I admit it to my intellectual shame and ethical shame because I respond all the time as if there is free will.

Today, we're featuring renowned neuroendocrinologist, best selling author, and Stanford University professor, Robert Sapolsky. He's one of Stanford's top rated professors, and you'll see why in today's episode. Robert's journey has led him from studying stress and neuronal degradation in wild baboons in Kenya to exploring the relationship between schizophrenia disorders and the emergence of a shamanism in the major Western religions.

The most relevant thing is how I came about wasting the first 20 years of my life studying baboons.

But more recently, Sapolsky has plunged into philosophical waters, studying free will, or rather what he claims is the illusion and lack thereof.

I was 14 when I decided there's no free will.

He's come up with a new narrative to describe the science of life without free will. In his book Determined, he combines neuroscience, anthropology, quantum physics, chaos theory, and philosophy to tackle some of the most important questions of the human species. You'll see I push back on him with my requisite love and respect, but no one gets a free pass on the Into the Impossible podcast. I wanna ask the questions I know you wish you could ask my guest and you will. Today, he's here to present his case and you'll be the judge. Who's right? Is free will an illusion or do we have control and are we the determinants of our future? Let's go.

Robert, as you know, I'm a physicist. I've had many physicists. I love talking to physicists, but I also love talking to biologists, neurobiologists, and all sorts of folks. I always have a problem with these people, when I talk to people like David Chalmers, bang that it seems hopeless. Cosmology seems hard, but consciousness seems impossible. And to me, how can we understand the notion of free will if we don't have a notion of consciousness that everyone accepts? So is that am I making a, fallacious experiment? Or is it really the case that you could not understand free will until you understand how consciousness itself emerges?

Nicely. I think, fortunately, one could ignore consciousness and I completely agree with you. Once once a decade, I force myself to read a review paper on sort of neurobiology of consciousness and see with great relief that, like, it still isn't making any more sense to me. And I don't think it's making any more sense to the people working on it, because it's such a damn intractable problem. But fortunately, in my view, the issue of consciousness is not terribly relevant to assessing free will. And that's because I think the problem people get into when believing in free will and just having such a strong intuitive sense of it is they get caught up in the notion that if there is conscious intent and there is conscious awareness that you have alternative behaviors available to you, that's it. Case closed. That's the requirements for deciding that there's free will.

And in my view, whether or not that intent is conscious or otherwise, whether or not there's alternatives, whether your brain decided milliseconds before you were consciously aware that you had intent to do something. All of that is kind of cool and fascinating and has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not there's free will. Because in my view, focusing on that is like asking somebody to read the last theory pages of the book and assess what they think of a book. Because what you're doing there is not asking the only question possible which is, okay, hooray, you have conscious intent to do that. And when you did that, you felt a sense of ownership over your intelligence. Where did that intent come from? How did you turn out to be the sort of person who would have that intent at that moment? And it's in that realm that I think one can find that there's not a shred of space for free will to operate in. And all we are the outcomes of all of those priors that made us the sort of person who would have that intent in that moment. And the trouble is in that moment, it's so tangible bang we're so conscious of having that intent that we have to have done that freely.

And that doesn't begin to address the issue. How do you become that sort of person?