> Sapolsky’s argument can be summed up like this: “We are beings caught in an unbroken chain of causes that dictate our choices. We lack free will and are wholly subject to circumstance. Therefore, we should choose to be better to each other.”<p>> This is a contradiction.<p>It's only a contradiction if you keep thinking in "free will" terms, i.e. thinking you have a choice in the matter.<p>The problem is that he has to use the language of persuasion and "choice" to explain why not believing in free will has benefits. But that's a weakness of our language around the subject, he's not expecting anyone to "choose" to change their position on the subject.<p>What he's actually doing is becoming part of your causal chain, and by voicing his opinion he's trying to change your future behavior. Ironically, in a world with no free will, we end up having more agency over others than ourselves.<p>Your behavior after reading the book was never a matter of choice. Either the past events in your life will lead you to modify your behavior upon adding the information in the book to your life or they won't. Sapolsky's entire point is exactly that, there is nowhere a choice _can_ be made. All we have is the illusion of a choice being made when we reflect on our behaviors and try to rationalize them post-hoc.
Could there be a categorical mistake at play here?<p>Sure, scientifically speaking, we may all be deterministic robots. But the complexity of those robots is so astounding, that free will, regardless of it being an illusion, an emergent property, or something else, simply works at a different level of abstraction than the molecular processes that make up our brains.<p>To put it in some Hacker News terms: you will not find static types in the ASCII standard, yet the C language <i>magically</i> has them.<p>Perhaps it helps to reason from the perspective of the biological processes, instead of trying to project human attributes on them, and then reason back up to see the whole unaltered. Do you think a DNA molecule has any concept of time, place, or choice?