Determinism is not Fatalism

And no one is saying that humans are like electric toothbrushes either!

Robert M. Sapolsky’s thesis in Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will,¹ which I explained and defended here, is that people are entirely formed by deterministic forces outside of their control. Consequently, there is no reason to believe that humans can transcend these forces through a non-deterministic free will. Drawing on genetics, endocrinology, psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, Sapolsky shows how human thought and behavior emerge out of what I termed a deterministic “bio-environmental mesh.” Sapolsky argues that determinism means that people can never be held morally responsible for their actions, a thesis that I defended here. Since you are entirely the product of your genes interacting with your childhood environment, neither of which you choose, you do not choose the self that acts and thus cannot be held responsible for what you do. Determinism, which is also sometimes called “hard determinism” or “hard incompatibilism,” is an ambitious and controversial thesis that naturally draws criticisms, and I have discussed how Sapolsky and other determinist thinkers answer some of them in my articles.

In a review of Determined, the historian Jessica Riskin delivers some criticisms of Sapolsky that I haven’t dealt with yet. Riskin’s main criticism of determinism is that it can’t account for the possibility of agency. Riskin places Sapolsky in a determinist tradition that casts people as mere “passive objects of their fate.” Determinists, she claims, believe that people are mindless and unreflective “rote machines” who are incapable of “even minor assertions of choice or will.” Determinists also, allegedly, see people as “inert” and incapable of changing themselves or the world around them. Riskin contrasts Sapolsky with Darwin and other thinkers who attributed “purpose, agency, and meaning” to people. Riskin also thinks Sapolsky’s evidence for determinism is weak and that the nature of free will is a philosophical matter that science cannot decide.

Riskin’s review is useful not because any of her criticisms hit the mark, but because it illustrates many common misconceptions about determinism. Determinists do not, in fact, deny that people have agency of the type that Riskin describes. Riskin’s understanding of determinism is clouded by two basic misconceptions: she equates determinism with fatalism, and she thinks that determinism means that humans must be simple machines, like electric toothbrushes. Neither of these is true.

What determinists really believe

Riskin never defines exactly what she means by agency, but she seems to have in mind something like the following. People form intentions, and often this process involves deliberation, or effortful, conscious thinking about exactly what they want and how to achieve it. They then will often act on those intentions and change the world so that it better fits their desires. People can also reflect on their own behavior and change it for the better. Riskin interprets Sapolsky to be denying that this type of agency exists.

While Sapolsky sometimes criticizes the notion that people have agency, he does not deny that people possess the kind of agency just described. He is critical of the notion that people possess an agency that is undetermined by biological factors, but he does not deny that they form intentions, act on the world, and the rest.

His point about intentions is that it is unfair to judge people based on them, not that they don’t exist. He thinks that judging people by their intentions is like judging a movie by its final three minutes:

this approach misses 99 percent of the story by not asking the key question: And where did that intent come from in the first place? This is so important because, as we will see, while it sure may seem at times that we are free do as we intend, we are never free to intend what we intend. Maintaining belief in free will by failing to ask that question can be heartless and immoral and is as myopic as believing that all you need to know to assess a movie is to watch its final three minutes. Without that larger perspective, understanding the features and consequences of intent doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. (19)

Sapolsky is not saying that the agentic self is an illusion, but that it is formed by factors that are beyond our control, like our genes, childhood environment, natural selection, and so forth. We all have selves that form intentions, make choices, and alter the world, but we don’t choose the selves that do these things. Both a young female San hunter-gatherer and a middle-aged, white, American man like myself deliberate, intend, and act, but we think differently and want different things because our minds have been shaped in ways that we did not choose by different genes, hormones, and environments.

That this is the view that Sapolsky in fact holds is confirmed by the work of other determinist thinkers, like the philosopher Derk Pereboom, whom Sapolsky cites and calls one of his “fellow travelers” (17). Consider Pereboom’s description of deliberative decision-making:

it’s generally accepted that given causal determinism, there remains a sense in which how an agent deliberates makes a difference to how she decides, which in turn makes a difference to the future. Suppose you promise to help a friend clean up his yard, but you consider breaking your promise and doing something more enjoyable instead. But upon deliberation—thinking of and weighing reasons for each option—you decide to keep the promise and help the friend. Imagine also that it was causally determined that you deliberated as you did and decided to keep the promise and that as a result your friendship wasn’t impaired and instead benefited from it. It is still true that had you deliberated differently, you would have decided to break the promise, and your friendship would have been impaired. In this sense, your deliberation made a difference to your decision, which made a difference to the state of your friendship.²

Riskin’s depiction of determinism is, in short, an obvious distortion. Determinists believe that humans are every bit as intentional, agentic, and deliberative as she could want.

Riskin’s assertion that determinists deny people’s capacity for change is explicitly contradicted in Determined, where Sapolsky devotes a whole chapter to explaining how the brain can change to be better adapted to the world. He gives the example of how the brain learns to detect and react to associations. If a tone plays just before a puff of air is fired at your eyeball, a normal human, or indeed any kind of mammal, will learn to shut its eyes after the tone plays. Sapolsky explains the neuroscience behind this simple act of learning. It involves the functioning of a coincidence detector, or neuron 5 in the graph below, which is connected to the neurons that detect sounds and air puffs.

Sapolsky goes on to explain how deterministic processes can account for the categories that humans form and the way that they change in response to environmental input. His point is that determinism does not entail that people are rigid, unchangeable, and “inert.” Rather, creative and flexible cognition can emerge from a deterministic brain.

Determinism is not fatalism

Riskin’s claim that determinists regard people as “the passive objects of their fate” is based on the common misconception that determinism is equivalent to fatalism, or the belief that we are fated to do one thing or another regardless of what we want. The myth of Oedipus illustrates the concept of fatalism. Oedipus is informed by the Oracle of Delphi that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother. He very much does not want to do either of these things and tries to avoid doing them, but, due to his ignorance of the identity of his true parents, he ends up doing them anyway because this is his fate. On the fatalist view, we have a destiny that bypasses our consciousness and will. No matter what we want, we must do what we are fated to do. Psychologists have shown that people commonly conceive of determinism this way.

If Sapolsky really were arguing for fatalism, then Riskin’s criticisms of him would much more plausible. Oedipus really is the plaything of fate and is in that sense incapable of agency. However, Sapolsky is not arguing for fatalism, nor is any other determinist thinker that I know of. Rather, Sapolsky is saying that the forces that determine our lives do so by shaping and influencing our consciousness and will, not by bypassing them. In fact, Sapolsky makes it clear that he disapproves of fatalism just as much as Riskin does. At one point he contrasts “scientific determinists (endorsing statements like ‘Your genes determine your future’), with fatalistic determinists (‘The future has already been determined by fate’)” (266). Sapolsky is concerned that the deterministic philosophy might degrade people’s morality precisely because they don’t distinguish between fatalism and determinism. He devotes a whole chapter to this problem. He discusses several studies that have found that lessening people’s belief in free will makes them more anti-social, less grateful, and less motivated to conquer drug addictions. Stating the case against him, he writes:

Thus, undermine someone’s belief in free will and they feel less of a sense of agency, meaning, or self-knowledge, less gratitude for other people’s kindness. And most important for our purposes, they become less ethical in their behavior, less helpful, and more aggressive. Burn this book before anyone else stumbles upon it and has their moral compass unmoored. (250)

It is clear from this passage that Sapolsky considers a sense of agency and meaning just as essential to human thriving as Riskin does. He concedes that, if it were indeed the case that the deterministic philosophy impairs our sense of agency, then it might be for the best to suppress it. However, he subsequently argues that the morality-impairing effects of belief in determinism are overstated. In any case, it seems to me that if people confuse determinism with fatalism, the answer is to educate them about the difference rather than to suppress the truth.

Of humans and electric toothbrushes

Riskin’s understanding of determinism is clouded by another bad analogy. Her reasoning seems to go as follows: Sapolsky is saying that humans operate deterministically. So do machines like electric toothbrushes, cement mixers, and pianos. These simple machines are also passive in that they don’t do anything unless someone acts on them, and they are unable to change themselves for the better. Therefore, Sapolsky must be saying that humans are also passive and incapable of change.

The fallacy is obvious: many deterministic systems may be passive, but that does not mean that all of them are. Obviously, unlike electric toothbrushes, humans come equipped with emotions and desires that cause them to act on their own impulse. Our brains are made up of 85 billion neurons, each of which has an average of 7,000 connections to other neurons. The brain is capable of rewiring itself through learning and even of growing new neurons. These enormous differences between humans and simple machines are capable of fully accounting for the differences in their behavior without the need to appeal to any non-deterministic process.

LLMs are evidence for this view. I don’t think anyone denies that computers operate deterministically. LLMs are programmed to have human-like motivations, like helpfulness. Once you create motivated systems that are powered by billions of parameters, you can start getting human-like behavior, like creative problem-solving using analogies and sycophancy.

What’s wrong with interdisciplinary arguments?

Riskin also criticizes Sapolsky for one of his great strengths as a writer: his dazzling ability to weave the findings of diverse sciences into a rich and coherent tapestry. Sapolsky makes the point that any individual science, like genetics, psychology, or endocrinology leaves some doubt about whether free will might be operative, but as you put them all together, the case for determinism becomes stronger and stronger. Sapolsky thus establishes that convergent lines of evidence point to determinism. Such convergence is usually taken to be exceptionally good evidence for a conclusion. However, Riskin makes the entirely irrational argument that if no one science establishes that determinism is true, then the combined effect of the sciences must also fail. But why shouldn’t a conclusion be established in this interdisciplinary way? I can see no reason. Sapolsky has addressed this point in a response to Riskin.

The appeal to philosophy

If Riskin believes that Sapolsky’s determinism is wrong, what theory of human behavior does she think should replace it? You would think that proposing such an alternative theory would be the central task of Riskin’s essay. Yet she never does. Since she is a history professor, much of her essay consists of information about the history of determinist theories. While this is all quite interesting, none of it is an argument for any theory of human behavior. Riskin expresses enthusiastic belief in agency, meaning, and purpose, but doesn’t explain anything about where those might come from.

The closest she comes is to declaring an opinion on this matter is a bald statement that the question of free will is a philosophical, not a scientific one:

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds.

But why isn’t free will a scientific question, and what philosopher does a better job of accounting for free will than Sapolsky? Riskin gives us no details. In fact, she does not cite a single work on the contemporary philosophy or science of free will, other than Determined, anywhere in her article. Riskin apparently believes that waving vaguely at philosophy is enough to prove that pesky, dogmatic scientists like Sapolsky are sticking their noses where they have no business. Her attitude seems to be that philosophers have written millions of pages about free will, many of which are very hard to understand, so somewhere in all of that, there must be something that effectively refutes determinism.

Riskin’s appeal to authority here is so empty as to be laughable. She uses “philosophy” as though it were a magic spell that can make all the science that she doesn’t like disappear! And this is highly revealing, because it seems like philosophy functions this way in a lot of contemporary debates. When people don’t like what science is telling them, they are highly prone to appeal to philosophy.

Why does determinism make people so angry?

Riskin’s article has a deeply angry and insulting tone. She calls Sapolsky “dogmatic.” She mocks his “late-night-dorm-room literary style.” She compares his views to those of John Calvin, a 16^th century religious zealot who preached the grim and unattractive doctrine that people were predestined to be damned or saved. She says that Sapolsky’s beliefs are rooted in “Judeo-Christian absolutism” rather than scientific rationality. She says that determinists aim for “a total consolidation of power,” a bizarre and sinister phrase. She claims that Sapolsky “relegates people to categories by class, biology, and cultural stereotype.” This is essentially accusing Sapolsky of being a racist or at least an enabler of racism. She doesn’t even try to justify this serious accusation by quoting Sapolsky.

This angry language in combination with all of her misrepresentations of Sapolsky’s arguments make it clear that Riskin is searching for reasons to dismiss determinism rather than to understand it and fairly evaluate its merits.

Determinism seems to make a lot of people angry. The determinist writer Jerry A. Coyne describes his experiences:

I’ve had many discussions about the topic, some of them quite heated, and you may remember that one of my old friends threw me out of his house on Cape Cod because I espoused determinism (it wasn’t even an argument; the guy just couldn’t stand the idea of determinism). A friendship ended over a metaphysical argument! I’ve also described another scenario after I gave a talk called “You Don’t Have Free Will.” A very large jazz musician accosted me afterwards and asked me if I thought that the extemporaneous solos he played were actually determined in advance. When I said “yes,” he got really mad and I was afraid he was going to hit me.

What is the source of this anger? Perhaps it is due to the fact that determinism challenges people’s assumptions about morality and justice. Perhaps the anger is due to misunderstandings of determinism: it may be that people are angry about fatalism, which they have confused with determinism.

It may also be that people have psychological motivations to believe in free will. In “Christianity and Positive Illusions,” I discussed the motivations for religious belief, which boosts self-esteem by inculcating an unrealistically positive view of the self in believers, as well as a false sense control, and unrealistic optimism. It’s quite likely that free will belief is, in part, explained by similar motivations. The belief that your free will and that will alone is in charge of what happens to you, independently of all the forces that formed you, plausibly brings people a false sense of control. People want to believe, “It isn’t my genes and childhood experience that make me do what I do, but my true, autonomous self!” Similarly, the notion that you can shape yourself into whatever you want to be, unhindered by any biological constraints, probably helps to keep people optimistic.

The question of what it is about determinism that makes people angry is a deep and fascinating one, and it deserves a separate article or two or three.

1. Sapolsky, R. M. (2023). Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Press. All page referecnes are from this book unless otherwise specified.

2. Pereboom, D. (2022). Free will. Cambridge University Press, pp. 41-42.