Sam Harris, bestselling author of THE END OF FAITH takes on one of today's liveliest issues: whether or not we actually have 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 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?

Review
"If you believe in free will, or know someone who does, here is the perfect antidote. In this smart, engaging, and extremely readable little book, Sam Harris argues that free will doesn't exist, that we're better off knowing that it doesn't exist, and that—once we think about it in the right way—we can appreciate from our own experience that it doesn't exist. This is a delightful discussion by one of the sharpest scholars around."

—Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology, Yale University, and author of “How Pleasure Works”

Sam Harris is the author of the bestselling books “The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, ”and“ Lying. The End of Faith” won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing has been published in over fifteen languages. Dr. Harris and his work have been discussed in “The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Time”, and many other publications. His writing has appeared in “The New York Times”, “Los Angeles Times”, “The Times” (London), “The”“Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Annals of Neurology”, and elsewhere. Dr. Harris is cofoun