Free Will

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brain's motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some "conscious" decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by ...

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brain's motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some "conscious" decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one's actions. The question of free will is no mere curio of philosophy seminars. A belief in free will underwrites both the religious notion of "sin" and our enduring commitment to retributive justice. The Supreme Court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our system of law. Any scientific developments that threatened our notion of free will would seem to put the ethics of punishing people for their bad behaviour in question.In Free Will Harris debates these ideas and asks whether or not, given what brain science is telling us, we actually have free will?

萨姆·哈里斯Sam Harris

被《连线》杂志评选为2012年影响世界的50人之一，撼动道德世界的科学勇士。

美国著名哲学家、神经学家、公共知识分子以及畅销书作家。

斯坦福大学哲学学士、加州大学洛杉矶分校神经学博士。

非盈利组织理智工程（Project Reason）联合创始人兼首席执行官。

他的作品荣获美国笔会非虚构文学奖，以15种不同的语言在全球出版发行，并引起《纽约时报》、《科学美国人》、《自然》、《滚石》、《新闻周刊》、《时代周刊》以及其他刊物的广泛关注。

他还在《纽约时报》、《洛杉矶时报》、《泰晤士报》、《波士顿环球报》、《大西洋月刊》、《新闻周刊》、《神经学年鉴》等刊物发表过多篇文章。