An informative book on neuroscience with attempts to explain and understand free will.

One of my all time favorite books. If you’re reading reviews of this book it means you’re interested in neuroscience, free will, what consciousness is, or how our society should operate as our understanding of the brain changes so you should go read it! This book does not fail to deliver on those deep questions. The author is very knowledgeable but also has a great sense of humor and humility. Topics discussed touch on many other diverse areas such as judicial reform, complexity theory, and mindfulness. I’d be shocked if someone who is interested in this topic didn’t completely love this book.

Intriguing book, with lots of terrific insights and ideas. Neurobiology for the common person. There was only one spot where I glazed over.

My only exception to the book was on page 157 where he describes the theories of Hare and Tomasello that constraining individual behavior -- for the social good -- eventually lead to genetic changes. That the cooperative nature of people, evidenced by building the pyramids and Roman aqueducts, has genetically reduced people's aggressive behavior.

I thought those grand structures were built by slaves. How did that change the game?!?! And the genetic makeup of humans? While we are more peaceful that in times past, despotism has not been weaned from the gene pool. I'm not sure I agree with the theory, at least not as described here.

I do recommend the book.

Yet another very interesting book about how psychological conditions affect the decisions we make and how judgements are passed depending on mental health. Great reading.

The book was an okay read. It demonstrated how the words & phrases we use to describe consciousness & our mental processes needs a lot of work. The short of it, do we have free will? From what I gather from the book, we do but it is limited. There is so much out of our control that we don't even think about or in day to day life we are unaware of that influences our thoughts, actions & impulses. Yet, our minds emerge from the processes in our brains in an abstract way & can influence our thoughts, actions & impulses either through constraint or by simply not getting in the way of the initial impulse after some further thought (indirect liberty I guess). There are some biological factors & some social ones & the mind that emerges from our brains seems to be as much influences by the latter as it is by internal processes. Our brains & the mind that emerges from it are not wholly deterministic, there is some wiggle room for choice & control, which is a part of what makes us human from what I gathered from the information in this book. There is a lot of good information in this book & some of it can be a little unsettling or even confusing which I would assume is because neuroscience is still in it's infancy & we still have much to learn about the human brain & mind.

I think that in part what the author is trying to stress is we are not completely free because of what influences our actions. However, we are free enough or have the right amount free will or just enough to be able to think for ourselves & be held accountable & reel some of our impulses in. So I guess our free will is not absolute but of degree & to what degree, I'm not entirely sure. It's an interesting book & I think it will raise more questions that will likely only be answered in time as the field of neuroscience progresses. Either way, it's not a question that will be easily settled & there is much more to learn on the subject.

I don't rate books 5 stars lightly, but this was exactly the kind of discussion of free will I wanted, at least at this point in my reading. I've read a lot of books about the mind, consciousness and free will and almost all of them spend far more time rehashing philosophy back to Descartes or further back, and then barely say anything at all based on modern scientific understanding. Then I've read books with plenty of modern scientific experiments, but that don't do nearly as good a job of tying those technical details back to higher level ideas with meaning or consequence.

Also, I don't usually read that many reviews of books before I review them, but for this book most of the criticism I read seemed to be that people thought the other was arguing for some particular point or another and they didn't like that. I didn't think the author was trying to argue that there's one right point of view regarding free will, but instead shows us how complex it is to define what free will even is, what different definitions might mean, and how experiments have validated those understandings or not. For example, this book briefly mentions that quantum effects might mean the universe isn't deterministic and could be a way for one interpretation of what free will is to be possible. I've never particularly liked that argument, but I don't think it was being put forth as the only possible solution, instead it's treated as many other ideas regarding free will and the mind and examining each in turn.

If anything the main flaw I see is that so many different points of view are presented it's a little hard to keep a coherent narrative and grouping of ideas going. However, the book is short enough that it's not too hard to follow the tangents.

My favorite part by far is the description of the experiments with split brain patients, which I'd heard about before at a high level, but are very well explained here. Likely because the author conducted many of these experiments himself.

I felt like this book gave me the background to more easily evaluate and succinctly state my own thoughts on free will without forcing me into that opinion. Basically I don't think free will exists the way it's always vaguely alluded to in colloquial use and some philosophical uses, which is basically like a ghost in the machine. If you define free will as basically being able to deterministically and appropriately respond to your surroundings then it seems to exist as an emergent property of complex underlying systems, even though that's a very unsatisfying definition. Even if free will is limited to that, the way we have a part of our brain basically providing a narrative to make it feel as though we're a ghost in the machine is fascinating.