More Determined Than Scientific? Unpacking the Fallacies in Sapolsky's Case Against Free Will

Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will synthesizes findings across disciplines to argue for hard determinism, concluding free will is an illusion incompatible with science. This critique contends the work, despite its breadth, suffers fundamental conceptual and methodological flaws. Primarily, it attacks a strawman definition of free will—equating it to an uncaused, acontextual neural event, an a priori empty set (FWS = ∅)—thereby sidestepping meaningful engagement with sophisticated accounts. Secondly, it exhibits logical incoherence, failing to define determinism clearly and oscillating between incompatible deterministic frameworks (hard/Laplacian vs. soft/contextual) without acknowledgment, leading to performative contradictions where the author implicitly exempts himself while advocating normative changes. Thirdly, it misappropriates concepts from complexity, chaos, and emergence, interpreting them reductionistically via a simplistic view of causality (treating it as a linear chain between noumena) and neglecting the causal efficacy of organization via constraint causation. Fourthly, it conflates biological historicity with deterministic necessity, ignoring how accumulated structure enables agency. Fifthly, it implicitly adopts an outdated behaviorist stimulus-response model. Finally, it recapitulates established arguments without offering the novel biological paradigm its subtitle claims. Sapolsky's determinism appears less a scientific conclusion and more an artifact of outdated metaphysics and insufficient engagement with theoretical biology and the philosophy of complex systems.