Who said free will is an illusion

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? You have no choice in how you act. You have will — but it is not free. O f course, this deterministic picture of our paths in life has prompted a vast literature attempting to save our notion of free will.

Get philosophy's best answers delivered direct to your inbox with our celebrated introduction to philosophy course. Discussing a full summary of compatibilist positions on free will is beyond the scope of this article for more here, check out our comprehensive reading list on free will — but one that Harris himself engages, albeit rather lightly, is a view well-articulated by American philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Dennett argues that even if some of our thoughts and actions are the product of unconscious causes, they are still ours. Anything that our brains do or decide is something we have done or decided. All Harris has done in his analysis is drive a wedge between our conscious and unconscious selves: we are still free to consciously shape our worlds — and so influence our unconscious — however we desire. Daniel Dennett, posing of his own free will.

In fact, what is the source of any of our thoughts, impulses, or desires? Do we consciously create them? Do they originate in consciousness? Harris argues no: rather, they appear in consciousness. So Harris says to Dennett: we have no control over how or why we desire what we desire — we simply experience these desires. As Harris states:. In Harris's view, therefore, compatibilists like Dennett do not address the root issues surrounding free will, rather they change the subject by redefining what it means to be free, and by extending our idea of agency.

Dennett, of course, is aggrieved by Harris's summation of his position and responds to it in his book-length review of Harris's Free Will. Harris then responds to that response , eventually leading the two of them to record a podcast , in which each responds to the other for over an hour.

The two of them may well continue to respond to each other for the rest of their lives. For our purposes in this article, however, we can say that though the argument rages on, Harris's neuroscience-backed case that free will is an illusion — though uncomfortable — is certainly a compelling one, and not fatally defeated by competing theories on the subject though compatibilists like Dennett would disagree on this last point.

I f, as on Harris's view, our choices aren't free, do they still matter? We might think that, if we have no free will, we may as well just sit back and do nothing — enjoy the ride of our uncontrollable lives as they play out before us like bizarre long-form experimental theatre performances of which we are mere spectators.

Our choices matter. What we decide to do shapes the paths we take in life. The point is that we cannot decide what we will decide to do. As Harris summarizes:. You can change your life, and yourself, through effort and discipline — but you have whatever capacity for effort and discipline you have in this moment, and not a scintilla more or less.

You are either lucky in this department or you aren't — and you cannot make your own luck. My choices matter — and there are paths toward making wiser ones — but I cannot choose what I choose. This conclusion — that our choices matter but that we cannot choose them — has profound consequences for our ideas of personal and moral responsibility — not to mention blame, justice, success, failure, and the entirety of our social, societal, and legal systems. I f all of our choices are pre-determined, the idea that we are morally responsible for our actions takes a serious hit.

As Harris says:. The men and women on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad environments, and bad ideas and the innocent, of course, have supremely bad luck. Which of these quantities, exactly, were they responsible for?

Follow Philosophy Break on Twitter to get philosophy's best questions, wisdom, and ideas directly in your Twitter feed. Our concept of justice, therefore, should reflect the fact that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. Smilansky is not advocating policies of Orwellian thought control.

Belief in free will comes naturally to us. Scientists and commentators merely need to exercise some self-restraint, instead of gleefully disabusing people of the illusions that undergird all they hold dear. Yet not all scholars who argue publicly against free will are blind to the social and psychological consequences. One of the most prominent is the neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris, who, in his book, Free Will , set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. Like Smilansky, he believes that there is no such thing as free will.

But Harris thinks we are better off without the whole notion of it. Illusions, no matter how well intentioned, will always hold us back. For example, we currently use the threat of imprisonment as a crude tool to persuade people not to do bad things.

According to Harris, we should acknowledge that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. Recognizing this, we can dispassionately consider how to manage offenders in order to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending. Accepting this would also free us from hatred.

Holding people responsible for their actions might sound like a keystone of civilized life, but we pay a high price for it: Blaming people makes us angry and vengeful, and that clouds our judgment. But if we give up our notion of free will, then their behavior must be viewed like any other natural phenomenon—and this, Harris believes, would make us much more rational in our response.

Although the scale of the two catastrophes was similar, the reactions were wildly different. Nobody was striving to exact revenge on tropical storms or declare a War on Weather, so responses to Katrina could simply focus on rebuilding and preventing future disasters.

Losing belief in free will undercuts the rationale for ever hating anyone. From that vantage point, the moral implications of determinism look very different, and quite a lot better. Determinism is the belief that our decisions are part of an unbreakable chain of cause and effect. When people hear there is no free will, they wrongly become fatalistic; they think their efforts will make no difference.

But this is a mistake. People are not moving toward an inevitable destiny; given a different stimulus like a different idea about free will , they will behave differently and so have different lives. Can one go further still?

Is there a way forward that preserves both the inspiring power of belief in free will and the compassionate understanding that comes with determinism? Philosophers and theologians are used to talking about free will as if it is either on or off; as if our consciousness floats, like a ghost, entirely above the causal chain, or as if we roll through life like a rock down a hill.

But there might be another way of looking at human agency. Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. In his new book, Restorative Free Will , he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint.

In his view, free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels. Waller believes his account fits with a scientific understanding of how we evolved: Foraging animals—humans, but also mice, or bears, or crows—need to be able to generate options for themselves and make decisions in a complex and changing environment.

Humans, with our massive brains, are much better at thinking up and weighing options than other animals are. Our range of options is much wider, and we are, in a meaningful way, freer as a result. One study found that people mostly thought of free will in terms of following their desires, free of coercion such as someone holding a gun to your head.

As long as we continue to believe in this kind of practical free will, that should be enough to preserve the sorts of ideals and ethical standards examined by Vohs and Baumeister. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements.

Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. When surveyed, Americans say they disagree with such descriptions of the universe.

From inquiries in other countries, researchers have found that Chinese, Colombians and Indians share this opinion: individual choice is not determined. Why do humans hold this view? One promising explanation is that we presume that we can generally sense all the influences on our decision making—and because we cannot detect deterministic influences, we discount them.

Of course, people do not believe they have conscious access to everything in their mind. We do not presume to intuit the causes of headaches, memory formation or visual processing. But research indicates that people do think they can access the factors affecting their choices. Yet psychologists widely agree that unconscious processes exert a powerful influence over our choices.

In one study, for example, participants solved word puzzles in which the words were either associated with rudeness or politeness. Those exposed to rudeness words were much more likely to interrupt the experimenter in a subsequent part of the task.

When debriefed, none of the subjects showed any awareness that the word puzzles had affected their behavior. That scenario is just one of many in which our decisions are directed by forces lurking beneath our awareness. Thus, ironically, because our subconscious is so powerful in other ways, we cannot truly trust it when considering our notion of free will.

We still do not know conclusively that our choices are determined. Our intuition, however, provides no good reason to think that they are not. If our instinct cannot support the idea of free will, then we lose our main rationale for resisting the claim that free will is an illusion.

Is Consciousness Just a Brain Process? Though a young movement, experimental philosophy is broad in scope. Its proponents apply their methods to varied philosophical problems, including questions about the nature of the self. For example, what if anything makes you the same person from childhood to adulthood? They investigate issues in ethics, too: Do people think that morality is objective, as is mathematics, and if so, why?

Akin to the question of free will, they are also tackling the dissonance between our intuitions and scientific theories of consciousness. Scientists have postulated that consciousness is populations of neurons firing in certain brain areas, no more and no less.