Our Confused Conversations About Free Will: On Sam Harris
That, then, which every soul pursues and for its sake does all that it does, with an intuition of its reality, but yet baffled and unable to apprehend its nature adequately, or to attain to any stable belief about it as about other things, and for that reason failing…
-Plato, The Republic
One thing never ceases to amaze me: the ability of philosophers to make arguments about free will that are not, and cannot ever be, either pragmatically important or metaphysically profound.
The source of these arguments is entirely political, as is obvious when one considers that every single time they surface, they concern themselves with the criminal justice system. The concepts of intentionality, choice, and moral responsibility, which surely ought to be matters of pressing concern for everyone, are entrusted immediately (and wholly) to murderous psychopaths, and to narratives about their pitiable, unrepresentative lives.
Take Sam Harris, for example. In his book Free Will — which is freely available, if you’re curious about it — the murdering gets started right away, in his second paragraph:
In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat.
And, having begun in this fashion, we spend the rest of the book in a lo-fi version of Minority Report, trying to understand whether murderers can ever, y’know, decide not to shoot people or strike them in the heads with baseball bats. (This would, of course, be a nice change of pace for everyone.)
Over the course of Free Will, Harris makes the (rather predictable) argument for determinism, with the help of bargain-basement Freud, neuroscience, and molecular physics. There are many other murders along the way — on one especially grisly page, whenever Harris inserts a bullet point, somebody dies. You would think he was using actual bullets. His argument goes like this: we make choices based on our genes, our circumstances, and our molecules. We also make choices based on our own prior choices, but since those earlier choices were determined, we end up at the same place once again.
Daniel Dennett, meanwhile, has written a refutation of Harris. (It’s also free, and easy to find.) Dennett’s refutation, like many such pieces of academic work, is basically correct, but suffers from a lot of preoccupations and minutiae. It is so dull that it manages to be viscerally unconvincing — what he’s saying is mostly true, yet none of it is worth agreeing with.
****
Let us put the question of free will to rest, shall we? Free will is, as I implied above, a political category, and not an ontological one. If we were — as most models of agency seem to suggest — completely alone in a world with no other people, “freedom” would be an irrelevancy. We would be self-evidently able to do as we pleased, with only physiological constraints on our behavior. There would be no point of reference from which we might survey our freedom, or our lack of it, since constructing autobiographical narratives would be absurd.
Freedom, therefore, only arises in social contexts, and basically measures an individual’s ability to make (what other people consider) bad choices. Freedom is not inherently valuable; human beings make motivated choices, and therefore freedom is only valuable relative to the problems that arise when society forbids us to make the choices we want.
In other words, the only interesting question concerning freedom is the Kantian question of moral imperatives. Say, for example, that I have ten dollars, and my neighbor has three dollars. Should I give my neighbor money? Furthermore, say that I’ve done extensive sociological and economic research, and concluded that I myself will have a better life if I do give my money away, because I will be less encumbered, and my neighbor will be more pleasant to live with. At that point, I could still (theoretically) refuse to be generous, but why would I? Why make an idiotic decision in order to uphold an abstract (and perfectly secure) notion of freedom? Therefore, as soon as I recognize a moral imperative, freedom becomes a merely practical concern: will I be allowed to make the logical choice or not?
This is all well and good, but unfortunately, there are virtually no major questions in human lives that resolve themselves so neatly. Over and over, we find ourselves with incomplete information, making choices that may not lead to their intended outcomes. It is a vast enterprise of trial-and-error, and since nobody has that much more information than anyone else, it is essential to let individuals try things out for themselves, including stupid things.
To their credit, both Dennett and Harris also portray choice as a motivated act (as opposed to an acte gratuit), and take these motivations into account. Dennett uses a game of bridge in place of my example about my neighbor: “Were you free to play your six instead? In some sense…[but] freedom involves the ability to have one’s choices influenced by changes in the world that matter under the circumstances.”
Harris describes the decision to eat, as opposed to a bridge player’s deduction. It’s more obscurely motivated, but the result is the same:
Am I free to resist this feeling? Well, yes, in the sense that no one is going to force me at gunpoint to eat—but I am hungry. Can I resist this feeling a moment longer? Yes, of course—and for an indeterminate number of moments thereafter. But I don’t know why I make the effort in this instance and not in others.
So much for ordinary decisions — a sandwich, a game of bridge. But what about those murderers? Harris, like others in his camp, seems to be wrestling with the legal questions surrounding exceptional defenses: insanity, intoxication, ignorance, etc. We know, however, that he does not really care about such things. Society must be defended:
Certain criminals must be incarcerated to prevent them from harming other people. The moral justification for this is entirely straightforward: Everyone else will be better off this way. Dispensing with the illusion of free will allows us to focus on the things that matter—assessing risk, protecting innocent people, deterring crime, etc.
This is, as Michel Foucault has shown, a fundamental misunderstanding of the criminal justice system. Prison terms are based on an old notion of rehabilitation — how long somebody must spend in jail, learning to make better choices. It is a doomed notion, since some criminals never change their minds, and others regret their actions immediately. We try to introduce flexibility into the system, via flexible sentencing and parole, and end up creating new opportunities for injustice. While deterrence is a real phenomenon, it is not a major factor in our penal code: the penalties for given crimes are simply not based on maximizing their value as deterrents. Some punishments, notably the death penalty, have almost zero value as deterrents, and persist regardless.
All told, the decision to incarcerate criminals is one that we make, as a society, almost without reference to the crime itself. We cite deterrence, public safety, and rehabilitation, as justifications for the penal system, but can’t be bothered to peg any particular laws to any relevant data about deterrence, public safety, or rehabilitation.
Against this backdrop, determinists like Harris pretend to bring us face-to-face with the hard truths about free will. They agonize over the fate of murderers, only to end up declaring wistfully that the status quo is necessary: if you do the crime, you have to serve the time! This distracts everyone from the real message of modern science, which is that prisons do not prevent crimes. It is the hardest thing in the world to accept that acts of violence and cruelty are impossible to undo, prevent, or redress. With that in mind, the challenges of forgiveness and renouncing vengeance strike me as problems worth trying to solve.
I cannot say the same for Mr. Harris’s proposed debate. It is, finally, not a debate at all, or even a serious claim; it is merely an alibi for his complacence, and ours. Until next time, this is Kugelmass, saying…
Joe – The way you have outlined Harris’ argument here wouldn’t it be more fair to call him an advocate of compatbilism rather than determinism? You’ve outlined a far more interesting ethical issue with your example (dollars and such), but Harris’ example of hunger seems, to me, to be one of a determined constraint of the human condition. Whether or not people are predisposed to murder the way that I am predisposed to eat seems like an argument that is becoming more and more in vogue with all of the tragedy that has befallen the US in the past few years (we should have seen this coming, “introverted geniuses” that become disgusted with the world, etc.). I worry about the way the country uses prison as a catch-all timeout, of sorts, yet I cannot help but fall back on the status quo that you critique. Short of near perfect benevolence or a creepy dystopian pre-crime system it feels like the best broken tool in our collective tool box.
James – Thanks for the great comment! I am using Harris’s own description of himself here; personally, I agree with you that there’s no significant difference between compatibilism and his version of determinism, but this is primarily because he’s so lazy about following his arguments to their logical conclusions. Harris doesn’t really care whether or not political institutions use the terminology of free will, and so he ends up being a compatibilist, but only by default.
That’s the main thrust of Dennett’s argument, in fact. Dennett spends a lot of time pointing out that Harris is slouching towards compatibilism, as if he can’t understand why Harris doesn’t just give it up already, and confess. Logically, Dennett is right. However, as we’ve seen, Harris will never concede this point, because he’s focused on the penal code…and the penal code is determinist by default. Even “extenuating circumstances” are basically assigned a quantifiable amount of influence over criminal behavior. They only differ from, say, “temporary insanity” in that they don’t total enough, as it were, to buy innocence.
One other observation: most of the ethical advantages of determinism, as Harris understands them, aren’t exclusive to such an absolute position. For example, you can still feel sorry for a violent criminal who was abused as a child, even if you don’t believe that his actions were the logically necessary result of his upbringing. A predisposition (as opposed to a determined result) can still inspire compassion and mercy.
Harris’ example of hunger seems, to me, to be one of a determined constraint of the human condition.
My problem with his hunger pangs is that he brings them up, then finds them absolutely mystifying. Every time Harris describes one of his preferences or urges, it is as if he is talking about an alien lifeform. Is he hungry? Is he hungry for a sandwich? Why a sandwich? He never has the slightest clue. This is rather hard to believe under any circumstances, and in a work of philosophy, such lazy bafflement proves nothing.
Short of near perfect benevolence or a creepy dystopian pre-crime system it feels like the best broken tool in our collective tool box.
I would respond thus: we’re already living in a creepy, dystopian society, on its guard against crimes that have yet to occur. That is certainly the basis for our domestic intelligence efforts, and is the logic of every police action based on demographic analyses, “broken windows,” and the like. It is also the logic of gentrification, and has been ever since the boulevards first sliced their way through 19th Century Paris. The prison system is not an alternative to these trends. It is quite the opposite — the totally artificial social world of the prison is a showcase, a kind of World’s Fair, for behaviorist strategies of governance and new forms of panoptical surveillance.
I’m not a libertarian, either. Some types of restrictive legislation are necessary; gun control, for example, is a pre-emptive form of top-down control that we desperately need.
As for the other alternative, “nearly perfect benevolence,” all I can say is that it sounds like the best idea I’ve heard in a very long time.
some of your arguments do not take into account the way our brains work – we are a lot of processes none of which come from outside of our brains – we have natural limits because we feel pain – mental pain which some humans lack or redirect or whatever. When we really realize that it makes less sense to punish and more sense to treat.
Ted, the odd thing about your comment is that you’ve framed it as a retort. I agree with you, wholeheartedly. “Mental pain” is a pretty messy category — I don’t really know if you mean emotional trauma, depleted neurotransmitters, or repressed instincts — but no matter which it is, your point holds up.
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Reblogged this on najlaleemik and commented:
Wow, nice ^_^
Nice post, and See my blog please!
“It is so dull that it manages to be viscerally unconvincing — what he’s saying is mostly true, yet none of it is worth agreeing with.” – A sentence likely to stick with me!
Dawkins’ dancing DNA kept traipsing in my head the whole time!
As well it might! Thank you, that memes a lot to me.
What do you propose is a successful way to deter crime? In my view, if jails and the death penalty didn’t exist, the murder rate would be much higher. That’s just from personal experience and observations of people. Of course there are some people that will always act like criminals no matter the consequence and some people who will avoid it no matter the consequence.
Dear me, how much personal experience do you have with the crimes that count towards the murder rate? Reasonable sentencing is a useful deterrent. Unreasonable penalties, such as the death penalty, are both immoral and ineffective.
Yeah I agree with the death penalty stuff. Some countries actually try to rehabilitate their criminals which seems to work kind of well. But it’s limited to only working on a certain segment of people.
For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.
(From Peter’s first letter)
Use your free will to live right.
As advice, this would be more meaningful if the meaning of “living right” was clear, which it is not, even within the corpus of Christian writing and belief.
Great, need sometime to digest this…. I shall return
Thanks!
Love love love this
Thanks Mike!
Lovely write up, giving insights to the inner as well outer plane…I liked it a lot. I wrote something parallel though in context to kids and freedom..you can check it out when free…I am gonna follow your blog though.
What’s the link to your post on kids and freedom?
Hey it’s a post called let’s talk about F on the link chaitalibhattacharjee7.wordpress.com. My blog name is love, life and whatever. Thank you for asking though and keep the good work going.
this is my first blog.It will be appreciated if you comment on the blog and give me a good start. Many Thanks :)
http://www.irajatmehta.wordpress.com
Jesus made this issue simple: He basically said you can choose to abide in Truth, doing works of love, faith, and compassion, or you can choose to aside in death, doing works of anger, greed, and selfishness. One choice leads to eternal life, while the other leads to eternal death and torment. He also sends us the Holy Spirit, if we ask Him, to guide our freedom into victory and abundant life.
“He who believes in me shall never sententiously paraphrase me in a reductive fashion” -Jesus
How does that reduce anything?
Reblogged this on lajbut's Blog.
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You said, “freedom is only valuable relative to the problems that arise when society forbids us to make the choices we want.” This is not completely true. Freedom of speech implies that I can say something that someone else might find offensive. In this case, society does not forbid me to make the choice I want, it prohibits the offended from responding in the way they might prefer.
You also said, “as soon as I recognize a moral imperative, freedom becomes a merely practical concern,” and this is also debatable. You get to decide your own morals, and have therefore imposed your own moral imperatives. Recognising a moral imperative is therefore an expression of your freedom to do so.
You then ask, “will I be allowed to make the logical choice or not?” which is irrelevant: logic has nothing to do with morality. For example, if you decide it is immoral to give child benefits to parents who earn more than some fixed amount, then you find yourself earning more than that amount, the decision to apply for child benefits is, to you, a moral choice, not a logical one. It is only a logical choice to those who have not decided it has a moral component.
As for your meta-question, it seems to me that we have prisons to justify having laws. What prisons “do” is not about the individual, it has nothing to do with deterrence or retribution or vengeance or rehabilitation, all of those are post-hoc justifications. Prisons are necessary because we have laws. We lock people up because there has to be a punishment for breaking the law, or the law itself becomes meaningless. We need laws because not everyone behaves the way we do. They don’t behave the way we do because they choose to do what they want. Therefore, the existence of prisons demonstrates that society as a whole believes that people have free will. Such phrases as, “responsible for your own actions,” and, “the rewards of your hard work,” and, “success you deserved,” and, “proud of your achievements,” all demonstrate that society considers that we are free to choose the appropriate course and may both benefit from those choices and suffer the consequences of them. Ergo, we have free will, because society says we do, in the same way that you have freedom of speech because society says you do. You are, of course, free to choose otherwise.
[When it protects freedom of speech], society does not forbid me to make the choice I want, it prohibits the offended from responding in the way they might prefer.
This is a distinction without a difference. I am not an anarchist; I believe in the value of democratic governments that protect individual freedoms and support the general good. Nevertheless, the enforcement of Constitutional rights is the same in kind as any other act of enforcement.
You get to decide your own morals, and have therefore imposed your own moral imperatives.
Says who? This is a very extreme position that has only even been thinkable since the mid-to-late 19th Century. Plato and Kant did not agree, and neither do most people in the world today, 85% of whom are religious. Personally, I agree that this seems to be the case, but I am not certain that it is so. If there was an objective good, and human beings were only very imperfectly equipped to understand it, of course it would appear to us that we could invent moral principles from scratch. That way, we would be spared the agony of moral uncertainty. But who are we, that we should spare ourselves this?
Honestly, who bases their moral understanding on pedestrian dilemmas about claiming tax exemptions or applying for AFDC? Moral logic is constantly supplying us with deductive links between large principles (e.g. integrity and thrift) and specific situations like this one. We return to those principles (by reasoning inductively) when we justify our actions: “If I send in this application, I am a hypocrite and a drain on society.”
It is only a logical choice to those who have not decided it has a moral component.
Every decision has “a moral component.” To abstain from moral judgement is, itself, a morally motivated act.
The existence of prisons demonstrates that society as a whole believes that people have free will.
This is a wonderful point, and quite true. On the other hand, the existence of the prison also demonstrates the ineradicable fragility of the law. To believe that people have free will — which I do, in a politically meaningful sense — is to understand that laws create and perpetuate criminal behavior and compliance, both at once. Laws impose moral judgments on the populace; the penal system is a system of artificial and variable consequences. The need to enforce laws makes them eternally open to question, and this is as it should be.
“…I believe in the value of democratic governments that protect individual freedoms and support the general good…”
A government (democratic or otherwise) is a group of people in a geographical area who claim and violently defend a monopoly on the legal and moral right to initiate force to achieve their objectives.
To equate violent monopoly on legalised murder, torture, theft, coercion, kidnapping, extortion and fraud with ‘protecting individual freedoms and supporting the general good’ is a bit of a stretch, wouldn’t you say?
Reblogged this on An Alchemist's Journey…. and commented:
Interesting and enlightening. Thank You.
Thanks so much!
Anytime <3
There’s certainly a political dimension to free will, but I’d argue economics is becoming a bigger one. With more of the world’s population in abject poverty, even in some of the richer countries, people’s choices are heavily constrained by what they can and cannot afford.
It’s a really good point; I agree.
i dig. nice piece.
Cheers.
Cheers!
Reblogged this on Hindsight Twenty/Twenty and commented:
read here ::
A great read! I wonder…what, if anything, do you believe would make for a “sensible” criminal justice system?
Thanks for reblogging! Honestly, my standard for a sensible criminal justice system isn’t especially radical. Many of the laws in the United States function pretty well. It is difficult to reconcile the principles of governance I mentioned above (individual freedom and the common good). Sometimes a much-needed law is held back by a specious appeal to “freedom,” as in the case of firearms. Canada regulates gun ownership sensibly; we don’t.
In other instances, fearing for our public safety (or homeland security) leads to oppression. This has happened during the (ongoing) war on drugs. It happened as a result of fear-mongering about “sexual predators” and “superpredators.” It is why the NSA began a full-scale program of domestic surveillance, and it is why Snowden’s act of civil disobedience was so admirable and necessary.
Thank god. There are still intelligent beings on this planet.
Reblogged this on Rants & Raves and commented:
This is a reblog that is definitely worth the time to read
“This distracts everyone from the real message of modern science, which is that prisons do not prevent crimes.”
Could you supply the data you are using to come to this conclusion? Are you actually saying that putting a serial rapist in jail for life does not reduce the risk of women in the community being raped?
Sure, I would be happy to oblige with some relevant facts.
I am not, however, saying anything in particular about a hypothetical “serial rapist.” First of all, no, jailing a rapist does not end rape. Second, there are many ways of protecting women from sexual assault. Third, I don’t know anything about this Snidely Whiplash character you’ve invented. Maybe the best place for him or her is a psychiatric care facility.
Here are some illustrative facts, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Really enjoyed your post, I was just looking up freewill last night on YouTube. Thanks for the insight.
Back. Firstly, cleverly argued. Secondly, I think the Norwegian are cottoning on to the idea that sticking people in prison does not reduce crime. So they stick them in a ‘holiday’ camp with amazing results.
There is a lot to unpack in what your wrote. One theme you might like to expand on is the idea of intention and choice. Moreover I don’t have the experience that my choices are random, even if that is an illusion.
Wait, HOLIDAY CAMPS? That is either beautiful or incredibly creepy. Links please?
(Related: Does anyone object to me calling my next band “Norwegian Holiday Camp”? It would be a joyful name, like that other band, Joy Division.)
You’d like to see me expand on intentionality and choice how? I’m happy to do so — say more!
I would never assert that we make random choices; my post basically makes the opposite claim. (Admittedly, some choices feel arbitrary, but in those cases, the choice is either a trivial one, or between alternatives we don’t understand. Cf. Kugelmass, in high school, choosing which college to attend.)
I can provide a link only that I saw it on a British TV documentary with Michael Mosley. The world holiday camp is my description not his. The argument in his documentary are compelling to say the least.
I disagree with you that our choices are random or arbitrary. Perhaps this is an area you could expand on. So we can have a good duel about that;)
Sorry to break it to you but there is no such thing as free will. We are a complex mass of cells manipulated by external stimuli and genetics. For example,
if you were to clone a child in the womb and give it exactly the same experiences as the original (impossible, I know) and then present it and the original both with making a decision the thought processes and reactions both physical and mental would be exactly the same.
Simply put our parents’ DNA and experiences in life make us who we are and determine every decision we ever have made or will make. Until the general public realizes this we as a people really have very little insight.
(Note: heavily edited for grammar, spelling, and other crimes against language. You’re welcome. -Kugelmass)
Well, I can certainly see how an impossible and hypothetical experiment proves that we have no free will. Another example: if you were to be visited by aliens (impossible, because there are no known aliens), then they would have this incredible civilization with parties all the time. Simply put, there are aliens, and they party all the time.
Until the general public starts coming to conclusions based on things that didn’t happen, we as a people will have very little insight, and we will never get invited to any intergalactic happenings.
Seriously, Sammy — you’re going to have to try a little harder than that if you want to prove that we have no control over consciousness. You’ll have to prove it using real experiments and data.
Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”
— Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, Bantam Books, New York, 2010
I think Ill go with Hawking over a blog
Did you “decide” to agree with Hawkins, or was that the result of a randomly generated electrical stimulus?
feel free to add the “G”
” if you were to be visited by aliens (impossible, because there are no known aliens)”
Do you wish to revise this in some way???
No. Should I? DID THEY ARRIVE?
does that mean it was impossible for anyone to get shocked before ancient Greece as electricity was unknown man ?
nothing random about it,but a very specific electrical response from cells created by the very specific combination of DNA and past stimuli. (the most recent being kugels response to my post.)
In which case you didn’t agree with Hawkins because he is right, you agreed with him because some combination of your DNA and previous stimuli has prepared you to accept his input. You didn’t critically examine what he said and work out for yourself whether it made any sense, your cells just followed some law of the universe which created in you a desire to accept his thesis. Good luck passing your driving test.
Sammy, you’re free to believe in Hawking’s speculation about free will if you want; the fact is that he’s a physicist, not a neuroscientist, and no more qualified than you or me to make proclamations about free will. Even if you did agree with him, which I do to a large extent here, the point of my post is that his way of framing the question doesn’t work. It doesn’t accomplish anything. OK, we “don’t have free will.” So what? There really should be something at stake, but there’s not — that’s why I describe such screeds as confused.
I believe his IQ makes him more qualified than some blogger w/ an IQ in the low 100’s
In that case I sincerely recommend The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould.
might be an interesting read sometime ,but i don’t think it will tip the scales in a n ordinary bloggers favour
I am laughing so hard right now. Sammy and Joseph and bonsaimartin you are cracking me up. This post was worth reading just to get a good laugh from your dispute. Thank you for that.
glad i could help put a smile on your face bek
“”In which case you didn’t agree with Hawkins because he is right, you agreed with him because some combination of your DNA and previous stimuli has prepared you to accept his input.””
Seems to me previous stimuli and our genetics are how we determine what is right(factually correct) and wrong, weighing more heavily on the previous stimuli knows as education.
“”You didn’t critically examine what he said and work out for yourself whether it made any sense, your cells just followed some law of the universe which created in you a desire to accept his thesis.””
Actually his position was unknown to me before this blog, i had to look it up.
I have thought about it very critically and it make much more sense that cells following the “laws of physics and chemistry” (hawkings words) make more sense than cells operating outside of them, Which would be the case if free will gave us random control over the very makup of our being and gave us “free will”.
Good luck passing your driving test.- been there done that 25 yrs ago, thanks to the stimuli of my driving teacher and experiences with my temps.
You should really do a peice on perspective and reality,I would be interested to see it.
The whole concept of free will is similiar to that of religion,based on belief and not any type of science of known facts.
Nice, you are using well known logical fallacy: appeal to authority. Hawking is no authority on neither philosophy or neuroscience, so his expertise doesn’t matter. He didn’t make a study on those topics, he just read what other researchers discovered, and draw conclusions, just like we all. Fact that he is smart and, that he is expert on field of physics, doesn’t mean that he is expert on free will. This like saying that Mozart was more qualified to judge Shakespeare’s works just because, they both were genial artists – even though musician is certainly not an expert on literature expert. Even in his field of study – black holes – Hawking tend to be wrong, so he is not infallible.
As for Harris’s theory itself… it’s full of inconsistencies, self contradictions and overgeneralizations . For exemple he writes: “If we cannot assign blame to the workings of the universe, how can evil people be held responsible for their actions?” What does he mean by evil? In deterministic universe concept of good and evil does not exist! In Harris’s universe Osama Bin Laden, was not more evil than a Influenza Pandemic of 1918 – neither of them had any agency, so you can’t call them evil. This same can be said about his claim that we are biologically determined, and yet he want to convince us with evidence and argument – products of conscious thought. OK, so can he reason with serial killers – exemple used by him – and influence them to stop killing, or can he convince gay people to change sexual orientation? If he can – because it’s biologically determined – then what make him think that he can change my mind, with is also presumably, biologically determined? How anyone could influence biology with non biological, non material thing like idea? And if he indeed can use logic and reason – product of conscious mind – to influence biology, then what make him think that free will is impossible? Also he said that just like serial killers, ordinary people are just a prisoners of their own biology. This is like saying Mozart was genial musician, he was human, ergo, all human must be genial musicians! But hust like Mozart, serial killers are just exception from the rule, and not representation of normal human being.
It is my inclination that an individual’s “Free Will” is unavailable to them as long as there are outside influences – the environment, other people, etc. Our “open” limbic systems require that we seek companionship, and in doing so, we alter our own beliefs and intentions in order to attain limbic resonance within the community.
I know, I agree with this, but every time I go into a community and make a simple request for “increased limbic resonance,” nobody will make eye contact with me afterwards.
You should be a comedian Joseph. You bring me to tears again laughing.
Reblogged this on Vale's.
Very well written. Thank you for sharing this.
Amazing, I write similar things. PLZ check out my blog
in philosophy, man is condemned to be free,,,, with free will lies the consequences. to wit, everything has counterpart…. black to white, good to bad, left to right, up to down, and so free will to consequence…..
I agree with many of these words; my only concern is with the way you’ve used them.
lighten up its just a blog why waste valuable time with grammar on a trivial blog?
” ….His (Sam Harris) argument goes like this: WE MAKE CHOICES based on our genes, our circumstances, and our molecules…..” (emphasis added)
Sam Harris is either an idiot or he is being intellectually dishonest by using the word ‘choice’.
For a ‘choice’ to exist it requires two or more possibilities to exist at the same time – from which to make a choice. In other words, to make a ‘choice’ (ie the act of ‘choosing’) means we must have two or more possibilities available to us at the same time, one of which we ‘choose’ and the rest we reject. That’s what ‘choice’/ ‘choosing’ means.
If more than one possibility exists at the same time (from which we can make a choice) then BY DEFINITION that cannot be a deterministic universe ruled by strict laws of causality.
In a deterministic universe there can only ever be ONE possibility existing at any given moment – ie the sum of all previous causal factors. Therefore ‘choice’ and the act of ‘choosing’ are literally impossible in a deterministic universe.
For determinists like Harris to describe a deterministic universe in terms of ‘choice’ and ‘choosing’ is as intellectually dishonest as an atheist describing a godless universe in terms of ‘God’ and ‘praying’.
We all understand that atheists must give up any notion of God existing if they are to be taken seriously as atheists. They can talk about ‘God’ but only as a fictitious entity, a delusion, a thing which does not exist in reality.
And in the same way determinists must give up any notion of ‘having choices’, or ‘having the ability to choose’, if they are to be taken seriously as determinists. They can talk about ‘choice’ but only in terms of an illusion, a fictitious construct, something which does not exist in reality.
Like all determinists Sam Harris want you to CHOOSE determinism theory over free based on a set of arguments. (But first he want everyone to disable their irony detectors).
He wants to choose his cake and then deny he chose it, presumably while eating it.
Some stage magic works by the patz being offered a “choice” of cards, where the magician forces the card that gets, “chosen.” So the patz thinks he has made a choice but has merely taken the card the magician wanted him to take. Whilst I don’t agree with Harris, I think it is at least possible that he means, “choice,” in this sense; the path you take appears from your perspective to be a choice but has actually been determined for you in advance. When it happens fortuitously we call this Kismet, when it happens adversely it’s Sam Harris’ fault.
Since our resistance to determinism has, therefore, been chosen in advance, we can only conclude that it is to give him something to argue against. Our resistance gives his life meaning. That must make determinism the only philosophy in which you are disappointed by those who agree with you!
“…I think it is at least possible that he means, “choice,” in this sense; the path you take appears from your perspective to be a choice but has actually been determined for you in advance…”
So if Sam Harris sees a rock tumbling down a hill and the rock tumbles to the left of a large boulder does he say the rock ‘chose’ to tumble to the left? Somehow I doubt it.
He (and determinists like him) only use the word ‘choice’ to describe human behaviour, even though according to determinism theory our behaviour is no different to that of a rock tumbling down a mountain (at least as far as having choice/ free will is concerned).
I choose to call that intellectual dishonesty :)
“…..Since our resistance to determinism has, therefore, been chosen in advance…”
Even this statement is problematic (IMHO).
If our resistance to determinism is chosen in advance (ie causally determined), then it is not true resistance in the sense of being a preference for one theory (free will) over another (determinism).
Having a preference for free will theory over determinism theory (or vice versa) implies there is a choice!
But if our stance (whatever it happens to be) is causally determined then there can be no choice… and therefore no preference is possible.
A rock does not ‘prefer’ to roll to the left of a large boulder. To ‘prefer’ such a thing implies (in fact requires) it to have the choice to roll to the right or the left. But it doesn’t.
The only thing a rock could say (if it could speak) is “I had no choice but to roll to the left of that boulder” And that is not an argument or a debate.
The only thing a determinist like Harris can say is “I have no choice but to support determinism theory”. And that is not an argument or a debate either.
It also makes for a very short book!
Sam Harris might as well spend his time flying around the world to various speaking events to promote his theory that planes do not exist.
“Having a preference for free will theory over determinism theory (or vice versa) implies there is a choice!”
Not necessarily. I didn’t, “choose,” to be heterosexual, my sister did not, “choose,” to be gay. Richard Dawkins explains in one of his books how he didn’t really, “choose,” to be a biologist; there is a sense in which biology chose him and he is simply a vector through which that is expressed. My father didn’t choose to be an engineer; he already had a tendency towards engineering and studied it because he was interested in it and only after studying it did he become an engineer which he did precisely because the instinct for it was already within him. They even have a word for this; it’s called vocation.
Norman Hartnell said that he didn’t “choose” to be a dress designer, David Beckaham didn’t “choose” to be a footballer and Tiger Woods didn’t “choose” to be a golfer. Not everything in life is the result of a conscious choice. I believe that people don’t consciously choose to be religious; they either are religious or they are not and their faith is not the result of a rational debate with themselves about the course their life should take. They just follow the path that offers them the least resistance and if that leads them to church or to God or to praying for deaf children then it does and they do that but if it leads them to atheism or agnosticism then they do that instead but I suspect the labels are not real choices but post-hoc justifications for the positions they have adopted.
Most people can’t tell you why they love one person and not another, hardly anyone can tell you rationally why they voted the way they did or why they like lemon cheesecake but not chocolate chip cookies and I will never be able to explain why I bought those flared yellow trousers with patch pockets on the legs. There are hundreds of things you do that could at some level be considered choices but over which you have very little conscious, rational, logical control. Sam Harris interprets this as evidence of a deterministic universe. I personally do not.
“I choose to call that intellectual dishonesty.”
Philosophy is a way of addressing questions that don’t have yes/no answers, so not too many people who study philosophy would recognise the term, “intellectual dishonesty.” There is no law that says a person’s philosophy has to be rational or coherent or intelligible to anyone else, so intellectual honesty doesn’t really come into it and it doesn’t have to make any more sense than David Icke believing the world is run by alien lizard people. Personally, I would far rather live in a world where there are hundreds of philosophies to choose from than one where you are told how to think and what to like. As incomprehensible as I find them, Sam Harris, David Icke and the National Rifle Association represent freedom of thought, and from the perspective of this thread, that can only be a good thing.
“….Not necessarily. I didn’t, “choose,” to be heterosexual, my sister did not, “choose,” to be gay..”
I don’t see the relevance. Even if we accept sexual orientation as being hard wired (the product of genes or hormones during pregnancy – or whatever) that still does not have any bearing on choice, free will or determinism.
You may not choose to be gay, but you DO choose whether to go and chat up a man or woman when you are in a nightclub. You may not choose to HAVE legs but you DO chose whether to use them to walk to the cinema or the museum.
“…..Richard Dawkins explains in one of his books how he didn’t really, “choose,” to be a biologist….”
I’m sorry but yes he did! That concept only works as a figure of speech (like when people say “My career chose me”).
The truth is that at various points in Dawkin’s life he was offered the choice of becoming (or training to become) a fireman, a train driver, a road sweeper, an astronaut, a dancer, a taxidermist, a dressmaker or a biologist. He ‘chose’ to become a biologist, presumably because that was his desire, his passion and his proclivity.
“… There are hundreds of things you do that could at some level be considered choices but over which you have very little conscious, rational, logical control. Sam Harris interprets this as evidence of a deterministic universe. I personally do not….”
OK, here’s my take on this. We should not define ‘choice’ by our ability or inability to measure or even comprehend HOW a choice is made.
What actually defines whether a ‘choice’ exists or not is very simple…. how many possibilities exist at the moment in question? If the answer is one then no choice exists. If the answer is more than one then a choice exists.
Whether our conscious mind, unconscious mind, limbic system, heart, hormones, reptilian brain, or left toe does the choosing is irrelevant. A choice available to any of these aspects of ourselves is still a choice.
And a choice MADE by any of these aspects of ourselves is still a choice made (ie the act of choosing). Just because our higher brains might not have been involved does not mean a choice and the act of choosing did not just occur.
In a deterministic universe there can never be a choice because each moment is always the sum of all causal factors leading up to (and determining) that moment. That is the only single possibility which ever exists at any given moment. And choice cannot exist when there is only one possibility.
In a deterministic universe we are faced with the ‘choice’ between
A) the sum of all causal factors up to that point
B) ???????? (you tell me!)
There is no B in a deterministic universe. Thus there can never be any choice. And if there is never any choice available to us we can never perform the act of choosing.
Our minds, hearts, limbic system or big toes cannot choose between ‘A and A’. They can only choose between ‘A and B’ (and C, D, E etc…)
“..Philosophy is a way of addressing questions that don’t have yes/no answers…”
I disagree. I define philosophy as ‘the pursuit of truth using reason and evidence’.
A salesman or politician or comedian can address questions that don’t have yes/ no answers, but that does not necessarily make them philosophers.
I would also say the first act of philosophy is usually to clarify terms and agree on definitions. Often by simply doing this the question can be swiftly answered, and the job of philosophy is already done without to any need to debate, discuss or argue.
“…so not too many people who study philosophy would recognise the term, “intellectual dishonesty.”…”
If a philosopher does not acknowledge ‘intellectual dishonesty’ in the philosophical community it is probably because they are engaged in intellectual dishonesty themselves.
(Like a politician who insists that politicians are NEVER corrupt!)
There is a difference between ‘philosophy’ and ‘philosophers’. Philosophy is an abstract discipline, whereas philosophers are people full of all the usual flaws like the capacity to lie and deceive.
An ‘intellectually dishonest’ philosopher is one who deliberately uses (abuses) the discipline of philosophy for motives other than the pursuit of truth using reason and evidence.
“..There is no law that says a person’s philosophy has to be rational or coherent or intelligible to anyone else, so intellectual honesty doesn’t really come into it and it doesn’t have to make any more sense than David Icke believing the world is run by alien lizard people. …”
There is no such thing as a ‘person’s philosophy’. There is just philosophy. Either a philosophical statement or an argument is valid or invalid. If a philosophical statement is just someone’s subjective preference or belief or desire, then it is not a philosophical statement.
If ‘my math’ is different to ‘your math’ then one of us is wrong. And if we agree that we can BOTH be right then neither of us is practicing math.
As for David Icke …. he does not simply ‘believe’ the world is run by lizard people. He presents numerous arguments backed by evidence. Sure, you can (as many people have) challenge his arguments and/ or refute the validity of his evidence or the conclusions he comes up with based on that evidence. But to simply say that what he talks about is just a ‘belief’ is disingenuous. What Icke promotes is somewhere between belief and fact… ie it is a ‘theory’.
Much of what the man says is valid and proven. But equally a lot of what he says contains serious flaws in logic and lacks evidence…. or the evidence he does provide is dubious, tenuous or not empirical enough to be trustworthy.
Most of Icke’s work is just him (or whoever writes his books) rehashing other people’s work, other people’s theories and other people’s ideas about the nature of reality …. which is fine, although he really should be more honest about that. He is like the owner of an ‘esoteric’ bookshops who claims to have written all of the books in it.
Of late he has been ‘jumping the shark’ (jumping the lizard?), even by his standards, in order to maintain his steady stream of books and speaking events (ie his income)…… But I digress…
“…Personally, I would far rather live in a world where there are hundreds of philosophies to choose from than one where you are told how to think and what to like…”
The is a great danger in wishing for that kind of world…. a world where ‘objective truth’ is synonymous with ‘subjective opinion’.
Civilisation is wholly a result of, and absolutely dependent on the concept of OBJECTIVE UNIVERSALISATION / OBJECTIVE CONSISTENCY…. whether it be in the sphere of science, technology, morality, human rights whatever….
If person A has certain rights then everyone else should also have that right too …. if a scientific theory is valid then it must be valid on every day of the week to be valid….. if murder or rape is immoral then it must always be immoral – even if you are lord of the manor … etc etc.
What you are proposing is a move *away* from universality… from consistency.. from objectivity… from the foundation of civilisation itself!
After thousands of years of bloodshed and mayhem we are *so* close to finally achieving a civilisation based on consistent, universal objective standards and rules in science, morality, law etc.
And this is ALL the result of applying philosophy.
We may even see – within our own lifetimes – a society where laws actually reflect rules. Can you even imagine such a thing!?
People like Sam Harris might not be ‘evil’ or ‘insane’, but in the race to achieve a truly rational and virtuous society before new technology makes global tyranny literally as easy as pushing a button, he is standing in the middle of the road waving his penis about and slowing all the traffic down (metaphorically speaking).
“I disagree. I define philosophy as ‘the pursuit of truth using reason and evidence.'”
The only place you will find truth is in an axiomatic system. Science is the pursuit of truth in that sense. There are no axioms of philosophy, so If you expect to find truth through philosophy you are heading for disappointing times.
“A salesman or politician or comedian can address questions that don’t have yes/ no answers, but that does not necessarily make them philosophers.”
Why not? If we define philosophy as a verb, the act of thinking about questions that don’t have yes/no answers, then a man considering who to vote for or thinking about whether prison is a retributive or a rehabilitative environment is doing philosophy. A woman considering whether to wear stockings or tights is doing philosophy just as much as a student wondering whether to study law or geography. Philosophy is not, or at least need not be, deciding the fate of the universe but can be about navigating our uncertain way through the travails of everyday life. Is it okay to buy Nike trainers yet?
“There is no such thing as a ‘person’s philosophy’. There is just philosophy.”
Philosophy is not an abstract concept. I have a philosophy. It is the collection of my positions on a number of issues I have thought about and decided where I stand on those issues. Everyone has such a collection of positions and it is their personal philosophy. You’ve just spent three days trying to persuade me that your philosophy trumps Sam Harris’ philosophy. How can you possibly argue that people don’t have a philosophy when all you want to do is persuade me that yours is better than his?
The whole point of the subject is for people to discuss with each other the positions they hold and the reasons they hold them, and to examine whatever thought process they went through to get there. But, crucially, you cannot be either right or wrong about any of these things. They are just positions you adopt, your opinion about things, a statement about where you stand. Your point of view.
“There is a great danger in wishing for that kind of world…. a world where ‘objective truth’ is synonymous with ‘subjective opinion’.”
Well, I don’t believe there is any such thing as, “objective truth,” so it’s not clear how that applies to me. If you can prove that you objectively exist we can start talking about objective truth. Until then, everything else is just an opinion.
“Civilisation is wholly a result of, and absolutely dependent on the concept of OBJECTIVE UNIVERSALISATION.”
Apart from the few months I spent sharing a flat with my brother, I have lived in a civilisation my whole life but have never even heard of, “objective universalisation,” and can’t even begin to imagine what it might mean. A quick Google for it turned up precisely no results whatsoever, so it’s obviously not a hot topic of discussion in my corner of the internet and is probably not the cornerstone of civilisation. Civilisation is more likely people living together for mutual support whilst agreeing not to eat each others grandparents when they die.
“if murder or rape is immoral then it must always be immoral – even if you are lord of the manor…”
Yes, but where must it always be immoral? My country has just legalised homosexual marriage but in Nigeria it is illegal to be homosexual and can, under certain circumstances, be punished with death. In Pakistan, sex outside of marriage can result in the woman being stoned to death but where I live sex outside of marriage is pretty much normal behaviour. How does your objective morality fit into these scenarios?
“If person A has certain rights then everyone else should also have that right too…”
Does everyone else have to live in the same country as person A for this to be true? There is no word in the North Korean language for, “protest,” and the other day a guy in Egypt was sentenced to ten years in prison for protesting outside his government buildings. I, however, spent the weekend protesting outside my government buildings and on Sunday morning a police officer shared her cup of coffee with me. “Should,” is a nice thing to aim for but we don’t live in a world where everyone enjoys the same privileges, where everyone has access to free healthcare, where everyone can vote for the politician of their choice, where social welfare is there for anyone who needs it or even a world where everyone has clean running water and a flush toilet and recognising that the world is not perfect is not, as you suggest, “moving away from objectivity,” because objectivity doesn’t exist in the first place, but a pragmatic recognition that humans are imperfect and everything we create will be imperfect.
Except my girlfriend, of course. She’s perfect. At least, she is when she’s asleep.
“After thousands of years of bloodshed and mayhem we are *so* close to finally achieving a civilisation based on consistent, universal objective standards and rules in science, morality, law etc.”
Have you mentioned this to anyone in Syria, or Iraq, or North Korea, or to any of those people who died in bomb blasts at the airport in Pakistan the other day, or any of the hundreds of victims of unmanned drones or the woman in Pakistan who was stoned to death for marrying the man she loved or that woman in Sudan who is on death row for being a christian, or what about those hundreds of schoolgirls who were kidnapped by Boko Haran, or those Tibetan priests who haven’t been allowed into their own country for forty years? I’m sure they will all be pleased to hear your marvelous news.
Civilisation isn’t something you, “achieve,” it is just an accommodation with the current state of play. And in case you hadn’t noticed; all civilisations end. Including this one.
“…There are no axioms of philosophy..”
Is that axiom part of ‘your’ philosophy?
“..A woman considering whether to wear stockings or tights is doing philosophy..”
You’re confusing philosophy with fashion.
“…I have a philosophy. It is the collection of my positions on a number of issues I have thought about and decided where I stand on those issues. Everyone has such a collection of positions and it is their personal philosophy. …”
No, you have a number of stances on various issues. Philosophy is the arena where we discuss our various stances, and it is the methodology by which we determine who’s stance is (the most) valid and why.
“…How can you possibly argue that people don’t have a philosophy when all you want to do is persuade me that yours is better than his?…”
Sam Harris has a stance. I used reason and evidence (AKA philosophical rigour) to demonstrate why his stance is invalid, by which I mean why it does not conform to reason, why it has no internal consistency, why it is illogical, self-contradictory etc etc.
If you think my arguments are invalid, just say so and explain why.
“..The whole point of the subject is for people to discuss with each other the positions they hold and the reasons they hold them, and to examine whatever thought process they went through to get there. …”
Agreed.
“..But, crucially, you cannot be either right or wrong about any of these things. They are just positions you adopt, your opinion about things, a statement about where you stand. Your point of view….”
Philosophy is a method for determining if a particular stance, or claim or argument conforms to reason and/ or evidence. Reason and evidence are objective, not subjective. Philosophy is (like mathematics) not just about our ‘opinions’ or ‘preferences’.
“..Well, I don’t believe there is any such thing as, “objective truth,”…”
That is itself a claim of objective truth. If there is no such thing as objective truth then that is the truth! ;)
It’s called a ‘self detonating statement’ … it’s like if I said “Everything I say is a lie”. If everything I say is a lie then that must be a lie, in which case not everything I say is a lie.
If there is no such thing as objective truth then that cannot be objectively true.
“..If you can prove that you objectively exist we can start talking about objective truth. Until then, everything else is just an opinion…”
Is that a fact? ;)
“…I have lived in a civilisation my whole life but have never even heard of, “objective universalisation,” …”
It’s when you take a concept (people stealing my ipad is bad) and universalise it (stealing other people’s ipads is bad).
It is the foundation of any civilised society. The more we universalise concepts, the more civilised we become as a society.
“…How does your objective morality fit into these scenarios?…”
Morality and law are two different subjects. If a law violates a moral rule then (obviously) that law is immoral.
“…Does everyone else have to live in the same country as person A for this to be true?…”
The issue of equal rights does not really have any meaning unless two people are interacting in some way. It doesn’t matter where they are geographically, it just matters if they are interacting.
“..Have you mentioned this to anyone in Syria..”
I didn’t say we have ACHIEVED universal moral standards yet, I said we were close to achieving them. There is really only one group left in society who still claim the moral and legal right to coerce, murder, steal, kidnap or torture. When society finally decides to no longer accept that group’s claim and to stop supporting and funding that group, 99% of the current bloodshed, persecution and wars will cease.
“…Civilisation isn’t something you, “achieve,”…”
Yes it is. A civilisation is no different to a shared house, or a business or an amateur singing group. In order to make it work there needs to be a lot of cooperation, negotiation and hard work. Of course it is an achievement.
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Nice article!
I agree with your view on the question of free will. If I got your meaning right you say it makes no real -ontological- sense.
In my dilettante opinion the question itself implies a dualism of mind and body.
I understand it as “Is our mind [as a separate entity] free in its choices, despite the influence of our surroundings and the physical processes in our body?”
I don’t believe in that dualism.
We ARE those processes.
But they aren’t necessarily deterministic.