To me it makes sense to think of free will as a subset of determinism. Your most subtle moral choices are indeed determined by your past life, but that does not reduce their authenticity or importance as moral choices. So individuals or large groups can react back on their circumstances, and sometimes those acts decide the course of much wider events. This approach does not require the existence of anything beyond the material world.

This is a subject that people do struggle with, but it's not really all that difficult when you get your head around it.

It's all to do with what's called "emergence", which I'm sure everybody is to some extent familiar with. The classic example at school is the additive reinforcement of waves, such as waves in a spring, whereby small waves can suddenly produce an enormously larger one, seemingly from nowhere. A slightly more obscure example is the diffraction patterns created by light passing through a slit.

In each of these cases the actual behaviour of every single particle is deterministic, yet a new behaviour that is not readily predictable from observing any individual particle or group of particles emerges from the interaction of all of the particles.

Similarly, what we experience as our life of free-will is much more likely to be an emergent phenomenon from a whole bunch of deterministic interactions on all sorts of scales. Hameroff and Penrose have the view that our consciousness is a quantum phenomenon and it is clear that quantum behaviour is itself emergent from deterministic interactions, including interaction with an observer (an observer in this case includes anything that may be impinged on by the quantum system without being obviously connected to it causally).

If anyone is really interested, I'd strongly recommend some study on the topic of subjective probability. It's not all that difficult either...

Who is Christopher Hitchkens?

TonyS – you say that you believe that our moral choices are determined by our past life but you do not believe that reduces their authenticity or importance as moral choices.

But as Harris says "Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behaviour – but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control", (p. 29). That chain of causes does not just extend over our lifetime but over the history of the universe. And ultimately what happens and why we think as we do has nothing to do with good reasons or intentions but is merely the outcome of the matter of the universe being acted upon by the laws of physics. "You will do whatever it is you do and it is meaningless to assert you could have done otherwise", (p. 43).

That being so, what can it mean to say that a moral “choice” is “authentic”?

Craig - The question remains,is Sam Harris correct in saying that we have no control over our minds?

That is the key point because if we do not then we are just generating meaningless noise or making meaningles marks (as with avalanches and clouds).

Nothing in your comment above gives any reason to believe that we are in control of our minds, hence your comment is meaningless, if determinism is true.

Bugsy - Christopher Hitchens was an outspoken author, journalist and antitheist who died in 2011.

JP, I know who Christopher Hitchens was.

But who is Christopher Hitchkens?

You will find that the majority of physicists believe, due to both theory and experiment derived fact, that the world is not-deterministic. Rather it is the exact opposite in that it is random.

This result/view derives from interpretations of the math of quantum phyiscs. However, according to some it is still possible that determinism is compatible with modern physics.

Regardless of the interpretations of the math, what is known is that the equations of quantum physics are the most tested and verified of all of physics. ie, there has never been a single observation performed under test conditions that deviates from results predicted from the equations and by now there has been gazillions of observations/measurements performed.

Personally, for myself, as a child I grew up believing that the world is *obviously* deterministic-- nearly everyone I talked to tried to convince me that I had a free will but I just couldn't see how it was possible. Then I went to uni and studied a bit of quantum physics (just a small amount- eg. finding solutions to the Schrödinger equation for simple systems such as the the standard fare particle in an infinite energy well extending to solutions of a single hydrogen atom- my understanding of physics ends at the developments made until about the 1930's. These physics studies persuaded me to believe that the world is at its base random.