Robert M. Sapolsky knows that readers might find his new book unsettling. Even he concedes that there’s something “absolutely nutty” about the core argument in “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.”

But after studying the brain for decades, the Stanford University neurology and biology professor has concluded that our self-conception — as individuals and a species — is based on a myth.

“We haveno自由意志,”Sapolsky写道。这意味着那t “holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong.”

自由意志已经been a source of contention since Socrates wore short pants. Sapolsky has spoken publicly about the subject for years, debating other scholars and discussing it in his book “Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.”

But “Determined” is a sustained attempt at demonstrating that the decisions we make every day are products of complex factors of which we’re not in charge. Surveying the many academic studies on free will, he’s decided that “we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control — our biology, our environments, their interactions.”

This is an amiable, surprisingly accessible and at times a persuasive book — a paean to empathy and tolerance that yearns for a world in which societies eventually realize that retribution is futile and wrong. But it’s also one that draws some oversimplified conclusions. “We don’tchangeour minds,” Sapolsky writes. “Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before, arechangedby circumstances around us.”

As defined by Sapolsky, those circumstances include history (did your ancestors grow crops or herd animals?), human ecology (what sort of gut bacteria did you inherit in the womb?) and community (was it easier to buy books or booze in your childhood neighborhood?).

This may seem like a matter for the ivory tower, but in Sapolsky’s framing, the free will question has huge potential implications for everything from our fragile egos to the criminal justice system.

You might believe that your professional success is attributable to a trait — persistence, say — that you’ve consciously nurtured; that you’ve overcome addiction thanks to carefully cultivated willpower; and that those who commit the worst crimes should get life imprisonment.

But these beliefs don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, Sapolsky writes: “No one hasearnedor isentitledto being treated better or worse than anyone else.” That, at least, is what the experiments he cites tell us.

A representative example involves imaging instruments used to depict what happens in different brain regions when someone is asked to press one of two buttons: “The results show clearly … that particular regions have ‘decided’ which button to push before you believe you consciously and freely chose.”

Sapolsky uses thought experiments to explain his ideas. In one, Person A, who takes medicine daily to manage epilepsy, nevertheless has a seizure while driving and accidentally kills a pedestrian. This driver is, of course, blameless.

Person B also has epilepsy but doesn’t take their medicine one day because it interferes with their plans to party that night. Person B, too, has a seizure while driving and accidentally kills a pedestrian. Person B is also blameless, Sapolsky writes. After all, “the brain that led someone to drive without their meds is the end product of all the things beyond their control from one second, one minute, one millennium before.”

OK, but if we start believing that we’re not responsible for our actions, won’t some of us just indulge our worst impulses? Sapolsky cites a study that tries to answer this question, which found that people on opposite sides of the free will debate “were identical in their ethical behavior.” But he acknowledges that nobody really knows — a concession that perhaps weakens his thesis, yet reinforces the integrity of his overall intellectual project.

Sapolsky envisions a world without blame or prisons, with criminals “quarantined” only as long as they’re deemed dangerous. As he endures the long wait for this to happen in America, he can be pleased with the knowledge that what he’s written is stimulating to read, even for those who doubt his conclusions.

Kevin Canfield is a freelance writer.