Writer and neuroscientist, born 1967

Sam Harris

Free will is not merely unsupported by science. It does not even match our experience. Watch your own mind closely, and you will see thoughts and intentions simply arise. You no more author your next thought than your next heartbeat.

The view

Harris is a writer and podcaster with a doctorate in neuroscience, and a long-time teacher of meditation. His short book Free Will (2012) argues that free will is an illusion, and that seeing through it is both possible and good for us.

His argument has two strands. The first is familiar: our choices are the products of prior causes we did not choose, and adding randomness would not make them more ours. The second is distinctive. Harris argues that the illusion of free will is not something we fall into through careful introspection; it is something careful introspection dispels. If you pay close attention, you find that you do not experience yourself authoring your thoughts. They just appear.

The argument

Think of a city. Why that one? You did not choose it from a list of all the cities you know; it simply appeared, and you cannot say why the others did not. After Harris, Free Will (2012)

Try the experiment below. The point is not which city you think of, but how it arrives. Harris argues that if you cannot explain why one city came to mind and not another, you are not the conscious author of the choice in any meaningful sense, and the same is true of every other choice you make.

Harris thinks letting go of free will makes people kinder. If a murderer had your genes, your upbringing and your brain, you would be him. Hatred makes no sense once you see that. We would still need to protect ourselves from dangerous people, but we could do it as we protect ourselves from hurricanes, without the urge to make them suffer.

Where he meets Dennett

Harris and Dennett agree about the causes: no uncaused choices, no soul outside nature. They agree that randomness does not help, and that the libertarian's free will is an illusion. They share a wish for a more compassionate justice system. And Dennett agreed that much of what goes on in deliberation is not visible to the deliberator; his whole theory of consciousness says as much.

Where they part

Fiercely, in public. In 2014 Dennett published a long review of Free Will, and Harris replied. Dennett argued that Harris was attacking a free will that hardly anyone outside philosophy seminars believes in, and drawing a conclusion, that free will is an illusion, which ordinary people would take to mean something false: that their deliberation makes no difference. Harris's introspective argument, Dennett said, makes the self small again, identifying you with the conscious witness who watches thoughts arrive. But you are not just the witness; you are the whole system that produced the city, including the processes you cannot see. That a thought arrives unbidden does not show it was not yours. Harris, for his part, thought Dennett was changing the subject: the free will people care about, he insisted, is exactly the one that does not exist.

See every view compared →

Further reading

• Sam Harris, Free Will (Free Press, 2012).
• Daniel C. Dennett, "Reflections on Free Will" (2014), a review of Harris's book, published online at Harris's own site and at naturalism.org.
• Sam Harris, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Simon & Schuster, 2014): his account of the self and meditation.