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…