Making Sense with Sam Harris - #360 — We Really Don’t Have Free Will?

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about the widespread belief in free will. They discuss the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Dennett, complexity and emergence, downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism, Benjamin Libet, the primacy of luck, historical change in attitudes about free will, implications for ethics and criminal justice, the psychological satisfaction of punishing bad people, understanding evil, punishment and reward as tools, meritocracy, the consequences of physical beauty, the logic of reasoning, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Thank you. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, I wasn't going to have much of a housekeeping, but just before turning on the mic, I learned that Danny Kahneman has died.

What a mensch he was. I didn't know him well. I really only hung out with him a few times. We did, I think, one blog interview a long time ago, I think 2011 or so. That's on my website somewhere. And episode 150 of this podcast is audio from an event we did in New York at the Beacon Theater, which I recall being a lot of fun. Danny was 90 today when he died, so that would have been about five years ago. He would have been 85. Just a beautiful mind and really good company. Again, I did not know him well. I have people close to me who were very close to him, and obviously I'm quite sorry for their loss. Life is short, even if you make

it to 90. So let's use the time wisely. And that's what I did earlier this week when I spoke with Robert Sapolsky. Robert is another extraordinary scientist. He is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate's Memoir, Behave, which was really a wonderful book, and most recently, Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will. In addition to being one of the only scientists who has fully accepted the implications of science as we know it on this topic, Robert is a professor of biology, neurology, and neurological sciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation, quote, genius grant. Today we dig deep into the topic of free will. We speak about

the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Dennett, complexity and emergence, so-called downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism. We discuss the work of Benjamin Labette, or Labey, however that's pronounced. Neither of us knows. The primacy of luck, historical change in attitudes about free will, the implications for ethics and criminal justice, the psychological satisfaction of punishing bad people, understanding evil, punishment and reward as tools, whether we have to give up on meritocracy, the consequences of physical beauty, the logic of reasoning, and other topics. As always on the subject of free will, if at any time you don't like the way you feel thinking about these things,

if my conversation with Robert feels like it is literally driving you crazy, by all means, pick another podcast today. I have learned through experience that this topic, really more than any other, is destabilizing for some number of people. Some people appear vulnerable to having the notion of free will undermined in any way. I can't say I understand that, but my inbox proves to me that it's true. So if you're one of these people, or discover that you are over the course of this conversation, by all means, pull the brakes. And now I bring you Robert Sapolsky. I am here with Robert Sapolsky.

Robert, thanks for joining me again. Well, thanks for having me on. So we attempted to record a conversation some months ago, and our robot overlords were not kind to us, and schedules being what they are, we have taken this long to get back to it. But you've had a proper book tour in the meantime, and perhaps talked yourself to death on the topic of free will. I'm going to drag you back to it, because people want to hear us converge on that. Well, this one's going to be great because actually we've reached the same conclusion.

We're the two people on earth who agree. Yes. Well, I think that there might be something we disagree about here in terms of how we live with the implications of what we agree about theoretically. So that could be interesting to uncover. But I'll remind people the book is Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will. And it's a great book. It's a very large book, unlike the book I wrote on free will, which is effectively a long essay or a pamphlet. You have written the proper multi-hundred page book. And parts of it really are laugh out loud funny. It's really, it's just, it's a great read. Parts of it really are laugh-out-loud funny. It's really, it's just, it's a great read. And you reveal a lot of relevant neuroscience, or just a lot of neuroscience, which in many cases may or may not be relevant. I think we both agree that it's a pretty simple argument that would put one in doubt of just its existence, but that it's even a coherent concept.

Let's take it from the top, and perhaps we can start with a definition of free will. What do you think you're denying the existence of in your book? Well, my definition has been giving people apoplexy for these months because it's a very, forget hard compatibilist, it's a very hard-assed stance, which is show me a neuron, show me a brain, show me a person who has just done something, produced a behavior, and show that the exact same thing would have happened if everything about that neuron's history was different, that that neuron had just acted free of history. Right, right.

And this is, in the philosophical literature, there's a conception that is often derided as a belief in libertarian free will, the notion that one could have done otherwise. If you just rewound the movie of your life to precisely the frame that you were in a few minutes ago, the idea is that if you, the conscious agent, decided to think or feel or do otherwise, you could have, you could change the movie of

your life. And there are many people in philosophy who deny that that's the right notion of free will. That's not a type of free will worth having. And it's birthed this whole literature on compatibilism, which I think you and I both feel that compatibilists like Dennett simply change the topic. Do you remember my analogy to Atlantis that I hit Dan with? Yes. I mean, this may or may not fully cover it for you, but it sort of does for me. So I just asked Dan to imagine that we lived in a world where more or less everyone believed in the lost kingdom of Atlantis. And what I see compatibilists like Dan doing is coming along saying, you know, don't worry,

Atlantis is real. It just happens to be the island of Sicily. And then they go on to argue that Sicily answers to most of the claims that people have made through the ages about Atlantis. Now, it's just obvious at a glance that this isn't quite true because much of what people have said about Atlantis is really quite crazy and incompatible with any history of Sicily. I mean, in particular, they're enamored of the idea that there was an advanced civilization that disappeared underwater, right? So people really are confused. And the notion of libertarian free will, while it is, in fact, indefensible, as you and I will go on to discuss, it really is what people feel they have most of the time. They feel they have it, they feel they can decide to do other than they did,

despite what you said about the deterministic implications of neurons, and they think they could have done otherwise not due to randomness. That's not what anyone feels is governing their conscious acts of willing. And in addition to that, they want to hold other people accountable for their behavior in a way that isn't just a matter of because it's a good way to influence the future behavior of other people, but because they really think people are the ultimate causes of how they behave. So this has ethical implications and legal implications. What has it been like for you to make your case since you published the book? What collisions with people have you have become predictable? And what arguments do you find

the least persuasive, the most frustrating? What is it like to be out there? The argument that has been most ever-present and crazy-making is the one just based on intuition. It just feels like it. It just feels like I'm exercising free will when I'm choosing to turn the light switch on. I didn't need to do that. I didn't have to do it. I could have done a cartwheel in front of it instead. And I chose. Are you telling me that's not free will? Just this intuitive sense of over and over seeing people who go through, yes, yes, I understand genes. There's genes. We're made of cells. We're made of atoms. There's a material basis to the universe. Going through all that, but in that moment where I'm making a decision, it is just so palpably

It is just so palpably me, me separate of all that brain yuck, that there's a me there who's choosing. And, you know, that's through what Dan Dennett is saying, much of the time he is saying, it just feels like it. So let's talk about Sicily. He's saying that, and he's also saying that it is politically and socially dangerous to push this argument too far, which is ironic. I mean, he's somebody who would be very quick to separate political concerns from any claims about truth, you know, philosophical or scientific in other contexts. But in this one, he really does tend to conflate them. He just says, this is bad for us to think this way, to rob people of their sense of that they are the true roots of their conscious agency. That is, there's something undermining of personal and social projects that we really have to figure out how to shore up. Yeah. And he takes that in two absolutely, Yeah. And he takes that in two absolutely, oh, surreal directions. The first one, I had a debate with him a few months ago, which was very interesting. But one direction is he will say, people want to be held responsible for their actions. If people do something they know is wrong, they want to be punished for it, which I never quite figured out. And the other one is, I think, driving a lot of his thinking about this is the parts of him that

are not thinking about this and that are very self-interested, where he has these howler of quotes of things like, oh my God, if people stop believing in free will, there'd be murderers running around, it would be sheer chaos, it would be anarchy. And how are we supposed to feel when we can't take credit for the rewards and prizes that we get? And am I thinking, whoa, bummer, yeah, that's the real problem with letting people know that there's no free will. Damn, can't take credit for all my accolades. I think that's what's powering a lot of him there. Well, we'll get into the psychological and social implications of accepting this view. And I do think that you and I might have a slightly different experience there and a

different set of intuitions. that you and I might have a slightly different experience there and a different set of intuitions, but before we do, perhaps tell me why the common claim around complexity theory and free will being an emergent property thereof, why doesn't that knock you back on your heels and convince you that this is all just, it's just a matter of our not having a completed science of the mind. If we did have one, we may well find a space for precisely the free will people think they have. Well, the notion that there's no free will popping out of emergence is heartbreaking for me because I think emergent complexity is like the coolest thing on the planet. The fact that one ant makes no sense and one neuron makes

no sense, put a thousand of them together and the ants make colonies and the neurons start baby-stepping towards consciousness and it just emerges with properties that are only describable on the emergent level. A single molecule of water, as the standard one goes, does not possess the property of wetness. Wetness is emergent only at that upper level. So it seems like it should be perfectly clear then that, oh, amid consciousness popping out and theology and complicated ant colonies, that free will should pop out of there also. And the trouble is every single person arguing that emergence is the pathway to free will does the same, I'm not trying to be pejorative here, the same sleight of hand, which is it relies on a type of downward causality that doesn't exist. You get this emergent, amazing, unexpected, unpredictable,

wonderfully cool, adaptive thing that emerges up at the upper level, and it gives you abilities then to, in effect, reach down and change the component parts of your emergent system. And in effect, it's always relying on a model where once ants are having this amazingly complex society, once you have a brain that can do human brain sort of stuff, it can reach down and make the ants smarter than they were and make the neurons smarter than they were. And the whole point of emergent complexity is you start off with some simple components that are stupidly simple, have a very small number of rules for how they interact with the neighbors, and out of that comes complexity. And the amazing thing about complexity is once that happens, those little ants, those single neurons are still just as simplistic and just as narrow in their options as they were beforehand. It's not the case that when ants form a whole emergently complex society that suddenly individual ants can

speak French or something. They're still the same simple pieces, and every model that somehow pulls free will out of emergence requires that the building blocks, the constituent parts, have suddenly gotten fancier. And they don't. And that's the whole point of it. gotten fancier. And they don't. And that's the whole point of it. Yeah, well, let's linger on this point because you're introducing here a claim that you're dismissing as spurious. And it's a claim that I've never quite understood, but I've heard serious people make it, or people at least who have real scientific and philosophical bona fides. They have made this claim of downward causation from higher level causation, emergent properties that are not simply the sum, however, bewildering in their complexity of their micro level constituents, right? So you take a brain and, you know, all of its parts and their various states, right?

So you have a neurophysiological soup that has structure, right? You have all the connections between neurons and, you know, receptor densities and, you know, all of the respective charges at one moment in time. densities and all the respective charges at one moment in time. And as you just pointed out, this whole system becomes capable of things that no individual part is capable of on its own, and it wouldn't even make sense to talk about such a capacity in terms of a single unit, right? In the same way that you just said by your analogy to water, there is no wetness of a single unit, right? In the same way that you just said by your analogy to water, there is no wetness of a single molecule because the grosser property of wetness, the emergent property of a system of water molecules is simply their disposition to slide freely past one another when water is in its liquid state. And if you only have one molecule,

it's not sliding freely past anything because there's just one of it. But it is still true to say that in the case of water, what that water does is still entirely a story of what all those individual molecules do as causal agents in relation to one another at their microscopic level, right? So it's like all the gross level phenomenon, even the emergent phenomenon that you can't conceptualize without reference to the whole, it is simply a story of what's happening at the bottom level. So the reductionism still runs through and there's no downward causation of a higher level property influencing the behavior of its lower level constituents. And in the case of a brain, there's nothing that emerges on the basis of its lower level constituents. And in the case of a brain, there's nothing that emerges on the basis of neuronal complexity that then exerts its effects downward on to simpler constituents, whether it's neurons or their behaviors, in any way other than

it simply being more of a story of all of those individual units doing what those individual units are doing all the while. Yeah, exactly. I mean, all of these notions are predicated on the idea that when you throw enough water molecules together, wetness occurs if and only if suddenly all of those molecules switch from H2O to O2H. That's what wetness is. And it doesn't happen. I mean, amid that, yeah, philosophers argue about, is there hard downward causality? There's obviously downward causality. I can sit and think here about global warming, and my heart may start beating faster. And we've just seen wonderful downward causality going from a very abstract cognitive part of my cortex to brainstem regulation of my autonomic nervous

system. That's great, but it's not changing the basic nature of the building blocks down there. The neurons are doing exactly what they would be doing if instead the heart was beating faster because I just carried a cow up a flight of stairs or something. It's simply a different entry point to it. And all of the free will models, I'm glad you said you've often been a little unclear what exactly these advocates are advocating, because that's certainly been the case with me. But when I really try to figure out what's being proposed, it's, and the constituent parts get smarter, or the constituent parts get freer. And it doesn't happen that way.

it freer. And it doesn't happen that way. Well, let's linger on this analogy you just gave or this instance you just gave, because it does pry at some of the intuitions here. So we have this experience of being minds, and we're language-using primates, but so much of our world and its influence upon us is a matter of ideas. It's a matter of talk with others and talk, you know, internalized talk to ourselves, our own thoughts. And so, as you just pointed out, you know, you and I could each experience a mere sentence spoken in our direction or, you know, decoded from our computer screen. We open our browser windows and we both look at the cover of the New York Times. And if we saw on that cover a headline which read, there's been a nuclear bomb dropped on Manhattan and no communication coming from the city as of the moment, but millions are presumed dead. Those

are just words. It's a simple sentence, and it would enter our minds, again, through our eyes or ears. It gets decoded through language circuits. If we can find no reason to resist its implications, which is to say no reason to doubt it, right? This really is the New York Times. We didn't go to a fake website. It's not April 1st. We're not being punked. Our computer hasn't been hacked, et cetera. Whatever we have to fight our way past to give these phonemes credibility, once they have it, and we believe that this sentence is actually mappable onto the world, so we're engaged in this act of cognition, then the floodgates open, as you point out, in a downward way. I mean, with a full physiology of panic and horror, etc., well, it would immediately change the way we feel

and what we do next. And the temptation here, because given the kind of richness of this experience, let's leave aside for a second that this cascade of effects offers absolutely no indication of free will, right? I mean, you and I would helplessly be moved by this stimulus, but leave that aside. People feel like the role of mind here, this sort of ethereal strata of what it's like, the qualitative character of our experience, simply can't be a bunch of complicated billiard balls slamming into whatever's next in line. So this downward causation picture suggests that there's something more complicated and more ethereal and more abstract that has been born based on all the complexity, and now it moves downward, and it's

moving downward. Its imposition onto, you know, our mere physiology is something other than the micro-correlates of mind all the while buzzing in a merely physiological way all the time. You know, one domino hitting the next. And that's the thing that's never made sense to me, this turnabout in a mysterious, you know, even magical way where mind is imagined. Many of these people seem to agree that mind on some level is what the brain is doing, and yet this reversal of causality seems to invoke a kind of magic that is something other than what the brain is doing all the while as a physical system. Well, I think you and I are two of the few people who would actually say the word magic at that point, and on some level actually mean it, yeah,

that's exactly what's happening. And to use your analogy, it just seems inconceivable to people that a vast number of billiard balls bumping into each other as a result of this news about New York City, those billiard balls can produce you bursting into tears, you being frantic about loved ones, you going full steam into denial. Whoa, no, the billiard balls have to be working differently. They have to have changed with news like that. And again, yeah, it's constituent parts that are just as simple and stupid and nearest neighbor interaction type stuff as they were beforehand. And none of that has anything to do with the amazing versions of downward causality. I mean, you could look at a whole

bunch of pixels on a screen, And if that's like repeating your childhood trauma of you're watching Bambi and mom has just met her fate, again, your autonomic nervous system is going to go crazy and all of that, but it's still made of neurons and the neurons still release neurotransmitters and they still do the same old thing. And yeah, it's so hard, I think, for people to feel the oomph, the viscera, the momentness with which moments of strong downward causality evoke, which is to say when more abstract things cause many very meat and potato ancient things to change in your body, that something magical hasn't happened there. Well, because of course, the more abstract thing, even the most abstract thing that anyone can conceive, has at its level of neural representation the same billiard ball

characteristics, right? So if you and I can have a discussion about prime numbers, I say to you, you know, it's been proven that there must be an infinite number of prime numbers, right? There's no final prime number. And you dust off your mathematics and you say, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. Strange, right? I mean, that's pretty amazing. It's amazing that we think we know that. We would bet a lot of money on that being true, right? So what the hell are we talking about? We're not talking about something that has an obvious physical instantiation out in the real world. Here, I'll give you a concept that will have representation somewhere in your brain, the prime number larger than the largest one

our species will ever find. Even if we live a trillion years, there's going to be a limit to the number of prime numbers we consciously find and articulate to one another. I'm now referencing the very next one, whatever that next one is. That's an intelligible concept that has some representation in our brains now, but the representation is a state of our brains. We're talking about complicated billiard balls. Yeah. And it just seems so inconceivable at that point that the way I often frame it in terms of the way emergence works is if you took a chimp and you gave him as many neurons as we have and the same general distribution of cortical to limbic to lower level, all of that, give a chimp that many neurons and that chimp is

going to invent theology and philosophy and aesthetics because it's just going to pop out. It's going to be an unrecognizable theology, I would assume, but it's just going to pop out of there because with enough of those pieces, and that just seems, whoa, just throw enough pieces in there together, and you get people who are willing to kill each other over trickle-down economics, whether it's right or wrong? Hmm. Okay, so let's have a sidebar conversation here about what we're not denying, because denying because people hear in any argument against free will a kind of nullification of various distinctions they care about and I think are right to care about. And this goes by Dennett's compatibilist change of subject, the sorts of free will worth wanting, right? So we're not denying

that there's a distinction between voluntary and involuntary behavior, for instance, or the distinction between a person whose prefrontal cortex is perfectly intact and healthfully tuned and is a model citizen, and one who can do none of those things because he's got brain damage and zero impulse control and has a variety of, you know, syndromes that will, for which we now have clinical names. So maybe talk for a moment about what remains once you strip out this, the magic here, what is so important about us? I mean, what, what, what is the neural correlate of our humanness, right? I mean, where is civilization in the brain? Where is being a mensch in the brain? What don't you want to damage if you want to be a person of high moral integrity

and productivity and a good friend, a good husband, et cetera? Well, all of those double-edged sword sorts of things. You want to have, for example, the neural underpinnings of empathy, but you don't want to have so much of it that somebody else's pain is so painful to you that all you think about is how to stop your pain. You got to get sort of the middle range with that. You want to be able to, oh, I don't know, understand somebody and have a sense of theory of their mind, but you don't want to have a life in which nobody can ever surprise you. It's all these inverted you sort of things where there's an optimal in the middle and you don't want too much and you don't want too little. The version of that I've spent half my career mulling over is you want the exact right amount of stress. And when you do, you love it and you pay for it and we call it stimulation. And too little is boring and too much is you're ulcerating. And this, yeah, brains having to fine-tune stuff and context dependency and change their criteria in different settings. And it's intensely complicated stuff. And it seems inconceivable that, say, there's a neurobiology to why somebody firmly, firmly, firmly believes in free will until they're getting blamed for

something. And then they come up with a situational explanation. Wow, that's an interesting thing, a brain that was able to do that flip there just now. Yeah, it's extraordinary. And mostly it's extraordinary because it comes out of rational building blocks and billiard balls. will people think they have to be hiding. I would also say there's no space for the ego to be hiding, but let's leave that aside. I mean, I think that's the obverse of the same coin. So take the simplest description here. I mean, what people have are their genes, their genomes, and the bodies and brains built upon that information and everything the environment has done to that system causally from conception onward. world and with other people have tuned your body and brain, and therefore body and mind, to be in precisely the state it's in now, right? And there's no other stream of causes. I mean, I would just add that even if there were, that doesn't give scope for this freedom people think

they have. Because even if you wanted to integrate an immortal soul into this clockwork, you didn't pick your soul. You didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes. You didn't pick the world into which you were born. You've got no responsibility for any of that. And you also didn't pick your soul if you have one, right? And you can't account for that. I love that point of yours that you've made about we didn't even get to pick our souls. That's wonderful. Right. You can't account for why you didn't have the soul of Ted Bundy. And presumably, if you did, you'd also be raping and killing women and making that your life project. So talk about epigenetics for a second. I mean, haven't some people argued that epigenetics offers an alibi here for freedom seekers? Yeah, and not in the slightest. All it does is give one pathway for something people figured out,

oh, I don't know, a couple of centuries ago and sort of compare it to Victorian beliefs, which is the way kids are raised influences the sort of adult who comes out the other end. There's a connection between the two. Oh my God, you can't just put sick kids into a NICU and they don't need maternal physical contact. Oh, you can just have calories and warmth that's sufficient to make a baby macaque monkey grow up normally, all of that. Whoa, people figured out who you are is deeply influenced by all sorts of stuff in your early life, and all people have needed it as a mechanism for how it works that way. Epigenetics is an immensely powerful one. It doesn't change your genes. It changes how your genes are regulated. Or framed a different way, it changes how your genes function in different environments. And that's an extremely powerful way that one can explain how you get multi-generational effects of trauma as soon as you could find

epigenetic effects on things like eggs and sperm, which is becoming more and more apparent. It's a totally powerful mechanism, but it's not that once you have conscious awareness and decide that you are a free organism, you can now choose which of the epigenetic things that happened to you in childhood, you reverse right now. You don't suddenly get a downward switch that could do that. It's as emergently cool of a mechanism for making us who we are as any of the other pieces in there. But again, it functions with the rules of billiard balls. So where does predictability come into the picture here? So I think many of us have argued, and it seems patently true, that if our behavior were totally predictable, like if I could have in advance shown you a transcript of everything we were going to say in this conversation, down to the last um and ah and grammatical error,

that would prove that we were automatons in some sense, right? This is just Laplace's demon applied to us. It's all determined. It's just one domino hitting the next. But people put a lot of stock in the fact that we don't live in that sort of world. We're not perfectly predictable, in part because even fully determined systems or fully deterministic ones are so complex that you can never measure the initial conditions such that you could predict far in advance. Again, it's like predicting the weather on 50 Tuesdays from today. But there's

also, it's thought, contributions that are random, whether this is quantum indeterminacy or some other sort of randomness. Again, I've never understood why people imagine that gives scope to free will, because what you're introducing is some version of rolling the dice. And if your behavior is pushed around by the rolls of the dice, I don't know why anyone feels like that confers greater responsibility to them. Yeah, exactly. Talk about this variable of predictability versus unpredictability because to my eye, unpredictability doesn't actually create space for free will. It just creates the enduring mystery, which I agree we have and live under, which is we don't know what's going to happen next. But I would extend

that to you don't know what you're going to think next, right? And for me, that actually undermines the lived experience of free will, right? Okay. This is such a fundamental area where people just get bollocked up because you're right. The world is not predictable. The future was not set at the big bang. Laplace was wrong in that sense. and because of things that not only we don't know. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription,

please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.