If we reject God, we can't simply assume the reality of the continued identity of the self (or even its very existence), an objective basis for morality, a rational basis for science, the existence of free will, the reality of the external world, the very idea of objective truth, etc. We need to mount arguments and evidence in support of these ideas if we want to be able to have a right to such beliefs.
And Sam Harris thinks we're lying to ourselves if we believe that our wills are free. His arguments are not particularly interesting or new here (and to many not even convincing). Harris may have just written a concise little book on the subject, but he's no Nietzsche, who clinched the case against free will and the self even more concisely, in less than a paragraph:
A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a superstition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’. . . . Even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently —’.But where Harris is interesting (and I've subscribed to this line of thinking for at least a decade now) is in what he has to say about the implications of the denial of free will: it doesn't de-humanize us. This recognition humanizes us because it helps us to understand that instead of jumping to conclusions and throwing blame around, as we're wont to do, maybe we need to be more compassionate and understand that people are not fully free, and that their actions are at least partly to blame on circumstances and other causal antecedents...
While I agree with a good number of points made by Harris, there is at least one fundamental point on which he seems to be utterly confused: his denial of free will cannot be a scientific conclusion when he argues that there is no possible world in which free will could, even in principle, exist. If this is not a testable claim that could be decided by empirical evidence but simply by conceptual analysis (as I would be perfectly happy to do), then this is a philosophical conclusion... and people say philosophy doesn't make progress :)
Dude, you are super, super jealous of Sam. He never claims to be original, yet you hound him on being a compiler of philosophy. I've found this reaction to be very familiar among those readers/watchers of Sam who have devoted their lives to philosophy. I think your devotion is admirable and your blog is fantastic, but you are worried a bit too much about the proper accounting of ideas instead of a human interaction with ideas. If we want this amazing subject to be edible to the outside world, we need to step beyond this.
ReplyDeleteOh, and your assumption that in order for a statement to be 'scientific', it must be practically 'testable' is erroneous and something Harris tackles. He doesn't find their to be an interesting division between science and philosophy and has some interesting examples to show that point. But whatever, you got your attack in and demonstrated that you are as competent, if not more competent, than Harris.
This is a beautiful and funny introduction to an obscure philosophical subject that is rarely thought about by the ordinary man. Give the man some props, yo.
Thanks for that heartfelt response, Austin. I do have to confess having a weird relationship with Sam Harris' ideas: while I tend to agree with many, though not all of his conclusions, I usually arrive at those positions through different means. Still, since he seems to represent, willingly or not, one of the most prominent voices for secular rationalism worldwide, I feel it is incumbent on him to represent those views as responsibly and rationally as possible, and I feel that in many instances he doesn't quite live up to the challenge... and makes the rest of us look like fools.
ReplyDeleteI realize that may be a difficult burden to impose on him, and I see the difficulty of maintaining a balance between exposing people to many of these ideas for the first time (what you seem to suggest), and coming up with sufficiently sophisticated arguments that religious fundamentalists who have taken philosophy 101 would not be able to dismantle in 5 minutes, but maybe that sheds some light on the different ways in which you and I may perceive to be the value of his work.
But I'm not closed off from the human interaction with these ideas (as I hope has been shown by this blog generally), and I do plan on posting a similar entry later this week, not so much on a refutation of free will, but on what we should do about it by a neuroscientist, David Eagleman, so watch out for that. I think you'll find that these ideas can be presented in an even more fun way than Harris', but it may ultimately just be a question of taste... So, word to Sam Harris and his mother :)
Yes, heartfelt, that was charitable of you. Imagine the awkwardness of agreeing with nearly everything a writer says. It's rather embarrassing and that sort of thing builds and must come out somewhere. Sorry for the emotional fanboy defense, it probably is a matter of taste. But I have good enough taste to like this blog, so you should maybe give Sam another try sometime. Fresh start!
ReplyDeleteActually, if you click on the "Sam Harris" link in the entry above, you'll be able to see all the times he's already been featured in this blog. Hopefully I've been more charitable to him in previous occasions, but in time, I will continue to post his lectures/debates. Peace!
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