Free Will

by Sam Harris

Had we been close to the Petit family, many of us would feel entirely justified in killing these monsters with our own hands.

Whatever their conscious motives, these men cannot know why they are as they are. Nor can we account for why we are not like them.

I cannot take

credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath.

if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would...

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.

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”?

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.

Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes.

The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness,

that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.

you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what

you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it.

all. Imagine what it would be like to see the time log of these mental events, alongside video of your associated behavior, demonstrating that the experimenters knew what you would think and do just before you did. You would, of course, continue to feel free in every present moment, but the fact that someone else could report what you were about to think and do would expose this feeling for what it is: an illusion.

It makes sense to treat a man who enjoys murdering children differently from one who accidentally hit and killed a child with his car—because the conscious intentions of the former give us a lot of information about how he is likely to behave in the future. But where intentions themselves come from, and what determines their character in every instance, remains perfectly mysterious in

subjective terms.

We do not know what we intend to do until the intenti...

the idea of free will emerges from a felt experience.

one finds three main approaches to the problem: determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism.

Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware.

Assuming that violent criminals have such freedom, we reflexively blame them for their actions. But without it, the place for our blame suddenly vanishes, and even the most terrifying sociopaths begin to seem like victims

The moment we catch sight of the stream of causes that precede their conscious decisions, reaching back into childhood and beyond, their culpability begins to disappear.

Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not.

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Your body is doing these things, of course, but if it “decided” to do otherwise, you would be the victim of these changes, rather than their cause.

By eating beef, we consume the grass the cow ate, and the grass ate sunlight. So the yogi is no liar after all. But that’s not the ability the yogi was advertising, and his actual claim remains dishonest (or delusional). This is the trouble with compatibilism. It solves the problem of “free will” by ignoring it.

People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.

Within certain limits, I seem to choose what I pay attention to. The sound of the leaf blower intrudes, but I can seize the spotlight of my attention in the next moment and aim it elsewhere.

The phrase “free will” describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness.

This is not to say that conscious awareness and deliberative thinking serve no purpose.

As Dan Dennett and many others have pointed out, people generally confuse determinism with fatalism. This gives rise to questions like “If everything is determined, why should I do anything? Why not just sit back and see what happens?” This is pure confusion. To sit back and see what happens is itself a choice that will produce its own consequences. It is also extremely difficult to do: Just try staying in bed all day waiting for something

to happen; you will find yourself assailed by the impulse to get up and do something, which will require increasingly heroic efforts to resist.

And the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean th...

Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.

You might have a story to tell about why things were different this time around, but it would be nothing more than a post hoc description of events that you did not control.

You wanted to lose weight for years. Then you really wanted to. What’s the difference? Whatever it is, it’s not a difference that you brought into being.

To declare my “freedom” is tantamount to saying, “I don’t know why I did it, but it’s the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don’t mind doing it.”

You can consider your first marriage, which ended in divorce, to be a “failure,” or you can view it as a circumstance that caused you to grow in ways that were crucial to your future happiness. Does this freedom of interpretation require free will? No. It simply suggests that different ways of thinking have different consequences. Some thoughts are depressing and disempowering; others inspire us.

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?

You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.

It is surely conceivable that knowing (or emphasizing) certain truths about the human mind could have unfortunate psychological and/or cultural consequences.

losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics—by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.

A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention—may radically transform one’s life.

The belief in free will has given us both the religious conception of “sin”

The U.S. Supreme Court has called free will a “universal and persistent” foundation for our system of law, distinct from “a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system” (United States v. Grayson, 1978).

Once we recognize that even the most terrifying predators are, in a very real sense, unlucky to be who they are, the logic of hating (as opposed to fearing) them begins to unravel.

Anyone born with the soul of a psychopath has been profoundly unlucky.

Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.

Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity—and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics.