Do we have free will?

The debate over whether humans have free will is a debate that has been raging in academic departments, as well as the public sphere, for centuries. The fundamental question is whether humans (or other animals) have free will.

There is a multitude of eminent people who have argued whether or not we have free will. This paper sets out the assertions of these writers, both for and against, and then outlines the author's observations and conclusions.

On top of the list is Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times best sellers, including Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. In his book Free Will Sam Harris confidently declares "we know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behavior, is true." In effect, we are nothing more than biochemical robots whose thoughts and actions are dictated by causal forces we don't control.

Determinism, one of the several new words that you will learn from this article, is the concept that everything that happens in the world is determined completely by previously existing causes. In his book Free Will Sam Harris confidently declared"we know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behavior, is true. In effect, we are nothing more than biochemical robots whose thoughts and actions are dictated by causal forces we don't control."

Determined: Life Without Free Will by Robert M Sapolsky is a book with a similar theme.

Free Will? People define free will differently. Many focus on agency, whether a person can control their actions, act with intent.

Wikipedia tells us:

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will" is a 2023 book by American neuroendocrinology researcher Robert Sapolsky professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University, concerning the neurological evidence for or against free will. Sapolsky generally concludes that our choices are determined by our genetics, experience, and environment and that the common use of the term "free will" is erroneous. The book also examines the "ethical consequences of justice and punishment" in a model of human behavior that dispenses with free will.

Sapolsky also wrote:

Behave. The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could,

Sam Harris' Waking Up has also been praised by critics. Frank Bruni of The New York Times wrote, "Harris's book ... caught my eye because it's so entirely of this moment, so keenly in touch with the growing number of Americans who are willing to say that they do not find the succour they crave, or a truth that makes sense to them, in organized religion." He notes that since publishing The End of Faith in 2004, Harris has shifted focus to some extent from criticizing religion to trying to understand what people seek in religion and arguing these benefits are possible without

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, #1 New York Times bestselling book also a free will sceptic, stating:

We do not have the freedom and free will that we think we do. Yes, you can make conscious choices, but everything that makes up those conscious choices (your thoughts, your wants, your desires) is determined by prior causes outside your control. Just because you can do what you want does not mean you have free will because you are not choosing what you want in the first place.

Jerry A. Coyne Professor of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, and author of Why Evolution is True is yet another who argues that we do not have free will:

Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don't have it. In Free Will, Sam Harris combines neuroscience and psychology to lay this illusion to rest at last. Like all of Harris's books, this one will not only unsettle you but make you think deeply.

Sam Harris, founder of the Reason Project and author of the New York Times best sellersThe End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation also endorses Coyne.

The above are all American writers, Are there any Free will sceptics from Britain or elsewhere?

THERE ARE THE ALTERNATE POSITIONS

Lawrence David, Debunking Determinism: Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and the Crusade Against Free Will Paperback –, 2023. This is possibly the most powerful of the anti-free will protagonists. Born and raised in Los Angeles, where he received a BA from UCLA and a JD from US David does not have the academic qualifications of Sapolsky and Harris Finding himself frustrated by the popular presentations about the nature of consciousness, David sought to explore the conventional wisdoms of pop culture, in particular the question of whether we have free will or are determined. Lawrence became fascinated by the self-contradictory nature of determinist principles – that our beliefs are due to causal forces. He argues that free will is losing the battle. Determinists are tirelessly spreading the gospel of causation. They dominate social media, podcasts, and YouTube. It's time to address the problematic nature of the gospel of causation.

Another supporter of free will is Kevin J Mitchell in Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will  Published by: Princeton University Press2023

Associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, Mitchell is the author of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are (Princeton) and runs a popular blog, Wiring the Brain. A search on that blog will reveal Undetermined - a response to Robert Sapolsky. Part 4 - Loosening the treaties of fate. His work has appeared in publications such as Scientific American, the Guardian, and Psychology Today.

Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications-for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence. An astonishing journey of discovery,

Gregg D. Caruso's edited volume, Exploring the Illusion of Free will and Moral Responsibility a collection of new essays brings together an internationally recognized line-up of contributors, most of whom hold sceptical positions of some sort,

Compatibilism, as the name suggests, is the view that the existence of free will and moral responsibility is compatible with the truth of determinism. In most cases, compatibilists (also called "soft" determinists) attempt to achieve this reconciliation by subtly revising or weakening the commonsense notion of free will.

Compatibilism has an ancient history, and many philosophers have endorsed it in one form or another. In Book III of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384–322 BC) wrote that humans are responsible for the actions they freely choose to do-i.e., for their voluntary actions. While acknowledging that "our dispositions are not voluntary in the same sense that our actions are," Aristotle believed that humans have free will because they are free to choose their actions within the confines of their nature.

Determinism is the view that all human decisions and actions, are inevitable. Historically, debates about determinism have involved many philosophical positions and given rise to multiple varieties or interpretations of determinism. Some philosophers have maintained that the entire universe is a single determinate system, while others identify more limited determinate systems. Another common debate topic is whether determinism and free will can coexist; compatibilism and incompatibilism represent the opposing sides of this debate.

An additional thought

The brain takes a long time to form completely. The wiring in a teenager's brain is only about 80 per cent completed (which may not come as a great surprise to the parents of teenagers). Although most of the growth of the brain occurs in the first two years and is 95 per cent finished by the age of ten, the synapses aren't fully wired until a young person is in his or her mid to late twenties. That means that the teenage years effectively extend well into adulthood. In the meantime, the person in question will almost certainly have more impulsive, less reflective behaviour than his elders, and will also be more susceptible to the effects of alcohol. 'The teenage brain is not just an adult brain with fewer miles on it, 'Frances E. Jensen, a neurology professor, told Harvard Magazine in 2008. It is, rather, a different kind of brain altogether.

This writer's opinion.

Is that we have limited or constrained free will. He bases this option on three thoughts:

1.His dog: he has written a book on his dog Dodger. published by Amazon in which he notes that dogs have loved us for thousands of years. The book has a photo of a Roman couple in bed with their dog. His theory is that some Neanderthal kid offered a wolf pup a feed, the pup decided to stay, and turned into our faithful friend: , Search on the web for "Why do dogs love us? Scientists believe that our friendship goes back 40,000 years. It is buried deep into their genes, passed on from generation to generation.

2. Then our behaviours are passed on from generation to generation, buried deep in our genes. So, if we evolved from some form of chimpanzee, that ancestry is tribal and we reflect what that tribal behaviour was like. It was survival of the fittest. The National Library has an article on it "The Law of Evolution: Darwin, Wallace, and the Survival of the Fittest". And how would tribes survive back then? By following the leader that promised the most, by taking the land that was the most productive, even though other tribes were there beforehand. In short, we have kept those genes buried deep within us. They are fuelling our conflicts today.

3, The world today is viewing many conflicts, the Israel Palestine war and Ukraine invasion being the most objectionable. Historians tell us that we, the world, has suffered war for most of our existence Do we want that? This writer has written another book Ending War also on Amazon that says we do not want wars, so why have we experienced them? It is in our genes.

So we do not have completely free will, I call it guided, limited or constrained, How to beat it is more research and perhaps another article.