The first casualty, if we are prisoners of an unbreakable chain of causes and effects, is free will. If we have no minds to intervene, options are an illusion. Our apparent choices are only the reactions of our physical brains to inputs from the physical world. The laws of cause and effect make these events as inevitable as the movements of the balls on a snooker table.

An ex-student of philosophy, returning to the subject of mind after many years, is convinced by overwhelming new evidence from neuroscience that the mind does not exist independently from the brain. The implications are...