Name: Is free will a myth? | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T16:53:31.000Z
Duration: 59 min 5 s
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Hey, I'm Sean, host of this show, the Gray Area.

For the show this week, I'm talking to Robert Sapolsky.

Adverbs of degree

He's a biologist and a neuroscientist at Stanford and the author of a very fascinating and provocative book called Determined A Science of Life Without Free Will.

We talk about his case that free will, in the sense we normally use that term, is.

And if he's right about that, the implications are immense for how we think about almost everything.

It's a very interesting, mind bending book.

I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you do too.

There are many ways to think about the history of humanity.

One of them is to say that humans have gradually lifted themselves out of ignorance as we've learned more about ourselves and the natural world.

That's a little crude, to be sure, but it's true enough.

Most of us don't believe in witchcraft anymore, and

most of us don't believe that demons are the cause of diseases either.

But for a long, long time, these were commonly held beliefs.

But that fact should prompt an obvious question.

When future humans look back on our time, what will they think?

What do we believe now that might, in retrospect, look absurd to them?

I'm Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.

He's a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford and the author of a monumental new book called A Science of Life Without Free Will.

The book makes a rather provocative claim, which is that free will is an illusion.

We all have the subjective experience of feeling like we're the authors of our thoughts and.

And we know enough about the brain now to finally accept that.

If he's right, the moral and legal implications are enormous.

The way we think of success and failure, as well as blame and punishment, will have to change.

The debate about free will goes back a long way, and

I doubt the debate will ever end, no matter what we learn about the brain.

he knows that it's almost impossible for us to fully let go of belief in something like free will.

But he wrote the book anyway because he thinks that we can still transform the way we treat each other in light of what we now know.

Robert Sapolsky, welcome to the Gray Area.

You have a pretty broad academic background.

When people ask you what you do or what you study, what's your answer?

I'm kind of half of a neurobiologist and in a lab and mucking around with neurons and genes and such.

And my other sort of hat over the years has been as a primatologist studying wild baboons in a national park in East Africa, going back to the same animals each summer for more than 30 years.

So I've kind of been oscillating back and forth, so I'm a little bit of each.

Before we get into your arguments, there are a few terms we should define.

I mean, unless you're a philosophy sicko, most people aren't spending a lot of time with this discourse.

And no offense to philosophy sickos, those are our people.

I just don't want to take anything for granted.

So let me just start with the obvious one, which is free will.

Well, maybe the best place to start is to point out how most people define it, because that immediately starts getting you into trouble, and

it's probably best displayed in a courtroom.

You got some defendant sitting at the table there, and everybody agrees the guy did it.

And now there's three questions that strike everyone in intuitively as covering the entire universe of free will.

First off, did the guy intend to do what he did?

Did he understand what the outcome was likely to be, and

And if the answer is yes to all of those, that's it.

And this is what gives me sort of polite apoplexy throughout this book, because in my view, what you're doing is you've got a movie reviewer and they've got to write a review of a movie, and

all they're allowed to see is the last three minutes of the movie.

It's not asking the only question that now has to be asked, which is how he wind up being the sort of person who would intend to do.

And that's where free will sort of withers on the vine.

Isn't one of the problems that the answer to that question is very, very complicated and long, whereas the answers to the other questions are yes or no?

And I've sort of seen that contrast over and over again.

I think the other two terms we need to define here before we go any further are determinism, and

Go ahead and unpack those however you like.

Determinism, sort of among scientists, philosophers, all of that.

It's basically admitting that the world is made out of sciencey sort of stuff, where we're made of cells, cells are made of molecules.

And thus we're dealing with, like, the laws of physical universe.

In my mind, what determinism means in the context of free will debate is if you take two, one of them has had the most outrageously successful life possible and is a CEO of somewhere, and

If you switched their childhoods and you switched their genes and you switched their prenatal environments and you switched what sort of neighborhood they lived in as an adolescent, so on and so forth, the other one would be the CEO, and

That's how I think of determinism in an everyday sense.

That how these people wound up was completely sculpted by all the things that came before that they had no control over.

And how is compatibilism different from that?

Well, that's kind of where 90% of philosophers are, according to polls, which is.

Yeah, they say the universe is indeed made up of atoms and there's like, physical laws, and

And yet somehow, somehow there is still room to pull free will out of there.

These are folks who definitionally are compatible with the notion that this is a deterministic world.

Yet somehow there's free will, and somehow it's okay to hold people responsible for their actions.

You call yourself a hard incompatibilist or a hard determinist.

And where do you fit in between these two poles you just defined?

Well, so alongside those deterministic compatibilists, there's us incompatibilists who say that makes no sense.