Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will. The point of the first half of this book is to establish that this can’t be shown.

In her writing, Roskies emphasizes the difference between conscious intention and consciousness of intention. Alfred Mele speculates that the readiness potential is the time when, in fact, you have legitimately freely chosen, and it then takes a bit of time for you to be consciously aware of your freely willed choice.

While it may seem ridiculous and nonsensical to explain something by resorting to an infinity of turtles all the way down, it actually is much more ridiculous and nonsensical to believe that somewhere down there, there’s a turtle floating in the air. The science of human behavior shows that turtles can’t float; instead, it is indeed turtles all the

And when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call “free will,” they have (a) failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking beneath the surface and/or (b) erroneously concluded that the rarefied aspects of the universe that do work indeterministically can explain your character, morals, and

If you do X and this is followed by Y, what increases the odds of your feeling like you caused Y? Psychologist Daniel Wegner of Harvard, a key contributor in this area, identified three logical variables. One is priority—the shorter the delay between X and Y, the more readily we have an illusory sense of will. There are also consistency and

If that’s the case for some baboon, just imagine humans. We have to learn our culture’s rationalizations and hypocrisies—thou shalt not kill, unless it’s one of them, in which case here’s a medal. Don’t lie, except if there’s a huge payoff, or it’s a profoundly good act (“Nope, no refugees hiding in my attic, no siree”). Laws to be followed

As such, depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.

To reiterate, when you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, and before that, all the way down.

However, in the Haynes studies, fMRI images predicted which behavior occurred with only about 60 percent accuracy, almost at the chance level. For Mele, a “60-percent accuracy rate in predicting which button a participant will press next doesn’t seem to be much of a threat to free will.” In Roskies’s words, “All it suggests is that there are some