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DonateAre we the true authors of our actions – or are we guided by a preordained fate? From the days of Greek philosophers to the present, the notion of free will and the question of whether humans can make their own choices is as captivating as ever. Those who think that free will exists consider it foundational to a rules-based society since it holds individuals accountable for their actions. Those who don’t believe in it argue everything that happens to us, and our actions and choices, is determined by prior existing conditions. Though we may feel in control of our actions, they are influenced by factors outside of our control, like upbringing, societal pressures, and biological predispositions.
With this background, we now debate the question: Do We Have Free Will?
John Donvan
This is Open to Debate. I’m John Donvan. Hi, everybody. Today, our debaters take on one of the oldest questions at the very heart of being human, do we have free will? I am exercising my free will on this one by handing off the moderating task to journalist and documentarian, Nayeema Raza. Nayeema has moderated for us in the past and is a very good friend of the show. This is a fun conversation that goes to some unexpected places, including a world where ants speak French, so please enjoy.
Nayeema Raza
Hi, everybody. I’m a journalist at New York Magazine, where I executive produce. And I’m on the podcast On with Kara Swisher. I’m also a documentary filmmaker, but lately it’s been hard for me to focus on anything at all since the team at Open to Debate asked me if I’d be interested in wrangling a conversation about whether we humans have free will or not.
Nayeema Raza
It’s a question that can quickly lead you down a rabbit hole of literature, which begins with dusting off the philosophical musings of Plato and Aristotle before delving into the physical determinations of the laws of nature, and then reviewing all kinds of biological studies of humans versus, say, chimps. The answer to this question can lead us to second-guess our buy into the whole structure of the world. You see, the idea of free will underpins our current social model. It is the basis of moral responsibility and also of merit. So in the legal system, our intentional choices determine whether we’re held accountable by punishment. In the school system, those choices tell us whether we have earned a particular grade or award.
Nayeema Raza
So today, we at Open to Debate are going to tackle a centuries old unsettled question, do we have free will? And we’re gonna do it through the prism of science. Let’s get into it and meet our debaters. Arguing that yes, we do have free will, we have social psychologist, Roy Baumeister, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the author of several books, including Willpower and Free Will and Consciousness. Welcome, Roy.
Nayeema Raza
And arguing no to the question, do we have free will, is biologist and neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky. He’s a Stanford University professor who has authored the books Behaved and a new book called Determined. Welcome, Robert.
Nayeema Raza
All right. Before we start, I just wanna take a minute to understand what motivated each of you to join us today in this debate. Roy, we’ll start with you. What are the stakes for you in this argument?
Roy Baumeister
Oh, well, I, I got wind of, uh, Robert’s book, uh, coming out and, uh, I was just at the same time working on a book, uh, developing the scientific theory of free will. And I have very high respect for, uh, his work and scholarship over the years, and I thought, “Well, this would be fun to, uh, uh, explore both sides of the issue.” And so I, I, I wrote to him and I said, “I suspect we’ll (laughs), we’ll agree on a lot of things, but the disagreements will be interesting too.” Uh, so, uh, I thought, “It’s fun and should be stimulating, and I hope to learn something.”
Nayeema Raza
Robert, same question to you. Why did you show up here today, if you had any choice at all?
Robert Sapolsky
Of course not, because, uh, one night when I was 14, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized there’s no free will whatsoever. And I have not looked back since then. And about half of my waking hours has been spent thinking about this. So the chance to talk about this with the likes of Roy Baumeister is, like, irresistible, and so I’m very excited to be here.
Nayeema Raza
Fantastic. Well, we’re happy to have you here today. We’re just gonna get into our opening statements. We want each of you to take a few minutes to explain your position. So Roy, you’re up first and you’re arguing yes to the question, do we have free will?
Roy Baumeister
Over the years, I have talked to many scientists who accept free will, uh, and many others who reject it. I find I mainly agree with both (laughs) of them, uh, because they’re not talking about the same thing. Remarkably though, both agree that the human mental system by which the human mind and brain control behavior is far beyond anything else in nature. Uh, so they agree about that, they just disagree about the term. Well, the terminology debate aside, there is the clear scientific fact that we have this marvelous newly evolved mental system for, uh, controlling behavior, and the scientific task, I think, is, is to explain it.
Roy Baumeister
For the record, free will is perhaps not the, uh, the ideal term, but I think it’s close enough. And actually for me, the will part is more of a problem than the free part. We don’t have a psychology of will these days. Psychology textbooks do not have a chapter, uh, on the will. The free part, I think where people get hung up is they think it has to be complete, absolute freedom independent of any external cause or circumstance, and what good would that be? I don’t know why that would even evolve. Uh, in psychology, most things are on a continuum. Maybe we might talk about, say, high and low self-esteem, uh, but when you actually measure self-esteem, scores are a range, uh, along a continuum. And so I think it’s the same with freedom, uh, it’s relative. Some actions are clearly freer than others. I think we’ve all experienced the difference. And so the challenge is to understand the mental processes by which, uh, the human makes the freer choices.
Roy Baumeister
Some key features, uh, of this system, uh, i- include the time extension. We forget the extent to which the animal mind is designed to respond with a bit of learning, but mainly to the immediate here and now, whereas human action can incorporate things from the distant future and the past. A human mind is superior at conceptualizing multiple possibilities, comparing them, imagining how they would play out, uh, even making contingency plans for, uh, different possible events. Conscious thought in humans is far, uh, evolved, uh, beyond, uh, what other animals have. And plenty of experiments show that conscious thought has significant causal effect on behavior, which is good because there are no theories of unconscious free will. Also, the human mind can incorporate meaningful ideas, abstract things into the causation of behavior, things like laws, financial calculations, religious, political views, moral principles, uh, and so on.
Roy Baumeister
And, uh, one more feature, uh, seems to be limited energy. These advanced mental, uh, processes take more energy. It’s metabolically expensive, if you will. And so we can’t use free will all the time. It has to be used sometimes judiciously, but partial sometimes free will, uh, is sufficient. Some of the processes include rational choice, figuring out with logic and reasoning what to do, self-control overriding one response so you can do something else. Planning, developing a sequence of steps in your mind, uh, as to how to get to a goal and then following them. The bigger picture for me is that the human mind, uh, was created by nature for culture. That is, our species solves the problems of survival and reproduction that all species must solve by, by culture. Uh, and so the distinctively true human traits are basically the result of biological evolutionary adaptations to make us able to profit, uh, from culture. And free will as an advanced system for controlling action in a complex social environment is one of these.
Nayeema Raza
Thank you so much, Roy. All right, now let’s hear from Robert. Robert, you’re answering a resounding no to the question, do we have free will?
Robert Sapolsky
Okay. No-no. Let me start off by saying, well, I don’t believe in free will, but what kind of free will I don’t believe in is a little different from most people’s everyday conception of it, which is where people focus on, where the legal system focuses on is somebody has done something and you ask, did they intend to do it? Did they understand what the outcome was likely to be? And did they understand they had alternative options? And if the answer to all of those is yes, that’s it. They had free will, culpability, responsibility, give them their prize, give them their prison sentence, whatever. And it is merely, did you have intent and did you realize you could’ve done otherwise?
Robert Sapolsky
And for me, from a biological perspective, that is like trying to review a movie by just seeing the last three minutes of it because what isn’t done is asking the absolutely critical question when you figured out, yes, this person intended to do it. They knew the conseque- Where did that intent come from? And that’s where we lack the free will. Where did that intent come from that person to do something wonderful or awful, in between? It came from what their neurons did in the previous half second, but it also came from what the environment in the previous minutes triggered them. Are they hungry, tired, scared, in pain? But it also came from this morning’s hormone levels because they were going to influence how sensitive the brain was going to be to those sensory stimuli. But it’s also a function of what’s been happening in recent months, seasons, years. Did you go through trauma? Did you find love? Did you find God? Because any of those things will have changed the functioning of your brain.
Robert Sapolsky
And then we’re barreling back to adolescence where you’re constructing the final project on one of the most important parts of the brain. Childhood, fetal life, your fetal environment, what sort of bloodstream your mother was supplying you with. What was in it was shaping the construction of your brain. And then of course, your genes. Your genes determining next to nothing, but your genes setting you up for proclivities and vulnerabilities and potentials and stuff. And remarkably, then you gotta ask, what sort of culture did your ancestors invent and what sort of ecosystem shaped that? What’s that got to do with it? Because within minutes of your birth, your mother was raising you in ways that were distinctive to your culture, distinctive to whatever they came up with four centuries ago and passed on and passed on and passed on.
Robert Sapolsky
So, in other words, what we see here is why did that behavior occur, because everything from one second ago to evolution a million years ago. And what you conclude looking at that is whoa, it’s complicated, it’s complicated. And when you look at it closely, it’s not complicated because all these different disciplines are relevant to where that behavior came from. It’s because ultimately, they’re all one discipline. If you’re talking about genes, for example, by definition, you’re talking about the evolution of those genes. And by definition, you’re talking about your childhood where epigenetic environmental events were determining which of your genes could be turned on or off for the rest of your life. And if you’re talking about genes, by definition, you’re talking about the proteins that were made in your brain 20 minutes ago.
Robert Sapolsky
What you have here is this continuous arc of, from evolution up to one second ago of this biology interacting with environment, over which you had no control. And when you look at that arc, there is not a crack anywhere in there in which you can shoehorn in what we think of, what we intuit as being free will because it requires something that doesn’t fit with biology.
Nayeema Raza
Well, I a- appreciate both of your opening arguments. I do wanna say, when we spoke earlier to this conversation, both of you rejected a kind of compromise solution. I think, Roy, you mentioned you, we’re not looking for some namby-pamby definition of free will, that the will part really mattered to you.
Roy Baumeister
No, I think the will is a, is a metaphor. There, there’s no will. Uh, we don’t have a psychology of will. Uh, as I said, the psychology textbooks don’t have, don’t cover it. Uh, I don’t know anyone who has a theory of, of will, at least not for the past century.
Nayeema Raza
Fair. Robert, you’re, you’re not a compatibilist. You’re going fully on the side of determinism. Why is it so binary for you? Why can there not be a compromise?
Robert Sapolsky
Because I don’t see any space in which you can look how the brain works and how the world brought you to this moment and made you who you are, I don’t see any space in there where you could get in a causalist c- a world in which you can successfully wish for what you want to wish for or intend to do what you’re going to intend without invoking fairy dust.
Nayeema Raza
You’re not advocating fairy dust. We are gonna take a quick break, and then we’ll dive right into the discussion on the question, do we have free will? We’ll be right back.
Nayeema Raza
Welcome back to Open to Debate. We’re debating the question, do we have free will? My name’s Nayeema Raza, and I’m the guest moderator for today’s conversation. We just heard opening statements from Psychologist Roy Baumeister and Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky. I wanna try and summarize those briefly, although I am neither a psychologist nor a neuroscientist, so bear with me when I do that. Roy, I heard you arguing enthusiastically that yes, we do have free will, even if it’s not a perfect term for the thing that we have. But what we do know is that we humans have evolved as a species, and our mind is able to have some control over behavior, that we’ve evolved by nature for culture. And the human mind has the ability to do things other primates can’t do, including for example, breaking past the present to conceive a potential future, to have conscious thought, to imagine amorphous ideas. An- and, and you also noted that the freedom aspect might be on a continuum, which is that some actions may be freer than others. But in e- either case, we do have volition or will.
Nayeema Raza
And then, Robert, you argued a pretty emphatic nope to the question of, do we have free will? You were saying, look, when we… Our entire system is based on this idea of intent, particularly, our legal system. Did someone intend to do something? It seemed like you were saying, well, intent underlies the system. Something else underlies our intent, an entire kind of machinery of neurons, of biology, of experience, of rearing, of culture, of even what was being fed into us when we were fetuses. So that really, it seems almost as if you were describing a machine to me, Robert.
Robert Sapolsky
Yeah. Um, unfortunately, I’m mechanistic enough, um, in both how biology works and how biology interacts with environment that yeah, I kinda think of us as machines that could know our machine-ness and that could feel as if our feelings are so real that they begin to be real after a while. But we’re made of the same stuff as, as like snails and then to learn, and we’re made of the same stuff as, like, wildebeests and asteroids and things and-
Roy Baumeister
Uh, well, a machine, almost by definition, is not alive, so there’s a, a big, uh, escalation, uh, already as we move from physics and chemistry up into biology. The question of what would make a machine, uh, what would make it, uh, have free will, uh, is an intriguing one. It would at least have to be able to reprogram itself, uh, to, uh, some degree. But, uh, ultimately, uh, machines, uh, aren’t alive and so they don’t care, whereas life wants to sustain life. Otherwise, it doesn’t, uh, it doesn’t last very long. Um, and so the wanting, uh, is a f- is a, an important foundation that you don’t see in a machine, uh, but that living things, uh, do have. Uh, and, uh, the v- volition, the, the system for controlling behavior is there to serve it, to help us get, uh, what we want and need initially in order to survive and reproduce.
Nayeema Raza
It strikes me that neither of you are saying, look, the laws of physics don’t apply. To the contrary, it’s, it’s almost as if we agree that intent exists in both scenarios, but Roy, you seem to think that this is something that is endogenous, that can be sparked inside of somebody, uh, separate to their biology, their chemistry, their hormones, et cetera. Versus Robert, I think you’re saying the intent is a, is a manifestation of all of these processes of the bol- biological machine, including the environment. Is that fair?
Roy Baumeister
I, I don’t, I don’t think, uh, we can go, uh… We cannot go against the biology. Uh, Philip Anderson had a c- uh, the Nobel Prize winner in physics some time ago, had a classic article, uh, called More Is Different. Uh, he said, you know, physicists used to believe that everything could be, uh, eventually explained by the laws of physics, and they don’t think that anymore. Uh, what Anderson explained is there’s kind of a hierarchy, and at each level, each level’s constrained by the more fundamental ones. So nothing can violate the laws of physics, but already with chemistry, new causes come into play.
Roy Baumeister
And then we move to biology, life is not just a chemical, uh, process. From the moment before you die to the moment after you die, you’ve got all the same chemicals in your body. Uh, they’re just not working together in (laughs) the same, uh, system that they were before. So new causes come into play as you move higher up. They also seem to be more probabilistic. Newtonian physics didn’t need much, uh, in the way of fancy statistics, whereas if you took, let’s say, economics, where understanding a complex, uh, a system with multiple people, you need very fancy statistics ’cause it’s a much more probabilistic operation.
Nayeema Raza
All right. So, free will is just another layer on top of these other layers that you’re describing in your model, correct, Roy?
Robert Sapolsky
It’s great that you brought up Anderson. That’s also related to one of my favorite quotes that with enough quantity, you invent quality.
Robert Sapolsky
Emergent things happen. One molecule of H2O cannot feel wet. Wetness can only exist when you have a whole bunch of this and m- emerging properties-
Robert Sapolsky
… directly cause and call wetness. But every model out there by which someone looks at an emergent trait, every one of the ways that people try to pull free will out of emergence, and it always requires something that just can’t work that way, which is that the other emergent conscious level there is able to reach down and change the fundamental nature of the building blocks. Like, one ant may make no sense, but when something emergent has happened, it’s totally amazing, there’s 10,000 ants and they’re building this whole society and all of that. They don’t suddenly, because of their societal complexity, have the ability for the ants to suddenly speak French.
Robert Sapolsky
What, what’s wonderful about emergent systems is it’s built out of these ridiculously stupid, simple little building blocks. And when you get some whole amazing emergent thing out of it like a sort of consciousness or whatever, it’s still made of the same incredibly simple little building blocks and what the philosophers calls, called downward causality, which is basically, you can reach down at that point and fumfer around and suddenly, because of that, you can have uncaused causes and ants can speak French. And all of, all of the models fall apart. It doesn’t work that way.
Roy Baumeister
I have to su- think that it, it does. I mean, think of the world economy. Uh, that’s a high-level system and it has downward effects on us individuals. Uh, you have 10 years ago the, uh, the world had a huge recession, uh, which, uh, nobody wanted or planned or intended. Uh, it’s just at the high level of the system, but lots of individual lives were affected and leading lots of individual people to do different things. I think you put your finger on the key thing. Those changes at the high level, uh, circle back not to produce magical things so that ants can teach French, but that changes the behavior of the individual ant once it becomes part of a giant system.
Robert Sapolsky
The thing is though, to stick with that, um, the ant gets no more behaviors. An ant is going about antness with, like-
Robert Sapolsky
… three or four rules simply about how it interacts. It’s like in a marching band, like, once they’re, like, performing Michael Jackson moon-walking or something on the football field, the tuba player is still following the same rules of either you walk forward, or you make a left or you make a right. And it’s still local, simple, simple neighbor interactions. But Roy, you’re absolutely right, we can have top-down stuff easily. All I can do is have this very abstract societally influenced thought right now that I’m sounding like an idiot, and my blood pressure will suddenly change. Something top-down has happened, but it’s not changing the fundamental workings of the stuff down there. You’re still constrained by the reality of those building blocks.
Roy Baumeister
Uh, but the, the, the tuba player is doing it only because there’s the rest of the band. Uh, yes, he has the same capabilities, so, uh, again, to go back to, to Philip Anderson, each level is constrained by the lower levels. It doesn’t make, it doesn’t give the tuba player magical new powers to fly or anything like that. Uh, but, uh, he or, or, or she, but he’s doing it as part of the group. He would not be doing it without that. And so, uh, to make the band work, there has to be, uh, this, this collective level which reaches down, uh, into the causality of, of what individuals do.
Nayeema Raza
Roy, t- give an example from, um, your research involving other animals. What can humans do that you’ve seen other primates are unable to replicate?
Roy Baumeister
I ha- haven’t done research with, uh, uh, primates, but, uh, uh, one that, uh, my colleagues at, at, uh, when I was at Queensland did, um, they, uh, uh, they trained animals, uh, humans and primates, it was human children and primates. They dropped a, a treat in a tube and it came out the bottom and fell into a hole and was gone unless they catched it. So, uh, everybody, uh, learned to read out, reach out and catch it. And then they modified the tube so that there were two openings at the bottom, uh, and it could come out left or right at random. Well, uh, then you’re only get half of them if you use one hand, but if you realize both are possible, uh, you put out both hands, uh, and, uh, and catch it that way.
Roy Baumeister
Well, the human two-year-old children couldn’t figure that out, but by three-year-old, three years old, they did. And the four-year-olds got it every time out of 20 trials. Uh, none of the, the gorillas, the chimpanzees, the orangutans, uh, ever figured it out. They simply weren’t able to process, uh, the simultaneous possibility, uh, of alternate possibilities in the world. And I think this is a, uh, is a profound point. I- in fact, uh, they said a couple of them stumbled on the (laughs), by accident, uh, put out two hands, but they didn’t realize they had solved the problem. And then they went back to guessing with one hand. So, it seems to me you are freer if you’re able to understand, uh, that there are multiple, uh, possibilities in that situation. And again, I think that’s what we, we, uh, uh, evolved these, uh, the more flexible brain to deal with.
Nayeema Raza
Robert, would you think that the ability to conceive the future and to assume multiple possibilities in the future allow for some free will?
Robert Sapolsky
No, because okay, we, we’ve, we’ve been circling around this, like, totally irresistible notion that you can, some circumstances, you could be freer than others. And maybe flipped another way, most people start off with this assumption that I’m a free agent and I have free will and all of that. But I can recognize there’s some exceptions to it. There’s some edge cases. And say if you’re sitting on a jury and you’re in one of the more enlightened outposts in this country, um, and edge case would constitute someone who’s done something violent and disinhibited and, and simply didn’t show self-control. And it turns out they had massive damage to their frontal cortex in a car accident a few years earlier. And an edge case like that, most people can see what has robbed that person of the supposed volition that could make them from a cau- a, a, a causeless cause.
Robert Sapolsky
But where the trouble comes in is then we look at the rest of us and we look at some person who’s done something just as damaging and disinhibited, but they didn’t have the concussive head trauma. Instead, they had eleventy different things happen to them, starting with their mother’s fetal stress hormones to what kind of neighborhood they were in, to what variant of this gene. And all of those factors put together has made that person exactly as incapable of exerting control in that circumstance. And what we call more and less free situations, it’s easier, uh, for us to recognize when there’s no free will when, yeah, it’s a brain injury.
Nayeema Raza
So, when I was reading your book, Robert, that was one of the things that was profound to me, this idea of the evolution of medicine, that we used to believe, um, that seizures were a sign of demonic possession or that schizophrenia was the result of bad mothering or dyslexia was caused by, you know, something environmental. But over time, we’ve learned, the science has borne out and the science has proven that these are deeply rooted and, uh, biology and, and genes and hormones, et cetera.
Nayeema Raza
So I guess, Roy, I would ask you, how would, how does your… Does your model allow that possibility that we’re just early in the stages of discovery and that, that we could learn that there’s a world in which nothing is our fault or nothing is our creation?
Roy Baumeister
Well, that, that’s going a long way that nothing is our fault. We’re certainly discovering new causes. I, uh, I debated, uh, uh, John Bargh, the psychologist who’d shown unconscious automatic causes of many behaviors, but, uh, does, is consciousness like the driver of the car or like the passenger, the driver in control of where it goes, the passenger just looking out the window and seeing it? I think we converged on it’s more like the GPS (laughs), the navigational system. Uh, so yes, something comes before the navigational system. The, uh, the driver asks it, can you plot a good route to me to get to my destination? Uh, a- and consciousness and we can have thoughts and consciousness that we can’t seem to have unconsciously. Uh, the consc- unconscious, for example, uh, seems to operate one word at a time. It doesn’t combine them, but you can say a lot more with sentences and paragraphs and lectures and books.
Roy Baumeister
Okay. Let’s say m- making an economic choice. I mean trade is, uh, over 100,000 years old in our species. Uh, it was early. It requires skills that, uh, other primates don’t have. You have to calculate quantities, decide it’s a good deal. It helps to understand the other person’s perspective. It’s, it’s a form of cooperation, which we don’t realize, but, uh, is my reading of, uh, uh, of evolution, communication, cooperation are the, the big advances.
Robert Sapolsky
Okay. You, you watched some TV program and there’s some, someone you want to emulate. And they’re dressed in some way that strikes you as the most irresistible thing on earth, and thus you need to dress like them the next day. And somebody else watches the same program and has the same thought. And by the next day, they think it’s silly. Why did they wind up intending different things by the next day? The same stimulus, but by the next day one of them intended to buy that shirt, the other one didn’t. Maybe they have different biology of color perception, just to be on a totally boring level.
Robert Sapolsky
Maybe they have very different backgrounds as to how they feel about conformity and how much standing out an being different makes them anxious or makes them feel excited. Maybe they have very, very different feelings about who that character reminds them of and what their associations are with that. Maybe they have very limited ability to remember the next day what it felt like when they were looking at them saying, “God, if only I could dress like that, I would finally be one of the cool kids.”
Nayeema Raza
Robert, if I’m to spin forward your theory, which, which, uh, takes the yarn off of everything we have a social fabric in terms of how we dole out awards or how we dole out punishments, what does society look like if there is, if we are to accept that there is no free will, where there’s no blame and no praise?
Robert Sapolsky
If this, like for years, I’ve been saying, “Oh my god, what if actually people started believing this?” Um, because it will change everything. What it won’t change is the fear that people will just run amuck because they can’t be held responsible for anything. And there’s a beautiful, interesting literature that one could get into with that that shows that’s not a worry. Another worry that doesn’t need to be there is, oh my god, if everything’s determined, nothing can change. Things change enormously, and in fact, when you study what goes on when we change, when a sea slug learns a new behavior or an adult human learns that they aren’t a white supremacist anymore and dramatic cha- When you look at how that works, it reinforces the, we are machines without free will.
Robert Sapolsky
What it should look like is a world in which, you know, if you really get down to things, praise and blame and reward and punishment make no sense whatsoever because all of that is predicated on you were responsible for your gifts, you were responsible for your sins of omission or commission. You are respo- You made yourself into the biological organism you are today. No, you didn’t in the slightest and that sounds totally crazy and impossible. And I can actually think that way, like, maybe one minute every three weeks or so. I think it’s imp-
Nayeema Raza
So a world without credit. A world where ev- we have to accept that everything is just luck or mechanics.
Robert Sapolsky
And find our pleasures other from thinking that we’re more deserving than somebody else and find our pleasures from something other than being able to punish somebody in self-righteous glow, because we love that. And neurochemically, that’s hugely rewarding. And we have to find meaning in other realms than being better than somebody else or getting to point out how somebody isn’t as good as you.
Nayeema Raza
Right. We’re gonna wrap up our discussion there. And when we come back, we’ll bring in some more voice to help further the conversation around the question, do we have free will? We’ll be right back.
Nayeema Raza
Welcome back to Open to Debate. I’m Nayeema Raza. I’m joined by Psychologist Roy Baumeister and Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who have been debating the question, do we have free will? We’re gonna bring in some other voices now, members of the audience. And our first question is from Glenn Altschuler. He’s a professor of American studies at Cornell University and a contributor to The Hill and Psychology Today. Welcome, Glenn.
Glenn Altschuler
Thank you. Uh, the question’s very simple, why does all this matter? We are who we have been, and who we have been is now increasingly understood as the result of the interaction of genetics, brain chemistry, nurture, nutrition and so on. And we also recognize, as Robert said, that people can and do change. So it really doesn’t make any difference, uh, uh, if we call it free will or don’t call it free will, especially if we don’t emphasize as much the intent as the behavior. And if societies reward or punish behavior, they will be doing a better job, uh, than they’re doing now, and free will as it’s understood won’t matter.
Robert Sapolsky
Well, where I would say it matters is that our world is run on the notion that it is okay for people to be punished, deprived, ignored, peripheralized and so on for things they had no control over and for other people to get corner or- offices in their corporation for things they actually had no control over either. And like, an abstraction of whether or not there’s free will is an abstraction until we’ve entered the world of a kid who grows up feeling like they’re lazy and unmotivated because nobody’s heard of dyslexia yet. We, we can have a thunderstorm come up at the wrong time and we don’t look for an old, toothless woman on the edge of the village who’s obviously the witch who caused it. We figured that one out. We sorted that one out. We sorted out that people who have seizures aren’t sleeping with Satan. Absolutely, we figured out that stuff, and yeah, we’ve won those grounds.
Robert Sapolsky
But the trouble is we’ve won on all the things we’ve won on, and at this point that everybody else says, “Oh, but this is the domain where somebody should’ve been able to show self-control.” And all we have to do is take the last century’s worth of realizing, oh, I had no idea that was something out of our control, because where we are now would’ve seemed inconceivable to somebody 50 years ago. They would’ve said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all agree about witches, but oh, kids who don’t learn how to read, they’re just not trying.” No, they’re cortical malformations, given dyslexia.
Roy Baumeister
First of all, uh, why does it matter? Mattering means it makes a difference. And in a deterministic world, nothing really makes a difference. Everything is the only thing that could happen. And I want to point out too, there’s no society that dispenses altogether with reward and punishment. It, it, it doesn’t happen. And in fact, the evolution of legal and moral systems has been to increase emphasis on intent. Uh, in some, uh, early societies, uh, it didn’t matter what you intended. You may have not even have known that what you, you touched was a taboo thing. Uh, but as long as you did it, uh, that was enough reason that you should be punished. Uh, and so, uh, factoring intent into there was, was progress and enlightenment. If we wanna get rid of that and just operate based on the behavior, uh, then, uh, we’ll be punishing people for things that, that they were unable to, uh, uh, appreciate.
Roy Baumeister
And I have to say, parts of, of Robert’s book that I really loved were where he, he did bring in some of these points that we used to punish people for things that they couldn’t help a- and it’s now nice, you know, people with obesity or, or whatever, uh, that, uh, we can understand there are biological causes and treat them more, um, more humanely. But, uh, we also live in a society where there’s plenty of violence and should we say, “Oh, well, we can’t punish those people for, for their violence ’cause that’s, uh, that, you know, they, ha- there were causes, uh, behind that too.”
Nayeema Raza
Thank you, Glenn. I’m gonna bring in our next question from Corinne Purtill. Uh, Corinne is the science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. It’s great to have you here.
Corinne Purtill
It’s a pleasure to get to be here with all of you. Um, you know, so much of our, this stuff, this debate centers on experience and action at the individual level, but I’d really like to talk, ask about free will or its absence at the societal level because this is really where we as a species seem to, seem to really struggle to, to get things done. Um, first of all, if you can clarify, do the same mechanisms for action and decision making that govern individuals, are those also, are those also operating at the species level as well?
Corinne Purtill
And then is there anything about free will or its absence that becomes evident when we look at collective response to species-wide threat, be it our, you know, our struggle to mount a meaningful response to climate change, um, to war, disarmament? Does anything become visible at the species level that perhaps isn’t, uh, isn’t visible at the, at the level of the individual?
Roy Baumeister
First, I think we have to, uh, uh, the species level is, is probably too much. Uh, it would be at the level of society. Uh, and, uh, M- Mark, Mark Moffett had a book that there’s, there’s never one society. There’s no us without them. Uh, and so collective decision making is almost always an environment where there’s in group, uh, and out group. Uh, and, uh, people have biologically evolved ways of, uh, of, of dealing with that. Um, but, uh, uh, here I go back to what Robert said, uh, before. Uh, the things happening at the collective level, they don’t change the powers, the psychological powers of the individual, uh, but the individual does have to use them to, uh, respond to that situation. So, uh, climate change may, uh, alter how people confront the question of what kind of heating should I build in my new home.
Nayeema Raza
Great. Thank you so much, Corinne, for being with us. And then our next question is from Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and the author of several books, including his latest, Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. Michael, welcome.
Michael Shermer
Nice to see you all. So, if the universe is predetermined in that, uh, it’s already determined how 13.7 billion years ago at the big bang, you and the three of us were gonna be sitting here talking, let’s say, um, and it could apply to either of you, uh, you’re happily married a- and you’re in a monogamous, uh, relationship with your spouse. And, but something happens and you, you slip up. You make a mistake. You’re on the road, you have an affair and your, and your wife catches you. Would you say to her something like this, “Honey, I don’t have the freedom you think I have. I could not have done otherwise because I’m nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck over which I had no control that brought me to that moment of infidelity”? (laughs)
Michael Shermer
Could you even finish the sentence before (laughs), uh, the reality of you, uh, better not ever do that again, and you better learn from your experiences?
Robert Sapolsky
In the case like that, um, what we’re left with there is figuring out, how do you make sure, like, it’s a good thing in which (laughs) people are caused less pain rather than more. And in a relationship like that, um, you have obviously caused vast amounts of pain, and is there a way to correct things without having to invoke some neuro-biological equivalent of having a rotten soul? Because you know that it is obviously absurd as framed by Michael of saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry, but I’ve got, you know, this, this sub-receptor of my glutamate NR1 receptor subtype, whatever. That’s why, that’s why.” So that’s, that’s ludicrous, but we know that there are people where this happens because they never figured out that anybody could love them. So they’re just endlessly trying to get affirmation of what is unaffirmable for them, or they…
Robert Sapolsky
You know, we’re capable of unpacking the actions that gave rise to something and to explain is not to forgive. And in this realm, forgive becomes an irrelevant term. Um, it’s understanding how we got to this moment and is there a way to do things so that there’s less pain like this in the future.
Roy Baumeister
Forgiveness being irrelevant, uh, I, I see the point. That is, uh, that is where the deterministic, uh, uh, worldview leads. Uh, and yet forgiveness has been such a, uh, force for good, uh, throughout, uh, multiple societies. Most, uh, religions, which try to help their societies function better, tout the, the, the beneficial value of, uh, uh, uh, of forgiveness. Um, uh, the, uh, the e- excuse for adultery that, uh, well, it’s all determined and it was decreed since the big bang, uh, yeah, that is the deterministic outlook. Um, please, somebody try it and, uh, let us know how it works out.
Nayeema Raza
All right. Thank you very much, Michael. We appreciate the question. Roy, what does the word choice mean for you?
Roy Baumeister
Choice. Uh, there are actually two meanings of choice. Uh, one is the situation with multiple options. One is the mental process, uh, of, uh, selecting among them. So, uh, the difference might be the rat in the classic, uh, T maze, it has to left or right, but does it really go through a, a mental process of comparing them? If it was reinforced for turning left the last time and it knows that’s where the food is, it probably does that without a, uh, without a choice. Uh, but I think we’ve all had the experience, uh, of pondering, uh, even for, for, for this debate, just thinking about exactly what to say and what questions to ask and, uh, and how to present things. Uh, so, uh, yes, conscious, uh, pondering of options and comparing them, again, this is something that it, it looks like humans can do in a much more sophisticated fashion than others. So it’s part of the, uh, advanced, uh, action control system.
Robert Sapolsky
A choice is this mythic word that we apply to the notion that that intent just came independent of all of the history that came before that. That is this mythological construct that we use at that point in trying to deny that no intent can come from nowhere.
Robert Sapolsky
Yes. Choice is, oh, just to really get in everyone’s faces, choice, like free will and all of that, are terms that we use because we don’t understand what actually went on yet.
Nayeema Raza
Now it’s time to bring it home with closing remarks. So, Roy, you have the floor first. Leave us with a reason to believe that yes is the answer to the question, do we have free will?
Roy Baumeister
I, I’d like to close by saying, well, determinism is the theory that everything that happens is the only thing that could possibly happen. Everything has been determined, hence the name, uh, long in advance. This requires a huge leap of faith. Uh, there’s no way to prove that nothing else could’ve ever happened. In fact, it’s impossible, uh, to prove. It’s contrary to our daily experience of making choices amid multiple possibilities, and it’s also contrary to our data. You can read thousand of psychology experiments, uh, and, uh, there are change in the odds of some behavior. Uh, I don’t think we have any deterministic laws, uh, in psychology.
Roy Baumeister
And more to the point, we don’t live in a deterministic world. We live in a world defined by choices and options and possibilities. Uh, I mean, think of the, the course offerings here at the university for the next semester. It’s set up as a giant matrix of options and it’s works because the students have enough mental capacity to process the different options and pick the ones that suit their interests and their, uh, educational goals. Psychological theories are about how our mind deals with an environment defined by possibilities, threat, opportunity, success or failure, negotiations, influence, responsibility, uh, things like that.
Roy Baumeister
Uh, for the determinist to come along after we’ve got our theory and say, “Well, that was inevitable all along,” that is completely unhelpful, uh, in terms of the kind of psychological theory we’re explaining for how the person looks at the, uh, the, the possibilities. So again, the scientific fact to me is the, the human species evolved a new, more complex system, a more flexible system for controlling action precisely for dealing, uh, with a, a complex environment defined by multiple possibilities, and, and that’s what I call free will.
Nayeema Raza
All right. Thank you, Roy. And now, Robert, you’ll have the final word here. Tell us why you answered no to the question, do we have free will?
Robert Sapolsky
Because it seems self-evident from everything we’ve learned, but what is not self-evident is how we’re supposed to function with that insight. And it’s certainly not useful, exactly as Roy just pointed out, if what we do is say, “Oh, well, of course I was gonna do that, it was predetermined.” And it’s also not useful if we expect, like, perfect predictability to come out the other end of it.
Robert Sapolsky
Where the lack of free will is most relevant is that we run a world predicated on the notion that there is free will. And the criticism is absolutely valid to say, we can’t explain everything at this point, and there’s all sorts of stuff we can’t explain. Um, what is absolutely clear nonetheless is with each passing year, we learn more and more domains where people would’ve attributed free will and judged and punished and rewarded based on that and in the most subtle ways of making people feel like they’re a crummy person, inadequate one or someone who is more deserving of somebody’s consideration than others based on this sort of thing. And what you see in cases like that is we know enough already. We can’t… We don’t have to prove there’s no free will as to whether, like, you started flossing on this side this morning or flossing on that side. We know enough already to know that every step along the way where have understood, oh, the person actually did not have control over this, the world has become more humane.
Robert Sapolsky
And if we truly, truly think and follow through where the science is pointing, we’re not there right now, but we know people a hundred years ago would’ve thought as inconceivable the stuff we now say, “Oh yeah, some people just have trouble learning to read because of something, could be whatever.” And we know that people a hundred years from now will be appalled at the things that we attribute free will to now. We know that amid only our partial knowledge of all of this that if you really, really take this to its logical extension, um, none of us are entitled, none of us have earned anything more than anyone else. We know enough already about how this stuff works.
Robert Sapolsky
Even if there’s a little bit of free will, we know that there’s enough less free will than society runs itself on that we know that in reality none of us are truly entitled or have earned any more consideration than any other human or based on just sheer luck. And if also, if you really believe this, hating another human is like hating a hurricane or hating a virus. It doesn’t make any sense either.
Nayeema Raza
All right. That concludes our debate. I’m curious, were either of you convinced by anything of the other side?
Robert Sapolsky
Convinced that a lot more credence has to be given to taking people by the hand with the concept of some things are maybe freer than other things, that that’s getting people going in the right direction.
Roy Baumeister
Oh. Um, oh, I think he’s made a number of good points. And the argument about the, uh, uh, you know, the progress that, uh, we no longer blame people for things, uh, that we used to blame them for, uh, I think that’s a, a very nice, uh, compelling point. The vision that if we can get rid of all credit or blame, though, that society will function better, I don’t know that that’s, uh, (laughs)… Uh, uh, again, it has never worked as far as I can tell in the past, but, but maybe it could.
Nayeema Raza
Well, thank you both for joining us today. We really appreciate it. And thank you for approaching this debate with an open mind. We appreciate your bringing thoughtful disagreement to the table and your being open to debate. Thank you also to our guests, Michael, Corinne, and Glenn, for contributing your probing questions. And thank you to the audience for tuning in to this episode of Open to Debate. As a nonprofit, our work to combat extreme polarization through civil and respectful debate is generously funded by listeners like you, the Rosenkranz Foundation, and supporters of Open to Debate. Open to Debate is also made possible by a generous grant from the Laura and Gary Lauder Venture Philanthropy Fund.
Nayeema Raza
Robert Rosenkranz is our chairman. Clea Conner is CEO. Lia Matthow is our chief content officer. Alexis Pancrazi and Marlette Sandoval are our editorial producers. Gabriella Mayer is our editorial and research manager. Andrew Lipson is head of production. Max Fulton is our production coordinator, and Damon Whittemore is our engineer. Gabrielle Iannucelli is our social media and digital platforms coordinator. Raven Baker is events and operations manager, and Rachel Kemp is our chief of staff. Our theme music is by Alex Clement. And I’m your guest moderator, Nayeema Raza. We’ll see you next time.
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