Sam Harris - Free will

 

Free will is an illusion.
Our wills are simply not of our own making.
Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which
we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control.
We do not have the freedom we think we have.
Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent.
Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them,
or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
If a man’s choice to shoot the president is determined by a certain pattern of neural activity,
which is in turn the product of prior causes
—perhaps an unfortunate coincidence of bad genes, an unhappy childhood, lost sleep, and cosmic-ray bombardment
—what can it possibly mean to say that his will is “free”?
No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom.
Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this.
The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions:
(1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and
(2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present.
Both of these assumptions are false.
But the deeper truth is that free will doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us
—and introspection soon proves as hostile to the idea as the laws of physics are.
Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference)
and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds.
A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny, and you might observe that you no more decide the next thought you think than the next thought I write.

 

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