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Some Thoughts on Sam Harris' Final Thoughts on Free Will

4/19/2021

In my last two posts (1, 2), I examined Sam Harris' long appearance on The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman. Shortly after those aired, Sam released his Final Thoughts on Free Will on his own Making Sense podcast, which I thought I should take a look at before summing up my own current thoughts on this matter. I didn't find Sam to be very persuasive in his conversation with Scott, but let's see if he's had any better thoughts upon reflection (and in sole control). Since I've already spent a lot of time on Sam's ideas, I'll try to be quick about it and just pick out any new points that need to be made.

The concept of free will touches nearly everything we care about: morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment. But the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. It is built on two things: the ability to choose otherwise and being the source of conscious awareness. But these are both wrong.

There are more things bound up in "free will" than just these two points. In particular, there's the question of avoiding external coercion, as well as the ability to carry out actions and plans that were made using conscious considerations. Both of those do a lot of work in building up feelings about the term free will. But even leaving those points aside for now, Sam's discussion of "the ability to choose otherwise" is a flawed repetition of ideas that have already been debunked. Dan Dennett knocked these down in his review of Sam's book, when he said:

"You can't assess any ability by 'replaying the tape.' ... This is as true of the abilities of automobiles as of people. Suppose I am driving along at 60 MPH and am asked if my car can also go 80 MPH. Yes, I reply, but not in precisely the same conditions; I have to press harder on the accelerator. In fact, I add, it can also go 40 MPH, but not with conditions precisely as they are. Replay the tape till eternity, and it will never go 40MPH in just these conditions."

So, looking backwards at decisions that were made just doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the ability to make decisions going forward. As for what Sam means about "being the source of conscious awareness", I'll have to hear more to understand his claims.

There’s no place for you to stand outside of the causal structure of the universe.

Agreed. But my unique genetic and environmental history forms its own cause. We witness that from the inside as we act. That is consistent with the embodied view of consciousness. As I said in my review of Just Deserts, we may not have free will, as that makes it sound like free will is a possession that could be separated from our selves. But we are a will that has degrees of freedom.

You aren’t a self. You’re not a subject in the middle of experience. You’re not on the riverbank watching the stream of consciousness. As a matter of experience, there is only the stream, and you are identical to it.

That’s right that we aren’t a homunculus watching the Cartesian theatre unspool before us in some ethereal mind space. But that stream that we are identical to is something. It exists. And I don’t see why we can’t call that an everchanging, unique, and personal self.

[Sam asks for you to choose a film. Any film.] We can’t see how those choices are made. If free will isn’t there, then it’s not anywhere.

Bollocks! This is just like the point I made in my last post about looking for a decisive moment in the random noise of choosing when to drink water. Sam is stacking the deck in his favour by asking for a random film choice, but there are no identifiable interior mechanisms to make random choices. If, instead, I asked you to choose the top 20 films of all time in terms of their return on investment, you would immediately be flooded with ideas on how to act to solve that problem. (And if you are JT Velikovsky, you will have already written a PhD thesis on this subject!) Where did those thoughts come from? From some mysterious darkness that we have no access to? No! They would come from learned experience that I myself have experienced, plus maybe some creativity at putting together bits of experiences that I haven’t thought about putting together before. This type of problem solving is one of the 13 types of cognition that we have evolved to have. And that feels very much like a self acting in its own self-interest.

Everything is springing to mind. What could free will possibly refer to?

To the ability to hold onto a train of thought rather than pinging among these random upsurges?

Letting go of free will is the only thing that cuts through the desire to retributively punish people.

Not so! The fact that you can’t change the past is another perfectly good reason to get rid of the desire to retributively punish people. From a consequentialist point of view, retributivism makes no sense.

People ask, “if there’s no free will, then why are you trying to convince anyone of anything? … Your very effort to convince people that they don’t have free will is proof that you think they have it.” Again, this is confusion between determinism and fatalism. Reasoning is possible. Not because you are free to think however you want, but because you are not free. Reason makes slaves of us all. To be convinced by an argument is to be subjugated by it. It’s to be forced to believe it, regardless of your preferences.

Well, this certainly doesn’t track with the history of reasoning with people about their beliefs. Sam hasn’t responded to any of Dan Dennett’s very good arguments. Why not? Because people have their own unique personal histories, which drive their passions and their reasoning. These people are selves who act for their own self-determination.

Not thinking about this clearly has consequences. In the United States, there are 13-year-olds serving life sentences in prison. Not because we have determined that they can’t be rehabilitated, but because some judge or jury felt that they truly deserved this punishment as retribution because they were the true independent cause of their actions.

This is an abhorrent shame and it definitely needs to be corrected. It’s possible that making the argument that “we don’t have free will” could actually open many people’s eyes to the problems with their retributivist thinking. But it’s also possible that such arguments close off many people’s minds because they think they definitely are autonomous agents, so free will skeptics must be out of touch with reality.

At the moment, the only philosophically respectable way to defend free will is to endorse a view known as compatibilism and argue, in essence, that free will is compatible with the truth of determinism. Compatibilists like my friend the philosopher Dan Dennett generally claim that a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsion that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions. So, if a man wants to commit murder, and does so because of this desire, then that’s all the free will you need. But from both a moral and scientific perspective, this seems to miss the point. Where is the freedom in doing what one wants, when one's very desires are the product of prior events that one had absolutely no hand in creating? From my point of view, compatibilism is just a way of saying that a puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Well, there are definitely strings from our evolutionary history. And natural selection has generally produced beings who love them. The ones that don’t tend to go extinct. In fact, in Just Deserts, Dan agrees with this and says, “I have adopted [this] sentence and reinterpreted it as indeed a pretty good definition of free will. … If you are lucky enough to be a responsible agent, you have an obligation to love your strings, protecting them from would-be puppeteers.”

Compatibilists tend to push back here. They say even if our thoughts and actions are the products of unconscious causes, they are still our thoughts and actions. Anything that your brain does or decides, consciously or not, is something that you have done or decided. So, on this account, the fact that we can’t always be aware of the causes of our actions does not negate free will. Our unconscious neurophysiology is just as much us as our conscious thoughts are. But this seems like a bait and switch that trades a psychological fact, the subjective experience of being a conscious agent, for an abstract idea of ourselves as persons. The psychological truth is that most of us feel identical to or in control of a certain channel of information in our conscious minds, but we are wrong about this. The you that you take yourself to be isn’t in control of anything.

This is not a bait and switch by compatibilists. It’s a holistic understanding of our evolved and embodied selves. What’s wrong with that? Sam is the one who insists on fighting a straw man by merely picking on the worst kind of dualist, Cartesian, libertarian free will.

Compatibilists try to save free will by asserting that you are more than your conscious self. You’re identical to the totality of what goes on inside your body, whether you are conscious of it or not. But you can’t honestly take credit for your unconscious mental life. In fact, you are making countless decisions at this moment with organs other than your brain, but you don’t feel responsible for these decisions. Are you producing red blood cells right now? If your body decided to stop doing this, you would be the victim of this change, not its cause. To say that you are responsible for everything that goes on inside your skin because it’s all “you” is to make a claim that bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings of agency and moral responsibility that have made the idea of free will a problem for philosophy in the first place.

And to treat red blood cell production the exact same way you treat conscious deliberation by human beings is (as I said in my last post) to sink to a level of dehumanisation that is truly troubling. To say no one is responsible for anything that goes on inside your skin also bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings and facts that have made free will a problem for philosophy. Guess what. We aren't responsible for it all. And we aren't responsible for nothing. Let the hard work of philosophy begin.

Okay, that’s enough from Sam. He has helped me see more issues that need to be discussed, but it’s time for me to put them all on the table in my next and final post in this short series about free will.

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Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 2/2)

4/7/2021

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In the last post, I covered Part 1 of Sam Harris' recent conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman. Sam didn't come off very well in that one, but Scott left him with an excellent cliffhanger question so maybe he can redeem himself. Let's remind ourselves what that question was and then jump right into Part 2 and pick out some interesting bits from the rest of their conversation.

Scott: Of course we are just our biology. What else would we be? But isn’t it the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we are? You could still say that it means something for the robot to be a unique robot. But don’t you think that the interesting thing is that the biology encompasses all the unique aspects of what Sam Harris is and who Sam Harris is including your unconsciousness and your consciousness?
Sam: Hmmm. I’m trying to think of how to make this point land…
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Sam: All of the causes of what I’m conscious of were first unconscious. I’m not aware of what my brain is doing at the synaptic level. I’m not a dogmatic materialist [but] let’s just talk in terms of materialism. ... So, my mind is what my brain is doing. … What we’re talking about is information processing in a physical system. In my case, the computer is made of meat. In a robot’s case, it’s silicone. In neither case is there something extra which is emerging or being added which gives a degree of freedom beyond just the impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment.
Scott: I think there is. Let me try to pinpoint precisely what I think that extra thing is. Cognitive control includes things like implementation of intentions. ... You are right, in the moment we don’t really have free will but we have the capacity to shift our behaviour in the future so that we can learn from our mistakes so that we can even make moral reasoning decisions. Turtles, chimps, apes, and robots right now don’t have a great capacity for moral reasoning about an action they already made so that they can change their behaviour in the future. To me, that conscious control is free will. But I don’t think I can convince you to use that label for that phenomenon.

I think Sam is correct here, but the "impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment" is actually just a very good description of what Dan Dennett calls "the free will worth wanting." And Scott's "cognitive control" and "implementation of intentions" is just more of the same. In my Summary of My Evolutionary Theory of Consciousness, I gave the following short definition:

Consciousness, according to this evolutionary theory, is an infinitesimally growing ability to sense and respond to any or all biological forces in order to meet the needs of survival. These forces and needs can vary from the immediate present to infinite timelines and affect anything from the smallest individual to the broadest concerns (both real and imagined) for all of life.

So, when Scott notes that the capacity of humans to change their behaviour is much greater than the capacity for turtles, chimps, and robots, I would say he's describing points on the spectrum of what all of these (living or non-living) systems are able to process with their levels of consciousness. The more you can sense, and the more responses that are available to you, the more degrees of freedom you have. And compatibilists may wish to call this your free will. Much like consciousness, this isn't an on/off switch. It's an infinitesimally growing (or shrinking) amount of freedom. As Dan Dennett said towards the end of his review of Sam's book, "You can't be 'ultimately responsible' (as Galen Strawson has argued) but so what? You can be partially, largely responsible." Equivalently, you can't have Ultimate Libertarian Free Will, but so what? There is a growing sense of freedom along the way towards that, which we might agree to call free will.

But Sam doesn't think we actually have that sense! And that is a big part of his argument that needs to be addressed.

Sam: [People] think they are having an experience of being a self that can author its own actions. The experience of having free will and the experience of being a self...are two sides of the same coin. ... Meditation, successful meditation, absolutely proves to you from the first-person side that that is a false point of view. [The] point of view that gives motivation to this claim about free will [is] how you feel when you feel that you are the conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do. [But that is] because you are not noticing that the next thing you think or intend to do is simply coming out of the darkness behind you which you can’t inspect. It is genuinely mysterious.

This is the kind of argument you make when you see consciousness as an on/off switch and you put far too much stock in meditating on conscious awareness (which is actually level 5 in my hierarchy of consciousness). Sam is right that "you" are not "the" conscious upstream cause of the next thing you think and do. But I would say that "you" are also an unconscious upstream cause! And these bleed back and forth into one another. There is bi-directional feedback between our unconscious activities and our conscious activities. If this was genuinely mysterious, the thoughts that came out of the darkness would be shocking and unrecognisable to us. But, of course, that's not what we experience. That only appears to happen in genuine cases of psychosis, which we diagnose and try to treat if that occurs. Why exactly does Sam think this way? He draws on two examples over the rest of the talk, so let's present them both at once and consider them together.

First Example:

Sam: Take a moment of conscious deliberation. I have a glass of water and I can decide to pick it up and have a drink now or I can decide to wait. This is a prototypical case of me being in the driver’s seat. I’m free to do this. No one’s got a gun to my head. I don’t have some kind of compulsive water-drinking behaviour. I’m a little bit thirsty, I’m conscious of thirst, but I can choose to resist my thirst. That seems to be me prosecuting my freedom there. But the more you pay attention to what it’s like to make that choice out of your own free will, the more you will discover that it is absolutely mysterious, in every particular, why and how you do what you do and when and how you do it. Subjectively, I have no idea why or how I do any of these things. I have no idea why or how one particular moment becomes decisive.

Second Example:

Sam: [I can provide a long description of someone becoming a classically trained musician because of a love of Bach.] That’s true of somebody. But not me. Why not? Why don’t I care about Bach? All of these things have reasons, they have explanations, causally...
Scott: Those are the things that make you who you are, even if you don’t know why they were caused. [They are part of your] environmental and biological confluence.
Sam: Yes. It’s deterministic or random, but it’s some pattern of causation. But so what does it mean to say that I am free to take a deep and all-encompassing interest in classical music? … The problem is, I have almost no interest in playing the cello. The fact that I don’t is something that I did not author. ... I am as I am with respect to classical music. Now, just imagine that by force of this conversation, you said something that inspired me to be different than I’m tending to be, this would really be the ultimate instance of free will because this would be kind of a surmounting of all my prior tendencies into this new commitment. What would it be like for me to experience that awakening in my own consciousness? That would be totally compatible with the evil genius in the next room saying “We’re going to give him the cello desire here.” It would not demonstrate anything like free will. It would be like, “What came over me?” This would have come from outside of consciousness. It’s not me.

These are not persuasive. In the first case, facts from our evolutionary history show that we humans are animals who only generally need water. We don't need to constantly drink, and there is a large range of hydration within which we can function perfectly well. Therefore, there is rarely, if ever, one instantaneous all-encompassing need to drink NOW. When Sam says he has "no idea why or how one particular moment becomes decisive," he is looking for something that just isn't there. Why not? Because it doesn't need to be there! Like Buridan's Ass, random noise is all that's necessary to decide to drink at any one second vs. another. However, let's say I'm a spy and I pre-arrange to have a drink in a bar at precisely 15 seconds after 8:00PM because that will be a signal to my counterpart that "everything has been arranged." Guess what. As long as everything goes as planned, I'm going to have that drink at precisely that time. And that particular action is going to feel very authored. Sam is trying to stack the deck with his meaningless example, but a meaningful counterexample drives an entirely different intuition.

Similarly, the second example isn't as mysterious as Sam claims either. A love for classical music and a drive to play the cello are very clearly driven by a bit of genetic variance (constitutive luck) and a bit of environmental conditions (situational luck). If you were born tone deaf and 500 years before the invention of the cello, you aren't going to have a drive to play the cello. If you are born with perfect pitch into a family of professional musicians who lead happy lives and have instruments all over the house, you may very easily develop a drive to play the cello. If your situation is somewhere in between these extremes but, at some point along the path of your life, cello-playing looks like a promising path to meet one or several of your Maslow's hierarchy of needs, then it is very possible a drive will develop to lead you down that path. That's how one might convince Sam to play the cello—by showing him he can, and that doing so would solve a very important need he has, over and above all the other need-fulfilling activities he already undertakes. That's a pretty high bar at this point in Sam's life because of his particular path dependence. But if we managed it, these causal explanations would be nothing at all like an "evil genius in the next room saying 'We're going to give him the cello desire here.'"

Are we "Ultimately Free" to choose all of these factors in our lives? No. No one should ever think that we are. But is there freedom in discovering who we are and exploring the "impressive complexity of the system in dialogue with its environment"? Yes. And I think that's a satisfying way to look at life. What is stopping Sam from taking this big picture perspective? Towards the end of the podcast, Sam shows that it comes from his personal history placing a laser focus on meditation and the tiniest details of neuroscience.

Sam: In certain cases, [conscious experience is] not descriptively mysterious at all. We know causally that we can tell a story about it. It’s just two different levels of connecting to the phenomenology here. When I say mysterious, I mean like, I can move my hand, right. This is one of the most prosaic things about me that I can move my hand. I can do this. I have no insight into how I do this. If I suddenly couldn’t do this, that would be flabbergasting. But the fact that I can do it is also flabbergasting. I have literally no insight. I know something about the neurology of this. I can talk about muscle fibres, actin, and the transduction in motor nerves and…I can vomit my concepts.
Scott: You kind of get it.
Sam: So, I’m not saying you can’t have any insight into this, but there is still something, however deep you go, however atomised your experience consciously becomes of a phenomenon, there is just simply this fact of first something wasn’t there and then it’s there. You can shatter your subjective experience down to its atoms and notice that things are just appearing out of the darkness. Sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions, intentions, or their microconstituents. Things can get incredibly pixelated when you spend months on retreats doing nothing but paying attention to mostly sensory perception. It can break down, especially if you are doing it strategically, so as to look for its kind of smallest and briefest aspects, which is one style of meditation. Things become amazingly pixelated. You don’t feel that you have a body anymore. You feel that you have a cloud of sensation, of temperature, and pressure, and movement, which just doesn’t have the shape of a body at all. You don’t feel “hand”, you feel these micro-changes of primary sensation at each moment. But again, whatever you are noticing is there and then it’s not there. And then something else is there and then it’s not there. And “you” are not doing any of it. That’s the crucial point. “You”, the one who is witnessing, aren’t doing any of it.

This perfectly captures Sam's walled-off dualism. If "you" are only "the one who is witnessing" then of course you aren't going to be able to understand everything moving in and out of that perspective. To expect differently would be like what the ecological philosopher Arne Naess calls "trying to blow a bag up from the inside." There are limits to what conscious awareness has access to and you have to examine the facts outside of those limits in order to understand it. And that's okay! The view from the interior—no matter how pixelated—only gives you so much. But a holistic view adds nicely to the picture, and it lets you understand more of the interior even if you don't have access to what is outside of it. For biological phenomena like us, Tinbergen's four considerations of (1) evolutionary histories and (2) personal histories, along with (3) functions and (4) mechanisms, add up to this big and informative picture.

In some ways, it's just philosophical wordplay to decide to call these perspectives free will or not, or free will worth wanting, but whatever label you use, the ideas you attach to that label have real consequences for the way you navigate through life. Let's examine a few of those.

I mentioned in my last post that Sam's views lead him to a very dehumanised place. In this episode, he puts that on display even further. Here are five examples of that which add up to something quite disturbing:

First Example:

Sam: Almost no one understands this. Dan Dennett does not understand this. He obviously doesn’t. He obviously feels like a self. And that is the string upon which all this controversy is strung. Most of the people listening right now are thinking, “what the fuck is he talking about?” But that voice in your head that says, “what the fuck is he talking about?”…that isn’t you! That is not a self.
Scott: What do you mean that’s not you? It’s you! Again, you’re a dualist when you say that.
Sam: It’s no more you than the bead of sweat that drips down your forehead is you. It is an object.
Scott: I disagree! People don’t identify themselves with their hand, but they identify themselves with their conscious desires and motivations so we can have gradations of things, of parts of our body that people identify themselves with.
Sam: From the point of view of consciousness, there is simply consciousness and its contents.

Second Example:

Sam: [Trump’s election] is a little bit analogous to if we elected a rhinoceros to be president. I’d be fucking tearing my hair out over how awful that is. At no point am I imagining that the rhinoceros can be anything other than a rhinoceros and at no point am I wishing suffering upon the rhinoceros. I don’t hate the rhinoceros. The rhinoceros just shouldn’t be president of the United States. That’s a catastrophe to do that. And in some sense, we elected a rhinoceros president.

Third Example:

Sam: Someone comes into your house and wants to kill you and your kids. By all means, shoot that person in the head. That is what guns are for. You should do it if it’s a grizzly bear and you should do it if it’s a person who seems to think he has free will to kill you and your kids. That’s morally uncomplicated in my view.

Fourth Example:

Sam: Hatred really does require an attribution to someone that they could and should have done otherwise. It’s like you really do believe they are the authors of their bad actions. The moment you find that they have a brain tumour that makes them exculpatory then you change your response. You think, well I did hate Charles Whitman for getting up in that clocktower and killing all those kids but once they performed an autopsy on him and found that massive brain tumour pressing on his amygdala, well then, okay, I have to recognise that I can’t hate the guy. He was as unlucky as the kids he shot. On some level that happens to everybody, once you recognise that free will is an illusion.

Fifth Example:

Sam: Every instance of [voluntary control], the sufficiency of my strength of will in one case, the weakness of my will in another case, every bit of it is being determined by states in my brain which I didn’t author, which I didn’t create.
Scott: It’s still you! It’s still you!
Sam: But my liver is still me and it gives me absolutely no sense of free will. If my liver stops, if my liver is working exactly the way it is in this moment and no other way, if it works better tomorrow, or stops completely on Friday, I am a mere victim of those changes, or witness to their consequences. It’s not within the domain of my autonomy or agency. But so it is with states of my brain. So it is with each instance of neurochemistry in my brain. And yet that produces everything that I experience including my preferences, my goals, my impulses that are in conformity with my goals, and then my sudden subversion of those impulses with some alternate impulse. That’s getting piped up from below and ... the fact that that comes online in that moment and doesn’t in another, that’s mysterious. The fact that it comes on to the degree that it does, and not one degree further, is also mysterious. It’s probably dependent on other things that seem completely adventitious to my character like whether I got enough sleep the night before or whether I had a full lunch or whether I got enough sunlight.

Bollocks! There are hard evolutionary facts that differentiate human minds from beads of sweat, rhinoceroses, bears, and brain tumors. Dan Dennett already answered this with an extended reply in his podcast conversation with Sam. It's helpful to read that in its entirety:

That’s very useful. Tom Wolfe has this passage where he says what we’ve learned from neuroscience is that we’re wired wrong. Don’t blame me. Don’t blame us. We’re wired wrong. No! What neuroscience shows us is that we’re wired. It doesn’t show us we’re wired wrong. Some people like poor Whitman are wired wrong. ... You’re saying it’s brain tumours all the way down. Well, I find that extrapolation doesn’t move me at all. I don’t think it’s a logical argument. I think it is a mistaken extrapolation. It’s like a mathematical induction gone wrong. [Free will libertarians also] say, we're all that way. Well, no. That’s precisely what we understand — that we are not all disabled. Nobody’s an angel. Nobody’s perfect. So, if anything short of perfection counts as being disabled to the point of being exculpatorily disabled, then you’re right. But that’s a very strange view. The idea that you couldn’t be able enough to be held responsible is the crux of the issue right now between us. I say that the boundaries are always porous, and as we learn more about neuroscience, we may very well move some people that are exculpated into the guilty / not excusable category and others will move in the other direction. But we’ll still keep the distinction between those who are basically wired right and those that are wired wrong.

This is similar to a point I made in my review of Just Deserts about how a Tinbergen view of free will challenges the view that luck "swallows everything" in our considerations.

It isn’t luck that I grew up to be a person rather than a horse. Once I was conceived, the evolutionary history (phylogeny) that led up to me put a lot of constraints on my personal development (ontogeny). Luck may explain all the differences between me and every other person out there, but we needn’t worry about luck when describing all the things we have in common. There are hordes of characteristics that all humans share, but the one that is most important for this debate is our capacity to learn. The extreme neuroplasticity we have (a mechanism of free will) is what enables all but the most unfortunate humans to sense and respond to their environments (a function for free will) to the point where they slowly, slowly become a unique self.

Sam has taken the giant step-change introduced by Charles Whitman's brain tumor and tried to apply its conclusion to each and every step-change up or down the evolutionary ladder from there. To him, nothing is responsible all the way down to beads of sweat, and nothing is responsible all the way up to billions of average humans. This is a very blunt and useless view of the world. And in the wrong hands, it could be used to wipe away humans as easily as one would wipe away a bead of sweat. I'm not at all suggesting Sam is that kind of a monster, but it would take a weird view of morality to intervene here and save us from such dehumanisation. As you might expect, Sam has exactly that kind of weird view.

[Scott and Sam start to have a giant discussion about the is-ought divide. Sam thinks it’s a language trick we should just ignore. He thinks the only thing you need to boot up morality is to agree that “we don’t want the worst possible misery for everyone.”]
Scott: The way I think about it is that there is no “should” without “in order to,” which is a goal. If someone says you should do X, that necessarily implies that you should do X in order to get Y. There can be no should without reference to a goal.
Sam: What if the goal is to avoid the worst possible misery for everyone?
Scott: But “better” or “worse” are value judgments. I don’t know why you don’t see that.
Sam: Put your hand on a hot stove and then tell me that.
Scott: If it was in order to achieve a broader goal, and putting my hand on that hot stove would help me to achieve that broader goal, I would do that and deal with the suckiness of the feeling.
Sam: [...stammers, then...] To say that “the worst possible misery for everyone is bad is a value judgment,” is to say nothing!
Scott: You’re accepting a particular definition of well-being.
Sam: No, no, no. You’re just not understanding my claim.
Scott: How are facts going to lead me to action?
Sam: The facts are that there are very different experiences on offer here and you will helplessly find yourself preferring the good day at Esalen over the rat-filled dungeon, just to take the fairly parochial differences that we can notice here on Earth.
Scott: But good can only be used in relation to a goal. How are you divorcing it from the goal? You disagree with that?
Sam: No, it’s just the valence of certain experiences within consciousness that have no necessary reference to a goal. You can be so happy or unhappy that it has no reference point in past or future. You can have the best possible acid trip or the worst possible acid trip and there’s no goal there. The sheer extremis of your physiology pushed to the breaking point.
Scott: There are pleasurable and there’s unpleasant. But I don’t think they map onto good or bad in the way that you claim.
Sam: Dial them up and give them enough time. What if existence was just that? [Sam then presents a poor analogy about how a physicist who doesn’t believe in math doesn’t get to have a vote at a physics conference, and he claims that is the same as the Taliban not getting to have a vote about morality.] They’re imbeciles. They have a shitty culture. We know this. And it shouldn’t be taboo to say this.

Ugh! Scott is 100% right here. His "in order to" is another way of restating my argument on how to bridge the is-ought divide with a want. For example, I say: Life is. Life wants to remain an is. Therefore life ought to act to remain so. Scott would put it: Life is. In order for life to remain an is, life ought to act to remain so. These are equivalent arguments that both require additional arguments as to why the "want" or the "goal" are correct.

Sam, on the other hand, has a viciously circular argument that tells us nothing about hard choices between where we are today and his worst possible outcome. How is one to judge whether one is moving towards or away from "helplessly preferring things that have no reference point"? He has no facts to consider for that! And his worst possible outcome is wrong too. I wrote about this in my response to Sam's Moral Landscape challenge, but I don't suppose he saw that. He was too blinded by the kind of thinking you get when you mistake a meaningless acid trip for profundity and then add in the woo-ey Buddhist claptrap that emotions should only flow through you. Sam wants to divorce morality from consequences but that's just not possible. The "valence of certain experiences" were given to us by our evolutionary histories and they help us reach our evolutionary goals. Am I free to choose whether or not I experience Jaak Panksepp's seven basic emotions of FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PANIC, AND PLAY? No, I am not. But they drive competing needs that I must meet if I want to reach my goals (in order to reach my goals), which I have freedom to discover and freedom to choose between.

Are those goals and choices mine? Am I responsible for the choices that get made? Not ultimately, whatever that is supposed to mean. I do not stand outside of life's evolutionary history. But those needs are felt by me, and those choices are not made anywhere else, so I don't see why they're not mine. Sam sees things differently, abdicating all goals, choices, and responsibilities (to the universe?), but that ends up tying him in knots and eventually making Dan Dennett's case even stronger.

Sam: There are paradoxes here. The responsibility paradox is real, and I still don’t know what I think about it. … When you take a truly competent person who then does something horrible, that person is really responsible. That’s the true case of responsibility. But the paradox for me is that the more competent you make the person, the more their failures to behave well become inscrutable. … This is very clear in parenting. I have daughters who I’m certainly not browbeating about the illusoriness of free will. No, I’m trying to raise them to be competent self-regulating human beings. So, when I talk to one of my daughters, if I say, “you really should have done otherwise,” …it’s never a claim that in this instance, if I rewound the universe, they might have done otherwise. No, this is a causally determined outcome that was always the way it was going to be. But, it’s a conversation about what I want them to do next time. And saying that is further input into the clockwork of their lives. So, that will change them. Ultimately, my daughters are going to become civilised human beings who will not behave the way they did at 7-years-old or 12-years-old when they are in their 40s. And those changes will be causally affected on the basis of demands imposed on them. But again, there’s no place for the folk psychological notion of free will to land there.
Scott: You wouldn’t give your daughter any credit if she became president of the United States some day?
Sam: I do feel like pride is a virtue that has an expiration date in a human life. Developmentally, there’s like a critical period where pride is not an ethical error or a sign of psychological confusion. It’s actually something you want to get into the code. … But at a certain point, I think you clearly want to outgrow it. … It’s not a basis for compassion for oneself and others. … I don’t feel pride about anything in my life now. I have all kinds of outcomes I prefer. Sometimes I realise them and sometimes I don’t. And the obverse of pride is something like shame. Again, shame is an important thing to be able to feel, but ultimately, I think it reaches its shelf life. You want to be able to transcend shame. Not too early. This is an interesting topic. I’m not sure what I totally believe about it. … You’re just telling yourself a story about the past in both cases. You’re thinking thoughts in the present that nominally refer to the past and they’re making you feel a certain way. It’s like you are watching a movie about your past and you’re being entranced by it and it’s kindling an emotional response that has a certain half-life and it’s incredibly boring. It’s an incredibly boring thing to do with your attention. It’s masturbatory on the pride side, a pseudo-source of gratification, which sets up a system of comparison between yourself and others that ultimately is not a source of well-being. If you are comparing yourself to others and feeling good about that, then five minutes later you are going to be comparing yourself unfavourably to other people who are doing yet more impressive things and you are going to feel bad about that. That pinballing between those two things is not the right algorithm to live a truly self-actualised life. I do think pride and shame ultimately get outgrown. At what point, that’s an interesting question.

Yes, Sam, that is an interesting question, because you are precisely describing the development of a person into a unique and responsible self. This is what Dan Dennett meant when he said that Freedom Evolves. We have the freedom to learn from our experience. If I rewound the universe so that every brain state and environmental influence was exactly the same, it’s true that “I couldn’t have done otherwise,” but that’s not the point. You will never face the same exact situation twice. The universe moves on. But you can learn from the first instance and do something different the next time in a similar situation. This ability to review the past is one of the most important capabilities of consciousness that has developed. And it does not have to be boring, masturbatory, or self-flagellating when done correctly. You cannot change the past, but you can have a growth mindset about the future. You should not continually cry over spilt milk, but you are not doomed to be clumsy forever either. And the emotional feelings generated from your own introspection (or in reaction to those expressed by others), are mechanical cranes that help make the necessary changes in your neural wiring to help reach our goals. See my post on where emotions come from to understand this in more detail. This larger view renders the "fully competent person who does something horrible" much less inscrutable. They've usually just learned something from the past and decided to pursue a new goal.

Once again, you cannot choose the universe you were born into or the particular characteristics and situations that affect you, but the needs, desires, and goals that you feel do not belong to anyone else, so they are yours to own. The beliefs you hold about this are important drivers of your ability to learn and navigate the world. The emotions that drive us should not be too hot from believing in libertarian free will and ultimate responsibility, but they must not be too cold either, holding no one responsible for anything. Sam’s arguments would literally drain the passion out of compassion for ourselves and others, which removes a crucial tool from our ability to learn and grow.

What terms should be used in the most helpful sets of personal beliefs about these issues? Perhaps the use of “free will” comes down to semantic choices between psychologists and philosophers. That’s something Scott and Sam explored briefly.

Scott: We can want to want things. You’re not distinguishing between first-order goals and second-order goals. What gives us free will as a human species? … It’s the wanting to want. It’s our capacity to use implementation of intentions to get out of the bed in the morning and go to the gym even if we don’t want to. I don’t want to do that, but my freedom lies in my capacity to use my consciousness and change my environment in all sorts of ways so that it’s easier, so that the constraints aren’t as big. Don’t you see that as an important part of free will that matters to people?
Sam: I see no reason to call that free will.
Scott: [After a short digression.] There’s a really interesting paper about smokers and free will by Roy Baumeister. He found that in almost every case, people overestimated the extent to which they wouldn’t be able to quit. They wouldn’t be able to have free will [to eliminate] the urge, but it turns out humans have much more self-control than they realise they are capable of.
Sam: There’s a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. There’s a difference between behavioural self-control and lacking that capacity. Let’s say that…my goal is to stop smoking but I’m completely incapable of not smoking. That’s one way to be. The other way to be is that I have a goal to stop smoking and I can actually veto the impulse and stop smoking when it comes online. But every instance of this, the sufficiency of my strength of will in one case, the weakness of my will in another case, every bit of it is being determined by states in my brain which I didn’t author, which I didn’t create.

There goes Sam again with his dualist "I" sitting outside of his embodied self. But I read the Baumeister paper after I listened to this podcast and found it really interesting. I especially liked the following list of definitions from the front of the paper:

Agency is the capacity to initiate and control action. It is related to the term agent, as in someone who acts. It encompasses choosing, initiating action on one's own, and accepting responsibility for one's chosen actions.
Voluntary control has multiple meanings. For present purposes, it can be understood as indicating that the person is capable of choosing between performing the action and not performing it. Voluntary control means that the power to decide resides within the individual: the person is capable of making a conscious decision and implementing it. Loss of voluntary control means that the person is incapable of acting differently, either because of external forces or unconscious causes. With regard to addictive smoking, loss of voluntary control means that smokers cannot stop themselves from smoking.
Free will is understood as the capability to act in different ways, subject to the person's own control and serving the person's reasons, goals, wishes, and choices. A recent and authoritative definition, based on an interdisciplinary committee working for a granting foundation, defined free will as the capability of performing free actions. Free actions, in turn, were defined in two ways. One was “any intentional action performed on the basis of informed, rational deliberation by a sane person in the absence of compulsion and coercion.” The other invoked multiplicity of possible actions (i.e., the person could do two or more different things) in a given situation as constructed by all prior causes and events. Thus, in simple terms, free will is the capacity to act in different ways in the same situation. It thus overlaps considerably with voluntariness. Shepherd (2012) showed that most people do not accept unconscious free will, so free will entails conscious control of action. The term “free will” is a traditional usage but modern theorists generally do not postulate “will” as a distinct psychological entity, so it would be more precise to speak of free action.

I quite like these definitions. They are thoughtful, careful, fully drained of extreme libertarian notions, and compatible with the facts of a naturalistic and deterministic universe. They also overlap with a lot of what Sam thinks is going on in the world, despite his controversial and confused labelling.

Sam: None of this is to deny that certain outcomes in life are better than others and worth wanting. None of this is to deny that there are ways to get what you want out of life and ways to fail to get what you want. None of this is to deny that there is this vast landscape of experience and we need to navigate one part of it so as to be happy and functional and we should avoid navigating so as to be captured by another part which leads to the worst forms of misery. All of that is true, and we can talk about how to do all of that. And all of that includes the prospect that people can learn, and people can improve themselves.
Scott: I don’t think what you are saying is wrong. I think you are confusing the hell out of people because you make such great points. The kind of free will that matters to humans—we have all of that. … My point is this. The cybernetic system wants to reach a goal that it desires. … Don’t you think that’s a sensible form of the term free will, that you have free will to write a book? You want to do so, and you use your consciousness to make that a reality. You don’t see that as the kind of free will that people truly care about?
Sam: People care about realising their goals in life. And there are causal ways to succeed at that, and causal ways to fail at that. Learning to play the cello is not going to happen by accident. My denying free will is not the same thing as endorsing fatalism. … This is how people misunderstand this criticism of free will. They think, well, if I have no free will, then why do anything? Why not just wait to see what happens? If I accidentally wait to see if I learn to play the cello, we know what’s going to happen there. I’m not going to learn to play the cello. The only way to learn is to intend to learn, to practice, to seek instruction. All of that. People care about outcomes in life that are worth caring about. None of that requires free will to talk about that.

Well, it sure seems like we do need some notion of free will to talk about this stuff. As soon as you deny free will, fatalism, dehumanisation, and coercion creep into the conversation. So, until free will skeptics like Sam come up with a better term, I think we’re stuck with Dan Dennett’s free will worth wanting or the more clinical definitions of free will from psychologists like Scott and Baumeister.

Feel free to propose something different though! I always look forward to the opportunity to learn and improve my own beliefs. Next time, I'll take a brief look at Sam's "final thoughts" on all this and then I ought to be in a good position to offer my own current thoughts.

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Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 1/2)

4/5/2021

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On March 22nd, 3 Quarks Daily published my review of Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett's new book Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. Ten days earlier, Sam Harris released his Final Thoughts on Free Will on his Making Sense podcast. Was he trying to scoop me? I wish! Did he even mention Just Deserts in his podcast? Surprisingly no! Why not? Probably because he and Dan Dennett have already had several heated conversations about free will. There was Dan's dismissive review of one of Sam's books, Sam's pissed-off response to that review, and then a 2-hour podcast discussion trying to smooth the water between them. No need to go back to all that!

So, what prompted Sam to speak out about free will now? Well, I think the real reason Sam posted his thoughts when he did was because it was fresh on the heels of a 3-hour discussion he had with Scott Barry Kaufman on The Psychology Podcast. Scott published his amazing book Transcend last year, which has the sub-title "The New Science of Self-Actualization". In other words, having a self that is free to be actualized is kind of an essential part of Scott's project. But Sam is famous for denying these things in his work, including his 2012 book Free Will.

Since I'm deeply immersed in the topic of free will right now, I thought I'd spend a few posts on these recent discussions. I'll get to Sam's "final thoughts" in a few posts, but first, let's take a closer look at Part 1 of Sam's conversation with Scott, which was posted on February 25th. Next time, I'll delve into Part 2, which was posted on March 4th. I won't bother transcribing all three hours of these free podcasts, so please listen to them for yourself for the full story. But here are some important bits that I'd like to comment on.

Sam: When I was in college, a girlfriend broke up with me and I just became this machine that was producing unhappiness until an MDMA experience showed me that that could be interrupted with no reason attached.

Sam has become a strong proponent of psychedelic drug use after this early experience kicked off his life as a contemplative and public intellectual focusing on consciousness and free will. I haven't used such drugs myself personally, but as a 49-year-old-man now, I have to say that every time Sam talks about the important lessons he got from the experience, I think I've already learned those lessons from other experiences. (Notably, in grand nature spots, but also while studying astronomy, geology, and deep evolutionary history.) Could I have learned these lessons earlier in my life on a drug trip? Maybe. But I tend to agree with Abraham Maslow who thought such experiences were cheating to try to get to self-actualization. Better to have reasons for your emotions and learn from those.

[Sam] studied for years with the leading Buddhist meditation thinkers. There are dualistic vs. non-dualistic forms of awareness meditation, with different sets of instructions for each one as to what to pay attention to and why. With these exercises, you aren’t meditating yourself into perfection; you are just learning to recognize something that is already there.

I've not been on any lengthy retreats yet, but I have done a fair bit of reading about meditation, and I have practiced it on my own for nearly 20 years now with the help of many guided meditation sessions along the way (including lots from Sam's Waking Up app). Meditating has been a good and useful experience in my life, but, a bit like using psychedelics, I think it's an artificial experience that doesn't have quite the relevance to everyday life that Sam thinks it does. I'll say more about that in the next post, but I wanted to flag that I have meditated and enjoyed it.

Scott: I want to read a sentence you wrote because I have issues and questions with it “Consider what it would actually take to have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions and you would need to be in complete control of these factors.” This sentence reads like you are an implicit dualist. Who is the “you” in that sentence?

This is a great observation that I also notice whenever I read or listen to Sam. He continually toggles back and forth between his cold declarations about the lack of a self or free will and then his hot instructions about what "you" need to do or notice about "your consciousness and its contents". In Dan Dennett's review of Free Will, Dan pointed this out too. He noted a sentence on p9 that said "I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat." Dan said, "If this isn't pure Cartesianism, I don't know what it is. His prefrontal cortex is part of the I in question." That's exactly right. Consciousness is embodied and should not be spoken of so separately as Sam is wont to do.

What does Sam say about this sentence when Scott asks him how to understand it? He shifts into Zen Koan mode.

Sam: Yeah. It’s not really understandable in that way. What you’ve really just landed on is the problem with the concept of free will. It’s an incoherent idea. ... As you know, Dan Dennett has tried to purify the concept so as to have in his terms a “free will worth wanting”. ... [But] you’re not acknowledging just how many important things shift ethically once you let go of that spooky free will. Things really do change. And they change in ways that are important not just for our justice system and our concept of justice, they are important for ethical intuitions about what it means to be a good person and how we should feel in the presence of all the misadventures we have in life...and Dan Dennett’s project acknowledges none of that. That’s why he and I have never agreed on this topic.

This is an incredibly disingenuous reading of Dan's work and his previous exchanges with Sam. If anything, it's the other way around as Sam has not done the hard work of trying to really see what goes away when the concept of free will disappears. As one example, Dan noted in is review of Free Will that "entirely missing from Harris's account...is any acknowledgement of the morally important difference between...the raving psychopath and us." Perhaps this is why Dan has just moved on to debate Gregg Caruso instead, since he's actually a serious thinker who has tried to develop a Public Health Quarantine Model to replace our current retributive justice system. Poking at the holes in Caruso's model took up a significant portion of Just Desesrts. Sam doesn't even have a model to poke at. And it's not just psychopaths he doesn't see as any different than the rest of us.

Sam: The rules, ethically and psychologically, seem to change entirely for people, when you are talking about [other] people. They don’t think this way about chimpanzees. They don’t think this way about people with certain kinds of brain damage. ...The problem is that it doesn’t make any sense. ... It’s very difficult to make sense of this in terms of the streams of causality that I’m not aware of, in terms of gene transcription, and neurotransmitter behaviour, and all of the causes reaching back to the Big Bang that I didn’t author.

I'll point this out again in the next post, but the way Sam speaks about humans is literally dehumanising. In case it's not obvious how dangerous that is, David Livingstone Smith has done excellent work on the subject. (See this book review by Smith for some examples of Nazi dehumanisation.) I get that Sam is merely recognising here that the "folk" have different intuitions about people compared to their intuitions about chimpanzees and brain damaged people, but by saying this doesn't make sense, he is opening up the door to some very bad attitudes.

Scott: You are really hung up on the magical part of free will.
Sam: It’s not hung up! It is what people mean when they feel that someone should be punished, really punished, because they deserve their punishment. That is “just deserts.” That is someone who feels that the logic of retribution is anchored to libertarian free will.

It's sad to hear that Sam is still stuck repeating these points even though Dan Dennett took them apart several years ago. In his review of Free Will, Dan noted that Sam said, "However, the 'free will' that compatibilists defend is not the free will that most people feel they have" (p16). But Dan countered, "First of all, he doesn't know this. [And experimental philosophy suggests he's wrong.] But even if it is true, maybe all this shows is that most people are suffering from a sort of illusion that could be replaced by wisdom. After all, most people used to believe the sun went around the earth. They were wrong, and it took some heavy lifting to convince them of this." And in Just Deserts, Dan and Gregg do lots of this kind of lifting. Both agree there are reasons to get rid of retribution and libertarian free will, and you can do so as a free will skeptic (Gregg's project) or as a compatibilist (Dan's project).

Scott: It seems like people can do all the things they care about. If they think they care about making choices that are somehow uncaused, they just aren’t literally understanding what that means, as you point out. What people really mean when they insist that free will is important is they don’t want to feel coerced. They think of causes as sources of coercion, but that’s a confusion. I think people want to make choices that are consistent with their own goals and be able to deliberate about the causes where their desires aren’t totally clear, and they can do those things. And it’s pretty clear their consciousness participates causally in that process.
Sam: I would dispute that. ... For much of what we seem to do consciously, it remains mysterious why consciousness need be associated with any of these things. We can imagine building robots that could pass the Turing test that could do all of these things without there being something that it is like to be those robots.

Ah, now we're getting to another root problem with Sam's view of the world. I think that all his meditation training focused on "consciousness and its contents" has left him with his dualist language and a fundamental misunderstanding of what consciousness is. I've spent the past year looking at the definitions and studies of consciousness (summarised here) and found it requires a much more nuanced understanding of how consciousness emerges to varying degrees via a hierarchy of activities. Along the way, there is clear evidence that conscious awareness is required for certain types of learning. (This kind of awareness is possibly what Sam means by "consciousness" but that's not at all clear considering his dabbling in panpsychism.) Also, Dan Dennett's paper on The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies shows just how unimaginable Sam's robots really are.

Scott: Of course we are just our biology. What else would we be? But isn’t it the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we are? You could still say that it means something for the robot to be a unique robot. But don’t you think that the interesting thing is that the biology encompasses all the unique aspects of what Sam Harris is and who Sam Harris is, including your unconsciousness and your consciousness?
Sam: Hmmm. I’m trying to think of how to make this point land…
<<< ROLL PODCAST CREDITS >>>

Wow, what a cliffhanger ending! I shouted, "Yes!" to Scott's question, but let's see what Sam says next time.

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Some Thoughts on Sam Harris' Final Thoughts on Free Will

Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 2/2)

Another Free Will Debate — Kaufman v. Harris (Part 1/2)

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