Free will and fake vomit
From the book’s title, “Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will”, you would not expect a comedy. But I laughed my way through Robert Sapolsky’s latest book.
Sapolsky himself says he cannot fully embrace the idea that there is no free will. However, there are nearly countless things that we have no control over and that shape our actions. For example, all of the following things influence your actions today:
How your brain developed in the womb,
How much stress your mother was under during pregnancy,
What month of the year you were born,
Which genes you inherited that influence your brain function.
And that’s just a few things that happened before you were born.
Yeah, but I’M the one in charge here . . . .
Sapolsky’s point is that our seemingly active, deliberate choices come from a lot of things that we do not choose and are largely unaware of. In the book, he spends time trying to find the moment that free will would be exercised – at what point do you escape all of these embedded influences? You do not escape them. You are not so much choosing your action as continuing the path set by these factors. In fact, your brain may have decided before you are consciously aware of it.
So what’s with the fake vomit?
A person who is disgusted (say by putting his hand in fake vomit) is using the same part of the brain that is repulsed by moral violations. We have had too little time for the brain to develop a separate mechanism for these two types of disgust. And, helpfully, Sapolsky’s book has a recipe for fake vomit (see p. 48).
In short, Sapolsky contends that we cannot draw a bright line between what we choose and what we are. Which means that we cannot fault people for making “bad” choices; the person is who he is. It’s an interesting perspective.
