Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will

Sapolsky’s 2023 book (Penguin Press, 528pp) arguing that free will does not exist: choices are determined by genetics, experience and environment, and the intuition of authorship is an illusion. Read here via the Wikipedia article, not the book.

The argument and what he thinks follows

The case is built from neurological and behavioural evidence — the biology of a decision, traced backwards through the seconds, years and generations that produced the person deciding. What interests Sapolsky most is the consequence: if nobody is the ultimate author of their behaviour, the apparatus of blame, punishment and praise loses its footing, and criminal justice in particular needs rebuilding around containment and prevention rather than desert.

That practical turn is why the book sits in this spoke rather than only in ../philosophy-wiki — and it’s the same move free-will-belief-effects makes empirically, asking what changes in people who stop believing in free will.

The reception is a disciplinary argument

Unusually useful for this wiki, because the critics are arguing about who owns the question:

• Andrew Crumey — praised the breadth of research and the writing.
• John Martin Fischer (philosopher, works on free will) — found “nothing new or illuminating.”
• Jessica Riskin — argued the free-will question is philosophical, not scientific, and called the approach an instance of scientism.
• Kieran Setiya — criticized Sapolsky for ignoring the philosophical literature while allowing that the scientific presentation has merit.

So two of the four reviewers say a neurobiologist has answered a question his methods can’t reach. That objection is a live one and this page does not settle it; see free-will for how the two disciplines divide the problem, and note that the routing decision here (psychology, because the arguments are biological and the payoff is behavioural) is exactly what Riskin and Setiya would dispute.

Related

robert-sapolsky · free-will · free-will-belief-effects · the-trouble-with-testosterone · synthesis