In January of 2014 Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist who is renowned as a world’s leading authority on free will, wrote a lengthy critical review of Sam Harris’s book Free Will (Reflections on Free Will: A Review by Daniel C. Dennett). Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, then wrote a lengthy and testy reply in February (The Marionette’s Lament: A Response to Daniel Dennett).
Some of Dennett’s criticisms are, though still necessary and valuable, not of major significance. I will not summarize those points here. Rather, I will focus on the heart of contention between Dennett and Harris and summarize those arguments that are most significant to that. Notably, on both points Dennett extensively cites experts and published work in the subject, something Harris much more rarely does. In fact in this respect, and in their actual statements, Dennett explicitly takes philosophy as a field of study far more seriously than Harris does. And consequently, I believe, Harris fails to ever become a good philosopher. Because you can’t ever “be good” at anything you hold in such contempt that you refuse even to study it.
But back to the main point…
Dennett’s overall thesis is clear:
[S]ome of us have long recognized [what Harris says] and gone on to adopt more reasonable, more empirically sound, models of decision and thought, and we think we can articulate and defend a more sophisticated model of free will that is not only consistent with neuroscience and introspection but also grounds a (modified, toned-down, non-Absolute) variety of responsibility that justifies both praise and blame, reward and punishment. We don’t think this variety of free will is an illusion at all, but rather a robust feature of our psychology and a reliable part of the foundations of morality, law and society. Harris, we think, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
In fact, he finds Harris’s book “a veritable museum of mistakes, none of them new.” Dennett notes that Harris is in camp with a minority view among actual experts. He points out that over 59% of leading experts concur with compatibalism, the view Harris inexplicably rejects. That is actually a poll of top philosophy professors. And in fact only 12% of that group side with Harris (“accept or lean toward no free will”). Of the rest, 7% take indecipherable views of the matter, 9% are undecided or said they don’t know how to answer, and the other 14% still believe in libertarian free will (and those are mostly Christians). That puts Harris in some extremely minority company. More philosophers believe libertarian free will exists, than share Harris’ view that no free will exists at all!
So how has Harris gone so wrong?
Harris Does Not Deal Responsibly with Folk Beliefs
Besides Dennett’s point about the actual consensus of experts (which Harris ignores), Dennett shows that studies have determined that, contrary to Harris’s armchair assertion to the contrary, large majorities of ordinary people accept a compatibilist view of free will, especially when that option is made available to them in questioning. He also points out that it wouldn’t matter if folk notions of free will were incorrect, because that’s commonly the case in science, and that doesn’t eliminate the concepts that common people incorrectly understand, it corrects them.
Hence, as Dennett says, “when social scientists talk about beliefs or desires and cognitive neuroscientists talk about attention and memory they are deliberately using cleaned-up, demystified substitutes for the folk concepts,” rather than declaring that beliefs and desires and attention and memory “don’t exist” simply because common folk understand and define them wrong. No, they exist. And our job is to explain in what way they exist, and thus correct the common misconceptions about them. Not to “agree” with a common people’s error and then tell them the thing they got wrong doesn’t exist at all.
Ironically, except when he doesn’t (see below), Harris fully admits that the “folk” belief about consciousness is false—that consciousness is not a dualistic Cartesian observer external to the brain—yet he admits this without then concluding we should tell people consciousness doesn’t exist. And he even uses this to try and argue against compatibilism (in a convoluted way shown by Dennett). Why is this ironic? Because Harris completely fails to do this with free will. When it’s “free will” and not “consciousness,” Harris inexplicably does exactly the opposite.
As Dennett explains, all Dennett is doing is replacing a “folk” belief about free will with a scientifically correct model of it, exactly what Harris wants to do with consciousness. Yet for some reason Harris switches scripts and insists we should deny free will exists at all, and that trying to replace an erroneous folk version of it with a scientifically accurate one is playing games and not to be tolerated. If Harris actually thought that was a sound approach, then he should follow his own advice: he should do the same with consciousness (and “memory” and “belief” and “love” and so on), and insist we should deny consciousness exists at all (and likewise “memory” and “belief” and “love”), and that trying to replace an erroneous folk version of it with a scientifically accurate one is “playing games” and “not to be tolerated.” Harris won’t even listen to his own advice. Maybe because if he tried to follow his own advice for consciousness and everything else, he’d realize how stupid his advice was. Why he doesn’t get this is bewildering.
Harris is Looking at the Wrong Component
Dennett’s second major argument is that Harris is looking at the wrong thing. In effect, it is as if Harris wants to write a book about how the accelerator on an old car works, but spends the whole time looking at the carburetor, concludes a carburetor can’t accelerate a car, and therefore that cars don’t have “the ability to accelerate.” Dennett corrects this mistake: free will is a discourse about ability, not about gaps in causation; so we shouldn’t be looking at the carburetor (or ‘for gaps in causation’), we should be looking at the acceleration train (the thing that actually causes the decisions we want to evaluate). As Dennett says, the question of whether a car ‘could have gone 40mph rather than 60mph’ is not asking whether a car can defy the laws of physics and go 40 when the accelerator is depressed to 60, but rather whether the car simply has the ability to go 40 instead of 60. Yes, to do that, the accelerator must be positioned differently, thus the state of the universe has to be different. But that’s the point. That’s precisely the thing we want to know if we want to control our car.
Thus, in fact, what we want to know is whether someone is of a bad or good character (and what it takes to get someone to move from one to the other). That’s the ability we want to know (the ability to be good or bad, go 40 or 60). And an action that is freely caused by that ability (and not interfered with, e.g. by being pushed or coerced) is for that very reason an effect of it, and therefore observable evidence that that ability exists. Just as we can test a car to see if it can go both 40 and 60, and just as the car’s accelerator needs to be free of interference for us to actually run that test (e.g. just letting it roll down a hill will not help us know what the car can do), so can we also test a person and see if they do something benevolent or malevolent, thus discovering whether they are a benevolent person or a malevolent one. This test requires determinism, not an escape from it. This also requires the tested person to have free will, as otherwise we won’t know whose will is being evinced (e.g. that of a coercer and not the test subject’s?) or whether their will is being evinced at all (e.g. if they were accidentally pushed, then it wasn’t even a choice they made).
Harris Relies on Folk Beliefs of Consciousness
Even though as a neuroscientist Sam Harris certainly knows better, Dennett points out that he nevertheless keeps slipping into a folk belief about how consciousness works whenever he wants to prove free will doesn’t exist. He must be doing this without realizing it. But he keeps doing it all the same. As Dennett says, “Harris shrinks the me to a dimensionless point, ‘the witness’ who is stuck in the Cartesian Theater awaiting the decisions made elsewhere. That is simply a bad theory of consciousness.” Indeed.
Harris inexplicably ignores the fact that the “me” is the whole apparatus (the actual engine receiving and processing the data and calculating the outcomes and making the decision) and sometimes mistakenly claims the “me” is some sort of external observer to all this, that the “me” is just the conscious awareness of what I did, and not the actual thing (the brain) that is making the decisions. That’s pseudoscience. Your consciousness is not you. Your consciousness is just a state of awareness of you. It is a causal product of you. It is in that respect a useful part of you. But it is in no way a separate entity or the whole of your identity. That’s why it is absurd to say the conscious state of making a decision didn’t make the decision therefore “you” didn’t make the decision. To the contrary, you are the thing (the brain) making the decision, of which your conscious state is simply an output report of what you did.
Once this mistake is corrected, as Dennett points out, a lot of Harris’s reasoning against free will dissolves. When you add in the other correction (looking at our actual abilities to do things rather than looking for a useless ability to violate causal laws of physics), we discover that, as Dennett points out, “We can improve our self-control, and this is a morally significant fact about the competence of normal adults.” And that requires free will (people have to be free of coercion, deception, etc., to do this; they, as a person, have to be in control of their own will). That we can knowingly choose to take steps to intentionally become more self-actualized, and more aware of and thus more in control of how we make decisions, demonstrates that all of Harris’s handwaving about our lacking such abilities is demonstrably false. Moreover, we can evaluate someone’s moral reliability based on how much or little they do this when it comes to developing themselves as moral agents. We can’t evaluate that if their free will is meddled with (by pushes, coercers, electrodes, cages, deceptions). Thus the importance of ensuring they acted freely in the case we wish to evaluate. Which requires “acting freely” to actually be a thing, not an illusion. And in no way does this require violating causal determinism.
At one point Dennett puts this succinctly: “Infants don’t have free will; normal adults do.” That Harris cannot explain this fact demonstrates that Harris is not working with a scientifically useful definition of free will.
Harris Has No Coherent Sense of Self-Influence
Harris says we can’t choose our desires. Because we can only do so under the influence of some desire or other that we don’t choose. But that is a self-contradiction: admitting that “we can do so” while denying that we ever can. The role of unchosen desires as motivators is being used too confusingly here for Harris to say anything useful about how we actually control our own behaviors and desires. And scientists should care about how we actually do things.
As Dennett says:
We use the same tools to influence our own desires as we use to influence other people’s desires. I doubt that [Harris is] denying that we ever influence other people’s desires. His book is apparently an attempt to influence the beliefs and desires of his readers, and it seems to have worked rather better than I would like. His book also seems to have influenced his own beliefs and desires: writing it has blinded him to alternatives that he really ought to have considered. So his obliviousness is something for which he himself is partly responsible, having labored to create a mindset that sees compatibilism as deliberately obtuse.
All correct. We do not need absolute freedom to have some measure of freedom. Nor do we need absolute control to have some measure of control. Harris seems fond of black-and-white thinking like this in other areas, too. It blinds him to the need to deal with the fact that we aren’t dealing with absolutes, but degrees. The question is simply not “Are we free?” The question is “How free are we, and when?” The latter is a question of vital philosophical and scientific—and legal and political—importance to answer. The other question is a waste of everyone’s time.
As Dennett says, “If [Harris] can be the author of his book, then he can be the author of his thoughts.” Semantics for the win.
Harris’s Attempt at a Reply
In his response, after 200 words of introduction, Sam Harris first burns 600 words complaining about Dennett being mean to him, treating criticism as an affront to his dignity that requires elaborating on for some reason. This is not a good start. It is usually a red flag for not having an actual defense. It’s the sign of a hack: If you can’t rebut content, complain about tone. Harris then burns 300 words attacking the weakest and most irrelevant of Dennett’s points (the effects actual indeterminacy could have), one which I didn’t even mention, and which a mere three sentences could have dispatched by in fact conceding the point—which is actually what Harris does. Though he again frames it as a defense of his dignity against an unjust attack rather than simply saying they agree and moving on. And since in fact they agree on the disputed point, there is no actual rebuttal to it.
Then Harris says Dennett failed to prove any of his points, and demonstrates this by completely failing to correctly understand any of Dennett’s points.
Harris does this most amusingly by ignoring Dennett’s strongest analogies (e.g. how we respond to mistaken folk beliefs about “consciousness” should be the same way we respond to mistaken folk beliefs about “free will”; or that “how we could have done otherwise” should be answered the same way as “how a car could have done otherwise”) and instead only complains about the weakest ones (spending 500 words on this). For example, Dennett’s “geocentrism corrected to heliocentrism” case fails, Harris says, because the sun exists, free will doesn’t. Of course, Harris doesn’t notice that he is begging the question, assuming the thing doesn’t exist that Dennett is telling him does (indignant reliances on circular argument being another red flag for a bad philosopher). But more importantly, Harris completely failed to get the analogy. He doesn’t realize that sun-rises exist, even though the sun doesn’t move, and it was sun-rises that Dennett was using as the analog to free will, not “the sun.” Which exists in both geocentrism and heliocentrism, and thus Harris should have seen the existence of the sun cannot have been the analogy Dennett intended…
Yeah. Harris is a really bad philosopher.
Not a promising start.
Harris then burns 600 words repeating his position, without adding any new arguments or responding to Dennett, before “Changing the Subject,” a section comprising 3500 words (compared to the previous section’s 2300), mostly consisting of Harris just rephrasing all the same claims of his book (some of which Dennett rebutted, others Dennet was wholly unconcerned about).
Wherein Harris doesn’t answer any of Dennett’s fatal four points:
- That Harris is being inconsistent (by treating free will differently than consciousness and every other mental capacity, vis-a-vis how we respond to erroneous folk beliefs about them).
- That Harris is looking at the wrong thing (hunting for an ability to defy causation, rather than the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions reflective of and thus informative of our character and intentions, which are the decisions we actually want to be able to make and judge).
- That Harris relies on folk psychology about consciousness to build his case against free will (even though Harris knows that version of consciousness is false).
- And that Harris has no usable model of self-influence and control (he is more concerned to deny free will exists than to explain when we have it and how much of it we have and what we can do with it and how we can get more of it).
That constitutes a decisive defeat of Harris by the rules of debate. Harris dropped every crucial point Dennett made, failing to respond to any of them. Dennett wins by default.
Missing Every Point
Instead, Harris tries to answer Dennett’s point about research showing people do intuit compatibilism when they are given the option to by claiming this same “research suggests that people find the idea of libertarian free will so intuitively compelling that it is very difficult to get them to think clearly about determinism,” completely missing all three of Dennett’s points: first, that that isn’t true of a lot of people (Harris is thus falsely generalizing; another mark of a bad philosopher), that it has to do with the way questions are asked and what options are given (Harris is thus ignoring crucial nuance; another mark of a bad philosopher), and that even when it’s true it’s just as true of consciousness and memory and belief and so on, yet inexplicably Harris does not treat free will the same way.
For example, Harris would certainly admit that “research suggests that people find the idea of dualistic Cartesian consciousness so intuitively compelling that it is very difficult to get them to think clearly about neuromechanics,” yet he would not then say “therefore consciousness doesn’t exist,” not even at all, much less simply because people’s intuitions go against the correct facts of the matter. Harris makes no rebuttal to this point. He doesn’t even seem to be aware that Dennett made these points. Yet he did. In detail. Harris stalwartly maintaining his inconsistency on this point remains inexplicable and bizarre.
Similarly, at no point does Harris describe a usable model of self-influence and control (even though Dennett has, and it accords with the scientific facts, and abundant empirical observations beyond). Thus Harris’s denial of free will is a useless dead end; whereas Dennett’s reconstructed model of free will (like, Harris admits, our reconstructed model of consciousness) is extremely useful and highly applicable. Nor does Harris ever seem aware of how we actually use free will in practice (such as in law, medical consent decisions, or our judging of others’ consent, character, and benefit or danger to us). He keeps looking for the wrong thing. Not the actual thing people use free will to look for in the actual real world. Harris is divorced from reality. Dennett is deeply concerned with reality.
Only with regard to Dennett catching Harris relying on a false folk psychology of consciousness to build arguments against free will does Harris attempt anything like a reply. But in doing so he completely misses any actual point Dennett made. Harris argues that these folk beliefs really exist and cause social problems and really are worth debunking—all of which Dennett conceded in his critique. So Harris is not even responding to Dennett here. What Dennett caught Harris doing was using the false folk Cartesian model of consciousness as if it were a fact to demonstrate that, because it is incompatible with free will, therefore free will doesn’t exist. That’s incoherent. Dennett said so. Harris made no reply.
The Point Being Missed
Harris does not seem to understand why Dennett is right about this: if in actual fact consciousness is a whole-brain phenomenon and not (as the folk belief has it) a Cartesian theater separate from the brain, then Harris cannot argue that because free will can’t exist on the Cartesian theater model, free will can’t exist. That’s to confuse falsehood with reality. The reality is, as Dennett keeps explaining to Harris, that consciousness—and thus identity—is a whole-brain product. Therefore, that free will can’t exist on the Cartesian theater model tells us nothing whatsoever about whether free will exists. Because the Cartesian theater model is false. As even Harris himself repeatedly admits.
What we want to know is whether free will is compatible with the whole-brain model. Because that’s what exists. And as Dennett shows, the answer is yes. Thus Harris can’t say that “we” are the conscious experience of ourselves (which is false), the conscious experience of ourselves isn’t making the decisions we are conscious of (which is true), therefore “we” aren’t making those decisions. That is logically valid, but unsound, because “we” are not the conscious experience of ourselves. That’s what it means to say the Cartesian theater model of consciousness is false: that “we” are not the conscious experience of ourselves; “we” are the brain that those conscious states are giving us feedback on.
But since the brain is making the decisions we are conscious of, and “we” are that brain, it follows that “we” are making the decisions we are conscious of. And that freedom to make our own choices can be interfered with, or bypassed, or employed more, or employed less. And so we do have more or less freedom. And you can’t have more or less of something if it doesn’t exist. So clearly it does. Causal determinism is true, but irrelevant. Obviously decisions are caused by information and circumstances and prior states of the person (their born and learned character and reasoning, their acquired skills and knowledge). Irrelevant. Yes, you are constrained by where you were born, what education you had, what you’ve been told or allowed to know. But you also have a lot of freedom within that constraint—and even, often, to escape that constraint, and enlarge your prison, expanding the space you can move in. More and more. That power clearly exists. Because it alone explains the whole of human science, literature, and civilization. We are the Robot’s Rebellion.
Because your internal processor, which evaluates what you do know and what’s best to do about it, is not someone else’s marionette. It can evaluate what’s going on from the top down, and make rational, informed decisions. It can change course, precisely to the extent that you use it to leverage the benefits of causal determinism—through the causally fixed effects of logic and evidence. It’s only really a slave to the facts you know and the desires you have. Everything else is escapable. Which means when no one and nothing else gets in the way of your own internal processor’s cogitation, it only ever does what you want it to do. Which is all you’d ever want it to do. And insofar as you’d want it to perform better, e.g. evade the manipulations of others or the limitations of your environment, violating causal determinism wouldn’t help. You need determinism, so you can reliably and causally interact with the world and yourself, to acquire more accurate knowledge of the world (and hence of your constraints), and more accurate reflection on your own desires (and hence of what you really want out of life).
As Dennett explains in well-sourced detail, this means we can have a useful model of personal autonomy, consent, responsibility, self-reflection, self-control, self-influence, and rational and informed decision-making. Which means we can have a useful model of free will. Because those are the things people in practice mean by free will. That they are sometimes confused about how this works is as irrelevant as the fact that they are sometimes confused about how consciousness works, or how memory works. Our job should not be to confuse them more by telling them that because their intuitions about consciousness, memory, and free will are wrong, therefore “consciousness, memory, and free will” don’t exist. To the contrary, our job should be to correct their misunderstanding of the facts and give them a factually correct model of what consciousness, memory, and free will are, and how they really work. Because determinism itself gives us plenty of Elbow Room.
Closing Assessment
Compatibilism is the strongest consensus view of actual experts. It’s coherent, scientifically and empirically verified, and useful. It entails that causal determinism has no effect on the existence or absence, or even degree, of human autonomy and self-control. Sam Harris has no coherent, verified, or useful alternative to propose. His model of free will is archaic pseudoscience, a Frankenstein’s concoction of the ivory tower, and not a real world phenomenon. Of course it doesn’t exist. Yet he has no alternative on offer. Dennett does. And Harris is too arrogant to even notice. He lost this debate. Catastrophically. Which only illustrates yet again why Daniel Dennett is the real expert here.
In fact, it becomes clear in all of this that Harris is a really, really, really terrible philosopher. He should probably just get out of the philosophy business, and leave it to folks who actually respect the field, and know what they’re doing. But this also reflects a perfect example of how a lousy armchair philosopher—like, in all honesty, most people—can get the concept and application of free will so wrong. Circular arguments, contradictory assertions, ignoring facts and logic, relying on pseudoscience, and being too stubborn to learn or listen. The example set by Harris in this whole debate is practically its own textbook for how not to do philosophy.
-:-
I need to add that I do think it’s a shame. Because Harris often has some interesting or innovative ideas. He just won’t learn how to articulate or defend them well. See, for example, how I find he dropped the ball on what I think was otherwise a brilliant model of moral reasoning. Time and again he does this. There is a lot of crap in academic philosophy he is right to critique. But he still needs to take it more seriously than he does. They’ve already debated most of everything he ever aims to defend. He needs to learn from that. Not ignore it. Otherwise, he just ends up on the other end of an expert’s bludgeon. In this case, Dennett’s. Maybe some day Harris will realize all the mistakes he made here, and how he may be making them elsewhere too. The outcome will be marvelous.
Thanks for the long analysis, I was hoping you would post about it, back when the exchange happened so better late then never! I should also point you to a more recent exchange between Sam and Daniel that happened in the aftermath here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFa7vFkVy4g [= https://samharris.org/podcasts/free-will-revisited ]
They get together in person to discuss the disagreements they voiced in those articles. That is not to say I think your analysis is outdated as I don’t think either of them cover much new ground that isn’t in the original writings. I disagree with your overall assessment of Harris as a philosopher but regardless I see you still make substantive points against his arguments in your critique.
I have noted (though unfortunately not on paper so I can’t actually point you to where) that Dennett seems to defend an idea of retributivism that seems to argue punishment is justified irrespective of its ability to alter future behaviour. In other words, as simply a means to “balance the scales” despite there being no actual scales. Something we both have a problem with and something that might stem (incorrectly) from his Compatibalism. You have no reason to take me at my word that Dennett thinks this, I may well have made a mistake in characterising his views and would welcome the correction! Or if I find an example I will post it back here.
However, I do I think this is what underlies Sam’s problem with Compatabilism, as he thinks it might sneak in backwards-looking retribution, where Hard Determinism would otherwise plug the gap. He then sees that they are both descriptions of humans in the world, but one does good work in relinquishing problematic retributivist instincts while the other “changes the subject”, doing bad work in allowing it to fester. I agree with you that correct conceptions of Compatibilism in fact solve the problem.
Whether or not any of that is true for each of their views, I think it is an important question to ask how peoples’ folk beliefs on punishment change, when primed towards towards Compatibilism vs priming them towards Hard Determinism. This is a different matter to philosophical one being discussed but one I am interested in.
I wish you could go on his podcast and discuss your disagreement, (he already had Bart Erman on so you could at least speak to that topic) but I am not sure your slightly combative writing style would encourage him.
Good to know. Thanks for that link.
I do prefer to rely on written sources, if I can, as spoken discourse makes it too easy to flub, mispeak, disorganize thoughts, so I don’t want to hold anyone (Harris included) to task for what they might say in such conversations, if I can consult written discourse instead, which is better weighed and edited.
I don’t know Dennett’s theory of justice. But I have seen determinist defenses of retributivism before (usually emotivist in form: it brings pleasure to the victims and those disquieted by “unbalanced scales” as you say, and things like that). I’ve yet to see one that actually fit the empirical and scientific facts (e.g. of what retributivism actually does to people and communities emotionally, especially compared to alternative models). If you find Dennett’s argument anywhere, do let me know. It could become another blog article.
(Or indeed, let me know of any such argument you find that attempts at sophistication, i.e. it actually has an argument structure from premise to conclusion, and adduces evidence for its premises; even if the argument wasn’t his.)
In reality, almost no compatibilists I have ever read are retributivists. Even the Supreme Court of the United States is explicitly compatibilist and anti-retributivist (at least up to now; with the conservatives packing the court, maybe we will go back to the 16th century). I present the documents showing this in my course on free will.
But note, asking how most people change with new information is vexed. Most people do not have coherent belief systems or even know what that is, much less how to maintain one. So I would doubt that convincing someone of compatibilism will necessarily correct their belief on retributivism. In my experience, support for the latter is entirely emotional and irrational, and is actually one of the cognitive blocks against accepting compatibilism (exactly the opposite of Sam’s fear, which again is, IMO, not based in reality).
It’s amusing you mention he might run away from a combative writing style. The ardent polemicist he himself is, would run away from an ardent polemicist just like him? He can’t even see himself in the mirror. Which is kind of the ultimate philosophy fail, IMO. As Know Thyself is supposed to be goal number one of the entire enterprise. Rational people care more about content than tone. Those who care more about tone than content…not so rational.
“I have seen determinist defenses of retributivism before” If the names of any defenders spring to mind I would love to check them out.
“If you find Dennett’s argument anywhere, do let me know.” I will make sure to make a proper look at this and get back to you if I can, although …
“In reality, almost no compatibilists I have ever read are retributivists” leads me to think I may be wrong about this and was not being fair to Dan.
“I would doubt that convincing someone of compatibilism will necessarily correct their belief on retributivism.”
That’s not quite what I mean, you can prime individuals to act one way or the other after some stimulus (like reading statements that seem to suggest Hard Determinism or Compatibilism for example) and then see how they respond to questions about punishment. So not necessarily altering beliefs just dispositions in the moment. The best example I can think of is in a paper from Shariff, Greene & Karremans http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614534693, although its not quite what I suggest (ie. its not like mechanistic descriptions are contradictory to Compatibilism).
Greene debated Dan on the topic here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YYr8311yY0 and Greene’s book Moral Tribes is a great primer for the Moral Psychology work that started off this new trend I will be jumping on (on Morality not Free Will so I am veering off topic a bit).
“In my experience, support for [retributivism] is entirely emotional and irrational, and is actually one of the cognitive blocks against accepting compatibilism” which is something really interesting to look at that could definitely be explored further in what I was suggesting, maybe-sort-of.
I guess we can disagree on our taste for Sam though, I still really enjoy his work. I think if he looked at your Goal Theory (and agreed with it and wrote about it) he would get a much stronger foundation to address his critics (specifically moral anti-realists or non-consiquentialists) which is why I still think it would be great for you both to have a conversation one day.
PS. I think I should note I am not a Patron (I would if I could afford it, but PhD stipend is less than bountiful!) and I appreciate you taking the time to respond in length!
“If the names of any defenders spring to mind” : Alas, no. I haven’t made note of them (they weren’t disciplined thinkers, so it was just in passing discussions or essays and the like; which is why I’d be interested if you run into anyone with an actually disciplined argument).
“That’s not quite what I mean, you can prime individuals…” : You should be a little less confident in priming (google around to find why; example; example). Priming effects are ephemeral and weak. They are in reality largely inconsequential. They can be useful to certain parties (e.g. casinos and marketing agencies), who can rake millions off of tiny momentary decisions that are of very little importance to the agent. But they have no measurable impact on belief systems. And its belief systems we want to change.
Not to confuse priming with other effects like stereotype threat, which are sustained enculturating factors (more impactful on children and adolescents than adults, and only significant when relentless, i.e. a sustained environment, evoking cultural emulation, which humans are born to do, for good or ill). The analogy there would be peers and authorities just repeatedly telling children and teens that retributivism is good and compatibilism/determinism/contracausalism is true (it wouldn’t matter which), the effect would be widespread belief in an incoherent worldview. Prominent example: Christianity.
I always welcome sincere and productive comments, like yours, BTW. Which is why I take the time to reply to them. In a sense, you are earning that merely be taking the time to ensure your comment is sincere and productive! I pay that back when I can.
— Dennett, Daniel C. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (p.367-368). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
I believe Daniel Dennett is against retributive justice.
Excellent. Thanks for finding and posting that.
Thanks!
There is will, yes, but there is nothing free about it at all. It costs, always. The very claim to find free will and reality compatible denies this in the name!
Whatever the fine print says, compatibilism always ends up insisting that people are guilty. This premise justifies social regimes that escalate punishment to force a rational choice to conform, masking intimidation as morality. The only reason for insisting it is free is to limit considerations of diminished capacity, on the one hand, and to rule out considerations of social causes, on the other.
There is no need for a notion of moral responsibility to justify deterrence, because deterrence is no more freely willed than any other non-action. On the other hand, the captain of their soul, using determinate laws of something or other to plot their course, is a fiction sailing Cartesian seas, instead of a fictional ego merely sitting in the Cartesian theater. I understand Dennett owns a boat, hence the preferred metaphor, yet it means the same.
And, so far as compatiblity with science is concerned, instead of compatibility with religion and law, philosophy’s siblings? I know of no work whatsoever by any compatibilists that acknowledges variation in human personalities and capacities. If compatibilitists truly believed they were doing scientifically informed philisophy/religion/law, they would be searching out the limits in the name of justice, rather than explaining them away in the name of injustice.
Lastly, on the question of expertise? There was, not so long ago, a scholarly consensus that Reconstruction was a terrible assault on the people of the South. And this followed all the canons of scholarship. I’m sorry but I do not concede that the community of philosophers is a disinterested search for truth. I agree Harris is a terrible philosopher, but disagree that’s necessarily a bad thing. I do quarrel with the idea that Harris is a neuroscientist, or a scientist of any sort.
Well, sure. If you are going to use a different connotation of “free” than Dennett and Harris and everyone else are using in this debate. But I don’t see that as productive here. We aren’t talking economics. We are talking degrees of freedom in a decision matrix. They overlap at points but not in any way relevant to anything you said.
Neither is true.
Please align your beliefs with reality. Empirically. No armchair deductions like this. Please.
In reality, I have never encountered any compatibilist who does what you claim. To the contrary, compatibilism has most prominently ended reasoning like that. On the Supreme Court for example. As I’ve collected documents showing before.
The value of autonomy is not relevant to the existence of autonomy. You are confusing two different things. One is: humans can make autonomous choices. The other is: should we ever force them to make different choices? The latter question’s answer, is wholly unaffected by the former. We can make arguments for the value of respecting autonomy that never even have to reference determinism at all (as true, or false; it’s completely irrelevant). Likewise the reverse.
It is Harris’s determinism that is in reality most often used to argue for more force and social control, falsely believing autonomy doesn’t even exist, and therefore unbridled regulation makes no difference. See my discussion here (of an actual example of a Harris-style determinist arguing for more social coercion).
You are confusing insistence with definition.
Respecting competent autonomy and the ability to escape social causes are what we mean by freedom. By definition. It’s not an empirical question. It’s simply one of defining terms. What matters to us is that freedom. No other has any value. And since that freedom exists on determinism, compatibilism is necessarily true. QED.
That sentence is unintelligible to me.
It sounds like a circular argument: presuming the conclusion (that no freedom exists; tell that to the people of Iran, and the guy someone just pushed in front of a train) in the premises. Deterrence is just as freely chosen as anything else. We have laws not by unstoppable external force. But by reasoned human thought and decision based on logic and information. It’s called legislation.
Um. All compatibilists acknowledge that. Dennett included. I can only conclude you have never read the extended philosophy of any compatibilist.
Another wholly unintelligible sentence. This time I can’t even guess at what you mean.
And your last paragraph makes several bizarre assertions, and adduces no evidence whatever in support of them. I see no need to answer an argument void of evidence. I evoke Hitchens’s Law: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
I wrote, unintelligibly: “There is no need for a notion of moral responsibility to justify deterrence, because deterrence is no more freely willed than any other non-action.” To rephrase: The compatibilist notion of free will means being deterred is a rational exercise of free will. Therefore, social punishments should prevent crime. Only innate depravity that actively endorses evil ends leads to immoral choices. Further, since some crimes are worse than others, escalating the punishments for the more severe crimes is a necessity, else the deterrent effect will be insufficient. I say the compatibilist philosophy is both ignorant and vicious. I say that feeling deterred is not an act of free will and you are wrong is saying so.I say that no regime of penalties, including death penalties, will ever suffice to deter all crime, and such regimes are largely exercises in social control and the intimidation of policed populations.
I also wrote, unintelligibly: “If compatibilitists truly believed they were doing scientifically informed philisophy/religion/law, they would be searching out the limits in the name of justice, rather than explaining them away in the name of injustice.” To rephrase: If compatibilists really believed they should be guided by science, the legal definition of insanity would be a matter of grave concern, if not the target of attacks. . Drug laws, which stigmatize people with emotional problems as criminals, would be viewed with alarm as ignoring diminished capacity. Severe and cruel punishments that work against rehabilitation would be judged to impair autonomy. None of these things is true, therefore I draw the obvious conclusion the point to compatibilism is to rule out such inconvenient considerations. The only point to redefining free will is to assign moral blame, to justify such policies.
Lastly you claim I make “bizarre” assertions in my final paragraph without support. I can only guess what you mean. I thought Harris did blogs and talks and quasipolitical polemics, not neuroscience research. I confess, I did not offer up a list of non-papers in the scientific literature to support this. As to my references to the long sway of the Dunning School in Reconstruction studies, I didn’t offer support because I thought it was common knowledge. As an introduction, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_School Then follow up with DuBois’ Reconstruction and Its Benefits, then Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: A Short History. I assure you the canons of scholarship and expertise you value so highly were always met by Dunning et al.
When I wrote I didn’t see philosphy as a community of scholars in a disinterested search for truth, this may have been offensive. But the idea that departments of philosophy are institutions that are funded to achieve certain ends, just like schools of divinity or schools of law, is not bizarre, in my judgment. As to support for this, I offer the history of funding. The occasional dismissal of philosophers whose opinions offended the masters is also symptomatic. If the parts where I agreed with you were the bizarre parts, I have no idea what to say to that.
Objections to your comments, as opposed to these clarifications, are offered separately.
As far as that sentence is even intelligible, it’s neither true nor logical. Social punishments can and sometimes do deter crime, in the sense of reducing the frequency of it. A measured empirical fact. And thus not disputable. Compatibilists, however, argue that social punishments are of value because they operate in several ways, not just that one. For example, reform, restitution, and defense (isolating bad actors from victims).
But I don’t know what the phrase “being deterred is a rational exercise of free will” means. Whose free will are you talking about in that sentence?
That’s false. And illogical. There is no such thing as that. Social punishment theory requires no such entities to exist. And whether choices are moral are defined by what follows without fallacy from true facts, and what is done knowingly (a criminal act requires knowledge and intent), not with whether someone is absolutely immoral, or any such weird pseudoscientific notion.
The science proves that false.
So let me remind you: please conform your beliefs to reality. Not to fantasy worlds you invent in your head. When deterrence no longer works is an empirical question, not something you can deduce from the armchair.
It’s called self-defense. We have a right to defend ourselves from the abuse and predations of others. That’s true wholly regardless of whether contra-causal free will is true, or hard determinism, or compatibilism. Those things have absolutely nothing to do with the matter. And you’ve shown no logical connection between them.
No one says that. They say it reduces the frequency of crime. Which is empirically verified fact. But only to a point. For example, the death penalty does not seem to have any measurable effect in deterring crime.
Moreover, no one says punishment exists solely to deter. Punishment exists also to reform, restitute, and defend (isolate). Among other things. And in every respect, each benefit it serves, is an act of self-defense, and justified on the theory of self-defense. Not on any theory about free will.
I don’t think you even know what the legal definition of insanity is.
And no one I know or have ever read, has ever attacked the actual legal definition of insanity.
They sometimes attack what they mistakenly believe it to be, because they are ignorant, and don’t check the facts to align their belief with reality. A failing you seem to be exhibiting here quite a lot. And no one who attacks it, is a compatibilist. Compatibilists are reality-based philosophers: they are the ones defending the real legal definition, and trying to educate ignorant philosophers on what it actually is. You should do that yourself. I have an entire section on it, with quotations from actual law, in Sense and Goodness without God.
Every compatibilist I know is against most drug laws. Precisely because of the reasons you state (and more).
So you don’t seem to have any idea what you are talking about. You clearly haven’t actually read any compatibilists. You have fabricated a fantasy in your head instead.
Please, please, please stop that.
Base your beliefs on reality.
From now on.
Please.
Nope. Free will is also a necessary concept for ascertaining capacity to consent, and actual consent (for example, in privacy laws, medical and sexual decisions, personal life decisions, and beyond) and access to liberty (e.g. freedom of speech and conscience), and assigning reward (who deserves to “get paid” or “get credit” for something). It is only used in moral-legal contexts to exclude persons from acts of self-defense (e.g. if someone has a lack-of-free-will defense in court, a real one, then that means they did not intend or know they were causing harm, therefore none of the punishment apparatus would have any utility, e.g. it can’t deter such things, there is nothing to reform or protect society against, and whether we want that to be grounds for restitution is a subject of democratic vote).
You evidently don’t know that the Supreme Court rejects determinism as ground for negating punishment. As one famous justice said, “Even if you were fated to commit crime, you were therefore fated to be punished for it as well.” Thus, determinism does not rescue anyone from punishment. The only argument that can logically warrant abandoning a punishment policy, is utilitarian. Which means the structure of free will (contra-causal, hard determinist, or compatibilist) never enters into that debate. It’s always irrelevant.
(This is true even for retributive punishment, which is rejected by almost all compatibilists; yet even it cannot be coherently defended on any theory of contra-causal free will, and people’s mistaken belief that it can, is simply folly.)
And here you add another even more unintelligible paragraph. You are literally making no sense at all here. I can’t fathom what any of your assertions even are, much less what your reasoning is.
P.S. Forgot to thank you for your books on science in the early Roman empire, my favorites in your work. I’m afraid I skipped almost all the remarks on calculations in your historicity book, but I found the rest enthralling. I got your Sense and Goodness on kindle but I haven’t finished it.
Interesting article! I agree whole-heartedly with your assessment, but I do see a tiny bit of value in Harris’s book. If you take it as nothing more than an argument against libertarian free will, it’s somewhat convincing. I should know because it helped steer me away from libertarian free will when I first started questioning the fundamentalist Christian worldview I’d been brought up with. I haven’t read Harris’s Free Will in a while, but if my memory serves me, most of his arguments seemed to oppose free will in the libertarian sense. The first time I came across compatiblism, in one of your books, I thought you were cheating by more or less redefining what the term “free will” meant, so convinced was I that libertarian free will was the only viable alternative to “free will doesn’t exist at all”. Since then I’ve come to be convinced by folks like you and Dennett that compatiblism is actually brilliant. Thanks for the great work you do! I’d love another book on a non-historical subject from you. (I know history is your main profession, but I love the way you think and would honestly love to hear your opinions and reasoned arguments on almost any subject.)
Indeed, I even use Harris’s book as the course text for my course on the Science and Philosophy of Free Will!
Largely because it’s a very good example of an argument for the wrong conclusion; and thus students benefit from studying it and being asked probing questions about it. But also, secondarily, because it does make many good points that are just as true on compatibilism, and does effectively trounce the pseudoscience of contra-causal free will, largely a trapping of supernatural worldviews (along with minds being disembodyable souls, intuition as a psychic power, and other folk beliefs).
“Respecting competent autonomy and the ability to escape social causes are what we mean by freedom. By definition. It’s not an empirical question. It’s simply one of defining terms. What matters to us is that freedom. No other has any value. And since that freedom exists on determinism, compatibilism is necessarily true. QED.”
Excluding empirical answers, relying on definition, shows once again that free will compatibilism is religious apologetics. There is no such thing as escaping social causes. Taking control of social arrangments is indeed an exercise in freedom, but it is not an act of individual autonomy, not individual free will. And this really is true by definition, the individual is not the social. As for freedom being the respect for competent autonomy, the sudden emergence of competence in the argument is in itself suspicious, especially when delusions about escaping society are invoked. QED? No. As to compatibilist free will being freedom itself, this is stuff and nonsense, sold by the pound. Compatibilist free will worth wanting is the ability to make rational choices about what we want, and how we feel, to ignore what we want we think it rational. The feeling that we have this is no doubt comforting as feeling sure of salvation. But it is not freedom itself.
Real freedom most certainly does involve economics. You are correct that Dennett and other compatibilists don’t address this. This shows Dennett and other compatibilists are engaged in scholastic exercises in service of obscurantist apologetics.
Equally you are absolutely correct when you observe that the US Supreme Court operates on a compatibilist philosophy. I have no idea why you would endorse the compatibilist philosophy behind prolonged prison sentences; imprisonment of drug addicts; death sentences for the mentally handicapped; the legal definition of insanity, etc. I could go on and on, but the truth is, these are not bugs in compatibilism, but features. The law by the way is the kind of empirical evidence to which you should conform your opinions.Your armchair deductions about what compatibilism “really” means are irrelevant.
Last, the bland assumption that “normal adults” acknowledges variation in people is simply wrong. It is an equivocation asserted without evidence. Compatibilism can therefore be dismissed without further argument.
No.
We all have to define what we are interested in, so we know what we are looking for, and thus can determine whether it exists.
That’s how all of science works.
You define the entity or behavior you want to check the existence of. Then you know what to look for. Then you look for it. Then you determine if and when it exists.
So:
We are not interested in libertarian free will (it doesn’t do anything we have any use for), but even if we were, we have already empirically proved it does not exist.
We are interested in compatibilist free will (because we need to know when people are capable of consent, and have consented, and when they have or lack basic liberties, and whether they are the agents who caused a particular outcome or not, or if someone or something else caused it instead), and so we look for that, and we have confirmed empirically that it exists.
That’s it.
Yes, there is.
Someone who physically escapes Iran, has escaped a whole system of social causes. Someone who lobbies and votes to end a restrictive law, escapes the social causes that law kept in place. Someone who escapes an abusive family, escapes a collection of social causes. Someone who works to gain wealth and education (when the opportunity is presented), gains access to numerous means of escaping various social causes that poor and uneducated people are still constrained by.
There are many degrees of freedom. It’s not simply all free or not at all free. People can be free to increasing degrees. Sometimes opportunities exist that their choices can exploit to increase their degree of freedom. And when that isn’t the case, the rest of us care to work to fix the social system so that it makes that the case more often, for more people.
A society (and likewise a government) is just a collection of individuals.
So yes, every change in the social system is the product of individual acts of free will.
Except in circumstances where everyone’s will is being thwarted (e.g. an uncontrollable natural disaster).
Otherwise, it’s always someone’s will involved. And the aim of increasing access to democracy, is to take some of that control out of the hands of the few, and distribute it over a larger base of persons. But a population voting, is still a collection of individuals exercising free will. Except when it isn’t, e.g. people forced under threat to vote one way rather than another (as in Iran). In one situation, the system is produced by the free will of the people. In the other, it isn’t. But it is then produced by the free will of the tyrants depriving us of our free will. Which is why we are justified in killing them. Hence the American Revolution.
Suspicious why? I don’t see any coherent argument here.
Competence is what we are concerned with. There is nothing suspicious about that concern. We don’t let toddlers make decisions about their own health and safety. But we defend the right of adults to do so. That difference is not “suspicious.” It’s a utilitarian reality, confirmed in empirical fact.
It’s not a feeling. Whether you get to make decisions for yourself, or someone else makes them for you or blocks your decisions, is a physical fact of reality. There is therefore an objective physical difference between being free, and not being so.
You have yet to present any example of what the hell you are talking about. You don’t even make any intelligible assertion here. Much less defend it with any evidence or argument.
That’s not the Supreme Court. That’s the Legislature. Which being Christian, acts on libertarian free will doctrine, not compatibilist.
You can’t even tell the difference between two entirely separate branches of government.
This does not bode well for your understanding of reality.
No, they aren’t. They are fundamental.
You can’t test a scientific theory, without first choosing what theory you wish to test, and defining it.
That’s all we are doing here.
Testing defined theories of a property of consciousness.
And empirical evidence refutes the existence of every one of those theories…except compatibilism, which it thoroughly verifies.
It’s not an assumption. It’s an empirical fact. Dennett writes a lot about variations in people and the role it plays in consciousness and free will. Please actually read his work. Stop building fantasies about it in your head instead.
Not a single thing you’ve said against it is logically coherent or factually accurate.
Hi Richard, just wondering what your definition of free will is?
Minimally:
A conscious agent enacting their own will with knowledge and intent.
Which means:
Without their resulting will being blocked or bypassed, or anyone else’s will being substituted for theirs.
Moreover:
Free will is a continuous and not a discrete variable. Meaning it always exists by degrees. It is not an either/or. A decision can be in varying degrees free. But it can never be absolutely free (because omnipotence (a) doesn’t exist and (b) is logically impossible). Though it can be absolutely absent (e.g. an unconscious body). We “mountain-molehill” the fuzzy point where this capacity does not exist enough to call a will free (e.g. coercion), or does exist enough to call it free (e.g. decisions freely made but under limited means).
And for practical reasons we usually measure this relative to the act being assessed (and not relative to all logical possibilities, as most aren’t even available): e.g. we never have infinite options available, and a person can even be highly constrained by their environment or circumstances, but if of the few options available to them one is better than another, and they choose the worse, we credit them as making a bad choice—as opposed to saying they had no choice. We only say they had no choice when their will is bypassed (e.g. by coercion or force); not when their will is caused, as we aren’t evaluating what made a person bad or incompetent, but simply whether they are bad or incompetent. Confusing those two things leads to most of the errors in evaluating the function and presence of free will.
Hello Dr. Carrier. Long time follower of yours and Sam Harris’ work (from Brazil, so excuse the stunted english)!
I just really wanted to echo the suggestion made by commenter SIMON – that a conversation between you and Harris would be immensely appreciated by many people.
A passing notion of this first sprang to mind while reading one of your posts regarding objective morality, right after having read Harris’ book on the same subject. But then it became absolutely CEMENTED when I listened to his podcast with Bart Ehrman as guest, during which Ehrman is – as usual – completely unfair to the Mythicist position. Are you and Harris at all acquainted and is there any interest on your part of such a conversation ever happening?
Thank you so much for taking the time to address such a wide range of subjects in such a comprehensive way.
P.S.: Still hoping to one day see a Portuguese translation of your bibliography in print!
I don’t think he likes me because I criticize him so much.
And he stopped corresponding with me years ago. For whatever reason.
I’d love to do a Portuguese translation of some of my work. The problem probably isn’t getting translators, but getting distributors. How does one publish a book in Brazil? That’s the question I’ve never gotten a good answer on. (Aside from “Become a Best Selling author and get a Big Super Contract with a Major Publisher” which is not actionable advice.)
I can sell kindle editions there. But would that be enough?
Sam is currently quite into bridging the gap between people with whom he disagrees (even vehemently) with honest real-time conversation which is commendable. It hasn’t worked well with some really bad conversations but has been really successful in others. His conversation with Jonathan Haidt for example where previously their exchanges were far more inflamed than anything you have said.
Not that I am in a position to tell him to invite you on, unfortunately I haven’t gained any fame!
Since I am doing moral psychology work, if I ever bump into people he knows at a conference I will float your name!
I approve of that.
That is such a shame.
I feel very confident that (at the vert least) the portion of his listeners that were interested in the podcast with Ehrman would be very much interested on your take on the subject. And I’m sure both of you could produce a conversation on free will and objective morality that would be of great value to his listeners.
I mean, he’s had some harsh critics of his as guests on his podcast – far harsher than you. Even if it’s true that he doesn’t like you, it would be inconsistent of him to let it stop such a potentially valuable exchange from happening. So I think the public can hope?
Unfortunately I know of no direct channel (such as your blog) through which he could be reached.
Regarding publishing in Brazil, I’m afraid “pop” popularity is pretty much the only viable route into print – especially so for foreign language authors. “Pop” authors like Oliver Sacks, Stephen Gould, Brian Greene, Steven Pinker and Harris himself seem to sit at the very edge of publishing interest.
And in my experience Kindle is just not popular here – even though it is officially sold by a countrywide bookstore chain. The overwhelming majority of people who buy books (not many to begin with) still go mostly for print – myself included.
I tried sending e-mails to a couple of publishers that have printed less “pop” foreign books in philosophy and science in the past. I suggested some of your books along with those of a few other authors that have works geared to a more general audience, and which I believe could be lucrative for them. But hey, I’m just some random nobody, they probably weren’t even read…
Sam Harris is playing a crucial role in the struggle to transition from a society based on superstition to one based on clear thinking which would result in actual human decency. I suspect that he will rethink his ideas concerning free will and move forward. The struggle you are all engaged in is not an individual struggle it requires the input of everyone like, yourself, Mr. Dennett, Mr. Dawkins etc. if it to have a chance of succeeding.
Bill Rogan
I feel most of these debates about free will is a slight talking-past-each-other more than rebuttals and whatnot, and I think the core of it is the distinction between hard and soft determinism which neither side seems to be talking about? I’m an ice-cold proto-hard determinist waaaay-to-the-edge myself, but Dennett (and I assume your) free will makes perfect sense in a softly determined universe, and I can follow (and mostlyagree with) that easy. Maybe that’s the bit Harris is missing?
Hard and soft determinism is just another way of saying the same thing: that free will exists (soft) or doesn’t (hard).
So that doesn’t help.
The place it should start is reality: the actual real world. How is free will actually used, in actual real world situations, that actually affect the actual lives of actual people? (For example, courts of law, medical ethics boards, moral judgments, sexual ethics, and so on.)
Everything else is a waste of time even discussing. (Outside games & puzzles magazines.)
And when we follow that principle, Harris’s position evaporates. The only one that remains, is Dennett’s.
Well, I think it is helpful in figuring out where Harris and you disagree.
And I don’t think it’s (hard/soft determinism) saying the same thing as disagreeing between determinism and free will; hard determinism takes the philosophical aspect of the debate all the way down to a quantum level, and that is important. You may say that Harris is a poor philosopher, however I think some of that notion comes from him being a physicist / neuroscientist first, philosopher second (despite his own claims), muddling the waters of the whole debate.
I can relate to that; if the universe is determined hard, all the way down, then the consequences all the way from the beginning of the universe couldn’t have happened any other way (unless you slip randomness into it somewhere, which true hard-ass determinists don’t do, of course), and hence all our thoughts and debates would be exactly the same. The concept is hence technically true, if that’s the case, using a different language from the more folksy philosophical one (although, there are variations and differences everywhere). Neurons and thoughts are determined in the past by events that couldn’t have been otherwise, so even your thoughts are determined by the causal universe. That means that what happens in the future is also determined by the state of every point in time. (I personally also think that the road to compatibilism is paved with so much complexity that renders our human notion of randomness vs. choice void, but I don’t think Harris thinks this).
I suspect this is all buried in a pile of early Wittgenstein’s rejected draft papers. In the end, I suspect you both agree, but you’re talking about it slightly differently. Not at odds, nor even wrong, just overlapping semantics. Sure, that makes Harris a worse philosopher in an academic sense, just not wrong in some other technical sense. Aren’t we just arguing over this expression? On what language we use to express the same idea?
As to how free will is used in the actual world, I think Harris and others have good arguments that show that it’s not that clear cut. You say / quote “free will is a debate about ability, not gaps in causation” but that’s a bit circular as abilities (Dennett’s example of it used in the real world) are governed, too, by determinism (Harris’ argument from reductionism [as I see it]). Doesn’t this just show that we’re using the wrong words, that we’re talking past each other? And I would claim neither is right or wrong?
No, soft determinists also deny quantum indeterminacy, same as hard determinists. The only difference between them is on compatibilism.
Dennett and Harris both agree it’s determinism all the way down. Neither believes quantum indeterminacy has any bearing on the existence or function of free will.
And indeed they are talking past each other. Dennett is talking about reality. Harris is not.
We are free to choose, but are we free to choose what it is we choose?
This topic is still a very hotly debated issue, which in itself makes clear that it is not so obvious as to whether our will is free or not.
Freedom for humanity is a paradox. To be free one must be unencumbered therefor one must also have something to be unencumbered from. This means our freedom is relying on something, which contradicts the very notion of what freedom means. It also means we are looking in the wrong place for freedom. (DT)
I think the strongest argument for the existence of our free will is the fact that we can weigh evidence, discover the best option then make our decision. Of course we can do this but does it prove we have free will? We do not have unlimited knowledge therefor any decision we make will reflect that fact. In weighing evidence we will make choices as to what evidence we should consider and there are no guarantees that what we’ve chose is all that’s is needed. What makes us decide, when we decide? All these when’s and why’s are arbitrary and more than likely our final choice will need to be mitigated or revised completely. Hind sight is twenty/twenty, is something we hear all the time, even about major choices by a so called intelligent people. I think therefor in looking at “we can analyze and then decide” doesn’t prove freewill, rather it shows the limitation of our will. A limited mind is not a free mind. And if you don’t see that it is because of your limited mind, sorry, I do not mean to offend.
In my view unless the mind has an awareness, from moment to moment of a concrete reality/actuality or unlimited knowledge, then it will always be limited. In our obvious limited state we are not in a conscious framework of freedom hence our will is curtailed and not actually free.
_____________________
Further if we are afflicted by something then wanting the opposite of the affliction will only keep what you want to be free from alive. The opposite won’t accomplish what you desire, it is the negation of the original affliction that can only free you of it. The need for the opposite arises with the original problem e g: If you think negative and want to be positive the desire to be positive is a direct result of being negative, if you were not negative you wouldn’t have a desire to be positive. Therefor in removing the negative the desire to be positive will also vanish.
Further there are no “thought’s” that can put us in the “here and now” this has many ramifications but perhaps the most important is that, if we are not grounded in the here and now, then we cannot move onto anything else. Like a “concrete actuality” or reality if you prefer that word.
All around the world we see people acting out their roles, living their lives just like Shakespeare stated. And all the worlds a stage, And the men and women merely player’s. It is probably safe to assume that most people do not feel they are acting out a prescribed role. Robert Wright in his book “Why Buddhism is True”, points out that much of our behavior dates back to our early history when natural selection programed human interaction, needless to say, these ingrained feelings are totally inappropriate in the current world situation.The book is a profound work of insight into the human condition. In David Bohm’s book “Wholeness and the Implicate Order he states. ” Fragmentation is now very wide spread, not only throughout society buy also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates and endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them.” He goes on to say that the fragments are so severe that it is generally accepted that most people will suffer from some form of neurosis, while many individuals go beyond these normal limits and are indeed psychotic. David Bohm was a prominent physicist and his work focused on weaving together science and spiritualism, he was considered by many one of the greatest minds in the history of humanity.
This entire blog has been dedicated to compassionately and humorously, pointing out the incoherence of humankind and although it is not a popular blog I have been insulted and befriended for my views, which frankly hurts. Yet the cost of silence is much more unacceptable so I will persist, until the world wakes or we all perish from our incoherence.
Humans, for some time now have claimed that the true difference between us and the animal world is that we are self aware and as a result can inquire into the meaning of life and as a result have a more fulfilling existence. At the same time it is humans that are in conflict with their environment, each other and even their internal selves. Thus we are compelled to ask, is there an aspect of the mind that is already in touch with our core, nature? The flora and fauna seem naturally connected to it and so we must be also. We are certainly of nature, since we are already connected, there is only the need to wake up to it. (If that’s possible) The mind [is] and the only way to tune in is through meditation. However it is simple awareness, there is no need to become anything, you cannot become what you already are.
DT AKA Bill Rogan
The language in this comment is fraught with ambiguities. But on one reading, it just restates what I said in the article it is commenting on. So I’m not sure what the point was in submitting it.
I wish you could find me wrong about this, however it seems to me that freewill is impossible for the following reason:
The present moment, as far as I am aware, has been narrowed to Plank moment which is like 10^-23 of a second… basically eruption of quantum events in and out of our reality by means scientists are still arguing about… The thing is that this Plank moment is the only real time in existence, the present, standing between future and past… It seems to me that there simply is no TIME for freewill to exist… our thoughts are said to take about 0.3 seconds of total brain parallel processing to accomplish any connection between thought and action… this is gazillions of plank moments of what was becoming what will be and far to slow to be anything but an afterglow of reality in motion… a motion that stretches back to whatever beginning we can name without a break. Everything we can experience and imagine is exactly where it must be at this very moment because all moments that brought it here are unchangeably part of the past… everyone on earth is exactly where they must be and doing exactly what they must be doing because the events that are making it all happen are happening far to fast for anything to change them… and since I can find no place where this is not so in the timeline of the universe, what can freewill mean other than the illusion that we could have done other than we did? The quantum facts may suggest that we could have and actually did in an alternate universe but there too everyone is just as much part of the quantum chain of events happening too fast for intervention… So please tell me I am wrong and how freewill might survive this onslaught.
Sorry. I have no idea what the logic is of your argument. Or how it pertains to compatibilism. You seem to be arguing against libertarian free will, not compatibilist free will. Which tells me you didn’t read the article you are commenting on.
Conscious choice is the only thing that need exist for compatibilist free will to exist (and libertarian free will is already incoherent so we already agree it doesn’t exist); and conscious choice is an assembly of moments. That the reduction stops at the Planck time has nothing to do with events being able to occur as an assembly of Planck times. Consciousness exists, for example, in a time span of about a twentieth to a fortieth of a second. That’s gazillions of Planck times. Consciousness and choice do not exist below that threshold, because consciousness and choice is computation, and computation takes time to complete. It takes up gazillions of Planck times to process a single step. But process the step it nevertheless does.
We already have an argument for determinism from Relativity Theory, since RT entails a B-Theory of Time, which entails all events have already occurred. We are just witnessing their unfolding. But that still means events occurred. And those events include decisions we consciously made. So we are still making conscious decisions. That is what free will really is: being free to make your own choices; not having someone else’s will substituted for yours (e.g. coercion, oppression, subversion) and not having your will blocked by external forces unconnected with your will (e.g. physical paralysis, prison cells, being lied to). Determinism does nothing to take that freedom away from you. And that’s the only coherent notion of freedom that anyone would ever really want.
If you understand the point of the gazillion events prior to conscious awareness, you must see that conscious decisions are never made. Consciousness is, in reality a part of our archival system… a means of stamping experiences and decision with some emotional tagging for later retrieval. Consciousness is not part of the decision making process as the decisions are made and then brought into awareness many micro-seconds later. I don’t agree with RT that everything has already occurred as that absurd proposition fails to answer to very important questions… 1. if all time exists already, how is any moment the privileged present moment. and 2. what is moving? The proponents of the blockhead universe fail to explain how motion is possible for those of us within the block… an external hyperdimensional being who is actually moving would see nothing but static frames or moments and unless you believe we are such hyperdimensional beings existing beyond the block, we do not share in such motion. It is to be remembered that RT and QM do not mesh and for that reason I am not alone in seeing that RT has missing bits.
“If you understand the point of the gazillion events prior to conscious awareness, you must see that conscious decisions are never made.” — Denying the existence of conscious decisions (as distinct from unconscious ones), much less on so illogical a basis as that, clearly entails you don’t know what we are talking about. You do not seem to have a correct or coherent definition of consciousness, or of its role in decision-making. Even though this is discussed in the article you claim to be commenting on. Please start reading the article you are commenting on, before commenting further.
Meanwhile, that RT entails all events have already occurred (from, e.g., the POV of a current photon, for instance, and thus of all information) is a scientific fact now. I cite the physicists who explain this, and summarize in The Ontology of Time. RT does not mesh with QM only at quantum scales. Consciousness is a macro-phenomenon, and thus does not exist at quantum scales. So the unification of RT and QM is not needed for this point.
I would hope you understand that a scientific fact is only a current point of view that can still be bested by a future theory… but lets assume you are right and everything is already fixed and set in temporal stone… doesn’t that make my point rather than yours? that no decisions are being MADE but everything is one way and one way only. All so called decision are just delusions of our ignorance…
Current science is current science. When it’s very well established and agreed by all specialists, it is folly to insist they are the ones who are wrong. You may have a contrary hypothesis. But that’s all it remains: an unproven hypothesis. When faced with a proven theory against it, you don’t have a tenable premise to build any conclusion on.
Your semantics are also naive. Decisions are selections among alternatives; conscious decisions are selections among alternatives with assent (the existence of knowledge of and desire for the selection made). Determinism does not contradict any of this. Just because one input always has the same output, does not mean a decision didn’t occur. If a decision had not occurred, the output would be random (we observe it is not, but caused by deciding elements, e.g. knowledge, deliberation, and desires), and a random output will not typically be in accord with the knowledge and desires of the decider (and yet we observe the opposite). And neither observation requires anything to be other than the same input always produces the same output. You shouldn’t want it to be any other way! Why would you want your decision to not be in accord with your knowledge and desires? And when your decision is in so accord, the same input (the same knowledge and desires)—you should want and hope!—will always produce the same output (the same selection among options). In other words, actual free will (the kind we actually want) requires determinism to be true!
And once again, that I have to explain this to you, tells me you still have not read the article you are commenting on. Read the damned article you are commenting on and comment on what is actually said in the article. Stop commenting in ignorance of what has already been demonstrated and explained. If you keep ignoring the article in your next comment, I will cease publishing any comment from you.
Ok, there is a major flaw in the scientific view of RT. RT has been proven to a very high degree, with this I do not disagree. However the conclusions being drawn are completely wrong. First of all, Before RT, time was viewed as this fixed river of motion, everything “happened” within this river at the same exact rate. RT came along and showed that there was a major flaw in this view, however Hyperdimensional thinking is still alien to most human minds and this caused scientists to view the new RT as just a different version of classical time… but time is not like that at all… something else is going on which is not easy to grasp nor even model.
First of all, the definition of time itself is not mathematically sound. The reason for this is that time is still being seen as a THING that objects move through. Time is NOT a thing, time is only a measurement of relationship changes amongst things… Everything in the universe is in motion… however RT correctly shows that different things move at different rates, however it incorrectly concludes that these objects exist in different TIMES(again seen as a thing) but in reality everything exists in the NOW. Impossible you say? no… not at all. When a ship travels away from earth at near light speed, the relationship change between it and earth is different than if the ship stayed on earth, however for every moment on earth, the ship exists in each and everyone of them, however the objects within the ship are moving at a different rate, one much slower than objects on earth… so when the ship returns to earth, its occupants are quite a bit younger however they never jumped out of any moment that earth existed. There was no travel to the future. I believe that scientists have a fundamental problem with picturing hyperspace as a physical realm and have incorrectly assigned time the position of 4th spatial dimension… We have proof that 4 spatial dimensions actually exist, we can see stars that should be behind the sun off to one side because the 4th spatial direction has bent the light around the sun… but this is different from time, the measure of relationship changes… its an actual physical manifestation that is completely alien to our senses by yet exists. By this view of things, there is no past, no future, only objects existing NOW and no way to travel to the past nor the future… sure you can get to the same space-time coordinate younger than me if you travel close to light speed, but there will be not one moment where I can’t find your exact position relative to me… you will always exist in the same present moment as I do, but your rate of change will be different. Again, those who hold all moments existent cannot explain motion at all, nor any present moment… as all of their space-time is fixed and solid and immutable.
Ooookay. Now you’ve put on your tinfoil hat. I should have seen this coming. Look, I don’t waste time arguing with people who say “scientists are all wrong about this well-studied subject, and I know better what the truth is than they do.” Especially people who aren’t themselves even scientists, much less experts in the physics of time. Even less someone who was just pointed to an article demonstrating the scientific fact you are now denying, yet doesn’t address any of the arguments in that demonstration.
You didn’t waste time on mythicists either… And I have been one since the 1990s. As to science, no I am not a scientist, I studied electronic engineering and psychology. As to no addressing any of the arguments, there is not an argument given showing that the future exists, only the false conclusion that is drawn from time dilation. Don’t judge the man, judge the argument… if you won’t even look at it, you are not nearly as smart as you think you are. You don’t know me, you don’t know that I am wrong, but because I don’t have credentials, I must be? that sounds like Bart Ehrman, not you.
You don’t give any reason why the conclusion is a “false conclusion.” That’s what I mean by not addressing the actual argument of the piece. And it’s a huge red flag when someone not a scientist (much less one who studies the physics of time) claims all scientists are wrong about the physics of time. When you get a peer reviewed study published advancing your new theory of time, let me know. Until then, I will defer to the widespread consensus of actual experts on a well-established fact of physics. Just as I did with mythicism. Being in fact an actual field-relevant expert (a historian with a Ph.D. and publication history) and the one who ended up publishing said peer reviewed challenge to the consensus, in a field that is always much less certain in its conclusions than physics.
I will defer to the current consensus when my main contentions to it are answered… see if you can find the explanations because I have been looking for decades and no one bothers to address them.
My main contentions: 1. there is no explanation of motion in a block universe.
If I exist from birth to death
What exactly is moving?
and related:
how is there ever a present moment for me if I exist in all moments?
Your “main concern” is scientifically illiterate. All of physics today is based on explanations of motion in what you call a “block universe.”
Movement is change. Change exists in a “block universe” even more concretely than in a comic strip or a novel: both of which are static from beginning to end. Yet show movement and change throughout.
And you are present in all moments. But you only consciously experience the one you are in. The “you” five minutes ago statically, eternally experiences the moment five minutes ago. The “you” five minutes from now statically, eternally experiences the moment five minutes from now. And the “you” now experiences statically, eternally experiences the moment you call “now.” You will never experience it otherwise, because you are only ever experiencing the moment you are in. And you always have, and always will, experience no other moment than the one you are in. The “you” at time t, is experiencing the “you” at time t. For every t.
YOU experience movement, you do not experience ONE moment, infact, as each moment is a planck length YOU can not experience any moment, you can only become conscious through a lot of moments, your present consciousness takes nearly 0.3 seconds to receive an input, decode that input, compare that input to the on going experience… YOU consciously do not exist moment to moment but only as a moving smear across lots of moments… so your statement is completely false and scientifically wrong. In order for consciousness to work there cannot be a static experience but only a dynamic living experience and that is the part you can’t seem to grasp… something IS moving and a block universe gives NO explanation for this. A movie can only be seen as moving from OUTSIDE the movie and I know you don’t believe in an external soul… if you believe we are not hyperdimensional beings enjoying a movie, I suggest you give it a bit more thought instead of just assuming what you currently believe makes any sense at all.
Every scientific expert in this question disagrees with you.
Every momentary version of you experiences one moment, including remembering the past moment and anticipating the future moment. Every version of you thinks he is moving through time just so, because that’s what it “looks” like for the version of you that is standing there. No version of you is capable of experiencing anything else. None of them can experience what it is like to be any other version of you. So every version of you thinks he is moving through time, and experiences doing so. But that’s only because later versions of you can’t access the experience of former versions of you, so you no longer “know” what they are experiencing. Only they do. Every moment like this exists eternally. All versions of you experience it. Every version of you mistakenly thinks he is the only version that exists and is experiencing anything. But that’s false. Hence change as occurring in an A-series sequence is an illusion. But change as occurring in a B-series sequence is not. See my detailed explanation in Sense and Goodness without God, pp. 88-95 (section III.3.6). If we look at this “outside” (there is no outside, but if somehow there were), you would be like a comic strip, changing and moving over time, but statically, and every cell would contain a version of you that thinks the other versions no longer or don’t yet exist and aren’t experiencing anything; and every version of you would be wrong about that.
Your Scientific “fact” still has people researching
alternatives because it simply cannot work.
WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES TO THE BLOCK UNIVERSE?
https://youtu.be/9L4I1ldPqbo
Marina Cortes, Royal Observatory, Edinburgh
She is advancing a fringe hypothesis contrary to all other scientific consensus that has yet to win support from the community. No one has unified quantum mechanics and relativity; and she admits this: she and Smolin are just proposing a possible way to do this, that hasn’t yet been demonstrated, and remains speculative and unproven (“it’s not answered,” her words). And there are serious problems with it: e.g. consciousness is an aggregate of gazillions of what she thinks are instantaneous time moments; but if those moments don’t exist anymore as she claims, consciousness could not exist at all, and you and I would not exist nor be having this conversation—in short, if no amount of time greater than a Planck time ever exists, but consciousness can only exist over a span of gazillions of Planck times (as we have decisively proved is the case), her model predicts consciousness would never exist. We observe that it does. Therefore her model is false.
if you bother to view the youtube video I linked, you will see that According to an astrophysicist. Martina Cortes, last year a conference was held with people from all over the world who are more and more DISAGREEING with YOU, and seeing things as I have seen them for decades. They are coming to the conclusion that FLOWING time is a necessity to mesh Quantum Gravity and RT. By saying that all scientists agree with you, you only show gross ignorance.
I can’t believe you can actually imagine that a static moment of you that exists at 10^-23rd of a second could possibly have any means of experiencing anything… there is nothing moving to create this experience for you, nothing changing in this static moment… what sort of ghost do you believe in here? Obviously consciousness must be some sort of emergent property of energy IN MOTION, dynamic data changes, comparisons, decoding, encoding, etc. I can’t imagine you believe in some sort of spirit entity capable of experiencing a static moment without moving parts… frankly thats just absurd.
First, I can’t find any links in any of the comments you have posted here. [Correction: It went to my spam folder. Fixed. I’ll respond to that there.] I do know the published expert literature on the physics of time. It does not say anything you are. Even psychology concurs time flow is an illusion constructed by our brain.
Second, consciousness does not exist at 10^-23rd of a second. I told you this. Repeatedly. That you don’t read and don’t listen and don’t check sources is starting to become a problem. Consciousness exists over a span of time, gazillions of “10^-23rds of a second.” It’s quantum of time is closer to a twentieth of a second. Every twentieth of a second or so is a new moment of “you,” which in B-theory means a new cell of you in the comic strip of your life. In each such aggregate of time, you experience being at that moment of time. Every such version of you experiences this, always, for all eternity. You (the you now) is just a different one of those versions every twentieth of a second or so. But you don’t know this because you can’t experience what other versions of you are experiencing. So you experience the illusion of the flow of time.
Because you cannot “perceive” what other versions of you are experiencing, you cannot claim that that are not experiencing something. This is the fundamental flaw in your reasoning. You seem to think you can “know” that no other versions of you are having the same experience of the flow of time as you are now. But you can’t know that. You have no way to access those other versions of you anymore (or yet). Because at this moment you aren’t that version. So you cannot draw direct empirical conclusions about what those other versions of you are or are not experiencing. We can only draw inferences from what we know about the relativity of time, which tells us that the sequence of events, even their separation in time, differs relative to the observer, which means there is no objective fact of the flow of time. To one observer (e.g. one traveling at the speed of light), all moments in the universe happen simultaneously. To another observer (e.g. one traveling near the speed of light), all moments for others appear frozen in time (e.g. you can travel fast enough that your entire lifetime passes under a thousandth of a second in the brains of others resting on earth: to you, no one in the universe is conscious but you, because you never get to observe even a single quantum of conscious time coming from anyone’s brain, and no one else in the universe is ever conscious of anything, such as that you exist, or even of what’s right in front of them).
From this and other facts we have established (such as I lay out in the article I linked you to) we know time flow as we experience it is an illusion, that in fact all time exists simultaneously, and we only differ in when and how we experience it. Studies from psychology confirm even more aspects of that fact.
you keep saying that a STATIC version of us in each moment experiences an entire apparent flow of time… tell me how you think something NOT moving can experience anything… you seem to just accept that this is rational and possible… From every current brain study I am aware, the facts boil down to this… we exist within a dream world… we have no clue how this dream is generated but its the ONLY world we ever know… it is our direct experience… the presumption is that while we are in the state called AWAKE our bodily senses are correcting this dream world, and while ASLEEP they are not and our dream is free to cascade down our memory net and create the world with far less limitations and far more incursions from associative memories. That part of us doing the experiencing, must of necessity have the ability to witness this dream world and as I believe both of us can agree, it must be made of real parts in a real world and doing work like decoding, comparing, introspecting, etc…. this parts are IN MOTION, they cannot function in a static form… something must be moving especially to explain the one thing you have made no mention of… the sense of forward time flow only, which if you are as up on modern physics as you seem to be, you know is the biggest stumbling block to the block universe… it is completely time symmetric. There is nothing explaining time asymmetry. The Link I mentioned is the youtube video you sited on the last post or next post… Martina Cortes mentions a conference that was held within the last year where physicists from all over the planet came together to discuss this ever growing problem of time asymmetry. The solution to this seems promising for resolving the fundamental difference between QM gravity and RT.
There may be a vast consensus on RT over QM but we both know not to trust the consensus view as FACT. The problems between QM and RT are far from resolved and the introduction of an ACTUAL FLOW OF TIME is what she says more and more physicists are looking at. Watch the video.
Motion and change exist in the block universe same as in a comic strip. And experiencing things is just another category of motion and change. I’m sorry your mind lacks the imagination or understanding to grasp this. I can’t help you with that. Everyone else studying the physics and psychology of time has no evident problem with it.
Since my last post I have been trying to determine what the actual consensus time theory is… I find no means of determining how many scientists believe what, how did you? I find George Ellis (in Discovery Mag) Advocating a “growing” block universe. I find Richard Muller talking about the expanding universe creating “new” time with its new space… I find Quantum time based on quantum fluxuations… I see nothing that say MOST scientist consider any of these theories a scientific “fact”.
Read the actual leading experts on time, who discuss the state of the field. They know the state of play and cite the examples. I pointed you to an article that directs you to a prominent example (Davies). Go get informed.
Among philosophers, we know the majority position among those who are informed enough to have opinions in the matter is in favor of B-Theory (most checked some form of they were undecided or insufficiently informed to answer). And almost no one in philosophy of mathematics or science, even philosophy of physics or biology (all of which would be the most informed persons in the sample) endorses A-Theory (fewer than 5%).
You say motion exists just like in a comic strip and ignore the fact that we the moving are providing that motion externally. Just tell me what You believe is the moving part. All i get from you is insert magic here… Everyone else does.
I have no idea what you mean by “we” are providing motion “externally.” There is no external. There is just what exists and its change over time. The answer to your question is the same as for a car: “where is the moving part.” The answer is the same on B-Theory as on A-Theory: every moving part in the car, and the car itself, is there, and moves, by changing across the time axis. Just like in a comic strip. Same for us and our consciousness as for a car.
Here in lies the problem… You hand me a comic strip… its static, its complete, back to front… and you are shouting at me… why can’t you see that each character in each frame SEES motion?
And I say, because its obvious that each frame is not a living thing, its just a static frame and there is no mechanism in a static frame to experience anything.
Then you pick up the comic and flip through it… see motion!!!
and I say, sure, to US it appears like motion because WE are alive and have the ability to change static frames into the ILLUSION of motion within our LIVING MINDS.
And you say, if WE were inside the comic WE would experience motion!!!
and I say how? How would we as static frames experience anything?
and you yell at me, because every scientist says so!!!
ah huh… yeah… ok.
“its static, its complete, back to front” is only true from a POV outside the comic strip. We do not exist outside. Inside the comic strip, each cell’s contents is real to those present in it; the past cells exist in their memory; the future cells they await. Each cell thus contains a conscious person. But none of them knows the others. You are simply experiencing being each person at each moment. The other versions of you are as conscious in the “outside” POV as you are. But you are not now located there, so you don’t know that.
That’s why it appears to us that time is flowing in such a way. It’s an illusion. There is no scientific evidence it’s anything else. We experience motion the same way our car does. And there is simply no contradiction between that fact, and a universe whose existence is static from an external POV. Neither we nor our car are external to the universe.
I understand knows how Consciousness works but surely you can’t believe a static image can be conscious there must be some kind of moving living mechanism that the accounts of Consciousness not just a static image.
I’ve been doing Zen meditation for years now and I don’t see past present and future I see an ever-present with things moving around me.
as to science quantum physics tells me that the present moment is a roiling bubbling mess of the fluctuations that are divorced from any past instances of causation and they are only appearing to be cause and effect by probabilities of very large numbers of events happening all at the same time… The ever present is where we are conscoius by some emergence that is a smear of this ever present and you are wrong to believe this is settled science. There are at leasr a dozen current philosophers and scientists i have found within the last few days… Some damn close to my views.
“there must be some kind of moving living mechanism” — There is; just as our car is a moving mechanism, even worms and bacteria are moving “living” mechanisms. All true on B-Theory. It’s not like bacteria can’t exist or live or move if B-Theory is true! Consciousness is just a process like any other. It moves and changes in B-Theory like everything else does, in the same way. The only difference is that consciousness is an illusion: it is a fiction created by an information processing system. It is the output of a computer. It makes you think things are that are not—for example, colors don’t exist. Nor solidity as you see it. These are fictions invented by the brain because they are useful to “represent” things in the environment. In the same way, your brain fabricates a feeling of time flow and movement, to represent change in the system you are navigating (and the system of your self as well). Nothing more is required for that than the information process itself, and change across the time axis. And both exist on B-Theory.
Yes everything seems to change across a starltuc time axis if there is something moving along that axis and you can seem to understand that part is requited
sorry, done from my cell phone without reading glasses… this is what it should have said:
Yes everything seems to change across a static time axis if there is something moving along that axis and you can not seem to understand that part is required.
Nothing else is required: just change along the time axis, and an information processor generating an illusion of change along the time axis, to represent the actual change along the time axis. Both exist on B-Theory. Nothing else is needed.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, like Adventists, don’t believe humans HAVE a soul, they believe that a living soul is a combination of matter and the spirit of God… an energy force without personality or individuality… when a person dies, they believe the only remains are a memory in the mind of God… there is nothing else.
They also believe that if they die now, God will raise them back to life.
So my brother asks a Witness… why are you wasting your life now, so that a copy of you can enjoy paradise… The witness says, its not a copy, it will be me.
God can create that same copy of you right now, right next to you and you KNOW its not you… so why will it be you in the future?
The witness does not grasp the problem… after all, God.
The key point my brother made and the witness could not understand is that they believe souls die and vanish but unconsciously still believe a soul exists… something that will make the connection between the current self and the future copy.
I feel you are doing exactly the same thing… you are denying a soul exists but unconsciously believing in one anyway, something that causes the experience of motion where none exists… something that causes a continuity between past and future moments.
What I find bizarre is that you can believe a full blown universe can just be… just exist past to future without anything causing its structure to be as we find it. Sounds like special creation…
In Quantum physics there really is nothing causing the next moment to be related to the last moment other than probabilities working out that way because alternatives are less probable but not impossible… there is an evolution of probabilities as reality unfolds… but you believe in a static universe that is just magically completely intact that oddly works out exactly as an evolving quantum universe would…
For a long time I, like Harris, considered freewill to be impossible and a legacy of religious mythology. I was taught, that anything CAUSED was not FREE and anything UNCAUSED was not WILLED and no third option seemed to exist until now. It occurred to me that a single life unaffected by another might be strictly determined but what happens when two determined beings meet for the very first time… if they were rocks the laws of physics would rule their interaction and that would be that, however two humans have goals and ideals and instincts and experiences which cannot predict in any way what will happen until it actually happens… a sort of EMERGENCE, a third thing, not determined by the past, not random either, occurs… and unlike the emergent properties of say sodium binding to chlorine and making salt, their second meeting can be just as unpredictable as their first because new experiences are involved including their first meeting… This, I believe, is why we determined beings, still must make choices in real time… because the universe will only make them for us if we don’t think about what is going on. The property of mind makes the difference, even to a much more limited degree in animals… any entity capable of accumulating experiences and learning from them will have this experience of choice as other than pure determinism… I have also told many that every move from this point forward is a gamble to some degree… and that is how I experience life, but I was never certain that it was not just a delusion until now. Now I believe it is an accurate element of reality… even in a determined universe choice is actually possible.
Indeed. The difference in fact is intelligent (sentient) decision making. What differs between humans and rocks colliding, is that each human can analyze what’s happening and reason out what they want to happen and initiate it—rocks can’t do that. Humans have limitations (fallibility, non-omniscience, cognitive biases, both genetic and cultural), but they can also become aware of that, analyze it, and reach a decision about what they can do to mitigate those problems and thus make decisions more informed and in line with what they want—rocks can’t do that.
But though humans have this power (to think about and choose informedly which way to be “knocked” when colliding with another), it can be thwarted (you can put a gun to someone’s head, physically chain them or push or block them, manipulate them with lies, etc.), and that’s what we mean by violating free will. Knowledge and intent. Is it what you wanted. Did you choose it or did someone else choose it for you (and if the latter, would you have chosen differently if they hadn’t substituted their will for yours). That’s why we all agree on when someone does and doesn’t have free will: we are not talking about causation and thus aren’t getting out scientific instruments to measure whether atomic or boson collisions occurred or not; we can tell when someone has free will or not simply by observing whether they get to choose what they wanted or not—are they acting informedly, and allowed to act as they would please. No scientific instruments needed; because atomic and bosonic collisions are totally irrelevant to the distinction we are looking for.
As such, free will is not binary. It always exists by degrees: you can have more or less of it. Your free will is restricted by physics (“I want to teleport to Paris but I can’t do that”) and by ethics (“I want this person to not exist but I have no acceptable right to enact that desire”) and by necessary social conventions (“I want to know personal information on this person but that’s not allowed”), and so on, in every decision you ever make. But in moral and legal matters we only care about disapproved thwarting of wills; not whether laws or conventions or ethics or physics block our will. We only care if someone was forced to make a decision by someone else, or tricked into doing so, again by someone we need to deal with precisely because of their doing that. Or if someone had no desire for the action they took in the first place (e.g. they were pushed, e.g. if a car crashes into them and knocks them into another car no matter what they desired; or if they didn’t know what was going on, owing to psychosis or optical illusion etc.). None of this is about whether the decision was caused. All computation, and thus all analysis, and thus all deliberation and choosing, requires causation (logic alone entails reliance on causation). It’s solely about how it was caused.
To confuse the two is what leads to the Sam Harris’s of the world. They don’t grasp the distinction that courts of law and everyone else in the real world long ago figured out: that free will is always and only about how a person’s decisions are caused, not whether they are caused.
First of all: this was a very interesting reading, full of insights and food for the mind.
Anyway, honestly I really do not see how throwing in personal attacks to one of the “contenders” may add anything useful or helpful to the debate. Quite the opposite, actually.
Does diminishing others make better philosophy (or philosophers)?
Personally, I find it just has the effect of diverting the attention from the substancial points made and extraniating honest readers, which is a pity as it can only dmage a richful discussion.
That said, anyway, any thoughts about this answer?
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/dennett-wrong-freewill/
Despite probably too superficial, it could arise few interesting points. Your thoughts on that would be, as always, more than useful.
Thanks
Can you give me an example of what you are talking about?
As to Miessler’s reply: he immediately straw man’s Dennett’s argument. Therefore nothing that follows even actually responds to Dennett. Indeed, the article of mine that you are now commenting on, already adequately rebuts Miessler.
So if you can find anything in Miessler not already answered here, please quote it, and I’ll address it. But if there is no such thing in it, then why did you even mention it?
Hi, Dr. Carrier. I’ve been thinking a bit more about free will and some of the things you’ve said about it. As I’ve mentioned to you before, I’ve become a Compatibilist, so we agree that it’s the most reasonable position to hold regarding the Free Will debate. We also agree that what we’ll call Libertarianism A (that your actions/decisions are free of causation) is not only false, but incoherent.
However, there’s what we’ll call Libertarianism B (that your decisions are caused by your character, but your character is free of causation). This is of course false, but my question is how is it incoherent? One way I thought of (and that you also mention in Sense and Goodness Without God) is that there’s no point to punishing people if it can’t/won’t cause them to change their evil character. However, it seems that your critique is aimed at Libertarianism A.
In SAGWG, you very briefly hint at this kind of Libertarianism in III.4.4.2. But you only discuss how Compatibilism makes sense of control and how Moreland’s Libertarianism A doesn’t match the colloquial usage of control. I was wondering if you had anything more to say on Libertarianism B and why it’s incoherent, as well as it just being false. (And of course, I just made up the Lib A and Lib B labels.)
Looking forward to your reply.
If your character isn’t caused, you didn’t cause it; ergo you cannot be held responsible for it. Libertarian free will conceptualizes responsibility as “you can only be held responsible for what you caused.” This is therefore incoherent. So A or B, the same incoherence obtains. Libertarian Free Will B simultaneously claims that you cause your choices and don’t play any causal role in your choices. That’s self-contradictory. They would have to declare themselves for Hard Determinism. Or else admit Compatibilism is the only view working with a coherent and useful definition of free will that is actually applicable to real world cases.
Thanks. I get it now.
Team Compatibilism all the way
Why even bother with the term freewill as it has no actual value… in nature we don’t consider ants to have freewill and yet they are rewarded for their efforts and punished for their inabilities just like we are. It seems the entire discussion is about making excuses to impose our goals and ideals upon others by rewarding them and punishing them for which ever way they go for or against us…. individually and collectively. Why not just call it that?
Free will is a standardly used concept in law, medical ethics, and personal relations. It is extremely useful, in fact vital to determining the difference between actions people are forced to take against their character (“against their will”), and actions they take that were caused by their character (“according to their will”).
You are confusing a made up concept only found in the ivory tower, with the actual concept actually in practical use in the real world (courts of law, discussions of autonomy and human rights, personal relationships, self-actualization). This is precisely the mistake I and Dennett call Harros out for. So maybe you should actually read the article you are here commenting on.
Really enjoyed reading this and I share your opinion.
Though, I am still wondering how much self-determinism, or possibility of escape we can have if we were born in a bad neighborhood and everything that is surrounding us is bad influence. Sure, we’ll have free will but I think the problem is we over-estimate our capacity to escape bad influence or our own desires for status and survival.
We can clearly see that with fake news and social media, political polarization, or in a more general way with crime.
And we can also see that when we try to change our habits, or when we try to hit the gym regularly, or when, as introverts, we try to be more social.
Authors of self-help books will certainly argue that we can become whatever we want, because that’s what sells. But I will have to disagree with them here. I will have to dig more into psychology to see if we can actually change ourselves and by how much and how much effort and time it actually takes. After discussing with some psy, it seems, not so much.
There is ample evidence that people can change, and the more so when they are told they can, and the skills needed to do so are made available to them to learn. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works even better than people left to change themselves, yet nearly everyone evolves and improves as a person as they gain experience without CBT. Countless narratives of personal change have been documented and verified. Countless control examples exist statistically across any society.
So there is no such excuse as you imagine. If people reject all this, even after being given it (and everyone in the first world has been given it by now), it is because they want to. And that is what we must judge them for: their desires. It does not matter where those desires came from. An evil man is an evil man. It matters not how he got that way.
Hence in the first (the only moral) example you give, it is not enough for “bad influences” to be functional. There is a difference between a child soldier in Uganda who is literally forced into service, and a drug dealer in Chicago who actually has plenty of options but chooses the glam and cash offered them to engage in criminal violence. Millions of kids in the exact same circumstances didn’t do that.
So obviously, the kids who did, could have done what the others did. That they chose not to tells us more about their character than our society. Though it does tell us something about our society, which we shouldn’t ignore, it nevertheless tells us more about the person, which we also cannot ignore. And it does not matter if they did not “choose” to have an inhumane character; that they have one is the problem we have to deal with. And it remains the same problem either way. So at that point, any discussion of free will is irrelevant.
The fact is, being told you can do things differently is a causal factor. As is being given opportunities to improve your reasoning and resistance to delusion and peer pressure. As is being shown the folly of your thinking. And so on. Which happens to everyone not trapped on a cult compound.
These things commonly do cause people to behave differently—when they want to. And what we want to know is what sort of desires people have: malicious, or benevolent. If someone chooses not to change from malevolent to benevolent even after being shown they are malevolent, then there is no solution left but to treat them as the malicious person they have chosen to be. We cannot “pretend” and act like they are benevolent. They are not. Free will makes no difference to that calculus. And never could have.
And indeed, being told this, is yet another causal factor that can change how people think about themselves and the decisions they then make going forward. “My lack of free will excuses who I am” is as false as “I am fated to be who I am and nothing I do can change that.” And that’s the case whether free will exists in any sense or not.
Thus, all that matters is what kind of free will does exist, and how we can use it to become better people. And on that point see my entire section on this in Sense and Goodness without God. And if someone doesn’t want to be a better person but to remain a terrible one instead, then we all get to treat them like the very person they thus chose to be. There is no kind of free will that could exist or not exist that would ever change that fact.
P.S. Your remaining examples are not moral but practical. There is a lot of science on what it takes to help people stick to healthy routines rather than grow frustrated with them and abandon them, and anyone who wants to accomplish the ends involved can find that out and make use of it if they want to.
But your first analogy might be a bad one, as gym work has been empirically shown to have little effect on health or weight, relative to alternatives. It’s only really useful if you have a more specific requirement (e.g. a job that requires bodily strength; a hobby you enjoy that requires higher than average levels of fitness, etc.). Otherwise, sufficient health is gained from just a thirty minute walk each day. Which is a lot easier to accomplish than all the tedious logistics of “going to a gym.” This, again, as information is causal, and thus knowing it can cause someone to switch from a hated gym routine to a more pleasant walk routine. That’s the point of communicating information.
Weight and health are far more impacted by diet, and all fad diets are empirically useless. There are far simpler routines to pursue that simply follow basic nutritional advice adapted to one’s own preferences. But this, presently, is heavily affected by an environmental factor causing weight gain across the entire mammalian kingdom (even wild animals), a third of which has been traced to a childhood adenovirus infection that alters one’s DNA their whole lifetime even after the infection is gone (thus, we ought to be developing childhood vaccines for it), and another comparable fraction is suspected to be related to pollution (thus, we ought to be doing something about that as well).
These influences “fuck up” our natural metabolism so that our body does not correctly regulate caloric intake and fat cell production, no matter what we “do” (gym et al.). This therefore is more akin to the child soldier in Uganda. We can’t “choose” to avoid adipogenic chemicals in the environment nor time travel into the past to avoid adenovirus infection as a kid. The medical response to these problems is going to be harder to achieve for most people, for many impossible, which we can well account for in how we judge them. This is not comparable to a “rough neighborhood” kid, who actually can avoid the things that would make them into a malicious person just as nearly all other kids in that same neighborhood do. They only have to want to.
Social anxiety, meanwhile, is a spectrum and thus can’t be discussed as a single bulk thing.
On the one hand, we actually classify the threshold between normal and clinical cases by how achievable it is to effect a routine to attenuate it. Milder cases can be improved with work. One just has to want to, enough to do the work. Precisely when that isn’t the case, we classify it as a mental illness and it requires more specific medical interventions, and insofar as we don’t make those available to people, we can’t judge them for “choosing” to not avail themselves of treatments that aren’t in any actual practical sense available to them. We’re back to the child soldier in Uganda at that point.
On the other hand, it is not rational to expect everyone to have the same level of interest and competence in social interaction. It’s perfectly reasonable to adjust one’s life and behavior so that one doesn’t need the same level as anyone else, and the rest of us can reasonably account for that in turn. Just as we can the most extreme cases of mental illness that defy all treatment. All we have to do is simply account for the facts as they are. And only when one of those facts actually is someone being lazy or disinterested do we have warrant to treat them as the person they are: a person who is lazy, or a person who is disinterested, and so on.
Most of what passes for doing that is epistemically illegitimate, e.g. treating someone as lazy who actually isn’t, by making false assumptions about the difficulties they face or the level of interest they should have. We can only validly judge someone when we have an accurate accounting of their factual situation, e.g. we are not warranted in treating a child soldier in Uganda the same as a “corner boy” in Chicago. Until their situations actually are relevantly the same (e.g. when gangs compel someone to work for them with threats of violence against them and their family, which actually is not as common in the U.S. as lore would have it).
I happened to be reading this post, years after the controversy, with the benefit of a bit of extra hindsight.
This post is extremely condescending and does not accurately represent Harris’ view, which is almost exactly the same as what Dennett believes. This post comes off as a team-sports-based knee-jerk reaction. I am disappointed.
You must not have read Harris’s book Free Will. Trust me. I have accurately represented what he says there. I use that book as the course text in my Science & Philosophy of Free Will class for that reason: to have students critically engage with it. Hundreds of students have come to the same conclusions about what Harris says there that I have.
But by all means, if you can find any statement in that book that contradicts anything I actually say here in this article, by all means quote it here, and I’ll check the context and see if a correction is in order. I can predict to a high probability you will fail at this. But who knows. Surprises happen.
Mr. Carrier, your compatibilist account is not sound. In the paper below, I responded to an argument similar to yours. I’ve also presented a novel way of rejecting compatibilism in favor of incompatibilism.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-018-0010-z
Please explain how that even responds to my own case, much less rebuts it.
Give specific page numbers or quotations of sentences from that paper as you describe its argument and its relevance to my case for compatibilism.
The argument(thought experiment) starts on page 3 and ends on page 6. It is a thought experiment about Planet M, akin to Pereboom’s four-case manipulation argument. It shows that ordinary intuitions suggest that Barry (one of the characters) is not morally responsible for his actions.
I also respond to five main compatibilist objections on page 8.
The point of the argument is to show that hard determinists do not “live in the ivory tower.” It tries to show that prima facie compatibilism does not appeal to our intuitions.
You have not explained what this has to do with anything.
First, why is Barry not morally responsible for his actions?
Second, what does that have to do with my argument? Lots of people can be in situations where they are not morally responsible for their actions because they were manipulated (even courts of law will acquit them).
So how does Barry not being morally responsible pose any challenge to any definition of free will, mine or the law’s? (Which are the same thing; mine is the law’s.)
In other words, you need to actually explain the argument and what relevance it has to my definition of free will.
Otherwise it has no relevance and thus does not rebut it.