Does Free Will Exist? The Latest Thinking from Sam Harris

The Feeling of (& Infatuation with) Free Will

“Free will is an enduring problem for philosophy and science for one reason: people think they experience it—they feel they have it.”

“This is the sort of decision that motivates the idea of free will: You’ve got two or more choices, and you’re picking between them, and it’s just you and your thoughts—there’s no coercion from the external world. You are doing it, apparently.“
“Most people feel that the conscious part of their minds—the one that is experiencing their experience, thinking their thoughts, feeling their feelings—is in control of their mental life and behavior in some real way. They feel that they are the source of their intentions and actions … that they are initiated by their conscious minds in some way.”
“They feel that they are the source of their thoughts and voluntary actions.”
“People are infatuated by this idea … that they could have done otherwise. It seems to most people that if you rewound the movie of their life to a few seconds ago, they could have thought or acted or wanted or intended—and therefore behaved—differently than they did.”

Try a Free Will Thought Experiment

“What is truly novel about what I’m arguing for is that you can recognize this subjectively … We better be able to find (free will) here. If it’s not here, it’s not anywhere.” — Sam Harris

Before we get too deep into the weeds, it’s probably best to start with a thought experiment. Sam Harris uses the same free will thought experiment in two different ways. Here’s how you can try it for yourself.

1. Simply watch this video, and try it for yourself (6 minutes):

2. The same thought experiment using movies instead of cities (starts at the 22-minute mark):

These thought experiments may generate some questions for you…

Free Will Questions

“Here’s the question: If you can’t control your next thought, if you can’t decide what it will be before it arises, and if you can’t prevent it from arising, where is your freedom of will?“

“Were you free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose?“
“What are you going to think next? You don’t know. Yet your thoughts determine what you want and intend and do next. Your thoughts determine your goals and whether or not you believe you’ve met them … Thoughts determine almost everything that makes you human.”
“You do not know what you will think next. In what sense is that a basis for free will? You do not know what you will think. You do not know what it will take to make it behaviorally active. You do not know what is happening when you are second guessing the thing you just thought and that becomes behaviorally active.”
“How do you explain your capacity for effort? How do you explain when you’re lazy? How do you explain when you’re lazy but then you suddenly get inspired and make great effort? You can’t. The ‘you’ that experiences sudden inspiration or doubling of effort or a failure of nerve, the ‘you’ that rises to the occasion or chokes isn’t in the driver’s seat.”

Free Will Assumptions

“The popular conception of free will rests on two assumptions.”

“The first is that each of us was free to think and act differently than we did in the past. We chose A but we could have chosen B.”
“The second assumption is that we are the conscious source of many of our thoughts and actions in the present. Your sense of deciding what to do in each moment seems to be the actual origin of your subsequent behavior.”
“The conscious part of you that wants and intends and perceives seems to be in control of at least some of your thoughts and actions. However, there is every reason to believe that both of these assumptions are false.”

What’s Happening in the Brain?

“What I hope to impress upon you is that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. And there are no subjective facts about it to reconcile with the truths of physics and neurophysiology. In fact, our conscious experience is perfectly compatible with a scientific picture of reality that does not stop or change character at the boundary of our skin.”

“Even if a conscious intention were truly simultaneous with its neurophysiological underpinnings, there would still be no room for free will. You still wouldn’t know why it is you do what you do.”
“All of the causes of what I’m conscious of are first unconscious. I’m not aware of what my brain is doing at the synaptic level.“
“Everything that (we’re) conscious of is being promoted into consciousness on the basis of neural activity of which we’re not conscious. There’s a base layer of neurophysiological causality that we can’t inspect.“
“There’s all the unconscious processing that our conscious phenomenology sits on top of.”
“When people are manipulated in a lab, they seem to always have a story about why they did what they did—and it often bears no relationship to what actually influenced them. It’s simply a fact that our judgments about the causes of our own behavior are often unreliable. Generally this comes courtesy of the left hemisphere of the brain.”

“Self” & Consciousness

“If you pay attention to how thoughts arise, you’ll see that they simply appear—quite literally out of nowhere. And, you’re not free to choose them before they appear. That would require that you think them before you think them.”

You as self / author:

“The only reason why we’re talking about free will—the only reason why anyone cares about this topic—is because people think they’re having an experience of being a self that can author its actions.”
“You aren’t the author of your thoughts, intentions, and actions. Rather, thoughts, intentions, and subsequent actions simply arise and are noticed.”
“When I think about myself from the first person side, and when I triangulate on myself and think about myself from the third person side, at no point does free will—any version of it—seem aptly applied to the situation.”
“Most people feel that they are the thinker of their thoughts—and therefore their author. This is one way of describing the feeling of self. Subjectively speaking, as a matter of experience, there’s no thinker to be found in the mind apart from thoughts themselves. There’s no subject in the middle of experience. Everything including thoughts and intentions and counter-thoughts and counter-intentions is arising all on its own. And the feeling that there’s a thinker in addition to the flow of thought is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you’re thinking. It’s the feeling of being identified with the train of thought that’s passing through consciousness in this moment.“
“That voice in your head … that feels like you … that isn’t you. That’s not a self. That is a thought … It is an object in consciousness.“

Consciousness / Witness:

“If you pay attention to the process of thinking, you’ll see that your thoughts simply appear in consciousness … You can observe that you no more decide the next thing you think than you decide the next thing I say.”
“From the point of view of consciousness, there’s simply consciousness and its contents.”
“As a matter of experience, you are not having an experience from someplace outside of experience. There is only experience.“
“The thing to notice is that you as the conscious witness of your inner life are not making decisions. All you can do is witness decisions once they are made.“
“You can’t inspect your causes.“

Causal Closure, Determinism, Randomness, & Fatalism

“Most philosophers and scientists believe we have an experience of free will that is undeniable, and the challenge is to make sense of it in terms of a picture of causality that seems not to allow for it—whether that’s deterministic or random. I’m claiming that we don’t have the experience we think we have. There is no experience of free will.”

Causal Closure of the Universe:

“You are part of the universe, and there’s no place for you to stand outside of its causal structure.”
“You are being played by the universe, but choices still matter because causes matter. Change matters, and a capacity to make change matters.”
“There is no free will, but choices matter. This isn’t a paradox. Your desires, intentions, and decisions arise out of the present state of the universe—which includes your brain and your soul (if such a thing exists) along with all of their influences. Your mental states are part of a causal framework. So, your choices matter—whether or not they’re products of a brain or a soul—because they’re often approximate cause of your actions.”
“No matter how we think about causation—whether things are determined or random or some combination of the two—there’s no place for you as the conscious subject to stand that isn’t downstream of causes that you can’t inspect or anticipate. Everything is just appearing in consciousness.”

Determinism & Randomness:

“The next thing you think and do can only emerge from this totality of prior causes. And it can only emerge in one of two ways: lawfully (that is deterministically) … or randomly.”
“The illusion of free will isn’t even there if you look closely at it. There is no mystery to solve experientially. Everything about your experience is totally compatible with determinism—or determinism plus randomness—neither of which gives you this freedom people think they have.”
“Whether these mental events are fully determined or in part random, the experience is the same. Everything is just happening on its own.”
“The problem is that neither determinism nor randomness nor any combination of the two justifies the feeling that most people have that goes by the name of ‘free will.'”
“To be in character is to be discernibly in line with prior tendencies. It follows a pattern … With true randomness, there is no why.“
“There is no will in randomness.”

Determinism vs Fatalism:

“Determinism isn’t fatalism. Choices, reasoning, discipline—all of these things play obvious roles in our lives despite the fact that they’re determined by prior causes. And again, adding randomness to this machinery doesn’t change anything.”
“Reasoning is possible not because you’re free to think however you want, but because you are not free. Reason makes slaves of us all … It’s the lack of freedom that makes reasoning possible … Reasoning is all about constraints.“

Where People Get Stuck

“A person can follow the purely philosophical or scientific arguments and arrive at some of the same conclusions. For instance, someone can understand how free will and the conventional notion of self don’t make any sense in terms of ongoing neurophysiological changes in the brain. But even most people who understand and accept those arguments, don’t really have the courage of their convictions because they still feel like selves that enjoy free will. Most people don’t have the introspective tools to discover that their experience is actually convergent with what makes the most sense scientifically and philosophically. So they’re stuck trying to grapple with a psuedo-problem: how can we make sense of our experience of an unchanging self that has free will when we know conceptually that these things don’t make any sense? That’s where many people are stuck.“

“You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose the society into which you were born. There is not a cell in your body or brain that you—the conscious subject—created. Nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world that you brought into being. And yet everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior causes. So what you do with your luck, and the very tools with which you do it, including the level of effort and discipline you manage to summon in each moment, is more in the way of luck.”
“All of our conscious experiences, our thoughts, intentions, desires, and the actions and choices that result from them, are caused by events of which we are not conscious, in which we did not bring into being. You didn’t pick your parents, you didn’t pick your genes, and you didn’t pick the environment into which you were born—and yet the totality of these facts determines who you are in each moment and what you do in the next.”
“You are free to do an almost infinite number of things today. Free in the sense that no one will try to stop you from doing these things … but you’re not free to want what you don’t in fact want, or to want what you want more than you want it. You’re not free to notice what you won’t notice. Or to remember what you’ve truly forgotten.“

Embracing the Mystery

“If you pay attention to how your thoughts arise and how decisions actually get made, you’ll see that there’s no evidence for free will. Not only no evidence, it’s impossible to make sense of the claim that free will might exist … What in your experience could it refer to? Everything is simply springing out of the darkness.“

“Everything is just happening—including your thoughts and intentions and desires and most deliberate actions.”
“Everything on some level is more of a force of nature than it is something that you need to take personally.”
“It is absolutely mysterious, in every particular, why and how you do what you do when and how you do it.”
“No matter how many times you go back and forth between two options—no matter how many other thoughts arise to give color to this process, giving way to one option or the other—the process itself is irreducibly mysterious.”
“In each moment there’s a mystery at your back, and it’s producing everything that you can notice: your thoughts, intentions, desires, inhibitions, and all of the behaviors and course-corrections that follow from them. This is an objective truth about your subjective experience.”

Moving Forward with Compassion

“Far from causing us to become passive, any insight into the illusoriness of free will can allow us to behave much more intelligently in life.”

“Losing one’s belief in free will can actually have very positive consequences. For one, it removes any rational basis for hating people.”
“Most people resist this idea, seemingly at any intellectual cost, and yet this single insight is the antidote to arrogance and hatred—and provides a profound basis for compassion, both for other people and for oneself. It’s the basis for real forgiveness, again for other people and for oneself. It is literally the path to redemption, and it’s the only view of human nature that cuts through the logic of retribution.”
“Our experience of being and acting in the world is totally compatible with the truth of determinism—or determinism plus randomness—and this has implications not only for our sense of self but for our ethics and our view of other people. This insight can be extraordinarily freeing psychologically. It can lead to much greater compassion—both for other people and for ourselves.”
“Taking the red pill on free will makes you much more forgiving … because you see everyone is an open system. No one authored themselves. No one created themselves … You are the totality of what brought you here. The universe has sort of just pushed you to this point in time.”