The author focuses on a trio of figures he describes as standing at the forefront of “determinist advocacy” who argue that free will is an illusion: Sam Harris, who wrote the 2012 book Free Will, Robert Sapolsky, whose 2023 book was titled Determined, and Sabine Hossenfelder, who runs a popular podcast that discusses the subject. Rose observes that because everybody goes about their lives making decisions every day “using some combination of instinct, reason, and desire,” the idea that everything we do is predetermined “runs against the grain of ordinary experience.” The authors covered here and other adherents to their perspective describe a universe that’s entirely determined, with every nuance of human behavior being the end product of impersonal forces—consciousness, in this formulation, is the byproduct of neural preconditioning that mandates every thought or action. For decades, determinists have asserted that free-will advocates have the burden of proof; they hold that their ideological opponents need to prove that autonomy exists. In his nonfiction debut, Rose takes issue with this core contention. He cites many of the studies underlying the debate, particularly a 1983 experiment by Benjamin Libet that appeared to show significant neural activity spiking well before a person “decides” to press a button, suggesting that such decisions aren’t conscious. Harris, Sapolsky, Hossenfelder, and other determinists have characterized this as indisputable proof that humans have no actual free will; Rose argues that this conclusion is artificial and premature (“Despite such extensive research, there is no consensus on the meaning or significance of the findings”).
The case the author lays out in this work pushes back against ideological overreach. He notes that Libet himself added cautionary notes about the implications of his own study, and that many determinists simply dismiss this material. “Such treatment,” Rose writes, “lends an unwarranted level of support to determinist interpretations of the neuroscience findings.” The author also examines concepts such as emergence theory, which considers human cognition to be “irreducible to the behavior of the physical neural events which support them,” casting free will as “selected for by evolution due to its adaptive advantage.” Rose points out that determinism would make reasoning itself, the foundation of science, “a byproduct of unthinking causal events,” since science presupposes “the existence of knowable conditions capable of objective verification.” The author has a large amount of dense philosophical and neurological material to sort through, which he consistently does a cogent job of; neophytes to the free-will debate will feel well grounded. Rose’s decision to let the countervailing arguments speak for themselves (rather than to write a manifesto) is wise. By calmly insisting that determinists actually have the burden to “explain how meaning, purpose, values, and abstract conceptual frameworks could arise from the activity of unthinking, insentient physical events” and by highlighting the overconfidence of their approach, the author very effectively undercuts their argument. Readers who consider the whole debate absurd on its face will find much factual and ideological support here, presented in a way that’s refreshingly free of partisan argument.