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Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Moral Landscape, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. His new book is short (96) pages, to the point, and will change the way we all view free will, as Oliver Sacks wrote: “Brilliant and witty — and never less than incisive — Free Will shows that Sam Harris can say more in 13,000 words than most people do in 100,000.” UCSD neuroscientist V.S, Ramachandran notes: “In this elegant and provocative book, Sam Harris demonstrates — with great intellectual ferocity and panache — that free will is an inherently flawed and incoherent concept, even in subjective terms. If he is right, the book will radically change the way we view ourselves as human beings.”
At 7:10 Sam suggests that our lives are determined by cause and effect, or by random chance, and that either way there is no space for free will. Yet free will could easily be assumed to be one cause among many. We live much of our lives unconsciously going through our days without making any significant choices, but there are times when we do make a significant decision and move in a radically different direction. One aspect of chaos theory is that you can map chaotic systems. You can't predict individual events, but over times those unmappable singular events form a figure that predicts the boundaries of the system. We are profoundly affected by the world around us, but sometimes the reverse is true as well.
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The IEET is a 501(c)3 non-profit, tax-exempt organization registered in the State of Connecticut in the United States.
Contact: Executive Director, Dr. James J. Hughes,
Williams 119, Trinity College, 300 Summit St., Hartford CT
06106 USA
Email: director @ ieet.org phone:
860-297-2376
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At 7:10 Sam suggests that our lives are determined by cause and effect, or by random chance, and that either way there is no space for free will. Yet free will could easily be assumed to be one cause among many. We live much of our lives unconsciously going through our days without making any significant choices, but there are times when we do make a significant decision and move in a radically different direction. One aspect of chaos theory is that you can map chaotic systems. You can't predict individual events, but over times those unmappable singular events form a figure that predicts the boundaries of the system. We are profoundly affected by the world around us, but sometimes the reverse is true as well.