Free Will by Sam Harris was one of those books that got my mind racing picking apart every sentence, so presenting my thoughts in a way that doesn’t turn out being ten times longer than the book is challenging. So what I will do is go over some general logical problems that underpin his entire argument, dissect a few sections and ideas from the book to elaborate and give specific examples of how my general criticisms apply, then offer some of my own thoughts on free will or what I term agency. Every unlabeled “quotation” is from Free Will by Sam Harris, pg indicating the page number according to my PDF copy of the book.
I like what Harris’ ‘New Atheist’ buddy Daniel Dennett had to say about this book:
“The book…is also valuable, as I will show, as a veritable museum of mistakes, none of them new and all of them seductive—alluring enough to lull the critical faculties of this host of brilliant thinkers who do not make a profession of thinking about free will. And, to be sure, these mistakes have also been made, sometimes for centuries, by philosophers themselves. But I think we have made some progress in philosophy of late, and Harris and others need to do their homework if they want to engage with the best thought on the topic.”1
This is coming from a colleague who shares all the same assumptions—someone inside the same echo chamber, and his rebuke is brutal. I find Dennett much more reasonable on this issue, but I did not bother to read, nor do I want to repackage his criticisms of Harris. I prefer to address it from my own perspective, as both Harris and Dennett share a common perspective, which I disagree with strongly. A view that Thomas Nagel calls “a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense”, which he is willing to bet “will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.”2 But again, while I will be quoting from different sources, I will be expressing my own views. I read a lot of books with which I disagree to one degree or another, and for the most part I do so without calling into question their authors’ intellectual integrity, but this book (as you will see) is an exception.
First we meet Mr. Materialism and the Straw Man.
Mr. Materialism
“It is important to recognize that the case I am building against free will does not depend upon philosophical materialism (the assumption that reality is, at bottom, purely physical).” pg34 This statement is on its face untrue. Throughout the entire book Harris’ assumptions are completely dependent on and built around the very strictest reductionist neo-darwinian materialism, and falls apart without it. His pretenses towards “soul-stuff” pg34 are only there to redefine it out of existence, and make it seem as if his framing of the spiritual is the only other option to his materialism. First he makes an argument choked full of materialistic assumptions, then to make it seem as if he is being exhaustive, he redefines the soul as being the same as the brain (because to a purely neo-darwinian materialist that’s all the mind is) and then makes the same materialistic brain argument applied to the redefined soul. And thus his arguments stay completely rooted in neo-darwinian materialism even as he pretends to consider what might be deemed an opposite view. This would be like a person who believes that God causes everything trying to be exhaustive by postulating that even if everything is, at bottom purely physical, God is still the cause of those physical laws; thus he stays doggedly within his own perspective while only feigning exhaustive consideration of all options.
Neo-darwinian materialism or scientific naturalism is obviously at odds with any real spiritual view of the universe, but even from a scientific or philosophical perspective it leaves too many questions. For one example, philosopher Thomas Nagel argues:
“…scientific naturalism…hope[s] that everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology. On the other side there are doubts about whether the reality of such features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at the most basic level only of physical facts… The attempts to defend the materialist world picture as a potentially complete account of what there is take many forms… But to those who doubt the adequacy of such a world view, the different attempts to accommodate within it mind and related phenomena all appear as attempts to reduce the true extent of reality to a common basis that is not rich enough for the purpose…this reveals a limit to the reach of the physical sciences, which must therefore be supplemented by something else to account for the missing elements. But the situation may be more serious than that. If one doubts the reducibility of the mental to the physical, and likewise of all those other things that go with the mental, such as value and meaning, then there is some reason to doubt that a reductive materialism can apply even in biology, and therefore reason to doubt that materialism can give an adequate account even of the physical world.”2
It is important to note that neo-darwinian materialism reduces everything to physics and chemistry, and not just free will but all introspective capabilities that make us human, even your sense of being someone—your sense of self, are an illusion. Harris explains this in one of his YouTube videos:
“…the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body…Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything you experience – your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior – all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain…”3
This worldview is what underpins and is assumed true in and between every word of this book. A premise that of necessity dismisses anything that cannot be boiled down to physics or chemistry, reducing self and free will to illusion. I totally reject this premise. If reductionist materialism’s premises are a universal reality, then it’s rational to conclude that the autonomous self is not. But the blaring problem is that every human knows from their own experience that they do exist as a separate self from the universe and make choices and act of their own free will every day. And it does not suffice to dismiss that as illusory merely because it contradicts the implications of reductionist materialism. The emperor has no clothes—we see the truth with our own eyes. In short, this reductio ad absurdum is as follows: if neo-darwinian reductionist materialism eliminates the self-evident conditions of our own existence, then that absurd conclusion counts towards refuting this worldview. And so positive evidence at least proportionate to the level of the conclusion’s absurdity is necessary to establish this point—negative arguments or merely asserting the premise’s truth as grounds to prove the conclusion will not suffice. As we shall see, Harris provides no such evidence.
Harris wraps himself in the mantle of the evidence, but his materialistic reductionist determinism, like everything else he tries to explain too much, at bottom is a homunculus argument. Simply put, you say everything is determined by the laws of physics? Okay, but that just begs the question—where did those laws come from in the first place? More laws yet unknown? An unknowable infinite universe? Magical odds? Or some other or combination of homuncular arguments that used as an explanation also requires the same level of explaining. The laws of physics explain what we can observe, but one cannot extrapolate from endlessly that which one cannot explain in the first place, and still pretend one’s views are scientifically based. Science has an observable boundary beyond which, depending on one’s level of intellectual honesty, crosses into philosophy or pseudoscience. Harris’ book totally lacks a rigorous scientific foundation, which if it wasn’t for his intellectually dishonest pretenses would land it much more in the realm of philosophy, but as it is, borders far too closely to pseudoscience.
The Straw Man
“Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors.” pg37 There is such a diverse spectrum of opinions that are or have been in the world, so likely somebody at some time believed in these ridiculously strict conditions for free will. Maybe it is very common, but I am unaware of any view of free will that is as extreme as what Harris is saying here. This false dilemma that free will has to be completely all or nothing is setting up a shameless straw man argument that he spends the rest of the book knocking around. With the stakes redefined so starkly, it is almost impossible to disagree with Harris: ‘To have free will you must be aware of and have complete control over every factor both known and unknown, so now I just have to show the obvious fact that there are some factors we are arguably unaware of or cannot control, and then I’ve proven the opposite extreme that no degree of free will exists.’ I’ll get into my view of free will later, but let it suffice for now to say that Harris’ description of free will serves no purpose other than to redefine it out of existence.
As Harris finishes the rest of the paragraph quoted above, Mr. Materialism and the Straw Man come together to redefine all of existence in a way that forces Harris’ conclusion: “But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom—for what would influence the influences? More influences? None of these adventitious mental states are the real you. You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.” pg37 With his Straw Man in place redefining free will as nonexistent if the source of any influence is unknown, Harris continues to assert ad nauseam that all actions or thoughts of the mind are determined (adventitious) mental states, and paints a picture of the mind as a storm. This storm of influences or adventitious mental states is not “the real you”, and yet (simultaneously and contradictorily) “You are the storm”, so you have no real self or autonomy from the universe—you are the universe. This platitudinous string of contradictions is masking his true argument: the mind is just a more complex hurricane, so anything (including free will) that would objectively differentiate a mind from a storm cannot be real. So by strawmanning free will as only real if totally disconnected from the universe and magically in control of every possible known and unknown factor, and then defining EVERYTHING (including your mind) as part of the observed materialistic universe, he has forced his conclusion from his premises before the argument even started.
Dynamic Duo of Fallacious Delusion (DDFD)
With his premises (Mr. Materialism and the Straw Man) in place and his conclusion already forced, he moves on to his argument primarily fueled by his dynamic duo of fallacious delusion: the False Dilemma Fallacy and Argument From Ignorance. Upon the crooked backs of these two fallacies, Harris carries the bulk of his arguments across the foundation laid by Mr. Materialism and the Straw Man. Compelling propaganda is spun not with nonsensical reasoning, but by cleverly sneaking in flawed arguments and false premises, then covering those with a veneer of strong logic.
[Sing ALOUD to the tune of Eurythmics’ 1980’s classic Sweet Dreams are Made of This]
♪ ♪♫ ♫ Compelling propaganda is made of these, ♫ ♫ ♪ ♪
But I use logic to disagree.
Read lots of books
And you will see,
Everybody’s spinnin’ up something.
Some of them deny a continuum,
Using an extreme to explain the norm.
Some of them shift the burden o’ proof,
A negative argument in place of facts.
♪ ♪♫ ♫ ♫ ♪ ♪
False Dilemma
First, Harris spins a very clever denying a continuum sort of false dilemma—almost like a double reverse sandwich. The rhetorical equivalent of this image:
To start the book Harris uses the extremest of extreme examples with Hayes and Komisarjevsky. Not just extreme in brutality, but extreme to the degree to which they possibly had seriously or totally compromised free wills. Free will is real—I know because I have it and I use it and I’ve grown it (I’ll get more into that later). But free will is not some kind of absolute thing. It is on a continuum and it is one competing influence. There is a spectrum from one person to the next to the last in terms of how much their free will contributes to their behavior. Free will is something that can be increased through effort, it is also something that can be decreased maybe even lost—through abuse, misuse and/or complacence. But that does not mean it doesn’t exist. Just because there are extremes that doesn’t mean there isn’t a continuum in between.
Komisarjevsky is ‘different‘ and that’s the point. He very well could have ‘”not consciously intended to kill anyone” pg24, but he is a very extreme example in that regard. To take Komisarjevsky and say ‘look here is a guy who doesn’t seem to have free will’, then to conclude that we must all not have free will creates a false dilemma by denying the very real (and I think obvious) possibility that free will is on a continuum and Komisarjevsky is at one extreme end, while the rest of us—to varying degrees—have a functioning part of us known as free will. This is a textbook example of a false dilemma that ignores the possibility of a spectrum.
But we are just getting started because this is not just a false dilemma; remember, it’s a double reverse sandwich. He doesn’t just say ‘these psychos don’t have free will, so no one does’. That is the meat of what he is saying, but to put it so straightforwardly would fail to mask the faulty logic. He has to make it seem that there is some evidence to connect a normal person to the thoughtless acts of these murderers. To do that he starts with a clever sleight of hand to sneak in the unsupported assertion that no one can decide how they view the world or resist impulses, then he supports that idea with a new false dilemma that doubles back on the first.
First, here is a breakdown of the sleight of hand:
“As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him:” pg25
This is a meaningless platitude: ‘if I was him, I would be him’ …duh, and so what? This platitude isn’t meant to convey meaning nor articulate an argument, it’s meant to invoke emotion. Emotion that can be rationalized to support conclusions that if stated directly would sound ridiculous, but when felt emotionally can help sneak in Harris’ assertions. The meat of this statement is just ‘if I was him, I would be him’, which doesn’t really mean anything. If an orange was an apple atom for atom, the orange would be an apple…meaningless semantics. But emotionally, it has the effect of taking the actions of Hayes and Komisarjevsky and mitigating their evil to some degree by making it feel as if an innocent person (Harris) would have done the same thing. Of course it would be ridiculous to say that Harris would have done the same things as these murderers, and Harris is not saying that outright, but that is the emotional effect of this platitudinous statement, which Harris continues to build upon as he continues.
“There is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or to resist the impulse to victimize other people.” pg25
So now Harris has completely substituted himself for Hayes and Komisarjevsky—not logically, but emotionally—in actuality Harris is just switching pronouns while referring to the original persons: if I was them, I would be them, so I’ll just use ‘me’ instead of ‘them’, but I still really mean them, or me as them, which would still be them…confused?…that’s on purpose. Harris is conflating himself with Hayes and Komisarjevsky in order to sneak in the assertion that no one can decide how they view the world or resist impulses. I reject this assertion and will detail why it should be rejected as I continue.
Next Harris makes a new false dilemma that doubles back on the first with his use of extremely mundane examples of decisions people make. From deciding what to drink in the morning to brain scans of people deciding to push a button to his bizarre stream of unconsciousness speech at the end of the book, besides the opposite extreme Komisarjevsky like examples, virtually every other example is of an action that is so mundane that it doesn’t even rise to the level of having anything to say about free will. There is a spectrum of how much our wills play part in a decision depending on the importance of the choice. Choosing when to push a random button or which of your favorite drinks to start your day with may very well be largely controlled by subconscious impulses. Now if that button was on a box that gave you a million dollars and killed a random person, or if you are a devout Mormon being offered tea or coffee, then that’s where free will would definitely come into play.
It is instructive that Harris chooses (yes, chooses with his free will that he is denying) to conflate these two extremes. On one hand showing a mindless murderer as an extreme example of someone who can thoughtlessly do horrible things, then on the other hand showing that mundane things can be done thoughtlessly by normal people. This is not a constructive comparison—it’s a double reverse sandwich. The existence of conscienceless murderers who kill without meaning to, says nothing about normal people. It just means there is a continuum and every continuum has an extreme end. The existence of actions so mundane that they can possibly be decided upon subconsciously, says nothing about real moral agency. It just means there is a continuum and at the lower end free will doesn’t necessarily come into play. In both cases Harris ignores the continuum and creates false dilemmas that sandwiches these two opposites together making it seem that all people with all actions exercise no free will, when the fact is he has shown no such thing. Carefully examine this book and you will see that this criticism remains valid throughout.
Argument From Ignorance
“If I had truly been in Komisarjevsky’s shoes on July 23, 2007—that is, if I had his genes and
life experience and an identical brain (or soul) in an identical state—I would have acted exactly as he did. There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this.” pg25
Harris: I’m going to prove there is no free will. See take these murderers, if I was them, I would be them, so I (meaning them) would have done the same thing I (as them) would have done. “There is simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this.”
Me: Wait, what? Your book is trying to demonstrate that we have no free will and all you are doing is shifting the burden of proof back on me to disprove something you never proved in the first place?
Harris: “Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent…No one has ever described a way in which mental and physical processes could arise that would attest to the existence of such freedom. Most illusions are made of sterner stuff than this” pg26-27
Me: You are just “asserting that a proposition is false because it has not yet been proved true”4: textbook Argument From Ignorance Fallacy. There is a good reason you have to call free will an illusion—that’s because everyone experiences it. It is a part of the human experience, along with consciousness and self. So you can’t just say it doesn’t exist, you have to say: ‘I know you feel you have free will and seem to use it everyday…but that is [waves hands mysteriously] an illuuuusion …’
Harris: “THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL IS ITSELF AN ILLUSION!!!” pg96 (emphasis added)
Me: Yes, you’ve said that a lot, but how have you provided evidence for that?
Harris: You can’t prove it’s not an illusion… “the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process.” “I find it utterly mysterious.” “just as mysterious as” “perfectly mysterious” “What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery—one that is fully determined by the prior state of the universe and the laws of nature…” Pages 63, 70, 35, 36, and 66 respectively.
Me: Wow, just add ‘and of Nature’s God‘ to the end of that and this could be a Calvinist manifesto. Which might go better with all your uses of the word mystery, which makes it hard to tell if you are writing about the Trinity or if you are supposedly taking a scientific look at what you call a natural phenomenon. If everything surrounding free will is so mysterious, then how are you drawing firm conclusions from that lack of evidence? ‘Free will is mysterious; therefore, my presumptive assertions must be true’…Argument From Ignorance.
What if we take that last statement and put the shoe on the other foot. If someone said: “The origins of life remains, at bottom, a mystery—one that is fully determined by the all-powerful Creator of the universe…”, you would instantly call them out for making an argument from ignorance, but you do the same thing throughout the book without batting an eye.
Harris: [staring off thoughtfully into the distance] “If the laws of nature do not strike most of us as incompatible with free will, that is because we have not imagined how human behavior would appear if all cause-and-effect relationships were understood.” pg34
Me: So you’re saying free will is incompatible with your materialistic view of nature because evidence we don’t have might hypothetically prove it? A repeated argument from ignorance that I would find hard to argue that you were ignorant of.
Harris: “The problem is not merely that free will makes no sense objectively (i.e., when our thoughts and actions are viewed from a third-person point of view); it makes no sense subjectively either. It is quite possible to notice this through introspection. In fact, I will now perform an experiment in free will for all to see: I will write anything I want for the rest of this book. Whatever I write will, of course, be something I choose to write. No on…” pg96
Me: [rolls eyes] Stop that! Seriously???
Harris: [annoyed, but with a firm and redoubled determination] ”…NO ONE HAS assigned me a topic or demanded that I use certain words. I can be ungrammatical if I pleased. And if I want to put a rabbit in this sentence, I am free to do so.” pg96 (emphasis added)
Me: Sam, please Sam…just stop for a minute. What are you doing?
Harris: I’m demonstrating that I have no free will because “why didn’t I put an elephant in that sentence? I do not know. I am free to change ‘rabbit’ to ‘elephant,’ of course. But if I did this, how could I explain it? It is impossible for me to know th…” pg96
Me: STOP! You’re doing it again. First off, that’s the same argument from ignorance because you’re still just saying that because no one has proven that you actively choose thoughts, that proves that they come from purely mechanical processes. You need to actually have some kind of real evidence; you can’t just say ‘it is impossible for us to know otherwise, so I must be right.’ Secondly, you are choosing to write in a stream of consciousness, which means by definition that you will write whatever pops into your head. This deliberately thoughtless exercise has nothing to do with free will, except to provide an example of what writing looks like when you choose not to choose. Imagine if you wrote the whole book this way—it’d make less sense than a Trump rally speech. If it were actually true that I “no more decide the next thought [I] think than the next thought [you] write”(and vice versa) pg27-28, then all writing would be this same thoughtless stream of consciousness. The fact that you sat down and wrote a well-thought-out book proves that you chose to not stop at what randomly popped in to your head—you deliberated in your conscious mind and made choices with your free will.
In fact, I will now perform an experiment in free will for all to see: I will continue to write coherent thought out arguments that you are free to agree or disagree with in part or whole…
Harris: “The book failed to make an impact on you”? pg61
Me: No, Sam. The book made an impact—just not the one you were going for.
Now I want to pick apart a few of Harris’ arguments in more detail. I’ve touched on some of this already, but now I want to show how the fallacies I discuss above tie together in the book and take a deeper look at some of the arguments.
Brain Scans
First some notes on Benjamin Libet’s brain experiments. I mentioned above why inconsequential button pushing has nothing to say about free will. But even with that, it’s not hard to find contrary studies and disconfirming evidence that come at the problem a few different ways. William R. Klemm Ph.D. published a paper challenging the conclusions drawn from these types of button pushing experiments, one of the problems he points out happened to be similar to what I was saying: “simple finger movements may be performed without much conscious thought and certainly not representative of the conscious decisions…”5
There were also some professors from the University of Otago who did some interesting twists on these button experiments, which suggests that what Libet was measuring and interpreting as the subconscious brain making a decision was actually just a sign that the brain is paying attention (readiness potential)—not that it made a decision that preempted the conscious mind.6
There were also brain scan experiments done on people making moral decisions, and no matter how one wants to read the neurological tea leaves, the picture these scans give is much more complex than merely a subconscious readiness potential in relation to a finger movement. The medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate, angular gyrus, and the ventral prefrontal cortex all “play a central role in the emotional processes that influence personal moral decision-making“.7
It is instructive that Harris chooses to ignore the disconfirming body of work, and instead makes logically flawed philosophical extrapolations to account for the conscious mind’s obvious involvement in higher level moral decisions:
“The distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought
itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying
brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?” pg 31-32
First off, this is so soaked through with his Materialist assumptions that the conclusion is forced from the start: ‘I am just the mechanistic conscious witness of my experience, so where is the freedom in that?’ And the false comparison between the prefrontal cortex and heartbeat is breathtaking in its distortion and oversimplification. But just notice how Harris moves the goalposts here. Harris’ argument had been that because we do not understand and cannot control our subconscious brain, that means any decision which seems to come from subconscious brain regions must not be of our making—thus defining for the sake of his argument subconscious action with the lack of free will. If he could have stayed with that, his argument might seem more defensible even if totally inexhaustive. But he had to address the obvious fact that “higher” conscious brain regions play part in decision making, so he moves the goalposts to include prefrontal cortex activity as also involuntary because its initiation by and interaction with the subconscious may not be fully understood. So he starts by making an argument that specific actions that show up first in the subconscious show we don’t have free will. Then he uses an argument from ignorance about the unknown connection between subconscious and higher level brain activity to include conscious deliberations as part of the unknown mystery that proves free will is an illusion; thus, moving the goalposts so ALL (not just subconscious) brain activity is evidence against free will. ‘Where is the [intellectual rigor] in that?‘
Deeper Problem with Scans
But the whole idea of using brain scans to discredit free will has a much deeper problem, one that illustrates well the intellectual shallowness of Harris’ materialistic assumptions about mind. “There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events. The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature—and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions.” pg34
Harris has a huge advantage here because he is taking one side of an age-old argument, full of all his implicit assumptions, then rather than going through the intellectual rigor of explaining why it is necessarily true, with what would need to be materialistic special pleading, he just dismissively asserts that there is “no question” that he is right. When in fact there is plenty of question and the connection he is drawing is only true because of the definition with which he defines it. And now I have to sound like an over-explaining nitpicking ninny because I have to unpack what Harris merely asserted. For the next two paragraphs, I will mostly be putting Thomas Nagel’s insights from Mind and Cosmos into my own words in explaining the problems with how Harris is trying to connect mental psychological states with physical events in the brain. This does not apply perfectly, but I do think it is instructive. Nagel’s complete argument can be found in chapter 3 of Mind and Cosmos on consciousness.8 The part that addresses this type of psychological=physical (Ψ = Φ) connection starts on the bottom of page 38 and continues through the end of that section (see the link in note 8).
One must actually prove a scientific connection between the psychological state and physical event in the brain in order for it to be a scientific truth and not just a conceptual truth. A scientific truth is something intrinsic that is true no matter how you define it. Like the equation for motion F = ma, which is experimentally proven true and applicable throughout the universe regardless how it might be defined; a force applied to an object will always be equal to the object’s mass times acceleration. A conceptual truth is only true by definition. Like that a widow is a woman who has lost her husband by death is only true because that is how it is defined: there is no intrinsic connection, it is just part of the conceptual structure of our language and culture.
The connection that Harris is using, psychological state = physical event in the brain, is not a scientific fact: only an assumed relational conception. And it’s not just that a connection hasn’t been proven yet, it’s that the two things are fundamentally different. Psychological states like joy or pain are not themselves physical events, so connecting them to physical events in the brain without admitting to some other nonphysical property to explain the feeling of subjective appearances can only be a conceptual or definitional connection—not an intrinsic or scientific one. Something in addition to the physical event is needed to explain a nonphysical feeling like joy. Just like the patterns of ink on paper in a book are not the meaning of a novel: the alphabetic symbols are about something beyond anything embedded in the ink and paper or the symbols themselves. The firing of neurons is not joy, just like letters are not meaning—there is something essential missing beyond the purely physical. Materialists do not account for the essential differences between joy and physical brain events but instead just define them as being the same because of an assumed causal correlation. So even though this route was trying to avoid an analytical or conceptual answer, in the end “mental events are the product of physical events”, not because they are the same thing or there is a necessary connection, but because that is how the relation is defined by materialists. So the evidence that Harris is citing to establish his worldview is completely dependent on assuming that what he is trying to prove is already true.
My Butt Did It
I found several instances in this book where Harris’ arguments sound surprisingly similar to the defense my 2-year-old Hyrum gave me when I ask if he pooped his pants:
Me: ‘Hyrum, did you poop in your diaper?’
Hyrum: ‘No!’
Me: ‘Then how did that poop get in there?’
Hyrum: ‘My butt did it.’
This 2-year-old of course has not yet seized the full control that is available over his body, and some functions that adults can control, may slip through the cracks without him doing anything one way or another or feeling responsible. But there is a difference between mental processes and deliberations that center around and/or include free will, and body functions like producing red blood cells or most of the digestive process. And there is a spectrum here from enzymes performing their functions to breathing, which goes on without conscious thought, but can be controlled to an extent if you choose to think about it.
Harris spends the whole book saying ‘My [subconscious] did it.’ But he at least tries to address one objection quoted in the book:
“[subconscious] processes are as much our own, just as much part of who we are as persons, just as much us, as our conscious awareness. We shouldn’t alienate ourselves from our own neurophysiology and suppose that the conscious self, what Harris thinks of as constituting the real self (and as many others do, too, perhaps), is being pushed around at the mercy of our neurons. Rather, as identifiable individuals we consist (among other things) of neural processes, some of which support consciousness, some of which don’t.” pg45
Harris hand-picked the quote he gets to refute, got to decide how it would be set up and presented, and only began to consider arguments from people who agreed with all of his underlying assumptions, but he still had no logically sound counterargument.
Let’s pick apart Harris’ reply to detail how it falls apart logically. First Harris says “They trade a psychological
fact—the subjective experience of being a conscious agent—for a conceptual understanding of ourselves as persons.”pg47. But as I showed above, Harris’ entire view of the brain mind connection is itself not a scientific fact, but a conceptual understanding. So this is really just the pot calling the kettle black.
Then look how Harris has to twist Dennett’s argument: “The psychological truth is that people feel identical to a certain channel of information in their conscious minds. Dennett is simply asserting that we are more than this—we are coterminous with everything that goes on inside our bodies, whether we are conscious of it or not.”pg47-48 This is a distortion of Clark’s summary of Dennett’s argument. Clerk was saying that subconscious as well as conscious neurological processes are both part of our self: i.e. you are everything that goes on inside your brain. But Harris distorts this to say instead ‘…everything that goes on inside our bodies.’ Harris continues to build upon his mischaracterization:
“At this moment, you are making countless unconscious ‘decisions’ with organs other than your brain—but these are not events for which you feel responsible. Are you producing red blood cells and digestive enzymes at this moment? …To say that you are responsible for everything that goes on inside your skin because it’s all ‘you’ is to make a claim that bears absolutely no relationship to the feelings of agency and moral responsibility that have made the idea of free will an enduring problem for philosophy.” pg48
So now beating on his distorted straw man, Harris spins up a false dilemma denying the continuum between the most automatic body functions and deliberations of the mind, and comes to the ridiculous and fallacious conclusion that because we don’t decide to make red blood cells, we have no agency at all. Blood cell production has nothing at all to do with free will—and no one here (except Harris) is claiming it does. To distort his friend’s argument, ignore the line between neurological processes and body functions, then lump everything that goes on in the body, brain, and mind together in an all-or-nothing false dilemma pretending that blood cell production and digestive enzymes disprove free will and moral responsibility is intellectually shallow and/or intentionally deceptive. Hyrum doesn’t understand what is going on, but I’m pretty sure Harris knows better.
Cause and Effect
Harris spends a whole section on quantum uncertainty and the Heisenberg principle, but misses or distorts the broader point. The point is not that the mind is necessarily a quantum computer, the point is if an inanimate particle can appear to act freely, why reject the belief that man does?9 Harris assumes based on the deterministic behavior of matter on the non-quantum scale that human action is also just as determined. Eddington and Born are just asking if the indeterministic behavior of matter on the quantum scale could point to human action also being just as indeterminate.
I think the Heisenberg principle, as it relates here, is interesting but less instructive than (excepting where it might tie in to) Chaos theory. I found it interesting that Harris didn’t even mention Chaos. Not because I expect him to touch on every scientific principle that I see as connected, but because all of Harris’ mathematical assumptions are based on the old idea that complex dynamical systems can be approximated lineally: “Genes are transcribed, neurotransmitters bind to their receptors, muscle fibers contract, and John Doe pulls the trigger on his gun.” pg52 Harris seems to still be “brainwashed” by the “classical models where everything is determined by initial conditions”10, but that is not the way a complex dynamical system like the brain should be viewed. There are many different interacting factors that play into every decision, and Chaos research had shown that these types of dynamical systems do not behave in a predictable classically deterministic manner. They can be affected greatly by arbitrarily small changes in initial conditions, deviate wildly from paths predicted by classical models, and even have more than one possible final state.
Chaos is “…determinism but not really.” It shows that “…classical deterministic systems…could generate randomness…” “The idea that an equation could bounce around in an apparently random way—that was pretty exciting. You would say, ‘Where is this random motion coming from? I don’t see it in the equations.’ It seemed like something for nothing, or something out of nothing.” “On a philosophical level, it struck [J. Doyne Farmer] as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.”10 Harris is quibbling about the Heisenberg principle and using linear logic to extrapolate mountains of assumptions from mole hills of 1980’s brain scans data, while he does not even address very recent advancements in our understanding of dynamical systems, which renders much of his reasoning pointless. Chaos is ushering in the end of reductionism, but Harris seems to have missed the memo.
Equivocation
Harris spends the whole book arguing from ignorance that the mysterious workings of the subconscious are proof that all human actions can be reduced to impersonal physical events. His materialistic conceptual framework for the mind assumes a deterministic homunculus hidden out of sight in the deep recesses of the subconscious pulling the strings and pushing the buttons; robbing our conscious awareness of any real choice. But then, Harris seems to equivocate:
“And the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they don’t matter. If I had not decided to write this book, it wouldn’t have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, will power, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading
to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.” pg59-60
I understand that this is supposed to be a nuanced form of deterministic will power and not “real” free will, but this somewhat arbitrary distinction is only possible to maintain when Harris is juxtaposing his “human choice” with his strawman free of will. When the paragraph above is compared with real attempts to understand free will or agency, it appears that Harris is just trying to equivocate with vague semantical quibbles about will power/human choice being the primary cause of consequential actions and just as important as free will except that (even though nearly identical) the former is acceptable and the latter is a self-deluded illusion. The only real distinction Harris makes between the acceptable will power/human choice causal state and the deluded idea of free will is that the former comes “out of the darkness of prior causes”: meaning that the true delineation is based on an argument from ignorance about what we don’t know about the dark and mysterious workings of the subconscious.
So while true free will may imply that there is something at work beyond the material universe we see, Harris’ worldview requires faith that even though we seem to act freely, at the root of every decision there is an unseen deterministic homunculus controlling every thought. Billions of stupid mechanisms combining to make up the human mind like an invisible organic Voltron in his garage that defies every attempt at illumination. Unverifiable, yet necessary for his conceptual framework, and so assumed to be true. And thus what Harris billed as a scientific look at free will boils down to his “evidence of things not seen.”11
My View
Now I want to sketch out some of my own views on free will to round out the mostly negative argument I’ve made thus far. I will cite scripture not as an authoritative source like one might do when giving a talk at church, but for the wisdom they articulate and to establish that this worldview goes far back into the past and is not just an ad hoc doctrine tailored to contradict Harris’ strawman.
The restored gospel has a unique cosmology, which collapses many of the age old problems surrounding human nature and freedom. The deeper I dig, the more beautiful symmetries and profound connections I find; from this spring of knowledge I drink in the insights that have formed my views. I do not pretend to Harris’ scientific level of proof, but that is due to a more intellectually honest approach, not a weaker argument. I fully acknowledge that my view is philosophical/religious in nature, but I find its explanatory power in understanding the universe and human nature very illuminating.
Mormonism, which agrees with neither Harris’ brand of materialism nor the strict dualism of the religious world, collapses the ghost in the machine dilemmas into one universe where “All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure” (D&C 131:7), and matter is eternal “in which dwells all the glory.”12 And thus by correcting the mind-body ontological divide and rejecting the (nearly ubiquitous since the 2nd century AD) doctrine of creation Ex Nihilo ‘out of nothing’, Mormonism resets the exaggerated gulfs between spirit and brain, God and man, which had denigrated the body and made our intelligence contingent on and separate from Aquinas’ first-cause13. Gone is the gulf that would make human freedom non-fundamental and subject to the Calvinist view of God as totally sovereign—including over your every action—or the Arminian view that freedom to choose is a recent indulgence of grace. And gone is the gulf that could justify the explaining away of the mind by understanding the brain.
Joseph Smith taught “We say that God Himself is a self-existing being…Who told you that man did not exist in like manner upon the same principles? Man does exist upon the same principles…The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is co-equal [co-eternal] with God himself.”12 “For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:33)
Man’s intelligence, mind, consciousness being eternal—as fundamental as every other law and/or property of the universe—sets a solid foundation for a more robust and logical form of what we have been calling free will. Harris’ book is called Free Will and that is the term he uses, so I’ve gone along with it while examining his analysis, but the term has way too much baggage and does not convey wholly the principles involved. In Mormonism (and in all reality) the idea is more precisely identified as agency, which is intelligent beings acting within law to move towards ends for which, for either better or worse, they will be held accountable by the consequences of those actions.
“Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be. All [intelligence] is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself…otherwise there is no existence. Behold, here is the agency of man…” (D&C 93:29-31)
The first principles of man or intelligence that is self-existent with God12, is placed by God through spirit birth into a sphere of action with “certain bounds also and conditions” (D&C 88:38), and thus our eternal existence as intelligence continues into our existence as spirit children. Although the point of exaltation is for it to someday be, until then, our agency is not fully realized. It is confined by laws, bounds, and conditions within a limited sphere of action. Exaltation is to ‘receiveth truth and light, until glorified in truth and knowing all things’ (D&C 93:28), and so become totally free to act, not just in a set sphere, but in all spacetime, worlds without end.
So for now, we are as Lehi puts it “free according to the flesh”. We have what is expedient to choose liberty and eternal life or captivity and death (2 Nephi 2:27). Agency or liberty to choose increases as we gain control over our natural impulses, poor choices lead in the opposite direction towards captivity to the flesh. We have to work at putting off or overcoming the natural man, which can only be ultimately accomplished through the atonement of Jesus Christ (Mosiah 3:19), but anyone can improve and strengthen their agency through exercising it. Either exercise it or exorcize it—use it or lose it—plus a whole wide spectrum in between.
So when talking about agency, it is important to note that this is just one part of you, one influence, the higher part that makes you human, but you still have a more animal side “the natural man”, with which your agency must contend. So the mere presence of influences, like subconscious influences, does not mean you are of necessity controlled by them. Nor does the reality of agency mean a person is always in total control of every decision. Addiction is only a special case, there is a grand continuum and complex dynamical network of interactions between these and other influences. The quest and hard work of this life is to try to condition ourselves “to act for [our]selves and not to be acted upon” (2 Nephi 2:26).
Thus law, including deterministic physical law, is necessary to—not the opposite of—moral agency because if our choices did not have set consequences, then choices would be meaningless and our agency void. As Terrence Deacon puts it: “Determinate causality is in fact a necessary condition for the self to become the locus of physical work. An agent is a locus of work that is able to change things in ways more concordant with internally generated ends and contrary to extrinsic tendencies.“14
“And again, verily I say unto you, that which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law…cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment.” (D&C 88:34-35)
“Agency is more than freedom—it’s the essence of our existence;
It demands choice and accountability for its eternal subsistence.
If we are not held accountable, our agency would become void,
God will not walk this crooked path, that’s the lie Satan
employed.”
From Justice&mercy, by Les Cookson (Yes, I just quoted
myself)15
This is determinism, not of every action but of consequence. If you drop a ball, it will collide with the earth according to F = Gm1m2/r2. If dropping that ball did not have some set or deterministic consequence, then what one did with the ball would be meaningless because the ball would not move in accord with an agent’s intended ends. Moral law (which is one and the same with physical law), if broken or followed, has consequences that are just as set, even if they may seem to be delayed due to the special conditions in this temporal probation. And this is not just an empty nod to determinism, even God has to operate within His eternal laws or else “cease to be God” (Alma 42:13,22,25 & Mormon 9:19).
Harris and I agree that the non-sentient physical universe operates wholly according to deterministic laws. I believe that the deterministic nature of the physical universe is a necessary condition for conscious agency (things that act, must have things to act upon (2 Nephi 2:14)), and that sentience (or intelligence) is as fundamental and eternal as matter and the laws by which they interact. So when Harris tries to extrapolate from physical law to show that intelligence makes no fundamental difference in the physical operations of sentient systems—both are fully deterministic—so that the divide, in regards to cause and effect, between a hurricane and a person is one of degree not of kind, I see this as an explaining away of (not an explanation of) fundamental and self-evident characteristics of sentience. Mormonism collapses Harris’ entire framework for which he provides no rigorous argument nor compelling evidence. Harris’ ideas on free will seem to be less about sound extrapolation and more about projection fueled by the idea that sentience is the serendipitous byproduct of purely physical events. Just as a child will personify a toy by projecting human characteristics onto an inanimate object, Harris’ extrapolations have the effect of projecting inanimate characteristics onto sentient beings: “a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense”2
Mormons like to talk a lot about Satan’s plan in the war in heaven, and how Satan “sought to destroy the agency of man” and was “cast down” to earth and continues his war “to deceive and to blind men, and to lead [mankind] captive” (Moses 4:3-4). But only the ends (destroy the agency of man), not the means are explicitly stated in scripture. Whatever the details of that plan (more accurately ploy), it could only threaten agency by proposing to remove choice, accountability, or both. Harris and Calvinists are two who push the idea that we have no ultimate choice; many others, including those espousing notions of salvation by grace alone and moral relativists, push the idea that we have no ultimate accountability. Both are error, both distort the agency of man past a logical breaking point. And so the deceptive means of the ploy are tailored to fit many even contradictory worldviews, but all to the same end. But no matter the form it takes, any attempt to ‘destroy’ choice or accountability necessarily affects both because they are connected in one principle—agency.
Agency is not about magically being able to do whatever you want. It is about being able to choose from available options and living with the consequences of those choices. Agency is necessary for growth, but inevitably all fall short of the law during this growth process. And thus being in violation of law, our process of growing in agency is stymied. To pull us out of this cycle and allow growth to continue without violating choice nor accountability, Christ “offereth himself a sacrifice for sin, to answer the ends of the law, unto all those who have a broken heart and a contrite spirit” (2 Nephi 2:7). And so the Atonement is all about preserving and growing agency. This makes agency and its continual growth central to the purpose of life.
Back to everyday life. With traditional free will (and certainly Harris strawman of it) being laid aside for the more logically robust reality of degrees of freedom within a sphere, how do we know we have this agency? Agency is part of and as self-evident as human consciousness. Harris’ idea that we are only the ‘conscious witness of our experience’; that we can be aware without having some ability to control, that there is no real center (real self) that defines who we are as a being, is antithetical to our own self-knowledge of consciousness that we experience every day. It is impossible to be aware of one’s own surroundings and thought processes and not have at least some sway over them; just like it is impossible to observe a quantum system without altering it. Any way one looks at it, the brain, mind, brain-mind are not some kind of linear system as Harris’ type of determinism requires, but a complex dynamical system that does not operate with linear certainty, but according to beautiful chaotic patterns that we help shape and control. And even an arbitrarily small act of will on initial conditions can greatly affect the final state, especially when applied constantly over a period of time.
Agency may be difficult to investigate with the scientific method because even though its existence is an objective fact, it’s only experienced subjectively within the mind. So “how can you believe what is utterly unevidenced, the question may be returned, how have you managed to repress the engrained evidence within?”9 Consciousness without agency and self is a meaningless gesture; a self-deception to avoid the contradiction of deciding to investigate whether decision is possible: I think, therefore I am not.
So now let’s reason based on our own experience and the evidence within to illuminate agency and how it operates. Agency is not the ability to magically decide to be someone you are not, nor do something antithetical to your nature: it is the ability to gradually improve (or diminish) towards an attainable end point, or do something you know is right (or wrong) despite other influences pulling on you. For the most part, you are who you are at any given point. But through continual application of one’s agency, people can change making different types of choices more likely in the future. More like hunting a rabbit out of the woods, than pulling one out of a hat. So a person is not just thought of as being responsible for a decision made in one given moment (which if played back exactly the same a hundred times they would do the same thing again and again), but they are responsible because every prior decision that led to that point made them the person who would make that given decision in that given moment.
This oft-quoted at church insight by Charles A. Hall illustrates the point well: “We sow our thoughts, and we reap our actions; we sow our actions, and we reap our habits; we sow our habits, and we reap our characters; we sow our characters, and we reap our destiny”.16
Agency viewed in this light becomes more clear and circumvents the pointless arguing about how many angels or deterministic homunculi can dance on the head of a pen that isolate instances and attribute them to magic or reductive linear mathematics. You are a conscious self, a being that can think, move, and act within an initial sphere of freedom. Choices like getting an education, cultivating healthy committed relationships, and obeying moral law are good because they expand one’s sphere of freedom. Choices like watching 5 hours of TV a day, shirking social responsibilities, and flouting moral law are bad because they constrict one’s sphere of freedom. Your conscious agency is your ability to understand and over time change your character and outward situation based on internally conceived ends and to be responsible, for better or worse, for the results of those decisions. To the extent that a person is forced to act, incapable of understanding, psychologically or morally damaged, etc., they are not held responsible by any rational or compassionate being—very much including their Heavenly Father.
Here are a couple specific examples from my own life because mine is the only mind to which I have access, but the examples are based on common and relatable principles. I work from home from about 8am to 6pm each weekday. On most weekdays when my wife is at the gym, I need to wake the kids up at 7am to get them ready for school. Within these constraints (which themselves are a result of how I’ve chosen to live my life) I have flexibility as to when I wake up. I choose, despite powerful influences to sleep longer, to wake up about 5am each weekday. I do this because I want to have time in the morning to study, write and exercise. I’ve also found that even though it is a harder pattern to follow than one I might fall into naturally, about 6 hours of sleep with a 10 minute power nap in the afternoon as needed seems to be the most invigorating and efficient sleep schedule for me.
It wasn’t that long ago that I used to sleep for that extra hour or so, and there were different influences that informed my decision to change. I saw a difference in my ability to feel and act on the promptings of the Spirit when I set more time aside for study. I feel a greater sense of satisfaction and self-fulfillment when I have time to write. I am healthier and more able to perform my duties as father and husband when I have time to exercise. I take very seriously the commandment to “cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated.” (D&C 88:124) But I also want to sleep more. Like food, the body wants more sleep than it needs—even more, it seems, than is healthy. I am a conscious agent, and I can decide which influences I let shape my actions. I struggled at times to make my body do what I had deliberated internally would be the best course to follow. I reflected on weeks when I had given in more to the body, saw I was missing the benefits I decided I wanted, recommitted and continued to improve. Then through a continual process of deliberation and effort, I (my mind) conditioned myself (my body) to wake up earlier and be more productive.
There is no ‘how do you know why you really did it’ subconscious mumbo jumbo. No ‘well if you played back one morning a million times, you’d wake up early every time’ deterministic hand-waving. Because it is not about that one instance; I chose to condition myself over time in accord with internally generated ends attainable within biological and physical laws, and because I continue to want the benefits of that extra time, the decision to wake up at 5am each weekday has become easier subjectively and much more likely objectively.
Through the concerted exercise of my agency, I have been able to accumulate greater degrees of freedom: meaning I act more in agreement to internal ideals. Decisions focused on internal goals that are part of a continual effort to improve upon like the sleep example detailed above are numerous. Battling hunger to fasting monthly from food and water for 24 hours, has not only made this kind of fast easier, but helps me control all my appetites all the time. Being internally committed to high levels of sexual purity both in thought and action has resulted over time in dramatic improvements in my ability to control my thoughts. An internal ideal of the kind of father I want to be, through much effort and continual repentance and recommitment has greatly improved my ability to be patient with my 6 young kids. So when a moment where an instantaneous reaction is generated through a combination of conscious and subconscious factors, that reaction is much more likely to reflect behavior in agreement with my internally held fatherly ideal. This is agency in action and proof that it exists, but you can only know first-hand if you test it in your life. But merely postulating that all this concerted deliberative effort over a long period of time is deterministic in a way that negates agency because materialism assumes that everything is deterministic (including human action) only begs the question: why did you assume everything was deterministic in the first place? Harris can imagine arguments from ignorance or spin false dilemmas or attack strawmen or recite materialistic articles of faith all day long, but that does not change the nature of our being.
A Pakistani rancher will keep a young calf confined by tying a small rope around the calf’s leg. The calf gets so used to thinking he can’t get away that even when he grows into a strong bull who could easily snap the twine, he doesn’t even try. Just like a bull who believes he is controlled by the twine, believing that one’s agency is an illusion is a lie that if embraced becomes effectively true. The reality of your own agency, if embraced and acted upon will bring forth the confirming evidence in your life. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).
Your brother,
Notes:
1. From Daniel Dennett’s review of Free Will by Sam Harris
2. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False By Thomas Nagel
3. https://youtu.be/fajfkO_X0l0
4. Argument from ignorance definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
5. You can see a summary of all William R. Klemm Ph.D.’s objections here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201010/free-will-is-not-illusion
6. You can read a summary of the University of Otago experiments here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17835-free-will-is-not-an-illusion-after-all/
7. http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/health/brain-moral-judgments/
8. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel. Chapter 3: http://web.mit.edu/philosophy/religionandscience/nagel2.pdf
9. Eternal Man By Truman G. Madsen
10. Chaos: Making a New Science By James Gleick
11. Hebrews 11:1 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
12. The King Follett Sermon By Joseph Smith, Jr.(1844)
13. Aquinas’ first-cause is God or the creedal view of God.
14. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter‘ By Terrence W. Deacon, pg 479
15. Justice&mercy By Les Cookson https://grace-for-grace.com//post/142035445185/JusticeMercy
16. Quoted in The Home Book of Quotations, sel. Burton Stevenson [1934], 845
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