Free Will

I'm a huge Sam Harris fan - his "Waking Up" podcast is consistently in my weekly listens and the episode with Eric Weinstein remains one of my favorite pieces of audio. However, this book is a huge letdown. It is either poorly written, intentionally hyperbolic or both. It's like a lazy blog post written after a night of drinking.Sam has a deep background in science and neuroscience, so it was startling and disappointing to see him write a manifesto that begins with a thesis and then back-fills it with nothing but personal anecdotes and off-hand observations to support it. He seems to think of free will as something that can only exist in a vacuum - completely devoid of context, internal or external forces, influences or stimuli. He simultaneously embraces the tenants of determinism while dismissing it. He constantly asks the reader/listener "why did you make a decision in your life?" and then removes all agency from our choices by ignoring anything in our collective experience which could inform that choice.A great example of this comes when Sam reminisces about his past involvement in martial arts and his decision to quit. He deliberately asks "why did I do this?" Instead of reasoning through his mindset at the time, the increased value of other interests, the condition of his environment, his own emotional state, etc, he lazily concludes he doesn't know.The whole book is intellectually lazy and sets this discussion of free will back years. If you're a real Sam fan, do yourself a favor and skip this.

This is not really a book--it takes about 20 minutes to read. Yet, Dr. Harris, who is a very good writer, makes some interesting points. Since functional magnetic resonance imaging shows that a person's decision to move is registered in the brain several hundred milliseconds before we may be consciously aware of it and our thoughts appear to us without our conscious control, these facts suggest to him that we have no free will.Then what is meditation about? The point of meditation is to watch our thoughts arise and not do anything with them (don't believe, don't disbelieve them, don't be carried away from observing them). It is obvious that this implies there is choice. If one is able to disassociate to some degree from our thinking, therefore not "biting" into our seemingly randomly generated thoughts, we are certainly free to ignore them or, even more interesting, we can discover that the world can be seen without the structure of presupposition.It may be true that if someone has no insight into the workings of their mind, he is pushed, pulled and apparently controlled by conditioned, yet random thinking, peculiar to his/her own unique situation in time and space. But that's like saying meat can only be eaten raw, which was true until we learned to control fire. We do have ways of freeing ourselves from "acting upon" our thinking and this ability will, in fact, generate other thought processes that go beyond our present understanding of mind, either as a "free agent" or as Dr.Harris suggests, a programmed machine.

1. Sam Harris thinks that a glioblastoma tumor destroyed brain has implications on whether a healthy functioning Brain has free will.2. When asked to think of a random city your mind obeys. Sam Harris thinks that since there is no basis for Why you came up with a random city this just proves free will. Doesn't the goal of thinking of a random city by definition mean you shouldn't have a base? I don't think Sam Harris thought this through.3. Sam Harris thinks this about conservatives "...one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments." I have no idea which conservatives he's talking about. I know these conservatives don't exist.4. The Libet experiments are a joke

I was initially skeptical to even start this book, thinking that free will is one of those philosophical questions “destined” to never be resolved. However, after reading this short book I am convinced that free will in a sense in which I thought I had it is just not there. And this was quite an eye opener.I have since read several other books and scholarly papers arguing both for and against the existence of free will, but nothing compelled me to disagree with any of Sam Harris's arguments and conclusions. (among the books that I've read are the compilation of scholarly essays called "Oxford Handbook Free Will", Steven Pinker's books "The Blank Slate" and "How the Mind Works").One popular review here mentions that the book is interesting in the beginning but then not so much - personally I found every page informative and very well written.Highly recommend.

‘Free will’ requires there to be a central chooser, a ‘self’, and there isn’t one! A terrifying notion to many, because of long cultural belief that we exist as independent entities that can garner praise and blame, without which seemingly looms an abyss of anarchy, chaos, nonexistence. But the fact is that we always ARE here and now, no matter what we believe; and right/wrong and good/bad remain as qualities of behavior, the particulars varying from culture to culture. Nothing to fear besides a change of perspective, self-image, loss of false beliefs.Inseparable from the universe, conditioned from the “big bang” to conception to physical death, free will for us is but an illusory concept. Then what is it that makes choices? The entire universe! In fact ‘you’ and ‘I’ exist only as ever-changing thoughts and feelings, moving processes in space-time, present participles rather than nouns: doing, thinking, etc., each in a unique way. Our freedom consists in deserving of neither praise nor blame, since what we do is (unpredictably, to a lesser or greater extent) inevitable. We are all constant change as mortal object of consciousness, stillness as mysterious subject.

I've read all six of Sam Harris's books in the last few months, and picking a favourite would be like asking a mother to pick her favourite child, but if I had to rank them from "best" to just "excellent", Free Will would come near the top.Drawing on his expertise as both a neuroscientist and an experienced meditator, Harris explores the age-old philosophical question, "do we have free will? Are we truly the conscious authors of our actions, or are we just fixed-track automatons living under the delusion that we have control?" The question itself is nothing new, and numerous answers have been offered over the years, ranging ranging from the interesting and insightful to the confusing, meaningless, and masturbatory. Can Harris bring anything new to the table? To me: yes.Granted, I have no formal training in philosophy and am not familiar with the huge body of work that already exists on this subject, but Free Will isn't intended to be an all-encompassing philosophical treatise to be kept on dusty university library shelves and only ever pondered by PhDs. It's a succinct and incisive opinion piece that's open to all comers, and I found Harris's arguments to be eye-opening and authoritative - delivered with his trademark ability to steamroll any intellectual opponent in his path.Without meaning to spoil the ending, Harris's own answer to the question "do we have free will?" is a resounding "no". His arguments have been formulated in both the philosophy department and the research lab - and I found them convincing from all angles. We don't choose our thoughts - our thoughts simple arise in the brain uninvited, and anyone who's ever tried just 5 minutes of meditation can tell you first-hand how difficult it is to get even a hint of control over the contents of our own heads. Recent advances in brain imaging have also shown that we're able to predict with high accuracy the decisions a person is going to make *long before the person in question feels like they've actually made the decision.* If other people can predict our actions before we even know them ourselves, what space does this leave for free will as the genesis of those actions? I'm not sure there's any, and reading this book has made me acutely aware of just how little of the behaviour I consider to be "me" is the result of conscious choice - if that choice could ever be said to be "conscious" at all.My main criticism of this book is that it's very short - more of a pamphlet than a book - but at £2.99 for the Kindle version, it's not a major complaint. Also, if you've read "Waking Up" by the same author, there's a fair amount of overlap between the two books (including a few passages that seem be copied and pasted directly from one book to the other), so you may get the occasional sense of deja vu as you read Free Will, but its "exclusive" sections are more than enough to justify the low cost and the short amount of time it will take you to read it.Read this book. It's not like you have a choice.

Interesting read, but slightly disappointed.He makes the point that our current physics understanding allows no room at all for free will - though actually he doesn't really make that point, he starts from there. But then, he says that since we have no free will, we should alter our approach to things like the criminal justice system and punishment (how can you punish someone who had no choice in their actions?). Well OK, but hang on, we have no free will, so how can we decide to alter our approach - since we have no free will to make that decision?He also says there is still room for taking a moral approach to life - but I could not see his logic, the same argument would surely apply.It seems to me that having or not having free will is like being a bit pregnant - you either are or you aren't, there is no halfway house. Either I had a choice as to whether to write this review, or I didn't. If I did have a choice, things may have influenced me, but in the end the choice was mine to balance the influences. But if I have no free will, there are no choices to be made.Nonetheless, interesting to read and thought provoking - which is surely the point, and quite succinct and short.I agree with others though that the quality of the binding and page cutting leaves a bit to be desired.

Very short, not an easy read. I have become convinced by his arguments, but if you asked me to repeat or explain the reasoning, I would really struggle!I think more effort could have gone into dumbing down the content a bit - and I don't consider myself to be your average dumdum. I wouldn't mind, but the book's packaging and marketing seems more commercial than the content inside.

This booked served to be my introduction to Sam Harris and immediately short-listed him as one of my favourite authors, a title he has now well and truly claimed. I cant be sure if the qualities i find in his writing are all that objective, or weather his chosen methods of formulating and communicating an argument with poetic intellectualism is subjectively canonical to me. Either way, through-out this text i found myself pausing in reflection, stopping to reconstitute my understanding of the nature of consciousness. This book is an easily recommendable, short and damning final word in the free-will debate.

Sam Harris takes on one of the biggest questions about what we think defines humanity. Free Will.Surely that's a given, if we don't have free will, then what can we be, Without Free Will, then we are simply robots?As always, Sam Harris doesn't disappoint, he will answer this question in the most informative and truthful way that he can discover, no matter what the outcome !As the brilliant scientist Richard Feynman once said ""Nature is there, and she's gonna come out the way she is"Free Will as it seems, is an illusion (which is not really that surprising if you consider the whole nature/nurture process), but to be absolutely critical of Sam's interpretation, he does not go far enough.Sam still eludes to the perception that although free will is eradicated, somehow, what we actually do in real life, is still important in an individual sense ?i.e. - this post would not have happened if I didn't actually write it, and post it !Is that not the point ? This isn't written and posted due to "Free Will", but simply a pre-conceived response, which was actually determined before I was born.So that's determinism then ?As a post script, I have to yet again thank Sam Harris for producing the most thought compelling books. posts, webcasts et al .What a pleasure it is to read everything he produces (whether I completely agree or not, but 99% do agree)We don't have enough critical thinkers at the moment, or they simply just don't get the "airplay".If you haven't read this book, then please do, and take your time to understand the concepts, as they may be disturbing to what you accept as your own self. It may frighten you, and it may astound you, but whichever way, it will enlighten you !