This is a very brief treatment by prominent nonbeliever Sam Harris, reasoning that free will is an illusion. He promulgates a deterministic viewpoint of the inner workings of the mind and their inevitable manifestations in the world. According to this reasoning, the psychopaths among us are preposterously unlucky, our thoughts do not arise de novo (in fact, in a reductionist fashion we cannot even determine whence they came), and anything that happens could only have happened in just such a way.

If there is a limitation here, it lies in the book's brevity. Harris doesn't build up enough steam to convince someone for whom this is a first consideration of the origins of free will. And to a cursory reader it would almost seem to lend credence to a belief in an omniscient superintelligence, something Harris certainly does not believe. Still, it is the easiest, and laziest, way by which someone would rush to attribute authorship to our ultimately authorless thoughts and actions.

Still, there is an elegant argument to be made and considered herein. In its conclusion, Harris reminds us why a deterministic worldview does not subtract from the beauty of our experiences or negate our responsibility for choices. Instead, the conditions from which those choices arose are not of our own devising, and oftentimes remain utterly unknowable.