Free will and the self. What are they? While they are the two most important phenomena to each and every one of us, they’re notoriously hard to describe. Of course, we ‘know’ what they are: respectively, they are the experience, the feeling, of being in control of our own actions, of our thoughts and behaviors, and of having an identity and a personality that exists over time. Without them, our lives seem pointless: if we have no free will, then we are mere automatons, and we can take no credit and no responsibility for anything we do. If we have no self, then there is no we, no ‘I’, at all.

Experiments and scholarship by neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, and others have revealed some starling things about the workings of the brain and how human beings think, behave, and make decisions. The field of neuroscience has grown by leaps and…