Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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I have said and written a lot about free will over the years, and I wanted to get all of my

thoughts or my most effective thoughts all in one place. Many of you find my argument against

free will to be very provocative and even off-putting, and many of you mistake it for a philosophical

argument that doesn't make contact directly with experience. So I want to see if I can do this

all in one pass and actually bring some of you along with me into the end zone here.

So here's the starting point. Most people believe that they have a self which enjoys

something called freedom of will. And in fact, this feeling of self and the feeling that we have

free will are really two sides of the same coin. But here I'm going to focus on free will because

in many ways it's easier to deconstruct. Now I found to my surprise that this is a very sensitive

topic, and so here I want to offer the usual disclaimer. If it makes you uncomfortable to think

about these things, you need to be the judge of whether this discomfort is healthy and worth

pressing into, or whether it's actually bad for you. And in the latter case, just skip this

...