You’re thirsty so you reach for a glass of water. It’s either a...

You’re thirsty so you reach for a glass of water. It’s either a freely chosen action or the inevitable result of the laws of nature, depending on who you ask. Do we have free will? The question is ancient—and vexing. Everyone seems to have pondered it, and many seem quite certain of the answer, which is typically either “yes” or “absolutely not.”

One scientist in the “absolutely not” camp is Robert Sapolsky. In his new book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, the primatologist and Stanford professor of neurology spells out why we can’t possibly have free will. Why do we behave one way and not another? Why do we choose Brand A over Brand B, or vote for Candidate X over Candidate Y? Not because we have free will, but because every act and thought are the product of “cumulative biological and environmental luck.”

"Sapolsky tells readers that the “biology over which you had no control, interacting with the environment over which you had no control, made you you.” That is to say, “everything in your childhood, starting with how you were mothered within minutes of birth, was influenced by culture, which means as well by the centuries of ecological factors that influenced what kind of culture your ancestors invented, and by the evolutionary pressures that molded the species you belong to...

Many scientists and philosophers beg to differ. Prominent among them is Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Trinity College in Dublin. In his new book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Mitchell argues that although we’re shaped by our biology, it’s that very biology that made us, over the course of billions of years of evolution, into free agents. Even the earliest and most primitive creatures had some capacity to control their destinies."

..."And yet some of Sapolsky’s arguments are also convincing. He, too, has physicists on his side. In her 2022 book Existential Physics, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder writes that the idea of free will is incoherent.“For your will to be free, it shouldn’t be caused by anything else. But if it wasn’t caused by anything—if it’s an ‘uncaused cause,’ as Friedrich Nietzsche put it—then it wasn’t caused by you, regardless of just what you mean by you. As Nietzsche summed it up, it’s ‘the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far.’ I’m with Nietzsche.”


Yes, we have free will. No, we absolutely do not. - Big Think