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Books

Determined by Robert Sapolsky

Philip Badger questions Robert Sapolsky’s determinism.

Robert Sapolsky is that rare thing in modern academia, a true polymath. This is evidenced by his multiple and simultaneously held professorships, which range from Anthropology to Neurology, as well as his willingness to stick his nose into what philosophers often consider to be their business. In this case, that business is the debate around free will. Sapolsky espouses a ‘hard’, if non-reductive, form of determinism – the idea that all physical activity is determined by previous physical activity, including in the brain, and so there is no free choice.

From the outset, Sapolsky dismisses outright the classical notion of ‘free will’, which is typically associated with a ‘dualist’ metaphysics – the claim that reality consists of both a causally-determined physical realm and a non-physical mental realm in which events are not causally determined.

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