Free will

FOR centuries, the question of free will - of whether human beings make choices that are not, or not entirely, determined by purely physical processes and causes - nested securely in the aeries of philosophy and religion. Ordinary people didn't worry about its having any practical significance for them. Although the issue of individual responsibility has animated novels, poetry, drama and parables, most modern people have gone about their lives believing that thenminds were the agents of their decisions. But the last half-century has seen this ancient subject pulled down from its academic perch and into courtrooms, laboratories, real-world questions about moral responsibility, and even popular culture. (It forms the plot of such contemporary movies as "Minority Report" and "The Adjustment Bureau.") Over the last few decades, procedures for measuring, imaging and analyzing mental processes have grown in number and subtlety. During this same period, books for the general reader about the brain and its functions, consciousness and will, thought and reasoning have proliferated. We have Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Cordelia Fine, Oliver Sacks, Michael Gazzaniga, Daniel Kahneman and scores of others explaining, and extrapolating from, new findings in neuroscience and almost always addressing the matter of free will. (Daniel Wegner's "Illusion of Conscious Will," published by the MIT Press in 2002, is a central full-length scientific text about this subject.) Sam Harris, a Stanford graduate with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from U.C.L.A. and author of "The End of Faith," a bestselling, Hitchensesque critique of religion, has now, in book form and fully armored, joined the free-will jousters with a kind of tractatus - a pamphlet-like work, "Free Will." Parts, of this book recycle some of Harris's earlier writing on the subject (as should have been acknowledged in the book's front matter and will be in future editions). But the work consists mainly of original text and distills Harris's position on the crucial issue of human agency. His absolutist position, I should add, because, as he puts it near the beginning of the book: "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 assume that we could have made other choices in the past, Harris continues, and we also assume that we consciously originate "our thoughts and actions in the present. . . . Both of these assumptions are false." Harris prosecutes his orderly case by explaining what he sees as the illogic of our belief in free will, and the recent findings that have undermined that belief. Probably the most influential among these discoveries were the results of the famous EEG experiments conducted by the physiologist Benjamin Libet and outers in the early 1990s. They showed that the brain makes decisions before consciousness becomes aware of them. As Harris puts it, "activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds" - almost enough time for LeBron James to get off a shot ahead of the buzzer - "before a person feels that he has decided to move." As Harris's text and impressive citations substantiate, these experiments and others like them have chiseled away much of the rock of free will upon which religion, jurisprudence and moral judgments have traditionally rested. (One could argue that Judaism and Christianity originated with Adam and Eve's decision to disobey God's order.) For quite a while now, philosophers and public intellectuals, including Harris's friend Dennett, have tried to rescue something like the common notion of free will from the jaws of science and logic by embracing a position called compatibilism. Compatibilists believe that "a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions," Harris writes, and they "have produced a vast literature in an effort" to salvage free will. "More than in any other area of academic philosophy, the result resembles theology" he continues, consigning it to what one assumes is, for him, the intellectual subbasement. Like almost all other thinkers who have publicly rejected the traditional model of conscious will, Harris claims that doing so does not entail the end of morality, the idea of criminality and codes of ethical behavior. "Many people worry that free will is a necessary illusion," he says. "It is surely conceivable that knowing (or emphasizing) certain truths about the human mind could have unfortunate psychological and/or cultural consequences." But it need not. We can still condemn "the conscious intention to do harm," he says, and he goes on to sketch a system of social and judicial evaluations that can lead to making valid moral judgments about people without invoking their wills. He even allows for the possible usefulness of public moral condemnation: "It may be that a sham form of retribution would still be moral - even necessary - if it led people to behave better than they otherwise would." But he does acknowledge that "certain moral intuitions begin to relax" with the abandonment of belief in free will. "Once we recognize that even the most terrifying predators are, in. a very real sense, unlucky to be who they are, the logic of hating (as opposed to fearing) them begins to unravel." Even though Harris assures us that civilized society can survive and might even improve with the abandonment of the concept of conscious agency, it would ultimately affect everything - all of our doings and sayings and thoughts, especially in ordinary sociomoral circumstances. This slender volume is perhaps less important in itself than in its representation of the arguments for accepting that we are not "the authors of our actions." As literature, "Free Will" has some mild humor - "If I want to put a rabbit in this sentence, I am free to do so" - and some ringing pronouncements: "We are working directly with the forces of nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with," But it is also generally prosaic, as most such intellectual treatises perforce tend to be. Harris often resorts to the thought-experimenters' clichés of inventing examples that involve violence (shooting the president) or the quotidian ("I just drank a glass of water and feel absolutely at peace with the decision to do so").'But if you want to acquaint yourself with the chapbook basics of this essential argument, "Free Will" is a good, cogent and readable . . . um, choice. Of course, questions persist What, after the dismantling of free' will, is consciousness? Just some kind of afflatus given off by three pounds of wetware? If so - if our conscious lives are nothing but the meniscus covering what our brains and bodies are up to, well then, isn't that some glorious meniscus? It may not tell us what to do, but it does tell us what what we do means - oh, and what beauty is. Couldn't it be that we need the experience of what Wegner and others call "perceived control," at least as a model of voluntary behavior, to get on with our lives and to have our achievements recognized and to be instructed by our failures? (Doesn't Harris enjoy his success? I bet he does.) Finally, what happens to traditional qualities of character like courage, villainy, leadership? Poof! However correct Harris's position may be - and I believe that his basic thesis must indeed be correct - it seems to me a sadder truth than he wants to realize. In Harris's view, 'free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making.' Daniel Menaker is the author, most recently, of "A Good Talk."

In a brilliant and concise book, the co-founder of Project Reason argues that free will is an illusion. Harris (The Moral Landscape, 2010, etc.) contends that while most of us feel like we have free will, everything that we seem to choose to do is the result of a chain of causes over which we have no ultimate control--synapses, neural chemistry and genetic predispositions, as well as past events and our environment. Harris, who has a background in neuroscience, relies on that discipline and personal introspection. The neuroscience is impressive. In lab experiments in which subjects were asked to make decisions as regions of their brains were monitored, scientists could see that a decision had been made 7 to 10 seconds before the subject was consciously aware of it. The introspection argument is equally powerful, and Harris points out that much of our life is based on luck and that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand. He argues that accepting that free will is an illusion will help us to create a more ethical society. Currently, our justice system presumes free will, punishing under the assumption that given the same circumstances, an individual could have chosen differently. Exceptions are made for insanity, brain tumors, etc., all of which presume that the individual's free will has been compromised. However, if we assume that free will is illusory--i.e., that criminals are acting outside of their own volition--the question becomes how to deal with offenders and how to protect society. Harris also asks what this conception means for an individual's sense of self. Short enough to be read in a single sitting and provocative enough to arouse outrage and rebuttals.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. Excerpted from Free Will by Sam Harris All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.