Free Will Paperback – Deckle Edge, 6 Mar. 2012

Excellent really enjoyed it. Great insight into human behaviour without getting too esoteric..excuse the big word

I've read all six of Sam Harris's books in the last few months, and picking a favourite would be like asking a mother to pick her favourite child, but if I had to rank them from "best" to just "excellent", Free Will would come near the top.Drawing on his expertise as both a neuroscientist and an experienced meditator, Harris explores the age-old philosophical question, "do we have free will? Are we truly the conscious authors of our actions, or are we just fixed-track automatons living under the delusion that we have control?" The question itself is nothing new, and numerous answers have been offered over the years, ranging ranging from the interesting and insightful to the confusing, meaningless, and masturbatory. Can Harris bring anything new to the table? To me: yes.Granted, I have no formal training in philosophy and am not familiar with the huge body of work that already exists on this subject, but Free Will isn't intended to be an all-encompassing philosophical treatise to be kept on dusty university library shelves and only ever pondered by PhDs. It's a succinct and incisive opinion piece that's open to all comers, and I found Harris's arguments to be eye-opening and authoritative - delivered with his trademark ability to steamroll any intellectual opponent in his path.Without meaning to spoil the ending, Harris's own answer to the question "do we have free will?" is a resounding "no". His arguments have been formulated in both the philosophy department and the research lab - and I found them convincing from all angles. We don't choose our thoughts - our thoughts simple arise in the brain uninvited, and anyone who's ever tried just 5 minutes of meditation can tell you first-hand how difficult it is to get even a hint of control over the contents of our own heads. Recent advances in brain imaging have also shown that we're able to predict with high accuracy the decisions a person is going to make *long before the person in question feels like they've actually made the decision.* If other people can predict our actions before we even know them ourselves, what space does this leave for free will as the genesis of those actions? I'm not sure there's any, and reading this book has made me acutely aware of just how little of the behaviour I consider to be "me" is the result of conscious choice - if that choice could ever be said to be "conscious" at all.My main criticism of this book is that it's very short - more of a pamphlet than a book - but at £2.99 for the Kindle version, it's not a major complaint. Also, if you've read "Waking Up" by the same author, there's a fair amount of overlap between the two books (including a few passages that seem be copied and pasted directly from one book to the other), so you may get the occasional sense of deja vu as you read Free Will, but its "exclusive" sections are more than enough to justify the low cost and the short amount of time it will take you to read it.Read this book. It's not like you have a choice.

It's short, assured and to the point and potentially devastating if like me you "believe" in "free will".I could not rebut him on his own terms but I do not accept his terms.That said, I think that any non mystical response would have to address his points or at least undermine them.For my part I think that the idea of free will as an uncaused will never made sense (even for a purported god). From my perspective free will is not simply compatible with an ordered universe (I think determinism is often overstated and Harris is probably in this territory but as he states Chaos does not help free will advocates) but depends on it.In short the will that I have is always bound to me in a context that precedes my choices but is not completely removed from them. It is not FREE in some unbounded mystical sense but it is still my will and is free to the degree that the outcomes I achieve are congruent with my desires.Did I chose those desires: no but that does not seem critical to me so long as I feel they were not imposed on me by a third party and I think this is what most of us mean.Science done by other humans with other desires says otherwise but if their choices are as predetermined as mine then their belief is not qualitively different from mine. In both cases the belief is a product of forces beyond our control...That's not to deny the power of science but a tool that has evolved to study the world by removing human subjectivity may not be the best tool for guiding human belief and human action in a universe where our becoming is no less a part of the structure of reality than the movements of particles or the interactions of fields.Indeed the way that science undertands these things cannot be understood without recognising the role of agency and will in that process.

This is a short book in which Harris pretty convincingly argues the case against the idea that we can do other than we do and also briefly considers the motivational, moral and political implications of accepting such a view.Central to Harris's argument is his view that not only is free will incompatible with objective descriptions of behaviour but also with our subjective experience: thus "the illusion of free will is in itself an illusion". In our subjective experience thoughts arise and take hold (or not) in ways that are subjectively if not theoretically mysterious (i.e. theoretically they arise from our brain states that are in themselves formed of chains of biologically coded influence). He writes vividly of his own 'choices' to show the determinism that is apparent if one carefully reflects on ordinary experience; "the choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being". He acknowledges, however, that our efforts matter and that we can alter the framework of our influences to make certain kinds of 'choices' more likely. He rejects that this entails free will but insofar as it acknowledges that we are causally relevant agents in the direction of our lives it seems to me that he comes close.If you find this review a bit heavy going, that is because I have needed to be succinct - the book itself is a much easier read. I recommend this book strongly to anyone who wants an accessible chew on the gristle of this fundamental and intriguing problem. Of course, whether or not you choose to follow this up is all a matter of determinism...