His two best-selling books, Behave (2018) and Determined (2023) are based on the same simple idea, that every event in the universe is pre-determined, the effect of a prior cause (or causes) that goes back to the origin of the universe, or "turtles all the way down," as Sapolsky knowingly misquotes William James on page 1 of Determined.

On p.15 he explicitly asks "What Do I Mean by Determined? And he answers unequivocally "The past and future of the universe are pre-determined."

In physics, this was the view of classical Newtonian mechanics until 1916, when Albert Einstein discovered ontological chance in the interaction of matter and radiation. See "How Einstein Invented Most of Quantum Mechanics."

In theology and many religions, determinism (and pre-determinism) appears as the logically inconsistent idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God (He can't be both!), one who created the universe and controls every event. See the logical contradiction.

A decade later Werner Heisenberg called this "indeterminism" in his 1927 quantum mechanics, He made it famous as the "uncertainty principle" and the controversial idea of an "uncaused" event.

As a professional biologist, Sapolsky must know that physical determinism is in conflict with Darwinian evolution and natural selection, which depends on the "blind" variation and selective retention (BVSR) in the genes, today understood as random errors, some caused at the atomic/molecular level by radiation damage to the DNA.

Sapolsky does mention quantum indeterminacy (Determined, p.208), but then "summarizes" it with brief introductions to quantum tunneling, wave-particle duality, entanglement, and nonlocality, none of which are the source of indeterminism and randomness that is necessary to break determinism and allow new information to come into existence (e.g., new species) and provide the multiple possible futures needed for freedom of the will.

A few pages later, in chapter 10 of Determined Sapolsky asks "Is Your Free Will Random?" He describes three problems.

• #1) BUBBLING UP. Can quantum effects down there at the level of electrons entangling with each other affect behavior or even "biology"?
• #2) IS YOUR FREE WILL A SMEAR? "If our behavior were rooted in quantum indeterminacy it would be random," he writes.
• #3) HARNESSING THE RANDOMNESS OF QUANTUM INDETERMINACY. Sapolsky quotes Daniel Dennett (who until shortly before he died was the leading philosopher arguing that free will is compatible with determinism). "In the words of Daniel Dennett in describing this view, 'Whatever you are, you can't influence the undetermined event — the whole point of quantum indeterminacy is that such quantum events are not influenced by anything.'"

(Determined, p.217-231)

Sapolsky then offers some conclusions. He writes...

Even if quantum indeterminacy did bubble all the way up to behavior, there is the fatal problem that all it would produce is randomness. Do you really want to claim that the free will for which you’d deserve punishment or reward is based on randomness?

(Determined, p.208)

Here Sapolsky has independently discovered the standard argument against free will, which we have shown has been invented and re-invented by dozens of philosophers and scientists over many recent decades, and which we have traced back to the ancient Greek philosophers (e.g., Aristotle and Epicurus). Sapolsky is sadly unfamiliar with the determinism/free will literature, as evidenced by the lack of a scholarly bibliography in his books.

The Standard Argument has two parts (or objections).
First, if determinism is the case, the will is not free.
This is the Determinism Objection.

Second, if indeterminism and real chance exist, our will would not be in our control, we could not be responsible for random actions.
This is the Randomness Objection.

Randomness is Sapolsky's main objection, but he clearly recognizes both, and like Dennett and many others, prefers determinism over indeterminism and unpredictability. He concludes chapter 10 with "A system being unpredictable doesn't mean that it is enchanted, and magical explanations aren't really explanations." This is quite true, but irrelevant.

Sapolsky's chapter on quantum indeterminacy pokes fun at various quantum phenomena and dismisses them as so many "weirdnesses." But quantum indeterminacy is real and plays an essential role in the first stage of the two-stage model of free will, even as it is averaged over and all but eliminated in the second stage.

1) Our thoughts are free, creative and random when alternative possibilities are developed.
2) Our actions are willed, adequately determined by our reasons, motives, and desires, averaging out quantum indeterminacy.

These "two stages" in free will are the same "two steps" in Darwinian evolution, as first seen by the great philosopher of mind William James in 1884 and as confirmed by the great biologist and philosopher of biology Ernst Mayr in his Toward A New Philosophy Of Biology a century later where he wrote...

Evolutionary change in every generation is a two-step process: the production of genetically unique new individuals and the selection of the progenitors of the next generation. The important role of chance at the first step, the production of variability, is universally acknowledged, but the second step, natural selection, is on the whole viewed rather deterministically: Selection is a non-chance process.

Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 159

Finally, information philosophy has found the same two steps or stages in the cosmic creation process that allowed information structures to form in the early universe, despite its beginning in a state of near equilibrium (maximum entropy), and despite the second law of thermodynamics which says that equilibrium is the end state, the "heat death."

These two stages or steps, the first free, creative, and random, the second selected or willed and adequately determined, are the correct explanation of any creation of new information, any "order out of chaos."

They are the basis of human creativity and the source of all our knowledge.

Even if quantum indeterminacy did bubble all the way up to behavior, there is the fatal problem that all it would produce is randomness. Do you really want to claim that the free will for which you’d deserve punishment or reward is based on randomness?

(Determined, p.208)