https://www.newscientist.com/article/23 ... -sapolsky/Robert Sapolsky is one of the most revered scientists alive today. He made his name from his work studying wild baboons in Kenya, unpicking how their complex social lives lead to stress and how that affects their health.
His most recent focus, however, has been on something rather different – a book that comprehensively argues that free will doesn’t exist in any shape or form.
As he writes: “We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control – our biology, our environments, their interactions”.
Basically, his point is that the choices you make are not made by free will in the moment, they are the result of various conditioning factors that work together to produce the choice. You make your choices subconsciously as a result of those conditioning factors in the split seconds before you feel like you’ve used free will to make a choice.In terms of my orientation, my basic approach is you look at a behaviour and someone has just done something that’s wonderful or awful or ambiguously in-between or in the eyes of the beholder, but some behaviour has happened, and you ask, “Why did that occur?” and you’re asking a whole hierarchy of questions. You’re, of course, asking, “Which neurons did what, ten milliseconds before?” but you’re also asking, “What sensory stimuli in the previous minutes triggered that?” but you’re also asking, “What did this morning’s hormone levels have to do with how sensitive your brain would be to those stimuli?”
You’re also asking, “What have the previous months been, trauma, stimulation, whatever, in terms of neuroplasticity?” and before you know it, you’re back to adolescents and your last gasp of constructing your frontal cortex, and childhood and foetal environment and it’s epigenetic consequences, and of course, genes. Amazingly, at that point, you have to push further back. What sort of culture were your ancestors inventing and what sort of ecosystems prompted those inventions, because that was influencing how your mother was mothering you within minutes of birth, and then, you know, some evolution thrown in for good measure.
Another, relevant question to the topic of free will, is do people with narcissism, sociopathic, or psychopath I personality disorders exercise free will?