Are You a Free Will Skeptic?

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I don't believe there's a shred of agency that goes into any of our behavior. 500 years ago in virtually every European country, if you had an epileptic seizure, the best doctors around had a diagnosis for you as to what caused it. And they had an absolutely clear neurological intervention, which was to burn you at the stake. Somewhere along the way, people learned, oh, no, it's actually a disease. They stopped putting people with epilepsy in psychiatric hospitals. People started developing laws that distinguished between who a person is and what a seizure might do to them. I'm not sure why constant exposure to these kinds of ideas would erode someone's belief in free will.

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

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Robert Sapolsky received his Ph.D. in neuroendocrinology from Rockefeller University. He is currently the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at Stanford University. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the McGovern Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Wonderfest’s Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.

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