Summary
In this response to Robert Sapolsky’s book “Determined,” the author discusses the topic of free will and the divergent conclusions reached by Sapolsky and himself. They agree on certain points, such as the incoherence of the compatibilist view that free will can coexist with determinism. However, they differ in their beliefs about the role of biological factors in determining behavior. The author criticizes Sapolsky’s dualistic framing of the issue and argues for a non-reductive materialist perspective that allows for holistic or top-down causation. The author also takes issue with Sapolsky’s elimination of the whole self as a causal entity and suggests that there are naturalized concepts of causation that can explain how organisms control their actions.
Highlights
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That we can survey the same evidence and interpret it so differently may suggest to some that the question of free will is not really an empirical one at all
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My previous book, Innate, was all about how the wiring of our brains shapes who we are. We are definitively not born as blank slates, but have our own individual natures – innate predispositions that derive from our genetics and the way our brain happened to develop. Both Sapolsky and I agree that these predispositions affect the way our patterns of behavior emerge throughout our lives. However, I take these effects to be distal, indirect, and non-exhaustive, which is why I used the word “shapes” rather than “determines”. As we will see below, one of the main points of disagreement is that I think of these and other factors as influences on our behaviour while Sapolsky sees them as absolute determinants of it.
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The framing of the issues in the cited paragraph is firmly, though implicitly, dualist. First, there is the odd idea that a behavior occurring because the person “simply” decided to do something is basically identical to it having “just happened”, as if for no reason. But the whole point is that we can do things for our reasons, not at random. And as we will see, there is nothing “simple” about our decision-making processes. Nor is there any reason, a priori, to rule out the possibility of the person themselves being a cause of things – that’s the very question under debate.
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In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. Why “out of thin air”, as if this requires magic? This just assumes that the individual cannot be a cause of their own behavior – exactly the question at hand. If you set up the problem such that the only solution that would meet the threshold of free will is one involving this kind of supernatural interference in the normal run of physical causation, then of course you will never be satisfied by any naturalistic claim that explicates behavioural control as an evolved capacity of living organisms
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This dualistic framing is also evident in Sapolsky’s repeated assertion that the only place where “you” can reside is in the gaps in our current knowledge of biology. Science is seen as revealing the real causes of what happens, at deeper and deeper mechanistic levels. As this occurs, there seems less and less for you to do, less and less room for any kind of holistic or top-down causation. All the causal power is located at the lowest levels (whatever they are taken to be) and the notion of higher-order causation by the self, as a whole entity, is eliminated in the process.
Terrence Deacon diría que esto es justo lo que la ciencia mecanicista no logra comprender, y por lo tanto lo forcluye de su modelo de mundo. La subjetividad es sólo un epifenóneno o ilusión.
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My own position is one of non-reductive materialism. We don’t need to invoke any supernatural forces to explain how organisms can control their actions and how agents can have causal power in the world. There are plenty of resources available to us in the various sciences of systems that give perfectly naturalised concepts of holistic or top-down causation