Episode 112: Welcome back to Real Health Radio. This week it’s a solo episode and I’m talking about something that’s been on my mind for a long time: free will.
Do we have as much free will as we think? Or does our environment, genetics, history, and health conditions impact our decisions more than we think? Or is the concept of free will a complete illusion all together? I dig into this and cover why I think it’s an important issue for how we think as individuals and how we should be functioning as a society.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 112 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/112.
Welcome to Real Health Radio, health advice that’s more than just about how you look. And here’s your host, Chris Sandel.
Hey, guys and girls. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel.
Before I jump into this episode, I have a quick announcement to make. I’m currently taking on new clients. I take on clients twice a year, once around the start time and then once around the midpoint. I work with clients for a period of five months, where we have a consult for an hour every two weeks.
I have clients all over the world, and consults are done via Skype or FaceTime or phone. So if you’re not based in the UK, this isn’t a problem. I’d say more than half the people I work with are based in Australia or Canada or the US or Germany or Spain or other places around Europe and the world.
Before working with anyone, we always have a free initial chat, and this allows me to find out about your background, about what’s going on, what you’re wanting to get out of working together, and it gives me an opportunity to explain how I work with clients and what that process looks like. Basically, it lets us determine if we’re going to be the right fit for one another, because I only want to work with people who I truly believe I can help and people who are on the same page as me. This chat allows us to figure this stuff out.
If you’re interested in finding out more, you can head over to www.seven-health.com/help for more details. You can read through that page, and at the bottom of the page is a link to apply for the free initial chat. I’ll get back to you within 48 hours, and we can arrange a time that suits both of us.
I would just say if you struggle with your health, with nutrition, with body image, with hormones, with food issues, or really just the multitude of things I’ve done podcasts on before, head to www.seven-health.com/help and get in contact.
With that out of the way, let’s focus on today’s show. This is my first solo episode for quite a while. I know I did a life update fairly recently and then I did an episode on my favourite books and documentaries and podcasts of 2017, but these episodes to me don’t really count. I mean the kind of solo episode where I dive into a specific topic and I cover it in detail. The last solo show was back at the start of August 2017, so this is well and truly overdue.
It’s actually a topic I’ve wanted to do a show on for quite a while. It’s something that’s been ruminating around in my head for probably the last year. I’ve thought about it a lot when I’m out walking, just trying to come to terms with it. I’ve been trying to read around the idea, listen to podcasts, and get a better grasp on where I stand.
The topic I’m covering today is free will. Free will is defined as the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded – basically that people get to choose whatever they want to do or to say and think, and this is within their control. I think on the surface, it definitely feels like this is the case. If not for everyone, I’d say for most people who are walking around, they feel like they are completely in control of their decisions.
But what I want to do as part of this episode is to look at how true this really is. Do we really have total free will, where we can choose and be and think whatever we like? Or do we have more of a constrained free will, where actually we are impacted on by our environment and our upbringing and our genetics, and these things can make thoughts or decisions more likely, but we still get to pick and choose how we act and think? Or is free will completely an illusion, where even when we think we’re the ones who are making decisions, this isn’t actually the case?
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Before I jump into this, I want to explain how I got started thinking about this topic and some of the material that has influenced my thoughts. A big part of what first got the ball rolling was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast where he was interviewing Sam Harris. Harris is a neuroscientist and he’s someone who spends his time focusing on things like beliefs and morality and ethics. He spent a decade of his life studying meditation, so this is a big focus of his interest.
Towards the end of the show, he was talking about how he believes that free will is an illusion and goes on to explain why he’d come to this conclusion. These reasons, which I’m going to go though as part of this podcast, were also detailed in his book called Free Will.
After I listened to the podcast, I then went and downloaded the book from Audible and I gave it a listen. This was then what started me on this journey where I’ve really been thinking about this topic ever since.
Later on last year, Robert Sapolsky released a new book called Behave. I’ve referenced Sapolsky many times before on the podcast; he’s hands down my favourite science writer. His book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers has had a huge impact on my understanding of stress. It is simply phenomenal. I listed Behave as my favourite book from last year.
The subtitle for Behave is ‘The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst’. Through the book, Sapolsky walks through all of the factors that impact on behaviour. One second before a behaviour, he’s looking at what’s happening in the brain. Then seconds to minutes before a behaviour, he’s looking at what’s happening in the nervous system. Then hours to days before a behaviour, he’s looking at hormones. It just keeps going back further and further, back millennia, where someone’s ancestors came from all the way back to how we evolved as humans.
I will just note that this is a real doorstop of a book. It’s over 700 pages. It is by no means light reading. I think Sapolsky has a real talent, a real knack for writing. He has a wit, he has ability with words, but he’s talking about complex topics. A lot of what he’s covered in the book is what Sapolsky teaches at Stanford in his Human Behavioural Biology course, which amazingly, you can watch for free on YouTube. There are 25 videos, I think; it’s about 40 total hours’ running time. As someone who has sat through large chunks of this whole course, it is time well spent.
The reason that I bring up the book is that Sapolsky has come to a fairly similar conclusion as Harris: he believes the notion of free will is an illusion. I’d say pretty much the 700 pages of his book are putting forward the case for that. Harris actually had Sapolsky on his podcast last year and they do cover the topic of free will, among other fascinating topics. There was also a fantastic interview that Joe Rogan did with Robert Sapolsky in which he touches on some of this stuff.
Despite referencing Joe Rogan’s podcast twice already, I have fairly mixed feelings about him. His views around nutrition and food are often misguided. He gets into conspiracy theories and often episodes feel like they don’t go anywhere, or there’s these long periods of getting bogged down in nothingness. But I did think he did a fantastic job with the Sapolsky interview, and I highly recommend that you check it out. His podcasts are often two or three hours, but for this one it was only an hour, and it felt like he wanted to make the most of it and he didn’t get bogged down in these nonsensical weeds.
All of these different links I’m going to be talking about, I’m putting in the show notes so that you can check this out for yourself, and if you want to go down the rabbit hole with this stuff, you can.
I wanted to also find people who disagreed with the idea that free will was an illusion so I could see what the counterargument was and where the differences may lie. Sam Harris, along with Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are or were collectively known as the Four Horsemen, and the moniker is because of a DVD they did together talking about religion. They’re all strident atheists.
Dennett and Harris obviously agree about religion and they agree about a great many other things, but Dennett really disagrees with Harris about free will. He doesn’t believe it’s an illusion. He wrote a rather scathing review of the book, which to Harris’s credit, he then published on his own blog, samharris.org, and then Harris responded to that review by writing a piece back. Then he had Dennett on his own podcast called Waking Up. They did discuss their differences. Again, all these links are going to be put in the show notes.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that great an episode. It felt like the two were talking past one another, and it wasn’t particularly satisfactory. I’d say the same thing for Dennett’s book review. I’ve also listened to Harris talk about free will on the Very Bad Wizards podcasts, and like Dennett, the hosts don’t necessarily agree with Harris’s view, but there was more of a convergence in opinion as opposed to with Dennett. The discussions felt more fruitful, but again, it felt like they were often getting bogged down and were missing each other’s points.
I also started to read different articles about the topic, again, all of which I’m including in the show notes. These were articles aimed more at the lay public, so things in The Atlantic or in Vice, through to more academic articles – things like Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.
This is a topic I am by no means an expert on. I really have only scratched the surface. What I’ve discovered is that I’m not the first person to become interested in this topic, and people have been arguing over this for the last 2,000 years and probably longer. So I’m not pretending that this podcast is some in-depth literature review; it’s just something I found fascinating and can’t stop thinking about, so I thought I would share it with you all and infect you with the same ruminating thoughts I’ve been experiencing.
This obviously is a podcast about health and nutrition and people’s relationship with food. Today’s episode is more tenuously linked to that stuff, but at the end I will explain why I think this is an important issue for how we think about individuals and how we should be functioning as a society.
As you’ll see when we get into this, it is a fairly contentious issue, and I imagine you’ll have strong opinions about this. I would love to hear from you and hear your thoughts on it, even if you disagree with me. But please play nice. As I said already, this is something I’ve been wrestling with for a while, and I know it’s not an easy topic.
The final thing I want to mention before I really get into this is around different terms. If you start doing your own research on this topic, there’s names of many different positions in this argument. Someone can be a determinist, a compatibilist, an incompatibilist, a libertarian, and then variations on these – a hard determinist, a near determinist, etc. For me to go through all of these different views and what they mean and how they’re different would be both time-consuming and not the ultimate goal of what I’m wanting to do with this episode. So I’m going to avoid using any of these terms, but just know that if you do start to do your own reading on this topic, you’re going to come up against those terms or be exposed to those terms. So let’s get started.
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For a couple of minutes, what I want you to do is just reflect on your own life. Think about some of your interests. Think about some of your hobbies. What are things that come to mind? Or maybe think about a book or a movie. Why do you find a particular book or a particular movie compelling, where you read it or you watch it and you are utterly engrossed and you want to tell everyone about it?
Maybe you can talk about the specific elements that really spoke to you, how you loved the prose or the music or the tension of some scene – but why did you like this? There are other people that could watch that same film or read that same book and it had no significant impact on them. They finish it and they barely think about it again. It’s not that everyone is affected in the same way. So why did it affect you in the way that it did? Did you choose to like it the way that you did? Did you consciously will on your own desire around this? Or did it just happen? Were you helpless not to feel the way that you did about the book or the film because of what it touched in you?
Same thing around music. Let’s imagine you love classical music. Did you choose this? And if you did, how did you choose this? You meet someone who loves thrash metal and they tell you about their love of Slayer and Megadeth and a host of different bands you’ve never heard of. If you listen to these bands, do you choose to like the music or not? Say you listen and you decide it’s not really to your taste. Why is this the case? Do you choose the sounds that cause the impulses in your brain to make you think that specific music is pleasurable or unpleasurable? Or are you just reacting to the responses that naturally occur?
Same thing with your preferences for food and drinks and cravings that arise here. If I were to ask you, “What is your favourite food?”, what would your response be? Maybe you have a couple of different meals, so it could be tough to decide, but just pick one for now. Why is this your favourite food? Again, undoubtedly there is a story you can think of to explain it. This was something your mum used to make when you were growing up, or this was a meal you had that one time on holiday and now you love. There’s typically a story.
But beneath this, think about why it’s your favourite meal. Of all the meals you could’ve picked, why this one? There are probably lots of meals your mum cooked as a child, so why did this one leave an indelible mark? Or there are lots of people who had lots of staple foods that their mother cooked that they now can’t stand. So just having that meal as a kid doesn’t guarantee it.
You can talk about specific flavours or textures, but again, why do you like them so much? Did you choose to like them as much as you do, or did you just notice that when you ate those foods, those preferences were there? Maybe one of your favourite foods now is something that you didn’t enjoy as a child. How do you account for this change? Did you choose your tastebuds and preferences to change as they did, or did this just naturally happen?
When we start to do this kind of inspection of all our preferences or our dislikes and keep drilling down and asking why, you get to a point where you can’t really explain it, where the only explanation is “That’s just the way I am” or “That’s human nature”. Is this really free will? Our preferences, as I just went through, can emerge because of background factors that we don’t have control over. Yes, you are free to do what you want, but where do those preferences and desires come from?
Same thing when you think about thoughts. Where do your thoughts come from? Have you ever had an experience of trying to do meditation? You sit down, cross your legs, close your eyes, and you decide for the next 10 minutes or 20 minutes, you’re going to make your mind blank. You’re not going to think about anything. Your mind is going to be a complete abyss. If you’ve ever tried to do this, you’ll know that it just doesn’t happen. Try as you might to empty your mind, thoughts arise of their own accord. For about 10 minutes or 20 minutes or however long you are intending to meditate, the vast majority of that time, you’re lost in thought – even when you don’t want to be.
To quote Sam Harris on this, “Thoughts don’t originate in consciousness; they merely appear in consciousness”. Kristin Neff, who’s done a huge amount of research on compassion, also talks about this. When we are trying to clear our mind, this is when we recognise the automaticity of thought.
You may be thinking, yes, that’s true for some thoughts. We’ve all had experiences where you’re walking down the street and you suddenly think of that kid you were friends with in the fourth grade, or out of nowhere you start thinking about the house you grew up in and what your bedroom looked like when you were in primary school, or you’re sitting and working and you’re suddenly like, “Oh shit, the oven” and you run downstairs and check, and you see, “Has my dinner burnt to a crisp?”
When you reflect on these kinds of thoughts, they do feel like they come out of nowhere. You can’t really explain it. They just popped up. There’s a TED talk down by Elizabeth Gilbert called ‘The Elusive Creative Genius’, and she talks about a number of anecdotes about novelists and poets being struck by ideas. Out of nowhere, the words are being channelled through them. There are songwriters who talk about writing a song in minutes, where the whole thing felt like it just came out of them on its own accord, fully formed. They didn’t feel like they were creating it; it just appeared.
Let’s just say you don’t experience that kind of intensity, but maybe you can at least remember times when intentional thoughts felt like they came out of nowhere. But what about outside these random thoughts? When we actually decide to think about something and put our mind to it, that’s different. This apparently is when we have control.
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Let’s do a thought experiment. This again comes from Sam Harris, but I really like it as an example. As we go through this, I want you to become aware of the process of thinking and what’s happening as part of that and how that feels when there’s processes going on. Just be aware of what is happening.
I want you to think of a city. You are free to pick any city in the world. Up until this point in the podcast, I haven’t mentioned the names of any cities. I did mention different countries at the beginning where certain clients are from or reside, but please ignore this. Or even if you can’t ignore this, it actually won’t matter. You are completely free to choose whatever city you want to think of.
Have you got a city? Just to fully get this, let’s say that first city is incorrect. I want you to start from scratch and pick another city. Again, you’re free to pick any city you want, so choose one.
Hopefully you’ve got a city in mind. Starting with the obvious, you can’t pick cities you don’t know the names of. That’s a given. If you’ve never heard the name of a city, you’re not going to pick it. But there are lots of cities you do know the names of that just didn’t occur to you right now. If I was to go through a long list of cities, you’d probably say, “Yeah, I know that one, yeah, I know that one, yeah, I know that one”. But when you were going through your selection process, these cities just didn’t occur to you. So were you free to choose the cities that didn’t occur to you?
Outside of this experiment, undoubtedly there are times in our life when we blank on words or we blank on names, where you meet someone and you can’t remember their name – and not some acquaintance, but someone you’ve known for a while, but for some strange reason in that moment you’re totally blanking. Or you’re telling a story and you just can’t think of some word. It’s a term you use all the time, but in that moment it’s just not there. In those instances, do you have free will to choose a word you can’t think of?
Back to the city thought experiment. What most probably happened is that a number of cities occurred to you, and you had three or four of them. Let’s say you were thinking about it and you thought of Paris and New York and Tokyo, and you were deliberating between them. You think, “I love Paris. I’ve been there many times. I’m going to go with Paris.” Then last second, you think, “Nope, let’s go with Tokyo.”
But why did you make that choice? Even though it feels like you had free will here, you were in no position to know why you picked what you picked. Often we’ll have a story to tell ourselves about why we picked one over another. Say you went out for Japanese last week and you had sushi, so that’s why you went for that. But again, why did you remember that incident?
If we went back through your events, there could’ve been other events linked to New York or Paris, or there could’ve been other moments that linked to events or cities that in this moment you just didn’t remember. But why didn’t you remember them? Or why did the memory that you did have, have an effect on you the way that it did? Why didn’t you think “I had Japanese food last week, so let’s go with something new. Let’s go with Paris”?
The reason is you’re a witness to your decisions. You don’t consciously know why you choose what you choose; it’s just so.
Think about what happened when I asked you to think about cities and what that experience was really like. Those cities just come into consciousness. You can’t choose the cities before they occur to you. It would be the same as me instead calling out the names of cities and you hearing the words – so Boston, London, Copenhagen, Sydney – that’s what’s happening in your head. You’re constrained to what naturally pops into your head and then what feels is the right answer in that moment.
This could be feeling really inconsequential. Like, “Who cares why I thought of the cities I thought of? I was still the one that got to pick the final answer. I had free will.” This is the common argument. People may not know why certain thoughts come up, but they are still the one who is the decider on what action to take. They have free will in that moment.
This is what the bulk of this podcast is going to be addressing. I know it feels like we have free will in the moment, but is that really the case? Is it that the first thought that naturally occurred, occurred spontaneously, and then we’re the ones that take the wheel? Or is it that all thoughts occur spontaneously, despite the fact that we feel like we are the thinker?
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Let’s start with a study done in 2011. It looked at the decisions of judges in Israel who presided over parole hearings. The paper looked at 1,000 rulings made in 2009 by eight judges. While judgment should be based on the facts of the case, they found something interesting. They found that the probability of a favourable decision dropped from about 60% at the first ruling in the morning to almost 0% at the last ruling within each session. Then the rate of favourable rulings returns to 65% following a food break and then heads back down to basically 0% by the end of the session.
Basically, if a judge was full and had good energy, a favourable judgment was likely. As time went on and they became hungry and low energy and more mentally depleted because they’d been concentrating for a long time, they saw defendants in a different, more negative light and were less favourable in their judgments.
If we were to pull the judge aside first thing in the morning and ask them why they made the decision they did, they’d be able to give an explanation. If we pulled them aside just after their last decision before lunch and asked them about their reasoning for denying parole, they again would be able to explain why they chose what they did. In both instances, they would not have felt like they had a gun to their head and they didn’t have free will. But in fact, the level of blood sugar and how long they had been continuously concentrating for had an impact on the thoughts they had and therefore the decisions they made based on those thoughts.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment is another prime example of this. I’ve done a whole podcast show on this experiment, so if you’re interested in hearing about that in much more detail, you can check out Episode 42. Let me just highlight the parts of this which I think are relevant to today.
The experiment was done on 36 men between 1944 and 1945. For a six-month period, they were put on a semi-starvation diet of just under 1600 calories. During this time, as well as losing a large amount of weight, they noticed lots of health and psychological changes, all for the worse.
But let’s just look at one feature. Food became the principal preoccupation in these men. Food became the main topic of conversation in their thoughts. They read books about it. They were reading cookbooks. They were reading menus. They were reading information on food production and agricultural production. They became intensely interested in food despite having no interest in it prior. They weren’t previously interested in diet and they weren’t previously interested in agriculture. A few of the guys even planned to become cooks and to open up restaurants.
These were men who prior to the experiment showed little interest in food, but now it was the thing that was most important to them. In theory, they had free will to think about anything they wanted, but given the physiological state they were in, thoughts of food kept occurring to them.
When people are stressed or when people are hungry, they become less empathic, and this can happen in an extreme example like a starvation diet or it can happen in more subtle ways, where someone’s just between meals. But these subtle ways, if you are a prisoner who’s up for parole, aren’t so subtle. It can mean a lot more jail time.
Someone’s blood sugar is just one example of this. There was a study done in 2014 looking at how smell can affect someone’s thoughts. They asked people to fill out a survey about their views – things like what they thought of gay marriage, premarital sex, pornography, the death penalty, tax cuts, military spending, foreign aid, etc. They did this survey while sitting in a little room.
They then take another group of people with the same demographics and give them the exact same survey, but this time, they stink up the room with smelly garbage. The researchers used butyric acid, and it made the room smell like cheesy pinto beans and too much beer and this garbage-y, smelly smell. The regions of the brain that deal with disgust are the same whether we’re talking about the disgust of a smell or the disgust of an idea.
What they found is if they prime the region for the brain for disgust with smelly garbage, people become more socially conservative. The smelly room had an impact on people’s survey results. Again, just like with the judges, if you were to pull these people aside and ask them to explain why they chose what they did, they would have a rational story behind it. They wouldn’t think, “Normally I’m more liberal in my thoughts, but that garbage really made me think differently.” It just happens to them.
And this happens in other ways. You put a poster of eyes by a bus stop and people start to litter less. You play classical music at a train station and it reduces antisocial behaviour. You put a pair of eyes on a computer screen and people become more generous in online economic games. And the rationale? People feel like they’re being watched.
There is a game called Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s an economic game where participants get to decide whether to co-operate or to compete at various junctures. If you introduce the game and call it ‘The Wall Street Game’, participants become less co-operative. If you call the game ‘The Community Game’, people do the opposite. Similarly, if you get people to read random lists of words before playing, you include more pro-social words like ‘help’, ‘harmony’, ‘fair’, and ‘mutual’ and it fosters more co-operation. You include words like ‘rank’, ‘power’, ‘fierce’, and ‘inconsiderate’ and it fosters the opposite.
Same thing can happen with other senses. You give someone a warm beverage to hold while playing the game, they are more likely to co-operate. You give them a cold beverage to hold, they go in the opposite direction. It’s the same game and people have the same free will to play it how they want, but change the name and change the list of words they read beforehand or change the thing they’re holding in their hand and people behave differently.
There’s actually been experiments done more directly looking at free will and the decisions that are made. I will say that with these experiments, there is contention about what the results mean. There is by no means a scientific consensus on this. I’m going to quote Sam Harris from his book Free Will when talking about this stuff.
Subjects were asked to push one of two buttons while watching a clock that consisted of random letters appearing on a screen. They could then report which letter was visible at the moment that they decided to choose one button over the other. What the experimenters found was there were two regions of the brain that contained information about which button the subject would press a full 7-10 seconds before this decision was consciously made.
In another experiment, they looked at direct recordings from the cortex and they found that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80% accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before it became aware to them.
What does this mean? Some moments before a decision, your brain decides what it’s going to do. Then you become conscious of it and you then decide you’re going to make that decision.
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To muddy the water even more, there is research done by a biologist, Martin Heisenberg, and he’s noticed that certain processes in the brain, such as the opening and closing of ion channels and the release of synaptic vesicles, occur at random and cannot therefore be determined by environmental stimuli. If behaviours can arise because of chance, where is the free will in that?
There’s a parasite called toxoplasma gondii, which is completely fascinating (despite me being unable to pronounce it properly, so we’ll just refer to it as ‘toxo’ from here on in). It is a parasite that is known to sexually reproduce in the cat family. It can affect most warm-blooded animals, and when it is in the animal, it makes changes, but it can only sexually reproduce in a cat.
If you are a mouse or a rat, a cat is your major predator. Through evolution, mice and rats have developed automatic and inbuilt senses to avoid cats. For example, a mouse has a highly acute sensitivity for cat urine or cat pheromones, and if it smells it, it sounds the alarm bells and sends the mouse running in the opposite direction. This isn’t a learned behaviour. It’s not that the mouse has to have a bad experience with a cat when it’s young and learns to avoid them later on. You can take the mice or the rats that have been in labs all their life, and they are the thousandth generation of offspring that have been born in a lab; you then stick some cat urine or cat pheromones in the cage, and they’ll try to get as far away as possible.
But if you take a mouse or a rat that has been infected with toxo, this parasite, things work differently. No longer are they put off by the smell, and no longer does it cause a reaction. In some species, it’s like they don’t recognise the scent anymore; in others, it actually turns them on. The scent that would previously have had them running now arouses them and sends them heading toward the smell. The reason this happens is that the mouse or rat then gets eaten by the cat, and the toxo is now able to infect the cat and it’s able to sexually reproduce in the cat.
This kind of behaviour isn’t just seen in mice and rats. Researchers have shown that chimpanzees can be infected with toxo and then are attracted by the urine of their natural predators, leopards. Just like mice or rats, the smell should make them run away. It now does the opposite, and if the chimpanzee ends up getting eaten by the leopard, then the toxo parasite now has its new host to infect, and because it’s a cat, it’s now able to reproduce.
We’re talking about a parasite that is able to affect the olfactory system in its host so that it can extend its own life cycle, not the life cycle of the animal that it’s living in.
What happens with toxo in humans? It’s actually correlated with lots of different changes. It can make humans less fearful and more impulsive in subtle ways. It can make people less inhibited and change personality. For example, a study in the Czech Republic found that latent toxo patients were involved in accidents 2.65 times higher than people without the infection. Higher rates of people killed on motorcycles have toxo. In a sense, it seems that people become more reckless as drivers without even noticing it.
It’s also correlated with many brain disorders – things like OCD, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, higher rates of suicide in people with mood disorders and bipolar disorder. There were two 2012 meta analyses that found the rate of antibodies of toxo in people with schizophrenia was 2.7 times higher than with controls.
The advice that women should stay away from cat litter trays in pregnancy is due to this parasite. If the mother becomes infected, it can also affect the developing nervous system of the foetus.
Why do I bring this up, apart from the fact that it’s incredibly interesting and something you’ll want to mention at a dinner party? Well, the infection can start to change the way you think and nudge you in certain directions or to do certain behaviours. Was your decision to speed the car or gamble completely down to free will, or was a parasite making changes that affect your biology and the likelihood that you do these behaviours?
It should be noted that this is just one parasite that we know a lot about. There are thousands or tens of thousands of different parasites that can affect humans, and that’s not to mention the other types of non-human cells that are all living in and on the human body. There was an estimate that’s persisted for a while now that bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our human cells by 10:1. More recently, they’ve started to change this estimation. The research indicates that the number is probably more likely to be around 1.3:1 for microbes to human cells. Still more bacteria and other microbes, but not as disproportionate as we once thought.
But while I’ve just highlighted toxo here, there could be many others that are pulling the strings inside us. Despite us not feeling like we are being controlled by bacterial or parasitic overlords, this could be having an impact.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) occur when an external force injures the brain, and this can create brain damage as the brain gets slammed against the inside of the skull. Traumatic brain injury can happen for many reasons. You could be in a car accident. You could clash heads accidentally playing sport. You could trip over on a slippery bit of ground and come down and hit your head, or you could live in a household with an abusive parent and you suffer regular beatings, leading to traumatic brain injury.
Traumatic brain injury or TBI has a massive impact on how someone subsequently behaves. It can change them emotionally – things like emotional instability, depression, anxiety, mania, apathy, irritability, problems with social judgment, and impaired conversational skills. It can lead to social and behavioural changes – things like inability to control anger, impulsiveness, lack of initiative, inappropriate sexual activity, and social withdrawal. It can cause cognitive deficits – things like impaired attention, disrupted insight and judgment and thought, reduced process speed, distractibility and deficits in executive function such as abstract reasoning, planning, problem-solving, and multitasking.
This is not inconsequential. Interestingly, when you look at prison populations, the level of traumatic brain injury is disproportionately high. Depending on which study you look at, something like 25% to 50% of those on death row have had a concussive head trauma. In other studies, between 25% and 87% of inmates report having experienced a head injury or TBI, compared to something like 8.5% of the general population.
Studies of prisoners’ self-reported health indicate that those with one or more head injuries have significantly higher levels of alcohol and/or drug use during the year preceding their current incarceration. These statistics come from a document put out by the CDC in the US, which I’ll link to in the show notes. There are many more statistics that they quote linking TBIs and those who are incarcerated.
No one asked to get a traumatic brain injury. Even if you’re an MMA fighter or you’re a boxer, you don’t go into it thinking this is going to happen to you. Or if you do, you assume that you will get better and it won’t really affect you. But again, this kind of event has repercussions on how people experience emotions and impulses and cognitive ability, and therefore the thoughts, beliefs, and actions that they take.
While I’ve been talking here about physical injury, you don’t necessarily need an event like this to create brain changes. Severe emotional trauma can do a similar thing. While the research is still in early days, it appears that emotional trauma – something like being a Vietnam vet or being the victim of sexual abuse as a child – shrinks certain parts of the brain known as the hippocampus. The hippocampus is vital to learning and memory, and it’s especially vital to short-term memory (the holding in mind of a piece of information for a few moments, after which it either resides in permanent memory or is immediately forgotten).
I will just say that some researchers caution that it’s not certain yet whether the trauma and the stress shrink the hippocampus, or it might be that people with smaller hippocampi to begin with are the ones who are more susceptible to post-traumatic stress symptoms. But considering that people don’t get to pick their brains or the size of the hippocampus, at least for today’s podcast on free will, it doesn’t matter what turns out to be correct. Trauma, at least in a subset of people, impacts on their ability to learn because it affects their hippocampus, and this will have massive ramifications on the direction that their life takes. Again, this is through no fault of their own.
I’ve previously done a podcast on the ACE study, where ACE stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences study. If you wanted to listen to that one, it’s Episode 85. I’ll link to it in the show notes. But very briefly, it was a study that looked at childhood adversity. This included 10 different categories, like psychological abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, household dysfunction during childhood, substance abuse, mental illness, violent treatment of mother or stepmother or criminal behaviour in the household. It also included emotional and physical neglect, living in poor conditions or poverty, separation, and divorce.
What the study found was that as someone’s ACE score went up – so the amount of the different types of adversities that they had experienced – so did the likelihood of many different types of behaviours and health issues. So as someone’s ACE score goes up, so does the prevalence of smoking, severe obesity, physical inactivity, depressed mood, suicide attempts. This can also be said about alcoholism, use of illicit drugs, injecting illicit drugs, 50 or more intercourse partners, and history of sexually transmitted diseases.
They also found a significant dose response between the number of childhood exposures to the following conditions or diseases: ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic bronchitis and emphysema, history of hepatitis or jaundice, skeletal fractures, and poor self-rated health. Just like everyone, these children didn’t choose their parents, they didn’t choose their childhood living conditions, and they didn’t choose the various abuses they suffered.
While someone can still argue that they have free will for all their decisions, whether they drink or they smoke, the research would show that these kind of experiences alter physiology that makes certain choices much more likely than others.
Interestingly, even for those with a high ACE score who don’t participate in these health risky behaviours, their health is still on the whole worse than someone with a low ACE score. This is because of the biological and physiological changes that take place because of these adverse experiences.
00:45:00
While I’ve just focused on adverse childhood experiences, all of our experiences growing up have an impact on how we think about the world. Let me just touch on a few.
I was listening to a podcast where Bret Weinstein, who is a biology professor, was talking about the malleability of human beings. If you look at most animals, they live in a set way. Yes, they’re discovering there is culture in other animals and there can be variation in some baboon troop or some parade of elephants, but overall, things are pretty narrow. But with humans, we’re incredibly malleable. The way that we live our lives, the way that we think the beliefs that we have – the spectrum of this stuff is vast.
There’s been obviously an ongoing debate forever about nature versus nurture. Is it someone’s genes? Is it someone’s experiences? Well, the answer is a resounding ‘both’. Our experiences through life really shape us.
Sapolsky does a fantastic job in Behave of going through all of the different brain regions and how each of them can affect our behaviour, but there’s one I want to mention here, which is the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the brain. Humans have a much larger prefrontal cortex than any other animal. What does it do? Its expertise includes working memory, executive function, gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions and reining in impulsivity, and to quote Sapolsky, “The frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.” Interestingly, the frontal cortex is the last brain region to fully mature, and it’s actually not fully online until people are around their mid-twenties. So until you are 25, your brain is still developing.
The reason for this is also the reason why humans can be so malleable. It is the region of the brain that helps us to understand and be okay with the contradictions that are relevant to everyday life and to social norms.
We know that we shouldn’t lie, but if the Nazis are knocking on the door to ask if you’re hiding anyone, you’re able to say ‘no’ in an attempt to keep Anne Frank safe. Or with killing people. In every society, we have rules around when killing someone is abhorrent and someone should be locked up, and other times when that person receives a medal for bravery. The prefrontal cortex develops late because it needs life experience to understand what is and isn’t appropriate behaviour.
I’ve actually talked about times when this can go awry. You suffer a head trauma; this affects your prefrontal cortex development and function. You suffer other forms of trauma; same thing happens. Trauma causes physical and functional damage to the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain.
Unless you’re a robot, I imagine you have some pretty dark thoughts at certain moments. Someone is frustrating you and you just want to punch them in the face, or someone says something hurtful to you and you just want to lash out. But after that first thought crosses your mind, another quickly appears. This is often you talking yourself back from the ledge. You tell yourself why hitting this person won’t solve the issue, or more likely all the trouble that would ensue and the longer term ramifications if you did do that.
In these moments, when you’re feeling in the driver’s seat and being rational and weighing up why this is a good decision or a bad decision, this is because of your prefrontal cortex. And how well or not well it works, from my perspective, isn’t about free will. It’s about a multitude of factors outside your control that have led to the development of that prefrontal cortex.
People often feel like it was that first thought that they want to hit someone that comes out of nowhere, that that isn’t really them; it’s their emotions. It’s then the subsequent thoughts that are really them finally taking the wheel. But I believe that those subsequent thoughts appear in the same manner as the first one. We just rationalise that they are more ‘us’ because this is how it feels.
I want to mention a couple of ways that the prefrontal cortex is shaped and can impact behaviour without it being caused by physical damage or extreme emotional trauma. People can think and behave in numerous ways, even when their prefrontal cortex isn’t damaged; it’s just shaped by experience.
Parenting styles. If you look at the work of Berkeley psychologist Diana Baumrind (I’ve probably pronounced her surname wrong), she identified three different parenting styles. No one parent parents in just one way, and these examples are extreme ends of the spectrum. People can have a mix of these. But some people fall more into just one of these categories.
First you have authoritative parenting. There’s rules and expectations, and they’re clear and consistent and explicable, with some room for flexibility. Praise and forgiveness trumps punishment, and parents welcome children’s input and the developing child’s potential and autonomy is paramount. This kind of parenting tends to lead to kids who grow up into adults who are happy and emotionally and socially mature, and who are fulfilled and independent and self-reliant.
Second, you then have authoritarian parenting. This is lots of rules, lots of demands, and these are numerous and arbitrary and rigid. They need no justification. “I said so, that’s why it is.” Behaviour is mostly shaped by punishment. Children’s emotional needs are low priority. Parental motivation is often that it’s a tough, unforgiving world, and kids had better be prepared. Authoritarian parenting tends to produce adults who may be narrowly successful or obedient or conformist. Social skills can often be poor because instead of learning by experience, they grew up following orders.
Then there is permissive parenting. There are few demands, few expectations, rules are rarely enforced, and children set the agenda. The adult outcome on this is self-indulgent individuals with poor impulse control, low frustration tolerance, and poor social skills thanks to living consequence-free childhoods.
You don’t pick your parents or their parenting style, but it does impact on how you see the world as an adult.
You’ve then got culture and how that impacts things. You have individualist cultures versus collectivist cultures. America would be at the forefront of individualist cultures, and say China and Korea and Japan would be more collectivist cultures. This has an impact on parenting too. Again, this stuff happens on a continuum; it’s not a dichotomy. But let’s look at some of the general differences between individualist and collectivist parenting.
On average, mothers in an individualist culture view themselves more as teachers rather than protectors. They abhor a bored child and they value high energy. The games they play with their kids, they emphasise competition. Hobbies are about doing rather than observing, and kids are trained in verbal assertiveness, to be autonomous and influential. Interestingly, if you show a cartoon of a school of fish with one out in front, the individualist mother will describe it to her child as the leader.
Conversely, mothers in collectivist cultures spend much more time soothing their child and maintaining contact and will sleep with their child to a later stage. They value low arousal effect. Games are about co-operation and fitting in, with morality and conformity being nearly synonymous, being nearly the same thing. Kids are trained to get along and to think of others. If you show the cartoon of the school of fish and the fish is out front, that fish must’ve done something wrong and that’s why no one will play with him.
I was listening to a fantastic podcast with Kurt Andersen, and he was talking about his book, Fantasyland. It looks at the history of America and why it has some of the characteristics that it does. For example, having strong religious beliefs, or having this ultra-individualistic belief that is really the backbone of the American Dream and the idea of meritocracy, and if you’re talented enough and work hard enough, you will naturally rise to the top.
Andersen was talking about those firm beliefs being seen today and dating them back to the times of people who came to the US as part of colonising it, that it was the religious people from the UK and Europe who were ultra-conservative in their beliefs and were factions or offshoots of other religious groups. They didn’t think that people were following the word of God closely enough, that they were being too liberal, and they were the ones who moved to the US. Then large amounts of people who came were part of the Gold Rush or were there because they believed they would make their fortune.
When you then have these types of people making a large percentage of those in America, and those were the ones who were breeding over the next couple of hundred years, it creates the kind of beliefs that we associate with America today.
I know I’m making a massive generalisation here. I am summarising a very long podcast interview with Andersen and his whole book into a little point that I’m making. But our heritage and our ancestry has a huge impact. It may seem invisible because that’s just how it is or how you see the world, and we often don’t think of this, but if you were transplanted into another culture when you were born, you would see the world through very different eyes.
Up until this point, I’ve touched on a number of different factors, but this is really just the tip of the iceberg of all the ways that you were shaped. You don’t get to pick your genes. You don’t get to pick your parents and what their health was at the time of conception. You don’t get to pick what was going on for the nine months that you were in your mother’s womb. You don’t get to pick your socioeconomics of your childhood or what city or country you were born into. You don’t get to pick all the factors that affect your brain function – your neurons, your synapses, your neurotransmitters, your receptors, your brain-specific transcription factors. You don’t get to pick your ancestors and if they were nomadic pastoralists or tended to rice paddies in a highly collectivist society. All of these have a direct impact on who you are and how you think in this world.
00:56:25
Let’s spend a moment to think about disease. If someone has a disease, we typically don’t blame them for it. And that probably isn’t completely true. There are lots of exceptions to this where we blame people for the behaviour which apparently leads to the disease.
But let’s try to use an example that I’m hoping most people wouldn’t blame someone for. Take someone who suffers from epilepsy. If someone starts having a seizure, we don’t think that it’s because of that person’s lack of willpower – that if they really wanted to, they could just stop having a seizure. In this instance, we say it’s not them; it’s their disease.
Well, this didn’t use to be the case. You go back a couple hundred years ago, and if someone was having a seizure, it was thought of their own choice. They had chosen to have sex with Satan, and this was why they were having a seizure, or they had chosen to be a witch, and this was why they were having a seizure. If they were having a seizure and they struck with someone, they could be charged for assault and then burned alive for being a witch. Nowadays, we know more about epilepsy and we understand that it’s not the person’s fault; it’s their disease.
Or what about Alzheimer’s? As someone is affected by the disease, they can have periods of inappropriate behaviour – shouting, cursing, hitting people, making sexually inappropriate remarks. Again, we are at a point where we differentiate here. We say it’s not them; it’s their disease. But the only difference between Alzheimer’s and some other behaviour that someone makes is that we understand Alzheimer’s more and why it creates the changes it does. Previously we didn’t, and these changes in behaviour would’ve fallen under the guise of free will and they would’ve been thought of as responsible.
It’s so common for us to look back on our behaviours in the past and realise just how appalling they were. We know so much now that when we look back on what we previously did, it was absurd. The same thing is going to happen in 100 years or 500 years from now. People are going to look back on what we’re doing now and think, “My God, this is horrible.” To quote Sapolsky, “Free will is just the word we use for the biology we don’t understand yet.”
Both Harris and Sapolsky reference Charles Whitman when talking about free will, and I think it’s a good example despite its gruesomeness. Whitman is infamous as the Texas Tower Sniper. While mass shootings have become worryingly common these days in America, this wasn’t the case back in 1966. On the 1st of August 1966, just after midnight, Whitman drove to his mother’s apartment and stabbed her to death. He then returned home and killed his wife, also stabbing her. In the morning, he called his wife’s work and his mother’s work, telling the supervisors that both of them were ill and would not be making it in that day.
Later that day, Whitman arrived at the University of Texas in Austin campus. He climbed to the 28th floor of the tower at the university and opened fire from the observation deck with a hunting rifle and many other weapons. Over the space of 96 minutes, he killed 17 people and wounded 31 others before he was finally shot dead by police officers.
Given these details, it would be fair to describe Whitman as evil. What kind of person would commit atrocities of this nature? Whitman had been in the Marines and he’d been trained as a sharpshooter, and now he was using this skill to kill innocent people. But in the year prior, he had seen doctors, complaining of severe headaches and violent impulses. Next to his wife and his mother, he left notes proclaiming puzzlement at his actions, because he had love for them. He’d also written a suicide note of sorts, and as part of it he requested that he have an autopsy be done when he died and it be performed on his brain because he thought something was going wrong. He also left instructions for what money he had left to be given to mental health institutions.
When they did the autopsy, it proved Whitman’s hunch correct. He had a tumour pressing on his amygdala. That’s the part of the brain that’s related to anxiety and fear and the fight or flight response. While we can’t say that the tumour caused Whitman’s violence, it is a huge risk factor that then interacted with other neurological issues and life events that Whitman had.
Whitman had grown up being beaten by his father and watching his mother and siblings experience a similar fate. Unfortunately, Whitman had not broken that cycle. He had physically abused his own wife. He’d been court martialled for threatening another soldier. Keeping along the same theme, Whitman’s brother was murdered at age 24 during a bar fight.
Not for one second am I saying that what Whitman did wasn’t a horrible atrocity, but I also think we need to take into consideration risk factors which were completely outside of Whitman’s control that led to these events.
I want you to think of the worst person you can in this moment. At the second before they’re about to do some horrible crime – whether we’re talking about a murderer, a paedophile, whatever you can come up with – my belief is that if I was to swap bodies with that person, atom for atom, if I had the same brain, the same genes, the same hormone profile, the same nervous system, if I had the exact same childhood experiences, if I had the same in utero experiences and the same health appearance at the time of conception, if I had every part of my life exactly match every part of their life up until the point before this incident, I believe I would act in the same way. As heinous as the act they’re about to commit is, if I was to swap lives and bodies with them, the same thing would happen. Why would I think that I would do anything different?
When you think about this, what do you think? Do you think that you would act differently and make a different decision? And if so, what makes you so sure? And if not, where is the free will in it?
As I said in the beginning of this podcast, this is a concept that has been knocking around in my head for the last year or so. While I obviously agree with everything I’m outlining so far, for 99.9% of the time, I sure feel like I have free will. My day to day experience is that I’m in control. I get to think what I want to think. I get to say what I want to say. I get to like what I want to like. No one has a gun to my head, forcing me to do any of this stuff. It is up to me.
There are moments when this drops away, like when you sit and meditate and recognise how thoughts naturally arise, or when you start to drill down and work out why you actually like things and the things you do, and you can’t really come up with an explanation, or if I get incredibly hungry and notice how that changes my mood or my thoughts. But once these brief moments are over, I go back to feeling completely in the driver’s seat.
01:03:45
There’s a great talk by Dan Ariely, the behavioural economist, where he shows a visual illusion. There’s a picture of two tables, and he asks, “Which one of these is longer?” To the naked eye, one looks much longer. It looks really obvious. But when you measure them, you discover that they’re the exact same length. But interestingly, as soon as you move the ruler, even though you know they are the exact same, when you look again, one table still appears longer. Every time I look at the image, no matter that I know the facts, one of the tables looks longer.
I feel the same thing happens with free will. No matter how much I spend my time looking into this topic and reading about it and coming to the conclusion that I do have now, that it is an illusion, my day to day experience feels like it is real.
As far as I can tell, this is a good thing. Let’s imagine for a moment that I’ve done something stupid. I’m driving and I pick up my phone and I look at a message and I nearly crash, or I’m speaking to someone and I make a hurtful comment and they end up in tears. In both of these situations, I’m going to feel some kind of negative emotions. In the driving scenario, it might be a mixture of fear and anger with myself. In the hurtful comment example, it might be a mix of guilt and embarrassment and regret.
From my perspective, these negative emotions are helpful. They’re trying to alert me to a behaviour that I would like to do different next time. They’re about reinforcing behaviour change. If I felt no emotion in either event and just reminded myself, “I have no free will” and went on as if nothing had happened, there is nothing encouraging me to learn and grow and alter my behaviour.
So from a development and a growth perspective as humans, I can see why we have the feeling of being completely in the driver’s seat, even if it’s not actually the case.
I’ve got a four-month-old son, Ramsay. As he grows up, I will be helping to guide and shape who he becomes. When he does something that breaks the morals or the norms of society, I’ll point it out and correct him in whatever way is appropriate. If all along the way I never intervened and just kept saying, “He has no free will, he has no free will”, this wouldn’t be helpful. How would his prefrontal cortex ever develop?
Life experiences, my parenting style, what he learns, the hobbies he has, all impact on the person that he will become. While in each specific moment he might not have free will, the automatic thoughts and the behaviours that arise because of neurons and brain activity are the products of prior experiences. If he’s been given a timeout or he’s sent to his room or whatever consequence we choose to use, it’s about impacting on future behaviour.
I’ve heard people say that if we have no free will, how do people change their minds because of reasoning? How come you can provide someone with a set of facts, and because of this, they change their position? Again, this doesn’t rely on free will. If you look at it, you can’t understand why those facts were so persuasive to you. Someone could’ve presented you with another set of facts on another topic and this time you’re just not swayed. In both scenarios, we’d have a story about why one changed our position and why the other didn’t, that the second set of information had holes in it – but the reality is, being reasoned into a new position isn’t something you choose. It just happens.
01:07:15
But what about the legal system? It’s meant to be built on the notion of free will. Without it, civil society will fall apart. Just because I don’t believe in free will, doesn’t mean that there is no place for jail or courtrooms – that because people don’t have free will, they should be left to roam the wild in society at large.
If someone commits a crime, there should be punishment, and the punishment happens for a number of reasons. The first is to change future behaviour. It should be about rehabilitation and whatever can be done in this area so that when the individual finds himself or herself in that situation again, the natural reaction is they do something different.
The second part is about protecting society at large. If rehabilitation isn’t possible, then the likelihood is that the individual is going to commit the same behaviours again. Then society should be protected. If someone commits murder and they’re unable to be rehabilitated, then it makes sense that they continue to be kept away from society so they can do no further damage.
But in this scenario, it isn’t about free will or agency. They have some combination of bad genes, a bad life growing up, multiple blows to the head that has led them to the place they’re at now. They shouldn’t be continually punished and told that this is what they deserve because they supposedly chose to do something.
Sapolsky uses an analogy when talking about this with a car. Say you have a car that has some fault, and the brakes don’t work and it hits someone. You take the car to the mechanic. If the mechanic is able to work out what is wrong and is able to fix the problem, then the repair work is done and it goes back out onto the road. If instead the mechanic tries every which way to figure out what’s going on and just can’t, the car is no longer let out. It spends its days locked in a garage. But we don’t come up with a story that the car is evil or possessed or should be doing better. We understand that it has some issue that is not the car’s fault, and that’s why it shouldn’t be on the road.
There’s probably a third category here when thinking about crime and punishment, and this is the deterrent of other people from committing a crime. You haven’t committed a crime, but just knowing what the punishment is can persuade you against doing it. So when sentencing someone for a crime, it might not be just about them, but the ripple effect on society at large. Here we are looking at net benefits. If giving one person a longer sentence means that it stops more people from committing a crime, then this makes sense.
We will still need courts and jails and the police force, but the focus would be on genuine rehabilitation and keeping society safe at large, and none of this is dependent on believing in free will.
01:10:00
This actually ties into the strongest opposition I hear in the free will argument, and it’s the idea that if we admit that we don’t have free will, then society will fall apart. This fear isn’t totally unfounded. There’s research to show problems that can arise when people stop believing in free will.
Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler have done research in this area. They asked one group of participants to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then they subjected the members of each group to a variety of situations to see what would happen. When asked to take a maths test where cheating was made easy, the group who were primed to see free will as an illusion proved more likely to cheat. When give an opportunity to steal, to take more money than was due from an envelope, the ‘free will is an illusion’ primed people stole.
In another study, they looked at beliefs in free will and work performance. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time more and were rated by supervisors as more capable. There’s another researcher, Roy Baumeister, and he found that students with a weak belief in free will were less likely to volunteer their time to help a classmate. They were less likely to give money to a homeless person or to lend someone a cell phone.
There’s more damning research around this as well, like believing free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less likely to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful towards another.
What you actually find is that many scholars or many psychologists feel that free will is an illusion, but it would be very bad for people to realise this and internalise it. What they want is that people believe a lie.
People also struggle with the idea of saying free will doesn’t exist because what about all the hard work that they’ve put in, all the effort and the dedication to being a good citizen and doing the right thing? But for me, just like everything else, I didn’t pick my parents. I didn’t pick my genes. I didn’t pick the country I was born into. My level of intelligence isn’t something I chose, and even if it is the result of hard work or dedication, I’m lucky that I have the ability and the desire to work hard, which again, isn’t something that I’ve chosen.
Sam Harris was asked about the negative impact related to people starting to think that free will is an illusion, and he brought up an interesting point. Often when people hear that free will isn’t true and that we are products of prior causes, they mistake this for fatalism and the idea that choices don’t matter, that everything is predetermined.
But this isn’t true. People aren’t moving toward some inevitable destiny. Given different stimuli, they will behave differently and have different lives. The choices you make in life do matter. Conscious and deliberate thinking has a purpose. Weighing up the pros and cons of certain decisions is crucial. If you want to learn Chinese, sitting on your bed playing video games is going to give you a very different outcome to opening up Duolingo or some other app and spending time reading and speaking Chinese.
I completely believe that the choices we make can alter the trajectory of our life. This isn’t about fate, where everything’s set in stone. I just believe that when we really start to analyse it, we can’t account for why we make the choices we do.
Many people have the belief that if we rewound the tape of their life, they would do something different. They think of how things could’ve panned out differently, and that given the opportunity again, they would pick a different option – kind of like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, where he gets to do the day over and over and over again until he gets it right. But the reality is, if we rewound the tape of your life a thousand times, every time it would be the exact same outcome. This doesn’t mean that the future part is set in stone. Different choices will lead to different outcomes. But if you got to do over your previous decisions, you would make the exact same choices over and over again.
I would add that there are times when it is appropriate or better to keep people in the dark about the fact that free will is an illusion. I won’t be having this discussion with Ramsay any time soon. My sense is that a child isn’t able to compute this idea. It’s beyond their cognitive ability, and it would hamper development. I know how much this has been rolling around in my head for a year, and I don’t think it’s worth inflicting that on a child.
01:15:00
But as adults, even if these ideas can be a little bit destabilising initially or momentarily, my feeling is that there is net benefit from believing that free will is an illusion.
To close this out, let me touch on what those net benefits are. Why do I think it’s better to see it as an illusion?
First of all, it should lead to more compassion, and this is both for yourself and for others. People don’t refuse to be treated for epilepsy because they blame themselves. They see it’s not them. It’s their disease. Hopefully this understanding around free will can have the same impact on mental health. Rather than people feeling shame around suffering with depression or bipolar or any kind of mental health issue, people can see it’s not them. It’s their disease.
It can help us to have compassion for others. As I’ve stated repeatedly, you don’t pick your parents, your genetics, your synapses, and the long list of influences that dictate our thoughts and emotions. Now, this doesn’t mean that we can’t use reason or persuasion to try to change behaviour and beliefs. Lack of free will isn’t about fatalism. Given the right influences, people can change.
But too often we’re very judgmental of others. We imagine ourselves in their shoes and how we would do it so differently, and maybe this is true if you take your current demeanour and your life experiences and put you in their shoes. But if you were to actually swap with them body for body, atom for atom, with their complete life experiences, maybe you would see things differently.
Alongside this, it should lead to more humility. Yes, you may have been dedicated and you may have put in your 10,000 hours and all the other virtues that make success more likely, but one must be incredibly lucky to succeed at life no matter how much effort they put in. One must be lucky to be able to work, to be intelligent, to be physically healthy, to not be bankrupted in middle age by illness of yourself or of a spouse.
I saw a post recently by Sol Orwell, the founder of Examine.com, and he was talking about how he detests founder stories – those stories of company execs who tell how they built something from nothing and they had no help along the way. He said that more often than not, this isn’t true. They’ll disregard some $30,000 from their parents and say it didn’t really matter, or some massive leg up like an influential connection, and they downplay the importance. No matter how tough someone’s life background is, it’s easy to downplay the advantages that led to their turnaround.
I’m very fond of the work that I put out, and it’s pleasing to hear from people when they say how much it has helped them, but I’m also aware of how lucky I am to be able to do this.
I will just add that I don’t take for granted the support or the good deeds of others. If someone does something nice, my gut reaction isn’t “Well, they don’t have free will. It wasn’t really them choosing it.” My reaction is to say thank you and to be incredibly grateful. It feels like the right thing to do. But again, this is my prefrontal cortex that has learned the social norms, helping me to do the right thing.
This belief about free will as an illusion could help us be better as a society. Society should be set up in a way that creates healthy and thoughtful humans. If we are the products of our prior experiences, we should be making it so those prior experiences are much more likely to be beneficial to someone’s development. Too often, what happens in the moment is people grow up in terrible circumstances, and then when they do something that we don’t like, we have no compassion for the individual. We say they had free will; they should’ve chosen something else. But as a society, we should be finding the levers that naturally lead to better human beings.
There was a great podcast interview with the historian and the writer Rutger Bregman. He wrote a book called Utopia for Realists. Part of the interview was him talking about this idea of universal basic income. This is an idea that has started to become more popular and talked about recently, especially in the tech circle and people talking about AI. The idea is that in the not too distant future, robots are going to be replacing more and more jobs, and new ones won’t return to replace them. At some point we’re going to have mass unemployment, and as a solution it’s often suggested that universal basic income will then ease this.
The concept of universal basic income is actually something that has been around for a really long time and isn’t something new. Bregman talks about a number of different pilot studies looking at this back in the 1970’s. While it’s quite a left wing idea these days, it was nearly implemented by Richard Nixon.
What he goes through as part of this was looking at what happened, and when people were given universal basic income, things got better. Medical costs went down, law enforcement costs went down, kids’ performance in school improved because parents were helping out more with homework and were less stressed. I think drug use and alcohol use also went down. Despite being thought of as a handout and costly, with all the reductions in other areas like hospitals and law enforcement, it actually saved the government money.
On top of this, people didn’t stop working. It’s often feared that if people were given a universal income, they would be like, “Why bother showing up for work? I’m going to quit.” But in fact, people continued to work like they did before, and they had just a bit more money and they were less stressed.
Now, let me just say that these were pilot studies. I’m not sure what happens if this is introduced country-wide and it becomes the norm without an end date. Maybe the results would be different. I’m also no expert on this, and I imagine there are counterarguments about why this is a bad idea.
But the point I’m trying to make is that shift in the way that society is set up shifts how people think and behave. You could say that in theory these people had free will to spend more time with their kids already, that they could’ve been helping them with their homework. But if they’re stressed and worried about money, alternative thoughts naturally occur.
This concept as well works on the individual level. I think there is power in realising how irrational we are as human beings and that outside causes impact on our thoughts and emotions. When you do this, you can realise that rather than white-knuckling it through every day, relying on willpower and believing that you are overpowering this stuff, you can make tweaks so that better choices naturally happen.
When you get more sleep, you naturally have less implicit biases. When you eat at regular intervals and keep blood sugar balanced, you are more empathic. If you change certain factors in your environment, you can shape the path and make specific choices the most likely to occur.
Linked in to this, it can help us see the benefits of introspection, noticing how different experiences give rise to different thoughts and feelings. Personally, I am a terrible meditator. I do it very inconsistently and just haven’t put in the time. I walk in nature and I tell myself that this is my meditation, but really, for the whole time I’m out walking, I’m normally lost in thought – typically thinking about stuff like this. On this front, I need to do better.
But the times when I do meditate, I do get a good glimpse of how thoughts naturally occur of their own accord. No, it doesn’t feel like all thoughts are like this, and as I said earlier on, my day to day lived experience doesn’t feel like free will is an illusion or that thoughts are arising from nowhere. But those moments in meditation help me recognise this.
There are probably other benefits, but that’s what I’ve come up with so far, and that’s the end of today’s podcast.
I hope you have enjoyed the show and that it’s one that stays with you and leaves you thinking. There is a ton of resources in the show notes if you want to explore this more. Even if you disagree with this idea that free will is an illusion, that is fine. But I’m at least hoping that it shines a light on all the factors that go into why a person is the way that they are, and it’s not so straightforward.
As I mentioned at the top of the show, I am taking on new clients. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can head to www.seven-health.com/help. I will be back in two weeks’ time with another episode. In the meantime, look after yourself.
Thanks for listening to Real Health Radio. If you are interested in more details, you can find them at the Seven Health website. That’s www.seven-health.com.
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