From Our Neurons to Yours

How to live in a world without free will | Robert Sapolsky

• Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, Nicholas Weiler, Robert Sapolsky • Season 6 • Episode 7

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Today, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament."

In his latest book, Determined, Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and environmental factors outside of our control.

Before we get into it, it's worth saying that where this is heading, the reason to care about this question is that Sapolsky's argument has profound moral implications for our understanding of justice, personal responsibility, and whether any of us deserve to be judged or praised for our actions.

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This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

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Nicholas Weiler (00:00):

Hey, everyone, Nicholas Weiler here. Before we get into this week's episode, just a couple of notes. First, this is the final episode for this year, but stay tuned as we will be back in early 2025 with more stories from the frontiers of neuroscience. Second, we're still looking for listener input and feedback to help inform the next phase of the show. If you'd be willing to help out, send us a short note and we'll be in touch. We are at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu, and you can find that address in the show notes. Now, let's get to today's episode.

(00:43):

This is From Our Neurons to Yours, a podcast from the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, bringing you to the frontiers of brain science.

(01:03):

Today, we have a treat for you. We are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky. If you're not familiar with Dr. Sapolsky, he's a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur Genius Grant winner, a bestselling author and one of the most original thinkers I've ever met. A few years ago, Sapolsky's bestselling book, Behave, gave a masterful overview of how our brains produce our behavior, taking readers on a tour of how everything we do results from the interplay between our brains, our bodies, our lifetime of experience, our genetics, and the family and culture we grew up in. Sapolsky actually told me that after Behave came out, he was surprised that many readers missed what he saw as the book's core message, specifically his conclusion that a biological account of human behavior leaves no room whatsoever for what we think of as free will.

(02:01):

In his latest book, Determined, Sapolsky tries to correct this misunderstanding. In Determined, he assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will, a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and environmental factors outside of our control. Now, I know that's a lot to process, but don't worry, we'll spend plenty of time discussing this in just a few minutes. But before we get into it, it's worth saying that where this is heading, the reason to care about this question is that Sapolsky's argument has profound moral implications for our understanding of justice, personal responsibility, and whether any of us deserve to be judged or praised for our actions. It's a fun chat, so let's get right into it.

(02:53):

Robert Sapolsky, welcome to From Our Neurons to Yours. I'm really excited to have you here.

Robert Sapolsky (02:57):

Well, thanks for having me on.

Nicholas Weiler (02:59):

I'm particularly excited about this conversation for a couple of reasons. One is that your books, particularly Primate's Memoir was a very formative read for me when I was first getting interested in neuroscience, thinking about the nature of behavior. I have fond memories of sitting in the lobby of the psychology building at my college and people staring at me because I was snorting with laughter when you were describing yourself being very excited to get a new blow dart, and hopping around your dorm room and imagining blow darting passing professors. That's an image that's always stuck with me, so I appreciate that. Thank you for that.

(03:34):

And the other is, I love a good debate about free will, discussion about consciousness, all these things. I know that not everyone does love discussions of free will. I've done an informal poll of colleagues and friends, and I think some people are put off by the topic either because it seems irrelevant, or overly complicated, or armchair philosophy, but one of the things I really appreciated about Determined, your book, is that from the outset it's very grounded morally in why it matters for us to think about free will. What are the stakes? So, I wonder if we could start with that, what are the stakes for you of thinking about free will and your position that we probably don't have any?

Robert Sapolsky (04:19):

Well, I think the stakes are whether or not we want to function as some modern equivalent of a society that burns people at the stake.

(04:30):

Oh, great. The dog just started barking.

Nicholas Weiler (04:33):

It's because you said stake, I think.

Robert Sapolsky (04:36):

Let me lure him back in. Okay. Well, he said he will be reasonable.

Nicholas Weiler (04:45):

I'll repeat the question. So, what are the stakes here? Why is it important for us to think about free will?

Robert Sapolsky (04:50):

Well, it determines whether or not we think it's tolerable to have a society in which people believe in witch burning or contemporary versions of it in which we hold people responsible for things they had no control over, and that essentially is everything by the time I'm done with my song and dance about this, and every time we are proud of ourselves about something and thus conclude that we are entitled to some sort of better treatment than any other person. It influences everything, my view.

Nicholas Weiler (05:27):

Yeah. I mean, we spend a lot of time as humans judging people's behavior as good and praiseworthy or bad and worthy of censure or punishment. So, I was struck in reading the book that this argument that we have no freedom of choice at all, it is quite revolutionary. And I want to get back to the question towards the end of what it would mean to live that way, but first maybe we can get into the science.

(05:55):

So, most of us realize we're not completely free in our choices. I can't decide that starting tomorrow I want to be a professional basketball player, or maybe more relevant to us, if I have a disorder like depression, I can't simply decide not to have it. My actions are constrained by genetics, my upbringing, my life history, and the brain that I'm working with and I recognize all of that. But there are places where we feel strongly like we are making free choices. I'm deciding right now how to phrase this question and you'll decide how to respond. I sometimes skip breakfast, but this morning I decided to at least have a bowl of Cheerios because I didn't want to be hungry when we were talking. A few weeks ago, I decided to invite you on the show and you decided to accept. So, your argument is that all of these choices are illusions and all of our behavior is determined by what came before. Help us understand this.

Robert Sapolsky (06:47):

Well, and there's a couple of classic ways in which people get caught up in a quicksand of believing they're seeing free will when it isn't there, but this is the most powerful one because we run on intuition and intuition is a pretty lousy litmus test for deciding how the world works. The intuition is, in a moment you're there and you decide that you're going to have Cheerios instead of cornflakes, or going and shooting up a shopping mall, or something. You have made a decision at that point. You've formed an intent. You were conscious of the intent. You had a pretty good feeling that if you opened up the Cheerios and poured it out, it would result in your eating it. And most importantly, you knew you did have alternatives available to you. For most people, that is so palpable and so in the moment that it seems inconceivable that we did not choose to have the intent to have Cheerios that morning.

(07:51):

Some incredibly interesting debates in neuroscience have been swirling for 40 years over what's going on when you form an intent, and do you form the intent, do you initiate the behavior before you're consciously aware of it, and which part... And in my view, none of that has anything to do with anything, because it's getting on the scene in the last five seconds of a movie.

(08:18):

The only relevant question to ask is one that is not asked too often at that point is, how do you become the sort of person who would form that intent at that point, not in the very narrow sense of why Cheerios, and because you saw a commercial last night, or who knows what? But in a much broad, how did you turn out to be the sort of person who could buy food, who would have the value of eating this instead of that, the sort of person who would get up in time in the morning to eat breakfast because you had an... How did you turn out to be the sort of person who would be here right now? How did you wind up in university? How did you wind up learning to read? How did you wind up not dying of cholera at some point? All of those things.

(09:04):

And all we are is whatever brought us to that moment and made us form that intent because no matter how much you want to try, you cannot intend something different than what you're intending. And what we're intending is the byproduct of everything that made us who we are up to this moment. And when you take that apart, we had no control over it.

Nicholas Weiler (09:30):

Yeah. That's really powerful. I mean, it is this summary of all of our history and everything that came before that forms such a core part of your book. One of the things that I was curious about, and you touch on some of this in the book... We're very focused on the frontiers of neuroscience here on the show. This question of free will goes back as long as people have been sitting around debating ideas. I wonder how much of your perspective on this that there is no free will, is that new science or is that something that you feel has been established for a long time and it's just time for us to recognize the implications of it?

Robert Sapolsky (10:08):

Oh, it's very, very recent science, by which I mean in the last few centuries or so. Yeah, it's contemporary neuroscience that does it, but it's also contemporary sociology. It's contemporary early child development, and fetal environment, and physiological ecology, and why we form the sorts of cultures that we do in different settings and how that influences how you were mothered from your first minute of life, et cetera, et cetera. It's not so much neuroscience on its own does not prove there's no free will. Genetics doesn't prove that. Child development doesn't prove... But put all the pieces together and it does for a really important reason. It's not just, ooh, you've got to take a whole bunch of interdisciplinary views into account.` It's when you see how biology in us influences our interactions with environment and how we have no damn control over either. When you see that it's not different disciplines, they all merge into one.

(11:13):

If you're talking about the effects of genes on behavior, by definition you're talking about millions of years of the evolution of it and the evolution of behavior. If you're talking about genes, you're also talking about your fetal environment and the epigenetic programming that went on in your brain as a result of prenatal environment. And if you're talking about genes behavior, you're talking about like whether or not your stomach is gurgling right now if you did or didn't have breakfast this morning and what proteins you've been synthesizing in your brain over the last hour or so as a result of the genes that you have. And the key point is, when you see all those disciplines form this one big arc of causality, there's not a crack anywhere in that in which you could shoehorn in the concept of free will.

(12:06):

At this point, I mean, I'm not trying to seem snarky, but the logical thing is rather than to ask someone like me, "Why do you believe there's no free will?", is to instead turn to someone who is still insisting there's free will and say, "Oh, yeah, show me how it works. Show me how we know the brain is influenced by an environment of an hour ago, and hormones from last night, and your early childhood and your fetal life, et cetera. Show me where there's room in there for you to have formed an intent and acted upon it completely free of that history." And nobody can, because you can't.

Nicholas Weiler (12:45):

Well, this is where I felt like I was following the argument and sort of nodding along as I was reading the book and as I've heard you speak. And this is one place where I'd love to get some clarification because, to me, when I think about free will, I sort of mean free from my decisions being controlled from outside myself. And it sounds like that's not exactly what you're talking about. You're talking about decisions that are free from history, or from anything that came before. Do I have that right?

Robert Sapolsky (13:14):

Yeah.

Nicholas Weiler (13:15):

I mean, I consider my personal history, and my culture and everything that I bring to the table as the things that allow me to make a decision. Without those things, I'd be lost. I couldn't make decisions at all. So, I guess, my question is, how is that not free if at least many of the factors that go into decision-making are part of the circle of myself?

Robert Sapolsky (13:37):

Well, there's two key points in that. One is this critical word you just used, myself, because what's floating between the lines, between the letters of that word is this dualistic notion that there's a me in there. There's a me in there separate of all the material bases of the universe that while they're producing the brain you have, and the motor memories you have, and the bladder you have and everything else, that there is a me in there that is sort of in the brain, but not of the brain. That there's a me that's separate of any of that.

(14:18):

The other is the notion that you had anything to do with becoming this thing that we erroneously view as this entity of a me separate of everything else up inside your head, that it's anything other than the sum of the randomness of life and the luck that preceded every minute of your life. And in that regard, the fact that it arose within you as opposed to somebody put a gun to your head and told you you had to eat Cheerios today, that point is irrelevant because it's still not touching on the question of how you behave that person, who would generate with the thing you call me would generate that intent. And when you put all the pieces together, you had no control over that intent because there's no you that is independent of everything that formed the brain that you have at this moment.

Nicholas Weiler (15:18):

This is an idea that I'd love to come back to a little bit later in our conversation, but you make a great point that when we are making decisions, when we are having this experience of feeling like I am choosing something freely, so I think it might be helpful for the rest of our discussion if we took a moment to think about what do we know about how the brain actually does make decisions? What is happening when I'm making a choice? And then maybe you can help us connect that to all of these threads and strands from the history of the individual and the history of the universe that determine the outcome.

Robert Sapolsky (15:57):

Great. The first thing with that is, yeah, at junctures we are making a choice. And neuroscientists like Kevin Mitchell at Trinity College Dublin, who just virtually the same week I published my book, saying, "Here's the neuroscience of why there's no free will", he published a book saying basically, "Here's the neuroscience of why there is free will." And we had a wonderfully incoherent debate on something or other about six months ago, and we're running it again in a different venue next week.

Nicholas Weiler (16:27):

Oh, great.

Robert Sapolsky (16:27):

Incoherent because it turns out that we're talking about totally different things. When you are making a decision, when you have gotten into your metaphorical organismal head to do this behavior, or turn on gene transcription of this gene instead of that, or have your cilius send you swimming to the left instead of the right, he does this wonderful analysis of essentially the evolution of how organisms derive information from the environment and make optimal decisions based on that, which is to say, "How do you not screw up and have your cilius swim you to the right, right into the mouth of some predator, or whatever." But all of that is about why, once you form your intent, your micro organismal intent of you as a single cell or you as a... Once you form that intent, how do you carry it out in a way so that there's a reasonably good chance that it will bring about the intent you've wanted? Do you have the sensory means to get the right information about the environment? And that's totally wonderful.

(17:38):

That's the most informed, I think, most interesting take on the evolution of the capacity to effectively act upon your intent, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the larger debate of, once again, where'd that intent come from?

Nicholas Weiler (17:57):

So, one of the things that I really found compelling in your book was you got into a section talking about willpower where some people say, "Well, yes, we all have our circumstances and there's the luck of the draw and so on. But if you have willpower, you can change things, and you can come out on top and so on." And you provide a pretty scathing rebuttal to that line of thinking, because you say you can't choose how much willpower you have, or whether you want to have more willpower, or whether you want to want to have more willpower. These are all things that are a result of, again, as we've said a few times already, everything that came before. So, is that where you're coming at from this like, "Yes, you have options. And yes, you choose one. But what options you come up with and which one you choose is based on who you are and where you come from"?

Robert Sapolsky (18:46):

Yep. And what you bring up I think is the second great moths to the flame pull towards seeing free will. First one being that in the moment you are forming an intent and acting upon it, it just feels so a agentive that is impossible for you to reflect on everything that made you who you are in that moment. The second thing is when you see someone do a spectacular act of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, or resisting temptation, or any version of showing willpower, the problem is exactly what you say, no matter how much you may want to, you cannot will yourself to have more willpower. And we understand the neurobiology of willpower and where that comes from just totally simplifying how your prefrontal cortex became the way it is. And it's the same story of antecedent causes. By the time you're three years old, the size of your prefrontal cortex and its metabolism is already significantly influenced by the socioeconomic status of the family you chose yourself to be born into.

(19:59):

We have this false dichotomy of you had no control over whether you're tall enough to play in the NBA, and whether you're left-handed or right-handed, or whether you have got an amazing memory, or any of that stuff. But ooh, what do you do with your natural attributes, that's made of willpower. And the trouble is, the false dichotomy is believing that what you have as your natural attributes are made of biology, but what you do with it is not, and it's made of this same exact biology. Willpower is made of the same stuff. It's not made out of fairy dust.

Nicholas Weiler (20:39):

Yeah. I was also struck that you had a beautiful chapter in the book about the capacity for change and that the absence of free will doesn't mean that people don't change. It just means that people change because of circumstances and environment and not because of some magical spark or some dualist external self that is changing the brain without being of the brain, as you say. And that was kind of comforting. It just means that, sure, we can change for the better, we can change for the worse, but that's largely based on whether we find ourselves in the circumstances that change us for the better or for the worse.

Robert Sapolsky (21:15):

And who we are when we stumble into that circumstance and, thus, how we're going to respond to it. Yeah. Exactly.

Nicholas Weiler (21:23):

So, one thing I wanted to follow up, you mentioned Kevin Mitchell's book and your debate, which I enjoyed. Though, I agree, it did sound like you were talking about slightly different things, but both of those things were interesting. So, one of the things that he brought up was your perspective on this is very much assuming, as many scientists do, that we live in a deterministic universe. And he was arguing that there is some indeterminacy in our choices, so that having different options, there is some way that there is not a predetermined outcome. And I haven't had a chance to read his book yet, I'm afraid. I didn't quite follow that. And I wonder if you could help us understand what he's saying and why you presumably don't agree with that.

Robert Sapolsky (22:04):

Okay. And this is great. Now, this gets us to the third of our dark triad of this deduction believing in free will is, if you think someone is saying there's no free will, that they are saying, "Two seconds after the Big Bang, the entire future was already determined. And thus, nothing can change from that. And thus, don't bother." That's as erroneous as believing you just formed an intent independent of the sort of brain you got handed by life. Where that comes in is two basic problems. Yeah, there's all sorts of random stuff, and the world of chaotic systems and non-linearities shows something absolutely critical, which is there's all kinds of stuff which is formally unpredictable. And it's not a matter of, ooh, when we get a better magnifying glass and we could see 10 more decimal places out to see what's really going... There's stuff that is unpredictable, but the key mistake that's made there is mistaking something being unpredictable with it having been undetermined.

(23:14):

There's just all sorts of realms in which antecedent causes are sensitive, dependent on initial conditions, that there's no way you're ever going to predict it. But that doesn't mean once it occurs, that it was not the end product of the same material universe that runs everything else. So, that's a really tempting conclusion that unpredictable means it wasn't determined.

(23:37):

The other piece that he pushes and where I think we have maybe our most fundamental difference is the one realm in the universe where stuff does seem to be undetermined and some stuff just happens without anteceding, but it is at the sub sub subatomic level. Where the debate then comes in is the world of quantum indeterminacy one that can bubble up enough dozen layers to affect behavior. I think when you dissect that one, it is impossible. Number one, it can't bubble up that much because when you probabilistically throw in all the particles that would be needed to just happen to do the same indeterminate thing at the same moment, that is beyond unlikely.

(24:30):

The second problem with that is even if it could bubble up that high, what you're just doing is outlining a sort of map for random behavior. The real Hail Mary that people go for at that point is some sort of [inaudible 00:24:48] irrational picture of how you can reach down at a higher level and harness quantum indeterminacy as a way of then shaping your behavior to your willpower. Every model that's given for how this supposedly works is contingent on basically nonsense. Quantum indeterminacy is utterly cool, but it's not the basis of deciding whether or not someone knew what they were doing and could have done otherwise.

Nicholas Weiler (25:19):

So, in the last part of our conversation, let's say that you've convinced us that there's no free will, that, as you say, that there's a myriad of threads in the material universe that determine our next move. And some of those threads we can see, most of them we can't, but they're all there and they're all determining what happens next. There's only one possible outcome. Either we accept that, or at least I think from your book, we can accept that there's much less free will than we commonly assume. And I think even Kevin Mitchell was very willing to accept that when you had your debate with him. So, I think the challenge is, it's hard to imagine a world where we believe that even though if the facts fully support it. Can you help paint us a picture? I mean, how do you see a world like that looking, where we all accepted this notion that our choices are all determined? Can you imagine living in a society like that?

Robert Sapolsky (26:12):

No, I can't. It's inconceivable because I'm a person of my place and time and I decided, when I was 14, that there's no free will whatsoever. And now more than half a century later, believe it, I can write a damn endless book about and all that. And 99% of the time I fail to follow through on what I see as the intellectual and the ethical requirements of believing there's no free will, which is to act as if blame and punishment make no sense whatsoever, and praise and reward make no sense whatsoever, and it is possible to feel pleased with yourself for something you have done, or to feel ashamed of yourself for something you've done, that none of that makes... Once a month or so for about three minutes, I can truly act in my judgments as if there is no free will whatsoever. And then I fall back into being a 21st century human with whatever foibles I have.

(27:17):

It seems inconceivable and maybe it is impossible, but the key thing is that over the centuries we've shown over and over again that we could subtract out a sense of volition and free will out of making sense of people's behavior. We've done it over and over again and sometimes so much so that intuitively it seems insane that people ever believed that like old ladies without teeth living on the edge of your hamlet could, by making the right potion, control the weather, that there are witches and that humans can will, if they're the right sort of Satan's sidekick, control the way... It just seems intuitively ridiculous, but all sorts of stuff...

(28:08):

Okay. Stay here.

Nicholas Weiler (28:10):

I tell you, it's every time you start talking about witches.

Robert Sapolsky (28:14):

He's a total wreck because it's almost Halloween and all those scary little cardboard things put up.

Nicholas Weiler (28:20):

So, you had said it's nonsensical to believe there's magic, people can control the weather because they're the sidekick of the devil. So, we've gotten over that. Although, I guess, there's some members of Congress who have not gotten over that. But other than that-

Robert Sapolsky (28:36):

And each time we've done that, each time we've realized, "Ooh, mothers don't cause their kids to get schizophrenia because the mothers are toxically poisonous in some Freudian gibberish", "Ooh...", as soon as we figure out some kids have trouble learning to read not because they're lazy and unmotivated or stupid, but because they've got cortical malformations that produce what we now call dyslexia or learning differences, each time we see someone who is extremely overweight, and we see self-indulgence and lack of willpower there when, in fact, what you're seeing is the consequences of some weirdo screwy variant of a leptin receptor and they're like dorsal medial hypothalamus kind of thing, each time we have realized, "Ooh, I had no idea biology had something to do with that", each time we've subtracted out judging someone, the world has become a better place. It's become more humane. The roof hasn't caved in. The people have not run amok on the streets being murderers. People have not fallen into puddles of paralysis because nothing can ever change, and it's all predetermined.

(29:56):

Every time we figured out there's no such thing as witches, and it's not only uncool but unjustified to burn someone at the stake, and every version of that in our contemporary lives, the world becomes more humane. So, most people respond to the notion that there's no free will whatsoever is some version of, "Oh, yeah, maybe, but don't tell anyone." Or, what's frequently the case when you read between the lines, it's some of the most influential compatibilist philosophers out there, what they're saying is, "Don't tell me that because I'm pretty proud of the advanced degrees that I've gotten."

Nicholas Weiler (30:35):

Don't tell me I don't deserve it.

Robert Sapolsky (30:36):

Exactly. When you cut through that, it's liberating. It's liberating because we are perfectly content to spend our time in a world in which some people are treated way better than average for reasons they had nothing to do with, and lots of people are treated way worse than average for reasons they had nothing to do with, and we're all pickled in this absurdly damaging concept of justice has been served, that this makes sense, and it doesn't. We have no ground to praise or blame anyone in a moral sense. The notion that those blaming or praising could be virtues in and of themselves is absurd. And we have absolutely no basis for deciding that anyone deserves, has earned having their needs and considerations considered to be more valid than anyone else's. And good luck to you trying to live that way 24/7.

(31:44):

And again, as I said, I pull that off a few minutes a year or so, but nonetheless, this process of realizing we are nothing more or less than the biology, blah, blah, et cetera, this process has gotten us to a point whereby now not only does it feel intuitively crazy to burn someone at the stake for controlling the weather, by now also it feels intuitively crazy to claim that someone's sexual orientation or sexual identity is a choice to stand by and think it's okay when a third grade teacher berates a kid for being lazy when they're flipping their looped letters and reading Bs and Ps, and things of that sort. We've come far enough along to see that these are gravely unjust.

(32:33):

And even though it's hard to imagine what they will look back on us now and from the future as to what absurd things we believed were volitional now, they make sense now because intuitively it totally makes sense and because for the average person, who'd be sitting around listening to something like this, and what that mostly is coming down to is, "But, damn, I worked hard. I worked hard to get to this position. It took a lot of willpower. I had to resist all sorts of temptations and I kind of earned something." I think ultimately that's a much stronger pull for people in our world than, "Ooh, don't judge people, who, because of the neighborhood they grew up in, were doing antisocial things by the time they were 12." Yeah, yeah. That takes some work to really view that you have to judge them without, that you can't judge them and because they had no control over...

(33:29):

But the one that our world's people really stumble into is, "But, damn, I worked so hard. What do you mean I did not earn anything, that I'm not entitled to anything? What do you mean that anything about who the person I turned out to be deserves to stand near the front of the line when good things in life are being handed out?" All we are is luck, and luck has no moral breath to it. And for people like us, it's most compelling when it comes to praise and reward for stuff we really didn't earn.

Nicholas Weiler (34:08):

I was thinking a lot about this in the last week or so as I was thinking about this conversation and reflecting on the book. And as you say, trying hard to believe this and seeing how to live that way, the only thing that I could really come up with, what it reminds me of is the Calvinist notion of predestination, where you're replacing all-knowing God that knows whether you've been bad or good, and therefore whether you'll go to heaven or hell, and therefore this is all preordained, but you just have to act like you think that you're one of the chosen.

(34:42):

It's sort of the same except it's a uncaring universe and you just have to be grateful for the good luck that comes your way and almost pray for the strength to deal with the bad that comes your way. And also, as you say, have this humility that I was saying earlier, for me, it all continues to come back to the familiar constraints of being myself, which I think most people are aware. It can be frustrating to be yourself because you know all of your own imperfections and so on, but to extend that to everyone, to extend that grace that everyone is doing what they do because of who they are. As you say, we need to rethink the morality of judging people's choices and come up with a way of saying, "Look, I'm grateful for what I've got and I recognize I'm lucky to be in the place that I am." Does that help?

Robert Sapolsky (35:37):

Oh, totally. And it's a special kind of gratitude that that brings up. And in my mind the way to crystallize that is, you've just done something wonderfully kind for someone and they say, "Whoa, I'm so grateful that you are the sort of person who just did something kind for me." Whereas the accurate things to say, "Wow, I'm so grateful that you just happen to turn out to be the sort of person who would do that wonderfully kind thing." And the next logical extension of that is the next time you reflect on something good about yourself, you should feel grateful that you just happen to turn out to be the sort of person who's good at patch clamping, or resisting temptation, or whatever version of that.

(36:28):

It's a highfalutin version of when someone doesn't give you a compliment for something kind you've just done. What they do instead is they say, "Tell your mother she did a good job." That's like a very narrow way of externalizing. There is no you independent of what made you, and that's a big ask. And you got to get some sort of, I'm told, Buddhist mindset. And I would not say a word more about that because I'm beyond ignorant, but some sort of mindset where you have to be grateful that you turned out to have this sort of brain that can help other people, that can be made to feel as if life is worth it when you're hearing the right music or looking at a sunset, any version of that.

(37:16):

It's a big ask to be a concert pianist and to get in a mindset where you say, "Wow, I am so grateful that I turned out to have hands." Hands, parenthesis, in your motor cortex, "that it turned out that I have hands that could do this thing on a keyboard, so people in an audience weep with the ways in which they're moved by it. Damn. How'd that turn out? What a cool thing that that is how it turned out?" Good luck thinking that way on a regular basis. That's a really big ask, but nonetheless, you got to do some version of that every time you're about to judge someone, especially if it's harshly, and especially if it's someone whose circumstances you really could not imagine because they became who they are for things that you were utterly fortunately spared from, and every time you decide, "Wow, that's kind of impressive I just did that. Wow. I'm really...", whatever laudatory thing you fill in at that point, and conclude that as a result you deserve any more consideration than anyone else.

(38:28):

Yeah, it's really, really hard and we can do it now with stuff that we couldn't do 50 years ago. When I was a kid, the kid sitting next to me wasn't learning how to read, was obviously lazy. We can now have a different view. We have a different set of intuitions at this point, so it's very hard to overturn all of our currently incorrect intuitions built on notion of us being agentive. So, if it's hard, reserve it for those occasions when you're judging someone, and when you're judging yourself and when you're feeling thus as if you deserve anything, because how do you turn out to be that sort of person? You had no control over it.

Nicholas Weiler (39:12):

Well, given all that we've just discussed, Robert, I won't thank you for a wonderful conversation, but I will thank the universe that the two of us are here and able to have this really interesting conversation and, hopefully, something that gives our listeners a lot to think about.

Robert Sapolsky (39:29):

Well, thanks. I'll relay what you're saying by telling my no longer with us mother that tell her she did a good job, whereas my no free will biologist interpretation is, she traumatized me in exactly the right way that things turned out like this, but I will relay what is implicit in what you just said.

Nicholas Weiler (39:51):

Great. All right. Well, thanks so much. This has been a great conversation.

Robert Sapolsky (39:54):

My total pleasure.

Nicholas Weiler (39:57):

Thanks again so much to our guest, Robert Sapolsky. To read more about his work, check out the links in the show notes. Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn professor in Stanford's departments of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery.

(40:12):

If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and share with your friends. It helps us grow as a show and bring more listeners to the frontiers of neuroscience. We'd also love to hear from you. Tell us what you love or what you hate in a comment on your favorite podcast platform, or send us an email at neuronspodcast@tanford.edu. From Our Neurons to Yours is produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios with production assistance from Morgan Honaker.

(40:40):

I'm Nicholas Weiler. Until next time.