Blaze News investigates: Famed neuroscientist claims he's disproven free will — but his peers say he failed miserably

Much is known, or at least believed, about the heavens and the earth. The human mind, however, remains a relative mystery. Although it has long been taken for granted by a great many legal and biblical scholars, the concept of free will is chief among the problems of the mind that has befuddled natural scientists.

Two blockbuster science books came out in October 2023 on the topic, pulling readers in opposite directions.

In the first book, “Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will,” Dr. Kevin Mitchell, an associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, argued that human beings are indeed free agents, endowed with “the capacity for conscious, rational control of our actions.”

In the second book, “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, argued that human beings are effectively automatons determined to act by numerous internal and external factors, and on whom admiration or blame is wasted.

Mitchell and Sapolsky’s contrasting arguments may be of great interest to those contemplating Christian morality, soteriology, and Western law, especially given the apparent centrality of free choices in all three.

Seeking to learn more about the state of play for the debate on free will, contemporary arguments for an agential mankind, and where Sapolsky may have stumbled, Blaze News recently spoke to Dr. Kevin Mitchell and to Dr. Stephen M. Barr, president of the Society of Catholic Scientists and professor emeritus at the University of Delaware’s department of physics and astronomy.

While Sapolsky could not be reached for comment, his rebuttals might appear in his discussion with Mitchell later this month.

Extra to exploring the science of free will, Blaze News has also briefly considered the religious side of the equation, hearing from Dr. Brian H. Wagner of Veritas Baptist College about what the Bible says about free will.

Undetermined

In “Determined,” Sapolsky argues that “we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control.”

Accordingly, in Sapolsky’s view, an individual — just another “biological machine” — executes action A instead of actions B through Z because their brain chemistry, hormonal balance, early experiences, prenatal development, cultural upbringing, and genetics work in concert with a multitude of other material factors to preclude them from doing anything else. Sapolsky refers to the determining influence of many such distinct factors as “distributed causality.”

“The intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before,” wrote Sapolsky. “All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such, there’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.”

Just as the rapist apparently couldn’t help but be a rapist and the concert pianist couldn’t help but become a pianist, the cynical neuroscientist in this case was fated, thanks to a “gazillion” determinants, to construct an anti-freedom argument vulnerable to attack by his peers.

While Sapolsky eagerly provided evidence of various determining influences as well as their respective causative strengths in his book, Dr. Stephen Barr underscored in his recent review in First Things and in conversation with Blaze News that defenders of free will going back to antiquity have gladly acknowledged the existence of multiple influences — including diminishing influences — on free will.

Sapolsky has drafted a fine list of possible influences, but that’s not enough, said Barr, as he “has the burden of proof backwards.”

“One need not know exactly how free will works to have rational grounds for thinking one has it, any more than one needs to know exactly how vision works to believe that one is able to see,” wrote Barr. “Rather, it is Sapolsky who has set out to prove something, namely that human thought and action are not merely influenced by physical factors but entirely ‘determined’ by them, and to do this he has the burden of showing that no other causes are at work.”

Barr told Blaze News, “He has to show that these physical causes are the only causes; that there are no other causes. So he thinks that by piling on all of this description of the physical causes that he’s somehow excluded the possible operation of other causes. That’s just not logically sound.”

“It simply does not prove what he thinks it proves. He hasn’t proven anything in the neuroscience part [of the book],” continued Barr. “He is a neuroscientist. That’s his expertise. That’s what gives his book weight. But he doesn’t deliver the goods.”

Dr. Mitchell identified a similar fault in “Determined.”

“[Sapolsky] provides lots of evidence of various influences on our behavior — genetics, experience, evolution, hormones, whatever — none of which is disputed,” Mitchell told Blaze News. “Everybody agrees that those are there. But his conclusion is that all of those things together leave no room for anything else. All the causes must have been accounted for and he provides no evidence for that conclusion. That’s just a vibe.”

Mitchell indicated that he agrees that the influences referenced by Sapolsky do indeed affect humans but that their actual impact has been overblown for rhetorical effect. Despite Sapolsky’s contextual intimation, personality traits, for instance, are not particularly predictive of any specific behavior in any specific context, Mitchell told Blaze News.

Mitchell noted further that Sapolsky:

cites tons and tons of studies in his book to make these points and to kind of give the impression that each of these influences, by themselves, has a really big effect. So he’ll cite these studies that supposedly show a big effect of something like social priming — these sort of psychological experiments where you surreptitiously expose someone to a bunch of words with some connotations like, say, ‘old age,’ and then having read those things, they change their behavior in a way that they’re not even aware of. That whole literature is supposed to reinforce the notion that all of our behavior is like that — that we’re always being pushed around by subconscious kinds of things that we’re not really aware of — but it turns out that literature is terrible. It’s just really, really bad. It’s absolutely the poster child for the replication crisis in science.

Dr. Barr indicated that Sapolsky also muddies the waters by referencing Libet-type experiments — on at least 28 pages in his book — despite ultimately acknowledging their irrelevance.

Benjamin Libet conducted famous experiments in the 1980s, which were initially mistaken for potential nails in free will’s coffin.

Test subjects were wired up with electroencephalogram brain monitors and prompted to make a series of simple, spontaneous hand movements. Prior to consciously registering their decisions to gesture, Libet detected an electric signal in the test subjects’ brains and later concluded that “cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act ... can and usually does begin unconsciously.”

Some prominent scientists concluded that this and related experiments were dispositive with regards to the debate over free will.

The late social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner concluded, for instance, that free will was an illusion and that consciousness was an “epiphenomenon” as causally related to human action as the “turn signals are to the movements of [a] motor vehicle.”

Barr noted, however, that these experiments have aged like milk, citing recent research that suggests, for instance, that the “brain preparing to move is actually happening simultaneously with the building of the intention to move.”

Edward Neafsey, professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine and former director of the university’s neuroscience graduate program, highlighted studies debunking the previously accepted timeline of intention and neuronal activity.

Referencing the time course of intention before movement when compared to the time course of human neuronal firing rate decreasing before movement, Neafsey noted that “there is no difference between the onset times. Both intention and neuronal activity related to movement begin about 2 sec before movement. Thus, ‘No difference’ is the correct answer to Libet’s original question about the relation between pre-movement brain activity and pre-movement conscious intention to move. This means that Libet’s 1983 conclusion that there was ‘unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act’ was wrong.”

While the findings highlighted by Neafsey are generally good news for scientific defenders of free will, they neither help nor hinder Sapolsky, who wrote that “all that can be concluded is that in some fairly artificial circumstances, certain measures of brain function are moderately predictive of a subsequent behavior.”

What actually hurts Sapolsky’s case, besides his apparent attempt to flip the burden of proof, is his adoption of a fringe definition of free will.

The straw man’s neuron

“Find me the neuron that [started the choice], the neuron that [was activated] for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before,” wrote Sapolsky. “Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, hungry, stressed, or in pain at the time.”

The takeaway from Sapolsky’s rhetorical search for the neutral neuron is that the only free choice would be one bereft of context and entirely random — a definition Sapolsky admits the majority of philosophers won’t accept.

Mitchell indicated that Sapolsky is setting an extremely high bar for what qualifies as a free act where “unless you’re free from any prior cause whatsoever, then you don’t have freedom.”

“When you think about it, no organism could be free of all prior causes and still be an organism and still be itself,” said Mitchell. “Organisms carry their history with them. That’s what makes them selves through time. That includes genetic history; it includes physical history; it includes psychological history; our biography; and all of our goals and beliefs and desires.”

While such defining characteristics and prior causes may constrain behavior, they also set the stage for rational decision making.

“If none of those prior causes existed, we wouldn’t have any reason to do anything but we also wouldn’t be a person,” said Mitchell.

Barr emphasized that the rationality condition absent from Sapolsky’s free choice is core to the concept of free will in the Judeo-Christian philosophical tradition — a millennia-old tradition that Sapolsky appears to have relegated to a single, dismissive footnote in his book.

Sapolsky indicated that he avoided theologically based Judeo-Christian views about these subjects because, so far as he could tell, most of the theological discussions center on God’s omniscience.

“That’s nonsense,” Barr told Blaze News. “There’s huge discussion in Christian history about freedom and moral responsibility, and what it means to have free will, and so on — a very rich tradition of which he is obviously completely unaware.”

“Traditionally, what it meant to act freely was you were able to control your actions, at least to some extent of the time, based on rational considerations. Another word for free will was ‘rational will.’ Another word for the spiritual soul was ‘rational soul,” continued Barr.

The rationality of free will, hardly limited to the Judeo-Christian tradition, is also borne out in Mitchell’s evolutionary account.

Organisms from microbes on up to humans “integrate multiple signals at once, along with information about their current state and its recent history, to produce a genuinely holistic response that cannot be deconstructed into isolated parts,” wrote Mitchell.

Humans are especially agential and dynamic owing to a nervous system that has evolved over time into a control system to “define a repertoire of actions and choose between them” and to “give greater and greater causal autonomy over long and longer timeframes.”

Equipped with an “executive function,” humans boast the ability to rationally factor historical inputs and regulate behavior, not just in the moment but through time.

“We make decisions, we choose, we act,” Mitchell noted in his book “Free Agents.”

There are, however, degrees of freedom, not just between species and from person to person, but across an individual’s choices.

When pressed on when a human is operating at his freest, Mitchell indicated it would be in those circumstances when an adult is confronted with multiple options and is able, without coercion, to settle upon the option he's worked out to be the most optimal.

“His book is an attack on human rationality. When you attack human rationality, you are in the final analysis, attacking all human values,” said Barr.

“The real reason we need free will is that we need to be open to what is good and what is true, and the mind cannot be making decisions based on what is good and what is true if its decisions are entirely controlled from below — by physics and chemistry and biology, and things below the level of rationality,” continued the physicist.

Barr noted further that while much of the conversation about free will often centers on questions of moral freedom, intellectual freedom stands to be just as much a casualty.

If you tell someone you’re not morally responsible for what you do or for your moral decisions, then that can be a welcome conclusion, because who doesn’t want to be exculpated or absolved from moral responsibility? They might want that, but if you tell the same person, ‘You’re also not free with respect to anything you believe or think. Your thoughts are really not your own. Your thoughts are just dictated by chemistry and neuronal activity. ... They don’t want to hear that.

Something borrowed

Whereas Barr figures Sapolsky’s neuroscience-centered argument is a failure, he noted that his appropriation of an established argument from physics for cognitive determinism is somewhat formidable.

“In the 1920s, however, quantum mechanics showed that the laws of physics are not deterministic. Any past state of the universe allows many possible future states, and the laws of physics determine only their relative probabilities. That revolutionary discovery eliminated the argument against free will based on the nature of physical law,” wrote Barr.

However, Barr told Blaze News, “Roughly speaking, the larger the system you’re dealing with, the less of what’s called quantum indeterminacy plays a role.”

Whereas there is indeterminacy at the atomic and subatomic level, “The structures of the brain are so large compared to atoms that — this is the argument — quantum indeterminacy doesn’t play any role, and therefore it’s quasi-deterministic,” said Barr. “If for all practical purposes, the brain is functioning as if it were based on deterministic physical laws, you’re back in the soup. Yes, the laws of physics aren’t deterministic, but when you’re talking about the brain, you can sort of treat them as if they were.”

This is hardly an original argument on Sapolsky’s part, but Barr noted it nevertheless remains a challenging argument, raising tough questions for free will defenders:

Assuming that we have free will, how is it that our wills can produce a physical effect in our brain — can cause this neuron to fire or not to fire or this thing to happen and that thing not to happen? How can it do that if there’s a quasi-determinism there that is, in effect, totally controlled by the physics? That’s a puzzle.

Mitchell, who has elsewhere criticized reductionism, was even more critical of Sapolsky’s argument from physics, stressing that physics “is not deterministic at the quantum level and it’s not deterministic at the classical level. And it never was.”

After casting doubt on strict determinism up to the level of psychology, Mitchell suggested that it’s simply not the case that when the brain is “exposed to any scenario, it basically just works through the algorithm of what you should do.”

“The whole point of having a brain capable of cognition as opposed to just a bunch of hardwired reflexes is that we encounter novel scenarios all the time. That’s what brains are good for. That’s why our complicated brains have enabled us to colonize every kind of environment in the world — because they allow us to solve novel problems that we’ve never encountered individually and that our ancestors have never encountered evolutionary,” Mitchell told Blaze News. “To say that our psychology is deterministic is just a very speculative claim.”

Sapolsky’s not-so hidden agenda

Sapolsky’s pitch to those who would embrace his determinism is that it’s high time for humanity to re-evaluate admiration and blame — to recognize that without free will, “there can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is indefensible.”

The pianist who dazzles an audience with unparalleled skill in the concert hall is not to be admired any more than the pedophile who preys on the innocent is to be blamed, as neither are ultimately responsible for their actions in Sapolsky’s deterministic utopia.

Sapolsky would further have society restructure its rules of criminal responsibility such that instead of arrests, trials, and measured sentences, those who have harmed others would be investigated, evaluated, then quarantined.

While quarantine might sound like imprisonment, Sapolsky’s version would be “the absolute minimal amount needed to protect everyone, and not an inch more.”

Ethics professor Susan D. Carle and Tara L. White, the founding director of the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience at Brown, recently analyzed Sapolsky’s proposals in the spring issue of the Rutgers University Law Review and found them wanting; they pointed out, for instance, that the neuroscientist fails to account for how future dangerousness would be evaluated, who would bear the burden of proof, and what ultimately his system would, in practice, improve.

When highlighting what would be lost in Sapolsky’s system, Carle and White referenced Dr. Mitchell’s understanding that “praising those who possess admired personality traits encourages socially cooperative behavior, just as heaping opprobrium and retribution on those who have transgressed community norms communicates social meanings about what the group discourages.”

While critics have noted the unworkability of Sapolsky’s post-free will system, Dr. Barr indicated further that his quest to eliminate the concept of moral deserts is not the cure to cruelty and undeserved punishment the neuroscientist figures it for.

“What he doesn’t understand is that the whole notion that punishments can be deserved or not deserved is actually a limiting principle,” said Barr. “It’s a limitation on punishment because traditionally — in the Judeo-Christian worldview and I imagine more widely than that — it was regarded as unjust to give someone a punishment more harsh than he deserved.”

Covenantal implications

The legal system would not be the only institution impacted by a deterministic proof. After all, free will not only entails the ability to think freely and act morally but to willingly accept Christ.

While uncertainty about free will appears likely to persist in scientific circles, scripture appears fairly clear about its existence.

Dr. Brian H. Wagner set the stage in his written response to Blaze News by highlighting 1 Corinthians 7:37-38: “Nevertheless he that standeth steadfast in his heart, having no necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well.”

Wagner accompanied the verse with the following argument for God’s sovereign conference of free will to man:

1. A libertarian freewill decision is made by a libertarian free will.
2. If a libertarian freewill decision is defined as made "having no necessity" by one who "has power over his own will" and the scripture gives one example of such a decision existing, then a libertarian free will exists to make that libertarian freewill decision.
3. The scripture gives such an example in 1 Corinthians 7:37.
4. Therefore, libertarian free will exists.

“The key phrase is — μὴ ἔχων ἀνάγκην ἐξουσίαν δὲ ἔχει περὶ τοῦ ἰδίου θελήματος — not having necessity but authority he has over the individual desire,” wrote Wagner. “How that is not seen as a very clear and appropriate definition of LFW being defined by Paul as the foundation for the decision making of this circumstance is beyond me.”

“I can only see theological prejudice as the reason for rejecting Paul's confirmation that a LFW decision can be made in this circumstance,” continued Wager. “And if in this circumstance, then that LFW truly exists for other circumstances is a reasonable inference.”

When asked what free will has to do with Christian morality and salvation, Wagner responded, “This question appears to be about whether sin or covenant love can come into existence without free will existing in the one declared guilty of sin or accepted into an everlasting covenant love relationship. The answer is no, sin or covenant love cannot exist without free will.”

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