Do We Have Free Will?

Do you feel you chose to click on this article? Or rather, did the firing of synapses in your brain force you to come here? Well, Sam Harris would argue the latter.

Sam Harris is an author, atheist, neuroscientist, philosopher, and also what is known as an incompatibilist. If the term incompatibilist isn’t in your day-to-day vernacular, let me explain. Firstly, to understand compatibilism we need to understand determinism.

Determinism is the belief that all actions are in fact shaped by prior events, and the events before those prior events, and so on until the very first moment of time.

You could imagine that we are all wind-up toys, and the Big Bang, (or whatever preceded it) was the hand that wound us up and put us on our course.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, an incompatibilist is someone who believes in determinism, and who subsequently believes that the notion of free will among individuals is incompatible with determinism.

In simple terms, given the number of factors that influenced us — influences which we had no control over — Sam would argue that we can’t claim ownership of our own thoughts or actions. Let me explain.