Robert Sapolsky on Determinism, Free Will, and Responsibility

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2023

⏱️ 74 minutes

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Summary

Your mother's socio-economic status at the time of your birth. Whether your ancestors raised crops or led camels through the desert. The smell of the room you're in when you're making a decision--all of these things, says neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, combine to affect your behavior, as well as everything in between. And if you're wondering where free will fits in, Sapolsky says, it doesn't: If we're all the sum of our biology and environments over which we had no control, it makes no sense to hold us accountable for anything that we do. In a conversation that's equal parts fascinating and frightening, Sapolsky and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss the science and philosophy behind determinism. They explore what this argument, taken to its logical conclusion, means for our social and legal systems, and the challenge of how to live if free will is an illusion.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is September 20th, 2023,
0:40.0	my guest is neuroscientist and author Robert Sepulzky.
0:43.6	He is a John A and Cynthia Fry Gunn professor,
0:46.5	professor of biology of neurology and neurosurgery
0:49.4	at Stanford University.
0:51.2	His latest book is D.
0:53.4	A Science of Life without Free Well.
0:56.2	Robert, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:58.2	Thanks for having me on.
1:00.2	Let's start with the title of the book which is extremely clever.
1:04.0	Explain it.
1:05.0	Well, thank you.
1:08.0	For one thing, months and months were spent in agitated ambivalence as to whether it should be called determined
1:16.0	a science of or the science of.
1:19.5	And I decided that the sounded like even more grandiose than a does.
1:27.0	Well, as one might guess from the title, my stance is there's no free will whatsoever,
1:35.0	which I guess we will get to the implausibility of that shortly.
1:40.0	But the title in a sense is a play on the two meanings of it. What is the science
1:48.6	that shows that there is no free will and in some ways what was the much more meaningful part of the book for me,
1:57.8	is there a science of showing how we're supposed to function once we accept that there's no free will. So that's basically
	...

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