… failed to inculcate prosocial values. It would be caused, instead, by an above-average tendency toward impulsivity, itself caused by factors beyond one’s control.

Sapolsky writes, “The socioeconomic status of a child’s family predicts the size, volume, and gray matter content in the prefrontal cortex. . . in kindergarteners.” Kindergarten is crazy-early to have effects like this show up. But socioeconomic status, i.e., class—human primates’ version of rank among baboons—determines important features of the brain even earlier. The effect is there “in toddlers. In six-month-olds. In four-week-olds. You want to scream at how unfair life can be,” Sapolsky writes. “Actually,” Kelly said, “Sapolsky should be advocating to eradicate poverty not just for all children but for all mothers.” “Oh, yeah,” I said, “you’re right.” For a four-week-old to have a smaller brain, the glucocorticoids must have been present in utero.

*

“You know who doesn’t believe in free will?” I said to Kelly at the next tea. “The tobacco companies, the food industry, the Sackler family, advertising agencies, smartphone manufacturers, and social media platforms such as Facebook and TikTok.” Addictive cigarettes and booze; snacks high in sugar, salt and fat; Oxycontin; product placement in movies; the doomscroll: the corporations behind these phenomena know precisely how effective they are in the aggregate with respect to changing the behavior of individuals. The “attention economy,” according to Scott Galloway, celebrity investor, popular podcaster, and marketing professor at New York University, is only a subset of the larger “addiction economy”—made up of companies that have figured out ways to control our behavior by manipulating our dopaminergic reward system. Galloway says—borrowing from E. O. Wilson—we have neolithic instincts, Medieval social institutions, and futuristic, God-like technology, which adroitly pushes our buttons and pulls our strings.

These companies deny free will, at least notionally—i.e., they count on determinism—in their manipulations of our behavior; could denial, instead, help us protect ourselves? Presently, in a culture that believes in free will, resistance to the addiction economy is more difficult than it would be after pervasive denial. Free-will credulity makes it possible to deny disingenuously the phenomena of addiction and manipulation are even happening (“There’s no system of control. People freely choose to eat our unhealthy food product!”) and recommends methods of resistance that might be hopeless (“Just use your willpower!”). Right now, strategies to resist corporate manipulation often recommend increased optionality, so individuals can ostensibly choose a different path rather than the maladaptive, addictive one. “Sure, there’s lots of processed food, but shoppers are free to buy fresh vegetables and whole foods just a few aisles away.” Sure, they bought the object of addiction’s desire, but they could have done otherwise. Yet, if you deny free will, it’d be obvious that the best strategy would be to eliminate or diminish the addictive stimuli in the first place. Research suggests you would increase the probability of healthy choices if veggies were centrally prominent in a store and processed foods were hard to get to. “But, notice,” I said to Kelly, “Free will drops out of the picture when predicting, manipulating, incentivizing, or just explaining behavior.”

*

“Denial seems to be approaching a kind of critical mass right now,” Kelly said at the next tea. “I mean, what’s the historical evolution of determinism’s threat to free will?” Myself, I’d assumed that determinism began to take its contemporary shape with the new mechanistic explanations of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But recently I have begun to wonder if determinism were not older and deeper in our psyches—a feature of explanation per se, not mechanistic explanation specifically. Rather than coming about because of early science’s impressive discoveries of the clockwork-like laws of cause and effect, maybe the first threat to humanity’s sense of autonomy and dignity came from deterministic stories—that is to say, from Fate. Narrative paths and story arcs, imposed on us by gods or divine forces, were taken to undermine something important to us: happiness or meaningfulness, if not also autonomy. Fate, oracles, curses, and the like preoccupied the ancient Athenians especially—as evidenced by their invention of the genre of tragic theater. At Oedipus’s birth, a divine oracle prescribed the inescapable story of his life, its end and its lasting meaning, as clear and unchangeable as if chiseled in the firmament.

Twenty-one hundred years before the Scientific Revolution, Democritus (c. 400 BCE) said that determinism governed the interactions between instances of what he speculated was the basic unit of matter: an invisible, indivisible substance he called atomos. Reacting to Democritus a hundred years later, Epicurus postulated that for there to be leeway for free will, atoms would have to undergo a “swerve” (Latin: clinamen), straying from their predetermined path. In other words, something somewhere would have to diverge from the deterministic causal chain in virtue of no cause at all (otherwise its diverging swerve would itself be part of a deterministic causal chain).

The Epicureans’ contra-causal reaction to Democritus’s determinism seems to presage the position that philosophers today call libertarianism. No association with the specious political philosophy of Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, and Paul Ryan, libertarianism about free will holds that humans have the ability “to have done otherwise”—as its slogan has it—i.e., specifically, to act in a way contradicting determinism. You can do otherwise than outside forces would have you do, or act contrary to internal desires, or even your long-standing character. Any influence can in principle be resisted. Libertarianism says we are always capable of a spontaneous choice between alternative possibilities. Yesterday, you chose soup over salad. According to libertarianism, we could rewind the universe and let it play again, and this time, you could choose salad without any change in any antecedent conditions—for example, without you even desiring salad. This is the sense one has of “could have done otherwise” when one occupies the ultimate perspective. Libertarianism does not mean the weaker proposition that, if I had wanted to do otherwise, I could have done so. It’s not that. It means I could choose to do something even if I didn’t want to, i.e., without there being any particular cause of my choice. It means my decision has causal power (for example, to move my arm) but is itself uncaused. It would have to be uncaused to allow for free will, because causation always comes in chains.

This “uncaused causer” of libertarian free will is called the causa sui, which Nietzsche, the most eminent critic of free-will credence, lambasted as “the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of logical rape and perversion. After 1900, the indeterminacy inherent to the newly discovered quantum realm gave libertarianism a boost, to be sure. There was now a permission structure to endorse the square circle of an uncaused causer. Yet, for close to one hundred years, many philosophers have been going blue in the face pointing out that quantum, libertarian, or any other kind of indeterminacy is no help to friends of free will. If there is a spot of randomness between my intention to lift my arm and the event of my arm lifting, that doesn’t make my movement free. It makes it random. I might intend to move my arm and my leg kick out if indeterminism were involved. Or, if I intend to move my arm and my arm moves, it could only be thought of as a fluke.

And yet, the vast majority of Americans say they believe in free will. Most philosophers do too. According to a 2020 survey of more than seventeen hundred philosophy professors, only 11 percent denied free will in the way Sapolsky and Harris do. Still, Kelly was right that free-will denial is coming into a kind of vogue. The deniers have learned that doing so makes some people furious. Philosopher Galen Strawson received death threats because of his denial, according to a 2021 article in The Guardian. “It seems to provoke some people to an existential crisis,” he said. In my conversations, many people bristle when I rehearse the arguments for denial. On a cross-country flight, a woman in my row—after asking me what I was writing about—stammered, “You . . . should not . . . think . . . that,” her mouth quivering with indignation. Then she proceeded to tell me with composed, clipped speech that “denying my free will means you are denying my godhood.” Suffice to say, the rest of the flight was uncomfortable. I stood for much of it, stretching my legs by the bathrooms. While deplaning, I realized the book I’d been reading was missing from the seat pocket in front of me. The Vohs and Schooler psychology study borne out in the wild!

This emotional reactivity is also present in the academic debate. I’ve observed breaches of scholarly decorum—including accusations of willful blindness, ideological thinking, bad faith, and even moral turpitude. The philosopher Dan Dennett, who was the most eminent defender of free will before his unfortunate passing in the spring of 2024, had said that denying free will causes “real harms”—harms for which deniers are morally responsible. Like Erasmus, Dennett has told deniers to “shut up.” Although, unlike Erasmus, Dennett did it in a YouTube video.

Sam Harris and Dennett were friends—part of the four horsemen of New Atheism, along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. But after Harris published his short book denying free will, Dennett wrote a nasty review. For all the heated disagreement, Dennett and Harris agree about much, but then they disagree as to the significance of their agreement. Both say libertarianism is false—nobody has the ability to act contra-causally—but Dennett thinks that “doesn’t matter much,” whereas Harris thinks if he can get the general public to admit libertarianism is false, then “that’s the whole shooting match.”

“But wait. What is Dennett’s position?” Kelly asked. “In another unlovely neologism from philosophers,” I said, “he’s what’s called a compatibilist.” Compatibilists assert you can’t solve free will by getting rid of the causal chain. That would be to embrace an unworkable, magical libertarianism. So, compatibilists redefine free will. To be free, they say, an action needs to be not uncaused but caused in a specific way, by the right kind of causes—those meeting certain criteria. For example, University of North…

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Two years ago, my fiancée told me that I’d been sleepwalking and carrying on full-fledged conversations with her each night. When Kelly first relayed this, her brow twitched slightly with what I took to be suppressed irritation. These mornings, I never remembered anything about whatever it was I’d done overnight. After all, somnambulism is a classic example of automatic behavior. Yet, the archetypal image of the sleepwalker—nightcap with drooping tassel, eyes closed, arms outstretched in front, wrists bent down—is wrong. Sleepwalkers engage in complex behavior: they might cook a meal, drive a car, carry on a conversation, murder a relative—all without the accompaniment of consciousness. It raises the question: if I’m not conscious, how am I seemingly able to adapt to changing circumstances? Who was talking when I was conversing? As Kelly and I sat up in bed that first morning, her pent-up prickliness made me acutely aware of the score between us. What was the regrettable conduct I unfreely enacted each night, but for which I must nevertheless accept responsibility? Evidently, I had been peeing in the closet.

During the first night, Kelly says, my rustling woke her up, and she asked me what I was doing. “Nothing,” I said. “Going to the bathroom.” But she could see I was standing in front of the open closet and said, “That’s not the toilet.” “Yes, it is,” I said, sounding offended, while gravely continuing to conduct my business. We would learn later why it’s said not to wake up a sleepwalker. Although it’s like a preprogrammed routine is being run, the person’s capability to react in complex ways can remain, but often only in limited form. I could interact with Kelly, for instance, but likely only to counteract her attempts to thwart me. If you attempt to impede a sleepwalker, they might instinctively find it aversive and—one article suggested—react impulsively, yet they’d be without the benefit of consciousness to reign in their anger. That was the theory anyway.

Luckily for Kelly and me, my nonconscious self was more likely to be cavalier and arrogant than angered by impediment. While following the going-back-to-bed algorithm, I responded to Kelly’s protestations, she reports, by uttering “an aloof grunt of bemused recognition.” During the night of my second episode, when she again informed me that I was standing at the closet, not the commode, I let go another self-satisfied, haughty grunt. But I apparently persevered in my task, because she could hear the unmistakable evidence—the damp applause—of my misguided micturition. A faux fancy language affords me distance from disgusting deeds.

The third night Kelly screamed at me, “ARE YOU AWAKE?!” “Yes,” I said. In that moment, she struggled with what to conclude about my inner mental world. For I was passing the Turing test, so to speak, yet she didn’t know if I was actually conscious. As we found out in the morning, I hadn’t been.

When I asked her to recount the events for me once more (in furtherance of writing this essay), I noticed her brow involuntarily furrowed again. The biggest irritation, she said, was having to clean up the soggy mess after I’d already roboted back to bed.

“That sucks,” I replied, dutifully. Yet, moments later, I caught myself feeling uninvolved again, like I hadn’t done it. I knew I had done it; I took what she said for the truth. But I did not feel that belief in my body. Usually when I’ve done something wrong, my self-criticism is more despairing. The knowledge of the injured party’s disapprobation is more—I don’t know—piercing. I get a nauseating knot in my stomach. But this time, my understanding that I was responsible for Kelly’s aggravation was entirely intellectual and bloodless.

Because I have so tenuous a connection to what I’ve done while sleepwalking, I find it easy to be glad of my inopportune nocturnal emissions. If I had not sleep-peed in our closet, then I would not possess such a good example of an action for which I take responsibility, but which I did not do of my own free will. It’s been a fascinating experience. It’s like when, at the dentist, I cannot keep my tongue from pressing against the hygienist’s elongated mirror.

Above all, sleepwalking gave me a concrete path into wondering what it’d be like as an experience to deny free will, as a small number of public intellectuals have recently done. It was weird enough to think that I had carried on a conversation without free will one, two, or three times. What would it be like to think every action you undertake lacks free will? Not just outbursts but even conscious decisions made after careful deliberation. What would it be like to believe that each thought in one’s stream of consciousness was an effect of previous causes?

For Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolsky, for instance, what is the experience of denying his own free will like? Sapolsky is convinced we do not have free will; so, from his perspective, he knows it. But he’s admitted he catches himself reverting to the default setting of free will belief every time he nonchalantly accepts responsibility. “Someone says, ‘You’re dressed nice today,’ and I say, ‘Thanks,’ as if I had anything to do with it,” Sapolsky joked during a guest appearance on NPR’s Radiolab.

When Sapolsky manages to believe what he knows—when he is actively remembering that he doesn’t have free will—how does his day-today self-conception change? Is denying free will bad for you? Or does it increase well-being? I’m talking about psychological effects. I became much less interested in the classic philosophical arguments for and against free will. Released from responsibility, does a free-will denier run amok, his face frozen in a gleeful rictus? Or does he lose all motivation and succumb to fatalism, thinking it doesn’t matter what he does? Would denial, as Sartre worried, serve as an excuse for bad behavior? Perhaps, as Sapolsky imagines, pervasive denial would bring about a fairer, more just, less cruel society, “a giant leap forward in our moral progress,” as he’s said. How would our thinking change if we cleansed our vocabulary of the term “free will”?

When Sapolsky and others deny free will, they don’t mean that everything is destined, that what will be will be, no matter what we do. It’s not fatalism necessarily. The precise logical implications of denial are, however, not a matter of what Sapolsky might want them to be; they are a matter of science and logic and will depend on arguments and experimental evidence. And, as it turns out, there is already an empirically informed debate going on.

My research into the psychological implications of free-will denial led me to novel places on the intellectual landscape: to a confrontation with bodies of knowledge called “informational existential threats,” to the conceptual affinity between progressive political opinion and freewill skepticism, to the idea of an Area 51 for anti-free-will research, and finally, to the existence of brain-scanning technology that can read the inner contents of your mind and know what you are going to do before you know.

*

When I sat down in my office to start my research, the first thing I noticed about online pictures of Sapolsky was the compassionate twinkle in his eyes. Framed by long curly gray hair and a gray Garibaldi beard, Sapolsky’s eyes sparkled like quartz in the Tolstoian rocky crag of his sun-wrinkled face. A specialist in neuroendocrinology, he’s spent thirty sunny summers in Africa studying simians. (Sorry! I couldn’t control myself.) Returning to the same troop of baboons each year, he’d observe their behavior, tranquilize them, and take blood samples. Sapolsky found, among many other discoveries, that baboons ranking low in the troop’s dominance hierarchy had chronically elevated levels of stress hormones (glucocorticoids) with concomitant negative effects on health, like hypertension, and on behavior, like an increase in isolated sulking and displacement aggression. Sapolsky estimates that nearly 50 percent of all violence among his troop of baboons is displacement aggression. Shit, as we know, flows downhill. “A high-ranking male loses a fight and so chases a subadult male, who promptly bites a female, who then lunges at an infant,” Sapolsky has written. The more a baboon displaces aggression after losing a fight for rank, Sapolsky says, the lower his glucocorticoid levels are when the good doctor, sans sun hat, tests his blood.

That explanation—a diminishment in rank causes stress hormones, which cause the loser to punch down to gain relief—is only one example from Sapolsky’s immense storehouse of explanations of primate behavior. Sapolsky’s 2018 bestselling book, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, exhaustively explores the myriad causal factors relevant to the conduct of your behavior: from your mix of neurotransmitters nanoseconds before a given action, to the moral emotions bequeathed to all of us by our highly cooperative hunter-gatherer forebears; from your stress hormones thirty minutes ago, to those…

“Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem,” by David J. Frost, published in The Missouri Review, July 2026.

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“Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem,” by David J. Frost, The Missouri Review, Summer 2026 Issue.

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The Missouri Review will be publishing my 7500-word narrative nonfiction essay on free will denial in their Summer 2026 issue. My essay is about the gap between what we know versus what we believe and can actually live by—focusing on free will deniers like Robert Sapolsky, Stanford biologist, and author of Behave and Determined.

From my essay:

Sapolsky is convinced we do not have free will; so, from his perspective, he knows it. But he’s admitted he catches himself reverting to the default setting of free will belief every time he nonchalantly accepts responsibility. “Someone says, ‘You’re dressed nice today,’ and I say, ‘Thanks,’ as if I had anything to do with it,” Sapolsky joked during a guest appearance on NPR’s Radiolab.

The essay is expected to appear on the Project MUSE website on June 19, with physical copies reaching subscribers later in mid-July. The free will essay is part of a larger project about what we know but do not believe.

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Brief bio

With an essay forthcoming in The Missouri Review, I’ve also published essays in The Smart Set, SLAB literary magazine, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I wrote the first chapter in Girls and Philosophy, an Open Court anthology about Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking HBO show Girls.

For more than ten years, I’ve taught philosophy classes, exclusively online, for Alamance Community College in North Carolina.

I live on the Oregon coast with my dogs, Fritz and Lou Salomé, 3000 miles from Brooklyn.

More credentials of which I’m proud, even though their achievement must be chalked up to luck, given there’s no free will:

• B.A. in English from Columbia University

• M.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Irvine

• Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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2. If you want a more literary narrative—

   Here’s the true story of my best friend’s death at fourteen-years old, which made me ask “Why?” so urgently that it turned me into a philosopher. Originally published in SLAB literary magazine, Issue 16. Archived here on Armchair Vertigo.

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Addendum: About The Missouri Review

For readers outside literary publishing, The Missouri Review is one of the country’s most respected literary journals. Here are a few ways it shows up in rankings of literary magazines.

I write about what we know but do not believe.

—David J. Frost

We know we will die, but mostly live as if we will not. We may know free will is an illusion, but still blame, praise, regret, apologize, and resent. We know happiness cannot be pursued directly, but pursue it anyway. I write about that gap: the distance between what we know intellectually and what we can actually believe, feel, and live by.

About Armchair Vertigo

Armchair Vertigo is a newsletter of literary nonfiction, philosophy, psychology, memoir, and cultural criticism. Its central subject is the examined life under pressure: death, grief, self-deception, procrastination, moral responsibility, free will, happiness, and meaning.

About me

I’m David J. Frost. My essay on the psychological effects of denying free will is forthcoming in the Summer 2026 issue of The Missouri Review. I’ve also published essays in The Smart Set, SLAB Literary Magazine, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I have a B.A. in English from Columbia, an M.A. in Philosophy from UC Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UNC-Chapel Hill. I teach philosophy online for Alamance Community College and live on the Oregon coast.

For more of my work, visit: davidjfrost.com or linktr.ee/davidfrost

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I write about what we know but do not believe.

—David J. Frost

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