In a recent short book neuroscientist Sam Harris pulls no punches on one of humanity’s oldest philosophical problems: “Free will is an illusion.”1
We don’t exist as immaterial conscious controllers, Harris claims, but are instead entirely physical beings whose decisions and behaviors are the fully caused products of the brain and body. Even having an immaterial soul as many suppose, Harris notes, would not give us free will: “The unconscious operation of a soul would grant you no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does.” He thus concludes:“We are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way people suppose…The idea that we, as conscious beings, are deeply responsible for the character of our mental lives and subsequent behavior is simply impossible to map onto reality.”2
After centuries of disputation philosophers have identified several different positions on the question of free will. Incompatibilists hold that free will conflicts with determinism— the idea that our behavior is fully determined by antecedent causes such as fate, acts of God, or laws of nature.3
Incompatibilists are themselves split into two camps. Libertarians hold that we have free will since humans transcend cause and effect in ways that make us ultimately responsible. In an actual situation as it occurred, we could have done otherwise.4
Determinists hold that we do not have free will, either because determinism is true (we could not have done otherwise in an actual situation as it played out) or indeterminism (randomness) doesn’t give us control or responsibility.5
Both of these groups are opposed by compatibilists, who argue that free will is compatible with determinism, or indeterminism for that matter.6
A Physicist’s Perspective
In this article, I will argue from a physics perspective that although quantum mechanics reveals that the universe is fundamentally indeterministic and that randomness plays a much bigger role in nature than most people realize, the human brain is basically a Newtonian machine. That is, quantum indeterminacy cannot be called up to provide a break with determinism that can be interpreted as some kind of free will. However,…
♦continue reading: from Skeptic 17(4), 2012, pp. 15-19
1. Sam Harris, Free Will, (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 5.
2. Ibid, pp. 12-13.
3. Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free
Will, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 23.
4. Ibid, pp. 32-33.
5. Ibid, p. 5.
6. Ibid, p. 12.
