You Don't Have Free Will. That's Good News. (NBI Vault)

I'm Rufus Griskom, and this is the next big idea. Today is a world without free will a better world? Do humans have free will? When you order a scoop of chunky monkey ice cream and decide whimsically at the last minute to change to chubby hubby instead, is that you, the unique individual floating between your ears, making that decision? Or is it just a quirk in the patterns of the swirling atoms that comprise each of us, just the causal chain of a biological process playing itself out?

If this question doesn't interest you, maybe it reminds you of the bloviations of stone philosophy majors in college, here's another question that might interest you. Would the world be better if everyone believed we did not have free will, or at least believed that we had less of it? This is the argument made by Robert Sapolsky, the MacArthur genius grant winning Stanford neuroscientist in his book Determined, a science of life without free will. Robert makes the case that the closer we look, the more each of our behaviors can be explained by biology and evolution and culture. One by one, behaviors we used to attribute to individuals, like schizophrenia or autism or dyslexia or ADHD, we now understand to be biological.

And because of this change of perception, we are kind to people with these conditions. We don't blame them. and we make efforts to help them flourish. Schizophrenia, autism, these are conditions with names, but each of us has a unique collection of strengths and weaknesses, a unique neurobiology that in the end explains our good behavior and our bad behavior every bit as completely. The more we learn about the human brain, the more we can explain it all, and the more we can explain it, the less logical it is to blame people for their bad behavior and congratulate people for their good behavior, and the more logical it is to simply help each other.

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