Annoyed with Coyne (on free will)
I still haven't explained why I think Harris' response to Dennett is embarrassingly bad. It's not because Harris is wrong about free will. It's about the arguments he gives and the tone with which he gives them. But I'm not going to get into that in this post. Instead, I want to discuss why Harris is wrong about free will. I've recently laid out a brief argument on the topic, but I suspect that unsympathetic audiences are not likely to be satisfied by it. They say they have a better grasp of how people think about free will. I don't know what makes them think they're experts on the subject, but what I do know is that they seem very confused about the issues. Look at Jerry Coyne , one of Harris' sympathetic readers: "I still see compatibilism as a wasted effort by philosophers to save our felt notion that we have agency; that we could have chosen otherwise . . . . Even Nobel Laureate Steve Weinberg, a determinist if there ever was one, ...