Sally's Reviews > Free Will

Whether there is free will or not is an open question, but this book throws very little light on the subject. Full of assertions and absolutist thinking, it sets up the problem and the definition of terms in such a way that "no free will" is necessarily the conclusion. If free will means that the conscious mind (the everyday ego or the "monkey mind" of the Buddhists) has to have full awareness, control, and origination of all impulses, thoughts, and desires down to their very furthest roots, then of course there is no free will. He says several times in the same sentence that our choices are both "mysterious" and "determined," which is not a happy combination - if they are mysterious, how do you know for sure that they're determined, unless it is an article of faith? To me his argument is like saying that if scientists don't understand why the Big Bang happened and what state it originated from to the farthest regress, it can't possilbly be a valid concept since it doesn't answer every why and what and how down to the most remote root cause the author can imagine. I was surprised to see he was a philosophy major, after reading this book.