Free Will [Paperback]

This book is in fact an essay (few pages large fonte size), which seems to have been written to cash in on a currently fashionable (probably true) idea that free will doesn't exist.

I bought this book because I was very impressed by the section about Free Will in Harris's The Moral Landscape and I wan't to know more.

Unfortunately the exposition here is very similar to Landscape. If I'm not mistaken, some of the most interesting parts of the text are lifted straight from Landscape.

That doesn't make this essay by any means bad. No, it's fascinating but it should be mentioned that the author is repackaging material from a previous book - something like releasing a single from an LP.

Philosophers debating free will have long understood that the term can be used in many ways, most of which are incoherent. Thus, advocates of "libertarian free will" (founded on the belief that free will requires indeterminism) have had to face the objection that indeterminate events in the brain would be expected to produce randomness, not freedom. And advocates of "compatibilist free will" (founded on the belief that some kinds of free will are compatible with determinism) have had to face other problems, including the one that many people find compatibilism intuitively implausible. Despite these difficulties, most leading philosophers (with a few important exceptions such as Galen Strawson, Derk Pereboom and Ted Honderich), have come to the conclusion that, if used cautiously, the term "free will" can be applied to human beings in a coherent, meaningful and true manner. One of the hard-won achievements of this 200 year old debate has been to separate out conceptions of free will that have a good chance of being coherent and even true, from those that are incoherent or probably untrue. It has been clear to all for many years that unsophisticated conceptions of free will are unlikely to stand up to philosophical analysis.

This 66 page text makes little attempt to contribute to the modern debate, but rather takes the easy option of attacking "the popular conception of free will" which, according to Harris "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". Of course, this popular conception gets a thrashing, because assumption (1) is ambiguous and assumption (2) is simplistic (interpreted to mean that we choose what to think before we think it).

Whether this conception is really popular is debatable. There has been research on what ordinary people believe about free will, and popular beliefs actually seem to be rather varied, but let us suppose that at least some people have a conception of free will resembling the one Harris attacks. For such people, the book may be useful. It is certainly much easier to read than the works of professional philosophers.

Harris has not refuted free will, but has mounted a ferocious attack on one rather naïve version of it. He doesn't seriously grapple with modern scholarship. Admittedly, he does briefly discuss two short texts from compatibilist philosophers Tom Clark and Eddy Nahmias. He merely dismisses libertarianism in a single sentence as not being "respectable" (page 16). He wins a cheap victory. Why should anybody be surprised if an unsophisticated "popular" view of free will can be knocked down?

If this easy-to-read 66 page tract stimulates people into reading more serious works on free will, this will be of value (they might start with Bob Doyle's comprehensive but readable book Free Will: The Scandal in Philosophy, 2011). If it lulls people into thinking that the problem is solved and free will does not exist, it may be a victory for obscurantism.

This provides a good readable account of why experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet during the second half of the last century and subsequent studies inspired by his work have led many philosophers and scientists to feel that the existence of freewill is discredited.

So far, so good, but what is disappointing for a book published in 2012 is the lack of discussion of relevant research in neuroscience and also psychology over the last 20 years. The most important aspect of this is modern knowledge of the brain's reward circuit and its relationship to behaviour. The reward circuit and particularly the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate brain regions evaluate the reward value of sensory signals, and project to the ventral striatum region. Here they are merged with projections from the dorsolateral prefrontal, which is associated with the planning/executive functions of the brain. All this processing lies upstream of the motor cortex, in which Libet's readiness potentials were detected, and would seemingly need to be at least discussed in anything bearing on the brain's decision-making processes.

Further to this, modern psychological studies may also need to be brought into the picture. Thus the perception of exercising will power has been shown to involve consumption of energy, which evolution would only be likely to select for if it were adaptive. Further studies show that subjects perform better in tests or academic undertakings if they think their conscious efforts can make a difference. Again it is surprising that such findings are not at any rate brought into the story, in relation to a book that is outspokenly confident in its conclusions.