Undetermined: Free will in real time and through time

In his book Determined, Robert Sapolsky argues that our cognitive systems are effectively deterministic, such that a preconfigured algorithm will inevitably spit out a single answer for what to do in every scenario we encounter, leaving nothing in that process “up to us”. A more realistic view of the psychology and neuroscience of decision-making undermines this deterministic impression and highlights instead how our cognitive processes are designed to “tune the algorithm” on the fly, precisely so that we can figure out what to do in novel scenarios where all of the contextual relations could not possibly be prestated. Carrying out these cognitive processes – by operating over meaningful patterns of neural activity, figuring the relative salience of various parameters, in a highly contextual and holistic manner, for person-level reasons, as best we can with incomplete, uncertain information and noisy components – just is us deciding what to do. This also undermines the argument that we have no control over how our neural or cognitive systems come to be configured at any moment. Some of the choices we make are about our own cognition and motivations: we shape our own character through time in ways that enable us to act as ourselves in real-time.