Sapolsky is almost certainly right about how causes unfold through time.
Biological, developmental, and environmental factors
shape behaviour at every scale,
leaving no human action untouched by causality.
Nothing in what follows attempts to dispute that fact.
Where his argument falters is not in its science,
but in the assumption that once causation is complete,
the phenomenon of free will
has been conceptually exhausted.
That conclusion follows only
if free will is defined as a
metaphysical exemption from causation.
But this is a category mistake.
Free will is not a loophole in physics;
it is a feature of lived biological systems.
And in Wittgenstein’s terms, experiences do
not vanish because our language fails to describe them.
They vanish only from discourse.
The limits of our language are the limits of our world
and the language we have inherited
for talking about free will
was built to describe ghosts, not organisms.
If we want to describe the world we actually inhabit
one in which biology constrains behaviour
without erasing agency,