Determined

by Robert Sapolsky

Rating: 7/10

Summary

In this book, Robert Sapolsky is attacking the notion that free will exists. He does so by looking at the brain, the environment, and the interactions between the two. He also looks at the implications of this for society and the individual and how we should change our legal system and how we assign blame as a result of this new understanding of how our brains work.

The main idea is that our brain is a deterministic computational and physical machine. It's hard to predict, but in the end it is not free, following the laws of physics and biology. Because of this, nobody can chose what they want to want and therefore nobody can be blamed or praised for their actions. Everybody is nothing else besides the total sum of their history, the last minute, the last hour, the last days, the last months, the last years, the last millennia that came before. It all shapes the way the brain is at right this moment, which then leads to the behavior that is exhibited. All of which happens automatically, without any conscious intervention. Free Will is an illusion bolted on top of that and that makes our notion of agency problematic. Because instead of helping people have better brains, we are punishing them for having bad ones. We are punishing them for being unlucky. And Robert Sapolsky would like to change this within our society, similar to how we changed our views on epilepsy and other neurological diseases.

Detailed Notes

Chapter 1 - Turtles All the Way Down

The question: why does a specific behavior occur?

Causes precede other causes, precede other causes. It's a causal chain all the way down. Turtles all the way down. There is no turtle floating in free air.

Biology -> no control over Environment -> no control over Biology + Environment = Behavior

We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

It makes as much sense to hate someone as it makes sense to hate a tornado. And it makes as much sense to love somebody as it makes sense to love a flower. Or a tree.

We have no free will. Nobody deserves blame or praise, because everyone is only a product of their biological and environmental reality.

Thought: The universe "peoples" and we have no role or say in that. Enlightenment is about recognizing this fact and then keeping the act up because that's fun. And even this recursively breaks the mind, because it was still the universe having those thoughts. Happening on their own. Without our involvement. The question is, who is the observer?

Taking the position of there being no free will seriously is difficult and somewhat crazy. What does it mean? It conflicts with our perception and conscious experience just too much. We feel responsible, like we do have a choice.

It's a separate question to answer how we live when we accept this conundrum.

Laplace's demon is not real, because some aspects of our reality are probably non-deterministic. Bells Theorem + Quantum Mechanics.

Free will => show me the neuron which isn't affected by the surroundings or another neuron that leads to a particular action somebody took... But instead "magically" free will style, twitched on its own.

Despite the world being deterministic, things can change. Brains change, behaviors change. We change.

Change all the circumstances of the garbage collector and the college graduate and these to, will switch places. We know that, yet we praise the graduate and don't respect the garbage man. We should respect everybody, and treat them like the humans they are. Uniquely bound by circumstances, yet beautiful, intricate, complex.

Chapter 2 - The Final Three Minutes of a Movie

We are never free to intend what we intend.

Paper: Libets Intention Studies

Having your work be important enough, that decades later, people are still trash-talking it, is immortality for a scientist.

Conscious choice and awareness has about a 200ms delay and happens after the neurons in the SMA fired that initiate the action.

SMA = supplementary motor area PFC = prefrontal cortex SMA = Gateway for PFC to muscles

PFC controlling neurons that decide which neurons will activate the SMA which decide which button to push are active up to a full 10 seconds before the conscious awareness of choosing this over that happens.

The timing of when the consciousness of the choice happens is dependent on mood and other variables. It's not even stable.

Thought: This attacks sense of agency - the conscious awareness of it, which is not the same as agency itself.

People think they control actions even if the real actions are controlled by a TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) probe.

Can you decide to decide? Are intending and having an intent the same thing?

Book Recommendation: Free - Alfred Mele

Conscious awareness doesn't have to be there for actions to happen.

We can consciously interrupt, i.e. veto an action. But also only kinda/sorta.

Quitting gambling and thinking about what we could have won is more painful than keeping gambling and actually keep loosing.

"Our brains" generate a suggestion, and "we" then judge it; this dualism sets our thinking back centuries.

Neither free-will nor free-won't neurons exist.

Book Recommendation: Elbow Room - Daniel Dennett

Myopia is central to how we scientists go about finding out new things—by learning more and more about less and less.

In our world luck, both bad and good, amplify their effects. People who have been lucky once are more likely to be so again. Winner takes all scenarios are common, yet unfair.

Chapter 3 - Where Does Intent Come From?

The debates around free will and Libets experiments are fundamentally meaningless for the debate around free will. Because you can't wish for a different intent. It's turtles all the way down.

Understanding this turtleism shows how the intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such there's no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.

Thought: Thinking about this level of determinism and what it means to live life this way is akin to thinking about fate and being happy in a world where fate is real.

The insular cortex changes moral sentiment when presented with disgusting stimuli while making these moral judgements, if the transgression has something to do with purity.

Moral disgust and food disgust are handled by the same circuitry in our brains. It also works the other way around: good foods or stimuli like that make us more agreeable.

Funnily enough, we post rationalize our change in choices. We say, here's a reason why this makes sense now.

Similarly, beauty and goodness are linked in our brains. Even though in reality they aren't. Beautiful people do shitty stuff just as much as ugly ones. Both involve the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) region in the brain.

The brain hasn't had enough time yet to evolve separate circuits for evaluating morality and aesthetics.

We believe our hands or mouths are dirty when we did moral transgressions that involved them. Typing a lie versus telling it, lead to desire for hand wash and mouthwash respectively. This is known as the Macbeth effect.

When people are hungry they are less morally good/lofty.

Hormones play a role in decision making. But the roles they play are complex, and mediated by the environment. The same hormone can have different effects depending on circumstances. Testosterone, Adrenaline, Vasopressin, Oxytocin, Glucocorticoids, they all play key roles.

Vasopressin/Oxytocin etc. mediate friendliness/cuddliness but only to perceived members of our in-group. Hormones can be that selective.

Testosterone activates aggression, but only when aggression is a high status thing to do. If there's other ways to enhance status, it enhances those behaviors and ways.

The prefrontal cortex matures last in humans, that's because people need to learn to use their brains and adapt to societal norms and stuff because they are too complex. Evolution unshackled this neural development to give it more time to absorb the tacit knowledge of culture and our complex human environments.

People with different birthmonths are more/less developed when they get to school. This can be directly seen in the distribution of high scoring college graduates. Higher development early on => more help => more chances => better outlook. Life is unfair.

Pre-natal environment plays a role in decision making and life outlook because of epigenetic changes that can be locked in. In general, epigenetic changes are pretty strong, which genes are expressed and to what amount can contribute to all sorts of things from an ability to deal well with stress, intelligence, or even tendency to get depressed. Brains and generic circuitry are surprisingly malleable and the influences on these systems from the environment have long lasting consequences.

Our gut biome can influence our thinking. Much more than one would guess... Gut microbiome is an important thing. It controls/affects hunger, but also mood, and many other things besides. There are more bacterial cells in our gut than total cells in the rest of our body combined.

Genetic influences are strong but a big part of genetics is epigenetic and the same gene can cause different behavior dependent on the circumstances of its expression, i.e. depending on the environment and the history of the individual.

Anthropology:

the study of the ways that different groups of people attempt to shape brain construction in children

Americans focus on the individual is a result of the selective pressure of heavy immigration into the country forming the base of the population.

Individualist society persons are stressed when asked who influenced them and collectivist societies are stressed when asked who they influenced. This shift is reversed after around two generations.

Environments shape religions. Desert like regions produce monotheistic ones, jungles polytheistic ones.

Pastoralist vulnerability leads to cultures of honour.

Book Recommendation: Hard Luck - Neil Levy

Chapter 4 - Willing Willpower: The Myth of Grit

All we are is the history of our biology.

Willpower is as much a function of our biology as anything else.

Prefrontal Cortex develops slowly. It's formed by the first 25 years of life, and it's impact on decision making is big. Especially decisions in the face of temptation.

The PFC learns new variants of rules. It is also inhibiting "normal" automatic behavior. Especially in social circumstances.

Successful alphaship is a minimalist art of nonwar.

People looking at faces, activate the amygdala, if the face is of another race. But not so much if the other person is famous, or not at all, if the person tested has grown up in a multiracial community. Also there is less activation of the fusiform face area, meaning we process faces of people of other races as less of a face. Then the PFC kicks in, overrules that decision and says, I'm not a racist! Except in actual racists.

Cognition and emotion intertwine. Limbic system and PFC act together. Sometimes inhibiting, sometimes enhancing each other.

People with damage to the dorso lateral PFC don't have the inner critic saying, "I wouldn't do that if I were you". They become impulsive, unable to exert control over socially inappropriate behavior.

Ventromedial PFC (vmPFC) is the connection of the limbic system into the PFC. This is where gut feelings impinge on decision making. People with damaged vmPFC can't make good decisions because they lack the ability to imagine how it would feel once this decision would have been made. They lack gut feeling. vmPFC runs feeling experiments. You still know what is good and what is bad, but you don't know what it feels like.

Grit, character, backbone, tenacity, strong moral compass, willing spirit winning out over weak flesh, are all produced by the PFC; the PFC is made of biological stuff identical to the rest of your brain; your current PFC is the outcome of all that uncontrollable biology interacting with all the uncontrollable environment.

Limbic system has dopaminergic connections into the PFC. These show how tempting a temptation is and can influence what the PFC is going to do.

Increasing dopamine in the PFC leads to impulsive behavior.

The presence of attractive woman near heterosexual men effectively shuts down their PFC.

If you want to be better at doing the harder things as an adult, make sure you pick the right adolescence.

The PFC changes it's structure tremendously based on the past. The past minutes, hours, days, years. It's just like the rest of the brain in that regard.

Genes work differently in different environments.

Thought: If everything we do and are surrounded by influences our brain so much and our behavior so much, wouldn't it make sense to write books that espouse good virtues and tell people that this is a good way to behave? In a way, every religious text ever works that way, and so does self-help?

Chapter 5 - A Primer on Chaos

Book Recommendation: Chaos - James Gleich

Book Recommendation: The Twenty One Balloons - William Pène du Bois

Chaos theory, the field that can make studying the component parts of complex things useless.

Some things transcend the sum of their parts. Even if you understand the parts perfectly, you miss what is really going on and don't understand the system as a whole.

Cellular Automata are not computable in advance. You have to run them in order to know what happens at step X in the future. Does this have an implication for free will?

Chapter 6 - Is Your Free Will Chaotic?

Paper: The Dripping Faucet as a Model Chaotic System - Robert Shaw

If you have a reductive mindset, unsolvable, nonlinear interactions among a large number of variables is a total pain to study.

Chaotics means the world is unpredictable. This doesn't break determinism though. Even if it's unpredictable, with the same set of starting conditions it would run the same way.

Paper: Determinism is Ontic, Determinability is Epistemic - Harald Atmanspacher

Paper: When Good Theories Make Bad Predictions - Vadim Batitsky

"Free Will" is what we call the biology that we don't understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will.

Thought Chaos Theory says that, well there is biology (or systems in general) that we can't understand at a predictive level. Ever.

We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we've chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons, that agency and volition well there. Our intuitions scream this, because we don't know about, can't imagine, the subterranean forces of our biological history that brought it about. It is a huge challenge to overcome those intuitions.

Cellular Automata can converter to the same state, from different starting states. Which means, many states can have multiple possible causes, with no way to differentiate between them. Hence determinism doesn't work backward - there might be points, just like in an integration, where you would have to guess which of the possible functions produced your derivative. There's loss of knowledge in going down a computational graph?

But for free will this doesn't matter. There is still a chain of cause and effect even if you can't figure out which of multiple options it it.

Just because you can't tell which of two towers of turtles propping you up goes all the way down, doesn't mean that you're floating in the air.

Chapter 7 - A Primer on Emergent Complexity

Many agents following random rules can produce highly complex, even beautiful, emergent structure in the process. Neurons making up the brain, cells the body, etc.

Question: What does Michael Levin think about free will and this debate around emergence?

The parts making up an emergent whole can change. The ants in the anthill, the water in the waterfalls, the cells in a human, the humans in a society. As long as there is something replacing the function of the part, honoring the interface, the set of rules that govern the interaction between the unit and the system, it doesn't matter. The whole keeps working the same, even if it's parts are different because in the important aspects, the parts are still the same. Put differently - change the waterfall to be filled with chocolate molecules instead and the character of the waterfall changes with it.

Thought: All of this reminds me of the Ontology video by Sauce where he tries to answer the question whether or not chairs exist and the notorious issues of Sorietes sequences and the Ship of Theseus that accompany identity discussions like this. Once again, I also wonder what Michael Levin would think about these things.

People solve complex problems like the traveling salesman problem, by using simulated swarms - essentially ants that follow simple rules. They program swarm intelligence.

Thought: This reminds me of Boids so much. And also of Physarum simulations.

Optimization challenges are solved in similar ways by very different collectives of agents. Ants, slime molds, neurons, humans, societies. All use the same underlying strategies of emergence.

Thought: Again, what would Michael Levin think?

Scouts + Quality Broadcasting + Rich get Richer Recruiting schemes to amplify signals. That is the pattern for most of these emergent behaviors.

Fractal geometry follows very simple rules that then expand in complexity by iteratively applying them. The whole information can be reduced to a single "seed", and yet the complexity of the resulting shape after myriads of iterations is staggering. Evolution uses the same tricks. Simple rules, iteratively followed. Phylotaxis in plants, the growth of blood vessels, or the organization of fibrous structures, neurons etc.

Mathematically, fractals can have interesting properties. Infinite surface area in bounded volumes, no volume at all, yet occupying space. That's also what makes them useful in biology. Little maintenance cost because no need for a lot of cells, yet high surface area and therefore good at distributing things like nutrients.

The instructions for how bifurcation works in living systems are relatively simple. Have a growth tip filled with some growth signaling molecule, where the middle grows slightly faster, then at some point it flattens out, leaving more growth molecule at the edges of the tip, resulting in two new tips being formed.

We know the genes involved in this. What's really cool is that different cell types creating vastly different structures (say brains vs. lungs vs. arteries) use the same underlying genetics to power bifurcation.

Thought: What would happen if you disrupt these sorts of genes? Could you influence the shapes of the branching? Also again, what would Michael Levin think about this, considering his work on salamander tubules especially?

Simple rules about how components of a system interact locally, repeated a huge number of times with huge numbers of those components, and out emerges optimized complexity.

Control attractor and repellant signals of many small agents moving around - and you get - brains. Things of utmost complexity. Or cities.

When there is multiple things that need to be optimized for things get more tricky. You can weight them, but there's always going to be a tradeoff in terms of structure and organization. The ones interesting in brains are speed, robustness, strength, flexibility and adaptability.

Nervous systems are organized in a Pareto distribution. Big local networks with most of the interactions happening => brains, with some rare, long range connections, toes etc.

Random neurons in a beaker, self organize into the beginnings of a brain.

Paper: Can Lab Grown Brains Become Conscious?

Chapter 8 - Does Your Free Will Just Emerge?

Book Recommendation: Why Free Will is Real - Christian List

Macro emergent phenomena have an influence on our neurologic circuitry and the workings of single neurons. The emergence goes both ways somehow. I.e. somebody's neurons make up what culture they are part of, yet this very makeup, their cultural, emergent values, like whether they are part of a collectivist or individualist society changes the way their brain subconsciously scans pictures. Eye movement related neurons triggered in different patterns, based on the higher level phenomenon of culture.

Even if there is an emergent high level concept, that doesn't change the inner workings of its building blocks. Water molecules don't change, even if they collectively exhibit wetness.

Neurons are not freed of their histories once they join the complexity.

Even if a system is emergent, that doesn't mean it can choose to do whatever it wants.

There is no magic.

Chapter 9 - A Primer on Quantum Indeterminacy

Quantum effects are weird, nobody really understands them, often New Age thinking abuses the heck out of these misunderstandings. Constantly confounding and confusing the findings that were actually made.

Chapter 10 - Is Your Free Will Random?

Paper: On the Reception And Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit - Gordon Pennycook

Chapter 10.5 - Interlude

We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control—our biology, our environments, their interactions.

Someone's history can't be ignored, because all we are is our history.

It can be very unsettling when a sentence doesn't end in the way that you potato.

The hardest question to answer is why do anything at all in a world where free will doesn't exist? Why does anything we do matter?

Chapter 11 - Will We Run Amok

Book Recommendation: The Astonishing Hypothesis - Francis Crick

People who are sceptic of free will existing are more amoral, more likely to get addicted, and kinda detached from life, not feeling like themselves.

Moralizing gods are a recent cultural invention, tied to the rise of agriculture und growing societies. In a hunter gatherer tribe there is no need for an all seeing eye, a constant watcher, in a larger agricultural society, where you encounter strangers all the time, there is.

Social behavior can be primed. In religious people with religious primers, in atheist people, with both religious and non-religious primers. Social networks and context mean more than being religious or not. The same is true for believing or not believing in free will.

Atheists are a minority in the US.

People who deeply believe in free will and people who deeply believe free will not to exist, show the same amounts of pro social behavior.

Chapter 12 - The Ancient Gears Within Us: How Does Change Happen?

If there is no free will, how does anything ever change?

We are fundamentally biological machines. Just like sea slugs, only much more complex in our behavior and the machinery determining it. But the underlying building blocks of the neuronal machinery are the same. They are evolutionarily conserved. Make the same circuits complex enough and they can represent very abstract concepts such as hope, or "being a good person" and therefore cultural values, that influence behavior at the neuronal level.

Chapter 13 - We Really Have Done This Before

We used to believe that people with epilepsy were responsible for their actions. Now we know better and don't attribute blame to them if they hurt somebody during their seizures. We should do this again, but for all sorts of actions. Helping people writ large instead of doling out punishment.

Book Recommendation: The Great Pretender - Susannah Cahalan

Schizophrenia is a disease with genetic component. These days some people wrongly believe Schizophrenia to be q disguised blessing. But that's complete BS. Schizophrenic deaf people can still hear voices, which makes no sense, because what does somebody "hear" who has never in their life heard something? They are trying to make sense of insensible thought and think that this might be hearing. Others also see disembodied hands using sign language. People with Schizophrenia also have different brain structures. Thinned cortexes, bigger ventricles. Schizophrenia is also linked to too much dopamine in the brain and so it's treated with dopamine receptor blockers. Parkinson's is caused by too little dopamine so interestingly enough treating Parkinson's patients makes them more likely to become psychotic and Schizophrenic people treated can show symptoms like those of people with Parkinson.

Book Recommendation: The Deaths of Psychiatry - Fuller Torrey

Book Recommendation: Freudian Fraud - Fuller Torrey

Book Recommendation: Surviving Schizophrenia - Fuller Torrey

Book Recommendation: The Uses of Enchantment - Bruno Bettelheim

Book Recommendation: The Children of the Dream - Bruno Bettelheim

Chapter 14 - The Joy of Punishment

Punishing people could be done in a humane way where further harm from people with bad brains can be prevented without making those people suffer in turn. Norway is an example. The weirdest thing is that this is overall cheaper because people treated like humans are less likely to re-commit their crimes because education and psychotherapy + proper medication can go a long way. The problem: humans like to punish others. It feels good, one could even say just.

Humans evolved to be very social. This caused this lust for punishment. It's a way of dealing with cheating.

Book Recommendation: Mutual Aid - Peter Kropotkin

Punishment works to maintain cooperation.

Gods of large social groups tend to be punishing in nature. They serve as a reminder that to cheat is not ok.

The fear of becoming ostracized for bad behavior in a tribe still stems from this evolutionary mechanism of punishment. It's really scary to cheat and get caught for most people, because the cost might be great. And it's the same with doling out punishment. We have evolved to like it. It activates dopamine circuitry no matter if we punish somebody who hurt us or whom we observed hurting somebody else.

People and cultures can learn forgiveness and we are on a trajectory of seeing criminals as humans, where it's not ok to slaughter them.

Society can function without our believing that people with epilepsy are in cahoots with Satan, and that mothers of people with Schizophrenia caused the disease by hating their child.

Chapter 15 - If You Die Poor

There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.

Depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.

People can be induced to believe more in their agency, but depressed people can't.

Truth doesn't always set you free.

The only way humans have survived amid being unable to understand truths about life is by having evolved a robust capacity for self-deception.

Sapolsky struggles with depression, that leads him to have an easier time to not believe in free will. It's personal to him in this regard.

There is no justifiable "deserve".

There is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.

The idea of the quote above is called un-selfing in Buddhism.

Overall, we have the choice of being kind to all humans and realizing that we would have acted the same way in their shoes. Condemning people for their choices is not morally right, on the contrary, because people don't have free will there is nothing to be gained by blaming or praising people for the ways that they behave. We should transcend this, even if it's hard.