I am Mr. There's No Free Will

During his November 2, 2023 podcast, Scott Galloway—the famous investor, NYU marketing professor, and frequent guest on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher—said that "free will denial is almost a movement right now."

It is a movement. There's Sam Harris—celebrity atheist, meditation advocate, neuroscience PhD—who published Free Will in 2012, and there's Robert Sapolsky—primatologist, stress hormones expert, Stanford professor, and author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and of the bestselling, encyclopedic Behave—who has a new book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, which came out three months ago.

And there's me. (Galen Strawson, Derk Peerboom, Greg Caruso are also deniers but not crusaders.)

Arrayed against us is probably 95% of Americans and the vast majority of philosophers too. According to a 2020 survey of more than 1700 philosophy professors, only 11% denied free will. Daniel Dennett—another celebrity atheist—is probably the biggest defender of free will.

And yet...

Free will is an illusion.

"So what? What difference does it make?" you say. Here's why it's interesting.

Forget for the moment the potentially soporific arguments for and against free will. There is a different angle on this. I've been researching and writing up the psychological effects of denying free will on the person who denies it. Yes, that's right. You might prefer they'd spend their time curing cancer, but some scientists have conducted experiments to see how people's behavior changes when you "prime" them with a text denying free will.

According Harris and Sapolsky, pervasive free will denial would be overwhelmingly salutary, that is, it would be a good thing for society and the individual. We'd be more forgiving of others and of ourselves, we'd attribute success to luck not hard work... Attributing your success to hard work is something the lucky, i.e., the privileged, tend to do right now.

Another good result of society-wide recognition that there's no free will would be that the criminal justice system would have to be dismantled root and branch.

There is a related, third implication that is dear to Sapolsky. He want government to intervene to prevent all childhood poverty. As a neuroendocrinologist, it was his research (in combination with others') that showed that poverty causes stress and stress hormones degrade brain development in young people. Poverty-caused stress is detrimental to the brain regions responsible for executive function, self-control, and emotional regulation. The data is striking. Stress hormones—those triggered in fight or flight, and regenerated in a chronic way by impoverished conditions—tell the body to inhibit growth and reproductive processes and concentrate on the fight or flight situation. Extreme, prolonged stress in childhood can significantly stunt a young person's growth. It's called "stress dwarfism" or sometimes "psychosocial short stature."

It's easy to glom onto physical examples like that: you see a man who is 4 feet 5 inches tall and you can guess he had a terrible childhood. But stress hormones are as bad for the brain as they are for growth to normal height. If you see someone with poor emotional regulation, deficits in executive function, and poor impulse control, you might be looking at someone in prison. And you might conclude they had an impoverished childhood... through no fault of their own.

It struck me recently that free will denial ought to be the cause célèbre on the progressive left. What pervasive recognition of the illusory nature of free will would require of society is pretty much what progressives say they envision for society. People who get in trouble with the law are actually rehabilitated rather than locked up in inhumane conditions.

The liberal left already wants to intervene to prevent childhood poverty.

So perhaps Sapolsky and Harris are onto something. But that brings us back to the studies scientists have done around the effect of free will denial on psychology and behavior. These studies as a group overwhelmingly show (or seem to show) that if you "prime" experimental subjects with free will denial by having them read a deterministic argument, they are more likely—to a degree that was statistically significant—to lie, cheat, and steal in subsequent lab games or observed situations.

I can argue with you about whether or not we have free will. I'm prepared with all the arguments against and I know all the arguments for, which I'd have to rebut. Send them to me. But I'm already moving on—because it is interesting and is our future—to consider what free will denial would be like. Are the psychological effects really so terrible? Or is there hope for Harris and Sapolsky's vision?

What is it like to deny free will?

There's no free will. There. I said it. And you read it. So you thought it. Now try to believe it.

The interesting thing is, even if you are a free will denier like me and Sapolsky (Harris is a special case I will return to: he has asserted he no longer "feels like I could have done otherwise) ... even if you deny free will, it is (dis)belief that evaporates pretty quickly. You return to your natural credence as soon as you blame someone or praise yourself. Even Sapolsky cops (I was going to say "freely cops") to this. He likes to tell a story about how, immediately after finishing a syllogism concluding in the falsity of free will, someone says to him, "You're dressed nice today," and, as Sapolsky tells it, "I say 'Thank you,' as if I had anything to do with it."

I'll also admit that if you concentrate and work hard to prevent the disbelief from fading, if you really grok that free will is an illusion, it is quite a dizzying experience. It means we are robots who labor under the illusion that we are not robots. It's disorienting. I have started to call this state "armchair vertigo," because it comes from thinking "too much" and goes away once you get out of the armchair of philosophizing and you engage again in the world.

I will stop here for now. I have a lot more to say about:

• Benjamin Libet's research and its controversial upshot... which is not needed anyway because the idea that consciousness gets its contents from nonconscious processes in the brain can be established a priori, as Nietzsche did 145 years ago.

• John-Dylan Haynes fMRI improvements on Libet's research (predicting thoughts and actions before the subjects thinks or acts)

• The recent AI-aided mind reading fMRI experiments in the news last Labor Day, which seemed to me to contravene free will

• The two different definitions of free will

  • I am free if I could have done otherwise than I did in fact do (that's called the libertarian definition of free will (this definition is meant to deny causal determinism)

  • I could not have done otherwise but I am free when what causes me to act is, for example, a desire I desire to have. (Definitions in this ballpark are called compatibilist because they mean free will to be compatible with causal determinism)

• Which definition is it that regular people (the non-philosopher, human on the street, i.e., "the folk") use when they say, "I have free will"? Lots to say on what experimental philosophy and social psychology has found and its impact on the debate

• I have more to say, too, on the psychological effects of denial. I can also summarize Sapolsky's rebuttal against their supposed findings which he offers in his new book "Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will"

• I have written a 6000-word New Yorker-style profile of Sapolsky (could work as a personal essay too) if any magazine editors are reading this