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.

6 Comments

Mark R Barna

4/20/2021 09:12:02 pm

I found Sam's discussion of self and free will with Scott Barry and Sam's "Final Thoughts" on free will highly illuminating. It cleared up some points that I was confused by from his book and lectures. I will go further: I had a major tragedy happen to me last summer in which I lost a lot. Sam's book helped me out, and his recent posts you speak about have filled in gaps. I have maybe a handful of books that have actually changed me. "Waking Up" is one of them. But you have to practice mindfulness/meditation and take it all seriously.

4/21/2021 05:22:34 pm

"From a consequentialist point of view, retributivism makes no sense."

This is true only in a dead universe. If you possess any intelligent friends or enemies, their knowledge of your non-retributivism policy _will_ have consequences.

John A. Johnson link

4/21/2021 07:59:47 pm

As I wrote before, Harris and Dennett are talking about two different kinds of freedom. Let's call them F1 and F2. If Harris is claiming that F1 does not exist, Dennett is not debunking that claim by demonstrating that F2 exists.

Harris's F1 is the claim that I could have intentionally done otherwise under the exact same conditions. He says that this is what ordinary people mean by free will—the feeling that, if I were able to travel back to some point in time when I chose A instead of B, that I could have chosen B instead. But if we assume determinism (and both Harris and Dennett assume determinism), if we went back in time and all the factors that determined choice A were still there, then I would choose A again. I do not have the ability to choose B under the exact same circumstances. Choice A was inevitable at that point in time.

What Dennett does with his automobile example, though, is what Harris calls "changing the subject." Whereas Harris is talking about the ability to have behaved differently under the exact same circumstances, Dennett changes the subject to the ability to have behaved differently if you changed some of the circumstances, in this case, the amount of pressure on the gas pedal. Dennett is talking about F2. But demonstrating F2 is not a refutation of an argument against F1.

Dennett doesn't think it is worth talking about F1. He agrees with Harris that if we have exactly the same causal factors, then only one intentional result can obtain (we have to say "intentional" because nondeterministic, random factors could cause a different outcome. But random accidents are not a matter of intention). Determinism is the view that the set of causal factors determining an intentional choice at a specific point in time fully determines the particular choice that they cause. No other choice is possible. Dennett is a determinist, so he grants that F1 cannot exist. He just does not want to discuss it because he finds F2 more interesting, and he thinks that ordinary people are more interested in F2.

Dennett may be right about ordinary people caring more about F2. I care about (although it is not clear whether I am ordinary). F2 has enormous, practical consequences. It is about changing in a positive direction over time, becoming better educated, learning how to manage your impulses, making reason-based decisions.

But the existence and importance of F2 does not debunk claims of the nonexistence of F1.

Concerning the Harris thought experiment where you observe yourself coming up with the names of three films and then choosing one of them. It is the case that when you come up with the three films, you cannot explain why you came up with these three films. Neither can you explain why you chose one of the three films as your final choice. The process by which this happens is beyond conscious control. It would not matter if you changed the instructions to choose the top 20 films based on return on investment. By that instruction, I am assuming, Ed, that you don't meaning Googling to find the correct answer. The potential great-investment-films that come to my mind are still doing so for reasons beyond my conscious awareness. As I apply my subjective estimates of the amount of money invested in these films and the amount of money they made, I am again unaware of how I do this. There are always unconscious determinants of my thoughts beyond conscious, intentional control.

Scott Barry Kaufman studied creativity for a long time before he got into humanistic psychology. He'll tell you what we all should already know, that creativity is still a mysterious process. We can do creative problem solving in ways that advance our self-interest, but we do not know how we come up with creative solutions. It is usually when we are not trying that the creative solution appears.

Ed, you suggest that free will might be "the ability to hold onto a train of thought rather than pinging among these random upsurges." Have you noticed that sometimes you can hold onto a train of thought easily, but sometimes when you really want and need to hold onto a train of thought, you cannot manage it? Being able to hold onto a train of thought is not always easily chosen. Maybe you can improve this ability by putting in hundreds of hours of practice. But not everyone is able to stay with the hundreds of hours of practice to do this.

As to whether compatibilists are doing a bait and switch when they include all unconscious processes as part of the self, this depends on whether we are talking about sophisticated persons like Ed Gibney and Daniel Dennett or ordinary people on the street. You and I and Dennett (and I think Sam Harris, too) are fine with including the unconscious processes of the brain and entire body as part of a biological definition of "self." But the ordinary person on the street who wants to take credit for achievements and vilify others for misbehavior does not take that broad view of "self." Ordinary peopl

John A. Johnson

4/21/2021 08:04:23 pm

Looks like I hit a word limit on my previous reply. Let me continue.

As to whether compatibilists are doing a bait and switch when they include all unconscious processes as part of the self, this depends on whether we are talking about sophisticated persons like Ed Gibney and Daniel Dennett or ordinary people on the street. You and I and Dennett (and I think Sam Harris, too) are fine with including the unconscious processes of the brain and entire body as part of a biological definition of "self." But the ordinary person on the street who wants to take credit for achievements and vilify others for misbehavior does not take that broad view of "self." Ordinary people discount the unconscious determinants of behavior, insisting that everyone could have behaved otherwise in a particular situation. In fact, for praise, credit, blame, and retribution only make sense to the ordinary person by assuming libertarian free will. Libertarian free will might be a straw man to determinist philosophers, but ordinary people have a very hard time understanding determinism (this has been demonstrated empirically) and therefore can't articulate a coherent compatibilist position. There are a lot of free will libertarians running loose on the street. They are not straw men.

Schopenhauer wrote "Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will." This is often translated as "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." This is a slightly confusing translation because the German "will" can refer both to the act of willing (making a choice) and to wanting (desiring something). So, a better translation is, "Man can do what he finds desirable, but he cannot determine what he finds desirable." I have the "free will" to choose to go buy some ice cream, but I do not have the free will to choose whether ice cream is delicious to me or not. For Dennett, it is sufficient to talk about freedom as the ability to choose the things that we desire, as long as those things are not grossly unhealthy or harmful to us and others in the long run. But Harris would point out, following Schopenhauer, that what we desire is largely out of conscious control. Just as much as the production of blood cells is out of our conscious control. Dennett was lucky to be born with his genes and into an environment that determined the emergence of desires (that he did not consciously choose) that have led to positive outcomes for himself and people who read his books and listen to his lectures. But other people are unlucky to have been born with other kinds of genes into horrible environments that led to desires harmful to themselves and others. The noble idea of free will isn't going to help them. Causal interventions might.

Ed Gibney link

4/22/2021 03:14:44 pm

Thank you very much for the thoughtful response John! I very much agree with what you are saying and wish you were the populariser of determinism rather than Sam Harris. When I write these posts and end up reacting poorly to Sam's arguments, it's not because I believe in the opposite, but because I see the nuance that you are elegantly laying out here. I'll do my best to explain that in my next post, and hopefully it will help create something that illuminates and gives structure to all the pieces and parts of F1 and F2 (as you put it) so that it ultimately becomes easier to discuss the multiple concepts that are all bound up in "free will".

Let me just make a few comments about your posts though.

Sorry, but I was assuming you could Google the movie question and get the right answer. And that would involve different paths for different people based on what they would ask and find on Google. You are right that this also involves differences between people, and even between different times of day for the same person, but my point is that this experience is still very different than the one Sam put ALL his stock behind of choosing a random movie (3 times). This doesn't drive me to say we have ultimate, libertarian, free will. It drives me to say that there is a gradation of experience and causation here that matters and is recognisable and important to people. As was often said in "Just Deserts", this presents a kind of "sorites paradox" in this free will debate where it seems like we are adding one grain of freedom at a time and having to decide when to take the growing heap of freedom and slap the label "free will" on it or not. To me, it's important to see that Sam Harris is too simplistic in saying it's all zero free will and zero responsibility, just as anyone else would be wrong in saying it's 100% free will and 100% responsibility.

This brings me to your point about ordinary people. I have no doubt the masses are confused about this. If I had had any doubt about that before, it would have been washed away completely when Sam Harris tweeted at me two days ago and my timeline immediately became overwhelmed by ordinary folks arguing the issue with passionate certainty on each side of the debate. I'm not interested in arguing with them....yet. I'm interested in teasing out the right nuanced position between Sam, Dan, Gregg, yourself, and other thoughtful professionals. Once I'm clearer about that myself (which for me requires a writing and re-writing and re-writing process), then I'll be better prepared to engage with folk. (Even at the length of twitter replies.)

Looks like your German lessons are paying off! I loved your breakdown of that famous Schopenhauer quote. Thanks for sharing that insight! To me, that is very aligned with Dan Dennett's love of his evolutionarily evolved puppet strings. That's an important part of the puzzle for sure.

Oh and creativity is certainly an interesting and complex phenomenon. I haven't read Scott's work on it, although I have listened to every single one of his podcasts so I have heard it in drips and drabs. I also did a bit of research on it for my short story "Creativity". One of my favourite facts in there was that some African languages don't even have a word for creativity since nothing comes from nothing. To them, it's all just combinations of existing things. That's how I see it too. And the more exposure our brains have to different ideas, the more degrees of freedom it has to make novel new connections between those different ideas. That's yet another example of the ontogeny of "free will". (Perhaps better described as the sum of F(1) to F(infinity)???)

Thanks again, John. Your attention and intentions are always a great help.

John A. Johnson link

4/22/2021 03:40:47 pm

I always enjoy reading your blog and contributing when I can, Ed. I look forward to seeing your next, nuanced consideration of these issues. I don't envy your dealing with all the Twitter chatter--that is a very difficult channel for meaningful communication. I have a Twitter account but rarely use it. And I suffered through enough debates about free will my amateur philosophers on Usenet groups back in the 1980s to want to talk about it with ordinary people any more. In fact, the phrase "free will" is so fraught that I strongly prefer to simply talk about "freedom." After all, the name of Dennett's book is Freedom Evolves, not Free Will evolves. I think some of the misgivings that people have about Dennett's ideas would go away if everyone avoided the phrase "free will" and simply discussed the multifaceted concept of freedom.

Some Thoughts on Sam Harris' Final Thoughts on Free Will

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