Free will is an illusion: Sam Harris

Free will, as we commonly understand it, is an illusion.

Chemical reactions and and a complex interplay of far-flung factors shape what options come before us, argued neuroscientist-philosopher Sam Harris in his slim, sharp 2012 book Free Will.

“You can do what you decide to do,” he writes. “But you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”

The practical implications inform how to treat criminality, with a sense of sympathy for the unlucky bastards whose lives lead them to bad deeds. Strategic punishment is still possible, though, he argues: If we could incarcerate hurricanes we would, and we give justice to wild animals without calling it free will.

Below are notes for my future reference.

My notes:

• “The intention to do one thing, and not another, does not originate in consciousness – rather it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it”
• Benjamin Libet used EEG to study the timing of voluntary actions, finding that brain activity (the readiness potential) begins hundreds of milliseconds before a person is consciously aware of deciding to move
• Says our decisions chemically form before we “decide” to act (My note: Couldn’t that be free will by another name?)
• “We are not authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose”
• The criminal should still be treated differently, and this “does not make social and political freedom any less important”
• “The idea that we, as conscious beings, are deeply responsible for the character of our mental lives and subsequent behavior is simply impossible to map onto reality”
• Voluntary and involuntary actions not same as free will
• Argues we would have to know all factors to have true free will (My note: really??)
• “You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”
• Free will has only endured as an idea because we feel as if we enact free will
• In philosophy we have determinism and libertarianism (both called incompatibilist because if background causes influence us, free will is illusion), and compatabilism
• “The only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist”
• “A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings”
• Compatibilists like Daniel Dennett (1924-2024): even if thoughts are the product of unconscious causes they are still our thoughts: neural processes are us and not separate from a real self
• Sam Harris argues ^ this is a bait and switch: that it trades a psychological fact (subjective experience) for a conceptual understanding of personhood (that we our neural processes) — “it solves the problem of free will by ignoring it”
• 90% of the cells in our body are microbes like E. coli
• Martin Heisenberg: opening closing of ion channels happen at random and not caused by environmental stimuli: is that self generated?
• Quantum mechanics: if a fly doesn’t have free will from uncertainty neither does humans
• Conscious thoughts are compatible with a lack of free will because the prompt “will come out of the darkness of prior causes”
• “You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do”
• Perhaps the only good outcome of existentialism is the idea we can interpret and reinterpret our lives
• “You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could’ve done otherwise”
• Reading an argument against free will made subjects more likely to test on an exam — less helpful and more aggressive
• We are “Neuronal weather patterns”
• This lets us focus on assessing risk with criminals (likelihood to do it again) and fear rather than hate bad actors — who are unlucky
• Those on death row have some combination of bad genes, bad parents, bad upbringing, bad environments, bad ideas and bad luck (supremely so for the wrongly accused):
• “The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior”
• If we could incarcerate hurricanes we would, and we give justice to wild animals without calling it free will
• “Viewing being as natural phenomenon did not damage our system of justice. If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricane for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well.”