The Debate Over Free Will
Another example of either/or thinking gone wrong.
There are few people as vocal and committed to the argument against free will as Sam Harris. He frequently revisits the topic on his podcast, and he has published a short book outlining the case against it as he sees it.
Harris and others are strong determinists. In his 2012 book entitled simply “Free Will”, he writes “Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.”
To make his point, Harris refers to a number of extreme examples of abnormal and typically violent behavior. Mass shootings, assassinating a president, and rape coupled with murder feature prominently in both his book and podcast. He then points to instances in which the perpetrators of these crimes were found later to have had a brain tumor or had brain scans that produced evidence of psychopathy.
However, these are extreme examples or what the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist commonly refers to as “limit cases.” In the introduction to his two volume The Matter With Things, McGilchrist describes a “limit case” as “mean[ing] that what is essential to the phenomenon has in…
