Determined
A Science of Life without Free Will

The book itself I would give 4 stars to (see below), but the audio version is deserving of only two stars because of one extremely annoying decision: every time there is a footnote in the book, the narrator says "Please see the attached PDF for a footnote." Given that there are roughly 350 footnotes in the book, you have to hear this repeated that many times, and sometimes there are multiple footnotes within just a few sentences. Surely there was a better way to do this. I've listened to many many audiobooks and I've never heard one take this approach for referencing footnotes. With respect to the content of the book itself, I thought it was a pretty thorough summary of the hard determinist's viewpoint. I particularly appreciated his desire to describe what it would really be like if everyone lived as if there is no free will. I, personally, do not agree with any of his positions on free will, so I was primarily listened to understand the "viewpoint of others." The author is arrogant and snarky (though he says he tries not to be), so you just have to be prepared for that. I haven't read a lot of other books from the hard determinist viewpoint, but this one seemed like a reasonable summary of the basic tenets of that system of belief and the practical implications of such a belief.

In the 15th century, a person with epilepsy would have a high chance of being burned at stake for being a witch. At that time, seizures were viewed as a sign of the devil, and as such, epileptics (people with epilepsy) were very commonly accused of witchcraft and murdered for it. Particularly if the......more

The following is an updated version. The original one can be found below. This book is a misguided attempt at moral reasoning based on scientific facts. Lacking a philosophical framework that can establish connections between morality and science, the author relied on his own rather lenient intuitio......more

This is a very technical book, yet Sapolsky made a considerable effort to break it down for the average reader. I have a bachelor's in Psychology and have read Dennett and some of the other authors Sapolsky mentioned, so many of the experiments mentioned were familiar to me already, and I have given......more

This book failed to change my mind about anything. Which is disappointing. I was expecting a solid argument because I have a high opinion of Robert Sapolsky. But I spent the whole book shouting to myself, "We don't even seem to agree on what free will is!" You can't even build and argument if we can......more

This book is a real winner for me — not only pop science at its best, but also giving scientific credibility to something I have long believed: the idea that the great majority of our actions (the author would say all of our actions) are determined by A) who we are genetically and B) what our life e......more