Free Will or Determinism: BookMarks Update #96 June, 2026

Friends: As we prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I am sick at heart watching the outrageous actions of those elected to lead our country. An illegal war in Iran with a disastrous and fragile cease fire, continued violent detentions of American citizens by ICE, the blatant bizarre behavior of trump with his Qatari bribe airplane, his overpriced and algae-filled reflecting pool, and his not-to-be-believed deal with the IRS to exempt him and his family from audits----you simply couldn't make up this stuff. Let us fly our flags, watch the fireworks, attend the parades, and spare no effort in the coming months to return our nation to the path of democracy, free speech, and its proper role as the model for the world.

Having gotten that off my chest, here are the books that I read in June:

Many of these books dealt with the question of free will versus determinism. Philosophers, physicists, neuroscientists, novelists, and poets have addressed this ancient debate with concepts like Bayesian probability, integrated information systems, Newtonian vs. Einsteinian universes, quantum mechanics and fractals while I view the question in a simpler way. Take this hypothetical. I'm sitting at Cabot's Ice Cream in Newton, Massachusetts and in front of me is a large hot fudge sundae with maple walnut ice cream topped with whipped cream, nuts, and a maraschino cherry. My doctor's advice, the risks of weight gain and diabetes, and my New Year's resolution all cry out to me to stand up, leave the sundae on the table and walk out. On the other hand, my genetic, epigenetic, and life experiences have primed my dopamine reward system resulting in absolutely no self-control when it comes to a sundae. I wolf down the sundae, enjoying every bite. Did I just exercise free will or did everything in my past determine that I was going to eat that sundae?

I recently read several books that cast some light on that question. While the hot fudge sundae scenerio was a trivial example of free will versus determinism, the question is an important one for each of us as we seek to understand the world, human behavior, and society's appropriate response to that behavior. For example, should we incarcerate individuals who commit crimes even if their life experience determined that they would be a criminal?.

I read Robert Sopolsky's "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will" several months ago, and found it fascinating. Sopolsky, a professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford, makes a strong argument that despite our intuitive sense that we are free to make decisions, our actions are the product of millenia of evolution, our genes, our fetal environment, and our childhood experiences all of which combine to determine our behavior. To make his case, Sapolsky shows that the biology of behavioral change in humans involves the same biochemistry, physiology, and anatomy as when a sea slug learns to avoid an electric shock. Sopolsky concludes that the world is deterministic, and there is no free will, i.e. while we think we are exercising free will when we take an action, in reality that action is the end result of a brain that is the sum of its biological past.

If you're still with me, consider this final paragraph from Sopolsky's first chapter. "Imagine a university graduation ceremony...the happiness, the pride.... Then you notice someone amid the family clusters ,,,the person way in the back, the person who is part of the ground crew collecting garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event. Randomly pick any of the graduates. Do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate's genes. Likewise for getting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that. Get the graduate's childhood as well---one filled with, say piano lessons and family game nights instead of, say, threats of going to bed hungry, becoming homeless, or being deported for lack of papers. Let's go all the way so that in addtion to the garbage collector having gotten all that of the graduate's past, the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector's past. Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. That is what I mean by determinism."

This view of determinism began with the ancient Greeks but was most clearly articulated by the 18th/19th Century polymath, Pierre Simon LaPlace who claimed tht if you knew the location of every particle in the universe at this moment, you'd be able to accurately predict every moment in the future. Tom Stoppard enlists this hypothesis in his play, "Arcadia", where the 16 year old Thomassina rejects LaPlace's determinism because it fails to account for human emotions, e.g. love and because the Second Law of Thermodynamics means that the world will become ever more random, chaotic, and unpredictable. Stoppard's superb play pits Newtonian rationalism and determinsim against Byronic romanticism and free will but leaves it to the audience to make their own judgment.

Michael Pollan's "A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness" which I read last month offers a related but indirect reflection on the free will/determinism debate. Pollan explored what this thing we call 'consciousness' is all about, this awareness of self and its difference from the rest of the world, and thankfully, admitted that by the end of interviewing scientists and philosophers, he was more confused than when he began. His book doesn't address the free will question directly, but does conclude that our feelings and emotions differentiate us from robots and AI, and give us the ability to behave in our own individual ways whether those actions are determined or free.

And that brings me to this month's book by Jo Marchant, "In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment". Marchant, who has a PhD in genetics and is a freelance science writer, focuses on time as the central theme in exploring the ultimate question of selfhood and agency. Taking the reader on a tour of neuroscience, Bayesian probability, bodily perceptions, time, space, quantum mechanics, and more, she argues for a new view of how human consciousness and the external world interact. This is not an easy book, but it exposed me to a new world of today's science. Marchant definitely comes down on the side of free will: "“But what if the universe wasn’t created in one Big Bang but in billions upon billions of tiny creative flashes that are sounding out all around us? This journey into Now has made me wonder whether reality might have given us, not just one long-ago moment of creation but an ongoing miracle. Now…Now…Now…. Perhaps with our help, the whole universe is continually being made and remade. And the future isn’t written after all.” This is a powerful plea for human agency and an explanation of why we have so much trouble defining Now. “Perhaps the reason we can’t pin down or perceive Now is because it isn’t a thing or a time. It isn’t a moment of an experience of even a probabalistic network of constraints. It is further upstream from all of this: the ever bubbling precondition that makes time and things possible. The creative source from which we carve our lives and worlds.” So take that Sopolsky!

Marchant's chant of "Now...Now...Now" is echoed in a chapter title in Yiyun Li's "Things In Nature Merely Grow", a stunningly powerful Pulitzer Prize winning memoir about the suicides of her two sons, Vincent in 2017 at 16 and James in 2024 at 19. What could have been a maudlin self-help book about grieving and mourning, is a courageous look at the individual personalities and persons that her sons were, a brave exploration of parenthood, and a beautifully written testimony to her will to live on. Li describes her days as containing “the absoluteness of life (that means) that in each day, time has to be marked before the next day arrives.” She finds solace and a model for her sadness in gardening where “things go wrong more often then they go right”, and she finds writing to be helpful and engaging, not as a way of forgetting or moving on, but as a way of dealing with what she refers to as “Now and Now and Now and Now”. While not addressing the free will/determinism dyad directly, I believe Li would embrace a non-duality explanation that would include the deterministic view that her sons were destined to find life painful and also the free will view that they were free to choose suicide as their final act.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Strout's new novel, "The Things We Never Say" confronts the question of free will and fate head on. The main character, Artie is a 50ish high school history teacher troubled by a world that is changing inexplicably around him. Contemplating suicide, he nearly dies in a sailing accident and given a new opportunity to live, reflects that he is simply living out his 'fate'. An earth-shaking revelation further destabilizes his world as does the current political situation which he refers to as a "national suicide". Artie muses that "everything in the world seemed to be filled with unspoken truths….All the things in the world that people did not know about one another. Even those very close to them.” ….now after all these years, he was finally becoming a grown up. What did he mean by that? That he was finally beginning to understand the multitudinous aspects of people. He was amazed ….that he had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.” Earlier in the book, Artie returning from a neighborhood cocktail party wondered “Why don’t people ever say anything real...And now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It was a private thing to be alive. He understood this now.” Is this private thing Artie speaks of fate or determinism? Strout leaves it up to us to decide in this excellent addition to her outstanding ouevre.

Continuing in this vein, Tom Stoppard's play, "Jumpers" deals with another aspect of the free will conundrum, the presence or absence of an absolute moral code vs. relativism. George, a professor of philosophy, and his wife, Dottie are spending a quiet evening at home when they are confronted by a group of acrobats, the eponymous jumpers, who turn out to be other members of George's philosophy department. When one of them is shot (did Dottie do it and if so, was that determined or of her own free will?) the play descends into farce as Inspector Bones explores the motives and evidence and Archie, yet another philosopher, beds Dottie. "Arcadia" was a far better play, but this early 1972 work presages Stoppard's later, more developed works.

After this large dose of philosophy and the space-time continuum, it was a relief to dive into some mysteries and a delicious book about 1968.

This is the second book I've read by George Howe Colt, the husband of Anne Fadiman, one of my favorite essayists. His "The Big House" was a wonderful book about an old house on the Cape that had been in his family for generations. In the entertaining "The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968", he focuses on the 1968 Harvard-Yale game as the lens to explore this pivotal year in America's history. Harvard and Yale had been playing this oldest of college football rivalries since 1875, and in 1968 they both entered the game undefeated and playing for the Ivy title. When Harvard, down by 16 points with one minute on the clock miraculously scored two touchdowns and two two-point conversions to tie the game as the clock showed no time left, the Harvard Crimson headline read, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. Colt skillfully interweaves the details of that game and the players with the events in the outside world---the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, American cities in flames, the VietNam war, the college campus protests, and the social upheaval of the times. I may be biased because I'm an alum of one and a daughter is an alum of the other or because Yale's fullback was my wife's boyfriend in junior high school, but I think this is a great book and a reminder that even when things look most bleak, there is hope.

Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the finest non-fiction writers of our times. A staff writer for "The New Yorker" since since 1999, she has collected 17 of her non-fiction essays from that magazine into "Life on a Little-Known Planet". The title is taken from a 1968 book written by Howard Ensign Evans, a professor at Colorado State University, that was a paeon to the sort of insects that people usually regard as pests. Evans and now Kolbert were making the point that most of life on earth has not yet been discovered, studied, and catalogued, and sadly, much of this life is becoming extinct due to global warming. Evans shows up in a chapter about searching for previously unknown caterpillars in the Chihuahuan Desert. This is typical of Kolbert's practice. Like another favorite, John McPhee, she finds a fascinating and little understood topic (sperm whale language, invasive species in New Zealand, flooding of Miami's streets, a Danish island which has achieved zero carbon emissions, the melting ice of Greenland, etc.), identifies a local expert, and travels deep into often dangerous places to achieve first-hand experience of the subject. She writes with humor, delicious details (e.g.the drought in our Southwest has resulted in a drop in Lake Powell's 24 million acre-feet of water, enough to cover Massachusetts to a depth of 140 feet!), and deep wisdom about the earth's creatures and about the climate change crisis we are facing. The only criticism I have is that many of the essays are 5-10 years old and felt out of date. Though it was published just last year, sadly the world has moved on in major ways from essays written as long ago as 2005. Nonetheless, the truth remains that climate change is the existential crisis of our time, and Kolbert is a worthy Cassandra calling to us to address it.

I often seek escape these days from the world's reality by reading mysteries,a genre that has long held its place among the best sellers. I read four of them this month. Two can quickly be dismissed as worthless disasters. Lee and Andrew Child's Jack Reacher series saw a new addition in "Exit Strategy", and despite my vow to never read another of their books, the will is weak (witness the hot fudge sundae!), and I dove in again. Bad decision. The plots have become even sillier. The violence has become even more mindless and disgusting. The book is a waste of paper and reading it was a waste of time.

Similarly, Martha Grimes should have found something else to do rather than write "The Red Queen", the twenty-fifth in a series featuring Superintendent Richard Jury of New Scotland Yard. I had read and enjoyed most of this series in the distant past finding Jury, his friend, Lord Ardly who prefers to be called Melrose Plant, and his sidekick Sergeant Alfred Wiggins entertaining and engaging; however, Grimes at the estimable age of 94 should have retired to the sidelines, hung up her typewriter, and sat on her laurels. The complicated and silly plot doesn't even merit summary. Save your time and read an early volume in the series should you be seeking a British mystery.

On the other hand, Simenon came through as usual in this Paris-based tale of murder and intrigue, "Madame Maigret's Friend." I'll spare you the 'spoiler alert' and skip the plot, only adding that following Maigret and his wife around Paris was, as always, a delight. What differentiates Simenon's literary mysteries from Childs' and Grimes' books, are the finely honed characters whose deep psychological traits (? determinism) make each Maigret novel a treat, and in this one, as usual, our Chief Inspector gets his man at the end.

The best of the lot and an outstanding book, is Tana French's "The Keeper". Dubbed the 'first lady of Irish mysteries', French once again takes us back to Ardnekelty, a small farming village on Ireland's west coast. Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective who settled there several years ago, becomes embroiled in a the death of Rachel Houlihan. Houlihan was the teen-aged friend of Trey, a young girl from a disturbed family who Hooper along with his fiance, Lena, is working to help. Is Houlihan's death a suicide or a murder, and if the latter, who did it? French's writing moves this book from a garden variety mystery novel genre to one with literary aspirations. Her metaphors, descriptions, and character development are grand as is the plot which twists and turns to a surprise ending. Despite its nearly 500 pages, this would make great beach reading this summer.

The Poetry Tree on the Charles this month has one poem from each of my four favorite poets. Donald Hall, Stanley Kunitz, Louise Gluck, and Robert Frost all share New England roots, and though they have all passed on, their work remains a tribute to this part of the world, the human condition, and the beauty of 'the best words in the best order."

In conclusion, here are quotes from two outstanding writers whose comments appear to address the issues confronted by Strout and Marchant.

Geoffrey Hill who died in 2016 at the age of 84 has been described as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English. In the same vein of thinking that Artie expressed in Strout's book, Hill wrote, "We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves; we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most 'intellectual' piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right--not an obligation--to be difficult if it wishes.

And Philip Rieff, the sociologist who died in 2006 at 83, seems to echo Sopolsky's argument for determinism when he wrote: "Character is the restrictive shaping of possibility".

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