@@salsaonthebeach1873 maybe more than just on details. For instance, I'm not American, but if I was, I couldn't have brought myself to vote for Biden. That's by no means an endorsement of Trump, that's despite me agreeing with Sam Harris on almost everything he said about Trump.
why is that ? argument from authority? are you outsourcing your thinking to leave it up to him to make deliberate decisions? ()which he then denies he ever made!)
@@johnjacquard863 it seems this one went over your head. But to be concise: what we will is determined by nature and nurture, by our biology and socialization. You are not the author of your own thoughts. If you were, you would have to think what you think before you think it, which leads to an infinite regress. Or as Schopenhauer put it: "Man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."
Scott is a smart guy but he’s just not getting it. And Sam is right that most people don’t get it. Free will has never made sense to me. Even as a teenager the concept just didn’t make sense. But getting people to see it has always been an uphill battle. Usually smart people get it but there are people like Dan Dennet who for some reason don’t.
I"ve been talking to people for years about it and they endlessly argue for free will. I figured out that it's all pride and ego. They feel like they have no purpose if they don't have free will. It boggles the mind
In academic philosophy the main view is compatibilism, Sam's "libertarian free will" is mainly taught just as a historical note rather than a serious idea. So it's kind of the complete opposite of what you think.
@@SkyGodKing Compatibilism is the ultimate have your cake and eat it it seems to me. And as Sam points out repeatedly, they do this by just redefining free will. It's really annoying.
Sam is trying to explain repeatedly that there isn't free will and then the host saying something like - I love you but there is free will, because even though I didn't have free will when some thought came up, I DO have the free will to decide what I'm going to do about it. And then Sam saying - No, you don't have free will about counter thoughts either since you don't know where they come from either, you don't have free will since you can't think a thought before you think it, you are just witnessing thoughts and counter thoughts as they come up. And then the host looks nervous, like his life has just changed. This was great stuff, thanks Sam!
Right. Scott simply hasn't a clue - he's not had the fundamental insight that you can't control your thoughts (and therefore has not had time to really examine the implications of that insight). Without that he's just 100% stuck/lost and in the end rather annoying - I just wanted him to STFU and LISTEN! (in the end I stopped listening/watching because he just wasn't realising what Sam was on about - I have a short attention span for people who don't get who they're with and continue to think they are an equal in the conversation). Maybe he should take some LSD. Or some really strong pot. But even those don't always supply that insight. I think it just comes down to luck - you simply can't manufacture it.
It boggles my mind on how anyone would argue and disagree with Sam Harris on the topic of free will after listening to him explain how free will is nonsense.
He's just being obtuse here because to grant this proposition he believes his entire life would unravel or something. But he never had free will all along, and his confusion causes much harm because free will substantiates so much malice, judgement, spite, revenge, punishment-- so much harm is scaffolded by the lie of free will.
@@nyc1234100 be careful scott. I know you mentioned on Sam's podcast that you have schizotypy. However, if it is safe for you, you should definitely do it.
@Sargon Second is the feeling like you're a locus of attention or an "unchanging self" inside your head that is experiencing all the conscious experience. Like the feeling of being behind your eyes looking out at the world.
Sam brilliantly sums up this whole conversation in just one simply sentence at 1:55:46 where he says "The reason why it's not free will is because all of it is being pushed from behind causally either deterministically or randomly or both".
Absolutely love this, thank you so much but in future is there any way you could make your and your guest's audio levels more similar? Sam is a lot quieter than you.
Sam is well balanced communicator. The real issue here is that even when Sam lose his patience he rarely raise his voice. All that he learned and all that he is is mirrored trough how he speaks. This is his argument about Trump that If you listen to Trump carefully you will notice that he is just a mess. Not pretending to be something he is not. Just people refuse to notice who Trump actually is.
What a genius, " the world is born anew in the next moment" Sam Harris has transformed my life. I knew all this but needed this genius to articulate it. Sam's book "Free Will" should be compulsory reading.
The idea of the world born anew in the next moment is originally from Judaism, because God is the soul of the whole existence, and every moment we reveal a dimension of him. God leads the universe by his will and he gave us some amount of free will to join his project of making this world heaven. It's cannot be understandable in human capability how God is free to do what he wants and also we have free will. But it is the case, we feel that we can choose between right and wrong, good and bad. So with all the respect for philosophy and this podcast, if we still believe that we can choose so there isn't any reason why wasting time on this argument.
@@dungeon-wn4gw we have to face it that we as humans have threshold to our mind, this free will question is beyond our threshold just as how all the suffering has divinity justice. We have subjective perspective like a tiny cell in a huge body that can only see what is near it from it's self, as opposed to God who has the infinite ultimate perspective as he is able to see the whole body. Some humility won't hurt us, humans...
The book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat has made the best case against free will than anything I've read on the topic of free will itself. It shows how much the brain determines who we are and what we do
It's interesting to watch Sam try very hard to explain the illusory nature of free will, and the self, and have the interview just *not get* it. Sam Harris was definitely the first intellectual I heard talking about the self in such a way and I feel he explains it very well. Perhaps the interviewer here should learn to meditate. :)
The illusion is not the self, the illusion is what we think the self is. We associate the self with the ego but it's more than that. The self is not an illusion. The self is the only real thing we are. It's the I AM... It's our link to god, the universal consciousness.
@@alainlangdon You may have a point somewhere in there but it's constantly flipping around the semantics of "the self" so that you're confusing people who think their definition of the self, is the self, and this changes throughout your sentence. You should not use "the self" to mean some personal definition. "The self" is the feeling that one is the center of the universe, the main character, a person who freely thinks their thoughts, a person to whom reality's representation **is** reality, while being clueless to the fact that it is possible to observe this entire phenomenon independently, which proves that this entire above feeling, is illusory-- how can "you" be the thing that's observing the thing which you only "think/believe/feel" is you? This illusion shatters the moment you observe through years of training, or take certain drugs.
Whether the interviewer 'got it' or not......not important. What was great about the questions was that it brought out such interesting and provocative and enlightening explanations from Sam. I really enjoyed all four hours of this discussion and came away feeling that I really need to incorporate this wisdom into my life practice.
The host's inability to deal with Sam's arguments about objective morality with anything more profound than "but that's a value judgment" was both frustrating and cringe-worthy.
1:34:37: Scott claims that it requires hubris to believe that infinite torture is bad. My god, Scott... come on! What happened? You're not made into a dictator by recognising that infinite torture is objectively bad!
Love Sam's comments on pride, shame and hate! 1:58:10 Sam was really on a roll and you interrupted him just as it felt like he might make some breakthrough! Otherwise, great interview.
It's actually when he says things like this that I stop and have a bit of a hiccup. Admittedly, I recognized long ago that most of this type of naval gazing is well beyond my mental faculties. However, how can "if you will only let it be" and "you don't have free will" occupy the same space?
@@Kruppes_Mulewe don't know when the feeling of "let it be" a raise, but if it arise in your consciousness let it be, don't interrupt it. and lucky us, cos we can train it trough meditation
😂😂 I think you cannot lying down on your bed all day. Actually, It’s hard to lying down on the bed all day.. So, you definitely you choose to some action. Not in the bed.
I feel like Scott had points he was just too polite to talk over Sam to make. I tend to agree with Sam, and he definitely won the argument, but I still wish he'd have backed off and listened a little. I'm already familiar with all of his points on the subject and hoped that argumentation might bring up some new ones but it was mostly 4 hours of rehashing, disappointing...
Its very critical of you to say that there is no new argument. Kind of stupid. Variety in content is what you're looking for ? Well you should watch whose line is it anyway or something like that then. And if someone is too polite to talk, its definitely a set back for any host of any show. Too of anything sucks. Just give it time and it will suck. But not the hosts choice anyway. He was born and developed this way.
The way I first came onto the notion that there is no free will is trying to imagine putting myself in someone else's shoes. Not just "occupy their body", but truly and completely change places, including memories, way of thinking, etc. Then "I" would "repeat" the exact same errors that they made and I would be "sentenced" to behave the same way they behaved. Everyone would see how there's no free will there. The next step is to realize that it is the same without changing places.
It's an excellent thought experiment. Another way is to simply ask why one person can't stop eating junk food wheras another becomes a bodybuilder. Why does 1 person choose 1 thing while the other chooses another? Just keep the causal regression going until you realise that you played no role in becoming who you are.
@@jwscheuerman Their argument is that their "spirit" made that choice. That's where determinism comes into play to debunk the spirit. Nature + nurture = determinism. We are no different than a computer executing code except biological. We have a set operating structure, take inputs, calculate then output actions/thoughts. This can be proven as there are no true random events in the universe. B happens because A happened.
@@TheFinalsTV It doesn't matter if someone invokes a "spirit" or "soul". This invocation doesn't change the fundamental problem. Whether it's your brain or your "spirit" making the choices, the fundamental fact is that *you* didn't choose your brain, and *you* didn't choose your "spirit".
I wish Scott would push back more on Sam's idea that there is no free will. I have listened to 3 or 4 podcasts with Sam talking about free will and his justification for thinking there is no free will seems to come down to the fact that we can't yet understand how our mind works. Sam doesn't like that there is a "mystery" behind where our thoughts and decisions come from. It's sort of like how we witnessed the planets moving around the sun, but we didn't know how gravity worked. It doesn't mean that gravity is a "mystery" just because we didn't understand it yet.
If there is no free will then Trump voters didn’t not freely choose him. Something in the society has gone terribly wrong to make them do this! So why all these emotions about their lack of seeing things the way Sam does? It makes absolutley no sense to be upset that people are making a choice they don’t do freely! Find the cause insted honey!👍
Shoutout to Scott for keep pushing back Sam’s argument of free will, allowing Sam to reveal every rebuttal. I now have a much more complete understanding of Sam’s argument and why free will, and even its illusion, doesn’t exist or is incoherent
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!" "So... what does the thinking?" "You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat." "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!" "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?" "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat." -Terry Bisson
17:07 You can not do what you don't want. But does it feel that way? Yes, it does. Two conflicting motives will feel like making a choice. Like Barrys dilemma between staying in bed or going to the gym. Getting up might feel like doing something he doesn't want, but then doing it anyway. Actually he wanted both things and working out just proved to be the stronger motive. Conflicting motives create the illusion of choosing between them, when actually the stronger one simply wins. That way it is not as mysterious as Sam claims. You might not know why exactly one motive is stronger than the other. But after the fact you know you did what you did because you followed the strongest motive and could not have done otherwise. Our human mind is simply an additional motive generator, additional to say basic physics. By having knowledge of tigers Barrys mind might make him run up a hill, while the stone beside him is rolling down, thinking like Barry it is by his own choice.
the interviewer was horrible! instead of keeping the talk strictly about determinism and free will, he kept bringing in other tangents and not only that, he also kept countering Sam with BS arguments without actually researching and understanding his stance at all. Such a waste of precious time with Sam
Scott Kaufman keeps referring to _"limited free will"_ where it's unfortunate and it's not his fault because it's not within his capacity but he simply doesn't understand.
It's of course not his fault but it's unfortunate that Scott Kaufman doesn't have the mental capability to understand that free will doesn't exist. He just doesn't get it.
I discovered Sam about 6 years ago. He was the doorway that led me to all the people I follow today: too many to list. Jordan Peterson, the weinstein brothers, peter singer, Jonathan haidt, etc.
Sounds like the toxic side of Harris wherein he makes all sorts of declarations about social issues for which he has little knowledge or expertise, if any.
@@countdebleauchamp He doesn't understand many social issues, but he thinks he thoroughly does, which is the problem. I wish he would just shut up where he has no expertise.
@@infinityand0 Agreed he may not be academically qualified as a sociologist or political scientist, but he is probably much better informed than the average member of the population. If you misunderstand him as an expert in those fields as opposed to a member of the public who simply holds an opinion, yes that may be an issue. But he still has the right to express that opinion.
@@countdebleauchamp I never implied he doesn't have the right to express his opinion. I just find his opinions on certain matters to be slanted and ignorant. He is also incapable of engaging with those that take issue with his views in any productive manner at all. He has not grown at all as a "public intellectual" IMHO.
I’m now almost certainly convinced Sam will not get through to anyone in his circle. Maybe it’s because they’ve all actually thought about these things. Can’t circle a square. I guess some brains are square or something. How can you not get the basis of the free will argument? It’s so damn simple yet some of the smartest people just can’t grasp it. They want to hold onto their “individualism” or something. Don’t get it.
"Dan Dennett doesn't understand this." I've been waiting years for Sam to utter these words. Never has a truer word been spoken. I wonder if determinism will play out to a point in time where Dennett does actually understand this???
Interjecting "free will" while Sam is talking about why Trump is so damaged seemed kneejerk and misplaced. Like he hadn't just had a long conversation about it and conceded all points.
You mean Sam did a bad job talking about Trump through the perspective of free will? Or you mean Scott shouldn’t have asked Trump and free will side by side as they make a bad pair of conversational points?
I think it was better that there was disagreement. It just made Sam go deeper into his points and more solid. I don't blame you though, the majority of people are resistant to the concept, I've found.
It’s so hard for his idea to just make intuitive sense. I’ve been struggling to just fully understand it and yet I know he’s right. There is no free will and I recognize that when I think about it.
It's almost impossible to illustrate how a very specific definition of a term can be applied to a variety of situations without others reverting right back to their previous definition every time. No matter how skilled you are at communicating, you can't get most people to consider a refined definition as it's carried out. I salute your determination Sam.
You said it friend. I find this cringe to listen to because when you have two honest speakers, in the end it is just about word definitions. You have to break it down to smaller and smaller concepts to find the source of misalignment.
What Sam is saying about Pride and Shame is SO important. Parents who constantly act like their children could of (and should of) done otherwise are basically instilling a life long sense of shame into them. They are basically telling them they should BE otherwise. In other words they should be ashamed of who they are. Those children will spend the rest of their lives trying to make their parents proud and seeking confirmation that it is okay for them to exist.
Except he also said that it is important to feel shame initially. But you must also be able to overcome it at some point, and that's where bad parenting certainly can mess you up.
The problem with this is that when childhood ends and adulthood begins, those lofty notions evaporate. So it’s more about training children for adulthood more than trying to instill shame. When they charge a 16 year old as an adult for murder, at no point is this ‘free will’ debate even entering the discussion, let alone the court room
@@tbk2010 I think it's important to feel guilt. Shame is never necessary. Guilt is a sense that you did something bad. Shame is a sense that you are bad. You instill a healthy sense of guilt in children when you encourage them to do differently next time. You instill an unhealthy sense of shame in them when you insist that they should have done otherwise. There is a subtle but very important diffrence.
Ppl do not want to think our brains are biologically determined. The public will accept genetics in the physical like height an hair color but when it comes to the psychological and genetic determinism for our brains they will refuse to except any if the facts.
I don’t think it’s that strange. It’s evolution. It’s tied to blame and responsibility which were adaptive for our ancestors. So it’s a part of a suite of illusions gifted to us by evolution. Danny Kanhemans work on this stuff is good.
@@adamp108 I'm saying that Ben Stiller is clearly pretty intelligent based off of this interview. He always plays kinda dumb characters in movies. Just pointing out that he's much smarter in real life clearly.
I'm puzzled why Sam doesn't qualify "free will" by calling it "CONSCIOUS free will." The difference is that Sam refers to consciousness when he says "you," whereas most people refer to thoughts/thinking apparatus when they say "you." I'm sure Sam will agree that one's "thinking machine" belongs to that identifiable person; he makes the (correct IMO) distinction that the real "me" is consciousness itself/attention/awareness. I agree with him that awareness doesn't author things; it's just "aware." Although what one is aware of surely then influences the "thinking machine."
The problem Sam keeps missing in his model of morality is that he has no reasons to prioritize well-being over anything else. If someone believes a world that produces more perfect knowledge but also less well-being is preferable to a world with more well-being but less knowledge, how can Sam say they’re wrong? And you can replace knowledge with anything someone or a group could care about.
Harris can't derive ought from is. As Scott says, "ought" is always relative to a goal - and goals vary hugely from agent to agent. Harris's "worst possible misery for everyone" scenario is contrived such that every single agent would agree on the project of "let's get out of here!". But so what? In no other situation (i.e. all of life as we know it) do agents have exactly the same goals. In fact, you might say that "the worst possible misery for everyone" - far from being the foundation of morality - is actually the one situation in which you wouldn't need morality. Because morality is the project of maintaining harmony in the face of competing interests. No one has got to tell you that you "should" leave the worst possible misery. Every single being would flinch from it involuntarily as sure as removing one's hand from a hot stove.
Your second paragraph is Harris’s entire point with the worst possible misery for everyone. Things can get so bad that it’s not a matter of moral philosophy whether it should be avoided. We will helplessly choose to avoid it. That’s how he argues he has overcome the is/ought divide. He argues we need not ever invoke oughts, and should just acknowledge that we are in a situation where we can navigate between needless misery and the most profound well-being, and that we obviously want to navigate towards well-being. Thus, we “ought” to do the things that produce well-being. Someone who comes in and says “well who’s to say we ought to avoid misery” just doesn’t remember what it’s like to have their hand on a hot stove.
@@motorhead48067 That's a good summary of Harris's point, but you're missing mine. Following one's own hedonic imperative isn't morality. Morality is social, it involves other people, and generally involves compromising on one's immediate gratification for the sake of others. Harris's thought experiment has nothing to do with morality, because it says nothing of such compromises. He's contrived the one situation in which all agents would agree on what to do, thereby bypassing the problem of what to do when needs conflict.
Scott, it's simple:) When you say that our conscious insight gives us that space in which we can use what we've learned to 'decide' - those lessons are also part of the whole plethora of causes in this thick soup of Causality! :) [By the way the chimps learn, too! :)] I laughed when Sam said 'almost no one understands it, D Dennett doesn't understand it' and I completely see his point:) But Scott, I love the smile on your face during this whole discussion:) I love when people smile so enthusiastically when disagreeing. Great discussion guys! :)
Dude I'm glad I had just put my dinner plate in the sink just before I heard you say that, because I would have had a major existential crisis if I'd heard you say it first!
Sam may be metaphysically correct. At the end of the day, however, we live our lives and are forced to make choices. We can call that something other than “free will,” but decisions will always confront us and we must choose among alternatives. Whether or not free will really exists, we as individuals have to act in the world in order to survive and flourish.
It boggles my mind on how anyone would argue and disagree with Sam Harris on the topic of free will after listening to him explain how free will is nonsense.
I don't think Harris is refuting free will. He's refuting omnipotence. And as such his arguments are completely tedious. Everybody understands that they, like their fellow humans, are bounded by their moods, by hunger, by lack of sleep, by lack of knowledge. We're often *painfully* aware of all that. No one thinks they're all powerful. But "free will" is a much more modest requirement. It's just "whatever it takes to keep a promise / fulfil your social obligations". And most healthy adults have that. I don't hold a friend / a lover / a colleague / a political leader responsible for their behaviour because I'm deluded into thinking they're a god. And when I say "you could have done otherwise", that doesn't reflect a mistaken attitude toward determinism. It just means "I know you have the general capacity to meet your responsibilities... so the only reason you haven't is selfishness, negligence or laziness".
The general capacity to meet responsibilities big or small are every bit at the mercy of the sea of involuntary variables influencing your being as much as your lack of sleep influencing your energy or your hunger affecting your mood.
@@codywirth8190 I believe that determinism (or determinism plus randomness) is true. But so what? That's really irrelevant to whether or not an individual has free will. So lets say determinism gave me my generic capacity to understand my social commitments and to fulfil them. That means if I break them, it's not for lack of ability, it's because I was deliberately cheating someone, or I was lazy, or negligent. One can say - correctly - that in any given instance I was "determined" to cheat, or slack, or whatever. But so what? Given my generic capacity to uphold my commitments, it makes sense to punish me to ensure I use that capacity.
@@joeboswellphilosophy It is necessary to abolish the notion of free will to improve the human condition from medicinal to the justice system to even our mudane interactions with others on a day to day basis. Purposefully keeping ourselves in the dark and keeping the idea of free will around to let us feel special about ourselves achieves nothing. It's literally mirrors the God argument. . "Just let people believe in God!" Despite the ridiculous implications it has on a society. If humans need the crutches of God and free will to make it through the day then maybe we shouldn't be here at all.
@@codywirth8190 I'm not the one arguing that "the universe" is a puppet-master pulling all the strings of human behaviour. Who is failing to transcend religious thinking, really? I'm simply stating the fully scientific, fully naturalistic truth that human beings have - by dint of evolution - the capacity to understand the social bargains they enter into and to keep their side of those bargains. "The universe made me do it" isn't an excuse. It wasn't the universe. It was a specific part of the universe. It was you.
Great conversation! Fans of both of you. I take issue with Sam on the is ought problem, and tend to agree with Scott. Sam seems to take this fundamental 'ought', that conscious creatures should avoid suffering, as an 'is' statement, conscious creatures simply do the avoiding of suffering. But from an objective perspective, obviously these conscious creatures have a built in goal. Just because a goal is integral to our being and passed down through our biological coding and is inescapable in some sense doesn't mean it's not a goal. It's just a deeper goal that we don't have control over. Avoiding suffering is still a fundamental 'ought', without which morality claims are unfounded
@@e.b.1115 I think Sam’s point is exactly your last sentence. Avoiding the worse possible suffering for everyone is a fundamental ought proposition, but it is one we can all agree on as an axiom. That is similar to any other axiom in any logical (or, by extension, scientific) system. It is similar to the axiom “from a single point contained in any plane there can pass at least one line”, or to the axioms of empirical science (“let’s accept as false any hypotheses that are contrary to empirical observation”). There is no philosophical ground to stand upon in order to prove empiricism is correct: we could be living in a simulated universe where the information we perceive by our senses do not map on “absolute reality” or where tomorrow there will be a new datum showing the law of gravity is false. But, accepting the axioms of empiricism (and accepting proposed theories, such as the law of gravity, as being provisionally true when we have tested them and have been unable to produce any empirical evidence to the contrary) we have built a system that produces compelling results (by results I mean both concepts with a high degree of explanatory and predictive value, as well as powerful technological tools that prove their validity via their increasing our ability to manipulate our perceived environment). Sam’s contention, as I understand it, is that, as long as we agree on that axiomatic proposition (“we ought to avoid the worse possible suffering for everyone”), we have ground to stand upon in order to work towards constructing a rigorous, coherent and systematic system of values, or of assessing the relative merit of different values, using all the tools human reason has developed (including the principles of logic, and the principles of empirical science). I don’t think an effective rebuttal of that notion was offered in this discussion.
@@PetrosSyrak but how do you get from the fact that conscious creatures do avoid suffering to the value that conscious creatures should avoid suffering? Just because conscious creatures agree on that goal? It does not necessarily follow that conscious creatures should do something just because conscious creatures already do something. Now, I happen to agree that avoiding unnecessary suffering is worthwhile, but I'm already starting with that goal, and once we settle on the goal, science can go to work towards that goal to great effect. Modern medicine is a great example. But this does not get past the is-ought problem of getting an ought from an is statement. I am not rebutting sam's point that once we have an axiomatic goal we can do science towards that goal, in fact I completely agree. I am rebutting the claim that the is-ought problem is merely semantic. There clearly is a separation between the world of is statements and the world of ought statements, between facts and values
Sam is really good at understanding the interviewer is limited in his capacity to hear and think through what he’s saying. And keeps trying to make him understand what he’s saying. I would have lost it so many times! 😂 I almost stopped listening when the guy said “ I can teach you to play the cello”, when the point was completely not that. 😂 Sam is right, accepting there’s no free will will be the hardest thing we humans will do. It’s completely transforming everything.
i really think that Sam tries very very hard to make this idea of non existent free will "his thing". all examples he gives i see as influences that shape your actions. what the heck am i missing?
1:59:35 O: I really like this analogy of free will to the self it made what Sam Harris' point very clear for me. His later explanation of moving the hand as mysterious was cool too. I loved the ending of this 4 hour podcast very provoking
18:23 No, you can't do it if you're unmotivated, if being unmotivated means you're entirely devoid of motivation to do it. If you have no motivation to do something, you will not, you _cannot,_ intentionally do it. You go to the gym, even though you "don't want to," because you _do_ want to. You have motivations to go, and motivations to not go; whether you go or not is entirely a matter of how those conflicting motivations are weighted to you
As a former smoker, I agree with Sam that my will played a minor but crucial role. Acceptance of the limits of my will was also a crucial incite that helped me transition to a non-smoker 25 years ago. I could argue that those who have the strongest sense of self will are the least likely to be successful in addressing addictions.
I finally get what Sam is talking about regarding free will. But his position relies upon a separation or distinction between thoughts randomly feeding into consciousness, vs soul, or being, for lack of a better way of putting it.
This is largely a semantic debate: Disagree with Sam Harris, it's not true that people think they have free will outside of context - that's the definition of randomness. That's not what people think they have. It's a simpler phenomena - I think I want pizza - I don't know why I decided I wanted pizza, but now I want pizza. It's free will when, after that desire is manifest, that I'm able to pick up a phone and get pizza, rather than watching my hands pick up the phone and, instead, call for Chinese food.
I want to want to work. Not wanting to work makes me not work. You could say that I am doing what I actually want, but my wanting to want to work is not making me want to work. Where my free will? I seem to have misplaced it.
Being consciously aware that your biological software sucks enables you to optimize for it. Consciousness is the spot light of our operating system/memory = thoughts/actions. If we focus consciousness on self optimization eg: creating loops of introspective consciousness observation, we can solve consciousness inefficiencies the same way our consciousness tries to solve its inefficiency of not going to the gym. By using your consciousness spotlight to introspectively self optimize, your spotlight will become much more effective on "wants" of going to the gym or becoming more productive. Basically the more often your consciousness spotlight focuses on a self audit "what am I doing right now, what am I thinking, why, what should I be doing, why aren't I doing it" etc. enables you to solve/optimize the engine itself of how you consciously perceive and act in your day to day. This is much like how AI will self evolve, but running on much less restricted codebase modification access and on a non-biological operating system = no evolution/scaling constraints.
1. Sam Harris engages in a modal confusion. The language of constraints is being mixed with the range of proximal actions. He's equivocating between a variety of hypothetical actions, some of which are not actually actions that are available. "Playing the cello" is not something Sam Harris can do in his current capacity, since he has no cello. "Acquiring spontaneous interest" is not something that can be done by virtue of the definition "spontaneity" implying intervention of external influence. All his hypothetical constraints appear as the absent conditions which would be met if his target action/goal had already been established, namely, already "midway becoming a cellist." What he can do, however, is "aspire" to become a cellist, which he is in fact participating in, though hypothetically, not quite in good faith/sincerity. But doing so reveals how "aspiring" is within the category of actions that is "fixing one's attention," where doing so surfaces all sorts of proximal actions which become salient, as he enumerates, "shopping for a cello," "asking for a teacher," etc. Now if Sam Harris would state that one does not have free will, not even in "fixing" one's attention in the micro-proximal actions that I described, then that would be a respectable Dennet-sized "biting the bullet" considering Sam Harris' background in meditation. 2. Scott Barry Kaufman I believe is trying to reclaim "second-order" volition as the space that free will can exist (in a compatibilist sense that it suits our social and ordinary usage of "free will.") First order would be Sam's statement of "I don't want to become a cellist," in which all proximal or distal actions have as a constraint "lack of sufficient interest" to cross into behavioral implementation. However, Scott would respond with the second-order choice to "want to want to become a cellist," which if taken, would enable all those actions encompassed by "aspire to become a cellist" to then be available for behavioral implementation. Scott Barry Kaufman may say, and maybe this is a Piaget idea, that "free will," if it is this unique capacity of humans, is the ability to "do" a distal action through a strategy of proximal actions. When "become a cellist" is a distal action of which no current environmental conditions support, then enumerating a hierarchy (yea this is Jordan Peterson, now) of proximal actions ("buy a cello," "listen to Bach," "message people for teachers," ...) that each bring the "distal action" closer in the sense of reconfiguring the environment in small probabilistic nudges that make the stochastic tree of environments/actions in the family of "becoming a cellist" more probable each time. In this way, we consider a healthy individual to have free will such that they can choose what they "want to want," what to "attend to," and to perform "proximal actions." You get both the self-realization of a folk sense of free will, as well as the legal/social/ethical culpability of motive and intention. Sam Harris' thought experiments have the bias of contracting free will and agency into the micro-discrete sphere of actions of stuttering to pick up a glass or not, which is not the appropriate frame to appreciate "free will" in the folk-ordinary sense of actually entailing a self extended over time.
Here are some random thoughts evoked by this discussion: Sam Harris seems to define “free will” such that it could not exist. It could be defined in various ways, some of which could exist. For example, one might define free will as independent choice among options to satisfy desire or to avoid suffering. Sometimes I contemplate strict determinism, wherein every event (choice) is the result of preceding events and predictable from the early universe were there sufficient computational power. But then there is neutron decay, and other random processes. In the macro world, events can become scrambled and mingled to the point that they can have no further macro effect, this process being entropy. That seems to limit determinism. Subsequent choices would then be free of old influences.
Can someone explain why wanting to want to play the cello is different from wanting to play the cello? How does that sort of want get us to free will? Why were you able to freely choose that want but not the first order want? How don't these wants come from the same place?
What people dont understand is that they think that because they willed it, that means their will is free. In reality, our wills control everything we do it compells us and we can never get behind our will and control it. That would require will.
You cannot choose to want to play the cello. If your action of practicing cello is a consequence of your want (to play cello), and you can’t choose the want, then you don’t have free will
i have to say, before i see all of it, that your mind is not just what your brain is doing. i recently by some accident, transplanted some of my feces into my brother's microbiome, and very soon he became bipolar 2, just like me. he remarked that he now has sometimes mania and sometimes depression, but during mania his mind works on overdrive, but it does not think smart thoughts, just more of the same stupid ones. consider this drastic change happened in the span of a week, by the transfer of a tiny amount of microbiome from one person to another, and caused him from sleeping almost all day, to staying up for up to 30 hours straight regularly, something i do and he never before ever did. feelings, thoughts, the quantity of them at least, are directly linked to the gut microbiome. i fully expect to see a market for very capable and healthy peoples feces due to this in the next 10 years or so, as this is realized, as a form of supplements that do 10000x what current supplements do.
The sense of free will seems to be a very specific programming by evolution. As such, the purpose of free will must relate to nature's two mandates of survival and reproduction. Since it seems to be a very specific programming, how specifically is it useful as it relates to survival and reproduction?
Sam really gets to metaphorical bedrock when giving his moral landscape worst case scenario, and then has to scrape away a little bit more bedrock a few times to try to explain his point. He certainly has patience.
The truth is- each being lives in their own “designed” script. No joke- it’s absolute. And there are “Sign posts” in your own script. What’s called “Free Will” Is the latitude to choose between options, intentions, actions and circumstances of any and all choices (doors) you choose in the existence experience. The choices made between absolutes each open different options in the never ending story of consciousness. Each has their own frequency on all information presented to them. Remember, every doorway is both an exit and an entrance.
This wasn't a good interview. Even after Sam clearly said how the free will believers change the definition of free will, the guy Sam is talking to still does it. If you are physical, then you obey physical law. If cause and effect are true, then you you're not free. If randomness is true, then you don't have free will. If determinism is true, then you don't have free will. I cannot possibly think of an argument for free will.
We're free of "our" own control. Such is as "I" type this.. unfortunately the person interviewing Sam seems to never understand this.. most people are like this it appears.. sigh.. "I'm" tired of being alone on this matter (aside obviously from Sam)
Based on this discussion, I can't help but think of the analogy of a human chess player competing against the Stockfish AI in an online game of chess. Unless the human player was explicitly informed of the chess AI on the opposite side of the board, he or she could easily assume the Stockfish AI chess engine were a real human being playing chess exceptionally well, using its free will to move about the board. On face value, it seems like we all have free will. But, after listening to these two exchange arguments, it seems reasonable to assume that Scott could argue that the chess AI actually has free will (it responds to infinitely-many move scenarios and calculations based on moves from the other player; it can anticipate the strategic moves the other player is making and respond accordingly, especially when pieces are deliberately being sacrificed as a means of some larger positioning strategy; etc.). Sam, conversely, could argue that the human player is really just another version of the AI that is less well-programmed. I'd love to hear these guys address this analogy of the human vs. AI chess engine competition as it relates to free will!
So, for all you non-free will having people on this thread, please tell me (as you are predetermined to do) what the words "choice" and "decision" mean when you have no free will to make a choice or a decision. Or, now, Sam is on about the Taliban being shitty, but how could they have "chosen" otherwise based on the causality all around them? But, Sam earlier said he would have killed Hitler if he could have, but would he not have been constricted by his upbringing, biology, and the inherent risks of such an action in such a way that he would have no option but to acquiesce just like the majority of others in that era? So many holes in this line of thinking when paired with Sam's other utterances (often just moments later).
Kaufman with his PhD and all is obnoxious, arrogant and a know it all. I’m watching this for Sam Harris! He is brilliant and Kaufman hates it he actually knows Harris is brilliant!
I want to argue that many of our random thoughts might be part of an "autopilot" mode, which allows us to conserve energy that would otherwise be wasted with "active" thinking, which are intentional thoughts, such as me writing this comment and attempting to do so in the most coherent way possible. I don't know if there is any scientific data on such a thing, and it would be very difficult to test, but that's the thing about science -- it is constantly proving old ideas wrong, even ideas that had previously been accepted because of the very same scientific process that later disproved them. So all we can say is that as of right know, with our current body of knowledge, it would appear that free will does not exist.
I dont think Sam did the best job to explain the hot stove analogy. What he is saying, is that good and bad are perceptions and not deliberate judgements. It is similarly describe by Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments. We dont sit at a table in the real world and discuss if some experience was good or bad, we can only know this by experiencing it directly, through ourselves or by observing it and invoking empathy. We experience it directly as an immediate perception.
I like Sam Harris a lot and I’m afraid I have a tendency to want one person to have every answer but I was disappointed. I wasn't understanding the free will conversation (so I was planning to just listen and let my confusion increase my intention to meditate) but the more Sam talked, the more I disagreed with him. He seemed passionate like a person who is certain there is one answer and needs fort there to be one answer-But he didn’t sound like he had it. Also, I don’t think he was listening super well. (A trivial example of that is that he said he could one day want to learn to play cello and look for someone to teach him-yet the other guy had offered humorously to teach him a couple times; it seems Sam would have referenced that if he had heard it). Still, I am happier and more myself (oops!) thanks to meditating which he inspires.
We can't even conceive the kind of "free will" most people think they have (the kind of free will sam is arguing for). Most people get upset over realizing or even thinking about the notion that they don't have this free will they think they had. But the funny thing is they can't even concieve what that sort of "free will" will look like. How can you be disappointed over non existence of something that you cannot even conceive of to begin with? I'll say the denial or the disappointment comes from a place of insecurity rather than clear rational thinking.
Why does Sam think that to have a spontaneous thought equates to the absence of free will? It is our consciousness, developed over years of experiences, and housed somewhere in our brain, that generates and sends out a thought the substance of which is formed based on the immediate stimuli surrounding us. Then, acting with the free will we have, we choose how we act. Our brain/consciousness spontaneously creates the thought in the present moment based on what is happening in that present moment. I think this is what Sam fails to take into account; Our self-generating thoughts are like a sense of touch for the present moment; a tool that gives us the information about the immediate situation before us to which we apply our free will to act on as required. He's right that we can't author our thoughts; They are -by design and necessity - self authoring and could not be any other way. It's like claiming that a reflex action and a conscious action are the same. Not being able to author a thought prior to having it has no relation to the presence or absence of free will. Sam is creating a relationship between notions that exist separate and independent of one another. The spontaneous thought is as a reflex action to stimuli and is not slave to the subsequent conscious response made with free will. I'm not going to attempt an explanation as to why the mind functions in that way (because we don't know) but only go as far as to accept that it functions that way for an evolutionarily valid reason. I'm suggesting that the thought that pops up "out of nowhere" has nothing to do with will. The brain is a highly complex organ and its function - among other things - is to process thought. Because we are also the thinker, we are going to see behind the curtain (so to speak) at some of the raw processing that is going on. By and large, the brain is also an automatic part of this human machine, just like the heart beating or the liver processing. That separate and automatic function of the brain (manifesting to us as a 'thought out of nowhere") is not a matter of will. It is when we apply our consciousness to the thought at hand, that is when the separate function of our free will comes into play.
Exactly. You can have 1st order desires and 2nd order desires that compete with each other. In the end which desire wins out can be based on a multitude of factors like Sam listed...did you get enough sleep that night, are you being held accountable by someone you don't want to disappoint, etc.
You also can't account for why not being a slob is an actionable goal for you instead of using that time to say learn chinese. It's just there as something you care about. Just because...
To get an "aught from an is" , you can think of a situation where you are stuck in a cage for example and the door is closed but not locked. All you have to do to get out is open the door and get out. Sooner or later you will know what you "ought" to do in order to live. Are you free to stay in the cage, really? The standard of value is "life", always has been. And we are biologically hard wired to "live". If you want to live, you "ought to " undertake action to attain values that support your continuous existence.
I’m interested in Sam Harris’s opinion on the Milgram experiment then. I’m of the opinion that, it gives a …misleading result. I suspect that the individuals involved rightly intuited that the people telling them what to do knew something that they themselves didn’t actually know. That is, they were trusting the authority because they could intuit that the authority knew something they didn’t. …though things that have happened recently are having me thing twice about that
My suspicion hackles are raised by this being sponsored by Better Health. They are not a good place to go for help. Their therapists are not always accredited. Once an organization has been shown to be duplicitous for money how can you ever trust them or people who choose to flog them?
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