Do We Have Free Will? Sam Harris Says No

the concept of free will only has relevance if you believe that there is such a thing as justice.

“the concept of free will only has relevance if you believe that there is such a thing as justice.”

Exactly. To punish people for actions they could not possibly have prevented themselves from taking is the height of injustice.

I bet he only addresses contra-causal free will. There are flavors of free will completely compatible with determinism and stochasticism. It’s a shame because this is some of Dennett’s finest work, and I bet Harris will have people who will parrot him and then accuse me of sophistry for being a compatibilist.

 You’ve been through this before, too, I see. Sigh….

If there is no free will, then I had no choice but to post this comment.

Would such punishment be considered an action one could not possibly have prevented oneself from taking?

Not sure what you mean. Most people born into a religion stay with that religion. You would expect heavy programming to usually override outside influences, not always override them, and that’s what happens.

If he really believed we have no free will, then he wouldn’t publish books about it that we would have to CHOOSE to buy to learn we didn’t really have a choice except to buy the book.
I agree with others here. The best arguments stating we have no free will have to get so esoteric that the difference between free will and no free will is meaningless. Certainly there are factors that influence us heavily, consciously and subconsciously, but the only one I have seen that is almost impossible to contradict is self-preservation. We have to totally believe all our options are gone to kill oneself, or that killing oneself affects the greater good so much you can’t avoid it. 

Most, but maybe it’s not as strong of a majority as I would necessarily expect.  The Pew forum says that 44% of American adults aren’t in the faith they were raised in.  Granted, the biggest share is switching denominations.

Seriously Sam get a life! You’re going to end up in a nut house with all that crazy thinking.

Then say we don’t need free will to preserve our “moral reasoning and intuitions.”

 Except that we need some term to describe the adaptive/reactive system for evaluation and action that sapient organisms have that differentiates it from a simple and static mechanical reaction. Why not call the former “free will”?

I like Dennett, for Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and for Breaking the Spell, but no book is more responsible for my rejection of free will than Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves,” which so utterly failed to make its case that it drove me to become a strict determinist.

You’re simply mistaken, and flying your ignorance like a flag.  And the argument against free will is not esoteric, but simple, straightforward, intuitive, and forceful: everything we think or do is either because of something that’s gone before, or it is random.  That’s it.  Things are either caused, or random.  There is no other option.  Actually READ the book and then come up with an argument against it if you can.  I’d be very surprised.

This is only the case if the purpose of the punishment is to dole out harm for the sake of vengeance alone. If punishment is done for the sake of directing future behavior of the offender or others, it can serve the interests of a well-functioning society.

(This is not to say that I think punishment is the best learning tool. There are more effective and humane ones available.)

Sam Harris does feel that free will is mostly an illusion. I believe we can make choices, but seldom freely. In my (free) ebook, “the greatest achievement in life,” is a chapter called “Outside the box.” Here are three paragraphs from it:

    What if you had to make all your decisions about living while detained in a jail cell? The cells may be open for brief periods each day, but the prisoners are still surrounded by walls. There are also walls around cells of everyday life. We are restricted by our ability to control our emotions, mind and body. Even with full command of our “self,” we must live within the restraints of Nature and society. Freedom is relative.    “Free will” is really quite limited, despite belief that we control ourselves and our lives. We think we have endless choices…until we try to make them. Each decision must not only be based on what we “want to do,” but also on our own capabilities and what is expected of us. Nature and society imprison us, whether we like it or not. The key to release is mystical realization. All in One and One in All, the divine unity, opens the gate between a universal consciousness and most people’s constrained awareness.    Outer walls are the boxes of Nature and of society. Inclement weather, lack of sunlight, gravity, and/or other natural phenomena may restrain our movements. Our own natural aptitudes, practiced talents and learned skills are always lacking in some areas. Human nature is controlled mostly by society. What we believe that other people expect of us greatly influences how we feel, think and act. Considering the reactions of our family, friends, business associates, community, and/or nation determines much of what we do. Those “laws” of Nature and society govern our lives, usually more so than we wish. Mystical awareness can allow us to obey divine law here and now. Sam Harris said ““I see nothing irrational about seeking the states of mind that lie at the core of many religions. Compassion, awe, devotion and feelings of oneness are surely among the most valuable experiences a person can have.”

Doesn’t get the joke.

Subjects readers to pointless post about determinism.

No it doesn’t. We don’t have the free will ourselves to choose not to lock them up…

More seriously, in order to make this argument, you’re implicitly assuming that the people who are locked up don’t have free will, whilst the people doing the locking up do. 

Whatever argument you use to absolve them for doing wrong, works equally well to absolve us for locking them up.

🙂 No, my husband just looks at me like I’ve lost my mind when I start babbling about free will or lack thereof.

I figure that knowing how you feel about this issue, whatever your opinion is regarding it, is one of those things that help you understand your own perception of yourself and others in the world. That can only be a good thing.

Sorry about the duplicate post. Please delete one.

 Thanks, Reuben. I am finding it easier to understand and forgive people, myself. I constantly remind people that they have done nothing exclusively of their own accord to earn themselves much, if any, credit for success.
However, the last thing I will ever do is claim I am a victim of circumstances.  That’s what it amounts to, isn’t it? If things are the way you say you believe, then we are all victims and deserve absolutely zero credit for anything.
That you still take pride in your accomplishments, and have pride in your loved ones’, that is what I mean by not changing very greatly.

It is a great stretch to go from even a little bit of control, or even possibility of such, to zero control. I’ve only read one or two people ever that expressed understanding what this would mean for their lives, and they were all compatibilitists.

Think about what gives your life meaning, then tell me you understand what not having any volition in life feels like.

Not really.   There are different conceptions of free will. Which are you talking about?   I’m not aware of one that has zero implications outside the realm of justice.   Free will theory tend to oppose fatalism, and would tend to encourage striving towards goals.   Why bother working on my ethical beliefs if I’m just going to choose to steal anyway?

That’s only true if you make some very bad assumptions.   There are different reasons to punish people.  One is to give negative reinforcement.   A completely deterministic system can respond to such reinforcement and behaved differently in the future.     The reason we don’t punish the insane is because we don’t expect it to effect their future behavior.     There are other reasons I won’t go into because that is a sufficient reason to punish.

Huh?   I believe there is free will and that Sam Harris doesn’t understand what it is.

In addition to what Reuben said we need to use it to follow the causal chain backwards to determine responsiblity.   The way the philosophical determinists have it (rejecting free will) the moral reasoning and intuitions don’t matter.    In their world view you can always trace backwards from a consequence of an action past the actor his past, and his environment in a way that always resolves him of responsibility.  Just as in the first Sam Harris quote.

Let me critique that from a compatibilist point of view so you can see some of his errors.   First off you cannot replace atom for atom because no two humans are identical in the number of atoms.   So his mapping is not one to one.   So I could map him to any object in the same manner.  Let me map him to a weed in my tomato garden that is shading my tomatoes and taking up nutrients.     So sam is a pokeweed.

Now it is quite clear in a determinist way that this pokeweed is responsible for reducing my harvest of tomatoes.   It is responsible for the undesireable situation.   So I find Sam responsible an pull him out by the roots and discard him.  

Why didn’t I punish him?   Well, because punishment would not have changed his pokeweedish behavior.

I can still find him responsible for something.   It doesn’t matter that his parents were pokeweeds, or how the wind blew him into my garden, etc.

If anything certain types of actions we take against criminals should be more severe for those that cannot be reformed.    Whereas we would only lock someone up who goes around poking people to protect others until we think he is reformed, a person with the trainability of a pokeweed should be lock up indefinitely as a preventative measure.

Free will is intimately intwined with notions of finding the origin(s) of responsibility and correcting as best that one can.   One cannot go back in time and correct someones long dead grandparents so they brought the parents up better and then the criminal.   One has to deal with what one has.    In the case where bad behavior is genetically based (and with current technology impossible to fix) then a preventative measure might include locking the person up indefinately so that they cannot spread their genes to future generations.

We don’t have to even decide what proportion of bad behavior is environmental vs. genetic.   We can punish in proportion to the crime and odds of catching the criminal.  That alone would provide selective pressures that would eliminate both replicable genes and memes from continuing on.

Acting beings do in fact act as a feedback locus that tends to enhance the ability of organisms to effect their environment and be effected by it.    It also tends to organize us as individuals with self interested goals.   This locus is quite real and no figment of the imagination and quite different than the undifferentiated and unlocalized cause and effect of the determinist.    People are causal agents.

“There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this. The role of luck, therefore, appears decisive.”

This is typical of Sam Harris, and many other philosophers.   The latter does not follow from the former.     He has snuck in dualism, and the assumption of the impossible.    You can’t replace atom for atom, because there would be a mismatch.   Furthermore any atom for atom duplicate of Komisarjevsky that was put in the exact environment, position, and time as him, would in fact BE Komisarjevsky.    It wouldn’t be Sam Harris.    Only if you believe in inmaterial souls and somehow made everything the same material except put in Sams soul would it be Sam.  But that is nonsense.

So actually Sam is the one who has the intellectual position that does not deserve respect.

Komisarjevsky is not some blank soul that sits at a place and time, in some body.   Komisarjevsky is a collection of genes and the phenotype that those genes programmed for,  he is also a product of his culture and thus a collection of memes that have reproduced.     This is no accident.     There was zero likelyhood that Komisarjevsky’s parents would have produced Sam Harris as a child, and zero likelihood that the memes that make up Sam would have been generated from Komisarjevsky culture, and environment.    Komisarjevsky inhereted memes from his parents also, which Sam doesn’t have.

Also deciding to execute Komisarjevsky isn’t some random decision.  It specifically destroys the individual locus of the replicators that were found responsible for his acts.   Sure there were some “innocent” genes for blue eyes, and five fingers that got eliminated at the same time but there are other copies of those elsewhere.    Presumably there were either genes or memes that he had that caused his behavior.   Executing him prevents further replication (of course permanent guarenteed detention with no access to women does the same).

Why?  According to his reasoning with humans, he could do an atom by atom replacement of the hurricane with an area of calm sunny skies and it would behave completely differently.   It’s only “chance” that the hurricane is so violent.     Why lock up the hurricane?

See my other post where I show that Harris has accepted the notion of a “mystical ability to reach beyond the physical realm” with his notion that you can do atom to atom, with time and place substitution to transform yourself into another person.    Just imagine I have the the power to do that right now and I flip Sam with a mass murderer.   If there is no soul than this operation is a complete NOOP (no operation).

In fact this power and you cannot prove otherwise.   POOF, I just switched you with Trickster Goddess.   POOF, now you are me.

Sam has defined an operation on the world that has no effect but somehow thinks that he has switched two bodies.   

He makes the same mistakes that guys like John Rawls makes in his philosophy.    These operations are meaningless.    Mass murderers are mass murders and do need to be treated differently than others and random chance didn’t make them that way.    The charge that creationists make that evolutionists think “it is all chance” seems to stick rather well to guys like Harris.   Well it isn’t chance.   Natural selection does not operate by “chance”, and people are not who they are by “chance”.

Oh, and Trickester Goddess can have her cake and eat it too by having cause and effect but believing she is an originator of cause.   Then you would have to show why that is not possible.    That her actions are predicated on past events isn’t a problem either.   Of course her decision needs to be predicated on past events.    She has to see what happened first, be effected by that, in order to originate her decision, which acts as a new cause.   If matter can pop into and out of existence with quantum physics than why can causes?

Of course that is not my position, and I have arguments against it.   It is just that you provided no argument against it.

So how many of you were pro-Sam and after having read all my comments here begun to suspect that he’s drawing some false conclusions.   A thumbs up if I convinced you that this atom for atom switch thought experiment should be considered silly from a determinist point of view?

Good – I’m not the only one then! 🙂

I guess that’s the thing though, I’ve tried to look at both sides of the issue, and my perception of myself or others, or what I do, wouldn’t change one iota whatever side I come down on.

Let’s say there is no freewill. What difference does that make? I am still me. My mother is still my mother, and someone who has murdered someone has still murdered that person. A ‘determined’ person still has a personality, still has philosophies that govern what they do, still has likes and dislikes, foibles, individuality, and everything else that matters. Perhaps I have been determined to love that person; if so, I still love that person. The feeling is as real as ever, whether or not I had any choice in the matter. 

Why are people who are afraid of having no freewill, not also afraid of the idea of ‘falling in love’?

What has changed? Their belief of having freewill is now believed to be untrue. They aren’t in control of their actions any more? Well, that depends what you define as being ‘them’. A computer has no freewill, and yet it still makes sense to say that the computer has done something rather than the person who coded the program it is running.

It seems to me a problem for someone who wants to believe in dualism, and especially for someone who believe our choices might send us to a heaven or a hell, but as I don’t, I have no problem whatsoever whichever turns out to be true. Even if I believe I am making the choice a few seconds after the ‘choice’ has already been made – I am still the one making that choice.

That sounds like a false tricodomy. I can understand my life has no external purpose and have different feeling about my success or failure, and any meaning to my life. My life has internal meaning to me, and I am successful at some things and a failure at others. That doesn’t require that I have a purpose like a hammer does, where the purpose is external and in a human being.

The concept of free you are importing into “free will” isn’t there in the first place. I know of no person who uses it to mean we can flap our arms to fly.

You need to read the book.  You come off as intelligent but ignorant in this area.

You still don’t understand free will doesn’t require indeterminism. In fact it requires the opposite, a predictable universe. Compatiblism is not a word game. If Harris believes it is then he is mistaken.

Your last line is asinine  You might be interested in “Rational Mysticism” by Sam Harris atr http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?page=harris_25_6&section=library 

Try reading Asonge’s comment above, and also Reuben’s.    Compatibilism is not about word games.  The compatibilists came up with many of the arguments that Harris is using.   The determinists were originally doing the opposite of what Harris is in part attempting, and found themselves in ridiculous philosophical positions arguing things that no one believes.     Many philosophers paint themselves into a corner this way.   The original skeptics, for instance, were ridiculous and would argue that reality isn’t real,  no one uses the term skeptic that way today.

This doesn’t count for or against what anyone else is arguing about concerning free will.   Everyone accepts that people make choices.    The differences are on the definition of the words “free”, and “deterministic”.   Christians pick a ridiculous definition of “free”, and philosophical determinists agree in using that definition.  That agreement by determinists isn’t merely being an assumption temporarily to undermine and argument using proof by contradition either.   They really believe that definition is the correct definition and proceed to make additional mistakes using it (like arguing that someone who is poor is not as “free” as someone who is rich.   Or you can see an example in the comments here .       Poor understanding of what determinism means from the point of view of fallible human knowledge.  

Not only that but according to Harris you were fated to be born with brain that tricks you into think you made the choices you did, and even tricks you into thinking you are you.

My questions for Sam would be.   If I didn’t make my choices than who did?    If I didn’t originate those choices then who did?     It’s one thing to believe that the world is deterministic and that all things are cause and effect, and quite another to think that individuals have not arisen that can make choices in their self interest.     Althought the singularity at the beginning of universe will eventutally result in the existence of self interested beings that doesn’t mean the choices made by those beings exist at the time of the singularity.   They are created later, and originate in those beings.   

The sharpness of a knife in my kitchen drawer didn’t exist in the past when everything was in a gaseous state.   It didn’t exist in the raw iron ore.   It originated with that knife when it was cast and sharpened.   That sharpness can also disappear.   This is because it is the relationship between the atoms that creates the attributes, not their mere existence.   So mere rearrangement can cause the origination of properties.    Properties are emergent in this way.

Sam Harris fails to consider all this.    It is quite possible for free will (the abilitly to make choices, learn, etc.) to originate in the individual, each and every time an individual is born.    As the genetic program unfolds it rearranges atoms into a new form that never existed before, and has properties that never existed before.    People are unique.

So the issue is, with a proper understanding of free will, do the decisions made to take alternate choices originate with the individual.    The answer is yes, and this is completely compatible with cause and effect.      Showing that individual nerve cells fire before we are aware (have modeled our own actions with additional cells) is in no way going to prove that we don’t originate our actions.

The Christian mistake is only to think that this origination takes the form of a ghost operating the machine.   No there is something called a brain.

 I would say that Harris is a whale arguing that he is a fish, because fish live in water.

I always ask the hard determinists, ‘if you don’t have free-will, why do you act like you do?’ Sort of like, ‘if you are a fish, why do you surface to breathe?’

My apology. When you wrote “I know of no person who uses it to mean we can flap our arms to fly.” I thought that you making a comment on  mysticism…which I found insulting. 

We do have free will, but there are both physical and psychological restrictions to it. Happiness is not an objective of mystics and many of them (including me) are not religious. 

This life and this world are not illusions, but most people have many illusions and delusions about it. Everything is not always what it appears  to be.

Until you learn to read and comprehend what you’ve read, I’m not going to waste my time with you.

You don’t seem to have the faintest idea about what I’m saying, believe me to say things which I explicitly say I am *not* saying, and to be honest, I really can’t be bothered.

You seem to think you are a lot more intelligent than you come across.

Ok, if you read carefully I don’t know how you thought I was referring to mysticism since I never mentioned it.

I understand that their are different types of mystics. Keep in mind that the Dali Lama is a mystic and has a book titled “The art of happiness” and that Harris is an admirer of mystics of this flavor. Despite what you claim their are mystics the emphasize happiness as a goal. They also deny reality in various ways, and even have mental exercises and lessons meant to dissociate the brain from reality. I’m not familiar enough with all mystic religions to make any universal claims that would encompass them all.

I’ve got no issues with people using religion or mysticism to solve their problems. I just don’t like it when they think I have a problem that requires their solution. I can see how your ideas might help certain individuals unshackle themselves from social barriers. Those barriers have never been a problem for me. They don’t even act as speed bumps. I have a hard time even comprehending why people are getting stuck up on these pebbles in the road.

I don’t think that realizing the world isn’t an open book requires mysticism, so saying the world is not as it seems, as a generality, doesn’t impress me.

A sentence can contain a single use of a word and be an equivocation, because it uses a different meaning of the word than the one used in the claim you are disputing. You are equivocating, and as I said do not realize it. I see why you equivocate if you think it only encompasses the meaning you inject into a word, and not the intent of the original argument.

If I use one meaning and you assume the wrong meaning and argue using the wrong meaning that is an equivocation. It doesn’t have to be intentional, it doesn’t mean I’m smarter, in fact it may just be that I wasn’t specific enough for my audience, or am just a crappy writer.

How can you honestly make the claim that whether or not we have choice in a matter doesn’t effect what we do? What possible definition of choice do you have in mind that would make that sentence true standing by itself?

We can have choice in the sense of having options. Well if we have options then our brains are capable of recognizing those options and taking one of them. Presumably the brain will take the option it evaluates as being the “best”. It is obvious if only presented with option A then A will be taken, if only B then B will be taken. We already have the options presented making a difference and we haven’t even had to use another definition of choice meaning to choose. Using this second definition of choice your sentence still makes no sense. How can making a choice between different options not make a difference in what we do or are capable of doing?

You are the one who came in saying that the concept of free will is uninteresting. Your first post implied that you believed in it because the quote from Hitch says you have no choice but to believe in it. Yet you claim it uninteresting (even though you also claimed to have thought about it slot, and as you admit post a comment on it).

A lot of what you are saying is self-contradictory and unintelligible from my perspective. I’m only trying to pin you down to some specific claim. So don’t get mad with me about it.

If your claim is that you no longer find free will and interesting subject, and that you just let it hang out there and do your thing, then why should we care and why would you post such a comment? I thought you might have something substantial to say. People get along fine being ignorant on all sorts of subjects and working on intuition. No surprise there. I get along just fine not knowing how to dance. I wouldn’t however go to a dance competition and tell dancers how uninteresting I find dance. I certainly wouldn’t then dance to show how uninteresting it is.

There are many areas of other people’s lives that require them to take a position on this subject and be interested in it. The law being one area. Philosophy being another. Religion being another. You are likely to be the victim of a crime someday and your beliefs in the area of free will will effect your judgements, wether you recognize that fact or not.

So I’ll leave this conversation perhaps in the most muddled state of mind about someone else’s position and motivation that I have ever been.

Brian, you are a hard case. Mysticism is not right for everyone and will not solve all of life’s problems. 

You replied Those barriers have never been a problem for me. They don’t even act as speed bumps.

Good for you. Unfortunately they are a hangup for many people.

Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we are opponents. No two people agree on everything.

I’ve read the book.  It’s super thin at only 70 pages and he does address causual free will and Dennett.   However he does so poorly.    He argues that because we don’t have conscious control over every firing of a neuron that we are being “push around” by events out of our control.   He mentions that Dennett would object that those neurons are part of the self, so it is silly to act as if they are separate things pushing us around.     Harris’s retort to this is that when other cells behave in ways out of our control we don’t assume responsibility.    This is on or around page 22 where he is addressing Dennett’s retort that a brain cell firing is part of “you”.

I’d quote the entire section of the book and show exactly where he get things wrong but I don’t think anyone is reading these comments anymore, and only you’d get notified via email.

There are simple counterarguments to his claims here.    He points out that we don’t actually “feel” responsible for things like our body creating blood cells.    Of course not.   The brain is modeling what you can consciously control and you can’t change the way your body makes blood cells via learing or reflection. So in this sense the “free will” our minds makes us believe we have is in perfect harmony with reality.     Yet, even though we don’t feel responsible in this way we still take responsibility in other ways.   We say things like “I have a disease of the bone marrow I’m not making blood the way I should be.”   Which is perfectly accurate.  It is no someone else who is doing this, it isn’t society, it isn’t your parents, it is you if it is congenital.    Now if you had a bacteria or virus that was doing this to you then you would blame in on the disease organism.  

What is clear from Sam’s book is that he doesn’t view the brain as a engineer would.    Our sense of “I” is no delusion.   It is a model of reality and a pretty good one considering it was developed without any intent to do so by a process of natural selection.    The fact that the model is running on hardware and is not aware of every micro-transaction within it is a ridiculous objection.   We don’t complain when our word processing software doesn’t give a complete report on how it draws individual characters (including all the transistor flipping that goes on).      The purpose of modeling the self is not to model the model.  

What Sam Harris is actually saying is that he is not going to be satisfied with a model of the world until it is perfect.   He’s not happy unless and until the part of the brain that generates this model of self is omnescent.   It not only has to do a reasonable job of modeling the self at the first level, but he judges it an illusion if it doesn’t model itself, and furthermore the low level hardware like neurons.    He wants the brain as a whole to model and predict when individual brain cells are going to fire.     How can it do that when it operates via brain cells firing?   It has to fire at least on brain cell before it can even start to make predictions.

This is what I had predicted he would do before even picking up the book.  He is making the same mistake that classical philsophical Greek skeptics made in questioning the senses.   They pointed out that the senses cannot be trusted at all because of things like optical illusions.  They assumed that senses must be perfectly transparent and infallible in representing the world as it “really is” in order for them to be “trusted”.    

Sorry, requiring perfection before accepting something as “non-illusion” is an unreasonable criteria.      We know of NO area of knowledge that is perfect.   Humans are not infallible.     Requiring prefection in the senses (as for example requiring that the eyes present a “true” representation of the world, is as ridiculous as requiring that they allow us to hear, and our ears to allow us to see.

Most of his mistakes are philosophical errors like this and his most common one throughout the book is equivocation between various meanings of the words responsibililty, self, I, punishment, etc.   He throws away all the distinctions that the compatibilists make in order to come to their conclusions, so of course he can’t support them.   This is not at all surprising in such a thin volume.

e-book? it  isn’t on Kindle                               

But you still have to take into consideration that you forgiving that person might also lead to that person acting more distrustful. Which is the exact thing Sam Harris is talking about. 

 Oh yes, I get it now. The closer to c we travel, our free will attains infinite mass and zero length. Until you smash into that black hole – sure didn’t look like anything was there!

Thanks, Ram, I didn’t understand what the word illusory meant until you brought special relativity and particle physics into it. Congratulations on the worst analogy of all time. I haven’t seen any of you attempt the house of mirrors dilemma, or the card up your sleeve paradox, though. That might convince a few kindergartners.