Naturally, I am fairly silly with anticipation for this book. Sadly it’s for pretty poor reasons, as I think he’s going to mirror my exact position — albeit with much more time spent on his arguments and better prose.

I do look forward to having some additional support for my position, though. He’ll spend time gathering data to support his arguments, which I do only in the form of a link to this or that.

I basically anticipate an extremely high-quality summary of my numerous articles, posts, and debate interactions on this topic.

Here’s what Gutting, commenters above, and many others are missing:

Even if we assume (for the sake of argument or by actually accepting the premise) that 100% predictability is NOT inconsistent with free will, the key fact is that at no point in time is the individual able to alter the course leading to the pre-conditions that determine the decision or action in question.

Let’s say anyone who knows me well (and I myself) could predict with virtual certainty that, if I were handed a gun right now and given the option to shoot someone on the street, I would choose NOT to do so. That’s because of “the kind of person I am” (and the fact that I’m not in any altered/abnormal mental state), which some would argue means it’s still part of free will.

But “the kind of person I am” is not something over which I’ve ever had any control, and neither are any of the physical conditions (inside and outside my brain) immediately preceding and causing (determining) my decision. If you disagree, tell me at what point in time I could have asserted any control. We have the physical conditions existing immediately prior to (and causing) the decision, and those conditions were caused by the conditions immediately preceding that state, and so on all the way back to the twinkle in my father’s eye.

This commenter has it right, in my opinion. See my Two-lever argument.

The experiments show that, prior to the moment of conscious choice, there are correlated brain events that allow scientists to predict, with 60 to 80 percent probability, what the choice will be.  Of course this might mean that the choices are partially determined by the brain events but still ultimately free.   But suppose later experiments predict our choices with 100 percent probability?   How could a choice be free if a scientist could predict it with certainty?

But my wife might be 100 percent certain that, given a choice between chicken livers and strip steak for dinner, I will choose steak.  Does that mean that my choice isn’t free?  Couldn’t she be sure that I will freely choose steak?

Perhaps, though, what’s important about the experiments is not that choices are predictable but that they are caused.   How could a choice that is caused be free?   Wouldn’t that mean that something made it happen?  On the other hand, how could a choice that was not caused be free?   If a choice has no cause at all, it is simply a random event, something that just occurred out of the blue.  Why say that a choice is mine if it doesn’t arise from something occurring in my mind (or brain)? And if a choice isn’t mine, how can we say I made it?

A great piece on one of my favorite topics.

The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes’s outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters¹. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

“The first thought we had was ‘we have to check if this is real’,” says Haynes. “We came up with more sanity checks than I’ve ever seen in any other study before.”

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person’s actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will — thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view — and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t — and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.

There is a distinction between voluntary and involuntary actions, of course, but it does nothing to support the common idea of free will (nor does it depend upon it). The former are associated with felt intentions (desires, goals, expectations, etc.) while the latter are not. All of the conventional distinctions we like to make between degrees of intent — from the bizarre neurological complaint of alien hand syndrome to the premeditated actions of a sniper — can be maintained: for they simply describe what else was arising in the mind at the time an action occurred. A voluntary action is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out, while an involuntary action isn’t. Where our intentions themselves come from, however, and what determines their character in every instant, remains perfectly mysterious in subjective terms. Our sense of free will arises from a failure to appreciate this fact: we do not know what we will intend to do until the intention itself arises. To see this is to realize that you are not the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. This insight does not make social and political freedom any less important, however. The freedom to do what one intends, and not to do otherwise, is no less valuable than it ever was.

While all of this can sound very abstract, it is important to realize that the question of free will is no mere curio of philosophy seminars. A belief in free will underwrites both the religious notion of “sin” and our enduring commitment to retributive justice. The 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). Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behavior in question.

This is *precisely* what I argued in Absolute vs. Practical Free Will..

The problem with compatibilism, as I see it, is that it tends to ignore that people’s moral intuitions are driven by a deeper, metaphysical notion of free will. That is, the free will that people presume for themselves and readily attribute to others (whether or not this freedom is, in Dennett’s sense, “worth wanting”) is a freedom that slips the influence of impersonal, background causes. The moment you show that such causes are effective—as any detailed account of the neurophysiology of human thought and behavior would— proponents of free will can no longer locate a plausible hook upon which to hang their notions of moral responsibility. The neuroscientists Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen make this same point:

Most people’s view of the mind is implicitly dualist and libertarian and not materialist and compatibilist . . . [I]ntuitive free will is libertarian, not compatibilist. That is, it requires the rejection of determinism and an implicit commitment to some kind of magical mental causation . . . contrary to legal and philosophical orthodoxy, determinism really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them (Greene J & J. Cohen. 2004).

Another post by Sam Harris on free will–this one a response to his previous one that caused a wave of hate mail.

It’s stunning to me how forcefully people reject reality just because they dislike its appearance.

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment. While we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. In fact, by merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your internal states and motivations than you are. And yet most of us still feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

The problem is that no account of causality leaves room for free will—thoughts, moods, and desires of every sort simply spring into view—and move us, or fail to move us, for reasons that are, from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable. Why did I use the term “inscrutable” in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word “opaque” come to mind? Well, it just didn’t—and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that “opaque” is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.

The topic of free will is one of great interest to me, so it was pleasantly surprising to discover earlier this year, while reading The Moral Landscape that Sam Harris shares my views on the subject almost perfectly.

It’s important to note that I’ve been following him for many years now but without having heard anything about his position on this. So for his views to so tightly mesh with mine was both stunning as well as vindicating. I openly admit that I rest strongly in the realm of bias here at this point, as I don’t see how both of us–me a decently smart guy who’s read and thought a lot, and Sam Harris the neuroscientist with a philosophy degree from Stanford–can be wrong about this.

Or, to be more accurate, I don’t see how either of our arguments can be wrong, but both of us having come to the same conclusion (with countless others as well, of course) it just seems that much more unlikely.

If you have even a passing interest in this topic, I suggest you read this blog entry of his, which is actually a restatement of his section on free will in the book.

I look forward to comments.