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Free Will [Deckle Edge] Paperback – March 6, 2012

by Sam Harris (Author)

4.3 4,785 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion.

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.

Print length

96 pages
Language

English
Publication date

March 6, 2012
Dimensions

5.63 x 0.3 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9781451683400
ISBN-13

978-1451683400
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From the Publisher

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, 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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1451683405
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; First Edition (March 6, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 96 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781451683400
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1451683400
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.63 x 0.3 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #17,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #15 in Free Will & Determinism Philosophy
- #17 in Sociology & Religion
- #48 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)

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4.3 4,785 ratings

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Sam Harris

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Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz), The Four Horseman (with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens), and Making Sense. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and The Annals of Neurology, among others. He also hosts the Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.

Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. Sam has created the Waking Up Course for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.

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LenZen

Strong Arguments Against All Notions of Free Will

Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2023

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In this book, renowned public intellectual and atheist Sam Harris concisely makes a strong case against all notions of free will.

My Prior Beliefs

Before reading this book, it had been about twenty years since I considered whether we have free will. Having some background in math and physics, including quantum mechanics, I spent a few days thinking about how one would define the concept mathematically, presupposing that there are laws of physics. I decided that there could not be a sensible definition without throwing out the notion that there are laws of physics. I further decided that the problem had a minimal practical impact: Even if it was only an illusion, I could still at least seem to make decisions from day to day and should try to make the best ones.

Sam's Case Against Free Will

I read this book to see if I had missed anything: In particular, if there was a definition of free will compatible with there also being inviolable laws of physics. (Saying "inviolable" is redundant: If the laws were violable, they would not be laws. Conversely, if there are laws, their consequences follow out of logical necessity: Even God himself could not change the logical consequences.) From the book, it turns out that Sam Harris also believes that the notion of free will is incoherent in light of the existence of laws of physics. According to Sam, this is the consensus in scientific and philosophical circles. In particular, almost nobody believes in "libertarian" free will, meaning an ability to choose that would imply something other than the laws of physics determine the universe's future state.

Sam's argument against free will is powerful in that it does not presuppose that the universe is deterministic. Sam argues that there is still no room for free will even in a quantum mechanical universe subject to fundamental randomness. The universe may end up in a random state, but the prior state plus randomness, neither of which you control, determine that.

Sam states that most who believe in free will seem to do so because it feels like we have it. Sam rejects this from a couple of angles: First, he asks the reader to introspect closely and answer whether the feelings of free will still feel real after closer thought. Are we really controlling the thoughts popping into our heads, for instance? Why is our choice made at one moment and not another? Sam also appeals to experiments showing brain activity predicting choices that will be made before subjects even feel they are making a choice.

Against Compatibilism

Sam spends a good portion of the book dealing with "compatibilism." This is a notion that free will is possible even if only laws of physics determine the universe's future state. Sam takes compatibilist arguments to either be redefining the idea of free will away from the fundamental question or stating something which can be seen to be false upon deeper introspection.

Societal Consequences

Although not strictly necessary to back his conclusion, Sam discusses the moral, societal, and personal implications of his belief in "no free will." Here he argues that there is a risk of adverse effects from not believing in free will, but he argues that these vanish when one thinks about the issue more deeply. A significant point that Sam makes is that he believes that less belief in free will results in greater compassion. He addresses positive benefits both in terms of secular parts of society: especially the criminal justice system, but, not surprisingly, considering he is an unspoken atheist, he thinks it would also have a positive impact on countering harmful religious beliefs: E.g., although you had no choice regarding your nature, the circumstances of your birth, and your "soul," you should still feel guilty for your failings and are, indeed, maybe even condemned to eternal damnation in some cases.

Summary

In the end, the book reinforced my belief that the notion of free will cannot be made compatible with the existence of laws of physics. I learned what "compatibilism" is and its flaws. I ultimately agree with Sam: upon deeper introspection, we do not even have an illusion of free will. I did not expect to end up believing this going into the book.

Unlike other Sam Harris books like "The Moral Landscape," I agreed with Harris on every point instead of just the vast majority. Given this, I am a bit surprised that Harris believes in consciousness when I do not. I, thus, look forward to reading his thoughts on that subject.

People who do believe in free will will find a strong, concise, and clear case made against it in this book. For those who go in not believing, I suspect they will find the notion even more problematic than they initially thought.

7 people found this helpful

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Ewen King-smith

Do we have free will? Yes and no!

Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2019

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The book’s conclusion is that we do not have free will. In the chapter “Cause and effect” on pages 27 to 30, Sam Harris dismisses the ideas of Martin Heisenberg who argues that we do have free will. I think that both Harris and Heisenberg are correct. I think that the apparent conflict is simply that they have different definitions of free will. For Harris, free will means that a choice between two or more actions should be made consciously. Harris argues that we do not make choices consciously because they have already been made by unconscious mechanisms. I think that Heisenberg would argue that even if the choice is not conscious, we have freely made the choice by unconscious mechanisms. Heisenberg argues that free will is the result of chance events in the brain such as the random release of “vesicles” which transmit signals from one nerve cell to the next in the chain. Harris is critical of this idea, saying “How could the indeterminacy of the initiating event count as the exercise of my free will?”. Below, I will try to present 3 scenarios which I think illustrate how the alternative views of Harris and Heisenberg are compatible, and seem consistent with other views in the book such as the discussion by Tom Clark on Pages 20 to 22.

Scenario 1. I am walking towards a new destination. When I turn a corner, I see that the entrance to the building is hidden directly behind a tree. I need to decide whether to go to the left or right of it but there is no apparent reason to prefer either course. I choose to go to the left, but when I arrive at the entrance, I feel I could have consciously chosen to go to the right. Harris would argue that I would be wrong, the decision had been made unconsciously before I thought I made it consciously. It also seems probable that the decision depended on the random state of my brain just before I felt I made the decision, perhaps even before I turned the corner. But my feeling that I could have chosen to go right was probably correct in another sense – if I had arrived a minute later, my brain would have been in a randomly different state and I might have chosen right rather than left.

Scenario 2. A robot is to be used to check a room or building, of unknown size and shape, for the presence of dangerous radioactive or toxic substances. The robot is placed inside an outside door, which is then closed to prevent the robot escaping to the outside by mistake. Imagine that the program controlling the motion of the robot is deterministic – for example when it strikes a wall or object, it will be reflected in the same way as a rolling ball. In that case, there is a danger that the robot will become stuck in an “infinite loop” if it comes back to the starting point and points in the starting direction. As a simple example, it may head straight for the opposite wall, bounce straight back to the door, and bounce back to its original position, thus repeating this back and forth motion indefinitely (more complicated infinite loops are also possible). A simple solution to this problem is to add a random number generator to the robot’s program so that, for example, when the robot bounces off a wall the return direction is randomized. This will prevent the infinite loop problem and illustrates a simple application of a random choice generator. There are other more sophisticated ways of completely searching a room or building but using a random number generator provides the simplest solution.

Scenario 3. I have moved to a new city and ask my new neighbor where she prefers to shop. She notes that there is a choice of 2 supermarkets, X and Y, but they are in opposite directions so people shop at one or the other. She definitely prefers X. Her judgment seems sound to me, so for several weeks I shop at X. X seems OK to me, but one morning I have the urge to try Y for no apparent reason (perhaps because the random noise in my brain has caused me to favor Y that day). The probable result will be that my neighbor’s opinion will be confirmed and my decision might be seen as a waste of effort. However, there is a small chance, say 10%, that I will be surprised and prefer Y. In that case, I will probably decide to shop at Y all or most of the time. So although the chance of preferring Y was small, the possible gain from finding Y was better can be greater than the probable loss due to finding that X was indeed the better choice, as expected. This illustrates how Heisenberg’s random choice mechanism can be helpful in practice.

In summary, the process of choosing between two (or more) alternative actions may be considered in terms of adding a “signal” and “noise”. The signal is the evidence for preference for one alternative compared with another. In Scenario 1, going left and right were equally preferable so the signal was zero; thus the response would be determined entirely by the noise, with equal probability of left and right. In Scenario 3, the evidence was that supermarket X was better than Y, but the evidence was not so strong that noise from random variations in the brain could not exceed this moderate signal, so Y could be chosen occasionally. As argued above, occasionally choosing the seemingly less preferable alternative can be a sensible choice.

This is an interesting book on an important topic. For those reasons it might deserve 5 stars, but I give it 4 stars because I don’t think it does justice to alternative ideas such as Heisenberg’s.

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thiago

THE SIN and free will are The same

Reviewed in Brazil on March 27, 2023

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Imagination, free will or sin. These are all common sense. These are all ways to try to control you. But if you read this book you will be a little bit more free than were before you read this book.

Upal

Book in excellent condition. Arrived fast.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 5, 2024

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Book in excellent condition. Arrived fast.

DHRAQE

The most important topic we should deal with as human beings

Reviewed in Italy on August 13, 2023

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I strongly suggest reading this short but groundbreaking essay: it may not change your mind, but if it does, your worldview will also change completely and forever. Free to choose, right?

Fabrice

Révélation

Reviewed in France on September 13, 2019

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J'ai acheté ce livre à la suite de la vision d'une vidéo sur youtube de Sam Harris. Certainement contre-intuitif et je me suis retrouvé comme une poule ayant trouvé un os: décontenancé. Plusieurs années après, je suis toujours à la recherche du contraire. C'est devenu un jeu puisque tout contribue à confirmer l'absence de libre arbitre.

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Maja Chesterman

Great read

Reviewed in Australia on November 5, 2022

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This book was very interesting and got me to think about the decisions I make in life and where they originate from. The book was very succinct, which I think is crucial in communicating more difficult topics. Overall a fantastic read, and I love discussing its contents with friends and family. I highly recommend this book!

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