Sam Harris - The Illusion of Free Will

Excerpt from The Moral Landscape, a MUST read for anyone, Sam discusses the concept that our perception of free will is merely an illusion generated by our mechanistic brains.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• psychology
• philosophy
• science
• atheism

[markviman]

@HannuMarijarvi In other words, your lending gravity to the notion that something was *chosen - free or not*. Well, if it isn't free, then you're not entitled to do that; you're just arbitrarily picking a domino and saying that it caused the catastrophe. Without free will, the choice isn't all that special - all in all, just another brick in the wall.

[markviman]

@HannuMarijarvi genes came from your parents, who got their genes from their parents, and so on till you go all the way back to the big bang. Now if you take a step back and see this sea of dominos systematically falling, doesn't it seem arbitrary and self-serving to point your finger to dominos #129293 through 12980 (which represent the conscious willing of pulling the trigger)? Any and all of the other dominos are just as responsible. With free will, the buck stops at intention formation.

[HannuMarijarvi]

@markviman This very argument is actually directly addressed in the book.

[markviman]

@HannuMarijarvi Suppose I shoot you deliberately and the police come. I say, "officer, I didn't hurt Hannu, the bullet did." The cop or judge says, "yeah, but you made the bullet hit him." I say, "no, the explosion of the gun powder did." They say, "yeah, but you made that happen." And I say, "no, the trigger being pressed did." And this goes on and on. Eventually we get to neuronal activity. But why stop there? The chain of causality goes to the genes and environment too, and your ...

[markviman]

@HannuMarijarvi I understand, but I the issue has arisen in my studies. My diagnosis of the problem is the problem of arbitrariness. If we suppose that determinism is true, then you can view the world like an enormous set of dominos that are lined up. The Big Bang represents domino number 1, we'll say, and #1 hits #2, which hits #3, and so on. Eventually we get to human beings and their brain, genes, and environment, with each component down to the last neuron and sway of the hand...cont

[HannuMarijarvi]

@markviman That's great but I don't think you have heard these because it doesn't seem to me like you understand them.

Lack of free will for example wouldn't at all cause you to think of people as tornadoes, because even if the behavior is not freely chosen it's still chosen. Maybe not consciously chosen, but chosen by the person anyway: The person thought about it and came to a conclusion. Tornadoes don't predict the consequences of their own actions, people do. World of difference.

[markviman]

@HannuMarijarvi I wrote the book title down and hopefully will check it out. Thanks for the rec. I should mention - not to sound all high and mighty - that I have a bachelor's in philosophy and took a 300 level course entirely devoted to the topic of free will, plus I did a metaphysics research paper on libertarian ontologies. That doesn't make me infallible, but there's a sporting chance that I've heard many of the arguments before. Really, I have.

[HannuMarijarvi]

@markviman I can see honest thought and effort from you though so good job. These issues are really tricky to think about.

[HannuMarijarvi]

@markviman I hope I don't sound like I have ill will towards you because I seriously don't, but you are really confused about this issue. Read Pinker's book.

I'm so glad we have Pinker. I agree 100% with the book so you can just take the whole book as my argument to you. Everything you raise here is fairly addressed in it, and you will come to laugh at having said something so silly as "Without free will I'd view you in the same way as a shark or a tornado". Honestly.

[markviman]

@HannuMarijarvi You also say that being retarded is not an immoral act. True, but the thing in question is disvaluable, bad, and undesirable. It would be a significant facet of a person's existence and personal identity. The point is, retards didn't freely choose to have their disease. W/o free will, choice would be an illusion; the explanation why an agent acts (freely or not) is very important; it's a game changer