The Choice and the

Illusion ,
Discovering the Hidden
Truth of Our Decisions

Exploring the Cause Behind Human Behavior

-Hello!

We are facing a problem: Human beings, composed of

tissues and organs, are profoundly physical, tangible
entities, if you will. Our behavior is evidently influenced
by these physical components and how they function.

For example, if the heart stops beating, behavior

becomes static, like that of a deceased person.

In some cases, the connection is quite evident. If the

heart still beats, behavior is largely determined by the
brain.

Here, things get complicated. The functioning of the

brain depends on its physical development, which, in
turn, is influenced by adolescence, childhood, and the
conditions during gestation. And yet, at some point, the
connection between physiology and behavior becomes
blurred.

Inexplicably, human behavior becomes independent of

these organic aspects, acquiring an autonomy, a capacity
for self-determination, stemming from the complexity of
the brain. This autonomy is so complex that, at some
point, the ability to choose behaviors that are not dictated
by physical development becomes evident.
In other words, free will emerges, allowing free choice
based solely on will, desire, and effort. Thus, as we well
know, our choices are deeply linked to our character, to
our will to overcome our condition. There are people
with weak will and people with strong will.

This is a moral responsibility of each individual for their

own behavior. Inappropriate, antisocial behaviors reflect
a defective character and are strictly our responsibility. Is
this correct?

We will further explore the biological connection

between human behavior and brain functions, attempting
to reconnect something that should never have been lost.
But it has happened, because discussions about human
behavior have always been influenced by culture.

Our culture, especially the Christian one, promotes the

idea of free will since Genesis. Literally, in the Bible, in
the second moment, man is given the opportunity to
choose whether to eat from the forbidden tree or not, and
his choice defines his character.

The term "free will" comes from Christian philosophy,

where it has been intensely debated for 2000 years. Most
have come to the conclusion that free will essentially
means the capacity to have chosen otherwise.

The ancient Greeks also discussed this capacity of man

to make free choices, but Christianity placed it at the
center of attention, where it continues to simmer.

Today, the notion of free will presupposes that you can

wake up one morning and make a spontaneous decision
that has no connection to your present or past
circumstances but emanates from somewhere deep
within some inaccessible mystery to science.

A decision that emanates from the soul, from the spirit,

from the impossible complexity of the human being.

I have always avoided this philosophical discussion

about free will because it always seemed imbued with
more or less disguised religious concepts to me.

Because that thing that should be capable of

transcendental freedom, regardless of the surrounding
environment, always ends up being something magical,
expressed in terms of the soul.

There is this physiological you and then there is your

spirit that does not depend on your physiology and
environment but has some special qualities, born out of
nothing.
And that just sounds annoying.

The reason I decided to tackle the discussion, however,

is that Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting
scientists alive today, published a book last year that
shows that this impossible complexity of the human
brain has become increasingly accessible and explicable
in the last few decades.

Still far from being completely explainable, but enough,

at this point, that we can draw some important
conclusions.

Half of his book consists of information discovered in

the last 5 years.

Titled "Behave - Life Without Free Will", it shows that

at the intersection of neurobiology, genetics, sociology,
anthropology, and others, there is hardly any room left
for free will.

Not even a bit.

The parking lot is full.

What he argues is not that there is just a little free will,

but that there is absolutely none.
Sapolsky also wrote a book in 2017 called Behave, in
which he explained in 800 pages how our behaviors are
dictated by our biology.

In the end, he had a small chapter left to say oh, and, of

course, this obviously means that there is no free will.

And his impression was that this chapter was

overlooked.

So now he's back with a new book that is actually the

culmination of about 40 years of interdisciplinary study.

And this book seems absolutely incredible to me.

In a way, it's everything I could have ever wanted in the

debate about free will.

Sapolsky says, therefore, that every human behavior is

determined.

Determined by what?

The mantra he keeps repeating in his last two books is:

by the previous second, by the previous minute, by the
previous hour, by the previous day, by the previous
month, by the previous year, by the previous century, by
the previous millennium, and so on.

All deeply intertwined.

The decision you make now depends on how your last
hour, your last day, your last year looked, all together.

How they looked depends on the environment in which

you exist, and your reaction to this environment depends
on genetics and how your brain has formed.

How your brain has formed is determined by what kind

of childhood and adolescence you had, and all together
determine what kind of choices you can make.

At no point in this journey did you choose in what

environment to form your brain, so there was never a
moment when you chose what your range of available
decisions looks like.

That is, you have never chosen what kind of choices you
can make.

At the intersection of the aforementioned things, there

was never a "you" who chose freely how and to what
extent to be influenced by all these factors.

The notion that there is a "you" there, somewhere behind

the scenes, who exists outside of historical-biological
conditioning, is part of the problem.

It is, in fact, the problem.

Because this "you", despite not choosing the
environment in which it was born, and despite not
choosing its own biology, can still supposedly make free
choices, it just needs to try a little.

If you strain your will very hard, but very hard, not in
jest, you can overcome these historical-biological limits.

Sapolsky's proposal is as radical as it can be. Humans are

biological machinery from which you can never extract
anything other than what you put in.

Something scandalous.

People who have managed to accomplish impressive

things, people who have managed to overcome their
condition, have done so because they could always do it,
because somewhere there have always been resources
that allowed them to do the things they did, or because
somewhere along the way those resources appeared
luckily.

Equally, those who have struggled and have not

achieved much, have not achieved much because they
could never, because the resources were never there, and
did not appear along the way, and, scientifically
speaking, -5 plus -5 will never add up to 10.
As a result, the so-called "bad" people are not at fault for
being bad and doing bad things, and, equally, the "good"
people have no merit for being good and doing good
things.

When you extend this argument, you reach the point

where people who commit crimes have no moral
responsibility for the crimes committed. It's not their
fault. We all compulsively play some hands that we
never chose, so punishing such a criminal is like
punishing a child for getting a cold at school. Something
even more scandalous.

Good news for all the bad people in the world, bad news
for all the award winners in the world, as they have no
very personal merit for obtaining them. These things
sound quite absurd today, now.

Sapolsky himself acknowledges the huge difficulty of

thinking like this, and says that he struggles with it and
only succeeds 1% of the time. That it's hard. But our
current civilization prides itself on constantly adapting
its worldview based on new scientific discoveries over
the past centuries.
The Earth is not the center of the universe, hurricanes are
not caused by witches, and epileptic people are not
possessed by the devil. If we were to continue this
scientific thread, the point it brings us to is this: that
humans do not have the capacity to choose what kind of
choices they can make.

That you can never choose freely from your history of

biological and environmental combinations, and that this
history is never something you choose. Somewhere, this
argument sounds familiar and reasonable, and yet it has
the capacity to be extremely annoying.

The familiarity comes from the fact that we can all more
or less agree that a child raised in a desert, physically
and emotionally starved, hurt and abused, probably will
never become a world swimming champion.

There is a causality and a correlation there that sounds

reasonable, common sense.

But it's very easy for us to apply it only in extreme cases.

When circumstances are not so black and white,
somehow that causality melts away, and people
supposedly are no longer determined by such factors,
because that divine complexity of the human being
intervenes.
That man was clearly determined by his environment,
but my environment is not like that, not at that intensity,
so it's exclusively my fault if I don't become a world
swimming champion.

What Sapolsky argues is that today science provides us

with enough information, from the combination of
various disciplines, to understand that people are equally
determined by less glaring elements, elements that,
although perhaps more subtle, are still just as
determinant of who or what you are. The discussion here
is not a philosophical one, but one anchored in
neurobiology, sociology, and all the other relevant
disciplines.

The impression left by his book is as if he stumbled upon

a kind of quantum physics. In a way, it's strange,
counterintuitive, it's unclear what to do with it and how it
turns our world upside down, and yet it proves to be
correct at every step.

Sapolsky doesn't have all the possible answers to this

situation, but what he keeps repeating, in an emotional
way, is that we still know enough today.

We know enough not to leave this discussion prey to

moral philosophy, we know enough to clearly state that a
person's behavior is strictly determined by their biology
and environment. And no one chooses their biology or
their environment.

And yet, in our everyday lives, we operate automatically

with the feeling that we have freedom of choice. My
subjective experience is that I choose when to eat, when
to pick up a pen, when to turn right instead of left. So
what do we do?

In his words, to the question: Sapolsky summarizes his

position like this: So we'll scrutinize all these steps to see
if somewhere escapes some free choices made by proud
autonomous human beings. Importantly, the argument
does not need to be accepted to its maximum potentially
paralyzing capacity to be valuable.
 Last Seconds

Understanding that there's far less free will than we once

thought is still a big step towards a more faithful
understanding of how humans operate.

At the level of analyzing behavior in seconds, there's a

study published in 1983 that has dominated the entire
discussion about free will in neurobiology since then.

In it, participants had electrodes placed on their heads to

record brain activity, and they were given a button to
press. They were told to think about something for a bit,
and then, when they wanted, to decide to press the button
and immediately declare what they decided.

People generally declared their decision 200

milliseconds before the physical action of pressing the
button. That's 0.2 seconds before. You would say
"ready" and in 0.2 seconds, you'd press the button.
The shocking part of this study, however, showed that
the neurons in the brain were ready for action 0.3
seconds before the declared moment of decision. That
means the brain had already decided 0.3 seconds before
the person thought they had chosen. Holy moly!

It means our impression of free choices is just a story to

cover some impulsive decisions of the brain. That
decisions are made by the organism already, before we
become conscious of them and rationalize them and
integrate them into ourselves and link them with a story
that explains why we did what we just did because that's
what we wanted.

In the following decades, these results have been

repeatedly confirmed. A study using modern and high-
performance fMRI has managed to demonstrate that, in
some situations, the decision is actually made in the
brain up to 10 seconds before the person says they
decided. The sensation of free choice, therefore, is just a
post-hoc justification of an automatic, unconscious
impulse.
Neurobiologists and philosophers have argued, and
continue to argue, about whether this is or is not the
definitive death of free will. There's a whole chapter in
the book about these studies, long, complicated, and
ultimately, says Sapolsky, irrelevant.

First, there are some concrete problems with the studies,

such as the fact that sometimes those brain signals
indicating readiness for action didn't accurately predict
that the action would actually happen.

Second, it's hard to say what the results of these studies

actually mean. That doesn't sound so threatening
anymore. The subject of the studies was how quickly one
gets from intention to action and what the microcosm of
this choice looks like.

However, the reason it's irrelevant, again, says Sapolsky,

is that the essential question for the broader discussion,
outside of the lab, is: where did that intention come
from? The more important issue here is whether people
can control the intentions that arise in their heads.
This debate always happens at the edge of language,
where there's always the feeling that you can slip and fall
off the linguistic cliff.

As dizzying as these questions sound, they're actually the

stakes of the discussion about free will. The answer to
them is also no. A very pragmatic field where the
relevance of intention is analyzed at the second level is
the legal system. A legal distinction is made between
premeditated murder and so-called crimes of passion,
where someone kills driven by a very powerful emotion
that hits them in the moment.

There are fragments throughout our culture that accept

that biology determines certain behaviors, but this
argument is only accepted to a certain extent, arbitrarily.

For example, if someone attacks you with a knife and

you shoot them, they fall to the ground, and, after 11
seconds, you shoot them again, which kills them: is it
premeditated murder or not?

Sapolsky has testified as an expert in 12 such cases,

always arguing that 11 seconds are not only not
sufficient for premeditation but are not sufficient for any
kind of thought in such a situation. In 11 out of the 12
cases, the jury decided it was premeditated murder.
Maybe even in the moment, instantly, you can't control
yourself and decide what you're doing, but in the next 11
seconds, you should come to your senses and make the
free choice to be measured and controlled.

Another major complementary part in all these debates is

that maybe it's hard to choose to do something specific,
but you should at least be able to choose not to do
something. Right? Because choosing not to do
something specific is still a choice, it's, umm, something
else. Anyway, returning, the question that interests us is:
why does a certain intention form?

The studies that measure milliseconds tell us nothing

relevant about that, so we have to look at the last seconds
or minutes. And here we enter the realm of studies that
demonstrate how people's intentions can be affected by
all sorts of seemingly irrelevant surrounding stimuli. I'm
going to say the words "study" and "studies" a lot in this
book, forgive me, but Sapolsky diligently cites hundreds
of studies in the book, noting that he included only those
studies whose findings have been successfully
reproduced by other scientists.
 Last Hours

That being said, an important and controversial study

shows that people who are in a room with a disgusting
smell are, on average, more critical of male
homosexuality. Even those who, in principle, didn't have
a major problem with it. The disgusting smell didn't
affect their feelings towards lesbians, elderly people, or
African Americans, but the idea of men loving other men
was truly contentious.

Another study shows that in a room with a bad smell,

people are less likely to agree with same-sex marriage.
There are also other studies that show that, generally, a
person placed in a context with a disgusting stimulus is
much less tolerant and more willing to punish behaviors
they perceive as disgusting.

In other words, physical disgust directly influences

moral disgust towards various manifestations. The
reason why this happens is extremely interesting. A
disgusting smell or taste activates a region of the brain
called the insular cortex, often simply called the insula.
In mammals, this is activated by smells or tastes that
seem spoiled, automatically triggering food rejection or
vomiting, a mechanism meant to protect against food
poisoning, to avoid consuming harmful food. Asked why
they previously agreed with behavior X, but surrounded
by a disgusting smell, they no longer did, nobody will
say that their insula confused physical judgments with
moral judgments.

Instead, they will seek and produce a justification that is

compatible with the idea that we decide when and how
we feel. They'll say they realized it wasn't okay, that they
thought better. The opposite effect is also demonstrated.
If you place people in rooms with pleasant smells, they
evaluate various things in a more positive light and are
generally more open.

Many other studies show how attractive people are

considered more honest, intelligent, and competent. Like
with the insula, we don't have new and sophisticated
structures that make the distinction between what is
physically beautiful and what is morally good. These
judgments use the same parts of the brain, so a
physically beautiful person is automatically judged to be
good.
If you're attracted to them, it means they're a good
person, if you're not attracted to them, they're probably a
bad person. Once again, our linguistic and conceptual
sophistication is a very recent event in evolutionary
terms, which has not yet produced equally dramatic
changes in the functioning of the mammalian brain.

So all this sophistication rests on the shoulders of

structures built to solve very concrete problems, dealing
with food and reproduction. If your heart is pounding
while you're thinking about something, you
automatically feel like those thoughts are very important.
When people are hungry, they become less
understanding, something I think we've all experienced.

A study analyzing 1000 judicial decisions shows that the

longer it has been since the judge's last meal, the less
likely they were to approve parole for a convict. If you're
hungry, you're not in the mood to release anyone. These
are just a few examples of stimuli that seem irrelevant
but can affect our day-to-day decisions.
Even so, Sapolsky says that the effects are still relatively
minor, that the studies always refer to an average and
that there were always enough people who were
exceptions. So free will escapes again this time, we still
need to look for it. However, I would mention, before
this chapter, that in principle, almost everything we call
morality is something we learn culturally.

Beyond the instinct of self-preservation and the need for

affection and love, people are not born with complex
notions of right and wrong, but learn from the
surrounding environment. Children simply mimic
attitudes they see around them and assimilate behaviors
and reactions long before any capacity to rationalize
these reactions. Rationalization comes later in life when
you have to explain behaviors already acquired.

This is something that is addressed in various ways in

the book, not explicitly in this chapter, but it needed to
be said. We've talked about factors at the level of
seconds and minutes that can influence your intentions;
now let's move on to minutes and days and enter the
realm of HORMONES.
 Last Days, Years, and... Hormones

Who are the hormones? There are about 75 of them, and

most of them affect your behavior in more or less subtle
ways.

Perhaps the most famous hormone in this regard is

testosterone, known to stimulate aggression. On average,
men have about 15-20 times more testosterone in
circulation than women. Its effect is somewhat similar
regardless of sex, just more intense where there's more of
it. However, testosterone doesn't invent aggression out of
thin air; it intensifies existing aggression.

Monkeys injected with testosterone fight more intensely

with monkeys they were already fighting with, while still
respecting those from whom they might get a beating.
Testosterone's effect is more of a boost, encouraging
impulsivity and risky behavior by more directly linking
the amygdala to behavior, without being filtered through
the inhibitory mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex.
We'll discuss these structures in great detail later, but for
now, we can say that the amygdala plays a central role in
fear, anxiety, and aggression, while the prefrontal cortex
houses the most sophisticated human abilities for
inhibition and deliberation. From an evolutionary
perspective, the amygdala is one of the oldest structures
in the mammalian brain, while the prefrontal cortex is
the most recently evolved part of the human brain.

So the relationship between them is very interesting.

Returning to testosterone, it also makes you less

generous, more egocentric, and less empathetic toward
strangers. However, it turns out that it's not quite that
simple. To complicate things further, the fundamental
function of testosterone seems to be related to social
status.

We say that testosterone makes you less generous, but if

social status depends on generosity, then suddenly it
makes you more generous. For example, in a charity
auction, people pumped with testosterone compete to
donate more money because it boosts their status.
If you take a group of Buddhist monks and inject them
with testosterone, they'll run through the city in a
desperate competition to perform the most charitable
acts. As Sapolsky eloquently explains, the problem isn't
with testosterone itself, but with the fact that our society
is often organized in such a way that aggression ensures
a certain status. So in that case, testosterone equals
aggression.

Depending on how much testosterone affects you at a

certain moment, you become more sensitive to various
threats, care less about others' pains, and are more likely
to fall into aggressive tendencies you already had. The
more threatened you feel as a child, the more aggressive
tendencies you have, which can be intensified by
variations in testosterone levels.

But testosterone itself doesn't generate aggressive

behaviors for which there isn't already a pattern. This
aggression shouldn't be thought of only in terms of
physically fighting someone, but also in terms of
impulsivity and engaging in more or less dubious risky
behaviors.
Another very interesting hormone is called vasopressin.
One of its roles is to regulate water retention in the body,
telling the kidneys when to conserve water and when to
eliminate it. But another role is to regulate how well
monogamy feels. This is a perfect example of how
interconnected human biology and the mind are.

There's nothing in the body that doesn't have some role,

small or large, in how your mind works. For this reason,
it's very odd to make a distinction between mind and
body. If you inject a polygamous mouse with
vasopressin, suddenly it starts believing in the eternity of
marriage, suddenly it's not interested in any other
potential partners.

Monogamous animal species seem to secrete more

vasopressin, making long-term partnerships feel much
better than short encounters. Humans seem to be
somewhere in the middle on the monogamous-
polygamous axis.

Here's a simple way in which understanding your own

biology can eliminate all sorts of societal dramas and
misunderstandings, if we understand that there are
people who physiologically have a predisposition
towards long-term partnerships and people who don't.
And that neither is wrong in any way.

Another important class of hormones is called

glucocorticoids. Their role is to, in stressful situations,
when you're being chased by a lion or your boss is
yelling at you, mobilize whatever energy sources are
available in the body and deliver them to the muscles so
you can save your life, running from the lion and your
boss.

Glucocorticoids, of which the most famous is cortisol,

increase tension, make your heart beat faster, cut energy
from reproductive functions because it's not the time to
reproduce when you're trying to save your life, and many
other things that together instill a state of emergency in
the body.

In this state, your behavior becomes more impulsive,

harder to control. Physiologically, the ability to deeply
contemplate options and possibilities decreases, and the
switch turns towards immediate actions, happening like a
reflex. If you have a history of aggression, when
stressed, you'll be even more aggressive; if you have a
history of anxiety, you'll be even more anxious; if the
history is one of depression, then even more depression.

The functions of these hormones are very complex and

sometimes apparently contradictory, but the idea here is
that they intensely shape human behavior, and no one
has ever chosen how much testosterone, vasopressin, or
glucocorticoids to have in their body. These things are
determined by the interaction over time between biology
and the environment.

The human brain enjoys exceptional neuroplasticity,

meaning it's in an uninterrupted process of adapting to
stimuli from the surrounding environment. How much
hormones you have in your body today depends on how
your last weeks and years looked. If you've been in a
state of continuous stress year after year, for example,
then the structures responsible for producing
glucocorticoids will increase in size, and they'll continue
to pump out this stress hormone even when the stress
disappears, out of inertia, since they've grown so large,
what else to do but be useful.
If you suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, for
example, the amygdala physically enlarges and becomes
more sensitive, so even a minor stimulus can produce a
huge internal reaction of fear, anxiety, and aggression.
Because your experience has oversized the apparatus
sensitive to upsetting stimuli, and therefore, when the
apparatus reacts, it has industrial, overwhelmingly
powerful capacities.
 Adolescence and the Frontal Cortex

Let's leap forward in time, beyond the early years, to

adolescence. By around age 10, a person's brain is nearly
fully developed; most of the structures that will exist in
adulthood are already grown. With one very significant
exception: the frontal cortex, which continues its very
active development process for about another 15 years.

Interestingly, a child's brain has more synapses than an

adult's brain—more connections between neurons, more
interconnecting branches. The developmental process,
which occurs most intensely during adolescence, actually
involves reducing the number of synapses. It's like
pruning branches that are not useful or not used. For this
reason, children are naturally more creative until they
have life experiences that teach them it's not worth
maintaining that creativity, that time means money, and
synapses are expensive.

So, during adolescence, neuronal connections are

selected for preservation or discard. This selection
process sculpts the brain you will have from that point
onward. Incredibly, humans have genetically evolved to
have this selection period last as long as possible,
allowing time to learn which behaviors are useful for
adult life and which are not, what constitutes good
decisions and bad decisions in your environment.

Genes cannot directly provide these instructions, so as an

adaptation to the complex human social environment,
you are instead given a period of 15 years of intense
neuroplasticity to sort these things out based on
surrounding needs. This spectacularly means that
humans have evolved in a way that the most
sophisticated part of our behavior is least determined by
genes.

A doorway is left open for the final phase of brain

development to be determined by our environment and
experiences. However, compared to what comes before,
this period is a more delicate adjustment, a reformulation
of a text that's too long, has too many unnecessary
words, lacks a certain efficiency. Adolescence, therefore,
is the moment when you're drafting the second version
of the text.
But the first draft, the text you're working on, comes
from childhood. In childhood, it's the same story of
neuroplasticity but in an even more brute variant, where
everything is much more sensitive, and an individual's
environment and experiences determine how essential
structures for rationalizing, controlling impulses, being
empathetic, and planning for the future are formed.

How these structures develop depends on the

relationship with parents, relationships with other
children, the environment—whether it's dangerous or not
—and the surrounding cultural values, which a child
always perceives before they are explained. All the
previously discussed things about hormones apply even
more intensely in childhood. If you grow up in a
stressful environment, then the negative effects are even
more fundamentally and biologically challenging to
overcome, not philosophically, but neurobiologically
speaking.

Because that part of you that was supposed to allow you

to push yourself and constantly self-improve simply
doesn't work as it could, it's underdeveloped because you
were terrorized too much when you were little. As I said,
we are always a continuation of our childhood
experiences, and this in a purely biological way.
In the last 25 years, a scale has emerged that
scientifically measures how unlucky your childhood
was, and this scale has become a pillar in relevant
discussions in neuroscience, sociology, and biology.

It's called Adverse Childhood Experiences, the table of

adverse childhood experiences.

They are: Physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse.

Physical neglect, emotional neglect. Then there's the
category of problems within the household you grew up
in: if someone had a mental disorder, if there was
domestic violence, if there was substance abuse (and this
includes alcohol consumption obviously), if a relative
was incarcerated, or if there was a divorce.

For each category you check, you get a point. There are
people with 0 points on this scale, and then there are the
true winners of the lottery of life, with 10 points. Then,
the discovery that keeps being confirmed and
reconfirmed: This is what the pyramid looks like,
recognizing that even before experiencing adverse
childhood experiences, you can be a victim of a societal
context that was already terrible, and before that, who
knows what generational trauma.

Each time, the more negative factors there are, the more
intensely they converge toward an extremely difficult
life and premature death.

Similarly, if there are very positive experiences in all

these categories, if you were physically and emotionally
cared for, if sexuality was treated openly and non-
threateningly, if the human relationships around you
were warm and positive, then all these factors predict
just as much a predisposition toward socially valuable
behaviors, toward good functionality in adult life, and
toward a longer and healthier life. If we take just this
point alone, of ACE scores, where does the discussion
about free will come in? Because no one has the ability
to choose what kind of brain develops, and the way your
brain develops is exclusively what allows you to make
difficult choices instead of functioning strictly
impulsively. The most prominent counterargument here,
and the easiest one, is that there are countless stories of
people who came from all sorts of difficult backgrounds
and still managed to overcome their condition. And
indeed, they exist. A high ACE score doesn't mean
you're destined for a miserable life; it just means it's
much harder for you to make short or long-term
decisions that lead to your own flourishing. It means the
inability to recognize opportunities and the inability to
take advantage of opportunities, when they arise,
because your fuse is too short, and it's unclear how you
could lengthen it. We'll explore these effects in detail a
little later. To continue our journey back in time, before
childhood, you are influenced by the intrauterine
environment, by your mother's biology, by her
experiences while nurturing a little human inside her.
For example, if a mother is stressed by environments and
annoying people and has a high amount of
glucocorticoids in her blood, the notion that the world is
a dangerous place is imprinted even during fetal life, so
you're born with an extra vulnerability to anxiety and
depression. And so on.
 Genetics

We move on to genetics then. What does genetics mean?

A rough but sufficient summary for our purposes here
would be this: our bodies are made up of thousands of
types of proteins, each with different functions. Some
come together to build bones, others muscles, others are
neurotransmitters, hormones, and receptors. A gene is
considered a piece of DNA that represents the recipe for
one of these proteins. We have about 20,000 genes that
are the recipe for 20,000 different proteins. And yet,
these recipes represent only 5% of our DNA.

That's the very simple part of it. Then comes the field
called epigenetics, which studies how the remaining 95%
of human DNA are mechanisms for implementing these
recipes. Switches, on/off buttons, switches for when and
how a gene is activated, when you take the recipe and
actually make the cake from it or not, when it's good to
produce that protein and when you take a break. These
switches are activated depending on the environment.
Environment here means everything from the
microscopic environment of the cell to the space you're
in, and the two are very much linked because depending
on your larger context, your microscopic context
changes. The more complex an organism is, the larger
portion of its DNA is dedicated to these switches. More
pronounced differences in animal evolution often occur
not by changing a gene, a recipe for a certain protein, but
by changing how and when and how much of it is
produced.

That's why we have 70% of our genes in common with a

sponge found at the bottom of the sea, a sponge that
doesn't even have neurons or hobbies. The real
complexity comes from how, when, and how much a
protein is produced, not from how many recipes you
have in you. Having said that, the biological way in
which our childhood experiences are imprinted on our
bodies is explained through epigenetics. Depending on
your experiences, the human body learns when to
activate a gene and when not.

Accordingly, when to produce various neurotransmitters

or hormones, when to produce testosterone, serotonin,
glucocorticoids, and so on. If you're a child growing up
in stress, then you're constantly flooded with
glucocorticoids, which keep your body in a state of
emergency.
This state is literally recorded in the DNA, in epigenetic
processes that learn that, because you're always in
danger, the switches for certain genes must operate in a
certain way.

As the body feels like it's in a perpetual flight from a

lion, it means you always need enough glucocorticoids
in you to be able to save your life. In this state of
emergency, the development of the frontal cortex, which
would make you capable of making reasoned long-term
decisions, is not a priority.

If the body is constantly in a state of let's see how we

don't die now, resources are redirected from long-term
projects to short-term ones, respectively, how not to die
now. That is how our experiences practically change our
DNA. It should be noted that there is a perfect
correspondence between this cellular level and everyday
life. It's pretty banal to say that people in a chronic state
of stress become less capable of making long-term
decisions, but this is something biologically observable,
there is this phenomenon expressed at the microscopic
level.

That's what this whole discussion and book are about,

that all human behaviors are mirrored in microbiological
functioning and that no one has ever been in a position to
choose their microbiological functioning. Returning to
epigenetics, given this situation, it is clear today that
there is no gene that dictates a certain behavior. I confess
that this is one of my favorite quotes from the book and
it stuck with me very deeply.

Depending on how your childhood looked, an infusion

of testosterone can give you an urge to beat someone on
the street or to beat someone very hard at chess. What
this explicitly means is that there are no human
behaviors directly dictated by genes. Genes and their
variations always relate to a certain potential, to
possibilities, not certainties. There is a recipe for a
certain resource, and depending on what your
experiences in life look like, that recipe will be
implemented in a certain way or not. In other words,
what is very clear from all this is that in the Nature vs
Nurture debate, there can be no winner because the
debate itself is wrong from the start.

These terms cannot exist in opposition. Nature

supposedly means innate behaviors and Nature acquired
behaviors through experience.

But there can be no boundary between the two.

Predispositions considered innate are also inherited from
our parents who acquired them from their interaction
with the surrounding environment.
 And further back, the types of experiences they had
were influenced by the experiences of their parents, be
they experiences of poverty and terror or listening to
music and developing a musical ear, respectively
developing a capacity to identify certain sound
frequencies.

This is what epigenetics actually explains, that the

complexity of human beings is genetically determined
by variations in the environment. Respectively, so-called
innate behaviors, to the extent that they can be said to
exist, are also behaviors and abilities acquired through
the experience of parents, grandparents, and so on.

Human beings have evolved in such a way that

interaction with the environment has become a very
important part of DNA, through these epigenetic
modifications.

So, regarding human behaviors, there is no nature that is

not heavily determined by interaction with the
environment, by the experiences of a person, influenced
by the experiences of parents, grandparents, and so on.

The exception here is represented by very rare genetic

diseases that have a degenerative effect on the brain, the
clearest of which is Huntington's and the others less so.
After genetics, we come to ancestors and enter the field
of anthropology. A short example here. If you are born
in America, you may inherit a predisposition towards
individualism.

If you are born in China, you may inherit a

predisposition towards collectivism.

One potential simple explanation is that America is a

country made up of people who emigrated, who left their
societies of birth and went to an unknown land in an
attempt to succeed on their own.

In China or East Asia, however, to plant and maintain

rice cultures, a huge collective effort was required.

For 10,000 years, people there have learned that to feed

themselves, they need to work together. More precisely,
people have worked together for 2250 years to maintain
an irrigation system for rice cultures that together are the
size of a hole medium County. Such an experience is
imprinted in human DNA in a predisposition to work
together with other people instead of going and planting
your 5 potatoes alone.

There are countless such collective experiences that

happened a very long time ago but left their mark on the
existence tendencies of various peoples.
These tendencies of existence then become the
surrounding culture, a set of justifications for why things
are good and why things are bad.

Then, before ancestors, there was our animal evolution,

which imbued us with certain characteristics and
capacities.

And only here, perhaps, can we really discuss some

basic behaviors that we have from birth, such as the
instinct for self-preservation, sexual instincts, and the
need for food.

But these are very broad categories, the specific way in

which they are expressed in each individual depends on
their own experience, their environment, that of their
parents, grandparents, and so on.

The argument of the book is that among all these things

listed here very briefly, there is nowhere any moment
when someone could have made a choice free from the
present context, of the last minutes, hours, days, years,
millennia, and so on.

Since no one has ever had any say in how all these
things looked, and since all these things, taken together,
occupy all the space that makes up a human being, then
the concept of free will cannot exist.
The conclusion seems correct and hard to dispute to me.

The power of the argument is considerably greater when

it is presented in 1300 pages because it explores in detail
the entire space that makes up a human being so that
there is no room left for free choices.

The more you see at every step that, oh, there was no
room here either, nor here, nor here, the conclusion
becomes more mandatory that indeed, if you don't appeal
to magical things and divine concepts, there is no reason
why you should ever have believed that free will exists.

No reason except for the very strong sensation that we

really make free choices every day, starting with the
choice to get out of bed or not.

But even this sensation is shaped to some extent by our

surrounding culture, we learn that this is how things are.

The free will we are discussing here is the Western

civilization's conception of it, so we struggle to solve a
problem with some local characteristics. This conception
says that:

This freedom assumes the idea that, in exactly the same

internal and external circumstances, I could have made a
different choice than the one I made. That is, in any
situation, no matter what the context, I could always
have chosen left instead of right.

This means that people have a moral responsibility for

the choices they make. That their choices are good or
bad, and through them they become good people or bad
people. Or here's how Dorian Popa sums up this whole
situation: Some people, it seems, choose to be ditch
diggers instead of choosing to be influencers. A curious
choice, clearly, but why aren't they satisfied with the
choice they made? This is really an efficient summary of
the popular conception of what choices and will mean.
We've talked about choices a lot. Let's see now: what is
will? For this, we need to dissect the brain again, this
time even more deeply.

This piece will be a bit more technical, but it is essential

in all these discussions because will is not something
that comes from God. Or, let's put that in the form of a
question: if will is not something that comes from God,
then where does it come from?
Spoiler: still from the brain. And where does the brain
come from? From all those things discussed so far.
 What is will?

Three more general words now about the brain. In the

1960s, the idea of the three layers of the human brain
had been established, which will probably sound
familiar. We have the reptilian brain, a structure that is
about 300 million years old, then above it grew the
mammalian brain, now 200 million years old, and then
above them, about 100 million years ago, the neocortex
began to develop intensively in advanced mammals,
such as primates. These dates are quite imprecise, but
I've given them strictly as an idea.

The oldest structure deals with the most automatic

functions of the body, such as temperature, breathing,
hunger, or triggering a reaction if you are physically
injured. Then the mammalian brain appears, also known
as the limbic system, where an ability to process
emotions develops. If you see something scary, you feel
a strong sensation, and now the body reacts even if you
are emotionally hurt, not just physically. If your
expectations regarding maternal affection remain
unfulfilled, for example. Then, like a glove over them,
the neocortex develops, where thinking, memory,
abstraction, and philosophy abilities emerge.
The advantage here is that this model gives us a simple
map, the disadvantage is that if you explore it a bit, it
immediately proves to be incorrect. All these structures
are interconnected in extremely complex ways, and it is
impossible to draw any boundaries between them,
especially when it comes to behavior. As I said earlier,
your thoughts can be shaped by a smell, without you
realizing it. If you meet someone while holding a very
cold bottle in your hand, a temperature you feel through
the functions of the reptilian brain, you'll have the
sensation that the person is rather cold.

What this means is that every degree of complexity

developed by the human brain has created at the same
time some dizzying connections with the older
structures. That is, your thoughts and emotions always
depend on some as automated structures as possible, and
therefore, there is no real boundary, like on a map,
between the most automated functions of the human
brain and the most complex ones.

I said all these things to have at least a somewhat map

for what follows. This last layer called the prefrontal
cortex really formed like a glove over the rest of the
structures, the word cortex means, in Latin, bark, and at
this point, if you remembered something from biology
class, unlike me, you'd probably already be exasperated
that I didn't say the name in Romanian of the neocortex
and that is: the cerebral cortex. Which really is a cortex.
The reason it's so wavy is to maximize available space.
The cerebral cortex has 6 distinct layers of neurons, the
more wavy the perimeter, and the more peaks and
valleys, the more space there is for the cortex filled with
neurons to occupy.

The brain of a mouse, for example, is smooth because it

has fewer worries than humans. Hence the insult smooth
brain and the compliment bright mind. The term cortex
is all the more suitable as the neurons themselves look
like a tree with roots and branches, which reinforces my
personal suspicion that I'm just a slightly depressed tree.

Okay, I might have gone into too much detail, but all
these things seem interesting to me. The idea is that the
most newly developed of the brain's new structures is the
prefrontal cortex. This area is what differentiates us most
intensely from other animals on Earth, and it's where
those complex actions followed by the words "Look" for
example, are born. The prefrontal cortex of a
chimpanzee, for instance, Ridiculous. In the same image,
we find the reason why your cat can't do your math
homework and refuses to tell you what you should do
with your life. The most representative function of the
prefrontal cortex is the ability to make the right decision
when the decision is harder. The ability to make tough
choices despite immediate temptation, things like
delaying reward, long-term planning, impulse control,
and emotional regulation. It is the structure that allows
you to learn and execute new rules.

For example,

if someone asks you to say the months of the year

backward, your prefrontal cortex starts working
intensively to produce the correct response, even if it's
harder and even if it's different from what you're used to.
That voice that starts in your head with "so it's
September, October, November, only now backwards: so
November, October, September" that voice is the sound
of your prefrontal cortex working.

You put some people in a room with two buttons and tell
them that when the blue light comes on, press the left
button, and when the red light comes on, press the right
button. After a while, the rules reverse, now when the
blue light comes on, you press the right button. Again,
here, the voice in your head telling you "so you see it's
reversed now, remember it's reversed" is the sound of
your prefrontal cortex. Because you'll have to keep track
of the new rule while the automatic structures in your
brain, a little annoyed by this unnecessary workload, will
be in a bad mood, trying to do the opposite.

People with damaged prefrontal cortexes due to illness

or injuries find it extremely difficult to perform such
reversal tasks, such as saying the months of the year
backward. This is because the mechanism that allows
you to do something differently from what you're used to
doesn't work well. Once a new rule is internalized and
practiced enough times, it no longer activates the
prefrontal cortex's resources as intensely. After enough
repetitions, the behavior becomes automated, and it no
longer asks so many questions at each step.

For example, when a child learns to use the toilet, their

prefrontal cortex is fully engaged to process the notion
of: okay, so I don't just relax my bladder here on this seat
where I am. After enough repetitions, going to the toilet
instead of wetting yourself no longer requires such a
high mental consumption, leaving room for all sorts of
other new and exciting things to learn.
As this is the structure that allows us to learn new and
complex things that oppose our habits, the prefrontal
cortex is indeed essential in our socialization abilities.
Communication and adaptation to interacting with other
complex beings that keep presenting you with different
sets of rules, different sets of correct and incorrect
behaviors. Socialization itself has a developmental effect
on the prefrontal cortex. If you take monkeys kept in
isolation and put them together to form a new social
group, after a year, they all have enlarged prefrontal
cortexes, mental space in which to run the dynamics
between habitual behaviors and new behaviors, which
allow you to belong to the group.

The prefrontal cortex also has the task of negotiating

amygdala reactions. The amygdala, again, is the
structure responsible for fear, anxiety, and aggression. If
you're playing passes with a ball with two other people
and you're passing the ball back and forth, everything is
fine and dandy. If suddenly the other two people only
start passing the ball to each other, the amygdala is
activated, which detects social isolation, so it produces
anxiety, which then forms increasingly distressing
thoughts: starting from hmm, why aren't they passing to
me anymore? And ending with ah, of course they're not
passing me the ball anymore because they've realized
that I'm a miserable being who doesn't deserve anything.

In this situation, the prefrontal cortex is the one that

intervenes with the voice of "hey, calm down, it's just a
game, it's okay, your absolute value of existence is not
determined right here and now." That's if you have an
adult and functional prefrontal cortex, because if you're
an adolescent, with the prefrontal cortex still under
construction, experiences like this can be devastating
because you lack exactly that voice to put things into
perspective for you.

In a very concrete way, that voice is something that is

physically built over time. Another example. If you put a
person in a room and give them small electric shocks
from time to time, the amygdala is activated, stress,
panic. Then, before delivering each electric shock, you
show them a picture of something neutral, like a broom,
and you do this enough times. The next day, only when
you show them the picture of the broom does the stress
reaction occur. But this time, you're not delivering any
shocks. You just keep showing them the picture of the
broom, without electrocution. Slowly but surely, under
conditions where the prefrontal cortex functions well, the
stress reaction diminishes.
If it sounds like Pavlovian conditioning, it's because it is,
and we'll come back to it because this mechanism turns
out to be the primary process by which we learn to adapt
to the environment. There are countless other examples
and studies that address the relationship between the
prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, and I encourage you
to find them in the book.

There's something else extremely interesting here, and to

get to the point again, we need to complicate things a bit
more. But just a bit. As I said, the prefrontal cortex is the
most newly evolved part of the human brain. Within it,
there is then a structure that is the newest part of the
newest part, called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
We're already stretching with these five-word compound
names, but the name itself isn't that relevant.

The important thing is that in this precise location in the

newest part of the newest part of the brain, we find the
most developed capacities for rationalization,
philosophizing, long-term planning, and thought
experiments. This structure becomes most active when
you need to say the months of the year backward, a
purely mechanical task with no emotional connotations.
It's the structure that allows you to make calculated
decisions, where you've analyzed potential risks and
benefits. When we say that a structure in the brain
becomes most active, it means that we can detect how
intensely the neurons are working there, starting to
demand resources from the body. In moments when the
frontal cortex has such a complicated task, it becomes
the most expensive structure in the brain; each neuron
can fire up to 100 times per second, consuming huge
amounts of oxygen and glucose.

This is why learning new rules can be physically

exhausting. Mountaineers who venture above 8000
meters know that the longer you spend at that altitude,
the more you lose your ability to make good decisions.
Since there isn't enough oxygen at such a height, you
don't have enough resources to fuel this very expensive
structure in our brain that gives us the ability to make
complex and thoughtful decisions.

An example of how when the frontal cortex doesn't

function well, the ability to make reasoned decisions
begins to disappear. Returning to our dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex, there's the famous trolley problem: a
runaway trolley that will run over 5 people and kill them,
or run over 1 person. You're at the switch and have to
decide, do you switch the track and kill one person or do
nothing and let the five people die? The more activation
there is in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the more
likely people are to choose to kill the one person instead
of the five. Because it's a purely rational decision, 1 is
less than 5.

Now, there's another part of the prefrontal cortex called

the ventromedial. In very simplified terms, it does the
opposite of these dry rationalizations. If the dorsolateral
cortex tries to calculate as many scenarios as possible to
reach a decision, the ventromedial is responsible for
delivering the brain the information: how would I feel if
I made this decision? What would I feel if I did this?
This part of the brain is considered the gateway of our
cognition to the limbic system, the piece through which
the newest part of our brain is deeply connected to one
of the oldest.

It's the part that activates when you think:

how would I feel if I had to give a speech in public? If

the answer, based on experience, is that you would feel
sick and faint, that you wouldn't be able to sleep for 3
nights before, and that you wouldn't be able to eat, that's
how you feel, then you'll probably decide not to give any
speech in public. If the answer you get to the question is:
I'd feel a little nervous but nothing too serious, then
you'll probably make the opposite decision.

I found it absolutely fascinating that there's an

identifiable part of the human brain responsible for
asking: how would I feel if? This means, again, that our
thoughts are never separate from emotions, that our
decisions always form at the intersection of rational
calculation and an emotion, and that this combination is
essential for a non-disastrous decision. Because if either
of these two structures doesn't work, if you make
decisions exclusively based on how something feels,
then you could never postpone a reward for extra effort.
You could never do your homework, for example. If you
couldn't evaluate how something would make you feel,
then you could never learn from your experiences so that
you wouldn't put yourself in situations that make you
feel very bad. What if you undertook an action without
any information about how that action would make you
feel? Hard, I think it would be hard.

I've gone into this level of detail to offer a perspective on

what a human decision looks like under a microscope.
All these concepts like drive, will, character, resilience,
self-control, are functions of the prefrontal cortex,
they're biological functions. The extent to which they
exist is determined by the history of interaction between
your biology and your environment. How well your
prefrontal cortex functions to execute all these complex
operations successfully depends on all the things
discussed earlier, on your last second, your last minute,
year, decade, on your adolescence and childhood.

And, to return to the theme of this book, since you

clearly had no control over these things, it's exactly the
same that you have no control over the amount of
willpower you have today. You can't produce more
willpower than you already have just by exerting your
will. Because this capacity called willpower is
biologically determined by how well a certain part of a
certain organ has developed. How well it has developed
depends on the combination of biology, environment,
and luck.

Since no one chooses anything in this whole situation,

luck is a very important factor, which is also discussed
and rediscussed in these debates. Ultimately, if you're
born into an environment that allows for good
development of the prefrontal cortex, it's a matter of
luck. If your parents send you to beg on the street or to
piano lessons, it's a matter of luck. Some of the great
philosophers of free will argue that, yes, clearly, you can
have bad luck at birth, but life is long, it's a marathon,
you have enough time to compensate for this bad luck
through the power of your own will. In this idea, it
should be clear that willpower is something that
somehow comes from the heavens, something that you
should have despite not having received the ingredients
for it.

But in our present world, bad luck at birth only adds

even more bad luck afterward. If you're born into
poverty, stress, and violence, by the age of 5, your
prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped. It doesn't develop as
it should, as it could. There are studies showing that this
effect is visible even in babies, even when they were 6
months old, even when they were 4 weeks old. One of
the main ways in which underdevelopment occurs is
through the effect of glucocorticoids, stress hormones,
which keep the body in a state of emergency where
resources are concentrated on immediate hyper-
vigilance, not on structures that might be valuable in 15
years. These hormones hinder the development of the
prefrontal cortex. Hindered, the PFC is not as able to
calm the amygdala, and since there's nothing to
effectively calm the amygdala, even more
glucocorticoids are produced that further hinder the
function of the PFC. It's a vicious circle. The more
stressed you are, the more you lose your ability to calm
down. This is true at any point in life. But in childhood,
this vicious circle determines the physical size of the
organ with the capacity for thoughtful decision-making
and willpower and such divine things.

The more points you have on the Adverse Childhood

Experiences scale, the more predisposed you are to an
enlarged, hypersensitive amygdala, and a prefrontal
cortex that can't cope. And here, the opposite of these
experiences produces the opposite result; the more
positive experiences you have, connections, interactions,
affection, safety, extracurricular activities, the more your
prefrontal cortex develops, the stronger your capacity for
planning, making good decisions for yourself, non-
impulsive ones, those that don't come as a reflex to
accumulated terror. By the age of three, on average, a
child from a rich environment hears about 30 million
more words at home than one raised in a poor
environment, where no one has time for them because
there are more pressing problems. Thousands of such
apparently minor things, added up, dictate how your
prefrontal cortex will function. Again, in this world we
live in, bad luck at birth, most of the time, only attracts
even more bad luck. If you have an underdeveloped
frontal cortex due to living conditions, you'll probably
find it difficult to pay attention in school, you won't be
able to learn, you'll find it difficult to integrate into
social groups, which will further underdevelop you, so in
the end you're likely to develop considerable chances of
developing antisocial, violent behaviors, because
ultimately, why not? And then these people are called
bad people, low-quality people, people who didn't want
things in life.

In addition to local, more everyday examples, what I've

been thinking about all these months learning these
things is: 40% of the population of the Gaza Strip is
made up of children under 14 years old. 880,000
children who have been bombed, starved, and displaced
by circumstances they didn't contribute to at all. What
kind of people should be formed from those
experiences? Whose fault is it if these children develop
extremely violent behaviors in the future? What kind of
willpower should you have to not? Where should that
willpower come from? To conclude this chapter, people
in general are quite capable of understanding that you
don't choose certain characteristics when you're born.
But that matters less, because what's really important is:
what do you do with them afterward? Maybe you were
dealt a bad hand and surrounded by violence. Do you
resist the temptation and suddenly decide to express your
violence through chess? Maybe all your ancestors were
alcohol-dependent, but you, you're a cool person with a
backbone, and you resist temptation, or not? The central
idea here is that what you can do with your
characteristics, how much you can resist or not, are all
things determined at the intersection of biology and
environment, capacities that you have based on how
your brain has developed, and how your brain has
developed you could never singularly influence,
personally. The notion that bad luck at birth can be
corrected through exercises of willpower in maturity
assumes that, well, clearly, you didn't have free will at
one point, when you were 1, 5, 10, 15 years old. But
suddenly, somewhere along the way, you acquired it.
When exactly? What age is free will acquired? This
reasoning suggests that in the past, there was no free
will, but in the present, there is. The obvious problem
here is that: the past was at one point present. If in that
present you were limited by your biological functions, in
this present how are you suddenly not? The precise way
in which we are only the continuation of our childhood
experiences is explicitly found in the construction of the
brain, which is a true history of our interactions,
connections, and opportunities. How your amygdala and
your prefrontal cortex function today is a very faithful
testimony of your experience as an organism on this
earth. These concepts deserve to be reformulated and
repeated endlessly, but we have to move on to explore
other things. Three scientific revolutions trying to sneak
free will into the equation and in the end: how do people
change?

Even if we accept that it's not possible by sheer

willpower to start making completely different choices
in your life, people still change, it's clear.
 Important Scientific Revolutions

How does this change happen? First, let's briefly discuss

the revolutions, even though they are incredibly
interesting. The first one is called Chaos Theory, and I'll
talk a bit more about it here because many people
intuitively grasp it, while the other two are more exotic
appeals. Its poetic summary is that a butterfly flaps its
wings somewhere in Brazil, and three weeks later, this
may trigger a tornado in Texas. In other words, in a
complex system, extremely small variables can have
very significant consequences.

The discovery was made by a meteorologist in the early

1960s. He was trying to predict the weather using an
ancient computer that had to perform calculations
involving 12 variables, such as temperature, humidity,
wind speed, and so on. One of these variables entered
into the program had a value of 0.506127. When the
computer was about to print it, it rounded it to 0.506, and
the meteorologist continued to use it like that.

In a linear system, where there are only 2 variables, this

error can result in an inaccuracy of 0.000127. That is, if
you add 5 + 5, instead of 5 + 5.000127, you'll get the
result of 10 instead of 10.000127, which probably
remains quite irrelevant. In a system of 2 variables, this
proportion of error remains minor.

However, in a system where 12 variables interact over

time, this difference has the potential to produce huge
effects. The meteorologist discovered this when he
noticed that the model running with the value of 0.506
and the one running with the value of 0.506127 started to
differ substantially at some point. Sometimes the models
converged in predictions, other times they were
completely opposite, and when and how they converged
or diverged seemed to vary chaotically.

For this reason, there can never be a 100% accurate

weather forecast. We will never be able to predict the
weather perfectly because weather is a complex system
with many variables interacting over time in
mathematically unpredictable ways. You don't even need
12 variables to reach this predictability impossibility.
Already when you go from 2 to 3 bodies influencing
each other over time, you can no longer predict the
respective interaction pattern.
Although the physical laws governing the interaction are
quite clear, their model over time cannot be predicted by
any equation. This is the famous Three Body Problem,
which arises with Newton and begins to be explored
more intensively in the 18th century. Three bodies
gravitationally influencing each other eventually move
chaotically over time. Chaotic here doesn't mean random
or arbitrary, because their movements are determined
step by step, caused by their last second, last minute, and
so on. Chaotic here only means unpredictable,
incalculable.

Where people insert free will into all this is that

ultimately, if a butterfly flapping its wings here today
can trigger a tornado over three weeks on another
continent, it means that life is complex, and somewhere
in this complexity, the ability called free will can easily
be born spontaneously. Although this doesn't make any
sense, it's an argument made on the fly. Each step in a
chaotic system is determined, from one moment to
another, always following the same rules. It's just that a
complex system, where there are many variables,
acquires some interactions that are impossible to predict
over time.
But this doesn't mean that those behaviors emerged out
of nowhere. Even if they are surprising behaviors, they
form step by step following the same rules. In other
words, there is a huge confusion between the concepts of
determined and unpredictable. Just because something is
unpredictable, that you can't predict its trajectory over
time, doesn't mean that trajectory wasn't nevertheless
caused, step by step, by some clear things. Just because a
system is unpredictable doesn't mean those causes don't
exist.

It just means it's a system complex enough that you can't

exactly declare how it will evolve over time. I think I
keep repeating the same thing, maybe because the
difference sounds subtle, although it's huge. Let's try
another formulation: Chaos Theory isn't about how,
when you input the value 0.506127, you get some crazy,
wildly varying results. Every time you run that system
with the value 0.506127, you'll get exactly the same
result. What Chaos Theory is about, what it says, is that
in exactly the same complex system, if that value is now
0.506126, some completely different things can happen.
That minor influences can have major, incalculable
effects. Not that effects appear out of nowhere.
What this means is that human behavior is determined, at
every step, by an infinity of influences, to such an extent
that it's impossible to predict with 100% accuracy what a
person will do in the next second, and it will always be.
But just because a behavior is unpredictable doesn't
mean it wasn't caused by its previous second, minute,
day, year, and so on.

There are also limited forecasting capabilities for

humans, such as that trauma score in childhood. The
name Chaos Theory somehow misleads. Chaos has
synonyms like hazard, accidental, disorderly, random,
arbitrary. But Chaos Theory precisely says that a
complex system becomes unpredictable because it's
determined so intensely, because it depends so much on
the 6th decimal place, because every tiny quantity
matters in the resulting order.

So the opposite of randomness. So it's not Chaos Theory,

it's the theory of order too complex to be predicted over
time.
Okay, I think that's enough here, as we're already
operating at the dizzying limit. For this reason, we'll just
tick off the next two points.

The next scientific mini-revolution is called emergent

complexity. It studies how when enough units of
something come together, new capacities and qualities
can emerge that none of the individual parts have on
their own.

So large groups of something simple can generate

complex behaviors and qualities that you wouldn't
otherwise find in any individual part of that group. For
example, the quality of water being wet only arises when
enough H2O molecules come together. A single H2O
molecule certainly isn't wet, but gather together a billion
billion billion H2O molecules, and suddenly you have
something wet.

Similarly, a single ant has extremely limited capabilities.

It operates on a limited number of instructions, such as:
go here, carry this bit of dirt, if you encounter another
ant carrying something, put down what you're carrying.
However, 100,000 ants, operating with the same very
simple instructions, manage to build elaborate
underground nests and perform complex tasks of
gathering food, despite there not being any ant with a
construction plan, none aware of these complex
behaviors.

It's very difficult to delve into detail here about how

people derive free will from this idea and how it can't
really be accurate. But shortened in a brutal way, the
idea would be that enough neurons come together and
somehow, as a phenomenon of emergent complexity,
they give rise to the capacity for free will. But
somewhere along the line, there still has to be some
magic for this to be true.

It's still the idea that okay, things get so complicated that
somewhere, somehow free will emerges. The main
counter-argument here is that even in such situations of
complexity, the new quality resulting from the group's
action doesn't change what the small and simple parts
can do in their individuality. The fact that 100,000 ants
are capable of building complex structures and
hierarchies doesn't mean that now, post-factum, each ant
is much smarter and gains new abilities. The fact that
enough H2O molecules come together for water to be
wet doesn't mean that each molecule is now H3O instead
of H2O because of the wetness. And just because many
neurons combined can give rise to our complex
behaviors doesn't mean that those neurons aren't still
equally conditioned by their physical existence, by the
structure they operate in, by how that structure
developed, by what makes them function well and what
doesn't.

In other words, the phenomenon of emergent complexity

can't change the fact that neurons are still determined,
caused by very physical events, by the environment, by
biology, and that they depend on these factors.

I'm sorry we have to shorten this so much, because this

chapter in the book also explores why neurons look like
the branches of a tree, why our blood vessels look like
that, why an entire forest seen from above looks like
broccoli, and why a mold managed to reproduce quite
faithfully the train network around the city of Tokyo.
The answer, briefly, seems to be that organic matter has
somehow optimized over time a certain type of energy
efficiency, which gives rise to these patterns in most
things we consider alive on this planet. The detailed
answer is much more interesting, and for this reason, I
strongly encourage you once again to read the book.
The last scientific revolution, ticked off even more
briefly, because it's quite an obscure argument. If not
perhaps free will arises from quantum physics. The
reason it might arise from there is that it's a domain
where there's room for uncertainty, for a certain level of
unpredictability. But quantum phenomena happen at
such an unimaginably tiny level that it's extremely
unlikely for them to have any effect on human behavior.

There are complicated arguments rooted in physics for

which it's believed to be impossible, in fact. We're not
talking about the 6th decimal place here, we're talking
about the probability of processes that might, just might,
modify a bit the 100th decimal place in a system with
millions of variables. The reason quantum physics is
invoked in the discussion is that from there you might,
just might, extract a much-desired element of hazard, of
randomness, a neuron that spontaneously functions in an
arbitrary way, without any reason, without any cause,
just because of quantum physics.

But there are two problems here:

The first is that quantum phenomena in the brain are
small enough that they don't have the capacity to tilt the
balance in any direction, and that degree of hazard most
likely cancels itself out anyway because it's hazard in all
directions, not just one.

The second problem is that even if somehow, by

absurdity, quantum phenomena could have an effect on
our behavior, it would be an effect of hazard, of pushing
you in a random direction. Whereas free will should
mean your ability to make one choice or another by will,
and then the consistency of those choices determines
your character. Not that a quantum phenomenon pushed
you to compulsively make a random choice, as you still
end up with a lack of control over your own choices
there.
 Adapting to the Surrounding Environment, or How
People Change...

That's about it for the scientific revolutions. I think we've

pushed the envelope enough, accumulating quite a few
complicated and hard-to-process concepts, but we still
need to go through a bit of difficulty to understand how
people change despite not choosing to change. And to
understand that, we need to talk about a sea snail.

A sea snail so large, in fact, that it's called a sea hare

because it can weigh up to 14 kilograms. In 2000, a
scientist received the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the
exact biological mechanism by which these snails learn
to hide their gills when they detect any danger. This
mechanism is exactly, but precisely the same process,
molecular, genetic, neuronal, by which humans adapt to
the surrounding environment. Despite the fact that we
are separated by hundreds of millions of years of
evolution.

Identifying this exact mechanism required about 50

years of work. The book discusses the process in
maximum detail, and it's very interesting to follow, but
the idea is this: if you deliver an electric shock to the
snail, it learns to keep its gills hidden for a longer time
afterward when touched. It has a siphon right next to its
gills, through which liquids circulate, and this siphon is
quite sensitive. If you touch the siphon a minute after it's
been shocked, while it's still recovering, it keeps its gills
hidden for a longer time.

If you deliver four shocks one after the other, then it

learns that, oh, the world really is a dangerous place, I
need to hide my breathing apparatus even longer. In the
first step, after the first shock, it releases a
neurotransmitter that makes it hide its gills. If nothing
dangerous happens after a minute, the neurotransmitter
degrades and disappears, and the situation returns to
normal.

However, if it receives four shocks, in addition to this

neurotransmitter, it also activates a gene in its DNA to
produce a certain protein that prevents the degradation of
the neurotransmitter, so it remains present for a longer
time, there remains a sensitivity that makes it even more
cautious.

If nothing happens, after about 4 hours, that protein

degrades as well, and then the neurotransmitter also
degrades. So, 1 shock, 1 neurotransmitter, multiple
consecutive shocks, 1 neurotransmitter and 1 protein. If
you continue to give it several shocks per day, for
several days in a row, it's a sign that things are becoming
really serious, so more genes are activated to produce
some proteins that together form a new synapse.

A physical circuit is formed to record the fact that the

world is a dangerous place. After such a traumatizing
experience of sustained shocks for several days, the snail
remains sensitive to external stimuli for several months.

Dozens of days after the event, a simple touch, not a

shock, makes it keep its gills hidden 10 times longer than
normal. If nothing happens, if safety returns, after
enough time, that synapse degrades, and the reaction to
touch returns to normal parameters.

This is the precise mechanism by which our bodies adapt

to the surrounding environment. Again, it's not somehow
like this snail, it's precisely the same physiological
process, using the same proteins, the same
neurotransmitters. It's how external events affecting you
are recorded in the brain, how associations are formed
that determine your behavior. Associations that are
physically expressed in the brain as synapses,
connections, and circuits. A person's behavior, at the
most basic level, is built from such associations.

And again, just as the snail never chose at any moment

of its own will to create a new synapse that would
produce the relationship between shock and hiding,
humans never have the ability to choose how external
events are recorded in their bodies.

These associations happen at a level as automatic as it

can be, biologically, and have no connection with any
choice.

Obviously, the associations humans are capable of are

extremely complex and depend on an incalculable
number of influences, but fundamentally, they look just
like this snail's. This also relates to emergent complexity.

Our behavior is complex, but it is fundamentally

composed of each tiny, simple association. Collected
together, these associations produce our behavior.
What this means is that we don't have the ability to
change as much as we want, by our own will, but we
certainly have the ability to be changed by
circumstances.

What we've discussed here is the physical mechanism by

which we are changed by circumstances. Just as the
reaction to trauma is a closing, a hiding, the reaction to
positive experiences can produce the opposite effect.

You receive enough positive electric shocks from the

outside that new synapses of openness to the surrounding
world are formed. All this discussion about the lack of
free will is incredibly valuable right here: the most
efficient and real way to change a person's behavior is to
change the stimuli they are exposed to. In other words,
you cannot not be determined by your environment.

There's no such thing.

All people are built on the go, from a continuous

improvisation composed of adaptations to what's
happening around.

What this means, very clearly, is that if there's something

you want to change about a person's behavior, the most
effective way to do it is to change the things they are
forced to react to.

There's this popular wisdom of changing the

environment when behavior modification is needed, but
that, everything we've discussed so far, is the scientific
demonstration of how real change actually occurs.
Through reactions to new stimuli, which produce new
internal reactions, new synapses born from new
connections, new experiences, new perspectives, and so
on.

This information seems incredibly important to me and

is a big part of why I wanted to write this book. The term
"environment" here encompasses any kind of stimulus
that comes from the outside, including conversations
with people, new activities, and even reading this book.

Flipping through the book in particular has the ability to

change something within you, only you don't exactly
choose what and how it changes.

A person who is firmly convinced of their own free will

may read this book just to find out what nonsense
scientists are saying, and in the end, they're even more
convinced that they have nothing very interesting to say.

Another person who is interested in the latest scientific

information about human behavior might gain even more
fuel to continue seeking ways to incorporate them into
their own life. But neither one has chosen with what
baggage they come in front of this information. Behind it
all is the same question: how did you become the kind of
person who reacts like this to this information and not
otherwise? And every time you feel like you're choosing,
but then you start questioning your baggage and realize
you didn't choose how you choose, it all starts that
potentially paralyzing whirlwind, where you look down
into the void towards something that doesn't seem to
have an end.
 Life, with or without free will?!?

So let's now face the most dizzying and worrying

conclusions that arise from this whole situation. The
first, and most common, upset that arises is that if you
don't have free will, it means your life is predetermined.
That things are already decided, so what should I do
now? But for this reason, we explored the chaos theory
more extensively. Something determined can very easily
be unpredictable. Even if human behavior is strictly
caused by the biology history formed in response to the
environment, it is mathematically impossible to predict
how this system will evolve over time. Like weather
forecasting, you can estimate a model for how someone's
life, whom you know, will look like the next day, week,
maybe even month. You can predict, with a decent
degree of certainty, that they probably won't resign
tomorrow and the day after tomorrow they will go live in
the mountains. It seems unlikely. But it's impossible to
predict what anyone's life will look like in 5 years, and
how we will function or not. It's impossible to predict
what stimuli will reach us and how they will change us,
synapse by synapse. Another variation on this first upset
is that if the dice were cast in childhood and adolescence,
it means you're stuck in current behavior and that's it.
But it's not. Because what has been discovered in recent
years is that there are extremely few irreversible things
in the brain. Our plasticity is much softer in childhood
and adolescence, but it never becomes completely rigid.
This is the whole field of neuroplasticity: the brain
always retains the ability to form new synapses and to
give up old ones that are no longer needed. In other
words, there is always the capacity for adaptation to new
stimuli. There are extreme cases here, exceptions that I
haven't included in the discussion, such as
neurodegenerative diseases or physical destruction of the
frontal cortex. Various studies show that among people
sentenced to death in American prisons, between 25 and
75% of them have suffered brain trauma, and it is
extremely unlikely that this has no connection to their
extremely violent behavior. But in principle, as long as a
frontal cortex has not been structurally destroyed
significantly, the ability to assimilate new behaviors is
preserved. But again, these new behaviors cannot spring
from a personal choice of the individual who is striving
very hard and overnight changing all their choices
through the unique power of will. These new stimuli
depend a lot on the existing opportunities in the societies
we live in, on what options you have, on what resources
exist, and most often, there are no resources. But let's
discuss a little how this issue feels from the inside and
then what it means at the societal level.
One of the common criticisms of this book is that it
invents a dubious definition of what free will means and
then demonstrates that that invented thing doesn't exist,
so what have we done here? Free will strictly means the
fact that if you ask me now to write an X or an O on a
piece of paper, I will obviously choose how I want, an X
or an O. How can you say I didn't choose? But who
chose? In other words, that free will means exactly this
moment, this capacity of mine to think X or 0 and put
one of them on paper. How is that not existing? Because
I just did it. With this question, I had many difficulties
myself at first interaction with the book, and it's a serious
problem indeed. How I initially resolved it was to
understand that what Sapolsky is actually saying is that
all those things we've talked about limit your sum of
possible choices. And now you have to choose
something from a restricted set of options over which
you had no control. Something sensible and intuitive.
And he actually says that. But as you follow all the
things that compose us and how they are interconnected,
that restricted set of options keeps narrowing more and
more, always limited by various causes that have caused
you recently, until you reach the point where actually,
from that whole set, only one choice remains available.
And in these conditions, it means that you achieve the
performance of choosing the only option you could
choose. Congratulations! Even a spontaneous choice,
between X and 0, is determined by your last seconds,
minutes, weeks. A very likely factor here would be if
many Xs have appeared in your visual field lately, or if
you've seen 0s and they stuck in your head. Then if
you're attracted to the shape of X, because it's very cool,
like Elon Musk, or if you prefer 0, because it seems
more harmonious. Then why would you be more
attracted to the shape of X than to the shape of 0? For
reasons related to your past, your hormones, various
associations made over time, and so on. So what
Sapolsky is actually saying is that even in such a trivial
example, without any stake, our choices will always be
heavily loaded with our own history.

Every choice, no matter how small, always comes from

the combination of your biological history and the
environment. And you have never chosen these things.
So you can never make any choice free from your
history, to position yourself outside of it, to pause, and to
choose from there, from the outside. So 1. Your history
is not something you chose and 2. You always choose
driven by your history. From these two simple and clear
statements, it logically follows that you don't choose
your choices, respectively, that you don't have free will.
Ok, well, let's say that put like this in the form of an
equation you can accept that it looks like a valid
equation. But I just experienced the feeling of making a
choice, I just thought better X or better 0? How is that
not existing? Well, that actually does exist: the feeling.
The feeling that you choose is a very real phenomenon,
it's a true experience. But, and here is where people get
depressed: it's an illusion. Human beings are not built to
carry within them, every second, extremely complicated
truths about determinism. Human beings have evolved to
live, to love, to eat, and to pass on their genes so that
others can live and love too. Within this mission, being
aware that you are determined so intensely by your
environment that you don't choose what or when you do,
turns out to be counterproductive. It turns out physically,
because there are already interesting signs that this
illusion of free will has physical components that
encourage it. In other words, in the case of such an
incredibly complex organism as the human one, we have
evolved some advanced self-deception abilities for
survival. This is not terribly surprising, because humans
are the only living organism on this planet that is very
aware that at some point they will die. Not just a bit
aware, for a second of a year, but it's a fact that you have
to relate to, in one way or another, advancing through
life. Given this situation, it seems perfectly logical that
we have developed some physical mechanisms to defend
ourselves from the supreme dubiosity of becoming
aware of our inevitable death. All purely practical
purposes. You need some mechanisms to prevent
yourself from getting stuck in contemplating your
imminent death. It's a serious business. So one of the
most spectacular functions of the human brain is
precisely this ability of self-deception, self-deception,
and it seems to have developed as a desirable ability. An
example that should be quite familiar is that when you
lie, you lie best when you've already lied to yourself.
When you believe the lie too. And in general, people
who lie best are those who are most capable of lying to
themselves, because then it becomes almost impossible
to detect. Neurobiologically speaking, this phenomenon
is extremely sophisticated. Another, more relevant
example of self-deception in the domain we discussed is
a study in which a person has to choose between two
objects towards which he is equally indifferent. He is
then forced, without realizing it, to choose one of them
and believe that he made the choice. After that, he will
manifest a preference for that object, because it's the one
he chose, his favorite. The same thing happens even with
monkeys. If you make them choose between two
candies, one red and one yellow, and you force them to
choose yellow while they believe they choose freely,
later they will choose yellow again, because it's the
candy they chose, their favorite. This kind of study
shows that the sensation of free choice might be related
to the sensation of identity, that you are the being who
chose x and y, for reasons a and b, and so you define
yourself, based on your apparently free choices. And
based on what you chose in the past, you then have a
better idea of what to choose just as freely in the future.
Returning, most likely this sensation of free will, and
how strong it is, is closely related to the difficulty of
being an incredibly intelligent animal who knows that it
will die at some point. For this reason, this sensation, at a
physical level, I don't think can ever disappear and nor
do I think it should be anyone's goal to make it
completely disappear. Realizing the nonexistence of free
will should be a tool, useful in situations that have higher
stakes in this life, a tool that allows you to understand
yourself better and the people around you. Trivial
decisions like writing x or 0 are irrelevant to this
discussion, you can consider that there you have free
will, it's okay. But in situations where it matters, in
situations that result in the judgment of a person, or your
own judgment, in terms of good or bad, weak or strong,
guilty or innocent, then how and whether free will exists
becomes important. The most difficult conclusion that
arises from all this information is that the concepts of
guilt and merit are a fiction. They are invented to live in
a somewhat more intuitive way, which is not always full
of the determinism of the universe. They are an illusion,
a shortcut that allows you to decree that a person is
simply bad, so you don't have to calculate their entire
existence context. In certain situations, it's irrelevant
whether you maintain this illusion or not, but in others, it
becomes very valuable to realize that they really are an
illusion. If we can agree that no one has the capacity to
choose their own behavior, then how could someone be
guilty of what they do? Obviously, the same reasoning
applies to oneself. But when you start thinking about all
the criminals in the world, about all the forms of
violence committed by them, then this idea becomes
effectively disgusting. I presented here the first half of
Sapolsky's book, the other half is dedicated to the
discussion of how justice could function in a world
where we accept that there is no guilt, how punishment
could exist, what sense it would still have. There is the
complication that people derive physical pleasure from
punishing a perceived guilty person, the whole dopamine
system is triggered. The discussed options are
quarantine, isolating people with violent impulses in a
way that there is a real hope for rehabilitation, without
the overwhelming weight of moral guilt. A quarantine
similar to keeping your child at home when they are
sick: it's not their fault they are sick, but, even so, it's
good not to make others sick. I won't delve into this
discussion because it is extremely complicated and, if we
are lucky at the societal level to adopt more intensely the
idea that there is no free will, it will probably be debated
in the next hundreds of years. Because the obstacle we
have in adapting our societies to this particular scientific
reality is absolutely huge. It is, I believe, a task that
determines the degree of advancement of a civilization.
And the world, at the moment, seems to be stuck in some
crises and priorities that leave no room for fine
discussions on how we could improve our existence in
the long term. If humanity as a whole were a
superorganism, a superhuman, then we could say that for
the moment its prefrontal cortex is not working too well.
That it has an oversensitive amygdala, that it is flooded
with glucocorticoids that prevent it from making prudent
choices for its long-term well-being. Despite the fact that
the notion of the lack of guilt of the criminals in the
world seems disgusting, if we accept the things
discussed here, then it's the scientific reality that
surrounds us. It's very unlikely, however, that in our near
future we won't have an immediate repulsive reaction to
crime, because it's a physical reaction, a moral disgust
mapped onto a structure responsible for physical disgust.

How Sapolsky says he manages this situation is that

when he hears that someone has committed who knows
what crimes, his immediate impulse is to BURN THEM,
and then after 2 seconds his prefrontal cortex kicks in
and whispers, yeah, but hold on, remember all this stuff
you've studied your whole life? And probably in the
short term, progress might look like this. Not that we
won't automatically react with disgust to news of
violence, but in the next few seconds, minutes, hours,
we'll be better able to manage that reaction and
contextualize it. But it's an extremely long road to get
there. Still, this can be considered a first step. The real
cause of violence is always found in the systems we live
in, not in each individual being, which forms only in
response to these systems. Beyond these extreme
phenomena of violence, realizing the nonexistence of
free will should, in moments that matter, give you the
ability to be a little gentler with yourself, with the
reproaches you bring upon yourself, and with the
reproaches you bring upon others.

I would add one last idea, although there would be many

more things to say, I think we've already reached a point
where the glass is full of concepts and it's about to
overflow.

Sapolsky concludes in his book that, all said and done,

we are just biological machinery.

He even has a paragraph where he says in a footnote at

the end of the book that he has struggled with depression
his whole life, and I kind of felt it throughout the book.

The pieces of logic and science I think are impeccable,

but in terms of personal conclusions, some fatalism still
slips through despite his extreme efforts to hide it.
But here it seems to me that it becomes most evident. I
don't believe that people are just biological machinery.
He keeps emphasizing this expression to underline the
fact that we operate deterministically, that wheel X
determines wheel Y and so on.

But beyond that, in the paragraph I quoted, it becomes

evident that he surpasses the regular perimeter of
comparison and slips into something darker than that.

It's not absurd to believe that something good can

happen to a machine, because people are not just
machines.

They are complex beings with an incredibly wide

emotional spectrum that happen to function in
accordance with the rest of the universe.

That doesn't mean that all human internal phenomena are

devoid of value.
There is nothing, in fact, inherently valuable in this
universe.

What is valuable or not is something we decide, as

humans, and there is no need to appeal to any external
authority to decide together that a person's internal
experience is valuable.

I don't think there's anything illogical here. Any value

we have is just a communal decision and can never be
anything else.

Each person is a capsule formed of time, space, and

biology in a perfectly unique, unrepeatable combination.

Each person is a reflection in this time, a mirroring of the

universe that has constituted them.

The experience of this mirroring is what is valuable, how

it feels, even if it is determined by the surrounding
environment.
This "even if" is stupid, how could it ever be otherwise?

So we are not just machines, but one of the most

complex formulations of this universe in which we find
ourselves.

Our fundamental reward is experiencing this complexity,

as it is, determined and unpredictable.

There are experiences that make people flourish, so they

can enjoy this complexity even more, and there are
experiences that make people shrink, reduce, and exist in
a perpetual state of urgency, where they no longer have
the resources to see beyond their own fear.

It would be better if there were more experiences of the

first type and fewer of the second.

There's nothing illogical here. It's, in fact, perfectly

logical.
We are determined by the environment, the environment
is composed of people, the more people live better, the
more we positively influence each other, the more we
create fertile ground for our flourishing, both present and
future.

A last repetition of the things discussed here. When

Sapolsky says there is no free will, he doesn't say that
there is no sensation of choice.

That sensation will probably always exist.

But we would do well to realize that every choice we

make is always an expression of our history, that each
person is a piece of history, and that no one has ever
chosen their own history.

Then, will, the ability to persevere despite obstacles, is

one of the most spectacular human abilities.
But its development requires fertile ground, physical and
emotional nourishment, resources.

Some people, without any merit of their own, have had

the luck to be beneficiaries of such resources.

And others have not.

No one can be neither guilty nor praiseworthy for how

their childhood unfolded, for the type of resources they
had around them.

People always retain a capacity for change, but it is

conditioned by external stimuli.

And the kind of information provided by Sapolsky's

book is an external stimulus that has the ability to change
what kind of decisions we are capable of, at the
individual and societal level.

That's about it for now.

There remain countless problems and unanswered
questions, but I've tried here to tick off only those that hit
me the hardest.

Sapolsky's book is, anyway, of a nature to clarify a very

well aspect so that we can launch hundreds of questions
further.

It's just one step.

As I've said before, if we're lucky, these discussions will

gain momentum at some point, sooner or later.

The book, in my opinion, is a historic one, the wet dream

of any sociologist, the most convincing demonstration
that has ever existed of the precise way in which humans
are shaped by the surrounding environment.

So if you found the information here very interesting,

there are still about 1300 pages to explore.
Sapolsky has also done a very intense tour of podcasts in
recent months where he explains everything we
discussed here, I've seen about 10 of them.

Thank you very much for the support of patient people, I

wish you all pleasant determination.
Dear Readers,

As I conclude this journey, I am filled with immense

gratitude for each and every one of you who has
embarked on this intellectual adventure with me. Your
curiosity, passion, and dedication to exploring the
complexities of the human condition have inspired me
beyond words.

I am deeply thankful to those who have supported and

encouraged me throughout the writing of this book. To
my family, friends, colleagues, and mentors, your
unwavering belief in me has been the driving force
behind this endeavor.

But as we reach the end of this book, let us not forget

that the journey of questioning and discovery does not
end here. In fact, it is only just beginning. I urge you,
dear readers, to continue to question everything in life —
the norms, the assumptions, the beliefs. For it is through
questioning that we truly learn, grow, and evolve as
individuals and as a society.

May you never cease to wonder, to explore, and to

challenge the status quo. And may your thirst for
knowledge and understanding never be quenched.

With deepest appreciation, Duban Mihai.

References

 Sapolsky, Robert M. Determined: A Science of

Life without Free Will.
 Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of
Humans at Our Best and Worst.

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