Do We Have Free Will? | Robert Sapolsky & Andrew Huberman
Speaker A:
- Along the lines of choice, I'd like to shift gears slightly and talk about free will, about our ability to make choices at all.
Speaker B:
Well, my personal way out in left field inflammatory stance is I don't think we have a shred of free will. Despite, you know, 95% of philosophers, and I think probably the majority of neuroscientists saying that we have free will in at least some circumstances, I don't think there's any at all. And the reason for this is you do something, you behave, you make a choice, whatever. And to understand why you did that and where did that intention come from, part of it was due to the sensory environment you were in in the previous minute. Some of it is from the hormone levels in your bloodstream that morning. Some of it is from whether you had a wonderful or stressful last three months and what sort of neuroplasticity happened.
Part of it is what hormone levels you were exposed to as a fetus. Part of it is what culture your ancestors came up with and thus how you were parented when you were a kid. All of those are in there, and you can't understand where is coming from without incorporating all of those. And at that point, not only are there all of these relevant factors, but they're ultimately all one factor. If you're talking about what evolution has to do with your behavior, by definition you're also talking about genetics. If you're talking about what your genes have to do with behavior, by definition you're talking about how your brain was constructed or what proteins are coded for. If you're talking about like your mood disorder now, you're talking about the sense of efficacy you were getting as a five-year-old.
They're all intertwined. And when you look at all those influences, basically the challenge is, show me a neuron that just caused that behavior, or show me a network of neurons that just caused that behavior, and show me that nothing about what they just did was influenced by anything from the sensory environment one second ago to the evolution of your species. And there's no space in there to fit in a freewill concept that winds up being, you know, in your brain, but not of your brain. There's simply no wiggle room for it there.
Speaker A:
- So I can appreciate that our behaviors and our choices are the consequences of a long line of dominoes that fell prior to that behavior. But, is it possible that I can intervene in the domino effect so to speak? In other words, can my recognition of the fact that genes have heritability, there's an epigenome, that there's a hormonal context, there's a historical context, can the knowledge of that give me some small, small shard of free will? Meaning, does it allow me to say, ah, okay, I accept that my choices are somewhat predetermined, and yet knowing that gives me some additional layer of control. Is there any philosophical or biological universe in which that works?
Speaker B:
Nah. All of that can produce the wonderfully positive belief that change can happen. Even traumatic change, you know, the worst of circumstances, most unlikely people and change can happen. Things can change. Don't be fatalistic. Don't decide because we're mechanistic biological machines that nothing can ever, change can happen, but where people go off the rails is translating that into we can change ourselves.
We don't, we can't because there's no free will. However we can be changed by circumstance. And the point of it is, you look at an Aplysia, a sea slug, that has learned to retract its gil in response to a shock on its tail. You can do like conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning on it, and it is learned, its behavior has been changed by its environment. And you hear news about something like horrifically depressing going on and refugees in wherever, and as a result, you feel a little bit more helpless and a less of a sense of efficacy in the world, and both of your behaviors have been changed.
Speaker B:
Okay, okay, yeah, I guess, but the remarkable thing is it's the exact same neurobiology. The signal transduction pathways that were happening in that sea snail incorporate the exact same kinases, and proteases, and phosphatases that we do when you're having mammalian fear conditioning. or when you're alert, it's conserved. It's the exact same thing it's simply playing out in obviously a much, much fancier domain. And because you have learned that change is possible despite understanding mechanistically that we can't change ourselves volitionally, but because you understand change is possible, you have just changed the ability of your brain to respond to optimistic stimuli, and you have changed the ability of your brain to now send you in the direction of being exposed to more information that will seem cheerful rather than depressing.
Oh my God, that's amazing what Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King and all these folks did. Wow, under the most adverse of circumstances they were able to do, maybe I can also. Maybe I can go read more about people like them to get even more data points of changed neurochemistry so that your responses are different now. And you know you're tilted a little bit more in that direction of feeling like you can make a difference instead of it's all damn hopeless. So enormous change can happen, but the last thing that could come out of a view of we are nothing more or less than the sum of our biology and its interaction with environment is to throw up your hands and say, and thus it's no use trying to change anything.
Speaker A:
So we can acknowledge that change is extremely hard to impossible, that circumstances can change, and yet that striving to be better human beings is still a worthwhile endeavor.
Do I have that correct?
Speaker B:
- Absolutely, because simply the knowledge either from experience or making it to the end of the right neurobiology class has taught you that change can happen within a framework of a mechanistic neurobiology. You are now more open to being made optimistic by the good news in the world around you. You are more likely to be inspired by this or that. You are more resistant to getting discouraged by bad news, simply because you now understand it's possible.
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