New Podcast Release: Robert Sapolsky
In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to Robert Sapolsky
In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to Robert Sapolsky, the renowned neuroscientist, primatologist, and author, to discuss his groundbreaking research on stress and what we can learn from baboons about human behavior, as well as his controversial recent book arguing that free will is an illusion, and that in a deep sense, we are not morally responsible for our actions.
Robert has spent decades studying the effects of stress on the brain and body, beginning with his fieldwork on wild baboons in Kenya. His research has implications for our understanding of how social structures influence health and well-being. Beyond that, he has written extensively on the neuroscience of behavior, and this has led him to challenge some of our deepest assumptions about free will and personal responsibility.
Below are some highlights from our discussion, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On Stress and Social Bonds:
Robert: "If you get a choice in the matter, rather than being a high-ranking baboon, you definitely want to be a baboon who has a lot of grooming partners. Social affiliation is far more influential on physiology, health, good outcomes, all of that, even for a baboon. CEOs versus having circles of like symmetrical, reciprocating, grooming partners? Go for the latter every time!"
On Baboons as Models for Human Stress:
Robert: "They devote enormous amounts of energy to generating stress for each other over petty nonsense. And that turns out to be the center of their world. That is why they have far more to teach us about our own lives than wildebeest running away from lions."
On His Personal Crisis with Religion:
Robert: "One night at two in the morning, I woke up and I thought, ‘Ah, I get it. There's no God.’ And 10 seconds later, ‘Oh, and there's no free will.’ Ten seconds after that, ‘Oh, and it is an empty, mechanistic, indifferent universe.’ And everything evaporated at that moment, and I've not been capable of a shred of spirituality or anything since then."
On Determinism and Free Will:
Kasia: “First of all, what is determinism? How do you define it?”
Robert: "I mostly infuriate people by falling back on what determinism is not. Determinism is not the intuitive sense in a moment that when you are making a choice, you are the agent of that decision. You are the agent of that intention. Because all we know in that moment is we have formed that intention, and we are consciously aware of it, and we have a pretty good guess of what the outcome is going to be. And most importantly, we know there are alternatives available. And for most people, including, a lot of the criminal justice system, intent, and awareness that there are alternatives, are enough to decide that this is not a deterministic circumstance, and this is someone who can be held culpable. And my starting point is that this misses 99 per cent of what's going on because none of that is interesting. The only question to ask is, how did you turn out to be the sort of organism who would form that intent at that point? And that's genes, and your second trimester, and your kindergarten teacher, and what society, and what your hormone level determines - all of that. The only relevant question to ask is, ‘How did you form that intent?’ How did you become, out of your control, the sort of an organism who would have that intent at that point? Because no matter how much you might want to, you can't successfully intend to do something different than what you intend. You can't will yourself to have more willpower. You can't wish to wish for something different than what you're wishing for.”
Peter: “I don't see why that's the only relevant question to ask. I think that we might want to ask questions about how can we make it more likely that you will choose things that are desirable for society rather than less desirable, right? Even if we accept determinism as an ultimate truth about of the universe. Even if we agree that an all knowing demon who knew the position of every atom in the universe could have predicted, a thousand years ago, how the universe would be now, and that we would be talking to each other now, and what we would be saying, it would still be true that we make choices. We don't have the demon’s knowledge, so we have to make choices, and I think it's clear that those choices are important and we want to influence other people's choices. So we praise them for courageously good acts. You write, in your book, Behave about the U. S. helicopter pilot who saw the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and landed his helicopter between the Vietnamese women and children and the U. S. troops who were firing at them and killing them. I think we want to praise that kind of conduct. It saved many innocent lives. and I don't think we want to just say ‘Well, everything that pilot did was determined.’ That misses a really important distinction between people who do choose to intervene in those circumstances and people with machine guns who just keep firing at the women and children.”
On the Ethics of Scientific Research:
Peter: “You didn't just observe the baboons, you also intervened by using tranquilizer darts to render them unconscious and take blood samples. I've written about research on animals. I think there's a lot of research that is clearly completely unethical and I think there's some purely observational research that has no problems, but there is a gray area. And I wondered whether you reflected on the ethics of intervening in baboons by tranquilizing them that way?”
Robert: "It was enormously conflicting for me because I come from a reductive science, brain science, with a laboratory tradition and most field biologists are coming more from like an ecology, evolutionary biology perspective. So I was somewhat of a Neanderthal in their midst in terms of the things that interested me."
Robert: "Yes, enormously conflicting. the process of darting them. I would not dart somebody if they were injured. I would not dart anybody if they were in a hundred yards of a buffalo I would not dart them if they were anywhere near trees that they could climb up and then pass out and fall.
If there was an infectious disease going around and there was a vaccine for it, I would inoculate them. So the balancing of scales I did in my mind was that somehow this evened out. And when I came home, what I would mostly do is work with PETA about busting illegal primate smugglers shipping primates.”
On the Role of Upbringing in Moral Behavior:
Robert: "People who did the incredible heroic things during the Holocaust, there's been research done on it. Who were the people who saved people during the Holocaust? Were they better educated? Nah, that wasn't a predictor. Were they more religious? No. Were they of particular religious traditions? No. What were the biggest predictors? Were they raised by parents for whom doing the right thing was a moral imperative? Yes. You do that. You don’t even stop and think about it."
On Finding Meaning in a Deterministic Universe:
Robert: "We are biological machines. We're the fanciest kinds out there. We are biological machines that make no sense out of the context of our social setting and our psyches and such ... This is where all my rationality and science-based whatever crap becomes completely useless because I have to reach this totally irrational conclusion that it makes no sense whatsoever to think about good or bad things happening to a machine. Nonetheless, it's a better thing when good things happen to machines than bad things, because pain is painful."
On What’s Next:
Kasia: “So what's in future? What are you working on now?”
Robert: "Combining my neuroses and family history and stuff. I think the most likely thing in my future is neurodegenerative dementia. So, I’m a little bit uptight about that."