Robert Sapolsky is an American neuroendocrinologist and author.His books include: primate memoirs, testosterone problems, Why zebras don’t get ulcersand behave, new york times It became a bestseller and was selected as one of the best books of the year. washington post and wall street journal. He is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.
Below, Robert shares five key insights from his new book. Determination: The science of life without free will. Listen to the audio version read by Robert himself on the Next Big Idea app.
1. What we are now is simply the result of everything that has happened before us.
When we observe someone else’s behavior, we may wonder why they did that behavior, but what we really want to know is: What part of the brain caused that behavior? Have you stopped acting?” However, this is where the behavior originates. Thinking about why a certain behavior occurs also means asking, “What triggered that part of the brain in those last seconds?” This is known as sensory stimulation. For example, if you put people in a room that smells like really disgusting garbage, they’ll probably end up being more socially conservative in a survey without having any idea what’s causing the change.
If you go back even further in time to a few hours or even days, behavior can be influenced by hormones. How were your hormone levels this morning? For example, if you noticed that your levels of a hormone called oxytocin were elevated this morning and you found yourself playing a game with a friend this afternoon, the increase in hormones from several people may make you feel more generous and forgiving towards your friends. You may notice that it is more likely to happen some time ago.
How have things been for you these past few months? Are you suffering from trauma? Did something great happen? Those experiences would have changed your brain through neuroplasticity. For example, if you have experienced trauma and currently suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the part of your brain called the amygdala, which controls fear and anxiety, may be enlarged. As a result, you will begin to see things as threats that others do not. Due to neuroplasticity, the actual structure of the brain changed over the course of a few months.
Your current behavior may be influenced even further back, to your adolescence. There is a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex that disciplines oneself and controls impulses. By the end of adolescence, the initial construction of the prefrontal cortex is finally completed. In other words, the randomness of the world in terms of environment during adolescence shapes the frontal lobes that we will have as adults decades later.
Going even further back into early childhood, there is a formal checklist that shows how many adverse experiences a child is likely to be exposed to during their early years. Were you being abused? Were there drug abusers in your family? And so on. You can also create a checklist of how many ridiculously lucky experiences your child will have in their early years. Your childhood experiences, or the things you ticked off the most on your checklist, can be surprisingly predictive of your adult behavior. For example, how likely are you to get into trouble with antisocial violence by the time you become an adult? With each additional adverse childhood experience, the probability of becoming an adult increases with statistical confidence. It will be expensive.
“What your ancestors did centuries ago will influence how you act now.”
If you keep going back further, you get to your genes. Genes interact with the environment, and the environment is out of your control. For example, if you carry a certain type of gene and experience a lot of stress in childhood, you are at higher risk of developing problems with depression as an adult. However, having the same genetic mutation has no effect in adulthood if it is not combined with an early stressor. Similarly, even if you don’t have the genetic mutation, you still have the stress factor early on and have no effect as an adult. Two things you had no control over can have a very powerful influence on all sorts of aspects of adult behavior.
Let’s go back one last time and see what culture your ancestors invented centuries ago. These different ecosystems can influence whether you believe in a single god or multiple gods. This can influence whether you turn the other cheek or take revenge when someone hits you. You may have grown up in a collectivistic culture, such as the rice-growing regions of Southeast Asia, or you may have grown up in an individualistic culture, such as the United States. What your ancestors did centuries ago influences how you act now. For example, as an infant, how many seconds did you have to cry before your mother responded? Mothers from collectivist cultures pick up their babies sooner than mothers from individualistic cultures. From the first minutes of life, how your brain is built is shaped by what your ancestors valued centuries ago.
So all these different factors from a second ago to thousands of years ago become important. They all produce one effect. For example, if you’re talking about genes, you can talk about the evolution of genes millions of years ago, or you can talk about which proteins were made in the brain this morning. There is a continuous arc of influence and no cracks in the concept of free will.
2. Tenacity, self-control, and perseverance are built from biology.
People have a hard time believing that persistence, self-discipline, and grit come from biology. However, most people are willing to admit that there are things that are out of our control. These days, unless you’re taller than 7’8″ or so, you probably can’t play in the NBA. Without a certain genetic-environmental profile, you probably won’t have perfect pitch. As an adult. , you can’t be an ace if you don’t have the right configuration of receptor subtypes for specific neurotransmitters. danger. This means that some of the things we do we have no real control over and no free will over our natural attributes.
What free will does is what we do with those attributes. Are you the 5-foot-3 Muggsy Bogues who played in the NBA? Are you like Edison, who went through thousands of failed experiments before creating the light bulb? Or did you waste your natural talent? 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation. We have no control over what nature has given us, but what we do with it is our measure, and it has nothing to do with biology.
“If you’ve been stressed over the past few months, your frontal cortex will likely have atrophied to some degree.”
Some might argue that it has everything to do with biology, since it has everything to do with what the prefrontal cortex produced a minute ago, a year ago, and 100 years ago. not. If you had elevated testosterone levels this morning, whether you were a woman or a man, your frontal cortex would have an even harder time making the impulsive, overactive parts of your brain think twice before doing something stupid. . If you’ve been feeling stressed over the past few months, your frontal cortex may have atrophied to some extent. If you were born as a fetus in the womb of a poor, stressed woman, you would be born with, on average, a slightly underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. You could argue that it’s all natural attributes and you don’t have free will, or you could argue that it’s something you do with your attributes.
3. Despite what everyone thinks, we are not going to stop believing in free will.
There’s an interesting experiment that shows that if you psychologically induce someone to believe less in free will, they’re more likely to cheat in a game right after that. But we can also look to people who have thought long and hard about these issues. What is the root of human good and evil? Are we the captain of the ship? Research shows that no matter how long and hard you think about existential questions, people become just as ethical.
Abandoning the idea that we can and should be responsible for our actions because we don’t have free will may cause people to go wild for a few minutes, but if we seriously think about it, people who hold other views remain more ethical than those who hold other views.
4. How can I protect myself from dangerous people?
We can protect society from dangerous people without bringing up the concept of responsibility or responsibility. If a car’s brakes don’t work and it’s dangerous, I’ll put the car in the garage without lecturing it about what a rotten soul it has. If your child has a runny nose, you send him home from kindergarten, but you don’t tell him he can’t play with his toys today because he did something wrong. We have learned how to remove moral responsibility from all areas, and we still know how to protect the world from cars with broken brakes.
“The concept of meritocracy is as questionable as the concept of a criminal justice system.”
The same applies to the back side. Just as it makes little sense to have a world built around praise and reward, it makes little sense to have a world that includes blame and punishment. We can’t make any money either. The concept of meritocracy is as questionable as the concept of a criminal justice system.
We can protect society from dangerous people, we can ensure that talented people end up becoming judges and brain surgeons, and that they deserve more or less consideration than someone else. You can do all this without convincing people.
5. We are still learning.
I will readily admit that 99% of the time I am a complete hypocrite and cannot function as if I had no free will. Nevertheless, there are grounds for optimism. Over the years, we have proven time and time again that we can subtract a sense of moral responsibility and moral goodness from the realm of people’s actions. The roof isn’t falling in, and the world is, in fact, a more human place.
We understood centuries ago that people with epileptic seizures are not friends of Satan and there is no need to burn them at the stake. About 50 years ago, we discovered that schizophrenia is not caused by a mother’s unconscious and harmful hatred towards her child. In recent decades we have discovered that some children who have difficulty learning to read have strange cortical malformations in their brains that cause them to loop letters backwards or suffer from dyslexia. It turns out that there is. We’re learning about the biology of how some people end up obese, no matter how hard they work. We learned the biology of why some people love the same gender and others love another gender. We are learning all the areas minus the traditional sense of responsibility, responsibility, punishment, praise, and reward. All that has happened is that Earth has become a more human-like planet.
If you think about it, none of us deserve or have had our needs considered any more than anyone else. If you think about it, hating someone is as pointless as hating earthquakes, and this is the only logical conclusion. Despite your best efforts, it only seems like it 1 percent of the time, but why not try 2 percent of the time instead?
To hear the audio version read by author Robert Sapolsky, download the Next Big Idea app now.
