"Determined" offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works - the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Robert Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world.
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