00:00:00.000 I think there's something to be said for the sounds, there are the rustic sounds of making
00:00:05.520 a podcaster courting outside rather than choosing to be all refined inside of a studio.
00:00:11.960 You might be thinking there's something to be said for how terrible it sounds.
00:00:16.040 Whatever the case, this is just a brief response to Sam Harris's latest epic podcast on
00:00:23.560 the topic of free will. Sam and I have both been engaged with making many, many remarks
00:00:30.640 and many postings on this topic. Sam, of course, has written a book defending the thesis
00:00:36.880 that free will does not exist. And I think that remains the best defence of that position.
00:00:43.560 So towards the beginning of the podcast, Sam seems to start by speaking about the feeling
00:00:50.200 of free will. Now, this is consistent with the way in which Sam speaks about many other
00:00:57.080 topics. Epistemology, for example, is often about belief or about confidence or about certainty.
00:01:04.520 Morality is about the feeling of well-being or simply happiness or other kinds of emotions.
00:01:11.080 I think that concentrating upon feelings and emotions when it comes to objective matters
00:01:18.280 of truth can be misleading. It's not that feelings and emotions are entirely irrelevant
00:01:25.200 when you have these discussions. And of course, our most valuable and important experiences
00:01:31.680 as human beings certainly do come down to the way in which we feel about those experiences
00:01:38.360 that we have. Joyful experiences are the most profoundly positive parts of our lives,
00:01:45.480 terrifying, saddening, rage-filled moments among the worst kinds of experiences that humans
00:01:54.040 can have. But I think because emotions are the very thing that calls us distraction moment
00:02:03.880 to moment, are the things that occupy our minds moment to moments so often. It can cause
00:02:12.200 some philosophers to see them as significant not only for the personal lives of human beings,
00:02:19.720 but also objectively important in their own right in the sense that they have significance,
00:02:27.320 not only for individual human lives, but for the way in which knowledge is created,
00:02:35.320 what makes moral claims true or false, or indeed in this case, whether or not an abstract reality
00:02:43.800 of free will exists or not, that it comes down to whether an individual has a perception of
00:02:51.720 that particular thing or not, that particular concept or not, and that lacking that particular
00:02:58.520 feeling, sensational perception, or indeed experience of, let's say, free will in this case,
00:03:04.680 would mean that the free will does not exist, that because you do not have the perception of free
00:03:10.520 will, then therefore free will does not exist. I want to say that this is a kind of epistemological
00:03:18.920 error, and it leads to an ontological error. It leads to one saying that therefore a certain
00:03:25.800 thing doesn't exist by virtue of the fact one doesn't have an experience of it. Free will, to my
00:03:32.920 mind, is not primarily about the experience, although I can defend the idea, and I have done so,
00:03:39.720 that free will is an experience that one can have. So let's just flag that up front, that I think
00:03:46.520 that just because someone searches for a thing x and fails to find it does not mean that thing
00:03:54.120 x does not exist. How many religious people have made this claim with respect to atheists,
00:04:00.120 that just because they, the religious person, cannot show you God. That does not mean God does not
00:04:06.280 exist. Now I'm an atheist, but I think it's a fair point, that if your argument is just because
00:04:13.080 you haven't found it, doesn't mean that thing doesn't exist. There are many such things in this
00:04:18.120 category. Just an interlude, which I've recorded after doing the rest of that podcast. It's one of
00:04:25.080 these things where talking about these issues frequently enough, you tend to think certain things
00:04:30.840 go without saying, but I think that this probably doesn't go without saying, but one example of
00:04:36.760 something in this category, where, of course, if you, or not one example of a thing in this
00:04:42.200 category, many such things in this category, things which you don't have direct experience of, but
00:04:47.960 which you know exist is just about everything in science. Just about everything of interest in science
00:04:53.160 is not something that we have direct access to, not something that we can see. And simply saying,
00:04:58.840 you can't see that you can't observe that therefore it doesn't exist, would be a ridiculous
00:05:04.200 non sequitur. For example, we do not see the Big Bang, but we know the Big Bang must have existed
00:05:12.360 as an event. Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago. We know that, but no one can see, no one can
00:05:19.720 observe the Big Bang. What we observe is the cosmic microwave background radiation 13.7 billion
00:05:25.320 years later. We observe the Hubble expansion of the universe. Galaxy's red shifted, moving a part
00:05:31.000 one from another. We observe the ratio of hydrogen to helium. Okay, we don't observe, we don't see,
00:05:37.320 no one has an experience over a perception of dinosaurs. We have the experience of patterns in rocks
00:05:43.960 that we call fossils. No one typically has the experience of actually observing atoms, but we know
00:05:50.760 they're there. No one has the experience or will have the experience, even in principle, given what
00:05:56.760 we know about science of literally the fusion reactions taking place inside the Sun right now
00:06:03.720 that causes the light to fall upon the surface of the Earth. What we instead have is an
00:06:08.440 experience of light falling upon the surface of the Earth and then a very long chain of explanation,
00:06:15.160 stretching all the way from here at the Earth to the surface of the Sun and then into the internal
00:06:20.920 workings of the core of the Sun. In other words, we explain the scene in terms of the unseen.
00:06:27.720 We explain the observed in terms of the unobserved. So we need to keep that in mind as we move
00:06:32.760 forward in this podcast that either haveling an observation or not is not the thing which
00:06:40.600 caches out whether or not something is true in reality. The purpose of an observation is as a
00:06:46.120 criticism of a particular theory. That's what observations do. And in the ideal case, we have two
00:06:51.800 competing theories and the observations can decide between them. And when we talk about this free
00:06:57.960 will issue, what we're going to have to decide is what is a good explanation. For example,
00:07:04.040 of people's behavior, because that's really what we're trying to figure out here. Why is it
00:07:08.440 the people choose to do one thing rather than another? Now, we can try and deny the existence
00:07:14.120 of free will, which I find rather synonymous with the capacity to create explanations.
00:07:20.120 For reasons beyond scope of what I'm saying here and now, there are various other links that I'll
00:07:25.160 provide beneath the video, the YouTube version of this, to my other writings on this topic where
00:07:29.960 I suggest following some of the things that are said in the beginning of infinity, that perhaps
00:07:37.080 consciousness, free will, the creative capacity of human beings, all of this stuff, all quite
00:07:44.120 mysterious, may be tied up together to be one single overarching mysterious quality at the moment,
00:07:51.560 mysterious quality of people that makes them qualitatively different to other animal species that
00:07:56.920 exist on the planet. And one convenient way of talking is simply free will. Okay, so back to the
00:08:03.320 main part of the podcast now. Now, there are other reasons we might reject. Godlets say of
00:08:09.560 supernatural beings. It's not merely on the basis that we can't find them, that we don't have
00:08:14.280 evidence for them, but rather no explanation is improved by postulating their existence. And that's
00:08:20.760 the reason ultimately that we dismiss certain entities as existing. If an entity is posited to
00:08:28.440 exist but serves no explanatory purpose, then it's metaphysical baggage and we can do away with it.
00:08:36.360 When it comes to free will, some people might claim that they have no experience of free will.
00:08:43.240 Others might say that they do have an experience of free will and we're at loggerheads. We can only
00:08:48.040 appeal to our internal subject of states. But free will stands apart from this claim. Free will
00:08:56.440 is an explanation of what people do and why. And we will come to this. I've talked at length
00:09:03.800 about this and written at length about this in various places. And I think the strongest argument
00:09:09.800 that remains is that free will is this emergent, abstract concept. Now, abstractions have physical
00:09:17.480 effects in the real world. This is shown by David Deutsch's wonderful Winston Churchill copper
00:09:24.360 atom argument that appears in the fabric of reality. I've talked about that before elsewhere.
00:09:30.040 And if I repeat it again now, it's going to be for about the 10th time. So I won't bore listeners
00:09:35.880 with that again. Please see the other podcast linked to alongside of this one for the Winston Churchill
00:09:43.320 copper atom argument. Now Sam says that removing free will from our epistemology, our morality
00:09:50.840 or just broadly our philosophy means that we will no longer have a rational basis for hating people.
00:09:58.360 But I think we can have free will and yet still have no rational basis for hating people.
00:10:05.720 As we say for those of us who subscribe to some of the ideas in the beginning of infinity,
00:10:12.200 what a person is is an explainer. A special kind of explainer, they're a universal explainer.
00:10:20.920 That essentially, I shouldn't say essentially, but what we can explain a person to be is an
00:10:27.320 explanation generator. That's what they do. We model the universe, we try and figure out what's going on,
00:10:32.920 we're a problem solver. There are many synonyms which all mean rough to the same thing,
00:10:37.480 pointing the same direction as to what a person really is. And given that description of what a
00:10:44.440 person is, that explanation of what a person is, one need not hate other people. Even if people
00:10:51.080 behave badly, if they have bad ideas, we can hate those ideas. We can direct our hatred towards
00:10:57.000 particular ideas, but people should not be identified with the ideas they have. Now Sam is an expert
00:11:05.080 at having people think carefully about their inner state, their inner thoughts, their subjective
00:11:13.560 experience of the world. In other words, what it's like to be conscious. And these thought
00:11:20.600 experiments he attempts to reveal to the listener, or to the reader in some cases, that not only
00:11:28.440 is free will and illusion and illusion, but that the entire concept of free will is a non-starter.
00:11:36.840 It is incoherent from the get-go. Okay, so let me turn this around on Sam. I think that this is
00:11:47.000 rather like arguing that cars don't exist. Now this seems absurd, but of course if you are
00:11:55.160 somebody who subscribed to the notion of free will, if you think you really do have the
00:12:01.560 sensation of free will and someone a professional philosopher says that you do not, then it can
00:12:08.280 seem to be just as absurd to be told that free will is an incoherent concept. So I want you to
00:12:16.600 reflect for a moment about how you get from A to B in the morning, let's say as you go to work,
00:12:24.680 and presuming you drive to work. So think about your journey, you're off to work in the morning,
00:12:32.760 and you go out into the garage or wherever the car happens to be parked and you start your engine.
00:12:40.360 And you have an experience, what you think is an experience of the car taking you from your
00:12:47.720 driveway, along back streets and perhaps highways to finally ending up in the parking bay
00:12:54.760 of your office or wherever your workplace happens to be. Now to most people, this makes it seem
00:13:01.000 like the car really has been the reason why you made it to work. But I want to say that there really
00:13:09.080 is no place in reality for the car. There is no car, that was an illusion. The entire concept of the
00:13:18.440 car is actually incoherent. In fact, all there has been in terms of our not only scientific
00:13:26.520 understanding, but your subjective sensation of what's going on are combustion reactions,
00:13:33.160 although in many cases a lithium ion redox reactions if you've got an electric car at Tesla. It's
00:13:39.320 basically the conversion of chemical energy of a kind into kinetic energy, matter undergoing
00:13:46.840 transformations. To say that it was the car that got you from A to B is to ignore so much of what
00:13:53.960 we know both objectively as a matter of science and subjectively what you're experiencing,
00:14:01.000 what you're experiencing other sounds. These are the sounds of combustion reactions or of
00:14:06.280 chemical reactions. These are the sounds of chemistry becoming movement and emotion. We might even
00:14:14.840 say that everything we know about chemistry and physics to this point tells us that something like
00:14:22.120 the car isn't real. It's just a convenient way that some people have of speaking, but it's
00:14:29.000 terribly misleading. In fact, it's worse than that. It's a lie and it's a lie because the car
00:14:35.160 itself is a fictional term invented by people labeling nothing that is truly there. Now, if you
00:14:42.040 think I'm being facetious, I just want you to reflect on what we know about relativity, even
00:14:48.200 Galilean relativity, because there is a deeper truth lurking here. And the deeper truth is that
00:14:56.520 there is simply a continuum of matter between you and the rest of the universe. And relative
00:15:04.840 motion tells us that it is just as reasonable to say that you remain stationary and the entire
00:15:12.440 universe moved about you until you found yourself at point B. And this is the sense in which the
00:15:20.520 car really is illusory and did not move you from A to B. And how trying to invoke it as a reason
00:15:27.880 why you found yourself no longer at A, but instead at B is to be hypnotized by a kind of
00:15:35.240 history of superstitious thinking on this front. The car itself indeed didn't arise spontaneously.
00:15:41.480 It hasn't always always been there. It came from the earth via a long chain of causation.
00:15:47.320 Okay, so perhaps I am lacking some generosity in the story I've just told about the car,
00:15:54.360 but of course I don't think that Sam has grappled with the idea of emergence or higher level
00:16:00.920 causation or possibly top down causation. Things in the causal chain are still causes
00:16:09.560 just because there are events prior to the goings on in my mind does not mean that goings on in
00:16:19.160 my mind are not the reason for my behaviour. And a convenient way of speaking about this
00:16:27.080 is to refer to the freedom of the wheel in the same way that a convenient way and almost unavoidably
00:16:34.200 convenient way to speak about how one gets from A to B is to say that the car was the way
00:16:41.960 in which they got from A to B. None of this is to detract from the fact that I think that Sam
00:16:47.960 does a very good summary and overview, even an explanation of the traditional debate as it's been
00:16:55.080 had for centuries, certainly decades. But I must say that I do think Deutsch takes us beyond that.
00:17:03.320 I've tried to explain this concept of emergence in the copper atom argument elsewhere
00:17:10.760 that if we want to explain why the copper atom is at the tip of the nose of Winston Churchill's
00:17:16.840 statue in Parliament Square, we have to invoke these higher level concepts, this idea of
00:17:23.800 war and culture and respect. These things are abstract, but they are real and they cause physical
00:17:31.800 events in reality. And of course what I person is, I person as a universal explainer,
00:17:39.560 not grappling with any of this when dismissing something alike, free will,
00:17:45.000 means that debate is stuck in the past, stuck some decades ago before these new philosophical
00:17:53.400 and scientific understandings have been found and explained and explored. I think that the
00:18:00.440 traditional way of framing the debate about free will in terms of determinism versus free will
00:18:09.080 or in terms of compatibleism in the traditional sense is all coloured by a particular worldview,
00:18:17.080 a different worldview. And that's not Sam's fault, it's not Daniel Dennis fault because
00:18:23.560 that's the default, that's the way in which people have always thought about these ideas. Sam
00:18:32.600 says in his podcast that you're not a self towards the end there, he says you're part of the
00:18:38.760 stream rather than being separate to it, but you can be both failing to draw distinctions in the
00:18:47.640 world, it's precisely the same era as the era of the person who says well it's not the car that
00:18:52.600 gets you from A to B, after all relativity says that there's no absolute motion that one may as
00:18:59.480 well say the universe is moving around you rather than you moving through the universe or that
00:19:05.560 trees don't exist or that birds don't exist because it's all just one unified whole of physical
00:19:12.600 reality. Although that's true we can still make meaningful distinctions and one meaningful
00:19:19.400 distinction is the existence of the self. Sam tries to use also this thought experiment
00:19:29.480 about picking a film that if you sit quietly reflect and think of your favourite film he asks you
00:19:39.000 to pause and really reflect on what that experience is like as a matter of subjectivity.
00:19:46.120 Now when I do this of course a random film will pop into my head as it will to yours because we've
00:19:55.160 been given no other instructions other than pick a film pick a film any film. Now there is no
00:20:02.280 good reason why we should pick any film so it should be unsurprising when we don't find a good
00:20:07.160 reason for picking a film that it seems like a free choice for which there is no reason because
00:20:15.080 we've not been asked to provide one. But what does the picking? Well what does the picking
00:20:21.160 there is a mental clean flip? It is kind of random and that doesn't mean that we do or do not
00:20:28.040 have free will. It will state very little but now I want you to try another kind of introspection.
00:20:34.680 I want you to reflect and think not of a random film I want you to think of the best film
00:20:41.160 and when I say the best film I mean the film that you judge to be the best film. Think now
00:20:49.880 what's the best film? I've got one in my mind. Now it's not so important what the film is
00:21:00.360 but what's important is the fact that I've said what is the best film and you will have criteria.
00:21:07.400 Now the criteria that you have may be you enjoyed it the most it may be that it has been
00:21:16.520 critically acclaimed the most awarded the most. It may be a combination of all these things.
00:21:23.720 It may have emotionally affected you the most. It may be something that is poignant because
00:21:29.000 you grew up with it. There could be any number of reasons why you've picked that film
00:21:35.000 but you should have a reason for picking that film. It won't be simply an arbitrary random choice.
00:21:45.160 The experience of trying to come up with an explanation why that film is your best film,
00:21:53.320 your choice for the best film is a very individual thing. It's a thing that reveals something
00:22:00.680 about the existence of self yourself because it will be unique to you. Your reasons will not be
00:22:08.360 like other people's reasons. Your film will not be like other people's films necessarily.
00:22:13.240 The arguments that arise in order for you to explain where you challenged why it's the best
00:22:19.560 film will be unique to you. You will create them on the spot and that will reveal to you what you
00:22:27.400 are. You're an explainer. You're someone who is able to generate some kind of creative piece of
00:22:34.680 knowledge about what the best film is. This is a different experience. Sam might want to say
00:22:43.480 but you're not choosing what those explanations are and all I can say here is that we must
00:22:48.280 differ on that point because then what is doing the choosing if not me? He might say, well these
00:22:54.600 ideas, these explanations are coming unbidden into your mind. Things have to stop somewhere.
00:23:00.600 Should we expect an infinite regress that if I... Sam already addresses this actually, but
00:23:06.840 if I can't choose the explanations that arise in my mind or the ideas that arise in my mind,
00:23:14.120 I can't choose to choose the ideas in my mind either. That's all fair. What other alternative
00:23:21.240 could there be? It has to stop somewhere and it stops with you and that stopping is actually where
00:23:28.120 it originates. Ideas originate somewhere. They originate in your mind. They are a part of your mind.
00:23:35.720 They're not identical to you. You are the thing doing the generating of the ideas. How does this work?
00:23:41.240 We don't know. We don't have a fully fled scientific theory of how ideas arise in the mind.
00:23:49.320 If we did, we could write down a recipe for how this has done an algorithm and we could
00:23:53.720 program computers to do it as well. We could have creative computers. But we can't do that yet.
00:23:59.560 We don't know how ideas arise in the mind, but we know that they do. Ideas arise in the mind.
00:24:06.760 They arise via a process of creativity in the minds of conscious people. How we don't know.
00:24:13.880 Now, is this a free choice? Yes, because you can choose not to think of anything if you want.
00:24:20.360 You can choose to think of different things. Now, if someone says to you,
00:24:24.760 don't think of a white elephant, of course you're going to think of a white elephant.
00:24:28.360 But that's just to say there are various forces impinging upon our minds at any given time.
00:24:34.920 One of which is the outside world and one of which are our own minds. And our minds are sort of
00:24:40.440 attracted hither and thither towards the external world and towards an introspection upon our own
00:24:47.400 subjectivity. We can do both because we're problem solvers. We both look outwards to solve
00:24:53.800 problems about external reality and inwards about what's going on in our own minds. Now,
00:24:59.480 Sam is quick to say that giving up on the notion of free will has great moral benefits.
00:25:06.200 One of which is being free from feeling the need to hate others because you don't think
00:25:12.600 that they're worthy of blame. Now, I already don't think that we need to hate people
00:25:17.880 or that we need to in a technical sense blame the person. I have a subtle difference here.
00:25:25.320 People do what they do because of the ideas that they hold. Now, there is some responsibility
00:25:31.160 for holding the ideas that you have and you should reflect upon your own ideas. And if you're
00:25:35.880 not a reflective person, if you're not choosing to think about the ideas that you have,
00:25:40.280 there's some culpability on your part for not being a reflective person. Of course, Sam might say,
00:25:45.160 well, you don't get to choose to be a reflective person. There's all sorts of ways in which you
00:25:49.560 might have been brought up due to luck. And so you're not blame worthy for not being a reflective person.
00:25:55.640 And I can agree with this, but that still doesn't mean that if you are a reflective person,
00:26:00.360 that if you do know you should be reflective person and then choose not to be a reflective person,
00:26:05.080 then you are somehow innocent of what I might say is the sin of choosing not to carefully consider
00:26:11.880 your thoughts and actions. But the hazard here, the moral hazard that this entire worldview
00:26:18.200 of free will doesn't exist introduces that otherwise wouldn't be there, is that everything
00:26:24.040 is reduced to luck. And Sam puts a primacy upon luck. He says that,
00:26:32.040 essentially, there's good luck and there's bad luck. It's nothing to do with you and your choices
00:26:38.120 because, well, ultimately it's not you that make the choices anywhere. And of course, you don't
00:26:42.520 really properly exist as a self. All your efforts are about luck because you're lucky to be
00:26:49.800 the kind of person to put in effort or not. This ends up having terrible moral consequence,
00:26:56.840 some terrible political consequences, because what it means is that lazy people are not ultimately
00:27:05.000 responsible for their laziness. And so should you choose to be lazy ultimately, well, it's not your fault?
00:27:12.840 You can be lazy. You can choose to sit on the couch and do nothing at all. And indeed,
00:27:18.360 we should all be quite compassionate about the fact that you've made that choice.
00:27:23.000 We see that today more and more and I think it's becoming really the prevailing view of how we
00:27:30.040 should see one another in society that everyone is to a large extent. A victim of their circumstance,
00:27:38.280 they're lucky. The wealthy people are nearly by good fortune lucky and the people who have very
00:27:44.760 little are nearly by good, by bad fortune, unlucky. There are many situations in which luck can
00:27:51.160 explain rather a large amount of what is going on in people's lives. No doubt, people born in
00:27:57.880 sub-Saharan Africa are unlucky. People born in California are, for the most part, rather more lucky
00:28:05.880 by comparison. But two people brought up in roughly the same area with roughly the same amount
00:28:12.760 of wealth who end up going on to make different choices, one of whom ends up wealthy, healthy,
00:28:19.800 happy and wise, and one of whom ends up becoming a violent criminal. We should be able to explain
00:28:26.440 this, not million terms of luck, but primarily and largely in terms of their choices and ideas,
00:28:35.000 their efforts and the energies that they choose to put into their output and into their work.
00:28:40.600 It comes down to who they are as people. Now, Sam makes a lot about Charles Whitman's tumour,
00:28:47.240 which is supposed to be proof positive that hardware problems of that kind must always cause
00:28:53.960 certain software problems. But what I want to say is that Charles Whitman had every chance
00:29:00.760 to tell the police what he was going to do before he did it. There was nothing in the tumour
00:29:05.400 that contained sufficient information to tell him not to warn the police about what he was doing
00:29:11.560 or to self-isolate or anything else like that. But just because you have a compulsion to be violent
00:29:17.800 does not mean that you must necessarily be violent. You can take steps to not be. Lots of people
00:29:24.200 have the compulsion to do things that they shouldn't do and choose not to do it. It doesn't
00:29:29.080 matter how strong the compulsion is. I don't understand that at all, really. Lots of people feel
00:29:35.560 like they want to do bad things. Lots of people choose to do those bad things and others
00:29:40.120 with precisely similar emotions, feelings, sensations, preclivities choose not to because of the
00:29:48.280 ideas that they have. The grizzly bear is raised and the grizzly bear thought experiment is,
00:29:56.680 well, the grizzly bear attacks you and you run away. So apparently you don't have any free
00:30:01.960 will because you are your fearful while the grizzly bear also has no free will and is not blamed
00:30:07.720 for attacking. You should not be blamed for attacking here. I agree, the bear should not be blamed
00:30:12.600 for attacking you. The bear is a mindless creature. Literally mindless in my worldview I would suggest
00:30:19.800 and that is why, by the way, being literally mindless, it's not a moral agent. We can argue about
00:30:26.360 whether or not therefore this means the grizzly bear not having free will, not having the capacity to
00:30:33.240 create knowledge to understand ideas, whether or not the bear is actually able to suffer in the
00:30:38.440 sense that people can suffer. That's a home of the story. But in Sam's story about that the
00:30:45.080 grizzly bear attacking the person, there doesn't seem to be any way in which there is a distinction
00:30:52.760 made, a fundamental distinction made between the grizzly bear and the person. That if neither of
00:30:58.760 them has free will then what is fundamentally the difference between the grizzly bear and the person.
00:31:04.760 The grizzly bear is just doing what it's genes tell it to do to attack someone and the person
00:31:09.320 is just running away because it's fearful. Apparently the genes are telling the person to run away.
00:31:13.320 So neither as free will. What's the difference? I sense that what Sam might want to say is something
00:31:18.680 like, well, the person is more intelligent. That on the continuum of intelligence between
00:31:24.120 a neighbor, fish, squirrels, bears, higher apes and humans. The bear and the person aren't that
00:31:34.360 different. They're just different in quantity of intelligence. I want to say there's a difference
00:31:40.040 in quality. There's a black and white difference, an infinite difference. One can explain nothing
00:31:48.840 about the universe. That's the bear. And one, in principle, can explain everything about the universe.
00:31:55.160 That's the human, the person. This quality of being able to explain the world around you,
00:32:01.480 to have experiences of the world around you and to incorporate them into a model of the universe
00:32:07.160 around you, provides you also with the capacity to choose among different explanations. This
00:32:13.320 capacity to choose, also known as free will, is what separates us from every other entity in the
00:32:20.840 universe. This is what makes people categorically different. Sam talks about putting people in prison.
00:32:28.520 That even if people don't have free will and so should not be blamed for the evil they do.
00:32:35.080 Nonetheless, we need to put them in prison. Well, I couldn't agree more. And I agree with him on this point
00:32:39.080 that prison is not a place of retributive justice. It's not a place in order to punish people.
00:32:45.400 It's a place hopefully to keep the rest of us safe from these violent people. And hopefully
00:32:50.600 to rehabilitate these people, to change them into people who will not do violent harm to the rest
00:32:55.640 of us. Ideally, that's what prison is about. So I agree with him on that. And then Sam
00:33:01.080 segues into talking about compatibleists. And what he says compatibleists do is to kind of conjure
00:33:10.280 an Atlantis into existence and then point to Sicily and say that Sicily really exists.
00:33:17.000 Well, this begs the question. He's essentially saying first, recognize that Atlantis doesn't exist.
00:33:23.080 It's a mythological island. Now, this is what free will is like. Well, no, not at all.
00:33:29.640 What any compatibleist would say, contrary to this point is, do you know what? Look at Sicily over there.
00:33:38.680 It really exists. Now, what you, Sam Harris, are doing, is saying that Sicily over there doesn't
00:33:43.720 really exist. That's Atlantis. It's a mythological place. It never has existed. It's always been a
00:33:50.360 part of myth. And you can point to it as much as you'd like. But, and although everyone else thinks
00:33:54.920 they have an experience of Sicily, it doesn't really exist. It's a mythological place. That begs the
00:34:00.440 question as well. And I think that Atlantis story gets us anywhere. Sam also says that
00:34:05.640 compatibleists identify themselves with the totality of their thoughts or experiences.
00:34:11.160 And this is false. I do not do this. And I think many others don't do this either. I am at
00:34:16.680 pains to say that we have ideas. We are not identical to ideas. We are universal explainers. Our
00:34:24.200 fundamental, the fundamental quality of what I personally is, is that we create, we generate
00:34:32.520 explanations. We model the rest of reality around us. This is what we try to do. I try to understand
00:34:40.120 stuff and comprehend stuff. Now, the particular things that we do comprehend, that's not what
00:34:44.760 makes us us. It's the capacity to do that. So, the particular ideas that we have at any given
00:34:49.800 point in time doesn't make us us. It sort of helps to form our personality, but not our personhood.
00:34:56.600 Our personhood is derived from our capacity to create ideas, rather than being identical to
00:35:03.160 any ideas. So, I'm not to be identified with the totality of my body or the totality of my thoughts.
00:35:09.880 Sam says that you are no more responsible for the structure of your brain than your height.
00:35:14.120 Okay, this is true as far as it goes, but the structure of your brain is not what makes you
00:35:22.840 you. It's the structure of your mind. This is a category error. The difference is everything.
00:35:31.320 We are not hardware, we are software, and the software is infinitely malleable. I could get into
00:35:38.200 that. I won't. Suffice to say that in remark, it's infinitely malleable. I'm not saying that it's
00:35:44.840 easy to change everything about your mind. It can be very difficult to change even small
00:35:51.000 parts about your mind. And with four minutes to go in the podcast, Sam says that he wants to bring
00:35:56.440 things back to direct experience. There's that phrase, the key phrase, the key phrase that permeates
00:36:03.960 much of Sam Harris's philosophy. And I have great respect for Sam, but this appeal to direct
00:36:10.200 experience is an area that has plagued philosophers for millennia, and Sam's area is the same as
00:36:18.840 theirs. We do not have direct experience of the external world, and we do not have direct
00:36:26.280 experience of our own mind. And this might seem too clever by half, but it's true. You interpret
00:36:32.920 what is going on in your mind. You interpret your thoughts, and then you come up with an explanation
00:36:38.520 of what's going on. And that can include something as naked as the experience of meditating and
00:36:45.160 having the full experience of pure consciousness. And when you have that experience, it's
00:36:50.280 merely an experience, an experience that must be interpreted, and then turned later into words that
00:36:56.440 you explained to other people, no matter how clear, what kind of clarity you think you have in the
00:37:01.960 moment, that is not a reason to say that, therefore, for certain, that experience means something
00:37:10.120 really exists in the universe. You need something more than that. You need a good explanation,
00:37:15.320 and I'm giving you a good explanation about what the self is. The self is that thing which generates
00:37:21.080 explanations, and you can switch that off at times. And when you do, you have the experience of
00:37:27.240 not having a self. But that doesn't mean that you are not a self. It just means that for that moment,
00:37:32.440 you have to switch off your mind and not have any thoughts, and that's different kind of experience.
00:37:37.160 But it doesn't provide any deep insight into the true nature of reality. You try to like switching
00:37:43.080 off all the lights in your room, not seeing anything at all, and concluding on that basis,
00:37:47.160 that, therefore, the universe has literally disappeared. Of course, it hasn't. And let's just end
00:37:51.880 on note that Sam is a great proponent of the mystery of consciousness. But the mystery of
00:37:58.760 consciousness is perhaps as great a mystery as the existence of the universe itself, the existence
00:38:04.600 of existence itself. But he dismisses the mystery of free will rather too quickly. And I think that
00:38:10.600 these two arrows are tied up together. I think that they're both mysteries, they're both very
00:38:15.160 interesting topics to explore, and they might actually ultimately be the same. And I just want to
00:38:20.520 observe that this is similar to how Daniel Dannett thinks that consciousness is kind of
00:38:26.280 more easily understood than people think. But on the other hand, free will is rather easily
00:38:31.080 understood. They're kind of mirror images of each other in this way. One thinking that
00:38:36.440 consciousness is a deep mystery and the other not. One thinking that free will is a kind of
00:38:41.320 interesting question and the other not. Jeremy Air talks about this as well, about how
00:38:46.120 when a philosopher denies one area of the mystery of the world, the other tends to crop up,
00:38:53.400 unbidden by them. So if you tend to dismiss the mystery of whatever, the nature of time is
00:38:59.800 the nature of the self tends to crop up, unbidden in your ontology. Okay, I think I've talked
00:39:05.880 more than long enough about that for now. Until next time, bye bye.
