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Science’s argument against the possibility of free will is disarmingly direct, and it doesn’t even need Libet’s discovery that feelings of willing come too late in the process to play any role in our actions.

The mind is the brain, and the brain is a physical system, fantastically complex, but still operating according to all the laws of physics—quantum or otherwise. Every state of my brain is fixed by physical facts. In fact, it is a physical state. Previous states of my brain and the physical input from the world together brought about its current state. They were themselves the result of even earlier brain states and inputs from outside the brain. All these states were determined by the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry. These laws operated on previous states of my brain and on states of the world going back to before my brain was formed in embryogenesis. They go back through a chain of prior events not just to before anyone with a mind existed, but back to a time after life began on this planet.

When I make choices—trivial or momentous—it’s just another event in my brain locked into this network of processes going back to the beginning of the universe, long before I had the slightest “choice.” Nothing was up to me. Everything—including my choice and my feeling that I can choose freely—was fixed by earlier states of the universe plus the laws of physics. End of story. No free will, just the feeling, the illusion in introspection, that my actions are decided by my conscious will.

Wait, isn’t the world really indeterministic at the basement level? Recall from Chapter 2 that there are plenty of events occurring every day at the subatomic level, among the fermions and bosons, that are random, the result of shear probabilities and nothing else. Such events have been occurring right back to the big bang and before it. This is quantum indeterminism. Could subatomic indeterminism obtaining among the fermions and bosons in my brain somehow free my choices from determinism? This is a wishful thought that has occurred to some people. It can’t. Sensing, feeling, and thinking are all processes that take place through the interaction of many large macromolecules in the neurons. These molecules are all much too big and there are too many of them milling around for the occasional quantum irregularity to have an effect even on a single neuron, let alone on lots of them or any other part of the brain.

Suppose, nevertheless, that such an event did occur. What if somewhere in my brain, there is a spontaneous quantum event, completely undetermined by the state of the rest of the universe. What if it starts the chain of events that sooner or later produces my choice, complete with the feeling of free will. Could that undetermined quantum event give me even a little free will? Hardly. That sort of start to the process of choice means not just that my choices are not up to me, but that they are not up to anybody or anything in the universe. I can’t bring about such spontaneous quantum events. Neither can anyone else. Such a random event would control me—switching on a process that leads to my actions the way Dr. Frankenstein turns on his monster with a jolt of electricity. Except in this story there is no Dr. Frankenstein. Quantum mechanics couldn’t give us free will even if it produced real indeterminism at the levels of organization that mattered to my brain.

In fact, very few people understand quantum physics and the molecular biology of the brain well enough even to pretend to argue from quantum mechanics to free will or to anything else about the mind. All the real resistance to science’s denial of free will comes from introspection, from “looking into ourselves.” Introspectively, it just feels like you choose; it feels like it’s completely up to you whether you raise your hand or stick out your tongue. That feeling is so compelling that for most people it tips the scales against determinism. They just know “from inside” that their will is free. We