misery and inequality.
The the most pernicious thing about inequality is
when it's not only just permeating everywhere,
(18:41):
corroding everywhere, but you've managed to get societal
beliefs that there's somehow justice built
around inequality. People get what they deserve.
People wind up in a way that has to do with
justice and entitlement and
earning one's position in life and things of that sort. I would say
(19:04):
if I have to reduce all of these science
factoids, which collectively said we're just biological machines and that's
where behavior comes from, if you think you
understand why somebody just did what they did, the odds
are pretty good that you're wrong because you don't
really understand how it turned out that that's how they
(19:26):
function. Or maybe another way of stating it is any time
you're about to like judge someone, especially when it's harshly,
especially when it's moralistically, stop instead and figure
out how did they become that sort of machine.
And every time you think you deserve better treatment or
entitled to something, ask the exact same question and nowhere
(19:49):
in there is agency going to be the answer. But
what's the answer? Somebody is wired to be a pedophile,
that assaulting another human being is just within their DNA.
How do we address that as a society if we have to have the compassion
that that's just who they are, but at the same time, protect the rest of
society from who they are. We do it exactly
(20:11):
as we deal with 5 year olds with nose colds.
300 years ago, illness and moral
worth was intertwined in Europe and if you got sick
it was God punishing you for, or if a kid got sick it was
punishing the parents for their sins. And like, okay, we got a
different view of illness now. If your 5
(20:34):
year old gets a nose cold, that is not a moral failure on their part.
You do not preach at them. But nonetheless, sometimes you gotta protect
society from them, which is if your 5 year old is sneezing, you
keep them home from kindergarten tomorrow because they're
dangerous. They're a danger to society. And the kindergarten
teachers say, you know, if your kid has a cold, please keep them home so
(20:55):
they don't get everybody else sick, and you constrain their
behavior. You impose what is literally
a public health quarantine model, which is you make sure your
kid can't hurt, harm anybody else, but you don't do
an inch more than that. You don't tell them, and you can't play with your
toys today because you're sneezing and you're rotten and you don't preach to
(21:17):
them. And if that seems inconceivable to us that
we do that with, like, a vicious, affectless,
remorseless, sociopathic, and nightmare of a human,
we've done it before. When people figured out that, oh,
sociopathic, remorseless people don't control
(21:38):
the weather. And when there's a sudden hailstorm and your medieval
crops are destroyed, it's not the work of witches. And
it's a better world when we don't burn people at the stake anymore. It's a
better world when we figured out, you know,
airplane pilots with hay fever who've taken
an antihistamine and were drowsy. They can't
(22:00):
be pilot for the next 3 days until there's all these
ways in which you can impose, in
a sense, public health models, figure out how to
make this person not dangerous to people anymore,
and constrain them in that way. And don't do it an inch
beyond that, and don't moralize about it. And as long as
(22:22):
you're at it, put a lot of effort into understanding how people like that
turned out to be that way and get a root cause so that's less
likely to happen in the future. But what if someone like your with your
knowledge was in power instead of having the
empathy that you do, they said, listen. This person's never gonna change.
There's no redemption. Let's bring back the death penalty. Are we
(22:43):
not concerned that this knowledge in the wrong hands could be
abused beyond belief? It won't work or it sure as
hell shouldn't work. They had nothing to do
with how they turned out that way. And you know what? If they
have an itchy back and someone scratches it, they
feel better. It's a nicer life for them for 2 seconds
(23:05):
there. If they are still capable of
experiencing things and they do
not deserve because there's no such thing as deserve. There's
nothing earned. There's nothing entitled. They
have no more or less claim to having their
needs considered than that of any other random human who
(23:27):
turned out to be who they are. When
we return, more with doctor Robert Sapolsky, and we go
back and forth in this conversation of free will or lack thereof. We
even talk about how it could apply when raising a child,
and, of course, my 3 takeaways.
(23:47):
Hi. It's Tony Chapman. You know, I thought this would be the perfect episode to
share some news about the RBC's foundation and their commitment to
stronger communities. What they've done is launch a new community infrastructure
fund. The end game is to make our community spaces more sustainable and
accessible through retrofits, repairs, and upgrades. The best way to think
about what they're doing is to think about a hospital that's easier to navigate, or
(24:09):
a community center that's more energy efficient, or a
vibrant cultural hub that's more welcoming. That's the future RBC
Foundation's investing in, and it's all part of RBC Foundation's $2,000,000,000
commitment to funding ideas for people and planet over the next 10 years. If
you're a registered charity, and you want to apply for funding, head to rbc.com.
(24:29):
Enhancing the sustainability and accessibility of buildings, well that
matters to you, to me, and to RBC.
You make a choice. You choose something. You're choosing
flavor of ice cream. You're you form an intent, and you act on
it. For most people, that is necessary and sufficient to
(24:49):
decide you had free will. How did you turn out to
be the sort of person who would have that intent?
Where did that intent come from? My guest
today is doctor Robert Sapolsky. He's a renowned neuroscientist
at Stanford University. And we're talking about his book, Determined, A
Science of Life Without Free Will, and his argument that our free will
(25:11):
is just an illusion. It's shaped by biology and environment. And if
that's the case, that challenges traditional views of moral responsibility.
Be curious how you think at the end of this episode.
I'd love to see you in a debate with somebody. What's the best debate you've
been in, toe to toe, and at the end of it, you walked out
smiling, going, we both held our own, and we both
(25:34):
feel we've improved our position. What was the most
interesting one was when I had during the fall with the philosopher
Daniel Dennett. He was one of the most visible
strident atheists out there, but was a total
mess of a philosopher insofar as he
somehow saw there was still free will out there. People
(25:56):
turn out to be the way they are because there's a lot of
things that you earn. And if the picture is good, it's
because you're entitled to it and having
ridiculous statements in all of his writing to the effect not even
to the effect of this is, like, verbatim, luck evens
out over time. Good luck and bad luck even out over
(26:19):
time. And thus people shouldn't cite luck when complaining about
how things turned out not so great for them. And the reality is
that starting with like the most basic biology to the most basic
sociology, good luck is likely to amplify
over time, and bad luck is likely to amplify, and they diverge
further and further over the course of their life. So we had
(26:42):
a debate, which turned out to be remarkably
frustrating, because I think all he
was saying at the end is, damn. It just seems
so intuitively obvious that there's free will.
Wow. And when you dissected his arguments,
intuition is a really lousy
(27:04):
guideline for figuring out how things work because, consistently,
intuition kinda takes you up dead ends. So we had a
debate, and they did, like, the most, like, embarrassing
thing that beforehand, the moderator asked the audience to
vote on whether or not there was free will, and, like, 30% of
people thought there was no free will. And then afterward, he asked him
(27:26):
again, and now most of the people in the audience no longer believed in
free will and, woah, what a triumph and all of that. You know, it
was cool. It was very stimulating in the sense of seeing all the
ways in which his stance did not have much
more to it other than, damn, it's gonna be really
uncomfortable to admit that there's no free will. Are you ever
(27:49):
concerned that what you've uncovered, this gives
people with the wrong intention, the ability to
in fact manipulate society if they can in fact rewire
where we're meant to be? One of those like comforting
things is, you know, life is not only stranger than we
imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. Every time you
(28:12):
answer a question, you generate 10 new ones, and it's
a pretty complicated system. Nonetheless,
we have ways of modifying behavior with interventions.
We're not at the point of doing it with, like, CRISPR ing
somebody's genome into being different, and it is beyond
terrifying that that seems inevitable that that's gonna,
(28:35):
like, fester in various outposts. There's been one case of
it so far. But, you know, we do the same thing with
propaganda. We do the same thing with advertising. We do the same thing
when we convince people that they really need to change second
messenger pathways in their brain in the morning by
drinking coffee and having caffeine do that in order to be alert.
(28:58):
Every time scientists come up with something, there has
tragically been ideologues who were willing to seize it and run
with it. And some of the time, it's been scientists themselves who've decided
this time to put on a brown shirt and start goosestepping.
I think if the only
logical outcomes of saying there's no free will is
(29:21):
blame and punishment make no sense, praise and
reward make no sense, Feeling as if you are
more morally worthy than any other human makes no
sense, and that you've earned nothing and are entitled to nothing more than
anyone else. I don't know. I guess somebody could be
creative and produce a truly miserable dystopian
(29:44):
world out of that. But I think what it mostly does is
it's gotta make you realize, like,
you're nothing special. Nobody else is deserving of
negative judgment, of condemnation, and hating
someone makes as little sense as hating an earthquake. Dan
Ariely was on my show, and obviously his passion is behavioral economics.
(30:06):
You've gotta be violently opposed to the whole concept
that we can change someone's behavior by, you know,
nudges and, you know. Of course, he can. You know,
the the danger there is deciding that the
nudges and tools of behavior economics are
more powerful than they actually are, that they explain everything
(30:28):
because they don't, because neurochemistry doesn't explain
everything and endocrinology doesn't and
physiological ecology doesn't, and none of them do. You put all the pieces
together, but you could change somebody's
sociopolitical view by what the smell is
in the room they're sitting in. You could change the likelihood
(30:50):
of somebody being a conservative or liberal
depending on the stress hormone levels they were exposed to when they were a
fetus. You you know, all of these influences are
coming in. The the infectious disease
load that your ancestors were dealing with
400 years ago is a significant predictor today of
(31:12):
the levels of xenophobia in your culture. What
scientists tend to do for a living is overinflate the
importance of the particular sliver they've just spent their
entire lifetime on, but you put all
the pieces together. So, yeah, behavioral economics, that's
great. We're not rational decision making machines optimizing
(31:33):
whatever, and that's fascinating stuff. And that's great,
but that's, you know, one part of the whole thing. There's a
lot of parents that'll be listening to this and going, so how
do I parent my children? Is there anything I can do? Do I have any,
anything that I can impact or is in
fact, who I gave birth to is really who they
(31:55):
are? No, because you're influencing them
enormously depending on what culture you're in
within minutes of birth. Teach them if they
wanna judge somebody else, they should stop and think how
do they become that way and how do they become that way in ways that
I've never experienced and can't even imagine. You teach them
(32:17):
when they think that it's not fair, that they're not getting
something, that fair is not a relevant concept, and they
did not earn the good things they have. They're just damn
lucky, and they should keep that in mind. It doesn't make any sense to
hate anyone. And if someone comes up to you
and says something like, woah. I'm so grateful that you just
(32:40):
did that kind thing to me. They're not making any sense because what
they should be saying is, I'm so grateful that you happen
to turn out to be the sort of person who could be kind to me
just now. And if that's said to you enough times,
you no longer say, woah, I am so impressive that,
you wind up saying, woah, I guess I'm kind of grateful that I turned out
(33:02):
to be that sort of person also. If kids are brought
up that their basic view is they see someone
different and whatever the judgment is,
if their first thought is how that person turned out to be like
that, kids have to wind up being
adults who are less judgmental and less
(33:24):
entitled and all those good things. So Determines coming
out in paperback, somebody was to buy this book
and read it. If you could just say, there's one thing I'd love them to
think about at the end of it, would it be just about the sense of
judging and empathy, or would there be something even more than that?
Basically, I'd be happy with just that. That's, that's plenty.
(33:46):
You know, on a certain level, you study biology, and it has
to ultimately be a mechanism of
social justice. Because you see us and you
see squid and you see how all of it works, and you gotta reach
some conclusions, which taken to their logical extent has
to make the world more humane. And if you thought about the
(34:09):
human race, a 100 years, 500 years, a 1000 years from
now, does it continue? Or is it is just the way we're
wired that we have a certain life cycle on this planet like almost
every other living creature? You know, I would have predicted we're gonna
be a completely dystopian nightmare,
fairly soon. We seem to be holding that at bay. Global warming may
(34:31):
hand us that. Now if things work out,
people in the future will look back at us and be as
horrified at our ignorance and our
societal assumptions than we are when
we look back and see that, oh my god. People used to believe that
old ladies with no teeth at the edge of the hamlet could control the
(34:54):
weather. Hopefully, they're not gonna be too self congratulatory about the
fact that they've, like, managed to crawl their way a little bit more in
the direction of this being a more humane place to be a
a human. But, you know, we're we're moving in that
direction. If you ever found peace, whatever you were brought on this planet
for seems to be this insatiable appetite for knowledge
(35:16):
and curating and synthesizing and
digesting and do you ever have a chance to just
relax or is this constantly kind of being how you've been ordained?
Is this is this is who I am until I leave the planet?
I've got some pretty clear,
things that explain how I turned out, how I am. If if
(35:38):
nothing else, my my parents traumatized me to the
exact perfect extent so that I would, like, wind up being
able to be a successful academic, not an inch more or less.
But, you know, I see where some of that stuff comes from. I don't know.
I'm at the very least a lot mentally
healthier and happier once I met my wife about
(36:00):
35 years ago, and my life was transformed by that. And I
decided that, like, living alone in a tent with a bunch of baboons in East
Africa was no longer my model for sociality.
Everything that I took out of the 14 year old
conclusion about how things work was pretty grim.
(36:20):
It has settled much better in me since then,
focusing on the liberating aspects
of all this depressing knowledge and focusing
on, you know, we're biological machines, but
we're totally weird ones and that we're capable of thinking, we're
having emotions, and thus we're capable of having emotions.
(36:44):
That softens the blow a little bit over the years.
You know, Robert, I always end with my 3 takeaways and it's interesting
enough that as you talked about at the end of how your parents traumatized you,
but I think their their love and passion for religion that almost cost
you your life was a great gift because it did fuel
that brain at 14 to decide, you know, I I could let
(37:06):
puberty take over my body, but I'm actually gonna just come to some conclusions
that I think at a very early age, most of us wouldn't even factor
in. The you chased this in so many different ways, with so many different degrees,
in so many different parts of the world, is fascinating me because
maybe it wasn't your free will and this is how you ordained, but I do
believe that when somebody finds something in life, if they just
(37:28):
continue to chase it, it's an interesting roller coaster between highs
and lows. And it sounds like you've had many of those. But I think the
thing that I celebrate the most is just the fact that you do
believe in humans, that you do hope that
there's a way that we can be less judgmental,
less entitled, and much more empathetic about just
(37:49):
realizing that everybody is all part of one race. And maybe if we can
just think about it that way, we could have a better race to the future.
It's absolutely ridiculous to think that something
good or bad can never happen to a machine.
But nonetheless, it's a good thing when, like, pain
is lessened. Pain is painful even though we're
(38:11):
machines. Happiness
is fragile, is wonderful. Like, yeah, it's
a better world if there's less pain. Thanks for having me
on. Once again, a special thanks to RBC for
supporting Chatter That Matters. It's Tony Chapman. Thanks for
listening, and let's chat soon.
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