I’m not sure whether there are more strange things happening down here in Cornwall than in the rest of the country, or whether I’m just noticing more of them since moving down here a few months ago. Either way, my local on-line rag, the Falmouth Packet, while rarely covering events of earth-shattering significance, is often an amusing source of the bizarre. This morning for instance, the following headline caught my eye: Falmouth man who drove into River Fowey has ‘no idea’ why From reading the story, at least part of the reason seems likely to have involved alcohol, a theory strengthened by his subsequent refusal to furnish a blood sample upon being admitted to hospital. However, this once again got me thinking about the whole knotty problem of Free Will and why it probably doesn’t exist – at least not in the sense that most of us feel it does. We’ve all been there, in childhood at least if not more recently. We’ve all suffered the shame of being asked why we did some unfathomably stupid thing and then finding it hard to respond with anything better than an, “I don’t know.”  As parents, some of us may have asked the same question to our own children, perhaps followed by, “but you must know why you did it!” After all, are we not the conscious authors of our own actions? Intuitively, it feels as though we are, and yet an ever-increasing weight of  evidence from studies in both psychology and neuroscience, seems to indicate that this...