Re: Sam Harris mini-book on Free Will
I disagree. Our usual initial assumption is that we are totally free, within the limits of physical possibility. Science presents the contrarian determinist view, that in fact all our decisions are fated by physics, that our freedom is an illusion, because our universe of matter in motion is remorselessly ordained in every detail from the big bang to the end of time. This scientific causal view has the advantage of pure logic, but it also has the disadvantage of saying that when a person makes a choice, they do so not as a free moral agent but as a predetermined automaton.
But, if we say this logical scientific causal model of time is possibly false, because of a degree of randomness in causal process, then we lose the original basis of determinism, the idea that the future is entirely set by the past. When the future is no longer set by pure logical causal process, it becomes the case that many different futures are possible. Maybe we could blow up our planet tomorrow, or maybe humanity could colonize the galaxy over the next billion years. Maybe there is nothing in our present circumstances that requires one of these results rather than the other, because their occurrence relies on free choice.
The random quantum switching (if that is the right term) seen in quarks opens the genetic possibility that our apparent freedom is truly free, that our decisions truly are not set by their past conditions. This is not to say nothing is fated, only that there does seem to exist an existential chink of pure freedom able to create its own fate. Physical randomness is decisive for real freedom.
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