Free Will [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

Sam Harris (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 6, 2012

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.

Editorial Reviews

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, and Lying. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing has been published in over fifteen languages. Dr. Harris and his work have been discussed in The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Time, and many other publications. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. 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 www.samharris.org.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; Original edition (March 6, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1451683405
• ISBN-13: 978-1451683400
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (259 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,004 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Free Will & Determinism
  • #8 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Sociology
  • #43 in Books > Science & Math > History & Philosophy

More About the Author

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, and Free Will. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over fifteen languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a Co-Founder 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 Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

186 of 220 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brief, cogent, provocative and convincing. March 6, 2012

By Greg TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

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.

31 of 37 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A good start, but could use some fleshing out. March 11, 2012

By Norman Bearrentine

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

It's great to have Sam on board the no-free-will train, but for those of us who have been riding it for a while, the scenery may seem largely familiar. Still, the idea of not having free will is so difficult to grasp, even for those who have been struggling with it for some time, that Sam's arguments, analogies, and the recent research he presents are likely to be helpful. It's a short book for such a big topic, but its brevity and clarity may make it more accessible to some than a work of more depth might be.

On the other hand, it would have been fairly easy to give his arguments a broader perspective. For example, he says:

"People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about."(pp. 31-32, all references are to the Kindle Edition.)

In fact, people of all cultures and all times have not necessarily had this feeling. The Greeks seem to have laid the foundation for the idea, and it primarily evolved as a topic of Western thought. Seeing free will as a cultural, historical phenomenon can undermine the sense of inevitability that accompanies it in Western discourse.

Free will is part of a complex of misconceptions about how our brains work, and while Sam scratches the surface of some of these in a scattered way, these misconceptions reinforce each other, making it difficult to root one out unless all of them are exposed.

The limitations of conscious thought are part of the complex: we are conscious of only some of the end products of infinitely complex unconscious brain processes, and this is a topic Sam covers very well:

"Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose."(p. 17)

This failure to appreciate the limitations of consciousness leads to further misconceptions, one of which is the sense of a unified self. Sam mentions that "People have many competing desires,"(p. 22) which would have been a great place to bring up the idea of multiple selves, or what I call "situational identity." Understanding how competing desires arise and how the idea of a unified self obscures their origins could further undermine the notion of free will, and help clarify how "one of these opposing desires inexplicably triumphs over its rival".(p. 22)

Language is complicit in many of our misconceptions, not just those involving free will. Its limitations allow us to imagine entities that don't exist, and no where is this more significant than in the idea of a unified self.

If Sam had explored the topics I've mentioned more thoroughly, he might have further loosened the grip of the idea of free will, and he would have had a broader base from which to explore the benefits of giving up that idea. As he says, "Getting behind our 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)."(pp. 52-53)

If you'd like to go further behind your thoughts and feelings and pursue the implications, check out my essay on free will: http://normbear.com/Html/lifeafterthedeathoffreewill.html

68 of 85 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb!! March 6, 2012

By J. Gomez TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.