You Have No Choice But to Read This

I fucking hate free will debates. 

They are the lowest-common-denominator of philosophical discussions. They reek of freshman-year philosophy majors, moldy marijuana, and the shallow profundity of Communist trust-fund babies. They are trite, heated, and mostly useless, like co-op board arguments over the color of the rug in the lobby.

I fucking love Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist whose books on biological behavior and stress, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, A Primate’s Memoir, and Behave, are some of the best science writing I’ve ever read. He is, in my opinion, the poet laureate of neurobiology. He is at once rigorous and humanistic, sardonic and compassionate, literary and scientific.

So you must be able to imagine my conflicting feelings upon learning that he wrote a new book (yay!) about free will (yuck!) called Determined. It’s like Scott Alexander writing a 10,000-word essay on the correct way to hang toilet paper. It’s like Annie Dillard writing a new book on whether or not a hot dog is, in fact, a sandwich. It’s like Bill Simmons writing a trilogy about whether Die Hard is really a Christmas movie. (Okay, okay, I’d read that.) 

Despite my misgivings, I read an advance copy of the book. I read it in a single weekend and reread it again last week. And then I decided to write this review of it. (Freud would’ve had a field day analyzing the masochism in my reaction formation here.)

It is a book about why science says we have no free will, and how we might best live once we accept that. It is simultaneously moral, scientific, and compassionate. It is funny and irreverent. It is merciless in its attack on victim-blaming “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” philosophers. It contains the most magnificent and beautiful description of the anatomy of the sea slug that you will ever read. 

It is both a masterpiece and a missed opportunity.

Sapolsky’s argument is this: