Free Will by Sam Harris

Sam Harris is an American author, philosopher and neuroscientist. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason, a non-profit organization that promotes science and secularism, and host of the podcast: Waking Up with Sam Harris.

Free Will was published in 2012.
___________________________________________________________________________________


Given it being an 83-paged book, the book is already condensed enough to deliver a powerful argument against free will, and any attempts to summarize and condense the book even more would not give the convincing nature of the book any justice. However, a brief summary of the points would not hurt, so as long as one keeps in mind that the book ought to be read in its entirety, which granted can be done in one sitting.

• Given a hypothetical of a person who has committed a crime by murdering someone, if you had that person's genes, life experiences, and exact brain (which includes exact mental states), then you would have done exactly as he has done, namely, murder someone. 
• Therefore, as Harris points out, there is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive. 
• Men cannot account for why they are the way they are, and we cannot account for why we are not like them. 
• "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." 

___________________________________________________________________________________

The Unconscious Origins of the Will

• "The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move."
• "Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imagine (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a "clock" composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found that two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made." 
• "More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80% accuracy a person's decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it." 
• "Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom—for what would influence the influences? More influences? None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm." 

___________________________________________________________________________________

Changing the Subject

In philosophical literature, one finds three main approaches to the problem of free will: 

• Determinism - For every event, there are conditions which led to cause that event. 
• Libertarianism - An incompatibilist position, positing that agents have free will, and that since free will and determinism can't coexist, then therefore, determinism is false. 
• Compatibilism - The notion that free will and determinism are compatible ideas.   

"For instance, I just drank a glass of water and feel absolutely at peace with the decisions to do so. . . [However], why didn't I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to me. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not."

On the compatibilist position, "Dennett (Dennett is a compatibilist) is ismply asserting that we are more than [a certain channel of information in a conscious mind]—we are conterminous with everything that goes on inside our bodies, whether we are conscious of it or not. This is like saying we are made of stardust—which we are. But we don't feel like stardust. And the knowledge that we are stardust is not driving our moral intuitions or out system of criminal justice."
___________________________________________________________________________________

Cause and Effect

"The biologist Martin Heisenberg has observed that certain processes in the brain, such as the opening and closing of ion channels and the release of synaptic vessels, occur at random, and cannot therefore be determined by environmental stimuli. Thus, much of our behavior can be considered truly "self-generated"—and therein, he imagines, lies a bases for human free-will. But how do events of this kind justify the feeling of free will? "Self-generated" in this sense means only that certain events originate in the brain."

"If my decision to have a second cup of coffee this morning was due to a random release of neurotransmitters, how could the indeterminacy of the initiating event count as the free exercise of my will? Chance occurrences are by definition ones for which I can claim no responsibility. And if certain of my behaviors are truly the result of chance, they should be surprising even to me. How would neurological ambushes of this kind make me free?"
___________________________________________________________________________________

Choices, Efforts, and Intentions

"Did I, the conscious person, create the pain I feel in my back? No. It simply appeared. Did I create the thoughts about it that led me to consider physical therapy? No. They too, simply appeared. This process of conscious deliberation, while different from unconscious reflex, offers no foundation for freedom of will."

"If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process. Yes, you can decide to go on a diet—and we know a lot about the variables that will enable you to stick to it—but you cannot know why you were finally able to adhere to this discipline when all your previous attempts failed. You might have a story to tell about why things were different this time around, but it would be nothing more than a post hoc description of events that you did not control. es, you can do what you want—but you cannot account for the fact that your wants are effective in one case and not in another (and you certainly can't choose your wants in advance). You wanted to lose weight for years. Then you really wanted to. What's the difference? Whatever it is, it's not a difference that you brought into being."
___________________________________________________________________________________

Might the Truth Be Bad for Us? 

Faced with the fact that free will is a necessary illusion, Harris points out that it isn't a completely unjustified concern to worry that without free will, we will fail to live creative and fulfilling lives.

• "One study study found that having subjects read an argument against the existence of free will made them more likely to cheat on a subsequent exam." 
• "Another found such subjects to be less helpful and more aggressive." 

He however offers, a bright side to the depressing conclusions to these studies. 

"However, becoming sensitive to the background causes of one's thoughts and feelings can—paradoxically—allow for greater creative control over one's life. It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. this understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bite of food may be all that your personality requires. Getting behind our conscious thoughts and feelings can allow us to steer a more intelligent course through our lives (while knowing, of course, that we are ultimately being steered.)"

___________________________________________________________________________________

Moral Responsibility

Harris points out how we view people in the moral sense when it comes to the criminal justice system. He poses 5 scenarios, of which all are committed by a 25 year old man who murders a woman. Except each of these scenarios differ from one another. The most distinctive scenario is the one in which the 25 year old man commits the murder because he has a huge tumor in his head, which psychologically motivated him to do those actions.

"—for the moment we understand that his feelings had a physical cause, a brain tumor, we cannot help seeing him as a victim of his own biology." 

So he essentially makes the point that if we are no more the arbiter of our actions, just as the man with the tumor is the arbiter of his, then it's much harder to draw the distinctions between someone who commits a murder as a result of a tumor in his brain, and someone who commits murder "just for the fun of it".

He also delivers an important point that says that the idea of retribution and revenge may not make much sense in a deterministic universe. In the light of the argument, we ought to re-evaluate this moral notion. 

___________________________________________________________________________________