Are You a Rationalist? If You Really Believe That You Have a Right to Anything More Than Anyone Else

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If more people were aware of how much of our everyday behavior was not completely rational rule based cognitive and how much of it was automatic visceral driven by heuristics that we've inherited from thousands of years ago it would cast our decisions in a slightly different light. If you really believe this stuff you have no rational grounds for ever hating anyone because they didn't have a damn thing to do with whatever it is they did, Robert Sapolsky says. "I can think those ways for about three and a half seconds at a time before I fall back into the much more encouraging stuff" said Sean O'Brien on Mindscape podcast.

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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