Sam Harris recently had Sean Carroll on his Waking Up podcast, and to my delight they arrived pretty quickly at the free will topic. You can read more of my free will content here. Carroll is both a physicist and a compatibilist, which was both surprising and exciting. It was surprising because I naturally expect hard science types…

Many people make the following argument in favor of free will: I know I have it because I, and billions of other people in the world, experience having it every day. This seems compelling enough, but there is a fundamental mistake being made here, and that’s the difference between experiencing something vs. that something actually being real. It’s…

I’ve argued against Dennett’s position on free will multiple times in the past. I’ve always thought his argument was a bit squirmish. It was opaque, and it made one argument while appearing to all but a few to mean something else entirely. In short, he was agreeing that the free will what both incompatibilists and regular people believe…

There is a common narrative put forth by compatibilists that goes something like this: Even if free will can be broken into subcomponents and disproved individually, that doesn’t make it false. Eddy Nahmias, a professor at Georgia State University, puts it this way in a New York Times piece where he defends compatibilism: The sciences of the mind…

I’m currently engaging in an email discussion on free will with Billie Pritchett, a keen thinker and writer on many philosophical topics. He is posting our exchange on his blog, which you should definitely take a look at. [ An Exchange with Daniel Miessler About Free Will ] The conversation has illuminated a key point for me in…

What follows comes from a long-running debate with two friends on free will. We’ve made progress recently (after around 5 years), and now we’re getting into a distinction between two different types of choice, freedom, and responsibility. Here’s my friend: (1) We have the capacity to make choices that are conscious, voluntary, and deliberative. (2) This is NOT…

Even after hearing, and often being convinced by, my arguments against free will, many still wonder why a belief in it is bad in practice. I awoke just now with an example: Pride. When I speak of pride here, I speak not of being a proud mother or shoemaker or football coach. As with most things, moderation is…

There’s no freedom in a deterministic universe There’s no freedom in a universe where our actions are random So why would we have freedom if we combined the two? There are few things more “hand wavy” than this. It constitutes a genuine faith-based claim to think, given our knowledge of the universe, that we as humans make free…

It’s pretty easy to argue that we don’t have free will, but it’s as least as easy to see that we do in fact experience having it. One argument I often hear about how free will cannot be an illusion is that evolution obviously selected for it, and that nobody has given a good explanation for why. Let…

My latest volley in a very long discussion about free will… — Explain to me the flaw in the following deductive argument: Outcomes are determined by the laws of physics (randomness included) We don’t control the laws of physics Therefore we don’t control outcomes As a result, any sensation we experience of controlling outcomes must be an illusion…

“Quantum physics makes predictions to 14 decimal places,” Doyle says. “It’s the most accurate of all mathematical physical theories.” Randomness and even free will, it appears, are fully compatible with some highly precise determinations.via Philosopher and scientist Robert O. Doyle has a new model of free will | Harvard Magazine Sep-Oct 2012. Someone tell me how we’re getting…

At a recent team meetup in Atlanta I had the chance to talk to someone who actually enjoyed hearing about my perspective on free will, a moral framework, and a quasi-universal method of evaluating political propositions. Normally, peoples’ eyes glaze over at a one or two levels of depth–either because they’re lost or because it’s just not interesting…

Image from skeptically.org In my ongoing efforts to convince others that free will is an illusion, I have found an argument vector that I’ve not yet encountered: If you believe in cause and effect, i.e. that all outcomes are the result of previous conditions, and you accept that all causes existed before you were born, then it impossible…

Sam Harris’s book on free will came out today and I read it during dinner (it’s a short read). Here’s what I had to say about the book back in December when he announced it: I basically anticipate an extremely high-quality summary of my numerous articles, posts, and debate interactions on this topic. Without arrogance or humility I…

Before going into my qualms with Daniel Dennett’s capability/evitibility-based free will, I want to point out that most supporters of Daniel Dennett’s brand of free will don’t realize that he agrees that we don’t have my brand of free will. What brand is that you ask? The absolute kind. The kind where people are free to step outside…

There was a recent article on the New York Times regarding free will. I posted it here earlier and I just finished posting a comment in the thread. It follows below: — The author succeeds in bringing life back to the debate, but he doesn’t make any new progress. The issue, as a few commenters have touched on,…

From Edge.org: 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…

Many believe the discussion of free will is pointless. This is usually because one believes it’s been settled (for the religious who believe God gave it to us) or because one believes it doesn’t matter (for the secular types who believe there is no practical benefit to having the discussion). I will attempt to convince the second group…

I write a lot about free will, and people don’t understand why. I’ll try here again to explain. Simply, one’s stance on whether or not we choose our actions directly vs. whether our choices are the product of genes and environment deeply saturates all of a person’s political beliefs. Here are a few examples: Rewarding the Rich: If…

I have, over the last few years, put out a number of arguments against the possibility of free will. My most popular so far has been that of my Two-Lever Argument, which can be found here. I now wish to make a separate, distinct argument argument against free will called the Zero-Control argument. The Zero-Control argument asks one…