Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?

As part of a solid and well thought through academic review, Murphy and Brown suggest that popularizations of recent developments in neuroscience and philosophy have begun to stimulate public discussion. However, they suggest that many popularizers are not only physicalists but also ardent reductionists.

Murphy and Brown's central thesis is that free will exists because reductionism is invalid for complex systems due to the imposition of higher-order system rules upon the base elements of the system. An example they provide is that DNA sequences do not totally specify themselves, but rather must take into account the interplay of higher levels of organization, such as the environment in which the organism finds itself, which determines the fitness of the organism, which therefore, in a manner of speaking, is "downward causation" (meaning, the environment is actually specifying the DNA sequence, so information/control is moving from the higher level to lower level, not vice versa as one might intuit).

"Did My Neurons Make Me Do It" isn't an easy read, especially if you're not conversant in philosophical terminology and concepts. That said, if you are interested in the question of free will in the age of neurobiology then the book is well worth the effort.