Free Will

I was first introduced to the concept of the absence of free will by Daniel Kahneman's book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. I was astonished by how much bigger the so-called optical illusions were than I had previously thought, and how they could affect things like the correlation between the right and left brain through the corpus callosum, the willingness to walk slowly after reading about an elderly person, or the tendency to be more selfish after reading the word “money”. All of these things made me realize that thinking is not a magical thing, but a totally physical thing that is influenced by preceding events. So, when I was introduced to Bayes' Theorem, I fully grasped the logic of natural things. Furthermore, I read other books that talked about free will, including “Homo Deus” by Harari, “The Errors of Descartes” by Antonio Damasio, and “Por que não somos racionais?” (Why are we not rational?) by Ramon Consenza (only available in Portuguese).

Free will is more objective and philosophical than the others, but less applicable. Harris could focus more on knowable neurological conditions (such as Phineas Gage) to show people that often we don't have control over our actions. Additionally, we could focus on the maxim of Christopher Hitchens, “I don't have a body, I am a body,” to show readers that we cannot be separated as entities from our physical bodies. However, it is still a good book, and I recommend it to those who are new to the topic. If you're not convinced, try reading the other books I mentioned. I know you can't control what you want, can you?