Free Will

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of y

Yes, you can do what you want—but you cannot account for the fact that your wants are effective in one case and not in another (and you certainly can’t choose your wants in advance).

Becoming sensitive to the background causes of one’s thoughts and feelings can—paradoxically—allow for greater creative control over one’s

And what a person consciously intends to do says a lot about him. It makes sense to treat a man who enjoys murdering children differently from one who accidentally hit and killed a child with his car—because the conscious intentions of the former give us a lot of information about how he is likely to behave in the future.

feel that we freely author our own thoughts and actions (however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms).

People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is illusory.

The more we understand the human mind in causal terms, the harder it becomes to draw a distinction between cases like 4 and 5.

As we will see, this distinction can be preserved—and with it, our most important moral and legal concerns—while banishing the idea of free will once and for all.

distinctly human about our lives seems to depend upon our viewing one another as autonomous persons,