Why did that behavior—dastardly, noble, or ambiguously in between—just occur? Because of what happened a second before, and a minute before, and a . . . The easy takeaway from the first half of this book is that the biological determinants of our behavior stretch widely over space and time—responding to events in front of you this instant but also to events on the other side of the planet or that shaped your ancestors centuries back. And those influences are deep and subterranean, and our ignorance of the shaping forces beneath the surface leads us to fill in the vacuum with stories of agency. Just to restate that irritatingly-familiar-by-now notion, we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control—our biology, our environments, their interactions.
The most important message was that these are not all separate -ology fields producing behavior. They all merge into one—evolution produces genes marked by the epigenetics of early environment, which produce proteins that, facilitated by hormones in a particular context, work in the brain to produce you. A seamless continuum leaving no cracks between the disciplines into which to slip some free will.
Because of this, as covered in chapter 2, it doesn’t really matter what Libet-style experiments do or don’t show; it doesn’t really matter when intent occurred. All that matters is how that intent came to be. We can’t successfully wish to not wish for what we wish for; we can’t announce that good and bad luck even out over time, since they’re far more likely to progressively diverge. Someone’s history can’t be ignored, because all we are is our history.
Moreover, as the point of chapter 4, it’s biological turtles all the way down with respect to all of who we are, not just some parts. It’s not the case that while our natural attributes and aptitudes are made of sciencey stuff, our character, resilience, and backbone come packaged in a soul. Everything is turtles all the way down, and when you come to a juncture where you must choose between the easy way and the harder but better way, your frontal cortex’s actions are the result of the exact same one-second-before-one-minute-before as everything else in your brain. It is the reason that, try as we might, we can’t will ourselves to have more willpower.
Moreover, this seamless continuum of biology and environment forming us doesn’t leave room for novel portals of free will by way of the revolutions of chapters 5–10. Yes, all the interesting things in the world can be shot through with chaoticism, including a cell, an organ, an organism, a society. And as a result, there are really important things that can’t be predicted, that can never be predicted. But nonetheless, every step in the progression of a chaotic system is made of determinism, not whim. And yes, take a huge number of simple component parts that interact in simple ways, let them interact, and stunningly adaptive complexity emerges. But the component parts remain precisely as simple, and they can’t transcend their biological constraints to contain magical things like free will—a brick may want to be something elegant and glamorous, but it will always remain a brick. And yes, truly indeterministic things seem to happen way down at the subatomic level. Nonetheless, it’s not possible for that level of weirdness to percolate all the way up to influence behavior, and besides, if you base your notion of being a free, willful agent on randomness, you got problems. As do the people stuck around you; it can be very unsettling when a sentence doesn’t end in the way that you potato. Likewise when behavior is random.
As shown in everyday life, in jury boxes, schoolrooms, award ceremonies, eulogies, and the work of experimental philosophers, people hold on to the notion of free will with ferocious tenacity. The pull toward attribution and judgment, whether of others or of ourselves, is enormous and is demonstrable (to varying extents) in cultures all over the world. Heck, even chimps believe in free will.[*],[1]
Given that, my goal hasn’t been to convince every reader that there is no free will whatsoever. I recognize that I’m on the fringe here, fellow traveling with only a handful of scholars (e.g., Gregg Caruso, Sam Harris, Derk Pereboom, Peter Strawson). I’ll settle for merely significantly challenging someone’s free-will faith. Sufficiently so that they will reframe their thinking about both our everyday lives and our most consequential moments. Hopefully, you’ve reached that point.
Nonetheless, we have a big problem, which is that amid all this science and determinism and mechanism, we’re still not very adept at predicting behavior. Take someone with extensive frontal cortical damage, and you’re on solid ground predicting that their social behavior will be inappropriate, but good luck predicting whether they’ll become an impulsive murderer or someone who is rude to a dinner host. Take someone raised in a hellhole of adversity and deprivation, and you’re pretty safe predicting that the outcome won’t be good, but not much beyond that.
In addition to the unpredictable versions of predictable outcomes, there are a world’s worth of exceptions, of thoroughly unpredictable outcomes. Every so often, two rich, brilliant law students murder a fourteen-year-old as a test of their addled philosophy.[*] Or a Crips gang member facing his second stint in jail has his mug shot go viral and winds up as an international fashion model and brand ambassador for a Swiss fragrance line, squiring around the daughter of a knighted Brit business mogul.[*] Maybe Laurey, out among the waving wheat in Oklahoma, realizes that Curley’s a dull pretty boy, and shacks up with Jud Fry.[2]
Will we ever get to the point where our behavior is entirely predictable, given the deterministic gears grinding underneath? Never—that’s one of the points of chaoticism. But the rate at which we are accruing new insights into those gears is boggling—nearly every fact in this book was discovered in the last fifty years, probably half in the last five. The Society for Neuroscience, the world’s premier professional organization for brain scientists, grew from five hundred founding members to twenty-five thousand in its first quarter century. In the time it has taken you to read this paragraph, two different scientists have discovered the function in the brain of some gene and are already squabbling about who did it first. Unless the process of discovery in science grinds to a halt tonight at midnight, the vacuum of ignorance that we try to fill with a sense of agency will just keep shrinking. Which raises the question that motivates the second half of this book.[3]
I’m sitting at my desk during afternoon office hours; two students from my class are asking questions about topics from lectures; we wander into biological determinism, free will, the whole shebang, which is what the course is ultimately about. One of the students is dubious about the extent to which we lack free will: “Sure, if there’s major damage to this part of the brain, if you have a mutation in this or that gene, free will is diminished, but it just seems so hard to accept that it applies to everyday, normal behavior.” I’ve been at this juncture in this discussion many times, and I’ve come to recognize that there is a significant likelihood that this student will now carry out a particular behavior—they will lean forward, pick up a pen on my desk, hold it up in the air and say to me, with great emphasis, “There, I just decided to pick up this pen—are you telling me that was completely out of my control?”
I don’t have the data to prove it, but I think I can predict above the chance level which of any given pair of students will be the one who picks up the pen. It’s more likely to be the student who skipped lunch and is hungry. It’s more likely to be the male, if it is a mixed-sex pair. It is especially more likely if it is a heterosexual male and the female is someone he wants to impress. It’s more likely to be the extrovert. It’s more likely to be the student who got way too little sleep last night and it’s now late afternoon. Or whose circulating androgen levels are higher than typical for them (independent of their sex). It’s more likely to be the student who, over the months of the class, has decided that I’m an irritating blowhard, just like their father.
Marching further back, it’s more likely to be the one of the pair who is from a wealthy family, rather than on a full scholarship, who is the umpteenth generation of their family to attend a prestigious university, rather than the first member of their immigrant family to finish high school. It’s more likely if they’re not a firstborn son. It’s more likely if their immigrant parents chose to come to the U.S. for economic gain as opposed to having fled their native land as refugees from persecution, more likely if their ancestry is from an individualist culture rather than a collectivist one.
It’s the first half of this book, providing an answer to their question, “There, I just decided to pick up this pen—are you telling me that was completely out of my control?” Yes, I am.
By now, easy. But I’m really cornered if instead, the student asks something different: “What if everyone started believing that there is no free will? How are we supposed to function? Why would we bother getting up in the morning if we’re just machines?” Hey, don’t ask me that; that’s too difficult to answer. The second half of this book is an attempt to provide some answers.