Study Guide for “Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem: On What We Know but Do Not Believe”
by David J. Frost, published in The Missouri Review, Summer 2026
Paragraph numbers below correspond to paragraphs in the PDF of the essay.
I. Sleepwalking and Responsibility (¶1–9)
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?
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?
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)
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?
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?
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)
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?
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?
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)
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?
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?
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)
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?
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)
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?
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?
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)
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?
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?
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)
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?
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)
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?
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)
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?
“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?
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)
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?
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?