Determined

The instant One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Robert Sapolsky’s Yet, as he acknowledges, it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world....

Auteur

Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. His most recent book, Behave, *was a *New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” He and his wife live in San Francisco.

Texte du rabat

*The instant *New York Times bestseller

“Excellent…Outstanding for its breadth of research, the liveliness of the writing, and the depth of humanity it conveys.” – Wall Street Journal

One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.

Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody’s “fault”; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession.

Yet, as he acknowledges, it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.

Résumé
*The instant *New York Times bestseller!

One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences

Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do.

Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody’s “fault”; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession.

Yet, as he acknowledges, it’s very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.

Échantillon de lecture
1

Turtles All the Way Down

When I was in college, my friends and I had an anecdote that we retold frequently; it went like this (and our retelling was so ritualistic that I suspect this is close to verbatim, forty-five years later):

So, it seems that William James was giving a lecture about the nature of life and the universe. Afterward, an old woman came up and said, "Professor James, you have it all wrong."

To which James asked, "How so, madam?"

"Things aren't at all like you said," she replied. "The world is on the back of a gigantic turtle."

"Hmm." said James, bemused. "That may be so, but where does that turtle stand?"

"On the back of another turtle," she answered.

"But madam," said James indulgently, "where does that turtle stand?"

To which the old woman responded triumphantly: "It's no use, Professor James. It's turtles all the way down!"

Oh, how we loved that story, always told it with the same intonation. We thought it made us seem droll and pithy and attractive.

We used the anecdote as mockery, a pejorative critique of someone clinging unshakably to illogic. We'd be in the dinner hall, and someone had said something nonsensical, where their response to being challenged had made things worse. Inevitably, one of us would smugly say, "It's no use, Professor James!" to which the person, who had heard our stupid anecdote repeatedly, would inevitably respond, "Screw you, just listen. This actually makes sense."

Here is the point of this book: While it may seem ridiculous and nonsensical to explain something by resorting to an infinity of turtles all the way down, it actually is much more ridiculous and nonsensical to believe that somewhere down there, there's a turtle floating in the air. The science of human behavior shows that turtles can't float; instead, it is indeed turtles all the way down.

Someone behaves in a particular way. Maybe it's wonderful and inspiring, maybe it's appalling, maybe it's in the eye of the beholder, or maybe just trivial. And we frequently ask the same basic question: Why did that behavior occur?

If you believe that turtles can float in the air, the answer is that it just happened, that there was no cause besides that person having simply decided to c…