"Free Will," by Sam Harris For centuries, the question of free will - of whether human beings make choices that are not, or not entirely, determined by purely physical processes and causes - nested securely in the aeries of philosophy and religion. Ordinary people didn't worry about its having any practical significance for them. Although the issue of individual responsibility has animated novels, poetry, drama and parables, most modern people have gone about their lives believing that their minds were the agents of their decisions. But the last half-century has seen this ancient subject pulled down from its academic perch and into courtrooms, laboratories, real-world questions about moral responsibility, and even popular culture. It forms the plot of such contemporary movies as "Minority Report" and "The Adjustment Bureau." Over the last few decades, procedures for measuring, imaging and analyzing mental processes have grown in number and subtlety. During this same period, books for the general reader about the brain and its functions, consciousness and will, thought and reasoning have proliferated. We have Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Cordelia Fine, Oliver Sacks, Michael Gazzaniga, Daniel Kahneman and scores of others explaining, and extrapolating from, new findings in neuroscience and almost always addressing the matter of free will. Daniel Wegner's "Illusion of Conscious Will," published by the MIT Press in 2002, is a central full-length scientific text about this subject. Sam Harris, a Stanford graduate with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from U.C.L.A. and author of "The End of Faith," a best-selling, Hitchensesque critique of religion, has now, in book form and fully armored, joined the free-will jousters with a kind of tractatus - a pamphlet-like work, "Free Will." Parts of this book recycle some of Harris's earlier writing on the subject (as should have been acknowledged in the book's front matter and will be in future editions). But the work consists mainly of original text and distills Harris's position on the crucial issue of human agency. His absolutist position, I should add, because, as he puts it near the beginning of the book: "Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We assume that we could have made other choices in the past, Harris continues, and we also assume that we consciously originate "our thoughts and actions in the present. . . . Both of these assumptions are false. Harris prosecutes his orderly case by explaining what he sees as the illogic of our belief in free will, and the recent findings that have undermined that belief. Probably the most influential among these discoveries were the results of the famous EEG experiments conducted by the physiologist Benjamin Libet and others in the early 1980s. They showed that the brain makes decisions before consciousness becomes aware of them. As Harris puts it, "activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds" - almost enough time for LeBron James to get off a shot ahead of the buzzer - "before a person feels that he has decided to move." As Harris's text and impressive citations substantiate, these experiments and others like them have chiseled away much of the rock of free will upon which religion, jurisprudence and moral judgments have traditionally rested. One could argue that Judaism and Christianity originated with Adam and Eve's decision to disobey God's order. For quite a while now, philosophers and public intellectuals, including Harris's friend Dennett, have tried to rescue something like the common notion of free will from the jaws of science and logic by embracing a position called compatibilism. Compatibilists believe that "a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions," Harris writes, and they "have produced a vast literature in an effort" to salvage free will. "More than in any other area of academic philosophy, the result resembles theology," he continues, consigning it to what one assumes is, for him, the intellectual subbasement. Daniel Menaker is the author, most ­recently, of "A Good Talk."