Overview
In this interview, Robert Sapolsky outlines his view on Free Will and related topics. The discussion anticipates his upcoming book Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will. Various topics are covered at the intersection of neuroscience with philosophy, education, and the criminal justice system.
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
Read the source for the full argument, qualifications, and evidence.
Findings and contributions
- Sapolsky states he is fully convinced humans have no free will, a view he says he has held since adolescence.
- Sapolsky argues that our conscious sense of agency is usually a post-hoc attribution.
- Responding to claims that disbelief in free will increases cheating, Sapolsky says those studies have not been replicated and that people already disbelieving are not less ethical.
- Sapolsky cites roughly a 35% rise in likelihood of serious anti-social behavior with each increase in childhood adversity, arguing group-level science bears on legal responsibility.
- Sapolsky says a key lesson to teach researchers is the very limited usefulness of reductionism, given chaos and emergent complexity.
Methods
- Written Q&A interview of Robert Sapolsky by Mikhailova and Friedman — The interviewers pose questions on free will, consciousness, law, and education; Sapolsky answers in prose, anticipating his book Determined.
- Questions seeded from Sapolsky's prior podcast appearances — The opening question picks up statements Sapolsky made on the Huberman, Here We Are, and Freakonomics Radio podcasts.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
Document downloads
PDFs are hosted here; supporting sources may use pinned archives.
- 2022_FreeWillSapolsky.pdf PDF · 0.28 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
Citation metadata follows the unified bibliography.
Catalog details and resources
Related works
Ranked by recorded methods, topics, contributors and associated software, with contributor roles and domain-only matches labelled. Metadata overlap is not a citation or a scientific equivalence.