This tome is a struggle. Although I managed to read through to the end, it would be lying to assert that I understood much of it. As a card-carrying humanist, I have been interested in what determines our thoughts, beliefs and actions for a long time. I have dabbled in the literature of modern philosophers such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens, but I cannot keep track of the different beliefs about free will by more remote thinkers, dozens of whom are featured in this book. I have listened to debates about this issue at humanist meetings and on different podcasts and radio programs. Perhaps my interest in this was first tweeted by reading Philip Zimbaldi’s classic The Lucifer Effect which showed how easy it is under various circumstances to make morally upright people into the embodiment of evil.
There are dozens of isms discussed in this encyclopedic work. To grossly oversimplify, the ‘scandal’, is that on one side there are hard determinists who argue that everything we think, believe and do is determined entirely by physical and chemical reactions in our brains, which are in turn determined by evolution since the Big Bang, as modified by chance experiences; therefore we are slaves to those processes. On the other side the compatibilists like Daniel Dennett try to reconcile our everyday experience of seeming to make choices and be responsible for our thoughts and actions with those brain physical and chemical actions that accompany them. The difficulty, from my simplistic viewpoint is that while there is no hard scientific evidence for anything determining our actions other than those brain activities, (we will never discover a soul or mind through science), the logical conclusion from hard determinism seems superficially to be that such concepts as responsibility, choice, good and evil, justice and punishment, become meaningless. I listened to a debate about this between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and became even more confused. (Full disclosure- in the past I have supported Sam Harris financially because I enjoy listening to his podcasts.) I have difficulty reconciling Sam Harris’s moral outrage on various issues (which I admire), with his insistence on hard determinism. If everything he believes is predetermined by the evolutionary processes that caused his brain to function in a certain way, how can he logically be enraged about it?
Perhaps the most useful way to look at this scandal is to doubt that we really have any free will, but to function on a day-to-day basis as though we do. This is not an original idea of mine (hard determinism would seem to deny that I or anyone else could have an original idea), but one that is universally scorned by academic philosophers and cognitive scientists alike as devious self-deception.
Sorry for this gross oversimplification, but that is all that I can get out of this book.
The Passionate Reader 