Sam Harris on The Illusion of Free Will -1/3

An excerpt from The Moral Landscape

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-moral-landscape/

"The illusion of free will is itself an illusion "

also see this related video:
BBC Horizon - The Secret You
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Biv_8xjj8E

Read the book.

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/505638-the-moral-landscape-q-a-with-sam-ha...

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[AscendingParadigm]

phenomenological glockenspiel 

[MsPerduta]

@DrMadolite

That's because you quote it out of context. The alternative of head butting the ball as a soccer enthusiast or not ducking because I believe the ball to be an illusion created by 3D cinema. I show that at least 3 possible responses are based on rational and conscious decision rather than instinctive reaction.

You don't have to take my word for it. There are whole websites by proper academic experts denouncing Sam Harris fake pretence of scientific basis.

[MsPerduta]

@TomfromExeter

@" Sam Harris for president."

No Sam Harris believes in hiding inconvenient truth for the sake of greater good. Sam Harris endorses unprovoked military intervention on foreign soil. To Sam Harris education is just a way of programming machines.

A presidential Sam Harris would be in the same league as Kim Li Sung.

[TomfromExeter]

If there's no free will (and it's a strong argument!) then that really underlines the importance of bringing up and educating children well and promoting a just and moral society for them to live in. Sam Harris for president.

[DrMadolite]

@MsPerduta "I would have consciously chosen not to override my instinctive impulse". By that statement, you have no way of differentiating between free will and instincive reaction. Your statement becomes a paradox.

[MsPerduta]

@DrMadolite

No it proves my point. If I didn't know it wasn't real then I would have consciously chosen to not override my instinctive impulse and I would have ducked. OTOH if I had been a soccer hero I might have deliberately tried to head-butt the ball. So you see I had free will to decide one way or the other at that time.

[DrMadolite]

@MsPerduta but what if you didn't know that it was a 3D cinema? your logic is flawed.

[MsPerduta]

@Gnomefro

I think it false to pretend we are deterministic automata without free will, just because we are not supernatural. The response that determinists developed ages ago is clearly unsound.

Somewhere I posted about a soccer ball hurtling towards me. My instinctive impulse was to duck, but then my logic kicked in and told me I was in a 3D cinema and that the ball was not real so I did not act on my impulse. That is conscious free will.

I can even make a choice now about future events...

[Gnomefro]

@MsPerduta The determinist would go something like : if true randomness exists, then choices exist only to the extent determinism holds, and it must hold to a large extent because we are able to predict a wide range of events in the world. This of course includes human choices. Both on the subjective level of it not being a mystery to us what people we know will do and in experimental settings with brain measurements predicting actions.

[Gnomefro]

@MsPerduta "IMO that is good enough to refute Sam's theory without attributing free will to elementary particles."

Not really. Determinists have developed responses to this ages ago. Namely that things that are not determined by prior conditions are not choices, precisely because they are not determined by prior conditions. You want there to be a relationship with what's going on and what you decide to do. Otherwise "free will" is a synonym for "shit happens".