Any political, psychological, economic, religious, and poetic concept or term can be brushed aside and argued away by anyone with strong writing skill. A bachelor’s in philosophy also helps. Free will certainly falls into such a category especially since it’s mostly a religious concept and is defined every which-way depending on your googling technique.

Harris argues one side of a coin, and he ostensibly relies on his neuroscience training. But since neuroscience remains a branch of science in its infancy—with only bits and pieces of the brain/mind connection so far having been sorted)—he actually relies on his philosophy undergraduate degree coursework in making his declarations about the death of free will, it seems obvious to me. Yes, of course free will is dead. But by dwelling on just this one side of a coin, we get no impressions about how it is we go about actually making decisions and how we actually can will certain kinds of things. Such mental activity is definitely not just a silly illusion. Harris’ disregard and silence about the other side of the coin causes him not to be able to answer certain questions, and I’ve seen him embarrass himself enough to change the format of this website.

(Ask for details if you’ve forgotten how things used to be, back when he encouraged readers of his articles to voice their opinions and discuss his ideas. He deleted a lot of embarrassing material, and it’s gone for good now, presumably because he found that he was unable to answer a simple question posed by a Christian journalist regarding morality and free will. I’ll link to certain things that do remain in this forum upon request.)

Rather than fruitlessly arguing about whether or not Harris’ take on free will is correct, it might make sense instead to wonder about Harris’ and others’ goals in their arguments. People don’t write books just to make points out of context with real-world goals, fears and emotion-based views. I can think of some valuable reasons to pronounce the death of free will. How about you? If I only get cricket chirps, I’ll try to return to this question later with some of my personal opinions on the matter.

Libertarian Free Will is as clearly incoherent as any idea of which I’m aware. Dispensing with it as a serious contender for the explanation of anything will save lots of time.

Retribution is a morally repugnant idea (to me) Making it also a scientifically and philosophically irrational concept will hopefully push it toward the margins.

There are others but those are easily my top two.

Thanks for responding, Brick. I had a feeling you might. To comment briefly on what you say, I reject the term “free will” in the sense that it’s not a useful term for my use due to its many and varied histories, no matter what adjective modifies it. I appreciate what you say, though, and certainly don’t disagree with you.

I remember a conversation I had back in 1983 with a friend who was studying law at the time. He wanted to be a judge some day, and I suggested that if that day ever came (and an election in his favor was just yesterday), I hoped he would see each defendant as being a slave of sorts to his environment. I was reading Dreiser at the time. I suggested to him that when a moralistic tone and high-morality words are used with defendants, recipients of such words and tone will tend to reject them if they don’t believe in God. (I was a faithful member of Jesus’ flock at the time.) I suggested to my friend that ornery words that might contain secularly-descriptive accuracy had at least some chance (if minimal) of affecting a defendant. Chances are they wouldn’t, but we can know with some confidence that a high moral tone will not, assuming the defendant is an atheist at heart. An oppositional effect can be expected, in fact. Many or most, of course, claim otherwise, but that’s beside the point. It’s easy and very often profitable to pretend to be a repentant Christian.

Defendants don’t typically see themselves as having acted immorally in the commission of their crimes. They act the way they act due to an inherent failure to control their anger—lack of “free will,” for the sake of this discussion—or due to complicated circumstances that required them (in their own analysis) to have committed the crimes. Someone whose personality or poverty-stricken/fucked-up upbringing brings intense and uncontrolled anger and resulting violence into the world does not respond well to accusations of sin, immorality, etc.

Of course, I was preaching to the choir, as courts back then and to this day seem to have an aversion to words that might tend to bring religion into the picture. My friend kindly took my advice and agreed, but in retrospect, I was not informing him of anything he didn’t already know.

Free will is a highly religious term. Courts tend to eschew such words because they don’t make sense to people who are not already well adapted to the social mores that surround them.

The death of free will is old news to people who actually work with those who lack neurological health and past environmental stability.

Dave you need to read Sam’s new book on free will. It might surprise you, albeit just a bit. Toward the end of the publication he actually says that fee will is not an illusion, at least in the classical sense. I will leave it to you to read his concept and figure out why.

Avogadro’s number - 04 April 2012 07:30 PM

Dave you need to read Sam’s new book on free will. It might surprise you, albeit just a bit. Toward the end of the publication he actually says that fee will is not an illusion, at least in the classical sense. I will leave it to you to read his concept and figure out why.

With your recommendation, I will, as long as it’s available as a non-cyber book. I haven’t even thought enough of his recent work to find out if it is. I trust your opinion as you’re certainly one of the most well-read people around here these days. Unfortunately I’m not, lately.

Dave, a few inquiries of you, if I may-do you consider yourself a physicalist? (i prefer that term over materialist) That is, do you think that things like consciousness, self-consciousness and free will are produced by physical processes of the brain, or is there an element that is beyond that? Some type of epiphenomenon holistically based complexity or metaphysical explanation?

If SH is presenting one side of the coin, what do you perceive the other side of that coin to be exactly?

Isn’t it possible, even likely, that there are physical processes that are still bound by current laws of physics and chemistry that we yet do not understand?

The complex cell for example-we do not fully understand how metabolism works. We do not understand much about the interactions that happen within the cell, which is the basis of all life on our planet. Does that mean that these happenings may not be a physical process?

You seem quick to point out to us here when SH or others that look for natural or physical processes to explain complex scenarios as representing one side of the coin.

What is the other side?

i hope I don’t regret asking this question.

I don’t disagree with the basis of your question at all, A. I’m purely a physicalist. The other side of the coin is the fact that we are legitimately able to make decisions even if at the base of it, some butterfly wing has influenced the world to “cause” us to do so.

Thanks for replying Dave and I appreciate your honesty.

I understand that some things in life are so astoundingly puzzling that it seems there might be something more to it, that we humans can surely not know or comprehend. And I also think we must have safeguards against quickly labeling everything as simply particles in motion.

These are the really hard questions and the ones worth living for and asking of those who care about such things.

Onward and upward we go, and hopefully everyday we can all strive to understand just a tad more than we did yesterday.

Personally I don’t experience existential angst, I just stumble upon a little existential enlightenment.

When you type 2 + 2 into a computer is it free to give you answer other then 4? Remember the IBM computer Watson that won on Jeopardy, it made lots of errors/bad choices was that freewill? How is the human brain any different and not a slave to it’s inputs and programming?

Keep in mind, A’sN, that I’m a Wittgensteinian in the sense that words have utility-value only, for me. That’s a socially polite way of saying that nothing on God’s green earth contains anything like the meaning people typically ascribe to what goes on. All we can really do is to attempt to construct, reconstruct and tear down what we see as what is needed for us to continue to thrive. At least we continue to thrive so far, and that’s worth celebration.

GAD - 04 April 2012 08:19 PM

When you type 2 + 2 into a computer is it free to give you answer other then 4? Remember the IBM computer Watson that won on Jeopardy, it made lots of errors/bad choices was that freewill? How is the human brain any different and not a slave to it’s inputs and programming?

Sure, but the fact remains that Harris is unable to fully and competently defend his position and felt so threatened by a Christian journalist’s questions that he changed a major part of his web site’s format in order to hide that fact.

nv - 04 April 2012 08:26 PM

GAD - 04 April 2012 08:19 PM

When you type 2 + 2 into a computer is it free to give you answer other then 4? Remember the IBM computer Watson that won on Jeopardy, it made lots of errors/bad choices was that freewill? How is the human brain any different and not a slave to it’s inputs and programming?

Sure, but the fact remains that Harris is unable to fully and competently defend his position and felt so threatened by a Christian journalist’s questions that he changed a major part of his web site’s format in order to hide that fact.

That’s on Harris not on freewill.

BTW if you haven’t noticed I’m Sam’s biggest critic, at least on this site, so you are preaching to the choir

Then we have nothing to argue about, GAD. I’m just thrilled that a thread I’ve started has moved beyond my own ruminations. They usually quickly die on the vine.

GAD - 04 April 2012 08:44 PM

BTW if you haven’t noticed I’m Sam’s biggest critic, at least on this site, so you are preaching to the choir

I don’t know, I think I may come close!  See the update I just posted:
http://www.project-reason.org/forum/viewreply/279366/

nv - 04 April 2012 01:42 PM

Ask for details if you’ve forgotten how things used to be ...

Your In Box is full, man.

I was expecting maybe a newcomer to ask about this—were you sick that week, Byron? Just google Mary Ann Spikes Sam Harris. Here’s an example of what you’ll find:
http://www.examiner.com/apologetics-in-modesto/why-does-sam-harris-moral-landscape-have-the-word-moral-it-review
Let me know if you want to finally read a related thread in this forum, as well. Who needs to PM? I’ll see your requests in this thread.