Do we 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.