They must be labouring under the illusion that one person is in charge, making all the decisions.
Most of us would argue that we make our own decisions, so there’s no point taking you to the man in charge (sadly, rarely a woman), not least because we didn’t even vote for that guy.
The general view is that our ‘leader’ is “not the boss of me”. Why? Because we’re all working under the assumption that we can control our own destiny, and we all possess free will.
And we’ve all watched the film Bruce Almighty and heard Morgan Freeman tell us, as God would, that “you can’t mess with free will”.
But recently one of the world’s leading scientists, Robert Sapolsky, did exactly that.
In his 2023 book Determined: Life Without Free Will, Sapolsky didn’t claim we have "less" free will than we think, he suggested free will didn’t exist at all.
In one of the greatest ever acts of scientific reductionism, he claimed that what we consider ‘free will’ is little more than our amygdala hijacking our prefrontal cortex and triggering a physiological cascade of hormones and peptides, producing a stereotypical pattern shaped by years of stress-conditioning which started in the womb and was then polished in the early years of our life. And these patterns, Sapolsky argues, are themselves shaped by the fluke of our genetic inheritance and the culture that moulded the people who raised us. None of which we made any decisions about.
Sapolsky claimed that if we conduct a root cause analysis and go far enough back there’s never a moment where a "you" steps in and makes a choice. He concluded that praise, blame, merit, and retributive justice are all stories built on the fake fiction of free-will.
It's a seductive argument precisely because it sounds humble and scientific. It also has some ‘face validity’. Look at the people around you. How awake are they? Are your colleagues, friends, family and people you bump into really making free will choices? Or are they brainwashed by social media into a belief structure, of which they’re not even aware? Are we all puppets controlled by a handful of tech giants? Have we become automatons, drones in a modern Matrix of Musk’s making? Or have we been moulded by his rampant rivals, as they all compete for supremacy in the tech billionaire’s boys club?
If we want to understand the truth of our existence, we need to research the origins of our will-fulness.
Philosopher John Martin Fischer, a leading scholar on free will and moral responsibility, and Professor at the University of California, pointed out that Sapolsky had smuggled in a pre-emptive sleight of mouth that sidesteps the neuroscience by confusing choice and causation. Sapolsky argued against a “free will” that is self-generated, independent of any prior mental or physical forces. Fischer points out that this is a definition that almost nobody seriously defends. Using this shrunken version of free will, Sapolsky was able to attack and then declare victory over the whole concept. Fischer suggests that this is not science, it’s rhetoric.
Daniel Dennett further dented Sapolsky’s claim that humans don’t have free will by pointing out that determinism, i.e., everything is pre-determined by our genetics and our biology, doesn’t mean someone lacks agency. Dennett suggested free will emerges through evolutionary processes rather than spontaneously erupting after it received a note exempting it from causality. He suggested that rationality, self-control and intentionality can all flourish even inside Sapolsky’s deterministic universe.
If how we function is caused by something outside our control, this doesn't mean we are reduced to irrelevance with no ‘will power’ or the ability to make decisions. A thermostat, a bacterium swimming up a nutrient gradient, and a human capable of self-reflection are all "caused" by something but only one of them models its own future, weighs competing goals, and revises its behaviour based on live updates to its model.
Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory Christian List, in his book, Why Free Will Is Real, argues that a free will which requires intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control is fully consistent with a scientific worldview and doesn’t necessitate either a scientific reductionist determinism or a retreat into mysticism.
Kevin Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin directly challenged Sapolsky’s view in his book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, from a biological rather than a philosophy standpoint. His argument traces the evolution of agency from the origin of life itself, through nervous systems and decision-making architecture, to the layered autonomy that lets organisms act as causal agents rather than simply being stimulus-response machines.
Commentators have suggested a heavyweight "book battle" between Sapolsky's hard determinism in the red corner and Mitchell's evolutionary case for real agency in the blue corner. Both books offer comprehensive arguments from different sides of the debate. Mitchell points out that Sapolsky’s view is not settled science, it's just one side of an ongoing argument presented as ‘case-closed’.
The geneticists have been telling us for decades that everything comes from our genes. This suggestion has fuelled the deterministic view that we are all "genetically pre-programmed".
But as Tom Bethell pointed out, way back in 2001, the human genome is a ‘Map to Nowhere’ because it’s the proteins that each gene codes that matter. Proteomics and epigenetics are the real drivers of human behaviour and outcomes. Epigenetics makes it abundantly clear that environmental factors influence gene expression. For example, a predisposition to aggression does not become violence without an environmental trigger such as abuse or instability. Identical twins share 100% of their DNA, but as they age and experience different environments, their epigenetic profiles diverge. Stress, diet, trauma and relationships all leave chemical marks that change which genes, and therefore which proteins, are switched on or off. Two people with identical genomes can end up biologically different because of what happened to them. Genes load the gun; they don't pull the trigger. Which proteins our genes generate is changed by the decisions we make.
In a 2008 study Vohs and Schooler found that participants who read passages arguing that human behaviour is predetermined by genetics and environment subsequently cheated more on a maths task and overpaid themselves for their performance. Participants who read about free will did not. The authors warned that publicly suggesting a deterministic worldview could undermine moral behaviour. Although, a large, well-powered replication attempt across five studies failed to reproduce the original effect, so the jury is still out on this one.
Whether we have free will or not isn't just an academic dispute, it's a highly charged political issue. Biological determinism has been used by those on the right of the political spectrum to justify some very ugly eugenic logic. Sapolsky's framing gives fresh impetus to such nastiness while simultaneously enabling people to abdicate responsibility for all sorts of immorality.
Ironically, some authors on the left of the political spectrum have also inadvertently facilitated the abdication of responsibility. For example, Mel Robbins' book The Let Them Theory doesn't travel well into situations of asymmetrical power dynamics such as domestic abuse, workplace coercion or medical neglect.
The casual attractiveness of such ‘pop theory’, that hasn't been properly validated, mixed with Sapolsky’s selective reductionism hands people a permission slip to stop asking "what's my part in this?" One argues “the universe made me do it”, the other suggests you should “just let people do whatever they want”. This is irresponsible passivity, dressed in two very different outfits.
We think the scientific evidence for free will is overwhelming. But most of all, a leader who’s done the developmental work and built their metacognitive muscle, their emotional regulation capability and their ability to witness an impulse without being swept away by it, has moved from being reactive to being response-able. And that’s ultimately a will-full choice.
As Viktor Frankl pointed out, there is a space between stimulus and response, and in that space we have the power to choose. In that space is where our free-will exist and our freedom resides. Both of these are developmental achievements.
Now it’s over to you. You can exercise your free will and comment on this Newsletter or not.