Do We Have Free Will? with Robert Sapolsky

Coming up on StarTalk, all about free will.

Where do we get it from?

Does it really exist?

Maybe it doesn’t.

We’re featuring my exclusive interview with Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Neuroscience at Stanford, an author of the recent book, Determined, The Science of Life Without Free Will.

Scary, but likely true.

Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson here.

You’re a personal astrophysicist, and I got Chuck Nice with me.

Chuck, how you doing, man?

I’m doing great, Neil.

Thanks for asking.

Okay, Chuck Nice, a professional stand-up comedian, actor.

Yes.

So, here’s a subject we haven’t yet tackled.

It’s the subject of free will.

Yes.

It came up in the edges of…

Yeah, I was going to say, we’ve tinkered around the edges.

It’s just the edge that we have to get into.

A couple of conversations with Brian Greene, a couple of conversations with Heather Berlin, a couple of neuroscience conversations that we have.

Well, we got another neuroscientist here, right?

Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist, biologist.

He’s a professor of biology, neurology and neuroscience, and neurosurgery.

Can you be any more neuro than that?

I think that’s all the neuros.

I think that’s all the neuros.

Or neurotic, that’s the word.

At Stanford University, a best-selling author of eight books, I have one in my hand right now, Determined, A Science of Life Without Free Will.

And that’s going to be a major subject of our conversation today.

Welcome to the show, Robert.

Thanks for having me on.

Before we continue here, let me just tell our audience, you captured so much of this life’s profile in a memoir.

Just tell us briefly about your memoir.

And then we’re going to pick up the free will discussion.

Oh, sort of one of my not even marginally scientific books that I cranked out is called A Primate’s Memoir.

And basically just stories of the 30 odd years hanging out with both the baboons, but sort of places there in East Africa.

I was there for one coup attempt.

I was there for one civil war.

It was so, you know, an interesting, colorful place to be a kid from Brooklyn who knows nothing about the outside world.

So that was a fun thing to write.

I’m glad you documented that, because if it’s a story that others will never have or can’t even imagine, that’s got to be in print.

Somewhere.

So tell me, so this is a fascinating birthplace for the ideas that maybe we’re not entirely in control of our own behavior.

So how did this rise up to become your central focus when thinking about free will?

Well, actually, just to undo all of that, I already didn’t believe in free will.

I was 14 when I had this incredibly epiphanal night where I suddenly decided there’s no free will.

I also, as long as I was at it that night, decided there’s no God and there’s no purpose.

There’s just a big, empty, different universe.

It was interesting stuff going on the days before that.

Were there mushrooms involved in this evening?

No, no, but there was religious trauma instead, which I think is a much more effective way of messing with your head.

So it was a wonderful sort of clarity of, oh, I can’t…

You became nihilist, I think that’s the…

Yes.

That’s when that word applies, nihilism.

Nihilistic, yes.

So I have not believed in free will since then.

So all baboon ecological physiology and all rat monkey mice neuroscience did was just add more factoids to like we’re just machines, we’re biological machines.

Wow.

All right.

So give us the central points of your thesis then.

You can’t just say, well, I don’t think we’re free will anymore.

Give me some foundations for this.

Well, it’s this basic deal where like somebody does something and you wonder like why that happened, why they did what they just did.

And like if you want to unpack it, part of the answer to that is because this was going on in this part of the brain a second before while this part of the brain went silent or that sort of thing.

But you’re also asking, wow, well, the person hadn’t eaten yet today.

They were sleep deprived.

They were happy.

They were stressed.

They were in pain, whatever.

What’s the hungry judge effect that reminds me?

Oh, I love it.

I remember something like 10 years ago, like if you get convicted before lunch, your sentence is higher than after lunch.

Yes, exactly.

It was this classic study, Proceeding National Academy of Sciences.

They looked at every parole decision made in this judicial county or whatever, over the course of a year, like a thousand of them looking at what predicted the judge letting the guy walk versus sending him back from war jail.

And the single best predictor was how many hours it had been since the judge had eaten a meal.

Oh, I thought it was definitely how black the guy was standing at the table.

Oh, well, that’s after we get rid of the one that explains about 99% of the variability.

Once that’s sorted out, the other extreme is…

Another variance in the force of the…

So that’s shocking and disturbing, just simultaneous.

And so if the judge…

Presumably the judge is thinking the judge is making the right decision in that moment.

In fact, they don’t even know.

They don’t know that they’re being influenced.

Because they can’t even…

If you were, maybe you could correct for it.

So, okay, keep going.

Keep going now.

So, by the way, that got challenged for its statistics and they responded adequately and it’s solid science and it’s been replicated.

Do not go and apply for a home loan in a bank if the person you’re talking to hasn’t eaten for four hours.

Other versions of that.

Interestingly, the more hours a medical resident has gone without sleeping, if they’re white, the more implicit bias they show on tests by the end of their sleep deprived lunatic work period.

So, yeah, that’s what’s up with the judges.

All sorts of stuff like that.

Mild effects, these are not, but they’re just part of this picture of stuff going on underneath the surface.

So that’s like how many hours it’s been since you’ve eaten.

That’s it.

But then you got to figure, like what have hormones been cool in the last 24 hours?

Because they’re marinating your brain and having influences.

And then you got to figure, what have the recent months, years, decades been like?

Did you get traumatized?

Did you find God?

Did you find love?

Did you lose either?

Because that changes the brain.

By the way, the food thing, that became an entire commercial line for Snickers candy bar.

You’re hangry.

Are you really hangry?

Hangry.

Oh, what a great one.

And the most amazing thing is it makes sense.

Like, ooh, blood glucose levels are low when you haven’t eaten.

And it turns out the part of your brain…

They’re all in a car on a road trip.

And one guy is just completely…

And actually, it’s usually some other famously crabby famous person, right?

So that’s who they turn into.

And then they give them a Snickers bar, and then they’re back to their normal self.

That’s, ooh, finally science influencing commercial America.

So reasonably…

And it makes perfect…

You know, you’re looking at this guy.

He looks nothing like you.

He’s got a background that has nothing in common with you.

And you’re deciding, is this a person who has reformed?

And it takes some work to see the world from this person’s perspective.

It takes some work to try to think about how they turned out to be different from who you were.

It takes work, brain work, and the most expensive part of your brain is the one that you’re working at that point.

And if your glucose levels are low in your bloodstream, what the hell?

Let’s just go with an easy answer.

It’s very mechanistic, and it’s exactly what you say.

You sit the judge down at that point, you say, whoa, that’s really interesting.

Remember just after lunch, you paroled this guy, and this guy just now did the same thing, and you set him back for another 50 years in jail.

What’s up with that?

And they’ll quote freshman year philosophy.

They’re not going to say, oh, because I was mildly hypoglycemic, and my frontal cortex is getting sluggish.

Delusional, delusional in their own intent, yes.

Yes, exactly.

So the big takeaway here is, if you are ever before any judge, make sure that you offer them cookies before they…

Exactly, exactly.

And the other advice is, find a way to mention that it’s your birthday.

There’s even been a study showing judges give slightly shorter sentences if they’re aware to the defense.

Not if yesterday was or tomorrow was.

It’s gotta be the day.

But terrible social conflict.

Conflict number one, we need to protect society from dangerous, rapacious people.

Conflict number two, be nice to people on their birthday.

And somehow it balances out and you get a slightly shorter sentence.

That’s great.

Makes sense.

By the way, I fully embrace everything you’ve said.

And I’ve done some recent amateur thinking about free will.

And I want to share some of those ideas with you.

But they will fully resonate with everything you’ve said thus far.

But I have to bring in sort of the physicist’s perspective of free will.

Where, if every action has a preceding action to it, you just take that all the way back till it’s no longer in your consciousness, right?

And then something set those series of synaptic trips in sequence.

And then you end up saying something or doing something.

So, the physicist’s cause and effect argument.

How does what you say dovetail with that?

Or are you saying something slightly different philosophically?

Actually, very similar.

And, you know, behavioral sciences, biology, whatever discovered me, this major discovery recently, by which I mean somewhere in the last couple of centuries, which is something happened because of what came just before that.

And that happened because of what I said.

And, you know, that whole deal, I freak out when we’ve gotten anywhere near the Big Bang because I understand zero about that.

But at the very least, and how do you turn out to evolve into the sort of species you are?

Yeah, you look at everything and it had a deterministic root.

Yeah, but, okay, so there is the physics, physiology, philosophical argument that you just gave.

And I don’t think there’s a good argument against it.

And let me just expand a little bit for those catching up.

The concept of chaos is not just disorder.

There are certain chaotic systems where you set them into motion with certain initial conditions and you’ll get a result.

And it’s a repeatable result with causes and effects determined from start to finish.

However, if the system is truly chaotic, an arbitrarily small shift from those initial conditions can produce an infinitely different result at the other end.

And so, what it means is you can’t realistically predict a future based on these starting parameters you give because of how sensitive the future is to those starting parameters.

Oh, like a hurricane.

Exactly.

Like a hurricane.

And a butterfly.

You can’t really predict weather more than a week in advance.

It goes completely chaotic.

So, all they can do with the hurricane is give what the models all say and pick the middle one and work it from there.

But every day you get closer to that, the models converge because it’s less chaotic.

So, my question back to you, which you’ve surely gotten this before, is okay, philosophically you can say what you did was predetermined, but the way we experience life, we feel we have free will and isn’t that good enough?

No, and not only isn’t good enough scientifically, it’s an awful thing for how life is for lots of people to believe in free will that isn’t there because you give somebody a sense that they had control over how things turned out.

So it changes society.

It justifies an awful lot.

Well, put it this way.

Once you buy into my deal that there’s no free will and when you look at all the biological stuff going on from like when you were single fertilized egg cell and everything thereafter, when you look at all that stuff, that’s the beginning right there.

That’s when you were born.

Yeah, yes, because that actually has a huge influence on stuff.

There’s not a crack anywhere in that edifice in which you could push in something that is completely free of the last centuries of science and how we understand the world to work.

So that’s great.

If you buy into that, you suddenly realize there’s something very wrong in that we run the world on the notion that it’s okay to treat some people way better than average for things they had nothing to do with and other people way worse than average for things they had nothing to do with and then slather on nonsense about this being a just world afterward.

And what getting rid of a notion of free will is about is saying actually that stuff you had no control over.

Ooh, I had no idea biology.

It’s an academic point is what you’re saying.

To be debated in journals, it has very real consequences in our social cultural fabric.

Yeah.

Hello, I’m Finkie Broke Allen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

So, I get what you’re saying, and I agree with it.

I’m not sure if I’m completely there with the total no free will, just being honest.

And so, explain to me this, all right.

So, here’s why I agree with you saying, I have a friend of mine, Dr.

Mike, had a patient who tried to sell their baby, okay?

And they were a drug addict, they were a drug addict.

So, and his-

These are your friends, these are your friends, just want to be clear.

No, not the drug addict.

Okay, just, sorry, who am I sharing a podcast with here?

Okay, go on.

Said to me, yeah, that they could not help doing that.

And I said, you got to be out of your gourd.

Like, what kind of hippie dippy commie liberal crap is that, that you’re saying, look, this person tried to sell their child and then he gave me all this information on how drugs hijack the dopaminergic system and how your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and your nucleus accumbens and all this crap comes together.

And basically you have no control over what you’re doing.

You are-

Your division tree has been hijacked.

Yes, you are just responding to these things, this cascade that’s happening in your brain.

And it’s really kind of like a neurosynaptic response to something that says, hey, go do this because we need this.

And you’ll do anything-

Okay, so you’re agreeing with Robert.

I thought you started-

Okay, now, here’s why I, that’s why I agree because I did all the reading and it makes perfect sense, perfect sense.

However-

Here’s what I want to know.

What about just your regular everyday decisions?

That has nothing to do with this outside force coming in and hijacking a system of your brain.

It’s just, I want vanilla ice cream right now.

I just want vanilla ice cream.

Some, you know, so what’s-

I want pepperoni on my pizza.

I want pepperoni on my pizza.

Because Robert, these are, I want you to see this movie tonight instead of this other movie.

Right.

These are the, the power we have over our lives, small examples that they are, all right?

This is the power over our lives that gives us this illusion that we have free will.

And we’re perfectly content thinking that.

You’re saying there’s some physiochemical biomolecular thing that makes me choose strawberry instead of in oil tonight.

Yeah.

Which is also saying there’s this cultural thing, which is also saying how you were raised and what lullabies were sung to you, have a neuroca, that it’s all one of the, okay.

Let me give you a sense of this with the drug guy.

If you happen to make a really stupid rash decision and pick the wrong womb to spend nine months in, and your mother was very stressed during the pregnancy, as a result, your brain would develop fewer of those dopamine neurons.

And as an adult, this is an epigenetic thing going on here.

Epigenetic, exactly.

A part of the brain called the frontal cortex has to do with reining in your imprudent urges and stuff.

You picked the wrong mother.

By age five, yeah, your mother’s socioeconomic status by age five has already influenced the rate at which this part of the brain has developed.

Every step thereafter, and it’s just one piece leading to another to another.

Okay, so something like you pick vanilla instead of strawberry or what were caught in there is exactly what you were alluding to.

You sit there, you make a decision.

You have a moment of intent.

You’re consciously aware of the intent.

You know what the outcome’s likely to be.

Most importantly, you know you don’t have to do this.

These are alternatives.

And that sure seems like free will.

And that has nothing to do with free will.

Because the only thing to ask at that point is, so how do you turn out to be the sort of person who would want vanilla over strawberry?

No, I’m going to do, Robert, next time I’m in an ice cream shop, I’m going to say, let me see, do I want vanilla?

No, I want strawberry.

Then, right when they’re ready to scoop it out, I walk out and say, I don’t want any ice cream at all.

That will totally confound your entire theory.

No, not at all, because how do you wind up being the sort of person saying, screw that with trying to say, this is how I’m going to show them, or whatever.

And if you wound up exactly like your parents, there was a certain absence of free will.

If at some point you said, oh my God, shoot me, if I wind up having anything in common with my parents, I’m going to do just the opposite, it’s the exact same absence of free will and any version of that.

You just happen to be someone who decides, ooh, I have a theory what this researcher is up to, this psychologist, I’m going to intentionally tell the opposite because I’ve got authority figure issues or because I’m cranky today and my underwear is too tight or who knows whatever the impinging, what made you who you are at that moment.

So, Robert, okay, so first, let me just preface all this by saying I completely agree with you.

And all of my recent thinking aligns with this and I want to share it with you just so I can hear you say, Neil, you’re like right on, I need that encouragement.

But so if this is an hypothesis that is strongly supported by observation, what would have to happen for you to say, I guess my hypothesis is wrong?

Because if anything anybody says or does, you count as evidence in support of your theory, then the theory isn’t testable.

And if it’s not testable, you’re accepting everything is evident, oh, he did that, I’m right.

They did the opposite, I’m still right.

You chose a vanilla, I’m right.

And if you’re right for everything, how am I gonna know if you’re ever wrong?

Here’s how you falsify it.

Show me and at this point like everyone says, oh, proof to us there’s no free will.

Proof to us there’s no Easter bunny.

Proof to us that like there’s, till you turn around, there’s somebody creeping up behind you, oop, they disappear.

That absence approved proof of absence that whole deal.

By now, the onus is on people saying there’s free will, and this is what would falsify all of this.

Show me a neuron or a network of neurons or brain that just did something and show me that it did that completely free of its history.

It wouldn’t matter what the other neurons.

It happens all the time.

I mean, you have particles popping in and out of existence.

There’s no known cause for it.

It just is, right?

Yeah.

And if it just is…

This is where I get conniptions.

When quantum physics is wonderfully relevant to quantum physics, it’s got squats to do with free will issues because it’s like, what is this physicist at MIT, Max Tagmark, he’s calculated 23…

We’re friends with Max.

Yeah, we know Max.

Okay, he’s calculated 23 orders of magnitude that an indeterminist subatomic effect would have to scale up to influence the behavior of a molecule.

Oh, good, okay.

I did not know that.

It gets decohered.

Very important.

I did not know that.

That should shut everyone up who’s trying to explain consciousness with quantum physics.

With quantum physics.

Exactly.

But it hasn’t.

And the next…

Because if they find a way where somehow magically it bubbles up, what you’ve just explained is a mechanism for randomness, for random behavior, not like the moral system you’ve had since you were in your diapers and the consistent…

Even if we went there, it’s not…

It’s random, okay.

And still, it’s still not really in our control, because it’s random.

Exactly.

And that’s not what we’re looking for.

We’re looking for…

You know, you get somebody’s funeral, and what do they do is they trot out their oldest friend who gets to say, wow, even when we were in kindergarten, they were already like this.

Consistent…

You’re not going to get consistency like that.

You’re not going to get like a stable moral compass or something out of quantum randomness.

And every model out there…

You get randomness.

You get randomness.

Exactly.

That’s not where the issue plays out.

Best explanation I’ve heard ever.

So, are you saying neurologically, because I’m still stuck on the vanilla ice cream?

I mean, I appreciate the quantum physics, but I’m trying to figure out yes and no up and down.

So, are you saying that our brains are ramped up with intention before we even enter the circumstance to say vanilla or chocolate?

There is something happening neurologically that has already put us at that precipice and then pushes us to that place.

From stuff that went on a second ago to back when you were a fetus and everything in between, and that’s exactly it.

Because all you are, okay, here’s my embroider this on doilies, we are nothing more than the biology over which we had no control and its interactions with environment over which we had no control.

And that’s why we are who we are.

Okay, ice cream or food.

If I go into a supermarket, I’m not going to buy cheddar cheese.

Probably because some of the genetics of my taste buds, but also because when my wife and I first got together, because I had been a vegetarian in college and thus all you ate was like large blocks of cheddar cheese because they had not discovered vegetables yet at that time.

And she said, oh my God, that’s saturated fat, that’s incredibly bad for your health.

And I was changed as a result.

And what we know is the biology of it even involves like change the makeup of my gustatory receptors in my tongue as to what tastes good now.

You know, all of this stuff, all of these pieces come into place.

And the challenge winds up being, show me that this person would have done the exact same thing if all this, if they had different genes, they had a different fetal life, if they got raised in a different neighborhood by different parents with different culture, all of that, and if they had had a different breakfast this morning and…

Okay, I still need to get this compliment from you.

So here are my recent thoughts.

Okay, here we go.

Okay, because I was following the free will argument and I would just wasn’t, the arguments were just not enlightening to me.

This every neurosynaptic firing has a precedent and that you’ll do things that you will make up the reason afterwards for why you did it, but in fact, it was predetermined.

Fine, okay?

You can argue that philosophically why that must be so.

But I came to that, the same conclusion differently in a more restricted sense.

I asked myself, the person who is depressed, chemically depressed, do they have the free will to not be depressed?

Absolutely not.

If you look at culture, one by one, things people have done in the past have fallen by the way the person is not accountable.

An early one of these would have been epilepsy.

Okay?

The devil got you.

It’s not your fault we’re bringing the priest.

Okay?

We got that.

But if you were, I’m old enough, maybe you’re old enough, the skid row bum, the drunkard, all blame was placed on that person.

Okay?

Are they just bad?

No?

Okay.

We find out that alcohol is addictive, and when you’re addicted, you can’t get off of it, and there’s a homeless community where circumstance put them there, and so society has changed in its response to this.

Okay?

The people who are depressed and on the brink of suicide, we’re not saying, oh, just cheer up.

No.

We’re saying there’s a neurological problem, and they’re not in control, and the instant before they jump off the bridge, do they have the free will to not jump off the bridge?

And as I went through this mental exercise, more and more of society ended up folding into this mindset, and I got more and more depressed.

Not depressed, angered.

I got angered by it.

And you find out, what is it, 70% of people in prison grew up below the poverty line?

So poverty is correlated with being in prison?

Maybe the problem is poverty.

Do they have the free will to not have committed a crime and end up in…

So then I thought, might this explain everything?

Everything, the bully in the yard.

Do they have the free will?

The person who wants to invade a country.

Is that their testosterone?

We all grew up saying, can’t have female leaders because they have hormonal shifts and we don’t know what they’re going to do.

But men don’t.

But men have testosterone.

And with testosterone, violence is…

I checked this at an intersection.

If someone cuts you off at an intersection, if someone says, f*** you, how did you do that?

Chances are it’s a guy, okay, with testosterone out of control.

Not in my neighborhood.

We got some rough women around here as well.

So, the men historically have not been honest about what role testosterone plays in their proclivity to commit violence, for example.

And so, all of a sudden, I said to myself, is everything in society explainable in this way?

And then I realized, oh my gosh, if it is, then our entire moral code has to shift.

It has to, it’s not a matter of punishment, it’s a matter of nurturing and understanding.

So, let me pivot now to you and say, if we agree, and I think we do, that you’re right, how does society need to change?

Massively, totally.

Because when you think this through…

The compassion machine has to be put into effect.

And you’re not getting that in conservative politics, right?

Conservative politics.

Yes, exactly.

But if you’re really going to test it, you got to see if somebody is willing to feel compassionate about how Donald Trump became the person who he is.

Because it’s the same issue there.

I mean, if you really follow this out…

You mean being the best of the best of the absolute best?

How did this happen?

I don’t know.

I believe God chose me.

Wow, that’s scary.

That’s really good.

And blame and punishment make no sense.

Praise and reward make no sense.

Meritocracies make no sense.

Criminal justice makes no sense.

Feeling like you have earned anything makes no sense.

Hating somebody makes as little sense as hating an earthquake.

All of that.

That’s the only logical point you can get to.

And I’ve been thinking this way since I was 14, and I can actually function this way about three minutes every other month.

Because it’s incredibly hard.

But I’ve done it in some ways.

I don’t believe when there’s a lightning storm that some old woman with no teeth at the edge of the hamlet caused it with her witchcraft.

That one’s easy now.

I subtracted response to that one.

That was not the case.

Right.

Exactly.

And when you and I, Chuck, you appear to be too much of a youngin for this, but Neil, when we were both young, when we were in elementary school, if you had the kids sitting next to you was just not learning how to read, and they just weren’t paying attention, and you know what the attributions were.

Then this kid, they’re not motivated, maybe they’re not so smart, they’re a little lazy, they just don’t pay attention.

Put them in the slow class with the short bus.

Exactly.

And then people discovered, oh, there’s this biological thing called dyslexia, like the architecture of one layer of your cortex is screwy.

And as a result, you flipped closed loop letters around.

And oh, just in our lifetime, we have learned that’s not a lazy kid.

Oh, we’ve done that one.

That one didn’t take 300 years of getting rid of witch burning.

That one, or, you know, people have figured out in our lifetime, who you love is a biological phenomenon.

It’s not some like, oh, I had no idea biology had to do it.

So we’re slowly getting better.

And in each one of these steps, we figured out schizophrenia is not caused by mothers who unconsciously hate their child.

Autism is not caused by mothers who are incapable of love.

Oh, it’s a neurogenetic developmental disorder.

We figured that one out.

And hundreds of thousands of women who spent their whole lives being told by every expert out there that they, they were the cause of their child’s schizophrenia, suddenly, oh, this isn’t depressing.

This is liberating.

Every time we’ve done this, it’s become a more humane place.

Yes, yes.

And even, and of course, I remember seeing a film from the 19, early 60s where someone was addicted to drugs.

And it was a drama.

He was addicted to drugs.

And he said, I’m a junkie, and I can’t stop it.

But the resolution of that story was, the cops came and arrested him.

Today, that’s unthinkable, right?

If someone says, I’m a junkie, I can’t stop it, you don’t arrest them.

You help them, right?

And that’s a compassion.

Wait, what country are we talking about here?

Exactly.

Well, if you say that from your men’s club where you’ve had a little bit too much vodka, then they send you to a nice, expensive rehab program.

If it’s out on a street corner, maybe something different.

Bye I’m showing self-aware that they need help, but we don’t deny them the help.

I mean, this is an evolution of our cultural response to people who are not entirely in control of their own fate.

So…

And I get it.

I mean, I don’t disagree.

I think what scares people is they start thinking about the consequences of this, because I was just thinking about, okay, so what about responsibility, and what do you do if people can just do what they want?

But then it just popped into my head while you guys were talking.

What if I were able to do anything I wanted?

Anything.

If you told me I can go out and do anything I want with no consequence, what would I change?

And the truth is, very, very little.

I would not go out and kill anybody.

I would not start doing drugs.

I would not start…

I pretty much still be the exact same person I am right now, even if you gave me the ability to do anything that I wanted.

It wouldn’t lead me down this path of, and now I’m just going to become the most decadent, most evil baboon-like person that I can possibly become.

I mean, like the laws were the only thing preventing you from committing crimes.

Yeah, it’s not just the laws.

It’s my place in society.

It’s my commitment to being a citizen.

It’s all these other things that make me me.

Okay, so, Robert, we can split the kingdom here by saying there are forces that are societal and cultural, and then there are forces that are purely biological and physiological.

And yes, there’s overlap, I get it.

But if we’re gonna prevent religious factions from killing each other, okay, we can’t, I refuse to think that that’s biological.

This is a trained thing from birth, where your religion is better than someone else’s religion, and they’re the wrong religion.

And so there’s a kind of a brainwashing there in not accepting the diversity of what exists around us.

So maybe if we can’t change the biology, we can change the culture.

How far will that get us in a world with no free will?

It’s gonna make a spectacular place to live in about 600 years.

It’s gonna be long.

First off, I’m obliged to, or I have to give up my head-and-tree license to say, oh, Neil, that’s a false dichotomy between culture and bio.

It’s one and the same.

No, no, I say there’s overlap.

There’s overlap, of course.

I’m not denying that, but what I’m saying is, what has to happen in this world if we cannot change our physiology to make it safer for us all and more of a utopia that you have imagined?

We can’t change our physiology.

Change the educational system, let everybody free from the prison system.

No, of course not, of course not.

You can’t have dangerous people running around, but we’ve figured out ways to deal with dangerous people who are damaging for reasons out of their control and to protect society from them.

Here’s a great example.

Your kid is sneezing.

Your kid has a nose cold, and what you do is you keep him home from kindergarten tomorrow because there’s a preemptive law.

Please, if your kid has a cold, don’t send them until they don’t get everybody else sick.

You quarantine, you constrain your child’s behavior, but you don’t then tell them that they can’t play with their toys that day because they’re a rotten person for sneezing.

You subtract responsibility out of it, and you still can protect, and we do that in all sorts of…

Airline pilot.

Airline pilot is taking antihistamines because of their cold, and it makes them a little drowsy.

You can’t work.

You can’t fly for X number of days if you’re taking antihistamine.

We can build a world in which we protect people from damaging folks, and hopefully along the way, recognizing how people became damaging, and while subtracting out responsibility and moralizing and sermoning at them, and because you could see biologically where things went wrong, and you can see where culture comes in.

Okay, so a great example, the schizophrenia thing.

People started figuring out schizophrenia wasn’t caused by bad mothering, it was caused by neurochemistry, and it had zero impact on psychiatry and family members of people with schizophrenia.

It had no impact at all until something amazing happened in the 1980s.

Phil Donahue, Phil Donahue was the Oprah of the time, who turned out he had a relative with schizophrenia, and he invited on-

The talk show host.

Very, very persuasive biological psychiatrist who did something amazing.

He held up some of the first brain scans that were just being published at the time, showing structurally there’s differences in the brains of people with schizophrenia.

Whoa, you can look at the picture of it, and that was the transformative moment.

So you could say, okay, so why do we have a culture where it took someone like Phil Donahue to have us rethink this?

Why do we have a culture where it takes Caitlyn Jenner appearing on the cover of whatever magazine that was for people to say, oh, this trans, sometimes people just feel like there are different sex than what their biology, and why’d we wind up being that kind of culture?

Why’d we wind up having a culture in which certain values are glorified, and culture is exactly the opposite?

How were you raised, depending on what culture, it was a difference in how many seconds on the average you would cry before your mother would pick you up.

Were they training you to be tough?

Were they training you to feel safe?

And just each time that happened, your brain got constructed a little bit differently.

And at each one of these steps, it goes on like that.

And how do you, like, what makes somebody an ex-white supremacist?

What went into that?

All of these things can change, and the cultural changes and the biological changes are totally intertwined.

And what we’re getting at here is like the worst conclusion to come out of this with is, oh, there’s no free will.

Nothing can change.

Things change enormously.

All you have to do is understand where the buttons are and where the levers are and where the irrationality is and where the post-hoc rationalizations are to explain something that in fact was a pure gut instinct and makes no sense at all.

And how do people get that way?

And how do you get people that way to stop being that way?

A post-hoc explanation is you see something happen and you after the fact account for why it happened without real evidence for what actually caused it.

And so you have a post-hoc accounting and there’s been a lot of that in the history of civilization.

So if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re kind of saying, let’s look at these social ill and maladies with an eye towards restoration and compassion.

And compassion.

And restoration as opposed to punitive measures only, which is what we do now.

We just go, we’re going to punish you and that’s it.

And normally people go to jail and come out worse criminals.

Better trained.

They’re trained to become criminals.

Exactly.

And you can use punishment and you can use reward as like instrumental tools because that’s a good way to make organisms change behavior.

But the notion of them being virtues in and of self are ridiculous.

And yeah, it makes no sense to hold somebody responsible either for the fact that their unbelievably awful upbringing resulted in someone with a really impaired capacity for empathy and feeling somebody else’s pain or the fact that somebody’s really privileged upbringing produced somebody who’s get really good SAT scores and know how to write a five paragraph essay and get into a prestigious college.

Like in both, there’s no intrinsic virtue in how any of us turned out and there’s no intrinsic earned or entitled.

And that’s hard as hell to subtract that out.

And what I’ve seen is, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s really scary in terms of saying, oh, what are we gonna have criminals running around in the street?

And what do we do with criminal justice?

It’s gonna be a lot harder for people like us to instead say, oh, I actually haven’t earned anything with my work ethic.

I actually haven’t earned anything with my good SAT scores or my corner office or my amazing salad.

It’s gonna be much harder to undo the meritocracy end of it because anyone who’s sitting and listening to like ridiculous stuff about cosmology, they’re one of the lucky ones.

They learned how to read.

They’re probably not homeless.

We’re the lucky ones.

And if they’re being no free will means bummer.

My CV maybe isn’t as impressive as I used to think it was and doesn’t indicate I’m a much better human than average.

Yeah, I think about that all the time, Robert.

And we’re the ones who, we’re in the subset where we were treated better than average in society.

And my urge is to say, well, I worked hard for this.

I worked.

Exactly.

You had that roommate who no doubt went out and got falling down drunk that Saturday night and you studied instead and you earned this.

And yeah, you learned something different.

Your brain did gratification postponement differently because of this, that and the other.

Here’s something I do tell people.

And how’d that turn out?

I watch less football than average because there was one stage where I decided that bullies would like me if I memorized every stupid factoid about the Green Bay Packers because they were in a sentencing at the time.

And that turned out not to work.

That turned out not to impress them in the slightest.

And okay, so football is not the route towards like, so like I lost interest in football.

That’s why I don’t watch football because like knowing Vince Lombardi and his like golden rule or whatever.

Yeah, all of these things come from somewhere and we turned out who we are.

And for most people, we’re claiming they’re responsible for stuff that can turn out very well that they in fact had no control over.

By the way, I watch football because I have to support anything that keeps what could be murderous barbarians off of the streets of our country.

Because I don’t know if you’ve seen these guys, but they are scary.

And the fact that we give them lots of money to run into each other instead of us is fine with me.

Just a couple of more sort of points to close this out.

So, you would say then that people might have a susceptibility, a biophysiological susceptibility to addiction, to joining cults, to belief systems, and there’s a certain…

To working hard.

It might not be the right word, but a certain unaccountability to that.

That’s a fair statement, correct?

Yeah, and other people wind up with a proclivity for feeling other people’s pain, or being able to look past superficial explanations, or reflect on things, and respect the process of reflecting on things, and yeah, the good sides, the bad sides, it’s all how we turned out, and it’s stuff we had no control over.

Okay, so what’s…

People, read your book, Determined, okay?

Just came out a few months ago.

All 5,000 pages of, no, 450 pages.

If people read your book, do you really think it would take 600 years to reach that?

I mean, if I look at the pace of social cultural change, it’s faster than that.

I would like to believe that the depths of compassion that a society without free will promotes is something that would come to us much sooner than that, than 600 years.

Well, maybe I’m more pessimistic than you.

We figured out, you know, witches don’t control the weather and it’s a bummer to burn old limited steak.

Yeah, we got that one sorted out.

We sorted that one out.

It was 50 years ago that someone would be telling.

We figured that out.

We’re kind of figuring out that there’s a biology to obesity and people who have trouble feeling a satiation signal and it’s not because they secretly hate themselves.

They’ve got screwy receptors for some satiation hormone and they’re a hypothetist and we’re doing that stuff all the time, but we got a long way to go with it.

And as I said, I think this way all the time, but I can actually act on this for two seconds at a time.

Somebody cuts me off in traffic.

I think they are a vile human who deserves to burn in hell.

Someone tells me like, oh, nice sweater.

And for a few seconds afterward, I think I’m intrinsically a better human than average as a result.

And then think about it a second time and a fourth time and a 10th time.

And when you next feel like judging somebody, do that.

And when you next feel like you earned the right to be at the front of the line for the next vaccine, think about it a second and 10th time as well.

And baby steps.

Well, for those only listening to this podcast, our guest, Robert, has a full up Santa Claus beard.

So I’m trying to think, given your free will hypotheses, would you make a good Santa Claus or a bad Santa Claus?

Chuck, what kind of Santa Claus is this man going to make?

You know, you kind of look like smart Santa, you know?

It’s because the hair, you got to remember Santa, you know, you have the professor hair and the Santa beard.

So you’re more professorial Santa.

All right.

It’s just that Santa said, were you naughty or nice?

Did you deserve this gift?

That’s right.

This would be the worst Santa ever.

Exactly.

You don’t have free will, get the hell off my back.

Actually, now I take it back.

You’re Oprah Santa.

It’s like, you get a gift, you get a gift, and you get a gift.

Yes, I’m Santa biological.

And in fact, I don’t care because all I care about now is if my parents were still alive, they’d be totally irritated by the fact that I have this beard still.

That’s why I have a beard, not because I want to seem like a good Santa or a bad, because it irritated the hell out of them in the middle 1970s.

And sure, that worked.

Operating on it.

Okay, so I’m going to end on a question to you that might short circuit your brain and steam will come out of your ears, like every episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk outsmarts the computer.

Okay, so if I tell you that I don’t agree with you that we all have free will, then I’m not in control of the fact that I am telling you we all have free will.

It’s predetermined that I think that everyone who thinks we have free will, that we have free will.

That’s predetermined.

There’s nothing we can do about it.

Yeah, until you get educated, until somebody persuades.

Is that a dream that you can’t get out of?

Yeah, like somewhere along the way you figured out the kid sitting next to you having trouble learning to read.

There’s this thing called dyslexia and you changed.

You changed as a result and like your brain changed.

When you look at somebody who has like a lot of spelling errors or whatever, and they’re writing and like they mentioned somewhere, yeah, I got a learning difference, whatever.

A part of your brain that would have had some aversive responses and told another part of your brain that has something to do with judgment.

It doesn’t activate anymore because you learned it.

And social enlightenment turns out to be neurobiology and neurobiology turns out to be different social behavior.

It’s completely intertwined.

Like thank God, we change.

So you can cure people who think there is free will.

It’s not their fault.

We can’t.

Exactly.

We pray for their souls, but still.

All right, Robert, this has been a delight.

This book, oh my gosh.

You know, some people write books just because they can write a book.

This one has the power to shift the center mass of civilization in ways that it’s already moving in that direction, but maybe too slowly.

And with a deeper understanding that you’re providing us all, perhaps we can achieve this utopia much sooner than, I don’t have to wait another 600 years, analogizing today to what, to the witch burnings of 600 years ago.

I like to think we’re on a faster track than that.

Let’s hope so.

Robert Sapolsky, thanks for being on StarTalk.

Chuck, always good to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

All right, dude, we’re out of here.

This is Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk.