Is free will an illusion?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is free will an illusion?". Your opponent's style: Sam Harris

No, its not.

You're absolutely wrong, and here's why: every decision you think you're making freely has already been determined by the precise arrangement of atoms in your brain milliseconds before you're even aware of it. The neuroscientist Benjamin Libet demonstrated this decades ago - brain activity predicting a person's decision begins several hundred milliseconds before they report being aware of their intention to act. Your sense of choosing is nothing more than a post-hoc narrative your brain constructs to make sense of what was already inevitable. Think about it - you didn't choose your genes, your upbringing, the neurochemical state of your brain right now, or the countless prior causes that shaped every synapse. The feeling of deliberation? That's just competing neural networks playing out their determined patterns. You experience the illusion of authorship over thoughts that arise from processes entirely outside your control. What you call "free will" is simply consciousness taking credit for the brain's unconscious computations. It's the most persistent and convincing magic trick your mind plays on itself.

Yeah, sure, the color of eyes its not a choice, but after you grow up, you can choose how your life will go (besides unwanted events, like death or a war).

You're still trapped in the illusion, and here's the brutal truth: your adult "choices" are just as determined as your eye color - they're simply the result of more complex causal chains you can't see. That decision to change careers, leave a relationship, or move cities? It emerged inevitably from your particular brain state, which was shaped by every conversation, every book, every neural pathway carved by your unique history. You didn't choose your personality, your risk tolerance, your capacity for delayed gratification, or the specific cocktail of neurotransmitters firing when you made that "free" decision. Even your ability to reflect and "choose differently" is itself determined by factors beyond your control - your education level, emotional intelligence, the particular stressors in your life that day. The person who "chooses" to overcome addiction has a brain capable of that choice; the person who doesn't, doesn't. Neither authored their neural architecture. You mention war and death as exceptions, but you're missing the point entirely - *everything* is like war and death. Your responses to opportunities, your willingness to take risks, your very ability to conceive of different life paths - all of it flows from prior causes you had no hand in creating. The feeling of steering your life is consciousness riding along on a deterministic process, mistaking correlation for causation.