Robert Sapolsky Quotes

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

To treat of human actions is to deal wholly with second causes.

I wonder whether being a scientist's daughter makes you so conflicted about free will and fate.

The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.

In philosophy, they talk a lot about humans being actual organic machines, and the idea of free will is something that we've made up. We actually don't have free will. We're acting according to our programming as organic mechanisms.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

free will is a theologian's artifice.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

This is plainly to ascribe divinity to 'free will.'

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.

The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration.

I suppose that the great questions of "Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge Absolute," which used to be discussed at Concord, are still unsettled.

There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation to dispel all these morbid thoughts of "sin" and "free will" and "moral responsibility.

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.

To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.

Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?

There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.