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Interested to hear what others feel.

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This is a wonderful book that covers many difficult areas relating to the human brain using language that is understandable by ordinary mortals. The author covers a huge amount of useful background in leading up to the titular subject of free will, but almost all of it is required (with perhaps one exception of the discussion in chapter 10 on psychological personality traits). But I do have a number of criticisms:

1) There are very few references. There is a bibliography of suggested sources of more information for each chapter at the end of the book, but only a small number of these are specifically referenced with footnotes in the text. There were quite a few places where I would like to have known the source of the information the author was quoting, but there was no reference given.

2) There is no specific mention of different “levels of description” of functionality in the brain. The topic is discussed indirectly in a number of places, and the impression strongly given that the author believes that there are different levels at which the functioning of the brain can be described, but I found it frustrating that there was no specific delineation of levels.

3) Consciousness was glossed over rather rapidly. There are several places in the early parts of the book that say that the distinction between conscious and subconscious processes will be covered later, but when the section on consciousness is finally reached in chapter 11, all it says is that “We are configured so that most of our cognitive processes operate subconsciously, with only certain types of information bubbling up to consciousness on a need-to-know basis.”

I have created a new website that contains proposals that cover these last two issues – see hierarchicalbrain.com

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yes good points about proving a negative. As a materialist, I just see no escape from causality.

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I see, yes. I admit I’m not convinced I find that a useful approach. It narrows the possible answers down to two extremes, neither of which sound realistic. Does that position interpret “it exists” as “a limited amount is not no free will, thus it exists”, or as “the only acceptable form is absolute free will” which is meaningless. Sapolsky is trying to proof a negative and the evidence he marshals doesn’t add up to support full rejection, hence I think he leaps to his conclusion.

Questions I raised in my review of his book is with which camp the burden of proof lies and what our default assumption should be in the meantime, as long as we cannot resolve this question. Those are questions he does not consider.

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I think you don´t understand the leap because he uses ´free´ in absolute terms. it´s a zero- one thing: it either exists or it doesn’t.

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