Reading Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, by Stanford University professor Robert M. Sapolsky has been a life-changing experience. To come to understand that there is no such thing as free will profoundly changes the outlook to life. We are a product of our biology and environment the rest does not add to much. The illusion of free will makes life more interesting but the powerful reality of why we do the things we do should not be overlooked. 

Excerpts

The approach of this book is to show how that determinism works, to explore how the biology over which you had no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control, made you you.
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Let me state this most broadly, probably at this point too broadly for most readers: we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.

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Again, my goal isn’t to convince you that there’s no free will; it will suffice if you merely conclude that there’s so much less free will than you thought that you have to change your thinking about some truly important things.
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To understand where your intent came from, all that needs to be known is what happened to you in the seconds to minutes before you formed the intention to push whichever button you choose. As well as what happened to you in the hours to days before. And years to decades before. And during your adolescence, childhood, and fetal life. And what happened when the sperm and egg destined to become you merged, forming your genome. And what happened to your ancestors centuries ago when they were forming the culture you were raised in, and to your species millions of years ago. Yeah, all that.
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Understanding this turtleism shows how the intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before.
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After all, most Americans have been educated to believe in free will and have reflected on how this produces responsibility for our actions. And most have also been taught to believe in a moralizing god, guaranteeing that your actions have consequences. And yet rates of violence in the United States are unmatched in the West. We’re doing plenty of running amok as it is.
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Finally, any contemporary view of determinism must accommodate a profoundly important point, one that dominates the second half of the book—despite the world being deterministic, things can change. Brains change, behaviors change. We change. And that doesn’t counter this being a deterministic world without free will. In fact, the science of change strengthens the conclusion…
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If you talk about the effects of neurotransmitters on behavior, you are also implicitly talking about the genes that specify the construction of those chemical messengers, and the evolution of those genes—the fields of “neurochemistry,” “genetics,” and “evolutionary biology” can’t be separated. If you examine how events in fetal life influence adult behavior, you are also automatically considering things like lifelong changes in patterns of hormone secretion or in gene regulation. If you discuss the effects of mothering style on a kid’s eventual adult behavior, by definition you are also automatically discussing the nature of the culture that the mother passes on through her actions. There’s not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will.
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In the first chapter, I wrote about what is needed to prove free will, and this chapter has added details to that demand: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain was unaffected by any of these preceding factors—by the goings-on in the eighty billion neurons surrounding it, by any of the infinite number of combinations of hormone levels percolated that morning, by any of the countless types of childhoods and fetal environments that could have been experienced, by any of the two to the four millionth power different genomes that neuron contains, multiplied by the nearly as large range of epigenetic orchestrations possible. Et cetera. All out of your control.
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We’re pretty good at recognizing that we have no control over the attributes that life has gifted or cursed us with. But what we do with those attributes at right/wrong crossroads powerfully, toxically invites us to conclude, with the strongest of intuitions, that we are seeing free will in action. But the reality is that whether you display admirable gumption, squander opportunity in a murk of self-indulgence, majestically stare down temptation or belly flop into it, these are all the outcome of the functioning of the prefrontal cortex and the brain regions it connects to. And that prefrontal cortex functioning is the outcome of the second before, minutes before, millennia before.
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What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.