Review: Determined

 Determined is Robert Sapolsky's book arguing that we have no free will and examining the implications of it. This book is incredibly dense and difficult to read, but the summary of its argument is that essentially there is no mechanism in physics or chemistry to indicate that you and I are nothing more than moist robots. Fundamentally, you're born with the life you have with genes that you have no control over, , under circumstances you have no control over, grow up in childhood where you also have no agency, into an adolescence into which you also have no agency, so why should we expect you to be able to exercise control just because you turned 18?

Intellectually, of course, you might agree with Sapolsky. But the reality is that we see people effect change all the time. As John Douglas in Mindhunter wrote: "I never saw anyone criminally insane feel compelled to exercise his criminality in direct view of a cop." The fact that a habitual lead-footed driver would suddenly ease off his accelerator just because he happened to see a cop indicates that people can choose, and that we can actually help them choose the right thing by providing an environment in which they can effect change. More prosaically, I've had co-workers who effected a whole-scale change in their lifestyle because their doctor told them that they were going to have to go on statins and other high blood pressure medication. The engineer, being an engineer inquired: "Wait, why go to drugs right away? Shouldn't I try lifestyle changes first?" "Lifestyle changes don't work, statistically." came the reply from the doctor. "Gimme 6 months, doc!" And of course, 6 months of hiking with his kids later he had no need of medication. Of course, I recognize that the people I meet in my social life are high functioning adults and unusually capable, but that just tells me that a blanket statement is most likely wrong or at the least unintuitive. 

The rest of the book is an exploration of the implications of this on various parts of society, chiefest of which is the criminal justice system. Once you accept the premise that even the most heinous criminal had no control over his action, your goal is to prevent harm by that defective individual, rather than punish him in the hopes of achieving deterrence. There's good evidence for this --- Finland's justice system is focused much more on preventing recidivism than the US's, and it achieves those goals better than the US policy of putting lots of people in jail. But of course, first you have to be willing to accept the idea that people do what they do because they effectively have no control over their behavior. I'm not sure American society is ready for that or will be ready for it anytime soon.

I don't want to give the impression that the book is not worth reading. I did learn a few interesting things, for instance, about the brain's default network:

One level higher—do entire networks, circuits of neurons, ever activate randomly? People used to think so. Suppose you’re interested in what areas of the brain respond to a particular stimulus. Stick someone in a brain scanner and expose them to that stimulus, and see what brain regions activate (for example, the amygdala tends to activate in response to seeing pictures of scary faces, implicating that brain region in fear and anxiety). And in analyzing the data, you would always have to subtract out the background level of noisy activity in each brain region, in order to identify what was explicitly activated by the stimulus. Background noise. Interesting term. In other words, when you’re just lying there, doing nothing, there’s all sorts of random burbling going on throughout the brain, once again begging for an indeterminacy interpretation. Until some mavericks, principally Marcus Raichle of Washington University School of Medicine, decided to study the boring background noise. Which, of course, turns out to be anything but that—there’s no such thing as the brain doing “nothing”—and is now known as the “default mode network.” And, no surprise by now, it has its own underlying mechanisms, is subject to all sorts of regulation, serves a purpose. One such purpose is really interesting because of its counterintuitive punch line. Ask subjects in a brain scanner what they were thinking at a particular moment, and the default network is very active when they are daydreaming, aka “mind-wandering.” The network is most heavily regulated by the dlPFC. The obvious prediction now would be that the uptight dlPFC inhibits the default network, gets you back to work when you’re spacing out thinking about your next vacation. Instead, if you stimulate someone’s dlPFC, you increase activity of the default network. An idle mind isn’t the Devil’s playground. It’s a state that the most superego-ish part of your brain asks for now and then. Why? Speculation is that it’s to take advantage of the creative problem solving that we do when mind-wandering. (kindle loc 3493)

An argument in favor of day dreaming inside a book telling you that there's no free will and therefore you had no choice when you're day dreaming anyway feels super strange. But there it is. You probably can skip reading this book --- I'm not sure it was worth the effort and it certainly didn't change my mind --- I'm of the firm view that if you accept that you have no control over your life then you will end up with much worse outcome than if you have the view that you're the master of your own destiny. But I suppose if you want to have excuses for your failures this book will provide lots of evidence for you to justify your own foibles!