I love reading about the topic of free will, and I just learned about Alfred Mele’s work. He’s written quite a few books, and this was one of the short ones, so I decided to go with it to get a feel for his thoughts. This is a great book that dives into the scientific research around free will, and Alfred provides some good arguments when looking at the results of the studies and debates around free will. Although I usually enjoy the philosophical look at free will, it was a nice change to see it combined more with the science. I definitely look forward to reading more of Mele’s work.

Interesting little book about science and free will. I don't think I would have believed anyone that told me "Science has disproved free will" but it is good to see how flimsy the evidence for that is regardless. A lot of this is common sense stuff.

I needed a short book to offset all these longer books I have been reading.

We do have compatibilistic free will; libertarian free will is ambitious but not definitely ruled out. Science does not rule out free will."

- In order for there to be libertarian free will, there would need to be deep openness about the future. I chose A, but could have chosen B, even if the conditions of the universe were the same. What would it feel like if it were necessarily true that, given the laws of nature and the condition of the universe at some past time, we proceed to make each and every decision we've actually made so far, in exactly the way we made them, and with the feelings we had at the time? The answer, to the best of my knowledge, is this; just the way it normally feels, just the way things feel now. I'm not saying that we don't have deep openness. I'm saying that the difference between deep openness and its absence isn't the kind of thing that can be felt.

- The main reason people say that free will doesn't exist is that they set the bar ridiculously high for it. They claim that in order to be free we need to be free from the causal matrix but that is simply too ambitious.

Given its delimited subject as defined by the subtitle, this is a pretty solid book. I already knew about most of the science discussed in the book so there wasn't much new for me, but the author did a good job presenting the material logically, and being fairly clear about the various definitions of free will floating about in the culture. I think this would be good reading for a curious high school or college student who might be confused by the misleading interpretations of the research. The book also got me thinking about conscious implementation intentions, and how I might hack some stumbling blocks in my life.

Meh. A nice, general, response to academics (psychologists, neuroscientists, etc) who claim free will doesn’t exist. It was interesting, but I chose to not like it. Nothing was pre-arranged. It could have gone either way. Certainly, what I’ve experienced and read before influenced how I felt about this book. Perhaps, if I had been educated as a psychologist I might feel differently. I’ll expand on this later. I have to. It was determined the moment I ordered the book. That too was pre-set.