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Free Will, by Sam Harris
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A BELIEF IN FREE WILL touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.
In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
- Sales Rank: #14214 in Books
- Published on: 2012-03-06
- Released on: 2012-03-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .50" w x 5.63" l, .26 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 96 pages
Review
"In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates—with great intellectual ferocity and panache—that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings."
—V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, UCSD, and author of The Tell-Tale Brain
"Brilliant and witty—and never less than incisive—Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000."
—Oliver Sacks
"Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it. In Free Will, Sam Harris combines neuroscience and psychology to lay this illusion to rest at last. Like all of Harris’s books, this one will not only unsettle you but make you think deeply. Read it: you have no choice."—Jerry A. Coyne, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, and author of Why Evolution Is True
"Many say that believing that there is no free will is impossible—or, if possible, will cause nihilism and despair. In this feisty and personal essay, Harris offers himself as an example of a heart made less self-absorbed, and more morally sensitive and creative, because this particular wicked witch is dead."
—Owen Flanagan, Professor of Philosophy, Duke University, and author of The Really Hard Problem
"If you believe in free will, or know someone who does, here is the perfect antidote. In this smart, engaging, and extremely readable little book, Sam Harris argues that free will doesn’t exist, that we’re better off knowing that it doesn’t exist, and that—once we think about it in the right way—we can appreciate from our own experience that it doesn’t exist. This is a delightful discussion by one of the sharpest scholars around.”
—Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology, Yale University, and author of How Pleasure Works
About the Author
Sam Harris is the author of the bestselling books�The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation,�The Moral Landscape,�Free Will, and Lying.�The End of Faith�won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing has been published in over fifteen languages. Dr. Harris is cofounder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. Please visit his website at SamHarris.org.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Free Will �
The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about. Morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment—most of what is distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons, capable of free choice. If the scientific community were to declare free will an illusion, it would precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution. Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous. And those of us who work hard and follow the rules would not “deserve” our success in any deep sense. It is not an accident that most people find these conclusions abhorrent. The stakes are high.
In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim’s screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.
The two then bound Petit’s hands and feet and went upstairs to search the rest of the house. They discovered Jennifer Petit and her daughters—Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11—still asleep. They woke all three and immediately tied them to their beds.
At 7:00 a.m., Hayes went to a gas station and bought four gallons of gasoline. At 9:30, he drove Jennifer Petit to her bank to withdraw $15,000 in cash. The conversation between Jennifer and the bank teller suggests that she was unaware of her husband’s injuries and believed that her captors would release her family unharmed.
While Hayes and the girls’ mother were away, Komisarjevsky amused himself by taking naked photos of Michaela with his cell phone and masturbating on her. When Hayes returned with Jennifer, the two men divided up the money and briefly considered what they should do. They decided that Hayes should take Jennifer into the living room and rape her—which he did. He then strangled her, to the apparent surprise of his partner.
At this point, the two men noticed that William Petit had slipped his bonds and escaped. They began to panic. They quickly doused the house with gasoline and set it on fire. When asked by the police why he hadn’t untied the two girls from their beds before lighting the blaze, Komisarjevsky said, “It just didn’t cross my mind.” The girls died of smoke inhalation. William Petit was the only survivor of the attack.
Upon hearing about crimes of this kind, most of us naturally feel that men like Hayes and Komisarjevsky should be held morally responsible for their actions. Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands. Do we care that Hayes has since shown signs of remorse and has attempted suicide? Not really. What about the fact that Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a child? According to his journals, for as long as he can remember, he has known that he was “different” from other people, psychologically damaged, and capable of great coldness. He also claims to have been stunned by his own behavior in the Petit home: He was a career burglar, not a murderer, and he had not consciously intended to kill anyone. Such details might begin to give us pause.
As we will see, whether criminals like Hayes and Komisarjevsky can be trusted to honestly report their feelings and intentions is not the point: Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them. As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people. Even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the problem of responsibility remains: I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath. If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky’s shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.
Of course, if we learned that both these men had been suffering from brain tumors that explained their violent behavior, our moral intuitions would shift dramatically. But a neurological disorder appears to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. Understanding the neurophysiology of the brain, therefore, would seem to be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it. How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity, which is in turn the product of prior causes—perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment—what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”? No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this.
The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present. As we are about to see, however, both of these assumptions are false.
But the deeper truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us—and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference) and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.
Most helpful customer reviews
305 of 354 people found the following review helpful.
Brief, cogent, provocative and convincing.
By Saganite
It was a Reformed theologian who disabused me of the concept of free will several years ago, and I've found it a fascinating topic ever since. Sam Harris has produced a brief monograph on the issue that manages to distill the key issues without creating an impenetrable density for the reader to slog through.
For those who think value is found in a dollars-to-words ratio, the thinness and focus of this volume might not seem like a bargain, but I loved having a book with something important to say that I actually READ. I'm not saying that all subject matter must be reduced to tweets, but I know that, for example, as fascinated as I am by the topic of moral improvement that Stephen Pinker covers in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I am never going to read more than 600 pages just on that subject. There are simply too many other things I also care about. So Harris has done people like me a real favor by thinking about free will and pulling together the relevant evidence for his position, and expressing his ideas with his trademark wit and clarity in a work that can be digested in an hour or less.
For those who read about free will in other books and publications, there's nothing very new here. In fact, given the choice between recommending this book and something else, depending on the person I was talking with, I might instead suggest Cris Evatt's The Myth of Free Will, Revised & Expanded Edition. Cris has no credentials and the book is a collection of essays and quotes from various sources rather than a single, cohesive argument, but it makes one of the strongest cumulative cases for determinism in a short work that I've seen.
The one thing that did surprise me is the positive blurb on the book jacket from Owen Flanagan, whose The Problem Of The Soul: Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them is a stunning case for compatabilism, whereas Harris writes, "Compatabilists have produced a vast literature in an effort to finesse [moral complications from determinism]. More than in any other area of academic philosophy, the result resembles theology. (I suspect this is not an accident. The effort has been primarily one of not allowing the laws of nature to strip us of a cherished illusion.)" And again: "Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings." What Harris (convincingly, in my view) makes a case for is quite different from the case that Flanagan makes, so I think it is to Flanagan's credit that he nevertheless endorses Harris's work.
Daniel Dennett comes in for some well-deserved (but well-modulated) criticism in "Free Will" for the sort of epistemological shell-game he employs in an effort to rescue some "elbow room" for a brand of free will. I noted earlier that it was the argument of a theologian friend that made me realize that free will is impossible, but that's not quite complete. It was that argument in addition to the utter failure of Dennett's Freedom Evolves to convince me that anything like a free will worth having could possible exist that drained the last corpuscle of my delusion from my mind. There's nothing like a failed argument, by friend or foe, to make you consider the plausible correctness of the opposite position. The weaknesses I discerned in Dennett's case are precisely the ones Harris goes after, and in brief, intelligent prose dispatches them with an effectiveness and efficiency few authors could manage.
Harris states that the existence of an immaterial soul does nothing to rescue the notion of libertarian free will. This is certainly correct, although I have heard the argument made many times as a trope that "free will is not possible if humans don't have a spirit or soul." Because the issue is causality in general and not merely physical causality, whether a cause is purely physical, like a cue ball hitting an eight ball (or an electron firing in a neuron), or can be thought of in immaterial terms, like an idea inspiring a poem, makes no difference. Everything, physical or otherwise, is either the result of prior conditions, or if not, is random. Souls change none of that.
So theists who try to argue that without a god, humans have no free will are wrong. That simply doesn't matter. And perhaps the most disturbing implication of some points in Harris's argument is that if a god did exist, in all likelihood it wouldn't have libertarian free will, either. If you struggled with some of the absurdities inherent in our existence before, a deep appreciation of our condition vis-a-vis determinism will push you so far down the rabbit hole you might just find yourself reading much longer, more profound, denser works in some effort to get your bearings. And in the end it is probable that the best you'll be able to muster is simple agreement with what Harris says in this slim volume.
120 of 147 people found the following review helpful.
Superb!!
By Book Shark
Free Will by Sam Harris
"Free Will" is the persuasive essay that makes the compelling case that free will is an illusion. Free will is intuitively understood but a difficult concept to master. Dr. Harris systematically, and with few precise words destroys the notion of the concept of free will. With a degree in philosophy and a doctorate degree in neuroscience and the innate ability to convey difficult concepts to the layperson, Dr. Harris is best suited to enlighten us on such a challenging topic. This 96-page book is composed of the following eight chapters: 1. The Unconscious Origins of the Will, 2. Changing the Subject, 3. Cause and Effect, 4. Choices, Efforts, Intentions, 5. Might the Truth Be Bad for Us?, 6. Moral Responsibility, 7. Politics, and 8. Conclusion.
Positives:
1. Fascinating topic in the hands of a great thinker.
2. Profound without being unintelligible. Elegant and accessible prose.
3. Does a great job of dissecting free will. The author systematically beaks down the concept of free will by attacking it from various angles.
4. More so than his previous great essay "Lying" he makes more use of his scientific background. He relays studies that support his arguments.
5. The illusion of being in control is a concept that Dr. Harris masterfully destroys.
6. The author differentiates voluntary and involuntary actions.
7. Great quotes, "Our sense of free will results from a failure to understand this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises".
8. A discussion on the three main philosophical approaches: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism.
9. Great examples that help the reader comprehend the challenging concept of free will.
10. Classic Harris eloquence, "How can we be `free' as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brains that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't".
11. Does quantum mechanics provide a foothold for free will? Find out.
12. Does the process of conscious deliberation provide a foundation for free will? Find out.
13. Do we really control our minds? Once again, the mastery of Dr. Harris continues.
14. The implications of not having a free will. Great points!
15. A fascinating discussion on the level of responsibility.
16. How does a retributive judicial system fit in all this?
17. Free will within a religious framework.
18. Free will and politics.
19. A final chapter that brings everything together.
20. Links worked great on the Kindle.
21. Brief, powerful essay that can be read multiple times.
Negatives:
1. My only discomfort with the essay is the casual use of the term soul. I understand that Dr. Harris does not accept the soul as an empirical concept and may have used the term as a metaphor (equating it to the brain in one instance) but I prefer leaving out all supernatural terms unless properly defined.
2. Some topics are introduced briefly and leave you wanting more, isn't that always the case with Dr. Harris?
3. Having to wait for Dr. Harris's next intellectual contribution.
In summary, what makes this essay great is that the more you read the more you get out of it. It's a profound essay that is easy to follow but is hard to master. It is so rewarding to read interesting topics from great minds. This essay is the ultimate appetizer, delicious and with an everlasting aftertaste. Free will is not an easy concept to understand but a worthwhile pursuit to endeavor and Dr. Harris makes the journey a fulfilling one. I can't recommend this brief book enough, highly recommended.
Further suggestions: "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" by the same author, "Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain" by Michael S. Gazzaniga, "The Myth of Free Will, Revised & Expanded Edition" by Cris Evatt, "The Problem Of The Soul: Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them" by Owen Flanagan, "Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality" by Patricia S. Churchland, "The Brain and the Meaning of Life" by Paul Thagard, "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts)" by Carol Tavris, "Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality" by Lawrence Tancredi, and the "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" by Steven Pinker.
33 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
The Virtue of Brevity, but Nothing New
By Herbert Gintis
I am curious about free will arguments because of what they inevitably suggest concerning our scientific preconceptions. Sam Harris is a determinist, pure and simple. The problem is that we have no proof that human behavior is fully determined by the causal laws modeled in modern physical science. I cannot imagine why Harris assumes a determinist model of human behavior. He simply assumes it.
I will believe in determinism when someone develops a model that accurately predicts human behavior from a set of physiological parameters. Clearly no one has done that yet.
Harris argues that if you reject determinism, you must accept either quantum mechanical indeterminism or a mysterious non-physical source of human agency. Quantum indeterminacy of course does not imply free will---it just implies quantum superposition or irreducible stochasticity. But we cannot rule out a mysterious source of human agency intimately tied to consciousness. Whether this is "physical" or not we cannot say. It could be an emergent physical property of complex neural systems.
Harris thinks that if it is mysterious, we cannot believe in it. Well, there are lots of mysteries of life that we can believe in. Consciousness is one. Try to fit that into some traditional physical, chemical, or biological model. It is simply, at this point in time, mysterious. It clear has evolved, because many species appear to exhibit it as much as humans.
Harris makes a big deal of the fact that our unconscious determines an action before we are conscious of it. I do not doubt this, but so what? No one believes all our actions are free will. Far from it. But if I take a baseball bat, break into a house, and beat a sleeping resident to death, please do not tell me the act was completed before my conscious mind had any knowledge of it. Some, but not all, actions may exhibit free will.
Harris also makes a big deal of the fact that we did not choose our genes or our environment, and if we lead a moral life, we are just lucky to be so constituted. I this this is a perfectly valid argument. I feel lucky that I am not a psychopath, a drug addict, or a lazy slacker.
Case in point: Last May I went on a diet and started a daily exercise regime. I lost fifty pounds and improved by aerobic capacity and musculature a good deal. When I went back to the doctor, she said "I am proud of you." I replied that there is nothing to be proud of. I don't know why I did it, or why I had not done it earlier. I don't know why others in my position did not do it. I just did it, and I was lucky. But it is plausible to think that I did it of my own free will, meaning that I was not compelled to do it and I could have done otherwise, as far as I can surmise. I could have done otherwise because I have done otherwise in the past, and others like me have done otherwise.
I must say that I find determinism a flimsy basis for any philosophical argument because there is no basis in scientific theories for determinism. We just don't know enough about the laws of the Universe to say with any authority what conditions human behavior.
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