Free Will: An Opinionated Guide

by Alfred R. Mele

Free An Opinionated Guide offers a clear and straightforward introduction to a vexing topic, from an internationally recognized authority on free will.

What did you do a moment ago? What will you do after you read this? Are you deciding as we speak, or is something else going on in your brain or elsewhere in your body that is determining your actions? Stopping to think this way can freeze us in our tracks. A lot in the world feels far beyond our control--the last thing we need is to question whether we make our own choices in the way we usually assume we do. Questions about free will are so major and consequential that we may prefer not to think about them at all, lest we feel completely lost and unsure of everything we thought we knew!

Free will is certainly important, but it does not need to be daunting. Free An Opinionated Guide offers a clear and straightforward introduction to this vexing topic. Drawing on decades of extensive research in philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, internationally recognized authority on free will Alfred R. Mele explains and explores the most prominent theories, puzzles, and arguments about free will, all the while presenting his own distinctive take on the topic.

Mele's use of attention-grabbing thought experiments brings deep philosophical issues to life. He tackles the questions already on readers' minds and some they will encounter for the first time, on topics like determinism, neuroscience, and control. Whether this is the only book on free will you will read, or just the beginning of a deeper investigation, you will never think about free will, or the decisions you believe you're making, in the same ways again.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

160 pages, Hardcover

Published August 10, 2022

About the author

Alfred Remen Mele is an American philosopher. He has been the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University since 2000. He specializes in irrationality, akrasia, intentionality and philosophy of action.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mele attended Wayne State University, and received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1979. He took a position at Davidson College in 1979 as a visiting professor, which led to a tenured position at Davidson, where he remained for 21 years until accepting his position with Florida State.

Mele explores the concepts of autonomy or self-rule and the concept of self-control. as they relate to terms like "free will."

Without committing himself to the idea that human autonomy is compatible with determinism or incompatible (a position held by both libertarians and incompatibilists), Mele provides arguments in support of autonomous agents for both positions. He is, as he says, "officially agnostic about the truth of compatibilism" and describes his position as "agnostic autonomism."

Mele proposed a two-stage model of "Modest Libertarianism" that follows Daniel Dennett's 1978 "Valerian" model for decision making. Like Dennett, Mele requires that the indeterminism should come early in the overall process. He describes the latter - decision - part of the process as compatibilist (effectively determinist).

Reviews

[kent shereve · Rating 3 out of 5]

very validating to realize that the general terms in which i'd been thinking about free will on my own, as well as the structure of some of my bespoke thought experiments, map neatly onto the debates at hand among philosophers studying the subject. and very helpful to have those terms advanced and challenged by exceptions and loopholes that hadn't occurred to me, chiefly the frankfurt-style stories and the problem of present luck. the penultimate chapter was convincing in most of its critiques of the neuroscientific research that advertised itself as proof of the nonexistence of free will. but otherwise, the book feels jumbled and frequently unsure of itself. Mele's coinages, describing the various sides of debates and the different ways to put forth arguments of the subject, often confuse rather than clarify. he spends too many pages explicating some concepts and way too few sentences explicating others. he is always prefacing claims with "as I'm sure you will remember" - he doesn't really know how to spend his reader's time. i appreciate that Mele didn't try to make the book an 'objective' primer to the field, and does indeed make his opinions and personal logic known throughout, but the way he does so is truly unconvincing, and sometimes comes off as quaintly self-aggrandizing. it doesn't feel entirely systematic, but it feels like it wants to be. it's a short, sometimes bumpy ride, a tour of an intellectual landscape, with binoculars that come on and off at the wrong times. still glad i rode, though.

[James Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really liked Alfred R. Mele's great little book, Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will, which I found in a local used book store for next to nothing. I loved it so much that I decided to read another of his books on the subject, Free Will: An Opinionated Guide. But, for me, this second book on the subject was more than I cared for. And it was less fun than the former one. So, if you'd like to read a great book on free will, read Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will. I can't really recommend this one. But I can recommend, without reservation, the other one. Mele has written a lot of books on this subject. These two are for a general audience. Specialists might enjoy some of his other work. I can't comment on any of it as I'm still new to his work.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am the first person to give this 5 stars!

This book is not for casual reading. Unlike many other books dealing with free will, the author does not advance a thesis to support his position.

Instead, he takes the reader on a journey to think critically about this divisive topic. It is a deeply philosophical approach containing many thought experiments. So, if hypothesizing gives you a headache, you might want to give this a miss.

2 main definitions of free will are advanced, what the author calls the Straight and Mixed conception. However, he does deal with other definitions as well including those that are set so high as to be meaningless to the conversation.

I was actually surprised by how comprehensive this concise work is. Not only are 6 arguments for skepticism in free will addressed, there are sections dealing with Sam Harris as well as Libet's experiment.

The author does share his own position at the end, after all, this is an opinionated guide. However, this in no way restricts the reader from forming a different thesis.

[Armen Shirvanian]

My interview with Professor Alfred Mele on "Free Will: An Opinionated Guide" for The Armen Show Podcast:

http://www.armenshirvanian.com/podcas...

[Michael Martinez · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only reason I give this three stars, rather than two stars like I otherwise might (for that option is in fact open to me by deep openness), is that although I think many conclusions throughout this book are mediocre, I give credit to Professor Mele for taking readers through a very comprehensible, concise, and extensive overview of different theories over the debate concerning free will. Professor Mele does not actually take up any certain position himself, and opts to just straddle the line. Although I can comment on many things throughout this book, I would rather just make a few (hopefully) unique comments about the topics on this book, and partly basing it on what I have come across through this book, and I will not attempt to summarize what Professor Mele says throughout this book, for like I have already said, the book is very concise and easy to understand already anyway. Something this book implicitly exposes is that many scientists are either complete idiots, or extremely dishonest. If anybody desires to just look at one chapter in this book, look at the chapter on neuroscience, which I think so clearly demonstrates the slimy tactics of neuroscientists who try to demonstrate the nonexistence of free will. They take a specific type of decision, one which stems out of them literally telling the participants in their experiment to be spontaneous and not think about their decision (ergo obviously pulling the results that they want), and then they extend these results to being conclusive of every type of decision (which comes off as extremely bad faith, considering they clearly think people can make other types of decisions, as they specifically tried to factor out certain types of decisions), and frankly I think anyone with basic logical skills can figure out logically fallacious moves these neuroscientists make in conflating urges with deterministic points of no return, and in committing very obvious quantifier shift fallacies. Professor Mele appears to suggest that free will can exist if physicalism is true, but after personally challenging him on this (I happen to be a student taking a class taught by him), he was unable to point to what physical thing free will is (for it would have to be a physical thing if physicalism is true). A physicalist who believes in free will, has to be able to account for why human-beings have free will, and why rocks do not, as in if not the rational soul, then what accounts for free will in human-beings? They have to answer this. Professor Mele making fun of Sam Harris is quite funny and very well done; he is certainly right to say Sam Harris (and others) set the bar for free will absurdly high. Although I think many things in the book are good, the lack of metaphysical backing for anything, leaves everything in it open to attack, as any coherent answer to this question requires some metaphysical understanding of the universe, and no number of thought experiments can serve as substitutes. For example agent-causalists can push back against the arguments made against them in this book by presupposing a metaphysical worldview in which substances are what move things. The last thing I would like to touch upon is Professor Mele using little Tony as an example of how to approach the problem of present luck, in that I would just like to say that this can entail that accountability varies by your grade of being (which is a position that I would take up, as in I think women should not get the same kind of punishments as men do, even when they commit the same crimes, and I think this because I think men are higher in the grades of being). I think Professor Mele can evade this by just saying that his example has to do with the number of times you have had to make a decision, rather than anything to do with what grade of being you are at (like a child being on a lower grade of being than their older self), but I do not think that merely the number of decisions you have made is what entails what level of accountability you ought to have, but that this, in addition to your grade of being (which is maybe really just to say your grade of being, as the number of decisions you have made play into your development, and thus your grade of being; though if you lower yourself over time, you may not deserve a pass, which is why we may want to have both as factors), is what entails it. For instance, if a 25 year-old has made an equal number of decisions as a 5 year-old (and ergo has had an equal number of opportunities to shape their metaphorical roulette wheel), are they to be considered equally culpable for the same actions? If anybody thinks it would be absurd to think so, then they must agree with me in that they must think the grade of being of an individual does in fact matter. The book covers many things, so there are many more things to cover and address, but I am satisfied with just stating these few things for my review.