Reader's Digest: February 8, 2025
What’s a poor reviewer to do? Skimming the advance proofs of a well-promoted book by a noted expert, you discover that its reasoning is full of holes—or rather, is one cavernous hole, a Grand Canyon of fallacy, camouflaged by science and slick prose. To review the volume is to give it more publicity and so to risk expanding its influence; not to do so is to leave its argument unchecked. You must determine the letter evil.
It was thus with mixed emotions that I found, in the NYRB, a review by Jessica Riskin of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Riskin is one of my favourite science writers, author of a string of stylish, punchy, quotable essays on genetics and evolution, the scientific method, machine intelligence, and more. Before she graduated to NY, she played the same role for LA. A particular highlight: her exasperated take on Steven Pinker: “With friends like these, the Enlightenment doesn’t need enemies.”
Riskin on Sapolsky—an occasion for corrective wit? or a misuse of cultural real estate, a prominent billboard for a misguiding book?
Riskin has some neat one-liners, dissing “Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style”:
Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.”
Sapolsky claims that causal determinism reigns: everything that happens, including how we act, is determined by the past and the laws of nature. He canvasses a number of scientific theories that might be thought to imply determinism and concedes that none of them do. But, he judges, “[put] all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.” His argument is a patchwork of results without grand synthesis, followed by italics. “Now, is that scientific?” Riskin scoffs. “[Do multiple] failures to prove something add up to a definitive proof?”
Riskin’s broader complaint concerns historical ignorance.
Early in his book, Sapolsky says he won’t be considering “theologically based Judeo-Christian views” about free will and determinism, yet his own view has deep roots in a form of Judeo-Christian absolutism.
Modern scientific determinism originates with Pierre-Simon Laplace,
who in 1814 wrote triumphantly that science had at last eradicated the belief in miracles from the minds of “enlightened men.” Each state of the universe, he announced, was fixed by the previous one and determined the subsequent one.
Yet, despite his infamous rejoinder to Napoleon, who asked why he did not appeal to God—“I have no need of that hypothesis”—Laplace was not an atheist. What he denied was the Newtonian view that God is constantly active in nature.
Nor was Laplace the first modern denier of miracles: that denial can be traced back, at least, to Protestant theologians of the 16th century. Here Riskin hits the reader with a pop quiz:
Which of the following passages are by Robert Sapolsky and which by John Calvin?
“The power of free will is not to be considered in any of those desires which proceed more from instinct than mental deliberation.”
“From this it is erroneously inferred…that there is some power of free will.”
“You are privileged…to cloak yourself with myths of freely willed choices.”
“Whatever happens in the universe was destined to happen.”1
It’s instructive, historical fun. I learned a lot from Riskin about the religious roots of modern determinism, including connections I might have missed:
the idea of living beings as rote machines also originated in an older theological tradition: the argument from design. Authors of arguments from design said they could prove the existence of God by showing that natural things, especially living ones, were complex machines and must therefore have a designer.
But when it comes to the substance of Sapolsky’s argument, Riskin disappoints. She complains, quite rightly, that he loads the dice:
Sapolsky [places] the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.”
But she mislocates the problem, which is less a false dilemma—“why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence?”—than a failure to argue from the premise of determinism to a conclusion about freedom that may, or may not, follow.
“Science can’t prove there’s no free will,” Riskin writes, “because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one.” Which is true, but in context, it misses the point, since the issue for philosophy is not, in the first instance, whether determinism holds but whether it is compatible with freedom—as many philosophers believe. Riskin doesn’t formulate that question, implicitly conceding to Sapolsky that if he’s right about determinism, he’s right about free will.
This means that her review, while critical, does not arm readers of Sapolsky with the tools they need to climb out of his logical ravine. I tried to provide them when I wrote about Sapolsky’s book last year. I could have picked on his presumption in doing philosophy while knowing very little about the subject. For a different audience—professional philosophers, perhaps—that would have been the right approach. But as my editor cautioned, the typical reader will not care about philosophers’ bruised egos or assume that we have relevant expertise. The only way to show otherwise is to philosophize, as best one can, in public.
The answers are: 1. Calvin; 2. Calvin; 3. Sapolsky; 4. Sapolsky.