Do We Have Free Will? | Robert Sapolsky & Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | [Silence]

00:00:04.000 | Along the lines of choice, I'd like to shift gears slightly and talk about free will,

00:00:10.000 | about our ability to make choices at all.

00:00:14.000 | Well, my personal way out and left field inflammatory stance is

00:00:22.000 | I don't think we have a shred of free will.

00:00:26.000 | Despite 95% of philosophers and I think probably the majority of neuroscientists

00:00:34.000 | saying that we have free will in at least some circumstances,

00:00:38.000 | I don't think there's any at all.

00:00:41.000 | The reason for this is you do something, you behave, you make a choice, whatever,

00:00:49.000 | and to understand why you did that, where did that intention come from,

00:00:56.000 | part of it was due to the sensory environment you were in in the previous minute.

00:01:01.000 | Some of it is from the hormone levels in your bloodstream that morning.

00:01:05.000 | Some of it is from whether you had a wonderful or stressful last three months

00:01:11.000 | and what sort of neuroplasticity happened.

00:01:13.000 | Part of it is what hormone levels you were exposed to as a fetus.

00:01:18.000 | Part of it is what culture your ancestors came up with

00:01:21.000 | and thus how you were parented when you were a kid.

00:01:25.000 | All of those are in there and you can't understand where behavior is coming from

00:01:29.000 | without incorporating all of those.

00:01:32.000 | And at that point, not only are there all of these relevant factors,

00:01:41.000 | but they're ultimately all one factor.

00:01:44.000 | If you're talking about what evolution has to do with your behavior,

00:01:48.000 | by definition you're also talking about genetics.

00:01:51.000 | If you're talking about what your genes have to do with behavior,

00:01:54.000 | by definition you're talking about how your brain was constructed

00:01:58.000 | or what proteins are coded for.

00:02:00.000 | If you're talking about like your mood disorder now,

00:02:05.000 | you're talking about the sense of efficacy you were getting as a five-year-old.

00:02:09.000 | They're all intertwined and when you look at all those influences,

00:02:14.000 | basically the challenge is show me a neuron that just caused that behavior

00:02:21.000 | or show me a network of neurons that just caused that behavior

00:02:25.000 | and show me that nothing about what they just did was influenced

00:02:30.000 | by anything from the sensory environment one second ago

00:02:34.000 | to the evolution of your species.

00:02:36.000 | And there's no space in there to fit in a free will concept

00:02:42.000 | that winds up being in your brain but not of your brain.

00:02:47.000 | There's simply no wiggle room for it there.

00:02:51.000 | So I can appreciate that our behaviors and our choices are the consequence

00:02:56.000 | of a long line of dominoes that fell prior to that behavior.

00:03:01.000 | But is it possible that I can intervene in the domino effect, so to speak?

00:03:09.000 | In other words, can my recognition of the fact that genes have heritability,

00:03:15.000 | there's an epigenome, that there's a hormonal context,

00:03:19.000 | there's a historical context,

00:03:22.000 | can the knowledge of that give me some small, small shard of free will?

00:03:29.000 | Meaning, does it allow me to say, ah, okay,

00:03:32.000 | I accept that my choices are somewhat predetermined,

00:03:36.000 | and yet knowing that gives me some additional layer of control.

00:03:41.000 | Is there any philosophical or biological universe in which that works?

00:03:49.000 | - Nah.

00:03:52.000 | All of that can produce the wonderfully positive belief that change can happen.

00:04:00.000 | Even traumatic change, even in the worst of circumstances,

00:04:03.000 | most unlikely people, and change can happen.

00:04:06.000 | Things can change.

00:04:08.000 | Don't be fatalistic.

00:04:10.000 | Don't decide because we're mechanistic biological machines that nothing can--

00:04:15.000 | Change can happen.

00:04:17.000 | But where people go off the rails is translating that into,

00:04:25.000 | we can change ourselves.

00:04:28.000 | We don't.

00:04:29.000 | We can't, because there's no free will.

00:04:31.000 | However, we can be changed by circumstance.

00:04:36.000 | And the point of it is, like, you look at an aplesia, a sea slug,

00:04:44.000 | that has learned to retract its gill in response to a shock on its tail.

00:04:49.000 | You can do, like, conditioning, Pavlovian conditioning on it,

00:04:53.000 | and it has learned its behavior has been changed by its environment.

00:04:58.000 | And you hear news about something, like, horrifically depressing going on,

00:05:04.000 | and, you know, refugees in wherever.

00:05:10.000 | And as a result, you feel a little bit more helpless

00:05:14.000 | and a less of a sense of efficacy in the world,

00:05:17.000 | and both of your behaviors have been changed.

00:05:21.000 | Okay, okay, yeah, I guess that's good.

00:05:24.000 | But the remarkable thing is, it's the exact same neurobiology.

00:05:29.000 | The signal transduction pathways that were happening in that sea snail

00:05:34.000 | incorporate the exact same kinases and proteases and phosphatases

00:05:40.000 | that we do when you're having mammalian fear conditioning.

00:05:45.000 | Or when you're -- it's conserved.

00:05:49.000 | It's the exact same thing.

00:05:51.000 | It's simply playing out in, obviously, a much, much fancier domain.

00:05:55.000 | And because you have learned that change is possible,

00:06:03.000 | despite understanding mechanistically

00:06:05.000 | that we can't change ourselves volitionally,

00:06:08.000 | but because you understand change is possible,

00:06:11.000 | you have just changed the ability of your brain

00:06:15.000 | to respond to optimistic stimuli.

00:06:18.000 | And you have changed the ability of your brain

00:06:21.000 | to now send you in the direction of being exposed to more information

00:06:25.000 | that will seem cheerful rather than depressing.

00:06:28.000 | Oh, my God, that's amazing what Nelson Mandela

00:06:32.000 | and Martin Luther King and all these folks did.

00:06:35.000 | Wow, under the most adverse of circumstances, they were able to do it.

00:06:39.000 | Maybe I can also.

00:06:41.000 | Maybe I can go read more about people like them

00:06:44.000 | to get even more data points of changed neurochemistry

00:06:49.000 | so that your responses are different now.

00:06:52.000 | And, you know, you're tilted a little bit more in that direction

00:06:56.000 | of feeling like you can make a difference

00:06:58.000 | instead of it's all damn hopeless.

00:07:01.000 | So enormous change can happen,

00:07:03.000 | but the last thing that could come out of a view of

00:07:07.000 | we are nothing more or less than the sum of our biology

00:07:10.000 | and its interaction with the environment

00:07:12.000 | is to throw up your hands and say,

00:07:14.000 | and thus it's no use trying to change anything.

00:07:18.000 | So we can acknowledge that change is extremely hard to impossible,

00:07:23.000 | that circumstances can change,

00:07:25.000 | and yet that striving to be better human beings

00:07:28.000 | is still a worthwhile endeavor.

00:07:30.000 | Do I have that correct?

00:07:32.000 | Absolutely, because simply the knowledge either from experience

00:07:37.000 | or making it to the end of the right neurobiology class

00:07:41.000 | has taught you that change can happen

00:07:44.000 | within a framework of a mechanistic neurobiology.

00:07:49.000 | You are now more open to being made optimistic

00:07:52.000 | by the good news in the world around you.

00:07:54.000 | You are more likely to be inspired by this or that.

00:07:57.000 | You are more resistant to getting discouraged by bad news

00:08:01.000 | simply because you now understand it's possible.

00:08:05.000 | [music]

Do We Have Free Will? | Robert Sapolsky & Andrew Huberman

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