“We are not captains of our ships. Our ships never had captains.”
— Robert Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will
When things get weirder — and I suspect that, politically, the weirdness is just beginning — I’m in the habit of remarking to whomever is listening, “We’re just running on a program anyway.” And if my listener is so foolish to ask what the heck I mean, I’ll give them my “No free will” rant. It can take a while, but the short answer is, “Other than the odd quantum event, the future is completely determined by the past.”
That’s what 2,500 years of physics has taught us, that the world and everything in it, including the brain, is deterministic: There’s no volition, no choices, despite what it feels like. Other than the occasional quantum event over which we have no control, this “now” moment is completely determined by the previous moment, which followed from the moment before that, all the way back to the Big Bang. Whatever it feels like — and it sure feels like I’m choosing my words as I type this column — either I have to reject physics or I have to accept that my feelings are a poor way to judge reality. As physicist Sabine Hossenfelder puts it, “For your will to be free, it shouldn’t be caused by anything else. But if it wasn’t caused by anything … it wasn’t caused by you, regardless of what you mean by you.”
According to the science, any decision we make results from entirely mechanistic computations in our brains. We are no freer than a thermostat reacting to the ambient temperature. OK, you’re a bit more complicated than a thermostat, since your skull contains about 80 billion neurons interconnected by trillions of synapses. Same idea, though. If it were possible to measure the position and velocity of every particle in your brain, a computer could predict the next movement you make and the next word you say.
Sometimes free will is defined as “the ability to have done otherwise,” the theme of Jorge Luis Borges’ famous short story “Garden of Forking Paths.” But since all of us have — and will have — just one version of our lives, this definition strikes me as pretty absurd. How would we know we could have done anything else other than what we actually did?
The ramifications of adopting a determinist attitude of, “We’re all machines following programs” is intriguing, to say the least. It’s also a well-nigh impossible attitude to maintain. Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, quoted above, is a leading proponent of determinism whose 2023 book Determined is a New York Times bestseller. Still, Sapolsky allows that, for all his decades of research and study, 99 percent of the time he can’t personally avoid the sense of agency, of being in charge of his own life. Why? Because we’re all wired, for good evolutionary reasons, to believe we’re captains of our own ships. And we’re extraordinarily good at self-deception. My go-to example is the Swedish study in which 88 percent of drivers said they considered themselves above average. (A mathematical impossibility, of course.)
If we, as a society, were to accept a deterministic viewpoint, that none of us is responsible for our actions any more than a thermostat, what are the ramifications for our criminal justice system? If it can be shown that someone convicted of a heinous crime has a terrible history beyond their control — starting perhaps with fetal alcohol syndrome in the womb, and/or childhood abuse, poverty, the whole 9 yards — how should they be dealt with? Retribution, as in paying for one’s sins? Or compassion? If we’re all acting mechanistically, how are we any more guilty and deserving of punishment than a faulty thermostat?
We’ve come a long way from burning witches for causing hailstones, blaming the devil for epileptic seizures and holding mothers guilty of causing schizophrenia in their children. Hopefully, the next stage will be to understand that none of us are blameworthy — or praiseworthy — for actions over which we have no control. And, to structure society accordingly.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com, planethumboldt.substack.com) is probably a figment of his own imagination.
This article appears in The Conductor.