Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Simply the most humane book I've ever read. This book dismantles the myth of moral desert, and it is liberating. But it also sets the stage for a society that is more just, civilized and rational than anything we have today. This is hugely ironic for the proposition that we are nothing more or less than animals, biological machines reacting to and learning from our environment. Abandoning the belief in free will and all the gross behavior that comes with it is what can truly set us apart from the "animals" once and for all. That's because we humans are capable of understanding our own nervous system, which may be more complex than those of other animals but is, Sapolsky shows in detail, fundamentally the same. Attraction, aversion, learning, personality traits, tendencies to do this or that - all are, fundamentally, about the material realities of our brain. The sometimes gentlemanly Sapolsky doesn't come out and say this, but it's glaringly evident by the time you finish the first half: There is very strong scientific evidence that we don't have free will, and - with no exaggeration here - zero scientific evidence that we do. Once we all get how our brains truly work, we can finally realize that praise and blame, the things holding us back from truly being kind to ourselves and each other, are chimeras. And Sapolsky shows us, we've done it before - as seen in our increasingly liberal attitudes towards epileptics, schizophrenics, gays and lesbians, those with depression, and many others. We can choose the myth of desert, and all the illusory and pointless feeling good and bad about ourselves, or we can simply choose to be kind.

Presentation fidelity: 1 single grammatical mistake (affect vs effect, but I won't tell you where) in this digital version, but otherwise immaculate version. Vitally, all the links back and forth between main text, references, footnotes, index, etc. seem to work great, which definitely makes up for the digital's version inability to be flipped through quickly to find things, compared to a paper book. All the illustrations are there, and you definitely feel like you're getting the complete package when shelling out your hard earned mula for a digital book. Content: Sapolsky's writing is refreshingly charming & humourous, while also being sharply logical without being dry at all.

Well written, accessible, even funny. Sapolsky makes a good case against free will. However, he skims a bit too fast over emergent systems, and forgets that information is independent of the substrate where it resides. The jury is still out on free will and consciousness. But the book has the merit of clarifying the position and arguments of one side of the debate.