Category: free will

Rob Henderson completely messes up when discussing free will

September 26, 2026 • 9:45 am

Rob K. Henderson is identified by Wikipedia as  “an American writer and political commentator known for coining the term luxury beliefs.” These beliefs are said to “”confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”, and are said to include “defunding the police” and “getting rid of the SAT”.

Apparently one of Henderson’s “luxury beliefs” is belief in free will, as you can tell from the title of his Substack post below.  But his thesis is not only wrong, but a dog’s breakfast of a meal.  For one thing, he never defines free will.  And he makes a ton of statements about it that are simply full of holes.  I could write a substantive essay about how Henderson’s short piece is misguided, but it doesn’t deserve that. So what I’ll do is put his statements in bold, indented type, and put my responses in plain text flush left. Truly, I don’t understand why this guy doesn’t understand.

Let me start by saying that, as always, I conceive of free will as “contracausal” or “I could have done otherwise” free will, explained as the ability of a person in a given situation, with all the molecules of the universe poised at the moment of decision/action, to have done more than one thing. It does appear that Henderson has that notion, too, but he doesn’t say so.

And Henderson’s thesis is that the elites do think they themselves have free will, but propagate to the “lower classes” an idea of determinism, which harms those people by making them think they’re automatons.

Click the headline to read:

Here we go. Strap yourselves in, as it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment,” he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in “Free Will” (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

No determinist I know pretends that these two situations are equal. They’re “equal” only in that a man breaks his wife’s nose when she’s asleep. In one case it’s an accident, in the other a deliberate act. Although we may not be able to find out which is which, no determinist I know thinks that the situations are equivalent in how they should be dealt with. If we could find a way to distinguish them, then of course the abusive man should be punished.

Here Henderson paints a misleading view of what determinism is, and what the consequences of various actions are in light of determinism.  A man who breaks his wife’s nose may be likely to abuse her further, or abuse someone else, and for that reason alone should be punished. This sanction does not apply to an accidental blow, which does not come from malice and isn’t likely to recur.

More confusion:

Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.

The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.

Well, we are spectators in our own lives, in that we know not the wellsprings from whence our thoughts and actions derive.  But no determinist is trying to blur the consequences of disparate actions, arising in different ways, that have similar consequences. The rest Henderson gets right, but the bit about determinists “blurring” the causes of actions is dead wrong.  And Henderson still hasn’t given us a cause of an action that does not ultimately rest on material objects like neurons. Does he believe in “ghostly” free will? Does he think that at a given instant, we can make more than one choice? He doesn’t tell us.

The psychologist Roy F. Baumeister has spent much of his career arguing against this type of thinking. In his recent book, “The Science of Free Will,” he claims that free will evolved because it was required to live in complex social systems. Culture works only if people can restrain themselves. They must follow rules when no one is watching. They must delay gratification. They must make plans. They must explain themselves. They must know that actions today bring consequences tomorrow.

Mr. Baumeister’s key move is to treat free will as a matter of degree. Some actions are freer than others. A man ordering dinner from a menu is freer than a man being robbed at gunpoint. A sober adult planning his career is freer than a drunk teenager in a parking lot at 2 a.m.

If free will “evolved”, then it must be material, for only material things are subject to biological evolution. Does Henderson mean that the feeling that we have free will evolved? I’m willing to believe that, but the existence of something immaterial affecting thoughts and “decisions”, which is what contracausal free demands, cannot have evolved.

As for degrees of freedom, that won’t wash, either. The man robbed at gunpoint is determined by his genes and environment to hand over his wallet, for he’s evolved to not want to die.  And a man ordering dinner? At the moment he selects his entree, could he have chosen another? Not according to what we know of physics.  Coerced action seems less free, but still involves determinism, just as with the man who chooses a burger rather than salmon (that would be me).

But hold on folks, for here comes the “luxury belief” part:

The determinists would have us drop these distinctions. But notice the asymmetry in their position. They rarely treat themselves as automatons. They also reserve agency for the educated reader, who is presumed to have the ability to redesign legal systems and reimagine institutions. Free will for me, but not for thee.

The deniers of free will haven’t improved society. They have merely produced a more forgiving vocabulary for those who damage it. The man who waits for his wife to fall asleep becomes harder to condemn, because somewhere in his past there is a reason. There is always a reason, but that isn’t the same as an excuse or justification.

Whaaaaat??? From what I know of Sapolsky and Sam Harris, the paragons of determinism, they do indeed see themselves as automatons. Sam Harris has even used the image of a puppet to represent a determinist, with genes and environment pulling the strings. Wherever Henderson got his idea that the “elite” determinists think they have free will while others don’t, it’s a blockheaded and palpably wrong idea.

Now why, you might ask, do the “elite” embrace free will for themselves but tell others that they don’t have free will? Apparently because all of us elitists want to parade their virtue by arguing that criminals should be treated more leniently—a consequence that Henderson sees as inevitably following from belief in determinism:

Arguments against free will often carry a hidden moral assumption. If no one truly chooses his actions, then no one deserves blame. Criminals should be treated more leniently because they couldn’t have acted otherwise. Judgment is redirected away from the criminal and toward the person who chooses to condemn him.

Notice, though, the asymmetry. The determinist grants agency to himself and a handful of other anointed beings. They can choose to become more enlightened. They can exert agency to redesign the criminal-justice system, revise social norms and build more compassionate institutions. Criminals and everyone else, meanwhile, are reduced to billiard balls.

This is presented as humane, but it’s condescending. It strips people of agency in the name of compassion. And once a person is no longer regarded as capable of governing himself, it becomes easier to justify governing him without his consent. If people are merely carried along by forces they can’t understand or control, then perhaps their preferences need not be taken seriously either.

The scientific and philosophical arguments about determinism are worth considering. But they should be separated from the moral conclusions that are so often attached to them. Too many deniers of free will smuggle in an exception for themselves. The unenlightened masses are automatons. The enlightened few, though, are free enough to decide what to do with them.

As I’ve said many times, and I believe Sam and Robert would agree, yes, people who do acts, injurious or meritorious, do deserve praise or blame. But that is simply a way of promoting good acts, discouraging bad ones, and reforming baddies or sequestering them away from society by locking them up.  You don’t have to have free will to come to those conclusions; all you have to do is observe human behavior and decide what kind of society you want. (Note that the elites seem to be denigrated for designing a more humane justice system, which does follow from accepting determinsim, but also that Henderson thinks we reduce criminals to “billiard balls.” What happened to all the other non-elites who aren’t criminals?)

Determinists don’t strip people of free will in the name of compassion; they strip people of free will because what is what, as far as we know, the databsuggest. Compassion may indeed follow from realizing that nobody makes a free-will choice to do good or ill, but again I emphasize that this doesn’t mean that criminals should be free from punishment or treatment. And of course we have to take people’s preferences seriously, because those preferences are coded in their genes and neurons, put there by their inheritance or their environment (environment, of course, can change people’s preferences and their apparent “choices.” And it is disrespectful to ignore their preferences: “No Sam, you don’t want the steak; you want the sirloin. I know!”

This is all an attempt by Henderson, I think, to shoehorn free will as a “luxury belief”, a belief entertained by the “enlightened few” who are able to follow a scientific conclusion to its social consequences. But you don’t have to be “enlightened” to ponder the idea and, I hope, to realize that there is no such thing as contracausal free will. (There is of course “compatiblist free will”, but that is a semantic trick described by Sam Harris as the idea that “a puppet loves his strings.”)

And how, pray tell, does the rejection of free will promulgated by the elites “inflict costs in the lower classes”? And how does it stamp us as “elites”?

I swear, this is one of the most misguided and erroneous things I’ve read on free will. I suppose that because “luxury beliefs” are Henderson’s leitmotif, and apparently his Big Contribution to social discourse, he has to grab free will with his tentacles and drag that “luxury belief” into the Tent of Philosophy.

Why did I waste a couple of hours reading this stuff and trying to show its problems? Because I had no choice, of course.

ID advocate Michael Egnor defends free will, misleads his audience

June 21, 2026 • 9:30 am

I don’t usually respond to attacks on me from the Discovery Institute and its flacks, but I couldn’t resist listening to this 25-minute talk on free will from pediatric neurosurgeon and Intelligent Design advocate Michael Egnor, who’s been going after me for years (read the last link to Wikipedia, and his Discovery Institute biography here).

This talk was given “at the 2026 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith presented by Discovery Institute’s Center on Science & Culture”.  The title of that conference, which featured lots of religionists, was “Endowed By Our Creator: Science,Faith, and the American Idea,” and the conference—and Egnor—made no bones about their a priori belief in God.  And if you believe in God the way these people do, there has to be free will:  otherwise you cannot freely choose to accept God, to behave according to his/her/its dictates, or, if you’re a Catholic like Egnor, choose Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. 

Egnor was once an atheist but then converted to Catholicism in his forties,after he had a “Damascus Road moment” involving hearing a voice.  As Grok says, Egnor “has spoken about falling in love with Catholic theology and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Thomism), which he integrates with his scientific and philosophical views on topics like the mind-body problem, dualism, consciousness, and intelligent design.” He’s abandoned the idea of materialism and, as you’ll see in this video, touts the existence a non-materialistic soul that could only have been created by God (who, by the way, has also gotten credit from Egnor for “creating” the Big Bang).

The talk is briefly summarized by David Klinghoffer, another ID advocated, at the Discovery Institute’s Science & Culture Today site. Click on the screenshot below to read the DI’s idea of humor:

Who are the atheist scientists? N0ne other than your host, Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky (whom Egnor repeatedly misspells and mispronounces as “Saplosky”). You’d think that Egnor could at least get Sapolsky’s name right; it is not a typo. But I am honored to be lumped together with these two smart guys.

And before the video, I want to give an example from Klinghoffer’s piece of Egnor’s quasi-humorous sarcasm, which makes the religious audience roar with laughter:

Regarding Harris, Coyne, Sapolsky and the books they’ve authored, Dr. Egnor says, “The people who deny free will, the authors of these books, if you want to find out out if they believe in morality, and therefore if they believe in free will, all you have to do is tear up their royalty checks from their books. And tell them, ‘Hey, I didn’t have any choice, it’s just an act of nature.’” That’s funny.

He also offers a proposal for a book to be co-authored by the esteemed free will deniers, to be titled, We Can’t Control Our Thoughts and We Don’t Know Where They’re Coming From: Three Scientists Who Didn’t Choose to Write This Book, to be published by The Atheist Press. That made me laugh out loud. Enjoy:

Apparently the idea that we could not do other than what we did is hugely funny to these people: all you have to do is say it and they laugh. But sarcasm is not a determinant of truth.

Well, enough. If you have 25 minutes to listen to a religious argument for free will, with some misguided science thrown in, click below:

I can summarize the talk if you don’t want to listen to it.  Egnor’s point is that there are four (actually five) arguments against free will. I’ll summarize them in bold (my take) and then address them in a few words. Those of you who have read my writings on free will (or Sapolsky’s or Harris’s books) should be able to refute these easily. I conceive of “free will”, as does Egnor, in the libertarian sense: if you have it, at a given moment you could have done or thought something other that what you did.

a.) Every human who has lived, is living, and will live believes in free will.  Most people believe in God, too.

This is simply the argumentum ad populum: something becomes more true if more people believe it.  There is no need to refute this contention; it asserts the truth of a proposition without evidence. However, Egnor goes on to present what he does see as evidence. 

b.) Morality supports free will. “We all believe in some kind of morality.” “If you believe in morality, you have to believe in free will, because without free will there is no morality.”

Nope. I can frame “morality” as simply “the tenets that a society or faith considers laudable or deleterious because they facilitate or impede the smooth running of society”.  Abrogating these tenets is considered bad, and they can be promoted simply by praising those who abide by the tenets or criticizing and punishing those who violate them. There need be no “free will” to have morality, for even though we lack free will, we are still malleable beings and can alter our behavior depending on society’s “moral code” and the praise and punishment that go with it.

c.)  Denial of free will is self-refuting. Here’s Egnor’s trope: “If you deny free will then you can’t choose to tell the truth, so why would you believe somebody when they say they deny free will.”  This is a crazy argument, for the denial of free will is based on evidence—evidence for determinism and the lack of evidence for free will. The data involve a growing body of experiments showing that decisions are made in the brain before we become conscious of them.  Other experiments involve psychological manipulation of people so that they think they have acted freely when they didn’t (brain stimulation), or they think they acted without agency when they actually did (e.g., Ouija boards).

d.) There is room for free will in nature.  As Egnor maintains, there are some “aspects of nature that aren’t completely determined by the state of physics.”  What are they?  Quantum physics, of course, and here Egnor cites entanglement. The problem, which he ignores, is that the purely unpredictable aspects of quantum physics involve things on a micro level (movement of electrons, etc.), and those cannot be affected by your “will”.  But Egnor, citing quantum physics, says it shows that “At any moment there’s room for will.” But since he sees free will as the product of an immaterial soul, he shouldn’t be using any aspect of physics to support it.

e.) Neuroscience points to the reality of free will. Since Egnor is a neuroscientist, the audience probably buys this the most.  Egnor cites two bits of evidence here.  First, as he says, during operations that involve stimulating parts of the brain, he says,  “Patients asked to raise their arms at some point could tell whether they raised arm voluntarily or due to electrical stimulation.”  And they could tell the difference.

But that is not “free will”, for your brain simply lets you know whether something you don’t understand is making you raise your arm, or whether, under orders from the doctor, you have to raise your arm at some point.  It’s similar to Libet’s button-pushing experiments, when you push a button at a time your brain determines, and think you did it of your own “free will.” The problem with that, and the reason Libet and his successors have done such provocative studies, is that brain signals (fMRI, etc.) say you’re about to push a button before you become conscious of making that decision. Like Libet’s experiments, being able to distinguish something that comes from your brain’s own workings from something imposed on your brain from the outside is not “free will”. It is not the exercise of agency, but the detection of agency.

For example, sometimes the brain is stimulated and a patient waves his arm or hand. When asked by the surgeon why the patient did that, he may aver that he was waving at a nurse across the room. Egnor completely ignores the various classes of observations and experiments in which stimulation of the brain produces a false illusion of intention or false agency. These need not involve brain stimulation, but can involve psychologically tricking a subject.

I should add that Benjamin Libet (last name mispronounced by Egnor, who uses a long “i”), who became famous for detecting the signals of action before the subject was aware of “deciding” to act, wound up believing, as Egnor says, in “free won’t.”  That is, though Libet accepted that decisions to do something were made deterministically in the brain, he concluded later that there was “free won’t”: patients could decide freely to cancel an action that they had already decided to do. Libet says that this veto instantiates free will because there is no neurological signal of the veto!  (This is about 14 minutes into the lecture.)

The problem with this—and this must reflect deliberate misrepresentation by Egnor—is that later work involving brain-scanning shows that you can indeed predict whether a patient would veto an action or not from brain activity.  Here’s the paper from PLOS One (brought to my attention by Grok) that showed this (click to read):

You can read the abstract and see that these researchers used electrical signals in the brain to show that decision to veto an action are also decided in advance.  Here is the authors’ summary:

Neuroscience cannot straightforwardly accommodate a concept of “conscious free will”, independent of brain activity [42]. However, the belief that humans have free will is fundamental to human society [43]. This belief has profound top-down effects on cognition [44] and even on brain activity itself [45]. The dualistic view that decisions to inhibit reflect a special “conscious veto” or “free won’t” mechanism [46] is scientifically unwarranted. Instead, conscious decisions to check and delay our actions may themselves be consequences of specific brain mechanisms linked to action preparation and action monitoring [19]. Recent neuroscientific studies have strongly questioned the concept of free will, but have had difficulty addressing the alternative concept of free won’t, largely because of the absence of behavioural markers of inhibition. Our results suggest that an important aspect of “free” decisions to inhibit can be explained without recourse to an endogenous, ”uncaused” process: the cause of our “free decisions” may at least in part, be simply the background stochastic fluctuations of cortical excitability. Our results suggest that free won’t may be no more free than free will.

Unless you think Egnor simply missed a paper that refutes his thesis, because he didn’t have a grasp of the literature, then he must be leaving it out deliberately: a scientific misrepresentation of a field by a neuroscientists who has supposedly studied the data thoroughly. This is why the word “Egnorance” is often used in connection with the man’s writings. But I won’t use it. . .

The rest is religious pilpul: Egnor immediately goes on to cite Aquinas, his hero, and to show this slide:

Where, asks Egnor, does free will come from? God, of course. His lucubrations lead him to conclude that “The Universe is more like a mind than a thing.”  Therefore, he says, there must then be free will involved in the foundation of the universe (“we cannot be free if everything around us is not free”).  After making the Big Bang, he believes, God created us with the ability to freely choose between right and wrong.

But wait! There’s more! He says that our possession of libertarian free will, which he claims to have proven in this lecture, also has implications for our immortality: for what happens to us after death!  His “telling” argument is that since human souls, whatever they may be, are immaterial, they cannot “disintegrate like a body does.” Our souls must live forever!   He concludes, to rousing applause, that “Free will is God’s fingerprint in us.”

Here we see that religion, tricked out in the trappings of science, has led Egnor to reject determinism and materialism because they don’t involve his Catholic God. But his arguments can be refuted with either logic or empirical observations and experiments.  Thus does faith make a hash of rationality.

My article in Skeptic: Coyne vs. Shermer on Free Will

April 2, 2026 • 9:30 am

In mid-February, Michael Shermer wrote a piece in Quillette called “The truth about free will,” the truth being that we have it, but in the compatibilist rather than the libertarian sense.  This article was a shortened version of a free-will chapter included in Shermer’s new book,  Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. 

I thought that Shermer’s article was confusing, largely because his own definition of free will seemed to smuggle in a bit of libertarianism, but also because the argument for free will seemed to say this: “We have free will because we feel like we have free will.”

Shermer then responded in the pages of Skeptic, the magazine he founded in 1992 and still edits; his response was called “Free will, determinism, and compatibilism: Shermer responds to Jerry Coyne.”  He once again argued for compatibilism, buttressing his argument with statistics showing that most philosophers accept compatibilism (59.1%), with minorities being libertarian free-willers (13.7%), determinists (12.2%, I’m in this camp though I’m not a philosopher), and those who are “other” (14.9%).  The gist of his argument seemed to be this:

I agree with Jerry and Dan that we live in a determined universe governed by laws of nature. But I disagree with Jerry that this eliminates free will, or if you prefer “volition” or “choice” (again, this entire field is, to use Jerry’s term, “muddled” with confusion of terminology). My compatibilist work-around is “self-determinism,” in which while we live under the causal net of a determined universe, we are part of that causal net ourselves, helping to determine the future as it unfolds before us, and of which we are a part. My compatibilist position is based on the best understanding of physics today. Let me explain.

Physicists tell us that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or entropy, means that time flows forward, and therefore no future scenario can ever perfectly match one from the past. As Heraclitus’ idiom informs us, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” because you are different and the river is different. What you did in the past influences what you choose to do next in future circumstances, which are always different from the past. So, while the world is determined, we are active agents in determining our decisions going forward in a self-determined way, in the context of what already happened and what might happen. Thus, our universe is not pre-determined in a block-universe way (in which past, present, and future exist simultaneously) but rather post-determined (after the fact we can look back to determine the causal connections), and we are part of the causal net of the myriad determining factors to create that post-determined world.

Free will, Shermer wrote, is somehow to be found in billions and billions of neurons, (to paraphrase Sagan):

Coyne is unhappy with my invoking of “emergence” and says I’m being rude to him and Sapolsky and Harris in accusing them of “physics envy,” but that’s what it is! Here, for example, is Sapolsky defending his belief that free will does not exist because single neurons don’t have it: “Individual neurons don’t become causeless causes that defy gravity and help generate free will just because they’re interacting with lots of other neurons.”

In fact, billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism (or volition or free will) arises. This is why I like to ask determinists: Where is inflation in the laws and principles of physics, biology, or neuroscience? It’s not, because inflation is an emergent property arising from millions of individuals in economic exchange, a subject properly described by economists, not physicists, biologists, or neuroscientists.

I found that confusing because I saw no freedom in simply saying that humans are part of the “causal net of a determined universe.” And I was confused by the claim that “while the world is determined, we are active agents in determining our decisions going forward in a self-determined way, in the context of what already happened and what might happen.” I didn’t understand that, and it seemed to smuggle some magic into the definition. And, as I’ll show below by quoting Sam Harris, I think that compatibilism misses the key feature of most people’s view of free will (yes, there are surveys): “We could have done other than what we did.”  If you say, “yes,” then you are a free willer, but have to specify what aspect of the universe enables us to have done otherwise. If you say, “No, never,” then you are either a determinist or a compatibilist. Determinism needs no further explication, but compatibilism demands that you confect a new definition of free will—one that insists that we have it despite physical determinism.

Now there are at least a half-dozen versions of compatibilism, each proposing a different definition of the “free will” we supposedly have, so compatibilists themeslves have incompatible views about free will! It’s my belief from reading Dennett and others that compatibilism is pursued by people who think that if we don’t think we have some sort of free will, society will fall apart. People will think that without free will, we lack moral responsibility, and apart from that, we’ll all become nihilists unwilling to even get out of bed. After all, what’s the point if everything’s determined?

I have answered both of these assertions before, saying that determinists like me are not nihilists, that society can function even realizing that determinism is true, because people still feel like they have free will, and that we can have “respnsibility” without needing to have “moral responsibility,” which assumes we could have behaved otherwise.

But I’ve written about all this before. Michael was kind enough to allow me to respond to his response in the pages of Skeptic, and you can read my 2000-word response by clicking the screenshot below, or reading the article archived here. (The title comes from an old novelty song, “Yes! We have no bananas,”)


I’ll give just a few quotes from my piece; it’s short enough that you can read it in a few minutes.

[Shermer’s] smuggled-in dualism becomes clear when Shermer claims that although the action of individual neurons may be determined, “billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism (or volition or free will) arises.” But how can one neuron be governed by the laws of physics but a group of interacting neurons not be governed by the laws of physics. If they are, then there is no freedom, no volition, no “willed” control of our behavior, and no ability to have done otherwise. Yet Shermer argues that when a group of neurons cooperates, some kind of “will” arises. This dilemma won’t be resolved until Shermer explains the relevant difference between the behavior of one neuron and of a group of neurons.

. . .As Shermer notes, 59 percent of surveyed philosophers are compatibilists while the rest are almost equally divided between libertarians, determinists, and those with no opinion. He deems philosophers the “most qualified people” to pronounce on the problem, but are philosophers more qualified than neuroscientists or physicists? As Sam Harris (a neuroscientist and a determinist) said:

[Compatibilism] ignores the very source of our belief in free will: the feeling of conscious agency. People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.

. . . Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings. [JAC: I love that line.]

Importantly, the “folk” conception of free will—the libertarian version—is what most people think they have. It is that version that permeates society, the legal system, and, of course, religion, and is therefore the most important version to discuss.

And my ending:

Finally, Shermer poses what he sees as an unassailable challenge to my determinism:

In fact, billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism (or volition or free will) arises. This is why I like to ask determinists: Where is inflation [of the monetary sort] in the laws and principles of physics, biology, or neuroscience? It’s not, because inflation is an emergent property arising from millions of individuals in economic exchange, a subject properly described by economists, not physicists, biologists, or neuroscientists.

That is a red herring. Like all phenomena in human society, you won’t find monetary inflation in the laws of physics. Nor will you find academics, music, sports, or any other human endeavor. The question is not whether these phenomena are in the laws of physics, but whether they result from the laws of physicsas emergent phenomena wholly compatible with underlying naturalism. And Shermer himself said yes, they do: “we live in a determined universe governed by laws of nature.”

The problem of free will is “insoluble” only insofar as Shermer, trying to retain an idea of self-control, and ignoring the massive body of data on affecting volition, has confected a new definition that simply redescribes human behavior. The important question is this: “Is there physical determinism of human behavior or not?” Both Shermer and I agree that there is. In the end, however, Shermer seems to argue that we have free will because we feel like it. One might as well say that there’s a God because we feel like there is one.

That’s it; you can read the argument and come to your own conclusions. For some reason I can’t stop arguing about free will. I guess my persistence is also determined. . .

Alan Lightman in The Atlantic: Dualism or not?

March 30, 2026 • 11:00 am

Alan Lightman a physicist best known for his writing about science, most famously his 1992 novel Einstein’s Dreams. At present he’s a “professor of the practice of the humanities at MIT.”

Lightman’s recent article in The Atlantic (click headline below or find article archived for frere here), while seeming to buy into the magazine’s recent penchant for osculating religion, really is not.  It seems to mostly express a kind of spiritual wonder.  But it’s confusing for two reasons.

First, he denies materialism, but latter accepts it (see below).

Second he deals with two forms of dualism: the mind/body dualism dealt with by Descartes, but also a dualism caused by recent advances in medical technology, in which part of your body is not made of tissue (examples are artificial hearts and mind/electrode interfaces) making people part human, part machine.

After reading the piece, I wasn’t sure what the point was except to mirror Lightman’s wonder at the world and his unanswered questions.

It began when Lightman had a colonoscopy, which got  him wondering what was going on inside himself; as he said, “I felt like a trespasser in my own body.” And that gets him into the first form of dualism.  All bolding henceforth is mine:

Modern neuroscience has largely overthrown the classical view that the mind and the body are fundamentally different substances, and it has shown that all of our thoughts and mental experiences are rooted in the material brain. But even granting that scientific view, there remains a profound disconnect between our conscious self-awareness—rooted in the three pounds of gooey stuff in our skulls—and the rest of our body.

And here’s the confusing bit, where he denies materialism: he simply has to be more than just the substance of his body. Bolding is mine:

After that unsettling medical adventure, I began mulling over why I was so disturbed to see the insides of my body. A number of issues come to mind. For starters, the experience struck me as a vivid demonstration of my materiality. Even though I am a scientist and have a materialist view of the world, I still harbor the belief that I am more than just a jumble of tissues and nerves. The experience of consciousness and life is so sublime that it is hard to imagine it all arising from mere atoms and molecules. 

This seems like a case of cognitive dissonance, but it’s not clear whether he really believes what’s in bold as opposed to “harboring” that belief. Yes, we don’t know how consciousness works, but what else is there to create it except the stuff of our bodies and brains? For other people, like Ross Douthat, a failure to understand is by default evidence for god, but nobody who knows the history of science would think that.

Lightman then muses for a while about our failure to fully understand our own bodies, but what is a source of puzzlement to him is a challenge to scientists. We have never made progress in understanding nature by assuming that naturalism is wrong, and so the program to understand consciousness must begin with a naturalistic program—until we find an exception to naturalism!

But later on, Lightman says that he’s really a materialist:

I must again confess that I am a materialist. I respect the belief in an immortal soul. I respect the belief in a nonphysical mind. But, despite my predilection for some transcendent element, I do not share those beliefs. Still, I am baffled by the disconnect I feel between body and mind. I look down at my bare feet and command my toes to wiggle. And they wiggle. But “I” am looking down at them from above. My toes are things that I gaze at from some distance. But what distance? The distance from the camera of my eyes? The distance from my conscious mind, which has these thoughts? And my toes are visible. The inside of my body is even more distant.

Once again his source of wonder is his victimization by an illusion, one described so clearly by Dan Dennett, that there is an “Alan Lightman” sitting somewhere in his brain, a little homunculus that looks down on his toes. Again, he’s baffled, while a biologist would see a challenge. My own view, and I’m no expert, is that the “hard problem of consciousness” will simply devolve to a problem of what brain connections are necessary for the sensation consciousness, and then we’ll have to say, “And that is all we know.”

Finally, having confessed his bafflement, Lightman goes on to describe some medical advances that truly are amazing, but, like the one below, must surely have a naturalistic explanation:

In 2013, scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California implanted two computer chips in the brain of Erik Sorto, then 32, who was paralyzed from the neck down from a gunshot wound. The output from the chips is connected to a computer, which interprets the patterns of their electrical activity; the computer, in turn, is connected to a robot arm. When Sorto is thirsty and merely thinks about reaching for a cup of water, the computer chips in his brain sense his desire and relay that thought to the computer, and the robot arm grabs a cup of water and brings it to his lips. When I interviewed Sorto in November 2021 and asked him what it felt like to have this machine in his body, he said that he felt mostly human but also part cyborg.

Now that is amazing, especially because, as far as I know, the way it works was not designed from first principles, although some knowledge of neuroscience was surely required (where do you put the chips?). But this surely has a naturalistic explanation, unless you think that god did it or some fundamental principles of how neurons and muscles work has eluded us.

And that’s pretty much it.  I may have failed to be impressed simply because I’m jaded, and as a scientist I’m used to unsolved problems that to other conjure up spiritual or even non-naturalistic explanations. But still, I wonder why The Atlantic published this.

A muddled argument: Shermer argues for the reality of free will

February 22, 2026 • 10:00 am

Michael Shermer has a new book out called Truth: What it is, How to Find it, and Why it Still Matters, and I’ve mentioned it before. I’m reading it now, and there’s a lot of good stuff in it. But one of the twelve chapters—the one on free will—is, I think, misguided and confusing. In the preceding link you’ll find a video he made about free will, as well as my critique of it. You may not want to read this post if you’ve read the previous one, but the video differs slightly from the article I discuss below.

So here’s my take 2 on Shermer’s views, recently expressed in a longish article in Quillette. (Michael was kind enough to send me a pdf, so I presume he wants my take.) Read it by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.

In short, Shermer is somewhat of a compatibilist—or so I think, for though doesn’t seem to fully on board with libertarian “you-could-have-done-otherwise” free will, but neither does he accept physical determinism.  Further, he doesn’t seem to think that “you could have done otherwise” is even testable, as we’re never in the same situation twice.

He’s right about the untestability criterion. But that doesn’t matter, for even if we were in the identical situation, with every molecule in the universe exactly as it was the first time, there are fundamentally unpredictable events of the quantum kind that might lead to slightly different outcomes. And the more distant in the future we look, the more divergent the outcomes will be. I’ve already noted that the future is probably not completely determined because quantum events could be cumulative.  In evolution, for instance, natural selection depends on the existence of different forms of genes that arise by mutation. If quantum effects on DNA molecules can lead to different mutations, then the raw material of evolution could differ if the tape of life is rewound, and different things could evolve.

Further, if quantum phenomena affect neurons and behavior, it’s possible—barely, possible, I’d say—that in two identical situations you could behave differently. I don’t believe that, and neither does neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, but quantum phenomena that affect molecular movement or positions do not give us free will, as our “will”, whatever that is, doesn’t affect the physical behavior of matter. And so, if we use Anthony Cashmore’s definition of “free will” as given in his 2010 paper in PNAS (the paper that made me a determinist), fundamentally unpredictable quantum effects do not efface free will. Cashmore:

I believe that free will is better defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature. 

Cashmore takes care of quantum effects by lumping them as the “possible stochastic laws of nature.” (Some physicists think that quantum mechanics is really deterministic though it seems otherwise.)

But Shermer doesn’t talk much about quantum physics—in fact, he doesn’t mention it at all.  He simply argues by assertion, saying that yes, we could have done otherwise, and we could have done so on the rather nebulous bases of “self-organization” and “emergence”.  Let’s take the assertions first. I’ll have to quote at greater length than usual:

Since philosophers love to employ thought experiments to test ideas, here’s one for you to consider (feel free to plug yourself and your spouse or significant other into the situation): John Doe is an exceptionally moral person who is happily married to Jane. The chances of John ever cheating on Jane is close to zero. But the odds are not zero because John is human, so let’s say—for the sake of argument—that John has a one-night stand while on the road and Jane finds out. How does John account for his actions? Does he, pace the standard deterministic explanation for human behaviour (as in Harris’s and Sapolsky’s definitions above), say something like this to Jane?

Honey, my will is simply not of my own making. My thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which I am unaware and over which I exert no conscious control. I do not have the freedom you think I have. I could not have done otherwise because I am nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which I had no control, that brought me to the moment of infidelity…

Could John even finish the thought before the stinging slap of Jane’s hand across his face terminated the rationalisation? If free will is the power to do otherwise, as it is typically defined by philosophers, both John and Jane know that, of course, he could have done otherwise, and she reminds him that should such similar circumstances arise again he damn well better make the right choice… or else.

This is argument against free will by assertion alone.  What his wife is evincing here is her illusion of free will. Nobody denies the fact that we feel that we could make real choices. But that doesn’t mean that we do.

But where’s the evidence that John Doe could have refrained from his one-night stand?  He is correct in thinking that he could have not done otherwise (how could he unless some undefinable, nonphysical “will” affected his libido?), but his wife, subject to the universal illusion that our behavior is more than “the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature”, believes in some undefinable property called “will” that could change the outcomes of a given situation. She thinks that John could have chosen not to fall prey to the allure of that other woman.

So Jane gives John a slap (that slap, too, was determined). And the slap could change John’s future behavior so that he refrains from other affairs, for, like all vertebrates, we learn from experience. That’s the result of evolution. (Keep kicking a friendly dog and see how long it remains friendly!).  He concludes what’s below (bolding is mine): But nobody with any neurons to rub together argues that changing behavior via learning somehow violates determinism.

More from Shermer:

But this is not the universe we live in. In our universe (unlike the one in which thought experiments are run), the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy means that time flows forward and no future scenario can ever perfectly match one from the past. As Heraclitus’ idiom informs us, “you can’t step into the same river twice,” because you are different and the river is different. What you did in the past influences what you choose to do next in future circumstances (the technical name for this is “learning”), which are always different from the past. So, while the world is determined, we are active agents in determining our decisions going forward in a self-determined way, in the context of what already happened and what might happen. Our universe is not pre-determined but rather post-determined, and we are part of the causal net of the myriad determining factors to create that post-determined world. Far from self-determinism being a downer, it’s the ultimate upper because it means we can do something about the future, namely, we can change it!

I don’t really understand this paragraph, nor the part in bold. In what sense are we active agents in determining our decisions in the future? Shermer doesn’t tell us, but he seems to be thinking of some nonphysical power of “will” to change the physics that governs our brains and behaviors. In fact, there is redundancy here: we determine our decision because our behavior is self-determined!

Apparently Shermer rejects physical determinism because, given the present, more than one future is possible. The laws of physics are likely to be, at bottom, unpredictable, though their effects on “macro” phenomena are probably minimal, and their effects on the behavior of human and other creatures is unknown. Shermer is even somewhat rude to determinists like Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky (and, implicitly, me, as I’m with them): we are hidebound reductionists plagued by “physics envy” (bolding is mine):

Do determinists really fall into the trap of pure reductionism? They do. Here is the determinist Robert Sapolsky defending his belief that free will does not exist because single neurons don’t have it: “Individual neurons don’t become causeless causes that defy gravity and help generate free will just because they’re interacting with lots of other neurons.” In fact, billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism arises. But Sapolsky is having none of that: “A lot of people have linked emergence and free will; I will not consider most of them because, to be frank, I can’t understand what they’re suggesting, and to be franker, I don’t think the lack of comprehension is entirely my fault.”

Determinists like Harris and Sapolsky have physics envy. The history of science is littered with the failed pipe dreams of ever-alluring reductionist schemes to explain the inner workings of the mind—schemes increasingly set forth in the ambitious wake of Descartes’ own famous attempt, some four centuries ago, to reduce all mental functioning to the actions of swirling vortices of atoms, supposedly dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness and choice at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organisation.

So what is there to behavior beyond atoms moving around according to physical principles? Shermer doesn’t tell us, but he seems determined (excuse the pun) to convince us that we do have free will, and it seems to be of the libertarian sort! He even evokes the mysteries of consciousness, which many people, including Francis Crick, think is best studied not from a “top down” approach, but from a reductionist “bottom up” approach.  And we know from various experiments and observations that we can affect our notion of “will”, making us seem like we have it when we don’t (people who suddenly confabulate a purpose when they behave according to stimulation of the brain), or making us seem like we lack it when we are actually acting deterministically (e.g., ouija boards). We can take away consciousness with anesthesia, restore it again, or alter it with psychedelic drugs.  All this implies that yes, consciousness and “will” are both phenomena stemming from physics.

Shermer rejects bottom-up approaches, raising the spectres of “self-organization and emergence” as arguments against Cashmore’s form of free will:

This we have through the sciences of complexity, in which we recognise the properties of self-organisation and emergence that arise out of complex adaptive systems, which grow and learn as they change, and they are autocatalytic—containing self-driving feedback loops. For example:

Water is a self-organised emergent property of a particular arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

Complex life is a self-organised emergent property of simple life, where simple prokaryote cells self-organised to become more complex eukaryote cells (the little organelles inside cells were once self-contained independent cells).

Consciousness is a self-organised emergent property of billions of neurons firing in patterns in the brain.

Language is a self-organised emergent property of thousands of words spoken in communication between language users.

That list goes on, but it’s muddled. First, what do we mean by “self-organized” properties?  Is water “self organized” beyond behaving in a glass in ways that are consistent with, but not necessarily predictable from, the behavior of a single water molecule?  Ditto for complex life.  In what sense are life and water “self-organized” rather than “organized by physics”? Yes, there are emergent properties, like the Eroica emerging from the pen of Beethoven, himself an admirable collection of organic molecules with the emergent property of writing great music.

Let’s dismiss “self-organization,” which seems like a buzzword that doesn’t advance Shermer’s argument, and concentrate instead on “emergence.”  Yes, water is wet. “Wetness” is a quale evinced in our consciousness, yet the properties of water that make it feel wet are surely consistent with, and result form, the laws of physics, just as the “pressure” of gas in a container is an emergent property of a bunch of gas molecules acting as a group. But nobody says that gas molecules have free will, even though some of their properties are “emergent.”

The issue here is not whether emergence is something predictable from a reductionist analysis, but whether it is something physically consistent with its reductionist constituents. If the laws of physics be true, then that consistency does nothing to efface determinism. Shermer’s failure is that he neglects to tell us the nature of something called a “will” that interposes itself between molecule and behavior.  And often, with greater knowledge of physics we can predict emergent properties from a reductionist analysis. (The gas laws are one such thing.)

I’ll draw this to a close now, adding one more note. Shermer’s failure is twofold. He fails to suggest how an undefined “will” can affect the behavior of matter, and he mistakes determinism for predictability, a rookie error. If quantum mechanics is a good explanation of physics, then the future is not 100% predictable, even if we had perfect knowledge of everything, which of course we don’t. And physicists tell me that quantum effects were important at the Big Bang, so at that moment the future of the entire universe was unpredictable. That says nothing about free will.

Shermer closes with another paragraph that I don’t understand; it sounds in some ways (this may anger him, but I apologize) like Deepak Chopra:

It may seem odd to think of yourself as a past-self, present-self, and future self, but as suggested in this language, your “self” is not fixed from birth, destined to a future over which you have no control. We live not only in space, but in time, and as such no matter the pre-conditioning factors nudging you along a given pathway—your genes, upbringing, culture, luck and contingent history—there is always wiggle room to alter future conditions. The river of time flows ever onward and you are part of its future.

Act accordingly.

This is more argument by assertion alone. I’m not sure what he means by “act accordingly”, much less “wiggle room.”  Of course we can be influenced by what we read, but we don’t have a “will” that could alter what we do at any given moment. As Cashmore said in his article:

Here I argue that the way we use the concept of free will is nonsensical. The beauty of the mind of man has nothing to do with free will or any unique hold that biology has on select laws of physics or chemistry. This beauty lies in the complexity of the chemistry and cell biology of the brain, which enables a select few of us to compose like Mozart and Verdi, and the rest of us to appreciate listening to these compositions. The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar.

I don’t mind being like a bowl of sugar, or, rather, a complex piece of animated meat.  I admire Shermer for all he’s done to further skepticism and attack quackery, but I think that on the issue of free will he’s gone awry.

From AI:

Michael Shermer on free will

January 28, 2026 • 10:15 am

Michael Shermer‘s new book is out, and in the video below, 55 minutes long, he gives an oral summary of its contents (a link to the book is at the bottom). The video was sent to me by reader Barry, who called my attention to the section on free will, and I’ve started the video at the 45-minutes mark—right when Shermer discusses the intractability of the “hard problem” of consciousness and then segues to free will. Here are the YouTube notes.

In this episode, Michael Shermer walks through the core ideas behind his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, breaking down how humans confuse meaning with reality, stories with facts, and confidence with correctness.

I’ve put a few remarks about Shermer’s view of free will, which seems to me confused, below the video.

Shermer avers that he’s a compatibilist: someone who accepts both determinism and free will. As Wikipedia puts it under “compatibilism“:

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.

And yet Shermer says he’s not a determinist, although he does define free will as “libertarian, could-have-done-otherwise” free will.  Shermer rejects libertarian free will because he says it’s dualistic, drawing a distinction between mind and matter, and here he’s absolutely right.

But then he argues that “determinists are wrong”! Why? He doesn’t say, but makes a confusing argument that the “could-have-done-otherwise” notion of free will is bogus because it involves replaying a tape of what happens when an instant of “choice” occurs.  Shermer says that if this is the contention, then of course you will do the same thing when you replay that instant, but argues that this is simply because you’re replaying a tape that already has a known consequence, like replaying a record. But if he thinks that, then what does he mean by saying that libertarian free will, which is the contention that replaying the tape could yield a different consequence, is wrong? He says that replaying the tape will always give the same result because it’s a tape. But that is not the argument that physical determinists make. The argument is that you are starting a fresh tape at the moment of choice, but it will always give the same result—absent any quantum effects (see below).

Shermer contends that “the past is determined, but the future isn’t”.  He doesn’t explain why, but here again I agree with his claim that the future is not absolutely determined. But Shermer doesn’t explain why it isn’t.  I will: the future is not completely determined only insofar as fundamentally unpredictable physical effects occur—that is, quantum effects, which as far as we know defy absolute predictability. We know quantum effects applied at the Big Bang, so at that moment the future of the universe was not predetermined.

But do quantum effects apply to human behavior and “choice”?  Perhaps; we just don’t know. Maybe an electron in a neuron in your brain will jump at the moment you’re ordering dinner, so you order fish instead of a hamburger.  If that could happen—and again we don’t know if it does—then yes, you could have done something other than what you did. However, because there’s no mind/body dualism, there is no way that you had any agency in moving that electron; it just happened. Is that what Shermer means by “free will”? If so, it’s a lame kind of free will, because the average person who believes in free will thinks in a dualistic way. Although they don’t say this expicitly, they contend that they have agency that can affect our neurons, brains and behavior.

I’ve written before about how predictability doesn’t equate to determinism, and by determinism I mean physical determinism, defined by Anthony Cashmore this way (this paper is what made me a determinist):

I believe that free will is better defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature.

Cashmore adds that the environment is still “chemistry”, which of course is also “physics”:

Here, in some ways, it might be more appropriate to replace “genetic and environmental history” with “chemistry”—however, in this instance these terms are likely to be similar and the former is the one commonly used in such discussions.

In other words, to Cashmore (and to me) this form of free will involves dualism. It’s woo. Cashmore, who admits that unpredictable quantum effects can lead to a universe where pure predictability is impossible, adds that that still does not give us free will as defined above—free will not governed by the laws of physics.

We know now that on a macro level, predictability is quite good: we can predict, using classical mechanics, when solar eclipses will occur, where the planets will be in ten years, and we can also use classical mechanics to put people on the Moon. But since classical mechanics is simply a reification on a large scale of quantum mechanics, the future is not completely predictable as quantum effects accumulate. I’ve used as an example the possibility that genetic mutations could be quantum phenomena in some way. If that’s the case, then we can’t predict at a given moment what mutations will occur, and if that is the case, then the raw material for evolution is unpredictable, which further means that evolution is unpredictable.

Nevertheless, because our behaviors are still controlled by the laws of physics, if there is no mind/body dualism then there is no “agency” as most people believe it, and thus there’s no libertarian free will.

But Shermer, as an avowed compatibilist (he appears to be strongly influenced by Dan Dennett), thinks that we do have a form of “free will”, and supports it by using as an example his ability to affect his own future by making preparations for tomorrow’s morning bicycle ride, even if he doesn’t want to ride. He puts his bike in the trunk, he lays out his bicycle clothes for the morrow, and so on. As he says:

“I can choose to do certain things now to make my future different than what it was in the past. That’s freedom; that’s volition; that’s choice. That’s free will.  That’s as good as it gets. So all the determinists, they’re wrong; they’re just simply wrong; they’re assuming we live in a universe that we don’t live in: a predetermined universe.”

It’s sure not choice the way most people mean it, and believe me, I’ve had this argument any number of times. People are not physical determinists, but dualists, just like the saxophone player who nearly attacked me when I told him that at the moment he decided to play an improvised jazz solo, that solo was not something he could alter by thinking.  People are not sophisticated enough to draw a distinction between free will and physical determinsim; they are not sophisticated enough to see that the only physical force that can ultimately change a behavior is quantum mechanics.

Shermer contends that “In the real universe, determinists don’t exist.” He says he’s never met one. Well, Mr. Shermer, meet Mr. Coyne and Mr. Sapolsky, both physical determinists.  We don’t distort the notion of “free will” just so we can say people have it. (Dennett thought that belief in determinism would erode society, and that’s why he wrote two books redefining free will for the masses.)

Finally, Shermer tells us why he doesn’t think there are true determinists: it’s because we act as if we have free will.  He says that some people who pretend to be determinists take pride in the books they write. As he says, “Why would you take pride in your books? You didn’t do anything; it was all determined at the Big Bang.”  Well, I don’t have to respond to that, Shermer knows better. We may well be evolved to think we have agency. We certainly do think that, and have evolved to think that, but I don’t know if natural selection produced that frame of mind. Regardless, we can’t help taking pride in our accomplishments, or looking down on people who do bad things, because that’s the way our brains are configured. That does not mean that physical determinism should not affect our views of punishment and reward: it should, especially with regard to the justice system. But I’ve discussed this many times before.

The last thing I want to say is that some atheist writers whom I admire greatly—people like Shermer, Pinker, and Dawkins—seem to shy away from the free-will problem. I am not sure why; perhaps they realize that if you deny libertarian free will, people will think you’re crazy. You tell me!

Here’s Michael’s book, which came out yesterday from the Johns Hopkins Press.  I haven’t yet read it, but surely will. If you click on the cover you’ll go to the Amazon site: