Why Sam Harris is Wrong about Free Will

In this episode of New Ideal Live, Ben Bayer and Onkar Ghate discuss Sam Harris’s argument against the existence of free will.

Among the topics covered:

Harris’s Humean argument equating causality with causation by prior events;
Why free will doesn’t mean self-creation out of nothing;
Harris’s argument for why we have no introspective experience of free will;
How Harris’s thought experiment involves superficial attention to our experience of freedom;
Why Harris can’t explain why his argument isn’t self-refuting;
Rand’s view of why man is a being of self-made soul;
Whether individuals with certain psychiatric conditions have volition;
The issue of soft determinism (compatibilism).

0:00:00 Introduction
0:03:09 Harris's Humean argument
0:12:29 Free will isn't creation out of nothing
0:15:35 Introspective experience of free will
0:24:57 Weakness in Harris's thought experiment
0:42:16 Harris's argument is self-refuting
0:53:59 Ayn Rand and the self-made soul
0:58:06 Volition in the disabled mind
1:01:41 Soft determinism (compatibilism)

[ylee-whmy]

Where is the part where Sam Harris is wrong about free will? Does it come in a part 2 video? Or did it come in an unaired portion of this discussion?

[scottwilson]

41:40 this is the best point on the movie-choosing section. No, I cannot predict ahead of time what movie will come to my mind first, but that does not characterise every conscious thought.

[PrometheanRising]

He isn't asking you to choose a movie at all. He is more or less triggering you to engage your memory. The second time, once I knew what he was asking for, I made a choice to try for another and actually had to recall another movie that I recently thought about.

To choose a movie, however, would be to recall some number of movies from memory, then pick one.

He is right in a very niggling sense that you don't necessarily choose what you recall, but that just means that there is a part of recollection that IS unconscious or sub-conscious.

I also have an inkling that, for many people, using movie is kind of cheating. Something more difficult to recall would likely require greater cognitive effort to make the recollection and draw attention to the fact that this experiment is about remembering rather than choosing.

[sharonnota]

The lack of free will is a hard pill to swallow. I think Sam's strong emphasis on this subject is to prevent us from judging each other and ourselves so harshly. We make decisions with a brain that we did not design or choose. Intellect, personality, beliefs, motivation and emotions are all dependent on this organ, and several other factors that shape it as we develop that are completely outside of our control. I feel this idea has enabled me to steer away from harmful emotions like pride and shame, and focus my energy on issues that are more worthy of my attention.

[gopibble]

It's apparent neither truly understands, conceptually, Harris’ position and his reasons for it and most of this is simply confusion.

[neoepicurean]

19:20 'if you cannot control your next thought': A total strawman. We may not have absolute control over our next thought, but it's not like we lack ANY control. We have self-correcting behaviour, we can learn, we can habituate ourselves, we can choose to condition responses.

[rogerwelsh]

The belief in free will is one thing in philosophy that I’ve never doubted.
I don’t understand how it isn’t blatantly obvious to everyone. To me it’s just a given

[fab]

I think this is the first time I grasped that one thing wrong with Humean “event-event” causation is that it takes events to be primary. But what actually exists with metaphysically self-sufficient primacy is not events but entities. Events are the (inter-)actions of entities and are dependent on the entities and their nature.

[matthewstroud]

In the part about film choices: where the choosing is happening is the choice to take part in the experiment. Once we take part, mostly we will come up with the same films if we replayed history again and again. Seems to be more an experiment with memory and access to memory rather than choice.

[AslanW]

Sam Harris doesn't even consider these obvious questions:

If everything is determined by anticedent factors, what was the anticedent factor to the initial singularity?

If everything has an anticedent factor, how did it even start?

If everything is determined by anticedent factors, why isn't human consciousness an anticedent factor to free will?

I'm not an objectivism, I haven't read any of Rands work except for paragraphs here and there, but I thoroughly enjoyed this video and I absolutely agree with the conclusion that free will does in fact exist.

[gabrielduran]

It would be helpful if ARI conversed with Sam Harris on his philosophical beliefs of the self. Live conversation can help clarify strawmen in real time.

I follow both Sam and Rand and find it puzzling that they both purport to be upholders of reason and yet Sam thinks self and it's capacity for free will as illusions. Yet Rand thinks they are not illusions. It's hard to know whether they are talking past each other or really do have a fundamental disagreement here. If the latter it would be insightful to see an interaction between someone very educated from ARI and Sam Harris as opposed to just writing articles or video reviews on the matter as I have said before it makes it easier to clarify in realtime.

I am not a professional philosopher and the most I can see is that there is a difference that can be seen at the surface. For Rand reason is volitional and for Harris, reason is not volitional. I don't think Sam Harris has really explored the idea of freedom being found in the psychological area of attention and directing and expanding attention in degrees (i.e. focus). I thought that was enough to see where Sam was going wrong but then I came upon his ideas of self which is really the fundamental issue here. He could grasp Rands definition of focus and still reject free will as free will depends on self and if there is no self, then poof goes free will. I have tried looking for Rands definition of self but have found very little she had to say on the matter other than your self is your mind and that it's an obvious fact. But this isn't sufficient enough all kinds things come from mind such as imagination, memory, etc.

Here is a small sample of where Sam brings up Self, Free Will and Ayn Rand:

[dustbringer]

Great podcast. Summary comments and reflections:

1. The "event-event" or "Humean" model of causation is unduly narrow and not even an especially pellucid construct. It reifies the action of existents as causal primaries as well as privileges the past, and results in a kind of haphazard child's metaphysic of simple momentum transfers. But actions are actions of existents and the past does not exist so it cannot be a causal agent (hence Ben and Onkar's appropriate dismissal of an essentially temporal component to causality and the affirmation of simultaneity). Causal chains are to be understood rather as being born of *what a thing is* - this is of course the Aristotelian appeal to the ineliminabitlity of intrinsic, potential capacities for action - such that identity is always and everywhere an irruption in the causal nexus, and - to continue the metaphor - not all "chains" are linked. On this model there is no struggle or need to reduce this or that action, including volition, to some prior instantiation (which on the Humean model magically gains causal power somehow - note also the vicious regress and necessary invocation of a "prime mover" of a sort which this theory is meant to indict) because causality is reducible to identity and identity is irreducible; powers *caused to be* are not also thereby simply *caused by* their parts; the form (interrelationships and organization) determines the matter also. So understood, volition is assimilated to the identity of an epistemological system of sufficient complexity that it is capable of self-modulated thought and conceptual awareness, that is, it is assimilated to the identity of the human mind. Volition is just another cause, continuous with the self-modulation we observe in other biological systems, and unique because the conditions of its realization are its very deployment, not because having the causal buck stop with identity is somehow an affront to causation. The reputed tension between causality and free will thus becomes entirely illusory, an artifact of a poor and unjustified equation of causality with determinism. I attack this equation further, especially when allied with pretensions about "physical law" here:

2. Objectivism identifies the locus of volition with the ability to raise one's level of awareness to the conceptual level (which is not to be equated with deploying concepts or the making of propositions). Thus Sam's thought experiment, putting aside its attendant and less than spurious introspective reports, has nothing to say to Objectivism precisely because volition for Rand is not a choice of *content* or a form of recall/memory. Ben correctly points out that Sam's assumptions commit him to a model of choice which presupposes a kind of magical foreknowledge, but that this indeed militates against precisely what choice is so often called upon to do, which is (among other things) to adjudicate in the face of uncertainty. In any event, Sam's assumption that a choice of mental content carries with it the propositional assent to or prior knowledge of that same content is merely a variation on a theme shared by plenty of professional epistemologists who also misidentify the locus of volition and put the phenomenological evidence of having no later or spontaneous control over the content of one's beliefs to work in their misguided denials of doxastic voluntarism. Thus Sam's position and his "novel" characterization are both wrong. Some of the profound confusion involved in characterizing volition as an illusion (as though aspersions on misleading appearances were possible or *epistemologically healthy and necessary* without volition, the cause of the fallibility of our abstractions, and as though it would be still be possible to adjudicate the evidence for either without the capacity to choose to conform to the standards of evidence and reason) was insufficiently remarked upon, but I understand these podcasts only get so much time.

3. Ben and Onkar are right to point out that Sam has not really even begun to appreciate the criticism he weakly alludes to at the end, but so have most actual philosophers with rare exceptions. Sam's stunning likening of reason to submission evinces a perspective which has not yet learned to distinguish reason from faith, to distinguish the choice to adopt and self-consciously adhere to the standards of evidence and logic from the spineless submission to whatever comes. Incidentally, I agree with Sam that he did not choose to adhere to precisely these standards in the formation of his beliefs, and that by his own lights his putative knowledge resolves necessarily as an appeal to an automatic conceptual knowledge, i.e., revelation. Objectivism - and I myself for that matter - stand against these invocations of *faith*, and identify determinism as an anti-causality viewpoint precisely because it belies the necessary requirements of conceptual knowledge, which is a specific *causal* product. Moreover, Sam's brand of dime-store philosophy here distracts from an individual's learned implementation of proper thinking methods (for which one must assume responsibility - knowledge is *work*) and a genuine pedagogy of scientific reasoning.

All in all, Sam's arguments and comments are almost always unlearned and downright awful, but I appreciate ARI's efforts to showcase some of the resources Objectivism has at its disposal to crush the pretensions of public intellectuals like Sam and others to the name of science on this issue, and I look forward to these resources' continued exposure and hopefully eventual embodiment in others.

[davidste]

"Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two makes four" - Winston Smith, 1984.

[A_friend_of_Aristotle]

This is as good as it gets with Sam Harris. A thinly disguised excuse for avoiding the consequence(s) of a bad choice. I wonder what bad choices he's rationalizing with this garbage.

With his advice a person could go through life without worrying about the results of his random, non-future divining thoughts. Its likely though that he will eventually end up where this leads other people who have taken the same advice: in prison or an early grave.

[apyorbitz]

I don't know if Sam Harris is right, but I'm not sure the hosts quite understood what he was given their response. Take the "think of a movie" example, both the hosts gave the movies they chose and provided a narrative about why they chose them, for example Casablanca because it's my favorite movie. But why? Why did he decide that his favorite movie was the one to choose? Why is it even his favorite movie? What's the mechanism there? He could have chosen the movie he dislikes the most, or the one with an actor he just read an article about, or any number of criteria.

Additionally the authors mentioned choices they have made as counter examples (they chose to do the thought experiments because they chose to do this podcast), but is the feeling that you are choosing a counter argument to whether your actually could have chosen differently? I don't think so. How deep can you go saying "why" and still have an explanation?

[ExistenceUniversity]

28:00
Where is the freedom in having to choose "The Wizard of Oz" given infinite replays of the moment. Sam Harris here thinks that free will is when, if you could go back in time, you'd choose a new random answer every time repeat the event, which actually means that he thinks free will is the path you choose at random from all the available degrees of freedom presented to you. He believes in a multiverse where every choice you make creates a spilt into multiple pathways of "choice". If you eat breakfast you go down Path A, you decide to skip breakfast continue to Path B. In this way, every individual is reading a make your own adventure book of their own life, and it seems up to you make the choice of which path to choice, but first your next choice is going to be based on the paths you "chose" which lead you to this point, and second, if you back him into a corner he can always turn to the adventure book is already written, you are just multiverse You #543 who is stuck on this path.


Also, I definitely would have come up with Wizard of Oz if I actually played along.

[libertarianonwheels]

One seminal aspect of human cognition is, in fact, the faculty of choice. This would include deliberation, action, and outcome. To deny the Power of Choice is to exercise it simultaneously. I am a man of faith, but I believe an empirical case for free will can be made.

[rvc]

I don't understand Onkar's argument around 15 minutes. Harris claimed that because you didn't picked your parents or jenes you don't have free will. Why do you need somone else to make this argument. For Harris if you didn't pick your genes or environment you can't have free will, that's all he said. He's wrong but he didn't made up a straw man.

[adamsmith]

31:02 YES! All the other choices that we make in life where we deliberate between the pros and cons are SIGNIFICANTLY more constrained because the pros and cons are INFLUENCING you. When you're choosing to pick a film than you're not being hit with nearly as many influences compared to if you're choosing whether or not to propose to your significant other.In the latter you're going to be hit with all sorts of constraints when deliberating such as whether this person is worth marrying, how marriage will impact my life act. All of those thoughts are pulling your strings and causing you to deliberate one way or another. It baffles me that this is even a discussion, but than again there are actual professors out there that hold tenure at universities who believe in a magical sky daddy. It'll be a while before we as a society come to accept the truth that free will an illusion.

[diegomorales]

Ed Locke summarized it in a memorable way. You can choose what to think, and the proof of this is your direct observation of you doing it.