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.

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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. But less embarrassment, more alarm or panic.

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.

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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 of your prenatal environment; from the sexual selection processes at work in your grandparents’ mating rituals, to the organizing principles—whether individualistic, communitarian, or honor-based—of your great-great-great-grandparents’ culture. Perpetually harried in his speech and even apparently in his ellipses-filled emails, Sapolsky—a 1987 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient—is charming and often approaches silliness. He turns serious, however, when he addresses what he calls the “appalling moral affront” of a society that continues to believe in free will. “The injustice and harm perpetrated by our justice system’s anti-scientific belief in free will should keep us up at night screaming,” he said on another episode of Radiolab. Sapolsky has staked out the most uncompromising position against free will in the public sphere. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to [where we are],” he writes. In October 2023, Penguin published Sapolsky’s latest book, which is about living day-to-day with free-will denial, titled Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Having established in Behave that every human behavior has a cause, Sapolsky writes in Determined about the potential consequences of society-wide free-will denial and how to integrate those implications into our self-understanding.

After my sleepwalking episodes began, Kelly cracked open my copy of the eight-hundred-page Behave, and I started reading a galley copy of Determined. We would compare notes at our ritual of Sunday three o’clock tea, recommended by our premarital counselor. I also read the eighty-page Free Will by Sam Harris, another denier. Harris is a multitopic public intellectual, unaffiliated with any university, and independently minded. The famously militant New Atheist, bestselling author, advocate of Buddhist meditation, neuroscience PhD, podcaster, app developer, and much-criticized critic of radical Islam agrees with Sapolsky that jettisoning belief in free will would be good for both society and the individual. Harris—who looks like a cross between Spock and a dour, karate-chopping Ben Stiller—writes that “losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.”

***

While Sapolsky’s and Harris’s predictions about a world after denial are quasi-utopian, the science does not appear to back up their sunny speculations. “Believe it or not,” I said to Kelly at tea, “scientists have run experiments in this domain”—lab experiments to discover the psychological effect of denying free will on the person denying it. It’s not long been the subject of empirical study, however. In one of the first papers, published in 2008, behavioral economist Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota’s business school, and Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, found that when test subjects are primed with anti-free-will belief (by reading a passage denying free will in Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis), they cheat and steal during real-money lab games in greater percentages than subjects in the control group.

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Nearly all the other results in this line of research run counter to Sapolsky’s and Harris’s rosy predictions. Reading dozens of journal articles, I learned that disbelief in free will causes dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior; reduces helpfulness; hampers learning from one’s misdeeds; curtails thinking for oneself; diminishes recycling; lowers expectations for occupational success; and decreases quality of job performance.

“What the fuck’s ‘recycling’ doing in there?” Kelly asked, in a moment of apparent lalochezia. I wondered silently what she might have been so upset about that she needed the pressure release of swearing. “Well,” I said slowly, accusingly, drawing out the vowel, “Wehhhhl, experimental moral psychology has an unavoidable dollhouse nature.” The lab can only be a simulacrum of real life’s moral dilemmas. While researchers may want to test a belief’s contribution to bad behavior, universities’ institutional review boards, thankfully, do not allow actual harm to come to the participants in these studies. Similarly, good, heroic, or praiseworthy behavior must have a stand-in, which is what recycling is doing in there. To test if an experimentally manipulated condition contributes to aggressive behavior, a number of studies have adopted the strategy of giving participants the opportunity to clandestinely drench another person’s food in hot sauce. And, you guessed it, participants primed with free-will disbelief administer more hot sauce, i.e., were more aggressive, than controls. The vast majority of the science around the psychological effects of denying free will seems to militate against the optimists and in favor of the pessimists. Who’s right

There’s actually a third position. In the recent intellectual conversation around free-will denial, three mutually inconsistent schools of thought have developed. On the one hand, there’s Sapolsky and Harris, the optimists, who think denial would rid the world of moral harms that are presently dependent on free-will credence; on the other hand, empirical research seems to show that not believing in free will has negative effects on our behavior and psychology; while, on the third hand—and this position is as strange as a third hand—there are those who say free will is an illusion but that the effects of disbelief would be so detrimental that this knowledge should be suppressed. Yes, that’s right, some philosophers and scientists who deny free will’s existence don’t think it would be wise to let everyone know the truth. As Vohs and Schooler write: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.”

They’re not just trying to justify their grant money with a practical upshot for their research. They categorize the falsity of free will as an “informational existential threat,” like the knowledge of how to build a nuclear bomb or make smallpox into an aerosol. The knowledge that free will is an illusion must be possessed only—the thinking goes—by a small elite who, supposedly, will be strong enough to resist the bad effects. Suppressionists never say nobody should know this truth. How could they, since they know it? I imagine there must be a certain frisson to making an exception for oneself precisely here. The physicist Paul Davies, writing in an essay commissioned by—of all places—Foreign Affairs, says free will is “a fiction worth maintaining,” and denial “is the world’s most dangerous idea.”

It’s not new, this moral panic. Catastrophizing about free-will denial goes way back. But today, it is not mere idle speculation, which it was in 1524, when Erasmus argued for free will against Martin Luther’s denial. Erasmus worried that the common man was too “weak, ignorant, and wicked” to handle what Luther was proposing. Therefore, Luther ought not to say it. But Erasmus did not seriously contemplate Luther’s denial becoming widespread, so his worries were merely abstract pearl-clutching—and self-serving to boot. Erasmus should have felt the bite of intellectual conscience, the pull of a certain epistemological scruple. Because it was in Erasmus’ time—and still should be in ours—a principle recognized by all truth-seekers that one cannot silence one’s interlocutor in a debate by asserting that merely uttering their conclusion would cause harm. It’s akin to ad hominem, as it does not address the issue on its merits (i.e., on the question of whether it’s true or not). Furthermore, it would preclude the discovery of harmful truths; for, indeed, some truths are harmful.

Today’s suppressionism is different because Erasmus believed in free will. These days, recommending suppression is most interesting (and most ethical) when it’s a move made by deniers, i.e., the thinker in Luther’s position. Suppressionist scientists are advocating for the sequestration of their own research. They argue that, if we really and truly believe “the un-free will” (a translation of Luther’s 1525 title) to be dangerous knowledge, then it should be “born classified,” as is the case now for developmental research for new nuclear weaponry. “Perhaps the government could,” I joked with Kelly at the next tea, “in the vein of UFOs, attempt to discredit as a kook anyone who proclaims the dangerous and secret truth that we don’t have free will.”

Thankfully, outright deception may not be necessary. “We are fortunately deceived about free will,” writes Saul Smilansky, professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and the foremost academic proponent of letting the illusion be. In Plato scholarship, an elite promulgating a falsehood to maintain social order is called a “noble lie.”

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A noble lie affirming free will may not be necessary, since few people see their way to the arguments for denial, and most, when the arguments are brought to their attention, do not accept their implications anyway—even when they cannot gainsay the logic. Smilansky worries that graduate students, working under the conviction that free will is false, will become depressed or psychotic post-disillusionment. So he discourages PhD students from working with him. He writes, “We must protect humanity in the hothouse of illusion from the chill of the ultimate perspective.” “I like that,” I remarked to Kelly. “The icy chill of the ultimate perspective.”

Adopting the ultimate perspective without illusions would be to cross one more threshold in the ongoing diminishment of human metaphysical dignity, which includes a familiar list: Copernicus decentering the Earth and us with it; Darwinism making us animal and accidental; Nietzsche and Freud dethroning self-transparent consciousness and foregrounding the unruly unconscious. It’s another instance of borrowed by Joan Didion to describe the ostensibly utopian world of 1968 Haight-Ashbury as, instead, an apocalyptic nightmare. Analogously, free-will denial is seen by some as utopian and by others as catastrophic. The latter think it would cause societal collapse, which must be prevented by a paternalistic noble lie. The former, like Sapolsky and Harris, think the ultimate perspective would yield an egalitarian, socially just, quasi-heavenly sublime, if only we could get people to adopt it. “No one would deserve to be treated any better or any worse than anyone else,” as Sapolsky writes. When I shared that quotation with Kelly at tea, it struck me that denial seems to rhyme with progressive politics. Because, for example, it is the positive belief in free will that allows some people (usually on the political right wing) to blame poverty on the freely made bad decisions of the poor, rather than on structural causes, which, by comparison, play a deterministic role. Also, many of the societal changes that progressives want to see are logical implications of free-will denial, including prison reform and intervention to prevent childhood poverty, to name only those on Sapolsky’s short list.

***

“The progressive-aligned cause Sapolsky is most passionate about in his books,” Kelly replied, “is government intervention to prevent all childhood poverty.” Why? Because it’s unfair what the stress of being poor does to the developing brain. Poor people, according to research by Sapolsky and others, have chronically high levels of glucocorticoids—“Like low-ranking baboons,” I interrupted mischievously—with adverse effects on health, brain function, and behavior. Sapolsky points out that the way stress works in baboons is exactly how stress works in humans. As part of the fight-or-flight system, the stress response is incredibly ancient—it’s shared by all primates and every mammal, bird, fish, and reptile. Same chemical compounds, same interactions.

When triggered, glucocorticoids prepare a creature’s body for emergency action, shutting down systems not essential in emergencies, including digestion, reproduction, neurogenesis, and growth. (I learned there is such a thing as “stress dwarfism”—when growth is markedly stunted by chronic stress in childhood.) In animals less social than baboons and humans, stress hormones are washed away as quickly as they are triggered, as Sapolsky cleverly captured in the title of his 1994 book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. By contrast, baboons hunt, gather, and eat all the food they need each day in only a few hours, “leaving the rest of their time to make each other miserable,” Sapolsky writes. The result is chronic stress (only for some, it must be said). In adult humans, the chronic stress of poverty creates a detrimental cognitive load, diminishing the ability to focus attention, according to studies on the psychological effects of poverty. In a 2013 study by researchers at Princeton, rich and poor study participants performed equally well on standard tests of cognition while preoccupied with lab problems involving trivial amounts of money. But if the amounts were $2000, a poor person, on average, displayed a drop in cognitive function analogous to 13 IQ points, or an entire night’s sleep. Rich participants preoccupied by the $2000 scenarios averaged no drop in performance on the cognitive test.

For a child, whose brain is still developing, poverty-caused stress can spell disaster, Sapolsky says. Stress hormones adversely affect the growth of the prefrontal cortex, generating measurable effects like poorer executive function, worse emotional regulation, and deficits in impulse control. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of many popular books on the brain, says that poor impulse control makes sense as a factor in criminogenesis. Studies show that prison populations tend to fill out surveys with the correct answers to moral dilemmas—that is, they know right from wrong. But prisoners score below average on tests of impulse control, like the marshmallow test and others. Thereby, nonviolent economic crime, like shoplifting or burglary, would not be caused by lack of economic resources coupled with an upbringing that 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.

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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 …

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

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Paragraph summaries for readers of “Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know But Do Not Believe” (The Missouri Review, Summer 2026)

1. Sleepwalking Confession The author recounts learning from his fiancée Kelly that he’d been sleepwalking and holding full conversations with her each night, remembering nothing afterward. He notes that the classic image of a blank, arms-out sleepwalker is wrong—sleepwalkers can perform complex acts without consciousness. The paragraph ends revealing his nightly transgression: peeing in the closet.

2. First Night’s Denial Kelly recounts waking to find the author heading toward the closet instead of the toilet; he insisted “Yes, it is” while continuing anyway. The author explains the folk wisdom about not waking a sleepwalker, since some reactive, even irritable, capacity may persist without conscious control.

3. Aloof Grunts Rather than turning angry, sleepwalking-Frost answered Kelly’s interruptions with arrogant, self-satisfied grunts on later nights, continuing to urinate in the closet regardless. He reflects that his own faux-fancy language gives him distance from the “disgusting deeds.”

4. Are You Awake? On the third night Kelly shouted “ARE YOU AWAKE?” and he answered “Yes,” effectively passing a kind of Turing test despite not actually being conscious, as confirmed the next morning.

5. Cleaning Up the Mess When asked to retell the story for this essay, Kelly’s brow furrows again; her biggest irritation, she says, was cleaning up the mess each night after he’d already gone back to bed unaware.

6. Feeling Uninvolved He responds sympathetically (”That sucks”) but immediately notices he still feels detached from his own nighttime actions, as though he hadn’t really done them at all.

7. Bloodless Guilt He contrasts this hollow, purely intellectual sense of responsibility with the visceral, nauseating guilt he normally feels when he’s done something wrong on purpose.

8. Glad for the Evidence Because his connection to his sleepwalking acts is so tenuous, he’s oddly grateful for the incident: it gives him a concrete example of taking responsibility for an act he didn’t freely choose to commit.

9. A Path Into Denial The sleepwalking episodes become his gateway into imagining what it would feel like to deny free will altogether, as some public intellectuals have done—not just for isolated lapses, but for every thought and decision a person has.

10. Sapolsky’s Slip He turns to Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, a committed free-will denier who admits he still instinctively accepts credit for compliments, illustrating the gap between intellectually knowing and emotionally believing something.

11. Living the Denial He wonders how Sapolsky’s self-conception shifts in the moments he actively remembers he lacks free will, reframing the inquiry away from classic philosophy and toward psychological effect—does denial liberate people, or does it produce fatalism and bad behavior?

12. Not Fatalism Denying free will isn’t the same as believing everything is predetermined regardless of action; the real consequences of denial are an empirical question, and an evidence-based debate on this is already underway.

13. Mapping the Research This paragraph previews where the author’s research will lead: “informational existential threats,” the link between denial and progressive politics, secretive anti-free-will research, and brain-scanning technology that can predict decisions in advance.

14. Meeting Sapolsky He describes Sapolsky’s warm public persona and his thirty years studying a troop of baboons in Africa, finding that low-ranking baboons suffer chronically elevated stress hormones with harmful health and behavioral effects.

15. Shit Flows Downhill Sapolsky’s baboon research shows aggression cascading downward through the social hierarchy after a loss in rank, and that acting out this way actually reduces the loser’s stress hormone levels.

16. Behave and Determined Sapolsky’s books Behave and Determined lay out the exhaustive causal chain behind every human behavior and argue that society’s continued belief in free will constitutes a serious, harmful moral failing.

17. Tea with Kelly The author and Kelly read Sapolsky’s and Sam Harris’s books together during a Sunday tea ritual; Harris, an independent public intellectual, likewise argues that denying free will improves ethics by increasing compassion and reducing entitlement.

18. Utopian Predictions Questioned He tells Kelly that these utopian predictions have actually been tested empirically: an early 2008 study found that priming subjects with anti-free-will messages increased their cheating and theft in lab games.

19. The Research Turns Grim Reviewing dozens of journal articles, the author finds that disbelief in free will consistently correlates with worse outcomes—more dishonesty, aggression, and conformity, and less helpfulness, learning, and job performance.

20. Hot Sauce and Recycling Kelly questions the odd inclusion of “recycling” among these harms; the author explains that lab studies rely on harmless stand-ins, like recycling or secretly dosing someone’s food with hot sauce, to simulate real moral behavior—and free-will deniers do administer more hot sauce.

21. Three Camps He identifies three competing positions on free-will denial: Sapolsky and Harris’s optimism, the pessimistic empirical findings showing real harms, and a stranger third position advocating that the truth be actively suppressed.

22. An Existential Threat Some scientists who deny free will argue the truth is so psychologically dangerous it should be classified information, comparable to nuclear or bioweapons knowledge—while quietly exempting themselves from that restriction.

23. Erasmus and Luther This panic isn’t new: in 1524, Erasmus argued the “weak, ignorant, and wicked” common man couldn’t handle Martin Luther’s denial of free will, though his worry remained abstract since the idea wasn’t yet widespread.

24. Silencing Isn’t an Argument The author argues that claiming a true idea is too dangerous to state functions as a kind of ad hominem, one that would, if applied consistently, block the discovery of any harmful truth whatsoever.

25. Born Classified Unlike Erasmus, today’s suppressionists are themselves deniers, arguing their own research should be sequestered from the public the way classified nuclear-weapons research is.

26. The Noble Lie Philosopher Saul Smilansky argues humanity is “fortunately deceived” about free will and discourages his own PhD students from studying under him, fearing depression or psychosis after disillusionment.

27. Diminishing Human Dignity The author situates free-will denial within a historical lineage of blows to human self-importance: Copernicus decentering Earth, Darwin making us animal, and Nietzsche and Freud dethroning conscious self-transparency.

28. Slouching Towards Bethlehem He connects the essay’s title imagery—Yeats’s apocalyptic phrase, later borrowed by Joan Didion—to how free-will denial is viewed either as a utopian breakthrough (Sapolsky, Harris) or a societal catastrophe by opposing camps.

29. Denial Rhymes with Progressivism The author notices a political affinity: belief in free will lets people on the right blame the poor for their circumstances, while denial supports progressive causes like prison reform and anti-poverty intervention.

30. Poverty and Baboon Stress Kelly notes that Sapolsky’s central progressive cause is ending childhood poverty, since poverty-driven stress hormones mirror those found in low-ranking baboons and damage brain development; this stress response is shared broadly across the animal kingdom.

31. Cognitive Load of Poverty Chronic financial stress burdens cognitive function in adults; a Princeton study found poor participants’ performance dropped sharply (equivalent to 13 IQ points) when preoccupied with large sums of money, while richer participants showed no such decline.

32. Impulse Control, Not Immorality Poverty-related stress damages the developing prefrontal cortex in children, and Sapolsky links the resulting poor impulse control—not moral failing—to nonviolent criminal behavior among the poor.

33. Unfair From Birth Sapolsky shows that socioeconomic effects on brain structure appear astonishingly early, even in four-week-old infants, prompting Kelly to note that the stress must originate in utero, implicating maternal poverty as well.

34. Corporate Determinists The author lists industries—tobacco, food, pharmaceuticals, social media—that effectively behave as if free will doesn’t exist, profiting from predictable behavioral manipulation via what one commentator calls the “addiction economy.”

35. Fighting Manipulation with Denial He argues that belief in free will lets corporations disclaim responsibility for engineered addiction (”people freely choose”), while denying free will would justify more effective interventions, like restructuring environments, rather than relying on willpower alone.

36. Free Will Drops Out A brief capping line: whenever we’re predicting, manipulating, or explaining behavior in practice, the concept of free will becomes irrelevant.

37. Fate Before Physics Kelly asks about the historical origins of determinism; the author reconsiders his assumption that it began with the Scientific Revolution, suggesting ancient ideas of Fate—as dramatized in Greek tragedy and the story of Oedipus—may be its true root.

38. Atoms and the Swerve He traces the philosophical lineage to Democritus’s atomism and Epicurus’s “swerve,” an early attempt to carve out room for uncaused freedom within a deterministic physical universe.

39. Libertarian Free Will Defined The author explains philosophical libertarianism (unrelated to the political ideology) as the claim that free choices are genuinely uncaused, meaning one could “do otherwise” even without any different desire or antecedent condition.

40. The Uncaused Causer Problem The libertarian “causa sui” was famously mocked by Nietzsche as self-contradictory; though quantum indeterminacy gave libertarians new hope, most philosophers argue randomness doesn’t grant freedom—it only makes actions arbitrary.

41. A Hostile Reception Despite most Americans and philosophers still believing in free will, denial is gaining prominence and provoking real hostility, illustrated by death threats against philosopher Galen Strawson and a tense confrontation the author had on an airplane.

42. Academic Hostilities The debate turns personal even among scholars: the late philosopher Dan Dennett accused deniers of causing “real harm” and told them to “shut up,” despite once being close friends with fellow New Atheist Sam Harris.

43. Agreement on Libertarianism Dennett and Harris both reject libertarian free will but sharply disagree on what that agreement means—Dennett thinks it’s inconsequential, while Harris thinks it changes everything about how society should think about responsibility.

44. Defining Compatibilism The author explains compatibilism: rather than requiring uncaused actions, this position redefines freedom as action caused in the “right” way, meeting criteria like rationality or reflective values.

45. Puppet on a String Kelly’s brief clarifying question—whether compatibilists think we’re both free and determined—sets up Harris’s rebuttal in the next paragraph.

46. Loving Your Strings Harris counters that compatibilist freedom is like a puppet who merely loves wherever its strings pull it—which, for him, isn’t real freedom at all.

47. Who’s Right? A brief transitional question from Kelly, prompting the author’s reflection on how scientific reassessments change everyday concepts.

48. Witch or Whale? The author uses philosopher Shaun Nichols’s framework—”witch” (a concept eliminated entirely) versus “whale” (a concept redefined but retained)—to ask which fate awaits the popular idea of “free will.”

49. Redefine or Discard Dennett wants to keep using the term “free will” but strip out its libertarian content, while Harris wants to discard the term entirely, relabeling the relevant mental states as mere “voluntary willing.”

50. Westworld’s Maeve The author draws on a scene from HBO’s Westworld, where the android Maeve is shown a screen predicting her own words before she says them, as a vivid illustration of what it might feel like to be confronted with proof of your own programming.

51. Crashing Like Windows 95 Maeve’s mental “crash” upon realizing her behavior is predictable dramatizes how disorienting real proof of determinism might be for an actual person.

52. Brain Scanners Predict You He introduces neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes’s fMRI experiments, which predicted subjects’ button-press choices seconds before conscious awareness, with a later replication achieving even higher accuracy.

53. Locked in a Windowless Room Further experiments show researchers predicting even math decisions purely from brain-scan data, suggesting that consciousness is populated by nonconscious processes rather than the true source of our decisions.

54. Feeling Versus Knowing Kelly asks whether the felt sense of freedom is enough on its own; the author cites Samuel Johnson’s line that theory opposes free will while experience supports it—though Harris disagrees, arguing that even our sense of authorship over thoughts is illusory.

55. Lessons From Meditation Harris argues mindfulness meditation reveals that thoughts arise unbidden from nonconscious processes, illustrated by how quickly novice meditators lose focus on their breath without even noticing they’ve drifted.

56. Identifying With Thoughts Being “lost in thought” means unconsciously identifying with thoughts that arise from nowhere; true mindfulness, for Harris, means gaining reflective distance from every thought, including apparent decisions.

57. No Sense of Otherwise Harris and Sapolsky conclude that even major life decisions are populated by nonconscious processes beyond our awareness, and Harris reports he’s personally lost the felt sense that he could have chosen differently.

58. Try to Believe It The author invites the reader to actually try believing “there’s no free will,” demonstrating how quickly the felt sense of denial evaporates and reverts back to natural, implicit belief in free will.

59. Armchair Vertigo Actively holding onto disbelief produces a disorienting “armchair vertigo,” a temporary intellectual dizziness that fades once a person returns to ordinary life and stops philosophizing.

60. Knowing Without Believing He connects this everyday lapse to the suppressionists’ prescription—knowing free will is false while choosing not to believe it—arguing that this gap requires self-deception or internal division to sustain.

61. The Sunset Illusion He offers the sunset as an everyday analogy: we know intellectually that the earth rotates rather than the sun moving across the sky, yet our language and lived experience never actually reflect that scientific fact.

62. Oedipus’s Knife The essay closes by asking what happens once the knowledge of determinism truly sinks in, comparing that reckoning to Oedipus’s horrifying shift from merely knowing to truly believing the truth about himself—after which he blinds himself.

I. Sleepwalking and Responsibility (¶1–9)

1. Frost takes responsibility for peeing in the closet even though he insists he “did not do [it] of his own free will.” Do you actually agree he owes Kelly an apology — or is his “bloodless,” intellectual guilt (¶6–7) evidence that some part of him doesn’t really believe he’s responsible?

2. He says he felt no visceral guilt about the sleepwalking incident, only intellectual acknowledgment. Have you ever done something wrong under diminished awareness — half-asleep, drunk, on autopilot — where you knew you were responsible but didn’t feel it? What does that gap tell you?

3. Frost uses the sleepwalking incident as “a good example of an action for which I take responsibility but which I did not do of my own free will” (¶8). Is that a fair analogy for everyday decision-making, or is sleepwalking too extreme a case to generalize from?

II. Sapolsky, Harris, and the Case for Denial (¶10–20)

4. Sapolsky admits he still says “thanks” when complimented, “as if I had anything to do with it” (¶10), even though he denies free will exists. Before reading further in the essay — is that a contradiction he should resolve, or a normal, forgivable human lapse?

5. Both Sapolsky and Harris predict that denying free will would make society more compassionate and less punitive. The empirical research Frost cites (¶18–19) suggests the opposite — denial increases cheating, aggression, and selfishness. Which result surprises you more, and why do you think your intuition ran that direction?

6. Frost’s then-fiancee Kelly asks, “What the fuck’s ‘recycling’ doing in there?” (¶20), pushing back on how psychology experiments operationalize morality with stand-ins like hot sauce and recycling. Do you find the “dollhouse” experiments Frost describes convincing evidence about real-world behavior, or too artificial to trust?

III. Suppressionism: Should the Truth Be Hidden? (¶21–28)

7. Some scientists Frost cites believe free will’s nonexistence is an “informational existential threat” that should be kept from the public (¶22). Where do you personally land: is there any true idea you think should be suppressed for the public’s own good? What would your criteria be?

8. Frost argues that claiming an idea is “too dangerous to say” functions like an ad hominem — it doesn’t engage the argument on its merits (¶24). Do you buy that comparison, or are there cases (he mentions bioweapons and nuclear science) where suppression is obviously justified and the analogy breaks down?

9. Erasmus worried the “weak, ignorant, and wicked” common man couldn’t handle Luther’s ideas (¶23). Smilansky discourages his own PhD students from studying free will denial with him, fearing psychological harm (¶26). Is there a meaningful difference between these two acts of paternalism, or are they the same move in different clothes?

IV. Free Will and Politics (¶29–33)

10. Frost claims free-will denial “rhymes with progressive politics” (¶29), since belief in free will lets people blame the poor for freely made bad choices. Did this connection strike you as a genuine philosophical link, or as Frost fitting the philosophy to a political conclusion he already held?

11. The Princeton study Frost cites found that money-stress lowers cognitive performance in poor participants by an amount equivalent to 13 IQ points, with no such effect on richer participants (¶31). Does this kind of finding change how you think about decisions poor people make — or does it feel like it proves too much, potentially excusing any bad decision as environmentally determined?

12. Kelly points out that if socioeconomic effects on the brain show up in four-week-olds, the stress must originate in utero — meaning policy should target mothers, not just children (¶33). What would it actually look like to take that implication seriously?

V. Corporations That Already Don’t Believe (¶34–36)

13. Frost argues that tobacco, food, and social-media companies effectively act as free-will deniers — they count on predictable, manipulable behavior even while publicly insisting “people freely choose” their products (¶34–35). Does naming this hypocrisy change how you think about your own resistance strategies (willpower vs. environmental redesign) around your own habits?

14. If Frost is right that removing temptation works better than relying on willpower, what does that suggest about how you should structure your own environment — and does accepting that feel like a defeat, a relief, or something else?

VI. A Brief History of Determinism (¶37–43)

15. Frost traces the fear of determinism back past science to ancient ideas of Fate — Oedipus’s oracle-dictated life (¶37). Does grounding the anxiety in Fate rather than physics change how threatening the idea feels to you, or is the emotional core the same either way?

16. Epicurus invented the atomic “swerve” specifically to make room for free will (¶38). Does it strike you as an honest philosophical move, or as motivated reasoning working backward from a desired conclusion? Have you ever caught yourself doing something similar?

17. Libertarian free will (the philosophical kind, not the political one) requires that a choice be genuinely uncaused (¶39–40). Once you sit with that definition, does it still sound like something you’d want — or does “uncaused,” on reflection, just sound like “random”?

VII. Compatibilism and the Semantic Fight (¶44–49)

18. Harris says compatibilist freedom is like “a puppet loving where his strings deterministically take him” (¶46). Is that a fair characterization of compatibilism, or a rhetorical dodge that avoids engaging with what compatibilists actually claim?

19. Dennett wants to keep the phrase “free will” and redefine it; Harris wants to discard the phrase entirely (¶49). Which strategy do you think serves communication better — keeping a familiar word with new meaning, or retiring a word that’s become misleading? Does your answer depend on the topic, or is it a general principle for you?

20. Nichols’s “witch vs. whale” framework (¶48) asks whether “free will” will go extinct as a concept or just get redefined. Which do you predict, and what would have to happen culturally for either outcome?

VIII. Predicting the Mind: Westworld and Brain Scanners (¶50–53)

21. Maeve’s on-screen breakdown in Westworld — watching her own words appear on a tablet before she says them — is offered as a dramatization of what real predictive brain-scanning might feel like (¶50–51). If researchers could reliably show you your next decision seconds before you made it, do you think you’d react the way Maeve does, or would you rationalize it away?

22. The Haynes and Fried studies predict simple binary choices (which button, add or subtract) seconds in advance (¶52–53). Is predicting a two-option button press the same kind of evidence as predicting a complex, value-laden life decision? Where’s the line, if there is one?

IX. Meditation, Experience, and Harris’s Radical Claim (¶54–57)

23. Harris argues that if you meditate carefully enough, you’ll notice you never actually experience being the author of your thoughts (¶54–56) — a much stronger claim than most free-will skeptics make. Have you ever had a moment (in meditation or otherwise) where a thought or impulse genuinely seemed to “arise from nowhere”? Did it feel like evidence against free will, or just like ordinary mental noise?

24. Samuel Johnson said “all theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it” (¶54). Frost notes Harris disputes the second half. Whose account of “experience” matches yours more closely?

X. Knowing vs. Believing: Armchair Vertigo (¶58–61)

25. Frost writes that even when he deliberately tries to believe there’s no free will while reading his own essay, the belief evaporates almost immediately (¶58). Try it yourself, right now: does your felt sense of free will hold up under active scrutiny, or does it slip away the way his does?

26. “Armchair vertigo” is Frost’s term for the disorientation of actively holding the belief that free will doesn’t exist (¶59). Did any specific passage in the essay give you a version of that vertigo? What pulled you back out of it?

27. Frost argues that the suppressionists’ position — “we know it’s false but it’s better not to believe it” — requires the same kind of self-deception that ordinary, non-philosophical people fall into automatically (¶60). Does pointing out that overlap weaken the suppressionists’ case, in your view, or is there still a meaningful difference between choosing self-deception and defaulting into it?

XI. The Ending: Oedipus and the Sunset (¶61–62)

28. The sunset analogy (¶61) says we “know” the earth rotates but never feel or speak that way. Is losing free-will belief more like this everyday, low-stakes gap between science and language — or is Frost’s closing Oedipus image (blinding himself once knowledge became belief) suggesting something much higher-stakes?

29. The essay ends on a question rather than an answer: “What will be our fate once a critical mass of us finally knows the falsity of contracausal free will?” Having read the whole piece, what’s your honest answer? Should we try harder to believe what we (may) know, or be grateful for the gap between knowing and believing?

For Reflection (Whole-Essay Questions)

• Frost never tells the reader whether he personally believes in free will by the end. Did you finish the essay able to guess his position — and does the essay’s persuasiveness depend on that ambiguity?

• The essay is structured as a series of Sunday teas with Kelly, who repeatedly interrupts, questions, and swears at Frost’s more abstract points. What work does Kelly’s voice do in the essay that a straightforward philosophical argument wouldn’t?

• Frost uses comic, self-deprecating language (sleep-peeing, “$20 words” like micturition and lalochezia) to approach a genuinely destabilizing philosophical claim. Did the humor make the ideas easier to sit with, or did it let both Frost and the reader off the hook too easily?

• Which of the essay’s three camps — optimists (Sapolsky/Harris), pessimists (the empirical researchers), or suppressionists — do you find yourself most persuaded by after finishing, and has your answer changed from where you would have guessed at the start?

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Further Reading for readers of “Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know But Do Not Believe” (The Missouri Review, Summer 2026)

Books Discussed in the Essay
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. By Robert M. Sapolsky. New York: Penguin Press, 2017.


Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. By Robert M. Sapolsky. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.


Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. By Robert M. Sapolsky. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994.


Free Will. By Sam Harris. New York: Free Press, 2012.


Free Will and Illusion. By Saul Smilansky. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Source of “We are fortunately deceived about free will” and the “hothouse of illusion” line.


Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. By Gregg D. Caruso and Daniel C. Dennett. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021. Three extended exchanges between a leading compatibilist (Dennett) and a leading free-will skeptic (Caruso) — the best short introduction to why these two camps disagree even when they agree.


Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice. By Gregg D. Caruso. Law and the Cognitive Sciences series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Caruso’s fuller case for what a justice system without retributivism might look like — relevant to the essay’s discussion of prison reform as a “logical implication” of denial.


Beyond Good and Evil. By Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Source of the “logical rape and perversion” line on the causa sui.


Freedom within Reason. By Susan Wolf. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Source of the compatibilist claim that free action must “stem from values determined by reason.”


Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. By David Eagleman. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Background for Eagleman’s comments on impulse control and criminogenesis.


A Companion to Free Will. Edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson, and V. Alan White. Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023. Includes Shaun Nichols’s chapter on how folk concepts like “free will” might shift — the “witch” vs. “whale” framework.


Journal Articles and Studies Cited
“The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating.” By Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler. Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (2008): 49–54. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x


“Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?” By Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and Kathleen D. Vohs. Annual Review of Psychology 62 (2011): 331–361. doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131126


“Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function.” By Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao. Science 341, no. 6149 (2013): 976–980. doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041


“Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain.” By Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and John-Dylan Haynes. Nature Neuroscience 11 (2008): 543–545. doi.org/10.1038/nn.2112 — the original fMRI button-press study (six seconds, ~60% accuracy).


“Internally Generated Preactivation of Single Neurons in Human Medial Frontal Cortex Predicts Volition.” By Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel, and Gabriel Kreiman. Neuron 69 (2011): 548–562. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.045 — the single-neuron (non-fMRI) replication the essay describes reaching ~80% accuracy at ~700 milliseconds.


“Undermining Free Will.” By Paul Davies. Foreign Policy, September/October 2004 (part of the special report “The World’s Most Dangerous Ideas”). foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/23/undermining-free-will —




Reviews of Determined (for readers who want a second opinion on Sapolsky)
"Review of Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, by Robert Sapolsky.” By Nikhil Krishnan. The New Yorker, November 13, 2023 issue. Draws heavily on P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” to push back on Sapolsky’s hard determinism. newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/13/determined-a-science-of-life-…


“Determined: Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky Review – The Hard Science of Decisions.” By Oliver Burkeman. The Guardian, October 24, 2023. theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/24/determined-life-without-free-…


“’The Clockwork Universe’: Is Free Will an Illusion?” By Oliver Burkeman. The Guardian, April 27, 2021. The long read describing the death threats Galen Strawson received over his free-will denial. theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free…

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. But less embarrassment, more alarm or panic.

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 of your prenatal environment; from the sexual selection processes at work in your grandparents’ mating rituals, to the organizing principles—whether individualistic, communitarian, or honor-based—of your great-great-great-grandparents’ culture. Perpetually harried in his speech and even apparently in his ellipses-filled emails, Sapolsky—a 1987 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient—is charming and often approaches silliness. He turns serious, however, when he addresses what he calls the “appalling moral affront” of a society that continues to believe in free will. “The injustice and harm perpetrated by our justice system’s anti-scientific belief in free will should keep us up at night screaming,” he said on another episode of Radiolab. Sapolsky has staked out the most uncompromising position against free will in the public sphere. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to [where we are],” he writes. In October 2023, Penguin published Sapolsky’s latest book, which is about living day-to-day with free-will denial, titled Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Having established in Behave that every human behavior has a cause, Sapolsky writes in Determined about the potential consequences of society-wide free-will denial and how to integrate those implications into our self-understanding.

After my sleepwalking episodes began, Kelly cracked open my copy of the eight-hundred-page Behave, and I started reading a galley copy of Determined. We would compare notes at our ritual of Sunday three o’clock tea, recommended by our premarital counselor. I also read the eighty-page Free Will by Sam Harris, another denier. Harris is a multitopic public intellectual, unaffiliated with any university, and independently minded. The famously militant New Atheist, bestselling author, advocate of Buddhist meditation, neuroscience PhD, podcaster, app developer, and much-criticized critic of radical Islam agrees with Sapolsky that jettisoning belief in free will would be good for both society and the individual. Harris—who looks like a cross between Spock and a dour, karate-chopping Ben Stiller—writes that “losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.”

***

While Sapolsky’s and Harris’s predictions about a world after denial are quasi-utopian, the science does not appear to back up their sunny speculations. “Believe it or not,” I said to Kelly at tea, “scientists have run experiments in this domain”—lab experiments to discover the psychological effect of denying free will on the person denying it. It’s not long been the subject of empirical study, however. In one of the first papers, published in 2008, behavioral economist Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota’s business school, and Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, found that when test subjects are primed with anti-free-will belief (by reading a passage denying free will in Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis), they cheat and steal during real-money lab games in greater percentages than subjects in the control group.

Nearly all the other results in this line of research run counter to Sapolsky’s and Harris’s rosy predictions. Reading dozens of journal articles, I learned that disbelief in free will causes dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior; reduces helpfulness; hampers learning from one’s misdeeds; curtails thinking for oneself; diminishes recycling; lowers expectations for occupational success; and decreases quality of job performance.

“What the fuck’s ‘recycling’ doing in there?” Kelly asked, in a moment of apparent lalochezia. I wondered silently what she might have been so upset about that she needed the pressure release of swearing. “Well,” I said slowly, accusingly, drawing out the vowel, “Wehhhhl, experimental moral psychology has an unavoidable dollhouse nature.” The lab can only be a simulacrum of real life’s moral dilemmas. While researchers may want to test a belief’s contribution to bad behavior, universities’ institutional review boards, thankfully, do not allow actual harm to come to the participants in these studies. Similarly, good, heroic, or praiseworthy behavior must have a stand-in, which is what recycling is doing in there. To test if an experimentally manipulated condition contributes to aggressive behavior, a number of studies have adopted the strategy of giving participants the opportunity to clandestinely drench another person’s food in hot sauce. And, you guessed it, participants primed with free-will disbelief administer more hot sauce, i.e., were more aggressive, than controls. The vast majority of the science around the psychological effects of denying free will seems to militate against the optimists and in favor of the pessimists. Who’s right

There’s actually a third position. In the recent intellectual conversation around free-will denial, three mutually inconsistent schools of thought have developed. On the one hand, there’s Sapolsky and Harris, the optimists, who think denial would rid the world of moral harms that are presently dependent on free-will credence; on the other hand, empirical research seems to show that not believing in free will has negative effects on our behavior and psychology; while, on the third hand—and this position is as strange as a third hand—there are those who say free will is an illusion but that the effects of disbelief would be so detrimental that this knowledge should be suppressed. Yes, that’s right, some philosophers and scientists who deny free will’s existence don’t think it would be wise to let everyone know the truth. As Vohs and Schooler write: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.”

They’re not just trying to justify their grant money with a practical upshot for their research. They categorize the falsity of free will as an “informational existential threat,” like the knowledge of how to build a nuclear bomb or make smallpox into an aerosol. The knowledge that free will is an illusion must be possessed only—the thinking goes—by a small elite who, supposedly, will be strong enough to resist the bad effects. Suppressionists never say nobody should know this truth. How could they, since they know it? I imagine there must be a certain frisson to making an exception for oneself precisely here. The physicist Paul Davies, writing in an essay commissioned by—of all places—Foreign Affairs, says free will is “a fiction worth maintaining,” and denial “is the world’s most dangerous idea.”

It’s not new, this moral panic. Catastrophizing about free-will denial goes way back. But today, it is not mere idle speculation, which it was in 1524, when Erasmus argued for free will against Martin Luther’s denial. Erasmus worried that the common man was too “weak, ignorant, and wicked” to handle what Luther was proposing. Therefore, Luther ought not to say it. But Erasmus did not seriously contemplate Luther’s denial becoming widespread, so his worries were merely abstract pearl-clutching—and self-serving to boot. Erasmus should have felt the bite of intellectual conscience, the pull of a certain epistemological scruple. Because it was in Erasmus’ time—and still should be in ours—a principle recognized by all truth-seekers that one cannot silence one’s interlocutor in a debate by asserting that merely uttering their conclusion would cause harm. It’s akin to ad hominem, as it does not address the issue on its merits (i.e., on the question of whether it’s true or not). Furthermore, it would preclude the discovery of harmful truths; for, indeed, some truths are harmful.

Today’s suppressionism is different because Erasmus believed in free will. These days, recommending suppression is most interesting (and most ethical) when it’s a move made by deniers, i.e., the thinker in Luther’s position. Suppressionist scientists are advocating for the sequestration of their own research. They argue that, if we really and truly believe “the un-free will” (a translation of Luther’s 1525 title) to be dangerous knowledge, then it should be “born classified,” as is the case now for developmental research for new nuclear weaponry. “Perhaps the government could,” I joked with Kelly at the next tea, “in the vein of UFOs, attempt to discredit as a kook anyone who proclaims the dangerous and secret truth that we don’t have free will.”

Thankfully, outright deception may not be necessary. “We are fortunately deceived about free will,” writes Saul Smilansky, professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and the foremost academic proponent of letting the illusion be. In Plato scholarship, an elite promulgating a falsehood to maintain social order is called a “noble lie.”

A noble lie affirming free will may not be necessary, since few people see their way to the arguments for denial, and most, when the arguments are brought to their attention, do not accept their implications anyway—even when they cannot gainsay the logic. Smilansky worries that graduate students, working under the conviction that free will is false, will become depressed or psychotic post-disillusionment. So he discourages PhD students from working with him. He writes, “We must protect humanity in the hothouse of illusion from the chill of the ultimate perspective.” “I like that,” I remarked to Kelly. “The icy chill of the ultimate perspective.”

Adopting the ultimate perspective without illusions would be to cross one more threshold in the ongoing diminishment of human metaphysical dignity, which includes a familiar list: Copernicus decentering the Earth and us with it; Darwinism making us animal and accidental; Nietzsche and Freud dethroning self-transparent consciousness and foregrounding the unruly unconscious. It’s another instance of borrowed by Joan Didion to describe the ostensibly utopian world of 1968 Haight-Ashbury as, instead, an apocalyptic nightmare. Analogously, free-will denial is seen by some as utopian and by others as catastrophic. The latter think it would cause societal collapse, which must be prevented by a paternalistic noble lie. The former, like Sapolsky and Harris, think the ultimate perspective would yield an egalitarian, socially just, quasi-heavenly sublime, if only we could get people to adopt it. “No one would deserve to be treated any better or any worse than anyone else,” as Sapolsky writes. When I shared that quotation with Kelly at tea, it struck me that denial seems to rhyme with progressive politics. Because, for example, it is the positive belief in free will that allows some people (usually on the political right wing) to blame poverty on the freely made bad decisions of the poor, rather than on structural causes, which, by comparison, play a deterministic role. Also, many of the societal changes that progressives want to see are logical implications of free-will denial, including prison reform and intervention to prevent childhood poverty, to name only those on Sapolsky’s short list.

***

“The progressive-aligned cause Sapolsky is most passionate about in his books,” Kelly replied, “is government intervention to prevent all childhood poverty.” Why? Because it’s unfair what the stress of being poor does to the developing brain. Poor people, according to research by Sapolsky and others, have chronically high levels of glucocorticoids—“Like low-ranking baboons,” I interrupted mischievously—with adverse effects on health, brain function, and behavior. Sapolsky points out that the way stress works in baboons is exactly how stress works in humans. As part of the fight-or-flight system, the stress response is incredibly ancient—it’s shared by all primates and every mammal, bird, fish, and reptile. Same chemical compounds, same interactions.

When triggered, glucocorticoids prepare a creature’s body for emergency action, shutting down systems not essential in emergencies, including digestion, reproduction, neurogenesis, and growth. (I learned there is such a thing as “stress dwarfism”—when growth is markedly stunted by chronic stress in childhood.) In animals less social than baboons and humans, stress hormones are washed away as quickly as they are triggered, as Sapolsky cleverly captured in the title of his 1994 book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. By contrast, baboons hunt, gather, and eat all the food they need each day in only a few hours, “leaving the rest of their time to make each other miserable,” Sapolsky writes. The result is chronic stress (only for some, it must be said). In adult humans, the chronic stress of poverty creates a detrimental cognitive load, diminishing the ability to focus attention, according to studies on the psychological effects of poverty. In a 2013 study by researchers at Princeton, rich and poor study participants performed equally well on standard tests of cognition while preoccupied with lab problems involving trivial amounts of money. But if the amounts were $2000, a poor person, on average, displayed a drop in cognitive function analogous to 13 IQ points, or an entire night’s sleep. Rich participants preoccupied by the $2000 scenarios averaged no drop in performance on the cognitive test.

For a child, whose brain is still developing, poverty-caused stress can spell disaster, Sapolsky says. Stress hormones adversely affect the growth of the prefrontal cortex, generating measurable effects like poorer executive function, worse emotional regulation, and deficits in impulse control. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of many popular books on the brain, says that poor impulse control makes sense as a factor in criminogenesis. Studies show that prison populations tend to fill out surveys with the correct answers to moral dilemmas—that is, they know right from wrong. But prisoners score below average on tests of impulse control, like the marshmallow test and others. Thereby, nonviolent economic crime, like shoplifting or burglary, would not be caused by lack of economic resources coupled with an upbringing that 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 Carolina philosopher Susan Wolfe claims that a free action must “stem from values determined by reason.” Dennett, for his part, says you are morally responsible (and free) if you act while capable of imagining the consequences of your actions, possessed of basic rationality, and not compelled by forces the direction of which you would disavow.

“But that means compatibilists maintain we are free and determined?” Kelly asked.

“Yes.” In rebuttal, Harris says that compatibilist freedom is akin to a puppet loving where his strings deterministically take him.

“Who’s right?” Kelly asked.

When new scientific consensus conflicts with folk understanding, sometimes folk beliefs change; sometimes they do not. The scientific difference between mass and weight has enjoyed—I’d wager—less than 100 percent adoption by the folk. When oxygen was discovered, however, everyone stopped referencing phlogiston. Will free will go the way of phlogiston? In Blackwell’s Companion to Free Will (2023), Shaun Nichols, a philosopher at the University of Arizona, suggests that the concept of free will will change in one of two possible ways: in the way of the concept witch (eventual widespread acceptance that there are no such things as witches) or in the way of whale (eventual widespread acceptance, in spite of Herman Melville, that whales are not fish but mammals).

Dennett wants us to continue using the linguistic expression free will, but such that any libertarian part of it will disappear, and it’ll have to start to mean something non-libertarian via a connotational revision. Harris wants us to accept that free will, like witch, has no denotational referent in the real world. And the self-same responsibility-conferring mental states that Dennett wants to label “free will,” Harris wants to use to label our concept of “voluntary willing.”

***

In the first season of HBO’s Westworld, Thandiwe Newton plays Maeve, an android brothel madam who doesn’t know she’s an android. “Everything you do, it’s because the programmers . . . programmed you to do it,” a technician named Felix (Leonard Nam) tells Maeve in a pivotal, revelatory scene. He shows her a futuristic iPad on which are displayed the words she is about to say. “I’ve run a brothel for years, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s when I am being fucked with,” she says with unintended sphexishness, not yet entirely focused on the tablet. Finally comprehending what she’s looking at, Maeve says, “That’s not possible,” a fraction of a second after we, the television audience, see the words “That’s,” “not,” and “possible,” boxed, highlighted, and linked together—making a flowchart-like path, like stepping-stones, among a cloud of alternative words she might have uttered. Confronted by accurate predictions of her behavior or speech, Maeve must conclude that her behavior is indeed caused by her programming. With this realization, she freezes and her eyes glaze over, evidently having crashed like Windows 95. If you or I were confronted by accurate predictions of this kind, we might faint. It would seem to be compelling evidence that free will is an illusion.

The most interesting recent empirical work that threatens free will belief—and in a similar way to Westworld—involves using brain scanners to literally “read minds,” and accurately predict what a test subject is about to do. There is not yet a generally applicable, universal brain decoder, but the in-principle possibility is coming closer and closer to actuality. Neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues can predict which button a test subject in an fMRI brain-scanning machine will press—a button under the left index finger or one under the right—more than six seconds before the test subject consciously decides which button. These predictions—published in a study from 2008—were accurate 60 percent of the time. But a 2011 replication, using a technique other than fMRI, achieved 80 percent accuracy 700 milliseconds before the subject consciously decides.

In one experiment, participants are shown two numbers and over a short period may decide to either add or subtract them. Scientists can predict the participants’ decision up to four seconds before the participants consciously decide which they’re going to do. A researcher on Haynes’ team can be locked away in a windowless room and still accurately predict which button the test subject will press, based only on the test subject’s brain-scan data and artificial intelligence software. The upshot for free will is that your conscious decisions have their causes in nonconscious regions of your brain, which the scan can see even though you can’t, since they are nonconscious. The fact of accurate prediction implies, more generally, that consciousness is fed its contents by nonconscious processes—nonconscious content bubbles up, on its own, to populate conscious experience.

***

“But if we feel free, is that not enough?” Kelly asked. I quoted Samuel Johnson, who said, “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Sam Harris, I told Kelly, disagrees with the last part. Harris thinks experience is against free will too. In this opinion, he is almost entirely alone. Feeling like the author of your thoughts, Harris argues, is not a feeling we ever actually have. We say we have it, but if we paid attention to our experience with sufficient care, we’d see that thoughts, intentions, and desires simply arise without consciousness calling them up. Harris says you can come to this insight through mindfulness meditation. Try it. Try meditating. You’ll see what he’s talking about. A guided meditation will ask you to focus on your breath and, when you catch your mind wandering, to refocus your mental attention back on the breath. It’s not necessarily the goal to have a clear mind, but rather to strengthen your ability to pay attention. In your early attempts, doing this is extremely difficult, and you immediately discover the wildness of your mind. Random thoughts pop up seemingly from nowhere; they take over your experience, leading you down tangents, pulling you away from paying attention to your breath. You’ll be thinking about something else for a good long while before you realize that you are no longer focusing on your breath.

Harris says this is you identifying with the thought provided to your consciousness by nonconscious parts of your brain. You do not even notice that the thought came from nowhere, nor do you notice that you’ve identified with it automatically. You are lost in thought. If you are a novice meditator, and you’re honest with yourself, the longest you can attend to your breath before your train of thought goes off in its own direction is probably two to three seconds. And the time spent not focusing on the breath without realizing it, i.e., the time spent identifying with your thoughts, can be much longer than two seconds before you realize it. For Harris, since being lost in thought is the same as identifying with your thoughts, enlightenment, or at least mindfulness, might be thought of as reflective distance from (non-identification with) every thought, including seemingly willed intentions and decisions.

Harris’s upshot for free will is exactly the same as that of Haynes’s experiments: namely, that the contents of consciousness are provided by nonconscious processes in the brain. Feelings, ideas, desires, evaluations, decisions—they all come to consciousness, as it were, out of nowhere. Thoughts appear on their own, “unbidden,” as Nietzsche put it. Thoughts come out of the darkness, entering the spotlighted stage of the mind’s Cartesian theater on their own. As long as they do not conflict with our character or otherwise rock the boat, we immediately identify with them and, if asked, we will have, post-hoc, filed them under “freely willed.” Harris and Sapolsky both think (and Haynes’s research seems to show) that when we make decisions, even momentous ones, the contents of consciousness are provided by nonconscious processes that we have no access to. Harris avows that he no longer feels like he could have done otherwise—a denial of libertarian experience, i.e., phenomenology.

To end, I return to my original question: what does denying your own free will feel like? Let’s find out: there’s no free will. There, I said it. And you read it, which means you thought it. Now try to believe it. The interesting thing is, even when assumed for the sake of argument, disbelief cannot be maintained for very long. One’s tacit assumption of free will—one’s tacit assumption of an event that Harris thinks we never actually experience—is nevertheless still so natural that disbelief evaporates quickly and usually unnoticed. Even when the denial of free will is based on the strongest evidence and most compelling arguments, it fades away (Harris’s point notwithstanding). Indeed, without deliberately and effortfully keeping denial at the forefront of one’s mind, one’s mind reverts to its natural, implicit credence. For deniers, the falsity of free will is something they know but do not (always) believe.

In those brief moments when we do actively deny our own free will, we get an intellectual dizziness; we start to freak out about the end of moral responsibility, and our actions start to seem not our own. But the discombobulation of the ultimate perspective is transient. Since it comes from thinking too much, I’ve taken to calling it “armchair vertigo.” Once you get out of the armchair of philosophical reflection and you engage again with life, it goes away. We only get armchair vertigo when, taking the ultimate perspective, we actively force ourselves to believe what we know (again, pace Harris). In day-to-day, normal life—that is, while not suffering from self-induced armchair vertigo—lost-in-thought deniers know they don’t have free will, but they don’t believe they don’t.

Knowing without believing is, furthermore, the prescription offered by that other group of deniers who wish to suppress the knowledge that free will is false. They say, “Yeah, we know it’s false, but it’s better not to believe that.” Maintaining that a non-veridical illusion is true amounts to not believing what you know. Of course, you cannot benightedly labor under an illusion you know is an illusion. The self-same person, or a transparent, open society, cannot both know that X is an illusion and be taken in by the illusion. To not believe what you know requires rifts, internal divisions, impermeable walls between parts, self-deception or forgetting.

We live in an age where much of what we know is not believed. Since the Scientific Revolution that started five hundred years ago, we have lived with this gap between the scientific image of the universe and the image tacitly animating how we experience and act in the world. Recall the last affecting sunset you saw. That fiery orb of nuclear fusion, the sun, moving down through bands of luridly colored clouds, getting closer and closer to the horizon. It is easy to forget that the sun is not really moving in the way it seems to be. It’s the Earth that is moving— rotating—so that, from our perspective situated on the sphere, the horizon eventually blocks our view of the sun. We are rotated away from the sight of it. We know this—if we take the time to think about it. Yet for our language to reflect our belief in it, we’d have to say, “What a beautiful Earth-turning tonight!”

What will be our fate once a critical mass of us finally knows the falsity of contra-causal free will? Should we try harder to believe what we know? Or should we perhaps be grateful for temporary ignorance of the icy knowledge gleaned from the ultimate perspective? If you know something but do not believe it, you are in the position Oedipus was in immediately after he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother. For a split second, or maybe longer, he knew it, but it had not sunk in. He did not yet grok the new paradigm he now disastrously occupied. When his time of sleepwalking through life was at its end, when, finally, Oedipus truly believed what he knew, when he was pierced by the knowledge that he was a motherfucking patricide . . . he took a knife and pierced both his eyeballs.

The End

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

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… of your prenatal environment; from the sexual selection processes at work in your grandparents’ mating rituals, to the organizing principles—whether individualistic, communitarian, or honor-based—of your great-great-great-grandparents’ culture. Perpetually harried in his speech and even apparently in his ellipses-filled emails, Sapolsky—a 1987 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient—is charming and often approaches silliness. He turns serious, however, when he addresses what he calls the “appalling moral affront” of a society that continues to believe in free will. “The injustice and harm perpetrated by our justice system’s anti-scientific belief in free will should keep us up at night screaming,” he said on another episode of Radiolab. Sapolsky has staked out the most uncompromising position against free will in the public sphere. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to [where we are],” he writes. In October 2023, Penguin published Sapolsky’s latest book, which is about living day-to-day with free-will denial, titled Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Having established in Behave that every human behavior has a cause, Sapolsky writes in Determined about the potential consequences of society-wide free-will denial and how to integrate those implications into our self-understanding.

After my sleepwalking episodes began, Kelly cracked open my copy of the eight-hundred-page Behave, and I started reading a galley copy of Determined. We would compare notes at our ritual of Sunday three o’clock tea, recommended by our premarital counselor. I also read the eighty-page Free Will by Sam Harris, another denier. Harris is a multitopic public intellectual, unaffiliated with any university, and independently minded. The famously militant New Atheist, bestselling author, advocate of Buddhist meditation, neuroscience PhD, podcaster, app developer, and much-criticized critic of radical Islam agrees with Sapolsky that jettisoning belief in free will would be good for both society and the individual. Harris—who looks like a cross between Spock and a dour, karate-chopping Ben Stiller—writes that “losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.”

*

While Sapolsky’s and Harris’s predictions about a world after denial are quasi-utopian, the science does not appear to back up their sunny speculations. “Believe it or not,” I said to Kelly at tea, “scientists have run experiments in this domain”—lab experiments to discover the psychological effect of denying free will on the person denying it. It’s not long been the subject of empirical study, however. In one of the first papers, published in 2008, behavioral economist Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota’s business school, and Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, found that when test subjects are primed with anti-free-will belief (by reading a passage denying free will in Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis), they cheat and steal during real-money lab games in greater percentages than subjects in the control group.

Nearly all the other results in this line of research run counter to Sapolsky’s and Harris’s rosy predictions. Reading dozens of journal articles, I learned that disbelief in free will causes dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior; reduces helpfulness; hampers learning from one’s misdeeds; curtails thinking for oneself; diminishes recycling; lowers expectations for occupational success; and decreases quality of job performance.

“What the fuck’s ‘recycling’ doing in there?” Kelly asked, in a moment of apparent lalochezia. I wondered silently what she might have been so upset about that she needed the pressure release of swearing. “Well,” I said slowly, accusingly, drawing out the vowel, “Wehhhhl, experimental moral psychology has an unavoidable dollhouse nature.” The lab can only be a simulacrum of real life’s moral dilemmas. While researchers may want to test a belief’s contribution to bad behavior, universities’ institutional review boards, thankfully, do not allow actual harm to come to the participants in these studies. Similarly, good, heroic, or praiseworthy behavior must have a stand-in, which is what recycling is doing in there. To test if an experimentally manipulated condition contributes to aggressive behavior, a number of studies have adopted the strategy of giving participants the opportunity to clandestinely drench another person’s food in hot sauce. And, you guessed it, participants primed with free-will disbelief administer more hot sauce, i.e., were more aggressive, than controls. The vast majority of the science around the psychological effects of denying free will seems to militate against the optimists and in favor of the pessimists. Who’s right

There’s actually a third position. In the recent intellectual conversation around free-will denial, three mutually inconsistent schools of thought have developed. On the one hand, there’s Sapolsky and Harris, the optimists, who think denial would rid the world of moral harms that are presently dependent on free-will credence; on the other hand, empirical research seems to show that not believing in free will has negative effects on our behavior and psychology; while, on the third hand—and this position is as strange as a third hand—there are those who say free will is an illusion but that the effects of disbelief would be so detrimental that this knowledge should be suppressed. Yes, that’s right, some philosophers and scientists who deny free will’s existence don’t think it would be wise to let everyone know the truth. As Vohs and Schooler write: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.”

They’re not just trying to justify their grant money with a practical upshot for their research. They categorize the falsity of free will as an “informational existential threat,” like the knowledge of how to build a nuclear bomb or make smallpox into an aerosol. The knowledge that free will is an illusion must be possessed only—the thinking goes—by a small elite who, supposedly, will be strong enough to resist the bad effects. Suppressionists never say nobody should know this truth. How could they, since they know it? I imagine there must be a certain frisson to making an exception for oneself precisely here. The physicist Paul Davies, writing in an essay commissioned by—of all places—Foreign Affairs, says free will is “a fiction worth maintaining,” and denial “is the world’s most dangerous idea.”

It’s not new, this moral panic. Catastrophizing about free-will denial goes way back. But today, it is not mere idle speculation, which it was in 1524, when Erasmus argued for free will against Martin Luther’s denial. Erasmus worried that the common man was too “weak, ignorant, and wicked” to handle what Luther was proposing. Therefore, Luther ought not to say it. But Erasmus did not seriously contemplate Luther’s denial becoming widespread, so his worries were merely abstract pearl-clutching—and self-serving to boot. Erasmus should have felt the bite of intellectual conscience, the pull of a certain epistemological scruple. Because it was in Erasmus’ time—and still should be in ours—a principle recognized by all truth-seekers that one cannot silence one’s interlocutor in a debate by asserting that merely uttering their conclusion would cause harm. It’s akin to ad hominem, as it does not address the issue on its merits (i.e., on the question of whether it’s true or not). Furthermore, it would preclude the discovery of harmful truths; for, indeed, some truths are harmful.

Today’s suppressionism is different because Erasmus believed in free will. These days, recommending suppression is most interesting (and most ethical) when it’s a move made by deniers, i.e., the thinker in Luther’s position. Suppressionist scientists are advocating for the sequestration of their own research. They argue that, if we really and truly believe “the un-free will” (a translation of Luther’s 1525 title) to be dangerous knowledge, then it should be “born classified,” as is the case now for developmental research for new nuclear weaponry. “Perhaps the government could,” I joked with Kelly at the next tea, “in the vein of UFOs, attempt to discredit as a kook anyone who proclaims the dangerous and secret truth that we don’t have free will.”

Thankfully, outright deception may not be necessary. “We are fortunately deceived about free will,” writes Saul Smilansky, professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and the foremost academic proponent of letting the illusion be. In Plato scholarship, an elite promulgating a falsehood to maintain social order is called a “noble lie.”

A noble lie affirming free will may not be necessary, since few people see their way to the arguments for denial, and most, when the arguments are brought to their attention, do not accept their implications anyway—even when they cannot gainsay the logic. Smilansky worries that graduate students, working under the conviction that free will is false, will become depressed or psychotic post-disillusionment. So he discourages PhD students from working with him. He writes, “We must protect humanity in the hothouse of illusion from the chill of the ultimate perspective.” “I like that,” I remarked to Kelly. “The icy chill of the ultimate perspective.”

Adopting the ultimate perspective without illusions would be to cross one more threshold in the ongoing diminishment of human metaphysical dignity, which includes a familiar list: Copernicus decentering the Earth and us with it; Darwinism making us animal and accidental; Nietzsche and Freud dethroning self-transparent consciousness and foregrounding the unruly unconscious. It’s another instance of borrowed by Joan Didion to describe the ostensibly utopian world of 1968 Haight-Ashbury as, instead, an apocalyptic nightmare. Analogously, free-will denial is seen by some as utopian and by others as catastrophic. The latter think it would cause societal collapse, which must be prevented by a paternalistic noble lie. The former, like Sapolsky and Harris, think the ultimate perspective would yield an egalitarian, socially just, quasi-heavenly sublime, if only we could get people to adopt it. “No one would deserve to be treated any better or any worse than anyone else,” as Sapolsky writes. When I shared that quotation with Kelly at tea, it struck me that denial seems to rhyme with progressive politics. Because, for example, it is the positive belief in free will that allows some people (usually on the political right wing) to blame poverty on the freely made bad decisions of the poor, rather than on structural causes, which, by comparison, play a deterministic role. Also, many of the societal changes that progressives want to see are logical implications of free-will denial, including prison reform and intervention to prevent childhood poverty, to name only those on Sapolsky’s short list.

*

“The progressive-aligned cause Sapolsky is most passionate about in his books,” Kelly replied, “is government intervention to prevent all childhood poverty.” Why? Because it’s unfair what the stress of being poor does to the developing brain. Poor people, according to research by Sapolsky and others, have chronically high levels of glucocorticoids—“Like low-ranking baboons,” I interrupted mischievously—with adverse effects on health, brain function, and behavior. Sapolsky points out that the way stress works in baboons is exactly how stress works in humans. As part of the fight-or-flight system, the stress response is incredibly ancient—it’s shared by all primates and every mammal, bird, fish, and reptile. Same chemical compounds, same interactions.

When triggered, glucocorticoids prepare a creature’s body for emergency action, shutting down systems not essential in emergencies, including digestion, reproduction, neurogenesis, and growth. (I learned there is such a thing as “stress dwarfism”—when growth is markedly stunted by chronic stress in childhood.) In animals less social than baboons and humans, stress hormones are washed away as quickly as they are triggered, as Sapolsky cleverly captured in the title of his 1994 book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. By contrast, baboons hunt, gather, and eat all the food they need each day in only a few hours, “leaving the rest of their time to make each other miserable,” Sapolsky writes. The result is chronic stress (only for some, it must be said). In adult humans, the chronic stress of poverty creates a detrimental cognitive load, diminishing the ability to focus attention, according to studies on the psychological effects of poverty. In a 2013 study by researchers at Princeton, rich and poor study participants performed equally well on standard tests of cognition while preoccupied with lab problems involving trivial amounts of money. But if the amounts were $2000, a poor person, on average, displayed a drop in cognitive function analogous to 13 IQ points, or an entire night’s sleep. Rich participants preoccupied by the $2000 scenarios averaged no drop in performance on the cognitive test.

For a child, whose brain is still developing, poverty-caused stress can spell disaster, Sapolsky says. Stress hormones adversely affect the growth of the prefrontal cortex, generating measurable effects like poorer executive function, worse emotional regulation, and deficits in impulse control. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of many popular books on the brain, says that poor impulse control makes sense as a factor in criminogenesis. Studies show that prison populations tend to fill out surveys with the correct answers to moral dilemmas—that is, they know right from wrong. But prisoners score below average on tests of impulse control, like the marshmallow test and others. Thereby, nonviolent economic crime, like shoplifting or burglary, would not be caused by lack of economic resources coupled with an upbringing that 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 Carolina philosopher Susan Wolfe claims that a free action must “stem from values determined by reason.” Dennett, for his part, says you are morally responsible (and free) if you act while capable of imagining the consequences of your actions, possessed of basic rationality, and not compelled by forces the direction of which you would disavow.

“But that means compatibilists maintain we are free and determined?” Kelly asked.

“Yes.” In rebuttal, Harris says that compatibilist freedom is akin to a puppet loving where his strings deterministically take him.

“Who’s right?” Kelly asked.

When new scientific consensus conflicts with folk understanding, sometimes folk beliefs change; sometimes they do not. The scientific difference between mass and weight has enjoyed—I’d wager—less than 100 percent adoption by the folk. When oxygen was discovered, however, everyone stopped referencing phlogiston. Will free will go the way of phlogiston? In Blackwell’s Companion to Free Will (2023), Shaun Nichols, a philosopher at the University of Arizona, suggests that the concept of free will will change in one of two possible ways: in the way of the concept witch (eventual widespread acceptance that there are no such things as witches) or in the way of whale (eventual widespread acceptance, in spite of Herman Melville, that whales are not fish but mammals).

Dennett wants us to continue using the linguistic expression free will, but such that any libertarian part of it will disappear, and it’ll have to start to mean something non-libertarian via a connotational revision. Harris wants us to accept that free will, like witch, has no denotational referent in the real world. And the self-same responsibility-conferring mental states that Dennett wants to label “free will,” Harris wants to use to label our concept of “voluntary willing.”

*

In the first season of HBO’s Westworld, Thandiwe Newton plays Maeve, an android brothel madam who doesn’t know she’s an android. “Everything you do, it’s because the programmers . . . programmed you to do it,” a technician named Felix (Leonard Nam) tells Maeve in a pivotal, revelatory scene. He shows her a futuristic iPad on which are displayed the words she is about to say. “I’ve run a brothel for years, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s when I am being fucked with,” she says with unintended sphexishness, not yet entirely focused on the tablet. Finally comprehending what she’s looking at, Maeve says, “That’s not possible,” a fraction of a second after we, the television audience, see the words “That’s,” “not,” and “possible,” boxed, highlighted, and linked together—making a flowchart-like path, like stepping-stones, among a cloud of alternative words she might have uttered. Confronted by accurate predictions of her behavior or speech, Maeve must conclude that her behavior is indeed caused by her programming. With this realization, she freezes and her eyes glaze over, evidently having crashed like Windows 95. If you or I were confronted by accurate predictions of this kind, we might faint. It would seem to be compelling evidence that free will is an illusion.

The most interesting recent empirical work that threatens free will belief—and in a similar way to Westworld—involves using brain scanners to literally “read minds,” and accurately predict what a test subject is about to do. There is not yet a generally applicable, universal brain decoder, but the in-principle possibility is coming closer and closer to actuality. Neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues can predict which button a test subject in an fMRI brain-scanning machine will press—a button under the left index finger or one under the right—more than six seconds before the test subject consciously decides which button. These predictions—published in a study from 2008—were accurate 60 percent of the time. But a 2011 replication, using a technique other than fMRI, achieved 80 percent accuracy 700 milliseconds before the subject consciously decides.

In one experiment, participants are shown two numbers and over a short period may decide to either add or subtract them. Scientists can predict the participants’ decision up to four seconds before the participants consciously decide which they’re going to do. A researcher on Haynes’ team can be locked away in a windowless room and still accurately predict which button the test subject will press, based only on the test subject’s brain-scan data and artificial intelligence software. The upshot for free will is that your conscious decisions have their causes in nonconscious regions of your brain, which the scan can see even though you can’t, since they are nonconscious. The fact of accurate prediction implies, more generally, that consciousness is fed its contents by nonconscious processes—nonconscious content bubbles up, on its own, to populate conscious experience.

*

“But if we feel free, is that not enough?” Kelly asked. I quoted Samuel Johnson, who said, “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.” Sam Harris, I told Kelly, disagrees with the last part. Harris thinks experience is against free will too. In this opinion, he is almost entirely alone. Feeling like the author of your thoughts, Harris argues, is not a feeling we ever actually have. We say we have it, but if we paid attention to our experience with sufficient care, we’d see that thoughts, intentions, and desires simply arise without consciousness calling them up. Harris says you can come to this insight through mindfulness meditation. Try it. Try meditating. You’ll see what he’s talking about. A guided meditation will ask you to focus on your breath and, when you catch your mind wandering, to refocus your mental attention back on the breath. It’s not necessarily the goal to have a clear mind, but rather to strengthen your ability to pay attention. In your early attempts, doing this is extremely difficult, and you immediately discover the wildness of your mind. Random thoughts pop up seemingly from nowhere; they take over your experience, leading you down tangents, pulling you away from paying attention to your breath. You’ll be thinking about something else for a good long while before you realize that you are no longer focusing on your breath.

Harris says this is you identifying with the thought provided to your consciousness by nonconscious parts of your brain. You do not even notice that the thought came from nowhere, nor do you notice that you’ve identified with it automatically. You are lost in thought. If you are a novice meditator, and you’re honest with yourself, the longest you can attend to your breath before your train of thought goes off in its own direction is probably two to three seconds. And the time spent not focusing on the breath without realizing it, i.e., the time spent identifying with your thoughts, can be much longer than two seconds before you realize it. For Harris, since being lost in thought is the same as identifying with your thoughts, enlightenment, or at least mindfulness, might be thought of as reflective distance from (non-identification with) every thought, including seemingly willed intentions and decisions.

Harris’s upshot for free will is exactly the same as that of Haynes’s experiments: namely, that the contents of consciousness are provided by nonconscious processes in the brain. Feelings, ideas, desires, evaluations, decisions—they all come to consciousness, as it were, out of nowhere. Thoughts appear on their own, “unbidden,” as Nietzsche put it. Thoughts come out of the darkness, entering the spotlighted stage of the mind’s Cartesian theater on their own. As long as they do not conflict with our character or otherwise rock the boat, we immediately identify with them and, if asked, we will have, post-hoc, filed them under “freely willed.” Harris and Sapolsky both think (and Haynes’s research seems to show) that when we make decisions, even momentous ones, the contents of consciousness are provided by nonconscious processes that we have no access to. Harris avows that he no longer feels like he could have done otherwise—a denial of libertarian experience, i.e., phenomenology.

To end, I return to my original question: what does denying your own free will feel like? Let’s find out: there’s no free will. There, I said it. And you read it, which means you thought it. Now try to believe it. The interesting thing is, even when assumed for the sake of argument, disbelief cannot be maintained for very long. One’s tacit assumption of free will—one’s tacit assumption of an event that Harris thinks we never actually experience—is nevertheless still so natural that disbelief evaporates quickly and usually unnoticed. Even when the denial of free will is based on the strongest evidence and most compelling arguments, it fades away (Harris’s point notwithstanding). Indeed, without deliberately and effortfully keeping denial at the forefront of one’s mind, one’s mind reverts to its natural, implicit credence. For deniers, the falsity of free will is something they know but do not (always) believe.

In those brief moments when we do actively deny our own free will, we get an intellectual dizziness; we start to freak out about the end of moral responsibility, and our actions start to seem not our own. But the discombobulation of the ultimate perspective is transient. Since it comes from thinking too much, I’ve taken to calling it “armchair vertigo.” Once you get out of the armchair of philosophical reflection and you engage again with life, it goes away. We only get armchair vertigo when, taking the ultimate perspective, we actively force ourselves to believe what we know (again, pace Harris). In day-to-day, normal life—that is, while not suffering from self-induced armchair vertigo—lost-in-thought deniers know they don’t have free will, but they don’t believe they don’t.

Knowing without believing is, furthermore, the prescription offered by that other group of deniers who wish to suppress the knowledge that free will is false. They say, “Yeah, we know it’s false, but it’s better not to believe that.” Maintaining that a non-veridical illusion is true amounts to not believing what you know. Of course, you cannot benightedly labor under an illusion you know is an illusion. The self-same person, or a transparent, open society, cannot both know that X is an illusion and be taken in by the illusion. To not believe what you know requires rifts, internal divisions, impermeable walls between parts, self-deception or forgetting.

We live in an age where much of what we know is not believed. Since the Scientific Revolution that started five hundred years ago, we have lived with this gap between the scientific image of the universe and the image tacitly animating how we experience and act in the world. Recall the last affecting sunset you saw. That fiery orb of nuclear fusion, the sun, moving down through bands of luridly colored clouds, getting closer and closer to the horizon. It is easy to forget that the sun is not really moving in the way it seems to be. It’s the Earth that is moving— rotating—so that, from our perspective situated on the sphere, the horizon eventually blocks our view of the sun. We are rotated away from the sight of it. We know this—if we take the time to think about it. Yet for our language to reflect our belief in it, we’d have to say, “What a beautiful Earth-turning tonight!”

What will be our fate once a critical mass of us finally knows the falsity of contra-causal free will? Should we try harder to believe what we know? Or should we perhaps be grateful for temporary ignorance of the icy knowledge gleaned from the ultimate perspective? If you know something but do not believe it, you are in the position Oedipus was in immediately after he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother. For a split second, or maybe longer, he knew it, but it had not sunk in. He did not yet grok the new paradigm he now disastrously occupied. When his time of sleepwalking through life was at its end, when, finally, Oedipus truly believed what he knew, when he was pierced by the knowledge that he was a motherfucking patricide . . . he took a knife and pierced both his eyeballs.

The End

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

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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. But less embarrassment, more alarm or panic.

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 of your prenatal environment; from the sexual selection processes at work in your grandparents’ mating rituals, to the organizing principles—whether individualistic, communitarian, or honor-based—of your great-great-great-grandparents’ culture. Perpetually harried in his speech and even apparently in his ellipses-filled emails, Sapolsky—a 1987 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient—is charming and often approaches silliness. He turns serious, however, when he addresses what he calls the “appalling moral affront” of a society that continues to believe in free will. “The injustice and harm perpetrated by our justice system’s anti-scientific belief in free will should keep us up at night screaming,” he said on another episode of Radiolab. Sapolsky has staked out the most uncompromising position against free will in the public sphere. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to [where we are],” he writes. In October 2023, Penguin published Sapolsky’s latest book, which is about living day-to-day with free-will denial, titled Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Having established in Behave that every human behavior has a cause, Sapolsky writes in Determined about the potential consequences of society-wide free-will denial and how to integrate those implications into our self-understanding.

After my sleepwalking episodes began, Kelly cracked open my copy of the eight-hundred-page Behave, and I started reading a galley copy of Determined. We would compare notes at our ritual of Sunday three o’clock tea, recommended by our premarital counselor. I also read the eighty-page Free Will by Sam Harris, another denier. Harris is a multitopic public intellectual, unaffiliated with any university, and independently minded. The famously militant New Atheist, bestselling author, advocate of Buddhist meditation, neuroscience PhD, podcaster, app developer, and much-criticized critic of radical Islam agrees with Sapolsky that jettisoning belief in free will would be good for both society and the individual. Harris—who looks like a cross between Spock and a dour, karate-chopping Ben Stiller—writes that “losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.”

***

While Sapolsky’s and Harris’s predictions about a world after denial are quasi-utopian, the science does not appear to back up their sunny speculations. “Believe it or not,” I said to Kelly at tea, “scientists have run experiments in this domain”—lab experiments to discover the psychological effect of denying free will on the person denying it. It’s not long been the subject of empirical study, however. In one of the first papers, published in 2008, behavioral economist Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota’s business school, and Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, found that when test subjects are primed with anti-free-will belief (by reading a passage denying free will in Francis Crick’s book The Astonishing Hypothesis), they cheat and steal during real-money lab games in greater percentages than subjects in the control group.

Nearly all the other results in this line of research run counter to Sapolsky’s and Harris’s rosy predictions. Reading dozens of journal articles, I learned that disbelief in free will causes dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior; reduces helpfulness; hampers learning from one’s misdeeds; curtails thinking for oneself; diminishes recycling; lowers expectations for occupational success; and decreases quality of job performance.

“What the fuck’s ‘recycling’ doing in there?” Kelly asked, in a moment of apparent lalochezia. I wondered silently what she might have been so upset about that she needed the pressure release of swearing. “Well,” I said slowly, accusingly, drawing out the vowel, “Wehhhhl, experimental moral psychology has an unavoidable dollhouse nature.” The lab can only be a simulacrum of real life’s moral dilemmas. While researchers may want to test a belief’s contribution to bad behavior, universities’ institutional review boards, thankfully, do not allow actual harm to come to the participants in these studies. Similarly, good, heroic, or praiseworthy behavior must have a stand-in, which is what recycling is doing in there. To test if an experimentally manipulated condition contributes to aggressive behavior, a number of studies have adopted the strategy of giving participants the opportunity to clandestinely drench another person’s food in hot sauce. And, you guessed it, participants primed with free-will disbelief administer more hot sauce, i.e., were more aggressive, than controls. The vast majority of the science around the psychological effects of denying free will seems to militate against the optimists and in favor of the pessimists. Who’s right

There’s actually a third position. In the recent intellectual conversation around free-will denial, three mutually inconsistent schools of thought have developed. On the one hand, there’s Sapolsky and Harris, the optimists, who think denial would rid the world of moral harms that are presently dependent on free-will credence; on the other hand, empirical research seems to show that not believing in free will has negative effects on our behavior and psychology; while, on the third hand—and this position is as strange as a third hand—there are those who say free will is an illusion but that the effects of disbelief would be so detrimental that this knowledge should be suppressed. Yes, that’s right, some philosophers and scientists who deny free will’s existence don’t think it would be wise to let everyone know the truth. As Vohs and Schooler write: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.”

They’re not just trying to justify their grant money with a practical upshot for their research. They categorize the falsity of free will as an “informational existential threat,” like the knowledge of how to build a nuclear bomb or make smallpox into an aerosol. The knowledge that free will is an illusion must be possessed only—the thinking goes—by a small elite who, supposedly, will be strong enough to resist the bad effects. Suppressionists never say nobody should know this truth. How could they, since they know it? I imagine there must be a certain frisson to making an exception for oneself precisely here. The physicist Paul Davies, writing in an essay commissioned by—of all places—Foreign Affairs, says free will is “a fiction worth maintaining,” and denial “is the world’s most dangerous idea.”

It’s not new, this moral panic. Catastrophizing about free-will denial goes way back. But today, it is not mere idle speculation, which it was in 1524, when Erasmus argued for free will against Martin Luther’s denial. Erasmus worried that the common man was too “weak, ignorant, and wicked” to handle what Luther was proposing. Therefore, Luther ought not to say it. But Erasmus did not seriously contemplate Luther’s denial becoming widespread, so his worries were merely abstract pearl-clutching—and self-serving to boot. Erasmus should have felt the bite of intellectual conscience, the pull of a certain epistemological scruple. Because it was in Erasmus’ time—and still should be in ours—a principle recognized by all truth-seekers that one cannot silence one’s interlocutor in a debate by asserting that merely uttering their conclusion would cause harm. It’s akin to ad hominem, as it does not address the issue on its merits (i.e., on the question of whether it’s true or not). Furthermore, it would preclude the discovery of harmful truths; for, indeed, some truths are harmful.

Today’s suppressionism is different because Erasmus believed in free will. These days, recommending suppression is most interesting (and most ethical) when it’s a move made by deniers, i.e., the thinker in Luther’s position. Suppressionist scientists are advocating for the sequestration of their own research. They argue that, if we really and truly believe “the un-free will” (a translation of Luther’s 1525 title) to be dangerous knowledge, then it should be “born classified,” as is the case now for developmental research for new nuclear weaponry. “Perhaps the government could,” I joked with Kelly at the next tea, “in the vein of UFOs, attempt to discredit as a kook anyone who proclaims the dangerous and secret truth that we don’t have free will.”

Thankfully, outright deception may not be necessary. “We are fortunately deceived about free will,” writes Saul Smilansky, professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and the foremost academic proponent of letting the illusion be. In Plato scholarship, an elite promulgating a falsehood to maintain social order is called a “noble lie.”

A noble lie affirming free will may not be necessary, since few people see their way to the arguments for denial, and most, when the arguments are brought to their attention, do not accept their implications anyway—even when they cannot gainsay the logic. Smilansky worries that graduate students, working under the conviction that free will is false, will become depressed or psychotic post-disillusionment. So he discourages PhD students from working with him. He writes, “We must protect humanity in the hothouse of illusion from the chill of the ultimate perspective.” “I like that,” I remarked to Kelly. “The icy chill of the ultimate perspective.”

Adopting the ultimate perspective without illusions would be to cross one more threshold in the ongoing diminishment of human metaphysical dignity, which includes a familiar list: Copernicus decentering the Earth and us with it; Darwinism making us animal and accidental; Nietzsche and Freud dethroning self-transparent consciousness and foregrounding the unruly unconscious. It’s another instance of borrowed by Joan Didion to describe the ostensibly utopian world of 1968 Haight-Ashbury as, instead, an apocalyptic nightmare. Analogously, free-will denial is seen by some as utopian and by others as catastrophic. The latter think it would cause societal collapse, which must be prevented by a paternalistic noble lie. The former, like Sapolsky and Harris, think the ultimate perspective would yield an egalitarian, socially just, quasi-heavenly sublime, if only we could get people to adopt it. “No one would deserve to be treated any better or any worse than anyone else,” as Sapolsky writes. When I shared that quotation with Kelly at tea, it struck me that denial seems to rhyme with progressive politics. Because, for example, it is the positive belief in free will that allows some people (usually on the political right wing) to blame poverty on the freely made bad decisions of the poor, rather than on structural causes, which, by comparison, play a deterministic role. Also, many of the societal changes that progressives want to see are logical implications of free-will denial, including prison reform and intervention to prevent childhood poverty, to name only those on Sapolsky’s short list.

***

“The progressive-aligned cause Sapolsky is most passionate about in his books,” Kelly replied, “is government intervention to prevent all childhood poverty.” Why? Because it’s unfair what the stress of being poor does to the developing brain. Poor people, according to research by Sapolsky and others, have chronically high levels of glucocorticoids—“Like low-ranking baboons,” I interrupted mischievously—with adverse effects on health, brain function, and behavior. Sapolsky points out that the way stress works in baboons is exactly how stress works in humans. As part of the fight-or-flight system, the stress response is incredibly ancient—it’s shared by all primates and every mammal, bird, fish, and reptile. Same chemical compounds, same interactions.

When triggered, glucocorticoids prepare a creature’s body for emergency action, shutting down systems not essential in emergencies, including digestion, reproduction, neurogenesis, and growth. (I learned there is such a thing as “stress dwarfism”—when growth is markedly stunted by chronic stress in childhood.) In animals less social than baboons and humans, stress hormones are washed away as quickly as they are triggered, as Sapolsky cleverly captured in the title of his 1994 book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. By contrast, baboons hunt, gather, and eat all the food they need each day in only a few hours, “leaving the rest of their time to make each other miserable,” Sapolsky writes. The result is chronic stress (only for some, it must be said). In adult humans, the chronic stress of poverty creates a detrimental cognitive load, diminishing the ability to focus attention, according to studies on the psychological effects of poverty. In a 2013 study by researchers at Princeton, rich and poor study participants performed equally well on standard tests of cognition while preoccupied with lab problems involving trivial amounts of money. But if the amounts were $2000, a poor person, on average, displayed a drop in cognitive function analogous to 13 IQ points, or an entire night’s sleep. Rich participants preoccupied by the $2000 scenarios averaged no drop in performance on the cognitive test.

For a child, whose brain is still developing, poverty-caused stress can spell disaster, Sapolsky says. Stress hormones adversely affect the growth of the prefrontal cortex, generating measurable effects like poorer executive function, worse emotional regulation, and deficits in impulse control. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of many popular books on the brain, says that poor impulse control makes sense as a factor in criminogenesis. Studies show that prison populations tend to fill out surveys with the correct answers to moral dilemmas—that is, they know right from wrong. But prisoners score below average on tests of impulse control, like the marshmallow test and others. Thereby, nonviolent economic crime, like shoplifting or burglary, would not be caused by lack of economic resources coupled with an upbringing that 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

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

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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

Still here? Read this next:

1. If you want more of the philosophical side of things—

   Here’s an accessible history of the changing concept of happiness from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers through to today. Plus, I show how hedonism and relativism insinuated themselves into happiness’s definition.

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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