Readers Respond to “Feeling Free”— and More; September / October 2012; Scientific American Mind; by The Editors; 2 Page(s)

FEELING FREE

I applaud Christof Koch for looking with fresh eyes into the puzzle of free will in “Finding Free Will.” He is certainly correct that many of our overt actions are led by brain events we have no awareness of, and this can be a good thing. As William James once remarked, it's a good idea to run from the bear before you have a fully conscious experience of “bear.” Drop a fragile object, and you react without getting tangled up in thought—the latter would be way too slow. But that says little about “the will to action” or the choice to do this or that “freely.”