Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

Science has found that thoughts and behaviors are determined or caused by preceding states, which is supported by chaos theory, emergent complexity, and quantum indeterminacy. Sapolsky addresses his biting tone in the previous chapters, expressing his frustration with moral judgment, and he explains that Chapters 5 through 10 carry a more professional, yet excited, tone: “These topics excite me immensely because they reveal completely unexpected structure and patterns; this enhances rather than quenches the sense that life is more interesting than imagined” (126). Reductionism is the scientific act of separating complex items or processes into component parts to better understand the complete unit; although a useful scientific approach, it is unhelpful when studying behavior, which is better understood through chaos theory, or chaoticism: the idea that dynamic systems are nonlinear, deterministic, and unpredictable.

In 1963, Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, was using a computer model to study weather patterns; he unknowingly changed one of 12 variables from 0.506127 to 0.506 after the computer rounded the number, and his model displayed increasingly different results from the first round. He discovered unpredictable

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