Transcript

Sam, welcome to the making sense podcast. This is Sam Harris, just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharis.org There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one as always. I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharis.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked.

I have said and written a lot about free will over the years, and I wanted to get all of my thoughts, or my most effective thoughts, all in one place. Many of you find my argument against free will to be very provocative and even off putting, and many of you mistake it for a philosophical argument that doesn't make contact directly with experience. So I want to see if I can do this all in one pass and actually bring some of you along with me into the end zone here. So here's the starting point. Most people believe that they have a self which enjoys something called freedom of will. And in fact, this feeling of self and the feeling that we have free will are really two sides of the same coin. But here I'm going to focus on free will, because in many ways, it's easier to deconstruct.