Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't spend a lot of time hedging on free will. His position, stated plainly across multiple StarTalk episodes and interviews, is essentially: the universe is made of particles, particles obey physical laws, your brain is made of particles, therefore your "choices" are the output of a physical system running its program — not some soul floating above the machinery making independent decisions. He's not alone. He's sitting in a long tradition of physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who've been making this exact argument for centuries, and the scientific evidence underneath it has only gotten more uncomfortable as the decades pass.
The most cited experiment in this whole debate is Benjamin Libet's 1983 neuroscience study, which produced one of the most unsettling findings in the history of consciousness research. Libet asked subjects to flex their wrist whenever they felt like it while he monitored brain activity and had them track exactly when they felt the conscious urge to move. What he found: the brain showed measurable electrical activity — a "readiness potential" — up to 550 milliseconds before subjects reported consciously deciding to move. The decision showed up in the brain before it showed up in awareness. Consciousness, by this reading, isn't making the call — it's being informed of a call that's already been made somewhere else in the machinery.
Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neuroscientist and author of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023), takes this further than almost anyone in the academic mainstream is willing to go. His argument: every thought, impulse, and decision you have is the downstream product of your genes, your childhood environment, your hormone levels an hour ago, what you ate for breakfast, a traumatic event from age seven, and ten thousand other variables you had zero control over. You didn't choose any of those inputs. So the "you" that's supposedly freely choosing — what exactly is it choosing with? It's choosing with a brain that was built by factors entirely outside its own control. Sapolsky calls free will a "feel-good narrative" that survives not because it's true but because it's useful for social organization — we need to assign blame and praise so we built a story that justifies it.
Sam Harris makes a slightly simpler version of the same point: just try to think of a thought you didn't think. Try to want something you don't want. You can't step outside your own mind and override it from neutral ground. Thoughts arise. You didn't author them. The feeling of authorship is part of what the thoughts feel like — but that feeling is itself just another thought the brain generated.
Now — does this mean nothing matters? That's the reaction most people have, and it's worth pushing back on. Tyson's point, which he makes carefully, is that the experience of deliberation is real even if the metaphysical "freedom" underneath it isn't. You still feel the weight of a hard decision. The process of reasoning still matters because it IS the mechanism — changing what goes into the system (education, therapy, information) changes what comes out. Determinism doesn't make you a passive spectator of your own life. It makes you a different kind of actor than you thought you were.
Which honestly might be more interesting. You're not a ghost running a body. You're a universe that briefly became aware of itself and started asking questions about its own operating system. That's wild enough without needing magic on top of it.
Go love somebody that you don't like. I love y'all. 🙏
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