esoteriic.com

This article concerns the work of Sam Harris and his writing on free will. I haven't read the author's book but I did read an article by him which you can find here: Life without free will. It is one of the few things I've read recently where I haven't felt an immediate knee jerk reaction against it; I disdain reactionary discussion and always try my best to walk away and calm down before replying. Fortunately, that wasn't the case here. I agree with the overall sentiment but I disagree with some of the details. His main argument here is (as I understand it) that many things are pre-determined due to genetics and socio-economic factors that are outwith the control of a single human. That latter clause is something I've inferred although is not perhaps stated so explicitly. Ultimately, this 'smells' like an article that asks the reader to consider their philosophical genealogy: "your worldview is determined by your background / upbringing + a dash of genetics". For me the main thrust of the article is not new but some of the details and analogies are not something I've come across in previous works.

I'll take some quotations from the article and give some comments on them.

The author points out a few criticisms that his work has received, most of it has been from a naive perspective but his defence is not as strong as it could be. From inference the author is an atheist and is of course doubtful on the concept of freewill but (from inference) he isn't in complete denial of a the Universe having a mildly non-deterministic future. To be clearer: a lack free will strongly implies a deterministic future. While everything in the Universe follows a pattern which is statistically predictable the outcome of an event is not guaranteed and hence not completely determinable.

Chaos theory applies to complicated systems which are in principle deterministic if you know how all the variables relate to each other, that is you would know their initial values and then the rules that govern them for all time. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, requires an inherent non-determinism and hence probabilistic relations of causality. In the latter statement you can't assume that the outcome is "completely random" or "completely unknowable", there are still laws that give you a range of allowed outcomes and each individual outcome has an assigned probability. I'll leave out Feynman's path integral considerations with sums of infinitely many outcomes which is an interesting topic but is straying into more advanced territory than I was aiming for.

"Many religious people allege against atheism: Without a belief in God, human beings will cease to be good to one another."

As I see it good is a relative value judgement, you must first understand what is meant by good before you can determine whether belief in god precludes the existence of good. The existence of a phenomenological being, God, allows for a phenomenological basis for the definition of good: a definition that is truly universal, one that is independent of the existence of humans and would be true of all life in the entire Universe. If God does exist then this Universal idea of good might exist but that also precludes that God has told us what this universal definition of good is. For theists they will point to their holy books and show their version of absolute good. It is no surprise that they complain that atheists can have no absolute notion of good, but it is more far fetched to say that atheist has no concept of good. An atheist should disdain any phenomenological / universal definition of good, but it is acceptable for them to believe in an inherent set of principles that all humans are born with and have developed in an evolutionary way. That is to say that there might be an inherent ''definition'' of good that can be found in all humans but that does not implicate that it is universal in the sense of the Universe (i.e. independent of human existence).

This latter point of inherent human properties is what I believe Sam Harris is promoting in his work. I'm not overly familiar with his work so I shouldn't try to put too many words into his mouth. That said, I do see some indications in the above article that suggests I am correct in this assertion. I would also point to the work of psychologist Ramachandran who does believe in universal morality but he it wasn't obvious from his lectures that he believed the origin of this set of morality to be phenomenological. The evolution of the brain is key to understanding what properties are inheritable. If we look at a psychopath then we might see a deficiency in the regions of the brain that are responsible for empathy (mirror neurons, if memory serves me correctly), therefore the definition of good if it is based upon empathy is heuristic. It is a trend in a population of humans, perhaps it is true for humans worldwide (probably), but it isn't a strict infallible law.

It is from this reasoning that I believe the author is arguing for a lack of free will in human society from the basis of heuristic determinism. We are most likely to behave in a way that correlates to our genes/ brain development and then socio-economic background. I don't want to boil this down to the overly simplistic (and frustrating) dichotomy of nature versus nurture: heuristics are important, consider the trends rather than just the outliers. This agrees with the authors logic that in order to become a surgeon you need the appropriate necessaries from nature and nurture, and that if you suffer from ill luck along the path to being a surgeon then it is still possible that your destiny is elsewhere. This is where the author is allowing for some non-determinism but he offers caution that free will is less of a non-deterministic phenomenon that most people believe it is.

"how can evil people be held responsible for their actions? In the deepest sense, it seems, they can’t be."

The use of the word evil here suggests that people can do bad things, where we accept bad is an opposite of good which is already a human-defined term. If good stems from, say, empathy then bad stems from a lack of empathy. If someone is born with a lack of empathy, such as a bear is born with a lack of empathy for humans, then how can such people be held accountable for their actions? Is there enough of the ''correct'' stuff in their brain that could have allowed them to choose not to be bad, hence they have enough free will to overcome an inherent condition. This higher realm of rationality is no doubt missing in many people too, therefore it seems less likely that certain people can be fully accountable for their actions. They acted wrongly (as the consensus sees it) but were unable to help themself. This isn't a million miles away from court cases involving people that commit murder but lack the rationality to consider the consequences.

But a smoking gun example of premeditated ''evil'' would be someone who is judged to be sane and has no appreachable brain defects relative to the consensus of the population. Those examples are less animalistic, less about the inherent properties of the brain and more about the non-deterministic aspect of free will (the luck part of it).

"In fact, I think that keeping the deep causes of human behavior in view would only improve our practical response to evil."

As a caveat the use of the word evil is too close to having a phenomenological basis for my liking. That is to say that this concept is somehow independent of humans in the Universe. For theists that is true, but for atheists is shouldn't be true. I've pointed this out several times in previous articles.

"A person’s conscious thoughts, intentions, and efforts at every moment are preceded by causes of which he is unaware. What is more, they are preceded by deep causes—genes, childhood experience, etc.—for which no one, however evil, can be held responsible. Our ignorance of both sets of facts gives rise to moral illusions. "

Exactly! The genealogy of your worldview is dependent on many factors, many of which you haven't consciously chosen. A classic statement of hypocritical idiocy from my own experience is that when someone told me that "All Tory and Labour supporters are idiots because they only vote for those parties because their parents did." Naturally I asked him if his parents voted for the Lib Dems like he did, and the answer is not astounding: "yes". Wow! The apple really fell far from the tree. I don't think he considered this belief to be a contradiction. At no point in his life do I think he went through a process of a re-evaluation of values; a nihilistic process to determine if the truths you hold are infact true in any universal sense, or if they are true because the genealogy of your worldview makes them appear true.

In simpler terms: killing is wrong because my parents and school teachers told me so, and all my friends agree with me. This does not strike me as well considered point of view where any philosophical effort has been exerted. People that start life with a particular point of view with regards to politics and don't evolve through teenage, and young adult years, make me deeply suspicious of their points of view. This would be most people, then. :-P

"Recognizing that my conscious mind is always downstream from the underlying causes of my thoughts, intentions, and actions does not change the fact that thoughts, intentions, and actions of all kinds are necessary for living a happy life—or an unhappy one, for that matter."

Worth baring in mind, I'll say little else here.

"The negative effects that people worry about—a lack of motivation, a plunge into nihilism—are simply not evident in my life. And the positive effects have been obvious."

A risk-free approach to expanding your understanding of human nature? I'm not going to be so quick as to suggest that is true. The title of the article is a lack of free will but the precise definition that the author alludes to is one that is only heuristically deterministic, not completely deterministic. So there is still a need for motivation as the outcome cannot be completely known, merely assigned some probability. Nihilism, as an end point, where nothing has value is independent of any consideration of free will. Naturally, people associate nihilism with pessimism or depression but they merely correlated: it isn't a causal process with probability of one given by some universal law. Some people may become depressed from considering the possibility of no free will but that isn't the same thing as nihilism.

"Understanding the true causes of human behavior does not leave any room for the traditional notion of free will."

I agree with the overall sentiment that a truer understanding of human behaviour requires that we re-evaluate our understanding of free will but I call into question the use of ''traditional'' here. The modern consensus use of "free will" is not the same as historical/philosophical considerations of the term, I may need to review the historical context of the phrase but I'm less inclined to say "everything that has gone before is wrong" (in the context of free will).