Dennett's books are the best at illuminating Darwin's strange logic. The evolutionary tale of humanity is much more rich and enlightening than any of its mythical counterparts, particularly as told in this book focusing on free will.

Free will is in some ways an illusion for us. Our bodies routinely react before our conscious mind is even aware of what our brain has told it to do, but this doesn't mean that we don't have free will. Our evolutionary tale is one of increasing freedom as our capacity as a species has evolved. Freedom has evolved along with us.

It began with sex (which is a good thing). When we started sexual selection, our genes had to learn to cooperate. The better our genes cooperated, the more likely they were to evolve and sustain themselves.

As we continued to evolve, our minds layered until we obtained consciousness. The process was as gradual as the shifting into mammals. The brain is a prediction machine and the better predictors evolved and continued to grow. The act of prediction is where we obtain the first steps of free will. We make choices based on what we believe will happen and to get a certain result. Couple this with our social, bee-hive like qualities as human and our choices take on moral significance. The better we have become at predicting the future as humans, our capacity to exercise free will has increased, not decreased. Did man just 150 years ago have the option of choosing to fly? I do. I can go places, do things, communicate with people by my brain's choice because our human capacity to connect our human species through technology has increased. This is freedom evolving and my free will increasing because we live in a deterministic universe with evolutionary life forms.

Our ethics and human laws on how to deal with human choice and free will should focus firmly on what type of risk we as a society are willing to take as to allowing members of our species to act. It is a subtle shift from religious based free will, but in the end will guide us to creating ethics and laws that are more in keeping with our evolutionary heritage.

It's not that I would disagree with Dennett on his main points. It's that I despise his writing.

All the space he uses to ridicule those who don't get his views, the overall condescending tone, the superfluous use of block quotes - sometimes only to show that he's famous: "hey, I was referenced to in this novel, in which there's a fictitious character who happens to be wrong about free will!". Frankly, I expected better, and those expectations were probably why I ended up finishing the book: I held on to the hope that it would get better towards the end.

Writing pop science is a tricky job. But as many other writers demonstrate, it is possible to be clear without being condescending, to be conversational without rambling, and to disagree with views without ridiculing them.

All the same, I probably did get something out of this, although I'm rather unsure what it was I got. I award the second star in honor of that mysterious take-off.

Had a silly little existential crisis and it was a perfect opportunity to read this book. Bought it because I didn’t like the idea that free will does not exist (Sam harris was my only exposure)

So many interesting thought experiments combining the works of prominent psychologists, economists, biologists. Cool points were definitely made.

Loved all the drawings and graphs. SO INTERESTING!! I absolutely DEVOURED it, will definitely read again after more books on this topic to examine the arguments made more critically. I definitely blindly trusted the author as an expert who holds the same beliefs as me so Im very biased

I'm not sure that I necessarily agree that it makes any sense that we have "free will" even in the compatabilist sense where free will is compatible with (but does not imply) determinism. Really it is largely a question of semantics and Dennett is surely right that other concepts of free will (libertarian free will in particular) are just incoherent. But Dennett does clarify very well in this book just what degrees of freedom we could possibly have given the physical constraints we are under and never allows himself to be influenced by any kind of woo, such as trying to explain consciousness in terms of quantum mechanics, so tempting to less clear thinkers. And he is a clear thinker unlike many philosophers and is able to explain himself in an engaging manner for the most part - although I see from other comments that all this is still a bit much for some people.

In any case, far from being just of academic interest, the topic of what kind of decisions we are capable of making is of great importance, because we need to finally recognize, when we are strolling through the designer malls, that people are very much the victim of their circumstances and are often not able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and so could use some help. In the end the more stable societies that would result would be beneficial to everyone, even if we had to forego the occasional Rolex watch or Ferrari.

I have never been a Daniel Dennett fan. His occasional arrogance and sometimes stodgy style don't help, but he does provide the reader with lots of very stimulating arguments, and on several occasions, I found myself stopping to put the book down and spend time mulling over the points made. It was worth the three stars just to experience that.

Wonderful exploration on how we developed several different cognitive abilities and how they amount to moral responsibility. Clarifies a lot of philosophical confusions about determinism and puts a lot of psychology and neuroscience findings in their proper context.

It is written splendidly: beautiful blend of logic and wit. He desnt pull anything over your eyes; he contends with the best objections and admits he simply doesnt want to cram the rest into the book.

Not only does clarify the details on this important issue, it hold deep wisdom on issues of cognitive science, evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, individual freedom, and moral agency.

Would recommend to anyone interested in a naturalistic account of morality.

To understand “the free will debate” better I recommend you to read some more books before you do to this book - especially the free will book by Sam Harris.

Free will such a huge debate and we need to understand the fundamentals of free will before we start the debate with the opponent.

Dennet here proves the Free Will does exist. But rather than freedom being an eternal, unchanging condition of our existence in the real life scenario. Darwin puts the foundation stone by Evolution Theory which was a great asset for Dennet to start his argument.

Whether you comforted to conclude that you don’t have free will - Or you’re sure you have free will, this book will alter your Free-Will fundamental.

Dennett cuts through the baggage wrought by naval-gazing philosophers of the past and gets to the heart of the issue of free will. He shows that determinism is no enemy of free will. He disproves quantum consciousness. He justifies using the intentional stance in a deterministic universe, then uses this handy tool to explain when and how free will arises as an human adaptation.

He also defends the morality of investigating the scientific validity of free will. He also investigates some of the moral consequences that arise when we apply the tools of science to the problem of free will.

I'll make this short and sweet. There's a lot of good material in here that made it worth the read, however Dennett hasn't convinced me that a free will worth saving exists. It seems like he uses a lot of rhetoric to metaphorically make it seem as if we have free will, but again this isn't free will... I know I got into zero specifics here, but I'm in a rush.

I'm giving this one five stars because Dennett is a genius and his writing style equally reflective of his genius.

However, I'm not sure this book has fully brought me on board with its core argument. Dennett's idea here is essentially that determinism is true, yet we should not consider the truth of determinism to be a negation of our own free will. And many supporting arguments (at least, to the extent that I could wrap my head around them) seemed to boil down to one big "Don't think about it!", i.e. we as conscious beings *feel* as though we have free will in context of the reality that we think and move around in, so we should just believe/act as though determinism doesn't get in the way of this. I felt there was very little in the book that tied all the evidence together with the central argument and truly compelled me to look at free will as Dennett does. But if you dive into this book and slog through to the end, even if you're not persuaded, you'll have enriched your own viewpoint with some truly fascinating ideas - about the human creature and more.

The writing style of this book is quite technical in spots, so of course it's possible that the nuances were going over my head and that I should re-visit the book someday to see if I can absorb more the second time around.

The Greek word that gave us 'pharmacy' meant both 'poison' and 'cure'. The thoroughgoing naturalism of which Dennett is arguably the most brilliant exponent has, it seems to me, pernicious influences in the world, mainly in the form of 'nothingbuttery' (love is 'nothing but' survival instinct, we are 'nothing but' genes etc). That's the poison part - often manifested in the increasingly widespread belief that since we are 'nothing but' assemblages of atoms obeying the laws of physics (with a smidge of genetic determinism thrown in), it stands to reason that we cannot have free will, since we are determined by our antecedent conditions (physical, genetic etc). This is where the cure part comes in. Dennett has established a reputation as a 'debunker' (of religion etc) - but this book shows him in a 'bunking' mode. In my view, he deserves to be much more known for this other persona. Like "Elbow Room", his previous book on the topic, he constructs careful arguments to prop up the idea that free will is notjust an illusion.

Perhaps the easiest starting point is by examining the odd hope that some place in quantum physics, who seems to outline some pockets of genuine indeterminacy embedded in the fabric of the world. Some harbour hopes that this would open a window through which agency can creep in, channels through which the will can affect and effect outcomes which are not given in advanceby the prior state of the world. Dennett's point is that such hopes are misguided. Randomquantum fluctuations cannot provide a solid foundation for free will - which, after all, is meant to maintain a *link* between intention, action and outcome. We would need to 'to get the undetermined
quantum event to be not just in you but yours.'. Like Velcro, we need something to latch onto - and asking for an indeterministic world is asking for too much!

Does this mean we are inevitably at the mercy of determinism? Not so, argues Dennett. The real variables are *information and control*, not determinism. But to see his argument we need to shake off a few persistent intuitions. Determinism suggests that, if you ran the movie of the universe again, I would do the same actions in exactly the same way (and, presumably, some sort of omniscient entity could predict that, too). Whither free will, then? If everything is determined, it could not have been different. Dennett argues that this is true, but not that interesting - almost a truism. If nothing changed, nothing changes. The more interesting question is whether I could have done different in *slightly different circumstances*. A golfer that misses a shot and says 'I could have sunk it' usually means that it was *within their capabilities*, perhaps with slight changes in footing, grip etc. Dennett builds on this intuition by comparing two chess programs, A and B. B loses one game - and an observer says 'B could have castled'. If we ran the same game over and over again, B would always lose. But if we run different permutations, and see that in some similar games, B is able to castle (perhaps because it spends a split-second longer evaluating moves, or it has a different value in its pseudo-random-number generator), it seems we are right to say that B could have castled. In other words, given the information set and capabilities of the programme, the option was in some sense, available. This is the crux of Dennett's 'compatibilist' position - the fact that B is a completely deterministic programme is irrelevant to whether we can speak in a real and causal sense about the options available - there is 'elbow room' for manoeuvre.

He explores some interesting implications of this idea with the help of John Conway's Game of Life - a simple model of cellular automata, where just two lines determining if the cells in a grid are ON or OFF - again, purely deterministic, but where nevertheless there are possibilities - not least the possibility of running a Universal Turing Machine on it, i.e. anything that can be programmed. His main argument is that even in such simple worlds, there can be an objective sense in which to speak of features which are more or less conducive to the avoidance of harm and the pursuit of goals (simple replication in the first instance, and more complex goals as entities - in the real world this time - get more complex. This explains the title: free will is not a metaphysical quality inherent in the universe, but something that *emerges* at a certain level of complexity - notably, when reasons (what Dennett calls 'free-floating rationales') become appropriated, consciously as our reasons. Importantly, is also something that can be lost. It is a faculty to be cultivated which is implicit in folk practices and law, too - infants and those with senile dementia are said, rightly, to not have it/have lost it.

This gradualist, evolving perspective is important. Consider, as a parallel, the evolution of species. We would say, today, that mammals are creatures with certain recognisable features, which are *born of other mammals* - that is the whole point of speciation, that different species do not mate! But if you run the clock backwards in time far enough, you run into difficulties as you run into the transitional species between reptiles and mammals. "Can we identify a mammal, the Prime Mammal, that didn't have a mammal for a mother... On what grounds? Whatever ever the grounds are, they will be indistinguishable from the grounds we could also use to support the verdict that that animal was not a
mammal—after all, its mother was a therapsid. What should we do? We should quell our desire to draw lines. We don't need to draw lines. We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that, you see, there were all these gradual changes that accumulated over many millions of years and eventually produced undeniable mammals."

Similarly, when incompatibilists insist that our antecedents condition us and thus negate free will, they do not allow for different degrees of determination. "Events in the distant past were indeed not "up to me," but my choice now to Go or Stay is up to me because its "parents"—some events in the recent past, such as the choices I have recently made—were up to me (because their "parents" were up to me), and so on, not to infinity, but far enough back to give my self enough spread in space and time so that there is a me for my decisions to be up to! The reality of a moral me is no more put in doubt by the incompatibilist argument than is the reality of mammals."

More: "what is inevitable doesn't depend on whether or not determinism reigns, but on "whether or not there are steps we can take, based on information we can get in time to take those steps, to avoid the foreseen harm. There are two requirements for a meaningful choice: information and a path for the information to guide".

Words as commonly used often capture important truths, and Dennett gives the example of Martin Luther, defending his views in front of the Inquisition with the famous: "Here I stand. I can do no other". This is a statement of determination (pun very much intended) - where the supposed lack of alternatives was not invoked as an excuse - precisely the opposite, Luther was taking responsibility!

Now for a small quibble - Dennett discusses the case of redwood trees that grow so tall due to a 'tragedy of the commons' situation - if only some agreement among trees could be reached so that they don't all have to waste time reaching so high for the light. This is an example of the problem with evolutionary 'Just So' stories - simple, seductive, but sometimes wrong. It turns out, as Peter Wohlleben shows in his 'Secret Life of Trees' that mother trees often regulate the growth of their saplings by sharing or withdrawing resources such that the young'uns don't grow too fast and thus, risk breaking by not having thick enough trunks. It's a minor point in the context of the book, but it is emblematic of the perils of 'nothingbuttery' - seeing trees as nothing more than basic organisms blinds one from seeing more complex modes of interaction. David Graeber's 'What's the point if we can't have fun?' looks at this issue more closely, exploring how the concept of play and fun is banished from biology https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-t....

Coming back to the topic, there is a different side of 'nothingbuttery' which Dennett is rightly worried about - the more we think we are nothing but the playthings of circumstance, the more likely we are to act irresponsibly. In one study, participants who were 'primed' to believe there is no free will were more likely to cheat during the experiment! And this is why I think this is an important book - higher-order concepts and values are often under assault from those who want to 'debunk' them, and Dennett makes an eloquent attempt to rescue free will from such assaults.

The open question, to me, is whether the tools of naturalism are sufficient here, given the broader cultural forces at play. One beautiful quote in the book speaks of how "it is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee." (JB Cabell). The idea that, without smuggling in metaphysics, we can speak of ourselves as persons capable of values in a way which is orthogonal to the 'stuff' we are made of, is the crux of the issue. Music is nothing but air vibrations, and yet it's something completely different at the same time. Similarly, there is a whole set of descriptions of what humans are - as persons, capable of recognising other persons, as well as reflecting and acting on the distinction between values (which we ought to have) and mere preferences (which we happen to have) - and, like in geometry, important distortions and losses can happen if we try to reduce them all in one plane. (Roger Scruton's books on Human Nature and The Soul of the World explore these ideas beautifully).

Dennett does an eloquent attempt at this reconciliation. But when he says that "Exercises in ethical theorizing that refuse to bow to the empirical facts about the human predicament are bound to generate fantasies that may have some aesthetic interest but ought not to be taken seriously as practical recommendations. Like everything else evolution has created, we're a somewhat opportunistically contrived bag of tricks, and our morality should be based on that realization" one can wonder whether that is putting the case two strong. Whatever our morality is, it is also partly a rebellion against the bags of tricks in the meatbags that we are! Nevertheless, to all those who feel that Science™ has long shown that we do not have free will (because of determinism) or, more recently, that we do (because quantum stuff), this book is well worth a read!

Clippings as if at random: If you make yourself small enough, everything takes place outside of you; alias: if you believe yourself to be insignificant, nothing indeed would be your responsibility. The more you know, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more obligations you face. Thanks to our growing understanding of nature (we have learned that we are indeed responsible), we have greater knowledge, a growing sophistication about who we are and what we are, and what we can and cannot do. (I don't understand why)...people (are) willing to wager their futures on a fragile myth that they themselves see the cracks in. One can do otherwise. We may yearn for the good old days when ignorance was a better excuse than it is today, but we cannot turn back the clock. Freedom is the capacity to achieve what is of value in a range of circumstances. Bootstrapping has worked (so far)... We don't need a skyhook.