Robert Sapolsky on Free Will and Determinism

hello everyone it's Michael Shermer this is my friendly reminder to sign up for our December 1st through 3rd weekend conference here and event at the skeptic Society open house Friday night here at the offices as well as Sunday afternoon for those of you who can't make it Friday night Saturday night fundraising dinner for the skeptic Society if you support us it would be great to see you there uh but most interestingly we're doing a couple of podcast Live recorded episodes uh I'll be in conversation with not only Jared Diamond Sunday morning but Michael shellenberger on Saturday now he's an interesting figure very controversial I've already gotten some mail from people saying how could you have this guy because he's one of the most interesting people working out there today he's worked in environmentalism on nuclear power on homelessness he lives in San Francisco area so he knows that well drug addiction what we can do about it uh and especially journalism independent journalism versus mainstream uh media alternative media you know what what what we could what we should trust as truth which is the theme of the um conference uh in journalism when you read something should you believe it or not this is what Michael has been not only studying but also working in so we'll be having a nice long podcast conversation on Saturday uh which is recorded live in the at the hotel at the Hilton Santa Barbara Hilton there uh in which you will participate that is to say he and I will talk for a little while and then when it it's time we go to you and you can ask questions you can even dialogue with him I mean it's going to be one of those kind of uh interesting podcast episodes which we'll then post on on my show afterwards all right so check it out go to skeptic.com and just click on the banner for the conference and uh and I hope to see you there thanks for your support so it's good to see you again Robert I think the last time we saw each other maybe was at that city of ideas conference in W Mexico like in the hallway behind the lecture hall or whatever but what a totally weird place that was uhhuh it certainly was yeah you know I've noticed a lot of people have tried to do the Ted uh model and you know it's hard to replicate that it's one of those things that happens maybe only once I just did this conference in England called how the light gets in which was very popular it was great and it was a little bit like Ted and burning man it was outdoors and Tents and music and you know trucks and stuff like that but but also lectures by professional whatever anyway so well food trucks are always good but were there billionaires helicop in to get into their no not like that no not like that yeah Robert let me give you a proper introduction here my guest today if you haven't figured it out already is Robert ssky the author of several works of non-fiction including a primates Memoir the trouble with testosterone and why zebras don't get ulcers his most recent book before the new one here is behave New York Times bestseller which was named best book of the Year by The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal he's a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius Grant he and his wife live in San Francisco here's the new book determined a science of life without free will all right um Robert this is my favorite book of yours I've read everything you've written um and let me tell you why well it's technically just as good as you know your other books in terms of presenting the science but there's something different about this one tell me if I get this right I was just trying to think like on my bike ride today like what is it I feel like he's having a conversation with me uh informally and then I realized no that's not it it's like you're having a conversation with yourself and I get to listen in on this it's well I think a punchline that goes throughout the whole book is I'm like so far out in in left field or right field in terms of Lunatic Fringe opinions about this but the majority of the time I can't follow through on the way I think the world should work so I no one said it's easy blah blah so I think a lot of the book is exactly that what what do you do when you turn out to be unable to follow through with your your prescription for what is like intellectually legit yes in other words you're wrestling with yourself about a very difficult issue Free Will and determinism you know it's one of these things here's how I think about it that you know we've had I don't know what 3,000 years of the greatest minds of all time arguing about this and and if we still don't have a consensus then there's something different about this than some other Theory you know it's like if it if we were still arguing about the steady state Theory versus The Big Bang Theory and there was no clear consensus I would think okay these you know after 50 years come on these guys they they got to try something new like baby string theory is like that or something like that uh maybe conceptually it's just the language or not thinking about it right or I don't know what it is I mean you wrestle with this throughout the book it's well it's it's a moving Target um it's one of those where uh everyone has a very very strong folk intuition about what free will is um what I discovered when having to read philosophers for the first time in my life when when preparing for the book is an awful lot of philosophers the lines of the philosophy have very very strong folk intuitions about what free will is and it's uh it's hard to get at and what I'm also convinced is a major fault line in that is what are the implications of there being no free will when we're thinking about criminality all that and what are the implications when we're talking about somebody's amazing resume um I psychologically there's a there's a big fault line between those two categories of wrestling with it yeah I like to cite that study let me see if I have those numbers I think it was David chers actually conducted this study in 2009 of uh what philosophers uh it was like their their position oh yeah here it is a 2009 survey of 3226 philosophy professors and grad students were asked to weigh in on 30 different subjects of concern in their field a priority knowledge aesthetic value God knowledge mind moral realism and then this one free will compatibilism libertarianism or no free will the survey found the following results 59% compatibilism at 14 15% other 13.7% libertarianism and 12.2% no free will so that's you you're in the 12 yes I'm actually surprised it's that high i' I've I've been spouting uh 90 to9 5% of uh Free Will acceptance I don't know what the the 13% libertarianism because that just for our listeners that's nothing to do with the political party um that there's something like a little homunculus in your head a mini me that's making the decisions but somehow yes it's completely well it's it's somehow fitting in uh you kind of admit the world is made of like material things but then you grant yourself a homunculus and give it complete power over the material things it's a I I decided early on and in trying to do this book that I wasn't going anywhere near the libertarian philosophers because it's just it's just a little bit too squishy for me to make sense of so I mostly ignore them and just deal with the compatibl ists yeah yeah it seems like a a resurrection of dualism like there's a you know ghost in the machine up there still floating around but that doesn't solve anything because if there's a mini me then who's inside mini me it' have to be a mini mini me all the way all the way down uh yeah one more thing before we get into the meat of that I want to read a passage from your book because again I like how your writing is so beautiful but but because I I think there's something else going on in this book um so this is you're discussing on page 16 and 17 what you mean by determinism imagine a University graduate graduation ceremony almost always moving despite the platitudes the boiler plate the Kish the happiness The Pride the families whose sacrifices now all seem worth it the graduates who were um the first in their family to finish High School the ones whose immigrant parents sit there glowing the saris dashas barang broadcasting their pride in the present isn't at the cost of pride in their past and then you notice someone amid the family clusters post ceremony the new graduates posing for pictures with Grandma in her wheelchair the burst of hugs and laughter you see the person way in the back the person who is part of the grounds crew collecting the garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event randomly pick any of the graduates do some magic so this that this garbage collector started life with the graduates jeans likewise forgetting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that get the graduates childhood as well one field was say piano lessons and family game nights instead of say threats of going to bed hungry becoming homeless or being deported for lack of papers let's go all the way so that in addition to the garbage collector having gotten all of that the graduates pass the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector's pass trade every Factor over which they had no control and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would still be hauling garbage can this is what I mean by determinism okay you know evolutionary theorist have this distinction between approximate and ultimate causes I'm going to say got out in the lamb here and say this book is not really about determinism and Free Will and your beef with Dan Dennett or anything like that this book is about the garbage collector yeah yeah this was my son's Stanford graduation oh wow of just of like seeing this guy and what the hell is he thinking and how did this end knowing you know all these graduates worked incredibly hard and they're great kids and they care about the planet with almost no exceptions and all but nonetheless wow that's this world that things turn out that way and we all know it we all if you really pin somebody down they'll say they would have switched yeah that's uh that's very uh interesting that you honed in on that yeah this book is about that I mean life is not fair how do lives turn out it's mostly luck it's mostly stuff you don't control and so what you're after here is why is it not fair like that and what can we do about it I mean we have been trying to do things about it you know the Civil Rights and women's rights and gay rights and animal rights and children's rights and workers rights and all the stuff that we've been working at abolition of slavery and torture and whatnot you know we've made made progress but it's still not fair and what can we do to level the playing field as it were yeah that's that's our problem and hooray redistribution of wealth and getting over all these biases and implicit biases and the that whole song and dance but um for me and what's at the heart of the book is kind of the starting point is um this is a world that runs on the myth that some people deserve the praise and rewards they receive and some people deserve the blame and Punishment and that that is rational and even more so ethically acceptable and where that makes no sense whatsoever and in a in a bizarre way just kind of given my training or whatever this is a book that's mostly about neurons and hormones and Gene environment interactions and all that stuff but it's you know ultimately a book about social justice it's a very screwed world that runs on a myth that things are just when they're not and they're not because it is a deterministic world could it ever be a just World given the very variation the natural variation in genes and epigenetics and social environments and so forth or are we just going to just aim for an approx not Utopia but protopia protopia just a little bit better that's Kevin K Kevin Kevin Kelly's phrase uh by which he means just try to make tomorrow a little bit better than today well you know I I come from uh my my my sociopolitical rats are along the lines of all reform undercut Revolution blah blah that sort of thing and this book is obviously an extreme extreme stance because it's not about how there's less Free Will than we think it's about how there's no free will whatsoever what do we do about it though you ask and like the pathetic thing that I come up with is like a gradualist little incremental reformist thing of like try every day to like deal with this concept when you interact with somebody or feel like pleased with yourself you know do a little bit at a time time just because a big theme of the book is oh my God how are we supposed to function if people actually believe there's no free will we've been spending centuries crawling in that direction at point after point you know getting enlightened about how the world actually works and where we subtract responsibility out of domains where we previously meded out major punishments and major rewards and you know it's a good thing that 400 years ago or so most people figured out that hail storms are not caused by witches they're not caused by the old woman with no teeth who has no family living alone at the edge of the Hamlet oh it doesn't work that way it doesn't work that way that someone H who has an epileptic seizure is possessed by Satan let alone that they chose to sort of mess around with him and here's what you got now all of this are cases where we've slowly learned there's not free will there so you know all I do is sit out way out there saying there's none whatsoever but you know we got to do it stepwise to get less and less of that attribution because you know a huge amount of the world's misery is due to the fact that people who had bad luck are treated as if they had something to do with it and that we all then congratulate ourselves in the notion that the world is just in that regard because we can be the Agents of our own actions when we're not yeah yeah so this even as a name just world theory largely supported more by conservatives than than liberals that is to say yeah the world used to be unjust but we've fixed most of that now still have a little ways to go but you know if you're rich you probably got there because you're hardworking and smart and creative and and if you're poor well you know you you just uh you should have gotten up earlier you should have worked harder it's like that Seinfeld episode where he has to he has to go back into coach and and the flight attendant closes the curtain and looks at you like I'm sorry you didn't work harder you don't get to come into first class there you have it there you have it somehow appropo of that there's a wonderful study some years ago on not road rage but Airline passenger rage during flights of like un Ry hostile Behavior looking for what the variables were that predicted it and the study had two killer findings which is the more likely or if it's one of those flights where when you're getting into coach you've got to walk through first class that increases the odds of airflight but but even more interestingly if it's one of those flights where the Hoy pooy coach passengers have to walk through first class there's even more of a boost of antisocial Behavior among the first class passengers really we don't want to see these people exactly what one is about resentment but the other is about like reification of of entitlement right God it's bad enough they had to walk through here now what I've got to wait a few minutes for my drink so that that's some sort of metaphor for everything out there but wow what a great finding yeah that's in that's incredible okay another passage from your book one compatibl philosopher after another reassuringly proclaims their belief in material deterministic modernity yet somehow there's still room for free will as might be kind of clear by now I think that this doesn't work see chapters 1 2 3 4 5 six Etc I suspect that most of them know this as well when you read between the lines or sometimes even the lines themselves in their writing a lot of these compatibilists and I know you're you're speaking about Dian denet along with others who's been on this show are actually saying that there has to be free will because it would be a total Downer otherwise doing contortions to make an emotional stance seem like an intellectual one humans descended from the Apes let us hope it's not true but if it is let us pray that it not become generally known said the wife of an Anglican Bishop in 1860 when told about Darwin's novel theory of evolution 156 years later stepen cave titled A much discussed June 2016 article in the Atlantic there's no such thing as free will but we're better off believing in it anyway so yeah I think that's a lot of what's happening but I was going to counter that with a quote from n n Chomsky who I listen to periodically on various podcasts because he's always interesting to listen to even if I don't agree with him and he basically said when asked about Free Will and determinism he said no one really believes in determinism nor do they act like it not even determinists so why bother to even talk about it great and you know what I wrestle with is I'm a total determinist then just a little bit of the time I'm able to actually function as if that's the case it's hard it's hard because we're we're people of our place and time I've got no trouble at all with the notion that there's no such thing as witches but no matter how much I believe in this stuff it's still kind of nice when someone says to me good job about something that I've done or when I'm appalled or irritated or pissed off at someone who's getting on my nerves to really truly step out from some notion of agency going on there it's really hard but we got to do it because it's a much more Humane World each time we get a little bit closer to that okay so you define one one of your definitions of determinism the shorter one 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 and then I'll quote from Sam Harris in his book titled Free Will interesting you both had the exact same position his book is called Free Will in your book is called determined yes okay let's see who gets more sales so here's what Sam writes our Wills are simply not of our own making thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control we do not have the freedom we think we have okay now remember the exact wording of both of those definitions I'm going to give you a thought experiment here as you know philosophers love thought experiments okay I'll I'll use I'll use John Doe and Jane Doe but it could be you and your wife okay John do is an exceptionally moral person who's happily married to Jane the chances of John ever cheating on Jane is close to zero but the odds are not zero because JN is human so let's say for the sake of argument that John has a one night stand while on the road and Jane finds out how does Jon account for his actions does he Pace the standard deterministic explanation for human behavior as in sapolsky's and Harris's descriptors above say something like this to Jane honey my will is simply not of my own making my thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which I'm unaware over which I exert no conscious control I do not have the freedom you think you I have I could not have done otherwise because I'm nothing more or less than the accumulative biological and environmental luck over which I had no control that brought me to that moment of infidelity could you even finish the thought before your wife would just slap you across the face well I think what we have here is a very very uh pointed and effective thought experiment showing the gigantic gap between like accepting the reality about how both the little itty bitty parts of the universe work and how when they get put together into us uh work and actually being able to live each day because pain hurts and that is a very painful Discovery and like we've got a major problem in there which it's very hard to hold on to our Machin and I'd sure be infuriated in that circumstance no matter how many like damn time times I read this book that I wrote and actually began to believe some of it this is very difficult because we're going against very deep intuitions of agency and it's not for nothing that an awful lot about what makes for psychological stress are circumstances that Rob you of a sense of agency and it's pretty you know appalling in many ways um in so far as we are functioning on self-deception most of the time one of the wisest definitions I've heard out there of what major depression is it's a pathological failure of the ability to rationalize away reality so yeah we got an uphill battle in doing this sort of thing and our our well-being really hinges a lot of the time on a sense of agency and an ability to wave away the evidence that it isn't there but nonetheless like this is how the world works and there's some do remains where we should do the hard lifting to really work through that in our heads M okay it's often defined as you know could you the question turns on could you have done otherwise okay now in my little thought experiment I assum in your wife would say you godamn well better never do that again if you find yourself in similar circumstances now you know let's take Steve Gold's metaphor of the rewinding the tape um you know as he said you know if you rewind the tape of life and played it back you know something like Homo sapiens would not appear again because of all the contingent steps and billions of years of evolution okay as Dan Dennett pointed out if if it's a readon Memory tape you'd get exactly what we have because it's a just a a replay of what happened like if you had a recording of everything that happened um that that would be fixed um the question is is that the Universe we live in is it something like the what's that called The Block Universe where everything that can happen has happened already past present future and you know we're just in the middle of the movie we don't know how it turns out but it it does have a fixed you know outcome or are we in a universe that is not predetermined in that sense the past is determined so determinism is true but this idea that could you have done otherwise so let's say you're on the road again your wife let you go travel still and says you better okay I promise I will and you find yourself in similar circumstances but not exactly the same it's not it's not a recording of what you did and you think well you know I did that the last time I really shouldn't do that again I've learned from my past I'm not going to do that in the future in other words uh when the person says should you find yourself in that circumstance again it's not going to be the same circumstance again okay let me see if I can reason to the dog for a moment sorry to resume when like she says if you find yourself in that circumstance again but it's not going to be the same circumstance you have just had at least one moment's worth and hopefully a whole lot of moments worth of remorse of empathy of feeling a loved one's pain you have hopefully had moments in there where you have reflected on why am I so damn unself disciplined the juncture is like it's not the same but going back to sort of the rewinding the tap deal will it be the exact same world from our perspective absolutely not because it's unpredictable which sort of leads us into the grass on some of these Free Will questions wait what about chaotic ISM what about sort of the fundamental unpredictability of the universe as soon as you're getting you know three body problems happening and things of that sort hey maybe that's where we can find free will and I devote two chapters in there to saying here's what chaotic ism is about and this the coolest thing ever and it is so exciting and I love it and not just for the great fractal calendars but it's not the basis of free will for a very simple reason because they make the same mistake every time which is confusing unpredictable with undetermined chaotic ISM guarantees the this is an unpredictable world and that's why we're never going to have like Tom Cruz sort of pre-crime insights into sort of things but it's unpredictable it's still deterministic you take an incredibly complex like cellular or automata and you start off at the beginning and it could be mathematically proven that you cannot predict what it is going to look like nobody can do that it is the only way to figure out what you know you started a what Z is going to look like is you got to first see what B looks like and then C and then D you've got to March through there's no ability to extract but you start with the exact same condition again and you will get the exact same outcome which like was just as a priori unpredictable unpredictability is not the same thing as undetermined and the nonlinearities in the universe mean that it's unpredictable in all sorts of interesting ways but that sure doesn't mean that we had any control over those steps sure that's just a kind of Randomness I guess that you don't control either so that's not giving you volition but in my scenario there you've learned something new about yourself and how to engage with your environment it's not going to be quite the same and you're not the same and even though all that learning that happened you grew new neural synaptic connections and all that stuff that's determined but um you are self-determining the future as you go into the future from the past you're part of the causal net of the universe and by learning you can change what your future Behavior does maybe this turns on what you mean by determined and what I mean by self-determined uh I guess I'm looking for what what is it you think happens when you learn something and change your future behaviors based on your past um you have now changed the way you were going to process new experiences you are going to change the way that you retrospectively evaluate things in the past and as a result of what you found out you know on this ridiculously mechanistic level your brain is going to respond differently to it um you know an example I use in the book is like you see the movie Hotel Rwanda and which was about like one little spot of Hope and heroism amid the the Rwandan genocide in the early 90s and you watch it and you come away with both the sense of the horror and also inspiration that one guy appear to have made a difference saving about a thousand people it's been controversial since then but you come away and you say that was incredibly inspiring what does that sentence mean neurobiologically the circuits into your brain that mediate senses of helplessness were just weakened they were weakened and there's even like fancy terms for it your synapses underwent long-term depression there they became less excitable and synapses having to do with efficacy and maybe even a sense of selfefficacy got strengthened there and somehow your basic temperament as to whether or not this is a this is a world in which we are helpless got pushed a little bit in the other direction and realizing it was one person who had absolutely no prior history of heroism makes you think well you know I'm not Mother Teresa I'm not special like I I put my pants on one leg at a time like it wow maybe I could be that and you ever so slightly that knowledge has tilted aspects of your brain so the next time you're at a position where that might be called upon for for you to be a little bit more that way you're a little bit more that way so that's great that's identifiable in a mechanistic way and then you take somebody who sees Hotel Rwanda and it has does absolutely nothing to them along those lines Why is it because they have a level of skepticism that got sort of pounded into them from their early environment or whatever so that they are irritating and feel emotionally manipulated by the movie and thus the last thing they're going to do is feel inspired by it and instead is going to say yeah well that was pretty trickly and manipulative and okay it it it wasn't quite like The Blind Side or whatever in terms of like feel good but okay so screw that but yeah they had some good cinematography it's not by chance that that would have been your response or all you have to do is look at every single person who decides yeah the drinking is getting getting a little bit out of control and only some of them will order ginger ale the next time where did that come from how did they turn out to be that sort of person and the way you turned out to be that sort of person is going to determine what this new piece of information in there is going to doe to your subsequent behaviors and that in turn is going to determine what other people's behavior is changed by the fact that you come out and now you talk about like how great the cinematography was but damn that was manipulative versus whoa you should hear about this guy that's going to have ripples of effects there as well and on this like ridiculously like narrow view like somebody next to you belches and there's one and a half neurons that are going to work differently as a result the odds are they're going to work differently only for about 35 seconds seconds but every one of these things causes a mechanistic trace in the biology of what makes us us okay let's take something like addiction uh now in my personal case my father was an alcoholic his father was an alcoholic one of his two brothers were one of my two half sisters is I'm not I can have a few drinks I don't really care I don't need to have more or whatever and I don't feel like I have super willpower I don't think it has anything to do with that at all I just feel lucky I didn't get whatever the physiology is that leads to alcoholism um but how would you then describe the difference between me and say my father he just really had little control so what he's more determined and I'm less determined or I have more degrees of freedom or How would how would you even describe it just in different ways somebody influenced you at some point along the way so that you got more of a sense of EIC eacy um the genes that helped construct your frontal cortex gave you one that's better at doing the harder thing when it's the right thing to do maybe amid that family proclivity whatever it is that makes alcohol taste good or something I don't drink but some alcohol receptors I know they don't exist but whatever it is that makes for a good experience um you have a biology where that was a little bit less uh irresistible um you know someone on a diet like I desperately need to I've got diabetes the doctor is saying if I don't Etc but here I am uh eating ice cream Again part of it is the genetic makeup of my gustatory receptors in my tongue and just how good it's going to be part of it is my upbringing and just how much my you know meso limpic dopamine system in my brain releases dop I mean in this circumstance versus in other circumstances all of that has come from somewhere and you're not your father and among other things perhaps you had the makeup where you watched him doing that and instead of saying well I love him and he's like a good guy so maybe this is not so bad maybe somewhere in there there was a switch that went in the opposite direction but godamn it I am not going to be like him and that regard and that that's a funny if you grow up and you're just like your parents you know that's kind of a deterministic picture if you grow up and you're exactly the opposite of your parents because you're so horrified by them that's equally deterministic or if you grow up and you're a lot like them but you're different in this way because that influential teacher or because the crowd you that's just as deterministic as well um those are are not examples of like breaking your destiny it's just another version of how you wound up being who you are and yours was a different route clearly and and very consequentially yes but when I'm a become self-aware of these impinging influences let's say my case ice cream and chocolate chip cookies you know I know I know I just shouldn't go to the store or this particular store uh that has this like plate-sized chocolate chip cookie with the almonds and the cashews and all oh my God it's like a th calories it's just the best you know I just make sure I Don't Go Near there when I'm hungry or I don't have ice cream in the house because I know between 600 and 8:00 after dinner I'm going to want ice cream so what what's happening there when I'm self-aware and I'm saying you know what I you know my future self doesn't want to have this issue of a little extra weight tomorrow so today I'm going to set up the conditions in my home so I'm not tempted later when this happens isn't that me kind of self-determining my future no where' the self where' the self-awareness come from where did where did the ability to reflect on your behaviors I love dogs but but yes there they can be a big presence you know once I was like lecturing about our lack of free will to one of the most like implicitly unreceptive audiences on Earth out there a bunch of Judges who who like wanted to learn what's new with the brain and I went through all these studies that are out there about extraneous factors that influence judicial decisions um and one that's very sort of well-known and much debated but I believe in fully because of the rebuttal the authors have come up with which is as judges get hungrier they become less open to giving a an understanding to decision with respect to a defendant but then there's studies showing that if you're very hungry you become much nicer to defendants if you're Muslim and it's Ramadan because you're hungry because you're fasting then there's another one that shows that judges are slightly less punitive if they find out it's the defendant's birthday whoa how cool is that because that's some sort of like compromise between two principles dangerous people in society should pay for what they've done and like wow we should be nice to people on their birthdays so like judges unconsciously on the average balance it out so you know half a year Less on the sentencing kind of thing so I'm going through that and this judge says you know that's fascinating but let me tell you last week I had a case where like it seemed cut andraw it's obvious what I was going to decide the next day and it was totally clear and it's funny that night I wondered if I'm getting a little bit sort of stuck in my ways and wow I used to be very different when I was younger and like maybe I'm not as On Solid Ground as I think and I really stopped and and thought about it and thought through I thought about how this guy wound up the way he was and and I also thought about the circum and you know I kind of surprised myself I made a different decision the next day are you telling me and I say where the hell did you get that self reflection where did you get a view of your younger self where some of your flexibility then is something you might feel nostalgic about where did you get the ability to view changing your opinion as a good thing rather than as a challenge where did you get the sense that if everybody the next day starting with a bayith is expecting you to do the usual thing and you come and you say the opposite then you're going to say oh God what's happened with him is he but where did all of those things come from and why would like maybe the judge sitting next to you in the seminar room not have done the same thing that didn't happen by chance most people would not have been self-reflective at that point most people would have that didn't happen by chance that that's who you wound up being right let me give you um I had Chris Christian list on the show a couple years ago with his book what was it called self I think self-determined anyway um he lists three cap capacities for free will one the capacity to consider several possibilities for Action two the capacity to form an intention to pursue one of those possibilities and three the capacity to take action to move toward that possibility what's wrong with that as a definition of freedom or volition or what whatever the right word is oh I'm I'm going to try to be sort of polite and a good house guest here and merely say that that that's 100% wrong okay it's totally wrong okay and you know he's a very influential think thinker his is writing about free will all of that but here's where we run into sort of the fuzzy squishy domain of we all mean something different we say free will yeah and what he is falling into is the most everyday conventional sense and it is a very proximal notion of free will it's one for example that plays out every single day in a courtroom where essentially it's the same three questions that are asked did the person intend to do what they did did they understand what the consequences had a good chance of being and did they realize there were alternative behaviors and the way every Court works is if the answer is yes to all three of those the person can now be held culpable for what they did and you know that's responsibility because they exerted Free Will and this is where I have apoplexy because this is completely Miss ing the point this is metaphorically what I say in the book this is writing a movie review based on only seeing the last three minutes of the movie because none of this involves asking the only possible question at this point which is yeah so where did that intent come from because if you're not asking that and if you don't have insights into that you have zero notion as to how this wound up being this person's actions and when you ask instead where did the intent come from it's from what happened a second before and a minute before and a year before and a million years before and you know that sounds like philosophically great so we're back at the big bang and I guess it got but biologically what went on in that person one second before had something to do with them forming that intent and what went on with that morning's hormone levels had something to do with it and what went on whether in the previous year they underwent horrible trauma or Found Love or found their God would have caused structural changes in their brain and their childhood and their fetal life and their genes and the culture their ancestors came up with because that influenced how Mom was raising them within minutes of birth and what ecology had to do with what sort of culture those ancestors came up with and if you're not asking where did that intent come from like the proximal notion of did they intend to do that they knew they could have done something else and they knew that something bad might happened if they were to go and do that is beyond irrelevant because the only question is where did that intent come from H did you read uh Adrien re's book the anatomy of violence um this this was a real eyeopener for me here I'm going to recount two stories he tells that'll support your position uh one is Mr of of is a guy who had an oral frontal cortex uh who one day all of a sudden finds himself attracted to children and his is approaches his stepdaughter inappropriately and the wife turns him in to child protection services and he's in big trouble and then he's talking to psychiatrist in the hallway wherever at court or something and he pees his pants and the psychiatrist is like there's something wrong with this guy uh let's get a brain scan so they do and he's got a tumor they take the tumor out his impulses are gone he doesn't have these desires anymore and then six months later the wife finds some kitty porn on his computer up then take him back in scan the brain the tumor's back and Adrian makes the point well we don't think of him as a criminal he's a pedophile he's a medical patient he's got a tumor he's got a a problem here we got to fix it and then he contrasts that with a young man named Dante page an African-American um man who raped and murdered a a woman this was in Colorado Adrien was on the defense attorney the defense U side to uh argue for life sentence rather than the death penalty and basically he recounts then this young man's history this Dante page and this goes on for like three pages this is like the worst background you can possibly imagine you know the mother was a crack crack cocaine addict and no father in the home and you know multiple boyfriends in and out of the house who would beat little Dante page when he was a child dropped him on his head multiple emergency room uh visits due to you know you just being beaten and and and so forth and you know just horrible environment the the neighborhood the you know the running with gangs the horrible schools food the air everything you know this is like the worst background you can possibly imagine and then by the by the time you finish this you kind of feel sorry for this guy and then he says but but I I should remind you of what he did to this woman and then you go oh God and it's just terrible what he did to her and it's like h you know so what's the difference between Mr of who we think well poor guy's got a tumor and and and Dante page you just just don't see it in the brain scan um where there's like obviously a tumor there's just you don't see anything um and so you don't know that background so um but what so then let me then give my response which is Dan dennett's degrees of freedom you and I don't have the tumor or that horrible background what's the difference between dant page and Mr op and me and you that don't have that and so Dan would say degrees of freedom they have fewer degrees of freedom we have more degrees of freedom the court accounts for this oh he's got a tumor okay then we're going to give them a lesser sentence or whatever yeah there's nothing different between the two of them all that differs is we have trouble thinking in terms of distributed causality somebody comes in and they got a whopping gray tumor and yeah we're pretty good at saying oh that's the cause uh um somebody comes in and I've done a lot of the same song and dance working with defense teams somebody comes in and they had a major concussive head trauma when they were little and it took out half of their frontal cortex and you know in my experience about 20% of juries are capable of seeing that as causitive and and mitigating um and as one of those great asdes that should stop one in their tracks depending on the study 25 to 75% of men on Death Row in this country have a history of concussive head trauma to their frontal cortexes okay so we're getting there and we've got an edge case which is yeah the guy comes in with a massive tumor and if you've locked out and it's a liberal jury and a nice sort of middle class place if the guy had a bad head injury somewhere along the way that's good account also of yeah there's there's involutional components and enough that that's going to change how we assess them but then you get the guy growing up in sheer hell and what you see is he's just as mechanistically prone towards antisocial Behavior as the guy with a brain tumor it's just hard to see that it's due to every little baby step of Misfortune that he had along the way because we have a lot of trouble with like statistical guilt oh if the mom had not been a crack addict would he have done the same thing I don't know if he had not been stabbed in the schoolyard when he was in Middle School would he have done the same thing would he have could you have predicted just from that no absolutely not and what you see is like in this incrementalism people who who study this there's even a jargony term for it what is your Ace your Ace score AC your adverse childhood experiences which is a way of formalizing just how much of a hell hole or a privileged like land of opportunity your childhood wasn't there's like even a checklist you can get your a score from 0 to 10 were you witness to physical abuse to psychological abuse to sexual abuse were you a victim of a b or c was there somebody incarcerated in the family was there unstable finan and you get your score and people study a scores but you could just as readily do it with your your R lce score your ridiculously lucky childhood experience score and what you see with a scores is for every additional step you get there is an approximately 35% increase likelihood that you will have been involved in antisocial Violence by the time you're a young adult if you are a woman down the line that you will have had an unplanned pregnancy as a teenager that you will have issues of substance abuse that you will have issues with mood disorders for every every step 35% increase and what you get is you know not all brain tumors in the orbital frontal cortex would have produced that some of that would produce somebody who would be outrageously inappropriate during somebody's eulogy it would have produced you know there's other contingent mediating factors but it's a whole lot easier to see where you get wildly shocking behavior from the middle class accountant who all of a sudden is doing this it's because of a brain tumor rather than why is this well prenatal alcohol exposure and you know when they were a child and exactly the long list of things you see and no single one of them but anytime you can look across a million kids and see that for every step higher in this index there's a 35% increase chance and every time you can do the inverse and see every step higher in your did your parents read books to you did you have hobbies that they encouraged all of that with every step higher there's a 35% increased chance that they're going to be a student of mine at Stanford University like all we're seeing there is it takes more work to figure out that there were 110 different causes that combined here instead of one big whopping one and it's much easier for us to deal with singular causality and very rarely are we the end products of anything as dramatic as a single cause so you would say that my background which was much better than Dante Page's uh is not due to anything I did that's just luck it's all luck it's it's tumors all the way down I just didn't happen to have one yeah yours were more subtle and in your case uh all versions of good luck because look at how you turned out your your mother must be so proud of you and you're not sitting in prison and you were not a you know all of these things I mean here's here's one study that should stop you into your tracks or that should stop a a radical compatibilist in their tracks you know there's a whole literature by now on how stress has atrophying effects on the frontal cortex um if you don't know about the frontal cortex it's the cool part of the brain it is so interesting I so regret having wasted 30 years of my life studying a different part of the brain frontal cortex we've got more of it than any other species it's the most recently evolved it's the last part of our brain that fully matures the frontal cortex is about self-control and impulse control and gratification postponement and doing the harder thing when it's the right thing to do and what does stress do stress and stress hormones on a very nuts and bolts level cause neurons in the frontal cortex to atrophy and what do you know afterward you're not very good at that emotional regulation stuff this is why during periods of enormous stress we make terrible impulsive decisions because your frontal cortex doesn't work very well with that and it turns out chronic stress does the same thing to your frontal cortex but even more permanently and it turns out childhood chronic stress does it even more dramatically because that's when they're still like laying the foundations for your frontal cortex in terms of brain development but then this newest study all of these are neuroimaging studies so by the time you look at kindergarteners their resting stress hormone levels are significantly influenced by their mother's socioeconomic status already by age five if you were growing up poor on the average you have higher levels of stress hormones when you show up for kindergarten each morning and on the average your frontal cortex is already developing to be thinner thinner layers a lower metabolic rate and less capacity to do the sort of self-control stuff it's a 5-year-old that takes a good frontal cortex and this is already a predictor of what you're going to look like as a 60-year-old okay that's outrageous but then here's this newest study because brain Imaging techniques have gotten good enough that you can start brain Imaging fetuses and already in a fetus the rate of brain development is influenced significantly by the mother's socioeconomic status because that's influencing how stressed she is and her stress hormone levels which get across the placenta and get into the brain you're a fetus and already this stuff is beginning to act out like go tell me this guy sitting there at the defendant table had control over it if that was his first step and every step after that just added to his like stunningly awful a score but it's hard to see wait when they were a fetus that had something to do with it wait their hormone levels this morning wait that they were stabbed when they were wait all of those things had something yeah collectively and you'll find somebody who went through all of those things and didn't turn out that way and the same way that this guy with his orbital frontal tumor his distant ambition could have taken a completely different form and you can work through that oh it's because it was this upbringing or because of that and that's why I took that form in him um but in all those cases there's just as little control but it's way easier to see it when it's a single Sledgehammer of a cause yeah rain talks about those portable MRI machines they take to these prisons where they scan the brains of these serial killers and rapist and so on and basically to a man and they're pretty much all men they just have no frontal cortex or it's just qu quiescent they just have no self-control so the urge is bubbling up uh from beneath the amigdala or whatever just have no break on them uh but you know I was thinking about this I don't have these urges bubbling up that I need a break why do they have the urges to you know be violent and rape or whatever that most of us don't have that that they need a break and we don't need a break so what's the frontal cortex doing there or I guess you would probably say they just had a different background that led to those impulses in the first place yeah and and sort of a great example of this like I've I've done same of that some of the same court work that that rain has done and I get like put up in front of a jury and I teach him about the brain I teach him about stress and early life adversity and regulation or behavior and you know finish with this whole song and dance that if this had been what you had gone through starting with when you were a second trimester fetus as this guy you would have done the exact same thing um and then as is the case the the prosecuting attorney gets to cross-examine me and if the person's good they shred me in the first minute because they say okay so are you saying that any person on Earth who had had the same concussive head trauma that this guy had when he was eight along with everything else that if they had had this same they would have done the exact same thing and I say of course not of course not this guy had frontal damage and as a result he like remorselessly killed nine people and some other guy has the same amount of frontal damage and what he does at family holiday get togethers is he plays the piano way longer than anybody wants to listen to Because hey the turkeyy ready come on everyone let's whoa they are both unconstrained by the rules of of society with you know like slightly different versions of unconstraint and I say no we can't predict that but you know comparing those two people I'd be willing to bet some money that the one playing the piano for too long grew up in a loving middle class household and this guy did not I'd be willing to bet that there's four or five genes that this guy has this variant and that guy doesn't I'm willing to bet that circumstances early in childhood gave this guy a bigger amydala than that guy and more reactive to perceived threat yeah give me enough pieces there and we're going to get some mileage here as to figuring out why this guy did what he did and for the same damage that guy did that and 50 years ago we couldn't have told you a word about this now we can like list the first few things stable middle class upbringing versus childhood abuse few other factors history of alcoholism okay so we've gone up to like 50% predictability from 25% just from knowing about the brain damage yeah with each individual piece but if you carried that out I mean you you you were kind of critical of the of the Minority Report idea but if you carry out what you just said for another Century or two could we not get to say account for 99% of the variance in in people that have these I don't know 25 different factors in their background um probably not 99% because again all those like chaotic nonlinearities in there and every time you get the like Wilmer Rudolph Wilmer Rudolph in 1960 she was the fastest woman alive she got gold medals all over the place and she was totally amazing and totally amazing because she grew up in a Sher Cropper Shack one of 22 kids and she had Polio as a kid she grew up with with leg braces and at some point decided I you say oh my God the degrees of freedom that lurk in us I don't know why she wound up being the fast what gave her the tenacity to just go back over and over and over again and work against the pain or who knows what Mario capetti got the Nobel Prize University of Utah some years ago for working out this technique called sight directed mutagenesis and he was a homeless kid in Italy after the end of World War II before he got brought in by the right family and like yeah these were these amazing none of those happened by chance either and a lot of those things that like caused that to happen was some random nonlinear fluke of a chaotic world yeah we're not going to have complete predictability but we've got statistical predictability we know which kids are statistically far more likely to be in trouble with the law and which ones are going to be going to law school so we won't have the individual predictability but I don't know there's a fair degree of predictability in those cases and one then says at that point okay okay so you've just said we're never going to have complete predictability you're not going to be able to tell which of those Street kids is going to turn out to be and all that stuff yeah we don't have predictability on the individual level we've got it statistically with popul s but any time population with each additional piece of crappy luck during childhood you're 35% more likely to be a violent dangerous adult we know enough already we know enough already to know that A system that will then convict this guy on a premise of culpability and Free Will isn't right and isn't right intellectually or morally okay here at this point you'll hear compatibilist say something like I I agree with everything you just said but free will or volition is not to be found down at the neuronal level or molecular DNA or anything you're going the wrong direction it's a higher order emergent phenomenon it's emergent property of all these convergent neural networks and everything else that's going on there and by higher order I mean again back to my self-determination so you teach somebody here are all the things that are influencing you and this is what you can do about it so there are you know clinical psychologists that deal with people with addiction or violence uh issues or you know whatever and okay here here is your crappy background you have a 35% chance of being violent because of these and so what are you going to do about it you know you can CH you know so you you cite Roy bom Meister in your book you know he has that book called willpower he and John tyy wrote about all the different things you can do to overcome these various factors and this is it at this higher level where like yeah yeah okay I don't want to do that I was just watching that movie the other night the big George Foreman about the history you know is a drama you know but they show you know one of these contingent turns where you know he was had this violent youth in Houston just horrible background and at some point he just randomly by luck ran into this boxing you know little coach or trainer whatever and said okay but we're going to channel your violence into sports okay so and then he he kind of makes that um transition it's like okay so there's a little bit of luck there but also at some point he's making that decision yeah I'm going to do this instead of this other thing and then you know he be he gets beat by Muhammad Ali and his life kind of spirals down and then at some point you he's like 150 pounds overweight and he's out of money and you know he's just like what am I gonna do I'm gonna make a comeback and he calls the trainer I want to make my comeback and we know what happena yeah and then after that he discovers barbecuing for a whole new like chapter career right and this is It's So inspirational because it's like you know can you change Personality yeah I mean he went from this kind of badass mean guy too just sitting next to Johnny Carson yucking it up talking about you know this guy he's gonna fight is any good I hope not where where do they get these boxes you're fighting oh they find them in bars it's just hilarious so how is it that he did that and why is that not some form of higher order volition I am going to turn my horrible life around and become something different because lots and lots of people at some juncture will say the exact same thing and they don't how come well let's start dissecting how they got there and none of that happened by chance that sort of thing um ironically Bal meister and I are scheduled to have a debate a month from now on NPR about exactly this stuff which is going to be total fun cuz he's like an amazing SCI scientist and we disagree on that one but you know you bring up something like a merchant complexity which like chaotic ism is the coolest thing in the entire world like one ant makes no sense and you put a thousand of them together and they all they make societies that do these incredible things and you like all of this emergent incredible stuff like ants through this very simple algorithm can solve the traveling sales problem in terms of minimizing how much they have to walk going from one food source to another and then you look in the developing cortex and it solves the traveling salesman problem the exact same way of minimizing the amount of axons you have to grow to hook up these whoa because of emerging stuff and exactly as with chaos that turns into like this irresistible playground to say ah Free Will is an emergent thing of of course you can't find it individual neurons because it's emergent it's a property that and what you get there is there's a very fundamental mistake there as well which is the thing that's amazing about emerging systems is you have these stupid simple little building blocks one ant one cell one person in a marching band or whatever that has very simple rules as to how you interact with the world immediately around you and you put all of them together and out comes a brain and not only that you out comes a brain where everybody has roughly the same brain anatomy but nobody has identical because Merchant meets chaotic ISM and unpredictability there this is so amazing and every single person who at that point decides that there's free will that can now be pulled out of this makes the same mistake which is they decide that somehow little bitty building blocks are working differently now they've gotten smarter they've got more degrees of freedom in their actions they're doing something differently and the Really sort of you know hail Mar desperate versions of pulling Free Will out of it is that somehow when the upper level emergent property comes out there it allows you to reach down and now fuss with those little building blocks and manipulate them so that they work differently and they don't and the whole point of what's amazing about it is when like all of your neurons are together and they're inventing Aesthetics the building blocks are just as simple and stupid and have the same number of small number of limited rules and like saying this is where Free Will comes from is like saying okay a great emerg think one water molecule cannot have the property of wetness wetness is an emergent property but it's like saying what comes with wetness is as enough water water molecules come together we all know you know water molecule is made of two hydrogens and one oxygen and when enough of them come together it's suddenly two oxygens and one hydrogen and that's where the wetness comes from That's not how it works all of the theories about emergence it's so I love emerant I torture my students teaching them about this but it's not will we free will comes from and it's something like you know if you gave chimps as many neurons as we have it is an emergent inevitability that they would come up with religion but they would come up with a religion like nothing we have ever seen before on Earth because the chaotic ISM that and somehow theirs is going to be featuring much more about you know bananas even though real chimps in the wild don't readily eat bananas I say as a primatologist yeah emerging stuff is amazing but you can't get free will by saying that in chaotic systems unpredictable equals indeterministic and you can't get free will out of emerchant systems because every single version of like how that happens requires the building parts to suddenly get a lot fancier and it can't work that way so you're saying like that Sydney Harris cartoon with the two mathematicians at the chalkboard and in the middle it says A Mir and then a miracle happens I think you need to be more explicit here in step two is that what you're saying by saying oh free well is an emergent property it's like saying and then magic happens yeah exactly magic can't happen there and it doesn't happen spontaneously the water molecules suddenly don't get a new image of what they want to be in their lives and they they two oxygen now team up kind of thing at and it can't work that way in terms of having like this emergent macro level ability to reach down and make neurons suddenly like have action potentials go in the opposite direction doesn't work that way all of those models depend on somewhere in the middle the and then magic happens every single one of them then what is the self is that an illusion too well damned if I really understand that let alone Consciousness and please let's not go in that direction because that just I'm just thinking because that's what we think of as volition it's me making this decision I am myself but you know in the reductionistic model you're presenting I'm just a bundle of I'm just a bunch of neurons and chemicals and just electric meat yeah and all you have to do to see that and to like validate what Sam Harris is saying who buy the the way is like the kindred soul for me in terms of just how extreme we are and he is brilliant at arguing for there being no free will whatsoever um but to come back to his notion we have Consciousness we have selfawareness all of that and we have fallen for this notion that that's where our decisions come from and all you have to do is do an experiment where you sit down somebody at a table someone who is dieting and you put a big bowl of M&M's in front of them and if you have stressed the hell out of them for 10 minutes before with unsolvable math problems they are now about 80% likely to eat more M&M's because when we get stressed the frontal cortex is still trying to deal with those consequences and it's that much less capable of saying believe me it's only like eight months till bathing suit season you really don't want to eat those M&M's self-control goes out the if you could do that to somebody and you can reliably see this often enough that like you can get a PhD out of your thesis of this it's so reliable you're showing self-consciousness and awareness and all of that that's like such a small part of what's going on by the way parenthetically I'm told that I forget who was telling me this that the blood sugar level self-control thing is did not replicate and this is I think Bon meister's actually responded to that criticism there's some debate going on there yeah that one is is highly embroiled um it makes tremendous sense to me not because I'm a psychologist but I spend a lot of time thinking about neuronal energetics and how some parts of the brain are more expensive than other parts what do you know the frontal cortex is incredibly expensive I think you know I've read the backs and forths with it and I'm in zero position to be like evaluating any of the details I think what the punchline is going going to be is that that is a legitimate legitimate effect but it's nowhere near as strong as a lot of the original enthusiasm suggested it was yeah and does that make it less interesting nah not in the slightest it's just a smaller voice in that whole picture of distributed causality okay let's pay a little bit less attention to that one but that's that's still part of the story um and that's happened with a lot of these the hungry judges is finding has been challenged by all sorts of people some of it on statistical grounds and the authors have responded and I think they have absolutely answered those complaints but there's other ones and there's been a couple of non-replication but they did it in very different ways and the usual thing in science which is at the end of the day probably the answer there as well is yeah it's for real but it's not quite as strong of an effect or maybe if it's a lot less strong of an effect but that's part of how it turns out we work as biological machines how cool is that very cool well but when I bring up the self or since you mentioned Consciousness these might be something like these if they're Illusions they're or fictions they're useful fictions I mean they work in terms of living a life that I feel like I have choices and it's good that I feel that way because I need to make choices that I'm a self I'm not just a bundle of neural networks I'm an actual entity I am sentient and I'm conscious and even though there's this hard problem of Consciousness and you know we'll never solve it I see Kristoff just paid David commers a a case of wine for their bet that this would be solved in 25 years okay maybe they need another 25 years but what what I'm thinking is I'm wondering if it's not going to happen in 25 years more 50 years more it's the wrong question or the concepts this why I mentioned penstein in her email you know you just we're just going about it the wrong way we're using the wrong words I mean it's not possible to know what it's like to be bad I can put on some sonar stuff and pretend like I can get in the closet we in yell I can tell which direction sounds coming from because of the walls and I wonder if this is what it's like to be about but at some point if I had all the apparatus the neural networks I would just be a bat and I wouldn't know that I'm even asking the question right I mean it's it's almost a a a dualistic thing as if my little many me homunculus can tiptoe into your skull and see what the red looks like to you and then go back and go oh yeah it looks the same as for us you know I mean it's it's a weird idea it's a very weird one because we're a totally weird species we are just as mechanistic as a sea slug and I like have one yeah endlessly long chapter on how a sea slug learns to do different thing learns and this resulted in like am in Nobel Prize for Eric cantel one of the greatest pieces and then show it works the exact same way in us some of the same exact molecules that's just a more complicated process um so in that regard we're just like every other species out there but then we're a weird one exactly along the lines you bring up of not only are we biological machines but we're the only species that could recognize our Machin maybe not all the time maybe never for some people maybe only in periods of Crisis maybe only when things are going great maybe intellectually like all the time with me but as soon as you're dealing with that sort of recursive meta stuff there we're in very complicated terrain because as soon as we know our Machin we have to wrestle with the fact that while our feelings are not real and are more mere material outcomes of our our reductive Universe our feelings feel like feelings yeah and somebody else's terrible pained feeling like carries some legitimacy even though it's an emergent property of their nuts and bolts you know atoms so we're a screwed up species in that regard and one of the things that happens when we recognize our Machin is we get totally depressed and traumatized because Machin involves knowing we're going to die someday and all those nice molecules you're going to get necrotic on us but another one is being able to look at the fact that maybe some of the traits we're proud of we had nothing to do with and that's exactly where like you and I may get freaked out because we we we both are like we we have jobs we like bring money home we could put meat and potatoes on the table neither of us us are like Mass murderers both of us have fairly like clear social skills we both like can like get all of that we both have like college educations and we've even published damn books and all of that and a totally mechanist deterministic world all you and I can do is sit there and say wow so maybe I didn't really earn it yeah all those times my roommate was out partying I studied instead and I've always felt like that had it but maybe I have nothing to do with any of this bummer and there's a big problem with this book of mine which is anybody who's going to like spend their time reading a book like this or anybody who's going to listen to a podcast like this is someone who by definition is going to be biased to go in the direction of finding out that the things that have gone well for them in life they may not have had really any entitlement to bummer but what the punchline the whole thing is is that for the majority of people out there the Injustice is not that they are getting rewards for things they actually had no control over it is they are getting punished or deprived or ignored or viewed as irrelevant because of things they had no control over for most people like the finding that like there's no free will that's liberating all you have to do is look at somebody who is wildly obese and whose family has always been and they really have tried and they and nonetheless everybody kind of thinks either implicitly or even says it to each other wow what can I say they just have no self-control and it's going to impact their likelihood of getting a job of finding love in their life of all these things because of implicit biasness about body weight blah blah blah Etc and then one day they find out there's this hormone called leptin which has something to do with satiation and in the hypothalamus and there's a leptin receptor and their family has a screwy version of that receptor Gene and that's why satiation doesn't work in there and you can read these accounts of that's the day my life TR that's the day I stopped hating myself that's the day I stopped that's the day I was freed from a totally false corrosive viciously self-righteous domain of deciding that's something we have control over you and I had some some control over our college degrees so yeah we should feel a little bit good about ourselves and no and like at the end of the day rather than this being you know suck it up and like maybe you didn't deserve your high salary and your corner office at the end of the day what this mostly is about is a huge percentage of like human misery is caused by the fact that like we met out punishment and neglect and all those things for things that people are not responsible for I like the idea of feeling good about things you're doing in your life so maybe it's just the wrong words instead of feeling Pride maybe gratitude maybe gratitude's a better word yeah because gratitude is the most logical thing to like come up with in the face of sheer random unearned good luck that's exactly what it what it should be yeah yeah I'm fine of making the point about um you know if you wake up in the morning feeling all uh motivated to get out in the world Make Your Mark uh what's the Hamilton line uh you know get out there and and what make no was it make my Mark or make my I forget I forget what it was now but I'm not g to waste my shot I'm take take my shot yeah take my shot but we know this is a personality and temperament we know from Behavior genetics that at least 50% of the variance on that is accountable by genes you didn't choose to feel like you have a high need of achievement um and so yeah so so gratitude about that is important um yeah and capacity to then generalize that to what it means for those who didn't right right have that and yes and so somebody that chooses not to work 80 hours a week I mean I've thought about this a lot what does it take to be success you know why aren't there more people or or or you know women CEOs you know to me it's like who would want to be a CEO anyway I mean who wants to work 80 hours a week and Lead this restricted life and you got no family life and no no joy I don't know I'm I'm probably overgeneralizing but unless what does it for you is that you've got a 20,000 square foot house just north of Silicon Valley up in the hills because those are the folks that like are foraging all over the bushes here out where I live in Silicon Valley yeah that's it's not by chance that that's like how that turned out you know there's got to be an explanation not only for Mother Teresa but for Elon Musk as well and Vladimir Putin as long as we're at it but yeah the pieces just came together differently and that's not where their source of meaning in life comes from or unless when they like get older and it suddenly strikes them that they've been running after the totally wrong source of meaning in life and then they but not not all of them are going to do that most of them are just going to fund startups that study how to like freeze your head after your die so you could live forever cryogenics is the crackpot growth research industry in the Silicon Valley right now because all of them have conquered the world except for death so that's what they're funding now yeah that's how it turns out yeah right okay let's talk about um uh punishment retributive versus restorative justice you know capital punishment and all that stuff I'm reminded of the um 1988 presidential debate Michael dukus and George HW Bush and dukakis's anti- capital punishment what if your wife Kitty had been raped and murdered wouldn't you you know want to put this guy away and you know he rambled off on some intellectual little lecture at about capital punishment and which he should have said yeah I would be pissed off and if it was just up to me I'd want to strap this to Old Sparky and Fry until his head count on fire that's how I feel about it and then you say but of course we can't run a criminal justice system based on how angry somebody is you know and that's why I shouldn't be on the jury yeah right yeah and it said oh what was what was the guy the the pared guy in Massachusetts right yes yes Willie Horton was it Wily Hort wi Horton yes yes when when George Bush Willie Horton Michael tacus right in that debate which was almost as destructive as the silly picture of Michael duckus with his head sticking out of the tank there trying to look militaristic yeah of course that's what you're going to do I you know a couple of years ago there was one of those horrors of some white supremacist guy burst into a place of worship with an automatic weapon and mowed down a bunch of people and it was horrifying and I was totally disturbed by that and like Monday morning NPR is saying the guy is being arraigned today and it looks like he's going to get Federal hate crime charges as well which will make him eligible for the death penalty and my thought was yeah fry the bastard all of that and two seconds later I stop and think wait I'm working on a death penalty case right now trying to yeah this is we are run by very visceral emotions Jonathan hey at NYU has done wonderful work showing how much of the time when we are supposedly reasoning our way towards a moral decision we're doing post Haw rationalization for our emotional decisions all of that but yeah we're also self-reflective and we begin to learn how is it that I wound up this way and probably much more importantly how is it that that person wound up being different for me before I decide I'm in a position to understand what made them do what they just did I like the discussion in your book on on um this idea that it helps the victims families come to closure when the guy is finally put away and that in fact the research shows that doesn't close the door for them because that's what you think of like well yeah it's well maybe we don't want to State killing people but at least it makes the it Clos the door for the family Ames yeah and it's very mixed it's very mixed it depends on what part of the country you're in and thus what part of regional culture yeah closure is much more of a myth than lots of people in criminology sort of think of people have different responses and you know there's a whole world of people whose immune systems work better after they are able to let go of their hatred and forgive someone I probably couldn't do that and that's one of the outcomes also there's ones who write letters to the authori saying yes yes yes this person did this to my loved one but you're going to accomplish Nothing by killing them that's part of the picture as well they align themselves yeah so the notion that that is where you get closure from separate of the fact that you probably don't get closure by most reports um yeah that one's a criminology myth yeah there's but there is kind of a game theory logic to why we feel that way those emotions you know Christopher bomb talks about this in his book moral Origins about you know these Hunter gather groups that have a whole series of uh steps they take to control bullies and Free Riders and people that don't play nice and follow the rules you know from Gossip all the way up to Capital Punishment where they you know they take Aug out for a a hunt and they come back without him and uh and and how everybody has to participate in the killing of this guy so that no one feels individually responsible and also it it helps attenuate some of the kind of um fight back against from that guy's fames uh you know what's a retribution against the Killer and so forth but if you don't have something like that then free riding and bullying can take over a group it can it can propagate so you need to have some way of dealing with bullies and free writers now why not why didn't Evolution get us to where we get rid of all all the bullies and the Free Riders and the answer appears to be a social group can tolerate maybe 1 to 3% of psychopaths which is the number uh and still and still function pretty well and we don't want to have allocate even more resources to getting rid of every last one of them yeah and also because when you have like nothing but an ocean of Cooperators in the game theory setting um the first wolf that shows up does fabulously and so does the second and so does the eenth but maybe not quite as much as the first wolf and eventually you're getting to a Tipping Point in this frequency dependent selection sort of thing where now get one altruist they're going to fail because all these wolves are just going to laugh at what a like naive bastard they are but get two altruists and they're going to outcompete the Wolves because the wolves are not cooperating and thus you start getting more and more outter there's this cycle of frequency dependent selection for in a world of nothing but nice people wolves get away with an awful lot and in a world of nothing but backstabbing cheaters two Cooperators who trust each other and who can interact on a regular basis they're going to drive everybody else out of business and force them to start cooperating so it's a it's a funny landscape in that regard um but in terms of so what do we do with societies like lone wolves um and here where you get like here's where people are just going to like throw down their their their their iPhones or whatever right now and saying this guy is such a ridiculous bleeding heart liberal no hopefully I've convinced by now that I am so far beyond that but you know one of the dictums of public health research is you figure out like what the disease is is and how to contain it and you do it in a way where you contain the medically dangerous person but you don't do one smidgen more than that and you do all that good stuff but the other thing that comes with it is you put at least as much effort into figuring out how did this person get sick in the first place where did this disease come from the the preventative sort of stuff and that's like at the heart of every Public Health person and every public health model of what you do with violent damaging people where you don't blame them and it's not retribution but it's a quarantine model so that they don't get people damaged but like you don't do anything more than what's needed to keep them from being dangerous and you don't preach to them about how they have a rotten soul and then in the same public health model you need to at least put a much as much effort into and how did they get this way in the first place place and how we can do things so that we wind up with fewer bullies and fewer lone wolves and fewer Free Riders and all of that and you see countries that do things that have far less bullying like the Scandinavian countries and what's one of the good predictors of that having a lot of Social Capital people trust each other and they feel like they have efficacy whoa a preventative measure and if you're doing any of this stuff it's not just oh let's not let's not tell murderers that they're terrible mean people and just like keep the figure out why growing up in this sort of neighborhood quadruples the likelihood that that's who you turn out to be figure out why why this prenatal stressor figure out do the preventative stuff and that's where you're going to make a world with fewer Free Riders and like you know roll your if you will but you got to keep coming back to the Scandinavian social support models like they are doing the preventative stuff and not only do they have less problems with recidivism with their violent people they have fewer violent people they have fewer bullies they have less spousal abuse they have less of all that stuff and yeah root causes because if I'm sitting there saying why' that person do that where' the intent come from because of one second before one hour before one sent all that is is this like Grand blowout of root causes so yeah do that the death penalty has been uh outlawed in pretty much every country except democracy except ours I don't know what is it half the states don't have capital punishment anymore but but half do and then the half that do only a few States Texas Ohio I guess uh Mississippi Florida few others uh actually practice it I mean most don't um in my book Heavens on Earth I got to thinking about what people think about facing death because I was thinking about Terror management Theory and then I got discovered this literature on what people say just before they're going to be executed to my utter astonishment the state of Texas actually records their final statements they the micro you know you're strapped in the microphone comes down what would you like to say and almost to a man and they're all men you know they I love my mother I want Mommy I can't I love Jesus I can't wait to see my Lord on the other side and it's all love love love love and once in a while they go and I'm sorry I killed your because the fames were there wow I know it's Aston I have no I I know there's all sorts of websites that supposedly have accurate information on what these people's final meal requests were but final words that's much cooler yeah yeah it's it's it's it's totally wild yeah W so I mean I'm against the capital punishment for for two reasons I don't like to give the power of life and death to the state and also they get it wrong so often I mean the Innocence Project has just been an eyeopener it's stunning uh what kind of differences there are I think you you mentioned uh the criminal J if you have money you can buy Justice if you don't you're probably screwed of course and since you work in the criminal justice system as a as a uh eyewitness or no what is it a consultant expert witness teaching witness yeah teaching Witness is it as bad as it seems like I mean is it really that corrupt I mean the rich people can buy the good lawyers and the and the you know the the per that gets the uh the district attorney or whatever the assigned person right out of college uh law school is just not going to get as good a Justice oh I have no idea at all other than like reading the news which any of us can do and see ample evidence of that day after day because I work with public defenders I work with the people who can't afford attorneys so all I'm looking at are the people who were like 99% of the way lost by the time they were third trimester fetuses yeah okay so I I never get to see wealth buying all the Justice you can afford kind of thing um but in this whole oh God we got to come like the Scandinavians and understand how people became the way we all the time in our society are capable of taking individuals who are dangerous who were dangerous to the people who are around them and we are capable of constraining them keeping them from being dangerous anymore and we could do it without responsibility Without Blame without preaching about their rotten souls and then we could get insights as to why it is that they're dangerous your kid is sneezing and you don't send them to kindergarten that day because they're get to get all the other kids sick Satan isn't involved in that we learn how to do a quarantine model because it's a literal quarantine model you keep your kit home until they're not sneezing anymore but you don't sit at home and tell your kid they can't play with their toys because like there's something like they did a bad thing you don't even do that you're not a bad person but you did a bad thing sneezing all over your CL it's got nothing to do with that yeah you just constrain them so that they're not dangerous and you don't do it one submission beyond that and you try to do some research of like okay why do people get colds when they're 5 years old and Society hasn't fallen apart and we don't burn 5-year-olds with nose colds at the stake even though who knows somewhere back when they would have thought that was a sign of Satan or because they thought illness is God's punishments for your you know fetal sins you were born sinful so it's not that crazy and like uh satirical yay we can do that and it's more Humane World why aren't we doing that why doesn't some State Governor go look what they're doing in Germany or wherever and go we're going to do that in our state we're going to try something different well for starters just look at the Republican debate the other night and look at what all those people were bragging about what they had done in their states which were like as different as you could get and predicated on free will like like I I couldn't contain how happy I was seeing some of the some of the sound bites some of these people came out with um why can't we do that because punishment feels good and seeing pain makes us irrational and makes us irrational in our attributions and very complicated phenomena are really hard to piece apart as to what caused them because that's hard to see and simple explanation ations are much more appealing cognitively and the more fragile and upset we are the more emotionally appealing they are and that's why that's much easier like go sit down somebody and say like you know it's a walking cliche to say they had a very tough childhood but my God some people do and that usually came after an even worse fetal life and then a subsequent and you know it's hard to think that way um yeah multiple ality is tough and Allah height we feel our way to decisions far more often than we like to think yeah but still rationality counts it does work sometimes Truth and Reconciliation idea has taken off in the last half century some countries have employed it to move beyond the anger which is going to get anybody anywhere to to try and find a a solution why this hasn't happened with the two-state solution you know in the Middle East I don't know just it just seems like a nightmare but then Northern Ireland somehow pulled it off I mean if of of Our Generation that grew up as looking as even more intractable than the Middle East and you know it's not perfect but stuff happens and somehow like beIN and Sadat managed to get to Camp David and that seemed just as you know every now and then but it sure look pretty awful but you know South Africa managed to get independence without a war afterward of the white militias somehow they pulled that one off every now and then like there's one in the wind column for this stuff yeah well maybe it's a meme that your book will launch once again let's let's let's move in this direction and apply rationality to solving social problems rather than letting our emotions drive us even maybe even being aware of those of those emotions and why we have them would help um yeah okay uh last couple points here um this is what you write here what the what the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning there's no answer to why Beyond this happened because of what came just before what which happened because of what came before that there's nothing but an empty indifference indifference Universe in which occasionally atoms come together to temporally form things which we call me well yeah this is interesting because I got to thinking about what I call Al Al's error which was alvie singer Woody Allen's character and Annie Hall where as a child he won't do his homework the universe is expand he's expanding yes and his mother upgrades him what's the universe got to do with it we live in Brooklyn and Brooklyn's not wrong with him got to take him to the doctor yeah oh I love that scene yeah right so the is that well that's not the level you know the ultimate meaning of the universe doesn't have anything to do we we live here and now uh I wrote about this with um I watched a debate with William Lane Craig and Shelley Kagan the philosopher you know so Craig writes this uh which so here I'm I'm referencing your chapter discussing people who believe and determinism de claim is that they're not as moral or they they're not they don't feel as motivated or what it has negative effects which you point out the the research on that is pretty debatable and some of that didn't survive the replication crisis but the other problem is that maybe that's the wrong level to think of it as and then you also discuss can atheist be as moral and so on of course that touches something that's close to me but here's what Craig argues on a naturalistic worldview everything is ultimately destined to destruction in the heat death of the universe as the universe expands it grows colder and colder as his energy is used up eventually all the stars will burn out all matter will collapse and dead stars and black holes uh there's no life no heat no light only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies expanding into endless Darkness at the light at the end it's hard for me to understand how our moral choices have any sort of significance there's no moral accountability the universe is neither better nor worse for what we do our moral lives become vacuous because they don't have that kind of cosmic significance then he went on about the Holocaust what difference does it make if we do something about it or not and Kelly Shelley Kagan says this strikes me as an outrageous thing suggest it doesn't really matter surely it matters to the torture victims whether they're being tortured it doesn't require that this makes some Cosmic difference to the internal significance of the universe for it to matter whether a human being is tortured it matters to them it matters to their family it matters to us you know so yeah that's great wow he must be a fun guy to hang out with Olo people may be saying the same thing about me at this point this brings us back to like like we're a totally weird organism in that we could know our machinist but at the same time our feelings feel real and that carries a certain kind of weight and a certain moral imperative that no matter how irrational it is the notion that something good or bad could happen to a machine it's a good thing when we decrease cumulative pain out there like I know that that like ultimately doesn't make sense because it runs counter all this mechan but at the end of the day like we're the species For Whom the fact that nothing good can ever really happen to a machine has to feel sufficiently unreal that we function and that we function even with some moral guidelines that come out of that yeah I guess yeah maybe it's different levels of analysis you know if you give me a shot of oxytocin in the nose spray then I want to cuddle more after sex with my wife or something I don't know what uh and you go oh it was the oxytocin that did that well yeah but but I still have the feelings and the feelings are good and I just experience the feelings and and not worry about the oxytocin and maybe the answer is yeah don't think about any of this stuff when it comes to like who you love maybe don't think about any of this stuff and how like your old factory receptor makeup has nothing to do with the fact that this smells like a great meal and you are happy and anticipatory sure as hell do the effort to think this way when you were feeling entitled to more care or more access or more influence or more money or more anything than somebody else just because you've got myths in your head about how you earn it and sure as hell do the hard work and resist that when you're judging somebody else you know go be happy enjoy your feelings of love go enjoy the meal go like figure out like why you love this music and don't have to think through why you're like part of this culture that likes this type of dissonance and this type of consonant chord progressions or God knows what yeah go feel happy go feel grateful but don't feel like you earned it and don't feel like you earned the ability to decide that somebody else earned their worse luck than you had yeah again gratitude yeah Fineman made that point about um uh you know analys a scientific analysis of nature it doesn't take away anything it just adds I mean it's nice to know why a rainbow looks like the way it does the light bounces inside each of the little drops droplets of water and so on but I can still appreciate it uh also just like anybody else it just is beautiful to look at and you get a an emotional feeling and even if the those emotional feelings have neurochemistry behind them so what it's still a feeling yeah like Bach can be broken down into all sorts of rules of contrapunto composition and like yeah that's true that doesn't take away for there's there's biomechanical explanations for why gazel look amazing when they leap but that doesn't you know the fact that there is more structure than we suspect superficially to explain things all that should do is like increase the amazingness of it like purpose of science is not to cure us of like gratitude and being Amazed by stuff all it does is just reinvent it for us MH right all right Robert I really love the book and I love your work what what do you hope could come of this thread of of thinking about why how lives turn out a little bit of an extension of your previous book behave I mean all the different factors that go into it but what's the bigger picture here changing Society in a certain direction oh I don't know given given the world I live in full of like uber Uber astonishingly privileged sort of inheritors of random luck I don't know maybe make us all feel a little less entitled make us feel a little bit less whiny and difficult make us have a little bit more empathy for someone who's very different from us and you know maybe have a few more people out there whose rotten luck could be explained by oh their subtype of like leptin receptor stop hating themselves in the process you know I don't know I'll settle for something incremental just because like scientists like are so accustomed to having no impact whatsoever so like getting three and a half people to think a little bit differently about their privilege or somebody else's lack thereof I think that should counts as a win for me yeah well again protopia just make tomorrow a tiny bit better than today the problem of aiming for Utopia is then that you can find ways to you know sacrifice other people who are standing in our way exactly at some point countries enlightened Scandinavian countries seem inevitable to go to war over who takes better care of their elderly yeah like somehow that that is still part of our potential Destiny I mean part of the theist argument which I I understand that you know without God then Hitler got away with it I mean that that is des settling but on the other hand you know we that's why we want to have good Justice now in the here and now because no one knows for sure what happens after you're dead yep except for those of us who suspect the answer is nothing nothing yeah yeah yeah because we're made of stuff and stuff stops this weird emergent thing called animacy at some point but yeah exactly no I know and people say well what you know what happens after you die well where were you before you were born well I wasn't anyway yeah right exactly back you go but again it's part of that kind of dualistic sense that we can't get away from you know Paul Bloom even thinks we're naturalistic Natural Born duelist that it just comes with the you know bundled with the the hardware um from a very early age and that you know the again back to Consciousness you you can't perceive your brain doing anything and so it just feels like there's thoughts floating around up there so maybe when my brain dies they float off into the quantum field or wherever uh because you you know if you say imagine yourself dead you can't you can't do it if you're imagining anything you're not dead yeah that's that's it you know it's like Oliver Sachs talking about hallucinations that people have you know they don't think they're hallucinate you know the the audio cortex is operating there even though they're you know in the brain scan they the voices are out there right so yeah nobody comes into an emergency room saying help I'm hallucinating they're saying Help Satan is telling me to do this and I don't want to do it because that wouldn't be right yeah I think you're the again the Free Will issue is along those lines it feels like something like I'm making a choice so it then you attribute to something well it's that Free Will thing and then hopefully you see enough circumstances where that wasn't the case that like you do a little bit of that like self-reflection stuff which is often not very appealing and kind of irksome and you know go do a little more of that yeah all right Robert that's a good place to end coming up on two hours here I know you're you're doing a lot of interviews for the book we'll post this as soon as uh let's see what's the pub date of this book I forget it's coming up pretty soon right this week or next week mid October yeah I think we mid October something yeah so you got some debates coming up that's good that'll be fun uh have definitely have to watch the one with Bob Meister he's one he's one of the most interesting people working in Psychology today I'm looking forward to it and he appears did you read his book you read his book evil right where where he went interviewed all these serial killers and you know that under the theory that they have low self-esteem just the opposite they hey a little bit of sociopathic narcissism here and there everything is the world's fault not mine right um not me not me I'm looking forward to it he also appears to be a very nice guy from our email exchanges so this this should be fun yeah he is I know him he's a super nice guy all right we we can ramble on for hours more I'll just hit the stop button there

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 94,202

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, biology, causation, compatibilism, consequences, determinism, dualis, dualism, free will, game theory, human behavior, intention, justice, libertarian free will, luck, meaning, morality, philosophy, self, The Michael Shermer Show, Robert Sapolsky

Id: vX6jKdIBNKI

Length: 113min 6sec (6786 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023