Free Will by Sam Harris

In this book, Sam Harris argues that the idea of free will is not only unsound; it is also contrary to our experience. For example, he says that, in the morning, he sometimes drinks coffee and sometimes tea, and when he makes the decision, it is just based on how he feels at the moment, which is caused by his genetic inheritance and life history, so it is not really a free choice.

Here and throughout the book, he fails to distinguish free will from volition (which is just will, without the freedom), so he fails to see that his examples involve volition. We can make this distinction by giving examples.

A dog following a trail sniffs in one place for a time and then decides which direction to go in.  This is volition without free choice; once the dog figures out which way the trail goes, it necessarily wills to go in that direction, rather than making a free choice of which direction to go in.  Volition evolved to let animals gather more information before acting, which lets them act more effectively: the delay lets the dog spend enough time to figure out which direction the trail goes, so it is more likely to find the prey it is tracking.  Likewise, Harris’ delay lets him figure out whether he is really in the mood for coffee of for tea before deciding which to do, and the decision is determined by his mood rather than being free.

By contrast, free will involves making a deliberate decision based on reasoning about evidence in the world or about our own experience. For example, when I was in my twenties, I read some books about nutrition, so I decided to eat whole grain bread and pasta rather than the refined grains I grew up on. I have generally followed that decision ever since, though I occasionally give in to my impulses and have some particularly delicious looking bit of bread made with white flower. When I made that decision, I was not being controlled by my mood: I decided that I should eat whole grains based on the scientific evidence that they are healthier.

Sometimes we make this sort of decision by reflecting on our own experience. For example, I might spend an hour reading comments on Twitter and realize that it is a waste of time and that I shouldn’t do it in the future - but occasionally, I might give in to temptation and binge on Twitter comments again.

After we have made this sort of decision, we can sometimes limit our volition based on it. For example, Harris gives in to his mood when he decides whether to have coffee or tea for breakfast, but if he were in the mood to have a few shots of whiskey for breakfast, he probably would resist that impulse. But sometimes we cannot limit our volition based on our decisions: for example, I occasionally have white bread.

Some people are chronically unable to limit their volition based on their decisions. For example, an alcoholic may realize that his drinking is destroying him, based both on scientific evidence and on his own experience, but he may not be able to stop drinking.

In cases like this, people traditionally said that the person was not free, that he was a slave to his impulses, unable to do what he himself had decided that he should do. The old-fashioned way of putting it was that he was a slave to his passions; the word "passion" was originally the opposite of "action," and it implied that the passions were not your own actions but things that happen to you and that you accept passively.  

Of course, Harris cannot make this sort of distinction. He would say that both this man's moods and his deliberate decisions were caused by his genetic inheritance and his past experiences and environment. Though he claims that our experience does not support the idea of free will, his examples don’t include any experience more complex than his decision to have coffee or tea on the morning, which depends on the impulse of the moment. He cannot deal with the experience we have all had of conflicts between our deliberate decisions and our impulses: we make deliberate decisions about what we should do and are tempted to give into the impulses of the moment rather than abiding by our own deliberate decisions.

The underlying problem is that Harris believes uncritically and unthinkingly in what philosophers call “physicalism,” the belief that the laws of physics that we currently know can explain everything.

Sometimes, he seems to go backward to the deterministic physics of the nineteenth century. For example, he says we cannot blame criminals for their crimes because “…if I were to trade places with one of these people atom for atom, I would be him: there is no extra part of me that could decide…to resist the impulse to victimize other people” (p.4).  Usually, he recognizes that some physical events are random, as twentieth-century physics showed, but he says that, if we act based on some random physical event, then we are not acting freely any more than if we act on based on determined physical events.

But he doesn’t consider the possibility that matter has some other property, which physics has not yet discovered, that lets us make deliberate decisions freely.

In the nineteenth century, physicists believed that the phenomena they observed were determined.  In the twentieth century, physicists believed that the phenomena the observed were either determined or random. It is possible that some day, physicists will discover that matter can also behave in some other way that lets us make deliberate decisions.

Physicalism is an occupational hazard of cognitive scientists and of neuroscientists like Harris, because they create models of the mind or study the brain using today’s physics, so they have an intellectual vested interest in believing that today’s physics can explain everything. But physicalism is a completely irrational position, because we know that contemporary physics is not complete. Today’s physicists have not developed a theory that reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics. They do not understand dark energy, which makes the expansion of the universe accelerate. They do not understand dark matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe. Physicist recognize what they don’t know, but cognitive scientists and neuroscientists don’t.

At one point, Harris claims that his argument doesn’t depend on materialism: “even if the human mind were made of soul-stuff, nothing about my argument would change. The unconscious operation of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does” (p. 12).

He is just showing how out of touch with our actual experience. Just as we can observe that our decision about drinking coffee or tea in the morning is based on our mood, we can observe the operation of our mind making deliberate decisions, which is conscious and which is the basis of our freedom.