Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky discusses the concept of free will, his belief that it does not exist, and the implications for our society.
Highlights
- Dr. Robert Sapolsky believes we do not have free will, because everything, including our behaviors, happens due to previously existing causes.
- Sapolsky references the removal of the frontal cortex brain region in driving coarse, disinhibited, and bullying behavior as a case against free will.
- The neurology professor also refers to a 1980s free will study showing that a brain impulse to push a button occurs before one’s perceived will to push the button as evidence that the brain knows of intent before we do.
“Free will is when your brain produces a behavior, and the brain did so completely free of every influence that came before,” says Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurology professor and celebrity author, in a YouTube segment. “Free will is the ability of your brain to produce behavior free of its history, and it can’t be done.”
According to Sapolsky, his view that the brain cannot produce behavior free of its history is what is meant by the philosophical idea of determinism. This philosophical perspective posits that everything that happens is completely determined by previously existing causes.
Along the lines of determinism, Sapolsky believes we live in a mechanistic world. Everything happens because something that preceded it happened. Translating that to biology, what shapes you and how you behave is a mix of what your neurons did a second ago, what your hormone levels were this morning, what traumas you had over the previous year, how your childhood helped form the brain you have now, etc.
Evidence Against Free Will from Biology
The first glimpse that scientists got of how the brain relates to free will came in the 1840s with the case of a railroad construction worker named Phineas Gage in Vermont. During his time, Gage clearly had his act together as a church-goer and sobriety proponent, among other socially accepted characteristics. Shockingly, there was an accident one day with the dynamite his railroad crew team used to blow holes, and a three-foot long pole shot through the underside of Gage’s brain, taking out part of his frontal cortex. Gage came back to work the next day transformed as a coarse, disinhibited, bullying character who was no longer employable. In the words of Gage’s doctor, “Gage was no longer Gage.”
Sapolsky says that coming to the realization that we are our neurological makeup and that removing a piece of one’s frontal cortex will change how they behave seriously calls into question the notion of free will. In fact, to explain how we are somehow something more than the sum of what is in our heads (i.e. the brain) and that we have free will, one has to invoke a step that involves some sort of magic, according to Sapolsky.
One striking statistic related to neurological health determining behavior — roughly half of the incarcerated population imprisoned for violent antisocial criminality has a history of traumatic brain injury versus about 8% of the general population. How do these incarcerated individuals with a history of traumatic brain injury relate to the case of Phineas Gage?
The story of Phineas Gage is just one example from the study of free will as it pertains to biology. In the 1980s, the University of California, San Francisco professor Benjamin Libet measured that brain activity precedes the intent to act. In his experiment, Libet had subjects push a button while looking at a clock. The subjects were told to remember the second when they formed the intent to push the button.
The subjects reported an intent to push the button about 2/10 of a second before they started moving to push the button. More intriguingly, a brain region that sends a command to press the button showed electrical activity about 3/10 of a second before the button was pressed, before the subjects perceived their intention. In other words, your brain knows about intent before you do. Thus, according to Sapolsky, this provides further evidence that there is no such thing as free will.
Sapolsky Calls into Question Our Conceptions of Responsibility, Punishment, and Reward
The case of Phineas Gage and UCSF professor Benjamin Libet’s free will experiment are two key examples from the annals of biology that have convinced Sapolsky that we do not have free will. Such examples call into question our culturally-endowed conception of responsibility. Afterall, if there is no free will, as Sapolsky believes, how can we attribute any behavior or action to a specific acting, responsible agent within each one of us?
According to Sapolsky, we may not have free will to behave freely, but we can change. Such changes can come from impactful movies or ideas from other people who influence us. In such a way, there is hope for change toward more ethical and prosocial behavior, even without the free choice of an acting agent within each of us.
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