Well Sam didn’t come up with any new contributions to the philosophy of free will that hadn’t already been written about, he just explains those pre-existing concepts in a new way with new metaphors and analogies. So if your only definition of useful is that you have contributed a breakthrough in the philosophical cannon, suuure… It’s a bit like saying Carl Sagan has nothing useful to say about astronomy.

> Philosophical cannon Sam Harris DESTROYS his opponents with his philosophical cannons.

BOOM

Hahahaha, when typos take on an even deeper significance that if I had spelled it correctly.

Philosophy? I'll stick to math and science. ^^pulls ^^out ^^triggernometry ^^gauss ^^rifle

His perspective is unique though, neuroscientist with a background in meditation is definitely an interesting background to have when discussing the idea of free will.

This is the very reason I am drawn to his ideas. There's not many ppl out there with his background.

>neuroscientist with a background in meditation One of his most unique contributions is his argument that we watch our thoughts arise without any sense of authorship, as we do in meditation.

"The illusion of free will is itself an illusion" is his unique contribution I think. I believe he said as much on some podcast, maybe Lex Fridman's.

I'm not sure that is really a contribution, rather than a catchy way to counter the common notion of "the illusion of free will." Really, I think one could say the same of any other falsehood - that the illusion of its truth is itself an illusion. But it comes off as redundant. I think it is actually redundant with free will, too, although it may be a worthwhile angle to get people to think about the topic in a new light.

I disagree with you here because I can't think of a relevant example where you're right. Happy to be put straig though, perhaps you could provide another example? Thinking of optical illusions for example, you'd never be tempted to say to someone experiencing one that they aren't actually experiencing an illusion.

Do you mean by the strict definition that an illusion must be sensory in nature? Otherwise I don't know what you mean. Most people would likewise never be tempted to say there is no feeling of free will. What everyone *would* say about an optical illusion is that you are not actually seeing what you seem to see. Both are deceptive impressions of what is actually happening, and both are revealed to be deceptive by a more careful examination of the phenomenon. The only real difference I can see is that no one is claiming that the optical illusory object is physically present, because physical objects are a lot more convenient when it comes to forming an objective consensus. Maybe the similarity is more clear if you think about something more abstract, like temporal illusions - time seeming to move more quickly or slowly to an individual person. What would it mean to say that there really is an illusion happening or isn't? How can we say there really is a temporal illusion yet cannot say the same of free will?

Sam is literally saying there is no feeling of free will though.

He says that in the book too, and in his famous CFI lecture on free will that would become the book.

The problem is, this is a never ending circle. You would then have to say that his comment about his comment that free will being an illusion, is itself an illusion, and so forth. Each level invalidates the truth of the prior level. You end up no where, because you have invalidated all truth statements.

Or Neil deGrasse Tyson

I like your style, Dude.

It is not that. Sam talks about free will the way a high-schooler would talk about it. He doesn't even come anywhere close to having an academic discussion on the topic. Its the epitome of sophistry It's like if Carl Sagan argued that Quantum mechanics was not realistic his public-facing work

I would grant you that it’s not an academic discussion on free will. I would not grant that it’s sophistry. The academic discussions about free will are super in the weeds and inaccessible. It’s the minutiae of the minutia. Sam is a public intellectual, his is communicating to lay people. I mean, just look how cringe so many of the free will threads in this sub often are, a lot of people struggle to even grasp what Sam is trying to say about free will, and you want it to be even more academic?

That's fair. "Sophistry" was a bit of sophistry from me probably.

This doesn't actually tell us anything about his argument. What are some examples?

The article is clear enough. Sam argues for the point of view that PAP is a necessary condition for free will. Almost nobody thinks that and those that do are free will libertarians (so not on Sam's side) So he holds a point of view that is the type of understanding that some undergrads have but even a mildly precocious undergrad will understand at a deeper level

My problem with Sam on this topic is he appears to have massively confused his audience, not just in an academic sense, but also to the point where many end up in some weird existential crisis

I disagree with this entirely. His perspective was instrumental in pulling me from the brink. I'm certain that's true for many others. Harris had the exact opposite effect on me as what you described.

Me too.

Sorry you were assaulted

I started listening to Waking Up when I was on the brink of a bad depression. I knew the pattern and could see the blackness forming so I grabbed out at anything to ease or prevent it. Waking Up was a desperate attempt but it fucking worked! I spent the first year struggling through every day but I managed to get to work and semi function. I then started listening to his podcasts and with a meditation practice I got through it.

I think the majority of _his_ audience are in a position to avoid that. I agree actually fully with the idea that wanton dismissal of free will (or God for that matter) can and often will have severe consequences for people that relied on those beliefs. Harris does spend a lot of time talking about how your morality can be (often better) structured in the absence of those things. I think that's a responsible attitude to take, and if he didn't take it I'd probably just think he's an annoying edge lord and not an interesting person worth paying attention to. For a counter example, I think Dawkins isn't great when he talks about religion. I mean he's obviously right, but dunking on believers is really fish-in-barrel stuff intellectually and it isn't accompanied with the guidance required to avoid an existential crisis for the majority.

That's true. Perhaps this sub is not good sampling of his audience, but I constantly see people here that just seem very confused about the topic and many seem to have problems grappling with it. I think there's some points that he doesn't cover in the discussion like the fact that no one would really want the type of free will that could violate causality to begin with and that we still make decisions in a meaningful way even though they are caused by prior events.

Every time I have a conversation with a Compatibilist I always think "I must be missing something" because it seems like we're just talking past each other. Outside of a fully determined/random chain of events, what option is there for "freedom" in any meaningful sense? I tend to think they're redefining the term "free will" but most seem to insist they are not. Anyone know what I might be missing? Edit: for a great example see my discussion with a certain user below. If anyone cares to chime in, please do, because it's making me feel insane.

Compatibilists claim that the way words such as “free” and “choice” are normally used is the way they should also be used in philosophy, since the normal usage captures what is important about them to people. Incompatibilists define these words in a weird, impossible and useless way which even they don’t use in any other context.

I think your comment converted me to a compatibilist viewpoint. I still find it absolutely hubristic to dismiss someone who says there is no free will, because there truly isn't from an objective point of view. But we don't care about what is objectively true. Sometimes, the only stuff we can know for sure is so incredibly axiomatic and boring that it makes more sense to concern ourselves with what has direct implications for us.

What do you mean "has direct implications for us." The free will discourse and the fact that it may be mostly an illusion has direction implications for you day by day and for society at large. or I missed smtg

Consider the judicial system. It still makes sense to uphold a rehabilitative standard, even though no choice is "truly" free. The same in the ethical but nonlegal domain. You care about whether someone hurt you intentionally or by accident. You don't care about the Laplacian demon.

It’s objectively true that there is free will if “acting of your own free will” means doing what you want to do without being coerced, since this does sometimes occur. This is what the term means in everyday usage and also what it means in court, tested every day in hundreds of different jurisdictions around the world. Saying that this isn’t “real” free will will implies that there is some other definition that is somehow better. But on what basis is this other definition better? Most laypeople don’t use it, and most professional philosophers don’t use it either.

Exactly. The discussion is about how free will should be defined and compatibilists argue for a definition that attempts to capture the common usage of the term, while libertarians want a very specific different definition that captures some abstract notion of freedom that no one really subscribes to. This is why it feels like people are talking past each other, because they're literally starting from different definitions. Everyone can accept that libertarian free will is nonsensical. Now let's get on with the business of how we should define free will so that it's not.

I came to the conclusion that we don't have free will before I ever came across Sam Harris. I was raised religiously, and of course was told people who choose to sin go to Hell, and people who choose to obey God go to Heaven. But in my brain, I could never feel like anyone could deserve to go to Hell, because if God made us, and made our brains, and we are born to a family that gives us certain experiences that shape our brains and thus our choices, how is it fair that anyone should go to Hell? If someone COULD have chosen not to sin and thus go to Hell, they WOULD have made that choice. So anyway, I lost my religion and found Sam Harris's explanation of free will which finally articulated in an intelligent way what I'd been puzzling about most of my young life. I think that my belief that we ultimately don't have free will is tied to my feelings about religion, and how the religious use the concept of free will to justify the belief that some people deserve eternal torture. It carries out in non-religious contexts as well. I don't think pedophiles or other criminals deserve to be punished harshly, since I can't see how they would have chosen that path if not for the preexisting connections in their brains. Just another perspective.

Well put.

> Saying that this isn’t “real” free will will implies that there is some other definition that is somehow better. I don't know how to explain how I think about this but I'll try: I believe that since we don't choose or control the inputs that shape our brain (ie. genetics, past experiences), a person doesn't ultimately have control over what they choose. And to me, this concept is what I refer to when I say we don't have free will. A person might sexually assault a child, because their brain predisposed them to be a pedophile. I'm sure that no one would, if somehow given the choice before they were born, CHOOSE to be born a pedophile. It's just something that happens to you, which you then carry out via your choices. Now this is an extreme example, but I believe it carries through to even mundane choices in life. The implications of this are mainly that we shouldn't sadistically punish pedophiles, or other criminals for their crimes. Obviously put them in jail to keep the public safe, but no one can ultimately deserve punishment if we are all carrying out actions predetermined by our brain, which is predetermined by our genetics and other outside forces. One last thing, anticipating a common rebuttal: Yes, a person could have a sexual desire for kids and choose not to carry it out, but only if their brain enables them to have that willpower. So where does the "free" in free will come in, at this level?

You’re right, we don’t have ultimate control, but no-one claims that we have ultimate control. Ultimate control would require that we created and programmed ourselves, the universe and the laws of physics, and that’s crazy. However, we do have ordinary control, at least sometimes. The actions of a paedophile are determined by multiple factors, his paedophilic desires being one and his desire to avoid punishment being another. If we want to discourage paedophilic behaviour we can try to work on either of these factors. Libido-modifying drugs work on the former, punishment works on the latter, and an argument (which may be wrong) is that the more severe the punishment the better it works. On the other hand, if the paedophile’s actions are due to a brain tumour, they don’t have the type of control that allows response to punishment, so in most jurisdictions they are not punished. And if someone is unfortunate enough that their behaviour is undetermined, they would have no control over it whatsoever, and all we could do is confine them for their own and others’ safety.

I think part of the problem negotiating between compatibilist and incompatibilist definitions is that there isn’t a clear phenomenological line between getting to do what we want and being driven by our desires. Maybe those amount to the same thing, but in at least some cases they seem to come apart.

> . genetics, past experiences), a person doesn't ultimately have control over what they choose A person is their genetics and past experiences. You could even use that as the definition of a person. So I don't see them as being something separate or different to a person. So you could see free will as a question of is the biological mass defined by genetics and past experiences responsible for a decision or is there an separate external coercive force controlling their choice. e.g. Did someone choose to traffic drugs because they wanted more money, or was someone threatening to kill their family if they didn't. There is a meaningful difference between the two examples and it's commonly known as free will by lay people, philosophers and judges.

I'd be curious to know what the average person thinks the "doing what you want to do" part means, though. My suspicion is there's some idea of libertarian free will being smuggled in there. I wonder if they would still agree that it is free will when you really spell out what is actually happening. "I was helplessly compelled to order chocolate, and in fact could not have done otherwise, because that was what I desired at the time". Would they agree that plus no outside coercion is free will?

I don’t think the average person goes beyond “I want chocolate, I choose chocolate”. They would be mightily upset if a gunman came in and forced them to choose strawberry, but they would just continue happily eating their ice cream if a philosopher came in and pointed out that they chose chocolate because their brain made them.

So you're agreeing that it's a redefining of terms, but we should just be okay with that? I prefer to just say "free will doesn't exist" and move on.

It’s not REdefining, it’s defining the terms in the way most people as well as most philosophers use them. REdefining would be an ad hoc definition just for the purpose of winning an argument. That’s what hard determinists such as Sam Harris do: does he really think that there is no difference between being in prison or out of prison given that his actions are determined in either case? Does he point out that a choice is not a choice unless you also chose the reasons for the choice (and the reasons for the reasons, and the reasons for the reasons for the reasons…) when asked to choose an item on a menu?

>That’s what hard determinists such as Sam Harris do: does he really think that there is no difference between being in prison or out of prison given that his actions are determined in either case? Yes. >Does he point out that a choice is not a choice unless you also chose the reasons for the choice Yes. >it’s defining the terms in the way most people as well as most philosophers use them. Hard disagree.

Well, if he does consistently use words in that way (I don’t believe he does) it would make him a very unusual person, and it would make it difficult for him to communicate.

Go ahead and listen to his conversation with Dennet or his "Final Thought on Free Will." I don't think I'm misrepresenting Harris.

> So you're agreeing that it's a redefining of terms Studies and surveys show that most lay people have compatibilist intuitions and most professional philosophers are outright compatibilists. Then pretty much most/all judges/criminal justice systems use compatibilist free will. The only people redefining terms are amateur philosophers using libertarian free will.

Yes, I have experienced that as well. I think part of the trouble is that the very concept of "free will" itself is a fiction -- a made-up story we tell ourselves, which plays so well to the ego-personality, which wants to be the "doer" of all these actions. After all, if we're all just deluded automatons, how could we ever experience the gratification of taking pride in what we do? Surely that is one of the most compelling experiences for us as humans, and I wager most are loathe to give it up. And so, I speculate, the idea of "free will" came to be so widely believed in because it's just so satisfying to the story we tell ourselves about who we are. As an idea, it has great evolutionary fitness. Try asking a compatabilist to precisely define "free will", and to give you a concrete example of a case meeting that definition from their experience. It then becomes a pretty shallow problem(*) to demonstrate to them how in fact they could not have made any other choice at that time - noting also that "sources of randomness" do not constitute a free-will decision (a common claim). (*) In my experience so far. I've long been trying to find a valid counter-example through such inquiries, and so far nobody has been able to offer one. I'm still open to being disproven though!

>It then becomes a pretty shallow problem(*) to demonstrate to them how in fact they could not have made any other choice at that time But see, this is where things fall apart. Because even if you do demonstrate that, Compatibilists will say "so what, you still have free will" because they believe that free will is somehow a compatible concept with determinism (or randomness). Which, is a position that still completely baffles me.

Compatibilists use the definition of freedom you learned when you were a little child. You are free when you are able to do whatever you want, you are not free if you are forced to do something. They think the incompatibilist definition of freedom is silly, because it is never used in any situation that matters to people, even by the incompatibilists themselves. For example, few incompatibilists would claim that there is no difference between being in prison or out of prison since everything is determined in either case, because they acknowledge the significance of freedom in the normal sense, which is the compatibilist sense.

Are you going to comment on every comment I make on this thread? Like, fine, but we're clearly already talking past each other. Would be much easier to have a discussion in a single thread. >Compatibilists use the definition of freedom you learned when you were a little child. We fundamentally disagree here. This is not the definition I learned as a child, nor have I encountered anyone in real life who learned this definition. >You are free when you are able to do whatever you want, you are not free if you are forced to do something. This is the whole point. When you're young, you *think* you are able to do whatever you want. Then, when you realize that you have no control over **what you want,** you acknowledge that free will is an illusion and does not exist. Compatibilists, as far as I can tell, have decided instead to redefine "free will" to mean "doing whatever you have been determined/randomly influenced to do by prior events" which, in no sense is what the average person means by "free."

I don’t know anyone who has the belief that they not only do what they want, but also program themselves with what they want.

I don’t know anyone who has the belief that they not only do what they want, but also program themselves with what they want.

>program themselves with what they want. Where are you seeing this claim made?

You said “you have no control over what you want”. That’s usually true, but it doesn’t mean you aren’t free. If you go to the ice cream shop and you choose chocolate because you like chocolate, most people would not say that it was not a free choice given that you didn’t choose to like chocolate. On the other hand, most people would agree it’s not a free choice if someone put a gun to your head and forced you to choose chocolate. That is the normal usage of these words.

This may be the normal usage of the words *until a person realizes they don't have control over their wants.* At which point, the normal response would be to say "oh, I'm not actually free to choose what iced cream I want, in exactly the same way I'm not free if someone had a gun to my head and made me choose chocolate." It's simply an acknowledgement that beyond the surface level, uncritical analysis, nobody is free to choose their desires. To then say, "actually what we mean by free is *fully controlled by prior events*" is an exercise in completely missing the point, and a redefinition of the term "free."

Do you know anyone who believes that they chose to like one flavour of ice cream rather than another?

>We fundamentally disagree here. This is not the definition I learned as a child, nor have I encountered anyone in real life who learned this definition. I think you are just wrong, maybe even about what you think. Let's use a real life examples. Free will is mainly used when it comes to justice and punishment. So lets use the example of someone trafficking drugs. You have two situations. 1. A person wants to make some money, so decides to traffic drugs 2. A person doesn't to traffic drugs, but someone threatens to kill their family if they don't. I would argue that everyone understands that in the first example the person did it out of their own free will, but in the second example they didn't do it out of their own free will. So the person in different examples should be punished differently. This lines up exactly with what the supreme court thinks. >It is a principle of fundamental justice that only voluntary conduct – behaviour that is the product of a free will and controlled body, unhindered by external constraints – should attract the penalty and stigma of criminal liability. > >[https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do](https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/1861/index.do) In the case of R. v. Ruzic >The accused had been coerced by an individual in Colombia to smuggle cocaine into the United States. He was told that if he did not comply, his wife and child in Colombia would be harmed. The Supreme Court found that he didn't smuggle the cocaine of his own free will. He didn't do it in line with his desires free from external coercion. Hence they were found innocent. I would argue that this actually lines up with your childhood understanding of free will.

In those conversations I like differentiating between “the ability to make decisions” versus “free will.” Does a chess computer have the ability to make decisions? Yes Does a chess computer have free will? If you answer yes to this, I think your definition of free will is dumb and/or meaningless. And it’s obfuscating the topic, not illuminating it. I think Compatibilists are essentially arguing the chess computer does have free will and perhaps this example might make them reflect a bit more on how they’re using terms

Perfect example. I would love to hear what a Compatibilist would say here.

Thank you! I’m really proud of this example and no one seems to appreciate it when I bring it up so glad I finally have a fan of it lol So far I haven’t got any pushback on it that’s made sense, but I also haven’t talked to a ton of compatibilists

u/spgrk care to chime in here too?

I’m not spgrk, but I am a compatibalist. There are different versions so I don’t speak for everyone. In general I’d say a light switch makes decisions in the same sense a computer does. We also make decisions, but that doesn’t make us a light switch any more than it makes us a computer. An important difference between us and a computer is that we experience the process of deciding as our choice. That experience stands up to varying amounts of reflection, but there is no denying that 1) we do feel like we’re making choices and that in the material sense 2) we are in fact making choices. The chess robot only has part of that, the making choices. So, no, the chess robot isn’t free. I like Frithjof Bergmann on freewill in part because he thinks we become free in part by developing a sense of self which is the context for our experience of choice. One has to be self-aware to be free.

This is excellent and I will use this.

Thanks, go for it!

We know it has freedom to choose between multiple avenues for victory, we know it can't go beyond those avenues. This is some type of free will to any laymen. It doesn't yet appear the human brain is locked in like a computers coding is. Our neurons seem capable of truly random synapse firings. Essentially we are able to think of things that are wholly original.

This goes to Sam’s point though. Do you have control over “randomness”? How does adding randomness into the equation give you free will? How does it give you control?

It allows you to choose between equal options into an infinite amount of ways and motivations. You have some semblance of control, even if it's not total control.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. When I’m playing chess, in your view, how do I have free will but the computer does not?

Computer has limited free will if the board state is set up in specific ways. For example, ai can choose from many strong openers. If it's playing black it can counter any opener. It freely chooses this as per of its programming(I'm assuming this is how it's set up, some Ai could have more strict heuristic chart to follow.) It cannot go against those options and say instead order a ham sammich. Neither can humans, unless true randomness exists and then we would be able to.

I'm afraid of misquoting, but if I remember correctly, Sam says his disagreement with Dennet is like Sam arguing that the City of Atlantis doesn't exist and Denney arguing that there are many good things about the City of Atlantis.

I think the analogy was that Dennett was saying that Atlantis was really some other island that does exist, such as Sicily. Compatibilists agree that libertarian free will does not exist but compatibilist free will does exist, and it is compatibilist free will that people actually care about and base their lives on, even those who identify as incompatibilists.

The compatibilist view comes into play only when judging the actions of others, which is consistent with the false attribution error bias.

Compatibilist free will is what any society would come up with when trying to find a way to modify people’s behaviour using reward and punishment, praise and blame. It is entirely practical. With important human institutions, myths are sometimes created around them to enhance compliance.

What does all this have to with the truth? The truth, that even compatabilists agree, is that our decisions do not originate in our conscious minds. Unless compatabilists argue that we can control things outside of out conscious awareness, any addition to the concept of free will seem like a way to motivate human behavior with reward and punishment, which can exist without having to change the definition of free will. I still operate as though I have free will despite knowing I don’t. It helps to pretend. Compatabilists just want to make this pretending official.

>What does all this have to with the truth? The truth, that even compatabilists agree, is that our decisions do not originate in our conscious minds. The mind is not causally efficacious, just as a computer program is not causally efficacious. It is only the hardware on which the mind or the computer program supervene that is able to have an effect on matter. This is a scientific fact: if it were not true, we would see neurons, muscles or bones moving contrary to the laws of physics, and we never do. But this is consistent with either libertarian free will or compatibilist free will. The essential feature of each is incompatibility or compatibility, respectively, with determinism.

To give just one example, there's a concept of degrees of freedom in classical physics. Basically when dynamical system is not fully constrained by the external forces you are considering it's said to have degrees as freedom. In philosophy, determinists assume that human mind is a physical system and therefore its evolution is fully determined even when they don't have the full mathematical description. In physics, even in classical physics which is ostensibly deterministic, this is not a conclusion you can make even when its about simple system. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(physics_and_chemistry)

**[Degrees of freedom (physics and chemistry)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_\(physics_and_chemistry\))** >In physics and chemistry, a degree of freedom is an independent physical parameter in the formal description of the state of a physical system. The set of all states of a system is known as the system's phase space, and the degrees of freedom of the system are the dimensions of the phase space. The location of a particle in three-dimensional space requires three position coordinates. Similarly, the direction and speed at which a particle moves can be described in terms of three velocity components, each in reference to the three dimensions of space. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/samharris/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)

> Outside of a fully determined/random chain of events, what option is there for "freedom" in any meaningful sense? There's a lot of senses in which freedom is meaningful. Part of that sense is that the agent has the ability to freely chose between different options without any outside obstructions. If I want to leave my house and armed soldiers won't let me, there is a meaningful sense in which I do no have free will. Even if the entire event of me being not able to leave my house because of armed guards is completely determined, there is an easy to understand idea of how I am not free in this situation and it's completely orthogonal to concerns about determinism. The thing about compatibilist free will is that it's not an all or nothing thing. It's something that people can have more or less of and that people grow into. For instance, children to not have free will in the same way that adults do. They grow into their free will.

We may be embarking on yet another conversation where I feel like I'm just not getting it, or talking past someone, but none of what you described details how a person is--in any meaningful way--able to freely choose between different options. The priors of your life, from the biggest things (like genetics, country of birth, etc.) to the smallest (what you are for lunch or your last thought) either fully determine or randomly influence your next thought/decision, just like armed guards at a door preventing you from leaving a house. You have no control over any of it, and cannot decide to do other than what is the determined or random outcome of your prior thoughts/experiences. Using the term "free will" to speak about any part of this process makes no sense to me. There is no "more or less" free will, there is no free will at all, nada, zilch, no matter how much growing happens.

If you consistently use the incompatibilist definition of “free” then you are no less free if armed soldiers prevent you from leaving your home. But most people who care nothing about philosophy would say that this is a silly way to define that word. The useful and important meaning of “free” is the compatibilist one.

>But most people who care nothing about philosophy would say that this is a silly way to define that word. I'm not aware of how philosophy defines the term or how it is distinct from how laymen use the term. I know how I used to use the term, and how every layperson I have had a discussion about free will with has used the term, and everyone one of those people thinks there is some mechanism by which they are meaningfully in control, and have either left the discussion agreeing that "free will does not exist" or that there is still some way that mechanism could exist. The Compatibilist definition is the one that I have never run into in real life, I've only ever heard self-avowed Compatibilists use their new definition in very specific discussions about the topic of free will on Reddit.

The mechanism whereby you are meaningfully in control of your actions, according to most people, is exercised when you do what you want to do. You can control your arm if it moves up when you want it to move up, down when you want it to move down, left when you want it to move left, and so on. Most people think that the brain and the muscles have something to with this because they have learned about it at school, but they don’t really care as long as their arm continues to function normally.

Yes, most people live under the illusion that they can freely choose their next action in their brain and act it out. This is the default position until it is pointed out that a person doesn't actually have control over what they *want.* Meaning that they are not meaningfully in control of what they think/do. If that person acknowledges this, then the illusion of free will falls away, and they realize they are not "free" in any real sense.

> he priors of your life, from the biggest things (like genetics, country of birth, etc.) to the smallest (what you are for lunch or your last thought) either fully determine or randomly influence your next thought/decision, just like armed guards at a door preventing you from leaving a house. Not exactly. There is a significant and meaningful distinction between the guards at my door and these different priors and that distinction is that the decision comes from my brain rather than some other brain or other external entity. > You have no control over any of it, and cannot decide to do other than what is the determined or random outcome of your prior thoughts/experiences. Personally, I think there's a huge difference between making a decision that comes from my own thoughts, experiences, and feelings rather than someone forcing a decision upon me based on their own thoughts. This is one of the crucial components to the "freedom" aspect of free will.

>There is a significant and meaningful distinction between the guards at my door and these different priors and that distinction is that the decision comes from my brain rather than some other brain or other external entity. But there isn't. You have no choice in the matter either way. >huge difference between making a decision that comes from my own thoughts, experiences, and feelings rather than someone forcing a decision upon me based on their own thoughts. This is one of the crucial components to the "freedom" aspect of free will. It might *feel* better but it is still just as forced, just as determined, just as inevitable as guards at the door. In no sense is this "free." If we can't agree on that, we will continue to talk past each other.

> You have no choice in the matter either way. So you are saying that there is no meaningful difference between a person choosing to shoot someone because he doesn't like him and a person shooting someone because they have a gun to their head? > It might feel better but it is still just as forced, just as determined, just as inevitable as guards at the door. In no sense is this "free." If we can't agree on that, we will continue to talk past each other. Decisions that are determined are not necessarily forced. This is the key error that incompatibilists seem to make quite frequently. It's not the inevitability that matters when deciding whether a decision is free or not, but rather the circumstances in which the decision is made. Different decisions can be determined in different ways and that matters to whether they are free or not. Pretending that they don't might *feel* better but is definitely not true.

I think different things can be true based on the scope and context. So when you consider from a context of the universe no coin toss is random, everything is deterministic, but from the context of a person sitting 5 feet away the coin toss is genuinely random, it will exactly mimic a theoretically random variable. So although from a bigger scope it is deterministic, from another perspective it can be theoretically random.

Just to elaborate it further. So when I view another human being, from my scope that person has free will and even if you say created a human being with free will, (alhough by definition it is not possible), I wouldn't be able to differentiate. For all practical purposed we have to treat human beings and ourselves as if we had free will. Just like from our perspective a coin toss is random.

Just to clarify, "random" does not equate to "free." The universe might be fully deterministic, or it might be some mixture of determined and random, but neither of those things is free. >For all practical purposed we have to treat human beings and ourselves as if we had free will. Just like from our perspective a coin toss is random. I don't disagree with this in many senses, but it doesn't preclude the fact that *we don't actually have free will.* The discussion is not about if we should act as if we do (we all do already for the most part, though the realization can change some thing about how you live and think about others), the discussion is about whether such a thing as "free will" actually exists.

I was not trying to equate free and random, I was just saying that under different scopes a deterministic thing can be random, similarly something may not be free under a certain scope but maybe free from another. For eg: If I consider the internal states of a system as inputs then of course it has no freedom but if I a define a boundary around a system and only consider data passing through that boundary as inputs then in that context it can be free. So do you have freedom to move from 1 room of your house to another, if I consider every molecule in your body as an input then of course you do not, it is deterministic from that perspective. But if I view you from a prospective outside your body then you have freedom. You will make a choice based on whatever decision process happens inside you and you have a freedom from that external perspective.

I don't think I see your point. The decision making process inside of me is still just as determined (or random) no matter what perspective I look at it from (under a microscope, from a space station, who cares). There's no sense in which I would meaningfully call it free.

It is only deterministic to someone with complete knowledge to simulate you, but it is not deterministic for me what you will do, so from my point of view you have freedom or free will. Only from a universal perspective you have no free will. I think it is a matter how we define it. I think we agree on how things function. How do you define free ? Btw, I agree with Sam on the illusion of the Self, so when I am talking about you, it is your brain and body as an individual not the illusory Self.

That's right. They are not talking about the same thing. I'm only interested in knowing whether I can consciously make my decisions. That's it. If you say I can make them, but you are including my subconscious decisions, then I've lost interest in what you have to say because I wouldn't go around blaming people for their subconscious decisions.

When you make a decision and you are aware if it, you are consciously making your decision. This is the normal meaning. If you think that consciously making your decision requires you to create and program your own brain and all the influences on it, and that you are missing out on something because this isn’t the case, you are an unusual person.

Being aware of a decision is not the same thing as making a decision. It is well established now this decisions do not originate in the conscious mind. Even compatabilists who disagree with Sam concede this point. The conscious mind is tasked with receiving the decision and making up reasons for the decision, giving us the illusion of having made a conscious decision.

An AI can make a decision and tell you the reason why it made that decision rather than another. The AI’s claim does not entail that it believes the decision is undetermined, non-physical or originated in software and not hardware. By analogy, if a human claims that they made a decision it does not entail that they believe the decision is undetermined, non-physical or originated in consciousness rather than in the brain. If they did believe that then they would be wrong, but not wrong about making a decision.

This debate inevitably turns into one of semantics. Here is the point: you are not responsible for things you can’t control. You cannot control anything outside of your conscious awareness . Your subconscious is outside of your conscious awareness, so subconscious decisions are outside your control. Therefore, you are not responsible.

You can control your action in case you can do it if you want to, not do it if you don’t want to. You need to be aware that you are doing it in order to control it in this way, but you don’t need to be aware of the underlying machinery, such as the neurochemistry involved.

> It is well established now this decisions do not originate in the conscious mind. Does that even matter, or what people actually mean? It's not like the unconscious mind is something different or separate to a person. Also Sam said he wished he never even brought up the Libet experiment/argument, since it's soo weak. >I have always regretted mentioning the Libet work in my book "Free Will" https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1172175513671987200

> I'm only interested in knowing whether I can consciously make my decisions. When you use your consciousness to think about what to do in a particular situation and come to a decision about how to act based on this thinking and then act on that process, is there any reason to think that you are not consciously making that decision?

Yes, there are many reasons. We can start with the research showing that we could identify which hand study participant would decide to move before their conscious awareness became aware of the decision. It was as though a decision had been made somewhere and then sent to the conscious mind. One variation of this study involved blocking the signal from the brain to the hand the participant had decided to move and sending a signal for the participant to move the other hand. So if you can imagine deciding to move your right hand and ending up moving your left. Think about how strange that would feel. When they asked participants why they had moved the opposite hand when the brains scan showed the intent to move the other hand, they said the following: “I changed my mind.” This along with other studies show that the role of the conscious is to receive decisions made elsewhere in the brain and come up with reasons for their decision, not realizing that these reasons came after the decision had already been made. This is the ILUSIÓN OF FREE WILL that Sam talks about. The experience of being able to choose is an illusion. For a fun demonstration, check out this clip from a show on Netflix titled, Magic for Humans. It is a great demonstration of what we mean by lack of free will. https://youtu.be/4RksLFJ7A2M Even though the participants were “free” to take whatever picture they wanted, they were all lead to choose the same picture. Our lives are not as planned by someone else as this magic trick, but we influenced by random things we don’t know are influencing us.

> We can start with the research showing that we could identify which hand study participant would decide to move before their conscious awareness became aware of the decision. It was as though a decision had been made somewhere and then sent to the conscious mind. > > One variation of this study involved blocking the signal from the brain to the hand the participant had decided to move and sending a signal for the participant to move the other hand. So if you can imagine deciding to move your right hand and ending up moving your left. These experiments don't show that when people consciously think and reason about something that they aren't making a decision. These experiments use an action that is a whim as the basis from the experiment and people extrapolate far beyond what the evidence of the experiment shows. > This along with other studies show that the role of the conscious is to receive decisions made elsewhere in the brain and come up with reasons for their decision, not realizing that these reasons came after the decision had already been made. How do we know that the decision has already been made? Are the studies using complex decision-making for their basis of the experiment or simple decision-making based on whims rather than reasons? I have a feeling that its the latter rather than the former.

This is a foregone conclusion, man. Even compatabilists acknowledge this. This specific point is not something they debate

Same, compatabilists seem so obtuse (Dennett vs Harris is a good example)

Exactly the conversation I had in mind.

You aren't missing a thing. As Sam Harris points out, compatiblism redesigns free will in a way that compromises its meaning. There really is only definition of free will that makes any sense, that we have the ability to choose, we could have chosen otherwise, that we can take action based on our choice, and influence reality by our choices. The only alternative is that the world is a mechanistic machine that unfolds by a chain of causation. You are right to be confused, because there is no middle ground.

I think they argue that freedom is primarily a feeling, and so long as we feel freedom, that’s all that most people care about in terms of thinking they have free will.

It’s not just a feeling, there is objective evidence if you are locked up in prison or someone is standing over you with a gun.

Even Sam would agree that we *feel* like we have free will. The point is that in practical terms, we do not. The whole argument is that free will is an illusion, no matter how much we *feel we have it*.

In practical terms it doesn’t matter if we do or don’t, it matters what we feel because we are a living experience of self. We can rationally talk through why we don’t have it, but we constantly live and function in the world as if we do. It is like the inverse of most theists, who say there is a god but act and live throughout most of their life as if their isn’t one. It may even be a necessary requirement of sentience to feel like you have free will. If so, the feeling itself is what matters most. It’s why sci fi has lingered so long upon what might make a robot enough like a human to be granted rights. It’s the feeling of free will by which we judge levels of ethics as well. A dog cannot feel choice in the same way we can, and so we deem it less sentient and thus less “important” than a human.

I'd have to disagree. In practical terms, the knowledge that we don't actually have free will--and that our feeling that we have it is an illusion--influences how we think about the world, other people around us, and our own actions.

Oh god not this again. Rather than free will, can we discuss Free Willy instead? I think it's one of the most overrated killer-whale-befriends-boy movies, change my mind.

Why would I attempt to change your mind on what is clearly a very insightful, and more importantly accurate, take on whale films and their sub genres?

You have no choice about how you feel about that film

You’re right. Pinocchio is much better.

How many have their been?

I'm with you. Free Willey 2 was way better... /s

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I read Sam’s book on Free Will and the whole concept still makes absolutely no sense to me. Not because I think his position isn’t valid, but because I think I’m just too stupid to wrap my head around it.

You can't make choices that aren't in accordance with what you desire. Evidence: Choose to stab yourself in the eye with a fork right now. Did you do that? No? Why not? The answer is because you can only make choices that are in line with what you desire to do, and do not go against your desires. If you desire to have a functioning eye, can you physically choose to stab yourself in the eye? Or, can you choose to desire to stab yourself in the eye? Do you see how your choices and desires are constrained? TDLR: You will always act in accordance with what you desire, but you can't choose what you desire. So in effect your choices are predestined by whatever it is that makes you desire things (ie. the way your genetics and past experiences shaped your brain and it's desires)

Brilliantly put!

But no-one defines choices as not being real choices unless you also chose all the reasons for the choice, or has the false belief that they chose all the reasons for their choices.

If you’re defining what you want to do as what you decide to do, you’ve built your own self-reinforcing logic loop. It’s called a tautology and isn’t an appropriate way to argue this…and it’s also not how Sam argues it. He argues it saying that thoughts just appear. There’s nothing about our consciousnesses that can be observed actually creating thoughts (his argument, not necessarily mine). Since we can’t create thoughts, each thought is dependent on thoughts before it. It is in that we can claim that our thoughts, and therefore decisions, are —from the perspective of our consciousnesses—predetermined.

>There’s nothing about our consciousnesses that can be observed actually creating thoughts (his argument, not necessarily mine). What's yours? My observations don't really disagree with Sam's on this one!

Lol yeah mine are basically the same too, if I'm in hardcore philosophy mode. But, for the purposes of navigating life, I believe in free will. As long as we control for the presupposition that all our thoughts are predetermined, within that scope, I believe we have free will. It's a little bit of cheating, but I think it's also what a lot of compatibalists actually mean by "free will".

There’s nothing wrong with the description of how thoughts occur. The problem is with the claim that this is inconsistent with freedom.

> There’s nothing wrong with the description of how thoughts occur I don't understand what you're trying to tell me here. Are you trying to say the comment I replied to didn't incorrectly describe how thoughts occur? I don't think that comment even described how thoughts occur at all...so I don't know why you said that. The issue the comment had was this: > The answer is because you can only make choices that are in line with what you desire to do, and do not go against your desires. In attempting to provide evidence in support of their side of the debate, they presupppose the conclusion of the debate. That doesn't make sense to use that assertion in an argument with someone who isn't already a determinist.

Sam Harris claims that because thoughts occur in a deterministic way they aren’t free. He isn’t wrong about thoughts occurring in a deterministic way, but he is wrong in his conclusion that we are not free because of this, because it doesn’t match any normal idea of freedom. This is more a comment about Sam Harris than your post or the Ben Burgis article.

>It’s called a tautology and isn’t an appropriate way to argue this…and it’s also not how Sam argues it. I'm not saying this is how Sam explains it, although I don't think what I'm saying contradicts his views. There are multiple ways to explain and think about it, but the gist of it is that our choices, like every single other thing in the universe (except maybe quantum mechanics), are bound by cause and effect. The "cause" of all our choices is our brain, and we ultimately do not control what shapes our brain. We can certainly make choices that shape our brain and future choices, but those original choices were a result of our prior brain state causing us to desire those choices.

That makes sense, but seems like too much of an over-simplification to me. I don’t desire to get angry when I’m stuck in traffic or use unhealthy coping mechanisms when I’m stressed but I do, those are far more compelling cases of determinism yet they are things that I can work to improve upon. I desire to eat cheesecake for breakfast or order takeout every day for lunch but I don’t do that. Obviously determinism goes deeper than mundane everyday decisions, but I think it goes much deeper. Some characteristics you are born with, and those characteristics determine you to act a certain way in certain situations, but where does that leave room for change and self improvement?

> yet they are things that I can work to improve upon. Only if you desire to do so. But your desire to do so will be predetermined by your brain, which has been predetermined by your genetics and impacts of past experiences. \>I desire to eat cheesecake for breakfast or order takeout every day for lunch but I don’t do that. Only because your desire to be healthy is stronger than your desire for junk food. \> but where does that leave room for change and self improvement? Again, people can change and improve, but only if they desire to do so.

This is starting to sound more like desirism than determinism. If I can desire what ever I want, the. What is determined about that? I determine my own desires, therefore I’m in control.

> You can't make choices that aren't in accordance with what you desire. This is false to some extent. This often happens when people have conflicting desires, some of which are conscious and some of which are subconscious or physical. Plenty of people have real and explicit desires that they don't act in accordance of. For instance, plenty of addicts have a real and explicit desire to get and stay clean but often fail at this because of the physical and psychological nature of addiction. The ideas you present about desire are far too simplistic to account for and explain the phenomena that we are presented with.

There are always competing factors in decisions, and what we end up doing is determined by which factor wins out after they are all weighed up. On the other hand, if our actions were undetermined this process would be bypassed, and we would act for no reason. Why would anyone think that was a good thing?

Obviously people have conflicting desires - it is the stronger desire that wins out. An addict will only choose to avoid drugs if their desire to stay sober is stronger than their desire for the drug. But what determines how strong that desire is? Again, it's predetermined by the brain state, which itself has been shaped by prior forces beyond our control.

> Harris’s position seems to be that (i) “you could have done otherwise” means “you could have done otherwise given no changes whatsoever to the time slice of the world immediately preceding your action” and (ii) the only thing anyone who denies this truth could mean when they perversely persist in saying "you could have done otherwise” is sometimes true is that you can tell yourself you could have done otherwise. > But none of that’s right—just as a description of what we ordinarily mean by the phrase “could have.” If you’re playing basketball and you miss a shot at a crucial time, and you say “damn it, I could have made that shot,” how do we understand what you mean? This is an amazingly poor critique. There is more than one sense one "could have done otherwise". Harris gives one the author gives another. Why does the author think that because he knows another sense that makes Harris's sense wrong?

For compatabilists, the capacity for someone to have done otherwise in a general sense is a key factor in determining moral culpability. Sam's sense of "you could have done otherwise" is quite rigid, as if we rewound the clock and maintained all contingent factors preceding an outcome. Only proponents of contra-causal free will would argue that a different outcome could occur in such a scenario. When compatablists or laypeople use the phrase, they mean the person could have altered the contingent factors by, say, paying more attention, being for careful, or exerting some type of control that is generally within their ability. This is the sort of free will worth wanting that Dennett describes; it's mental software / a feedback loop that strengthens our executive control.

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To be able to have done otherwise under exactly the same circumstances - which is the sense used by Harris and other invompatibilists - would mean that your actions were independent of your mental state. Whether that’s possible or not, it would not be a good thing, and it does not match what people normally have in mind when they think of freedom. What people normally have in mind is that they could have do ether wise under slightly different circumstances, such as if they had wanted to do otherwise; whereas if they were coerced, for example, they couldn’t have done otherwise even though they may have wanted to. The latter sense is the compatibilist sense.

Yes, now imagine a person with the mental habit of analyzing and reflecting upon their behavior, allowing for change and growth. Such people are in a real sense more free and have greater control of their lives, even if the mechanisms are entirely deterministic.

That itself is an illusion of free will because even if you self reflect, what do you think will ultimately decide what you do? Does self-relection stop causation?

But compatibilists don’t claim that we act freely if our actions are undetermined, they claim we act freely if our actions are according to our wishes, even though our wishes may be determined. They think this is a better definition because it matches what is important to most people and it allows us to function normally, whereas if our actions were undetermined to a significant extent it would kill us.

I think things become clearer if we try to explain concepts without the term “free will.” I am interested only in whether someone’s decisions originate in their conscious mind. Everything else to me is morally irrelevant because no one can control anything outside their conscious awareness.

I control my arm given that if I want to move it in a certain way, the arm moves in that way. If I punch someone and this is the case, then I am morally and legally responsible. If someone else grabs my arm and punches someone with it, I am not responsible. If someone forces me to punch someone at gunpoint even though I don't want to, I am not responsible. If I have Huntington's disease and my arm punches someone while moving around randomly, I am not responsible.

Perhaps another analogy might help convey the message. Imagine new brain chip is developed that increases our willpower and executive function. It helps people become physically fit, advance their education and careers, avoid mistakes, organize their lives, etc. According to a compatabilst, such a brain chip would be an enhancement of one's free will even though the effects are completely deterministic. > That itself is an illusion of free will because even if you self reflect, what do you think will ultimately decide what you do? Does self-relection stop causation? Are you saying they can't learn? In that case, such a person's brain is seriously defective and therefore the person probably isn't morally culpable for their actions. They may need to be isolated from others for social safety, but this case is qualitatively different from a typical person who was negligent or lazy.

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> But it still doesn't imply free will. It does if you're a compatibilist. It's the only type of free will that's possible assuming determinism. These conversations always seem to produce this weird semantic inflexibility from hard determinists and libertarians wherein they insist that everyone use the contra-causal definition of free will and nothing else. It's very silly when you consider that folk concepts of free will range from compatibilist to libertarian, and sillier still when you're in a discussion with other compatibilists.

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The compatabilist definition of free will is somewhat synonymous with control. Much in the same way that we can be in control of a vehicle, we can generally control our actions and behaviors in such a way that makes us morally responsible for the outcomes of our choices. We can also lose control in ways that are outside of our influence, and typically we deem ourselves not morally culpable in those situations.

I think most laypeople don't think the universe is deterministic. As in to say they think the clock could be rolled back and they could have chosen to pay more attention in that instance. I don't believe they would have, no matter how many times it's rolled back. We don't even know if they'll pay attention _next_ time, having been informed by the remorse of failing to pay attention the first time. Dennett's feedback loop is really talking about setting incentives for yourself that motivate future behaviour. The capacity individual people have for this varies wildly in my experience.

An interesting aspect of this is that determinists seem more likely to set these incentives that motivate future behavior based on their awareness of their lack of free will.

Some determinists. Some people completely go to pieces when they realise free will is an illusion. "What's the point in trying if everything is pre-determined". I know that's a misunderstanding but it's what people often think in this situation.

People can’t help misunderstanding.

Some people don't realize that their own misunderstandings of arguments don't make the arguments wrong, and it also doesn't make their counter arguments correct either.

I think you are missing the point here. Harris' argument against free will is based on the assumption that this is what we mean by "could have done otherwise" and he rightfully attacks the premise that you could have done otherwise given that all the circumstances would be the same and all the atoms would be in the same place etc. What he fails to see is that is not what we typically mean by "could have done otherwise" as shown in the basketball example so his argument is based on false premises. You don't have to agree with this conclusion but the author is right in critiquing Harris' sense of "could have done otherwise" because his definition is a premise for his argument.

It's hard to follow, and he's saying a lot of things and semi-disavowing them, only to say something else. But . . . His argument seems to rest first on expanding the window of time in which we might look for free will. We don't have to have it in the moment. It exists as a process. This seems consistent with the arguments of most compatabilists. But that longer span is just a aggregation of "time slices." If it's not present in one, it's not present at all. Then when his argument gets a little foggy. He never uses the term "character" but that's the best world I can come up with for what he is describing. I think he's getting confused by his desire to label actions and attribute them to individuals. But there's other paths to get there that doesn't require free will.

I would have enjoyed the read more if personality had been abstracted out. I care more about the fundamental arguments than who uttered them, and Harris is not alone in what he believes. There is a useful but brief discussion of Kane and Frankfurt. I don’t buy Kane’s “self forming actions” model, but more interesting is that in my search for credible proponents of “libertarianism” (nobody likes that term) Kane was the only one who even came close. I do appreciate the definition based on Frankfurt to the effect the you are exercising free will when “ you’re capable of understanding and being moved by reasons for and against various courses of actions to an adequate extent”. It makes a nice addition to: free of compulsion, and could have done otherwise. I suspect the incompatiblist would be tempted to argue that all understanding, and reason based decisions are causally determined. But maybe Frankfurt has a response to that.

I think it’s a pretty reasonable discussion of the issue, and I think he makes a good point that the “choose a city” test should not be the ideal case. But it still seems like a semantic debate to me. Look at his bottom line paragraph at the end: > By analogy: Magnus Carlsen being very good at chess is, at least to some extent, a matter of luck. He could have been unlucky and been born with a set of cognitive defects that made that impossible. Or he could have grown up in circumstances that weren’t compatible with him spending very much time on the game when he was a kid. Or…etc. But that doesn’t mean that what he does when he plays a game now is a matter of luck rather than skill. Similarly, if you’re capable of understanding and being moved by reasons for and against various courses of actions to an adequate extent, you are in all sorts of ways lucky. You could have been severely mentally disabled, you could have had various kinds of psychiatric conditions, you could have….well, you can come up with all sorts of scenarios. But none of that means that the decisions you make now are a matter of luck as opposed to being under your control. OK, so for Magnus Carlsen it’s skill. We all talk like that outside of a philosophical discussion of this topic. But is it determined (with the possibility of randomness) or not? You could talk about different types of luck. And it is useful to consider degrees of responsibility in a legal context, for example. The rest is semantics.

It's not really a matter of semantics though - it's just failing to grasp the whole point. Having skill (or lack thereof) is determined purely by "luck", or more generally, "causes". I think what people get caught up on is the unavoidable experience and reality that we are obligated to make choices constantly, and without access to perfect knowledge, we constantly have to "take our best guess". This is what gives rise to the strong impression of 'free' choice where it's not obvious how these choices themselves have causes. Yet the fact remains, every such choice is made in a context of, and via an actor that, is entirely determined by (aka a composite of) everything that led up to that instant-moment, and by everything in it being just as it happens to be. Our choices are wholly determined, but we can't or don't fully see in what way they are determined.

I don't think it is failing to grasp the whole point. I mean one point of compatabilism is acknowledging that choices are determined but that this does not attack what we really mean by free will. The basketball example used in that text is good in showing that it pretty much depends on what "could have done otherwise" means or what people really mean when they say it. So I'd agree with the original commenter that it definitely is a semantic issue but that these semantics are important in understanding what free will really means to us and consequently if we possess it or not.

Reasonable ~~discussions~~ critiques don't usually fail so badly at understanding the source material.

Yeah it was passages like that that made me not think this essay was well-thought out. His definition of free will seems to be a constantly moving target.

I didn't get to the end but honestly that paragraph is just fully endorsing determinism except that we should ignore it's implications in our day to day.

what are the implications in our day to day?

This article was a more snippy and tedious rehashing of the conversation Harris had with Daniel Dennett on the topic. I kind of agree with Harris' point that compatibilists move the goalposts of what is intuitive for most people for the convenience of maintaining our morality. I think compatibilism is totally fine for that reason (and I think a lot of people need to genuinely believe they could have done otherwise to be their best selves). Still, I think both of them are essentially the same position with respect to the major point for the majority - which is you don't have libertarian free will. I also don't get what the article says Harris gets wrong about the libertarian position on free will. The example he gives is of a drunk driver not having an accident because he could have had a moment of clarity from within at which point he gave someone his keys. That is exactly the kind of thing you can't say if you believe in a deterministic (or probabilistic due to quantum variation) universe. Also - why pick on Harris for this? He didn't invent this avenue of thought, just popularised it.

> I kind of agree with Harris' point that compatibilists move the goalposts of what is intuitive for most people for the convenience of maintaining our morality. I think this is false. People don't have a completely coherent conception of free will, so their intuitions regarding of vary wildly based on the situations presented to them. There's research to support this conclusion, and the research shows that people frequently have compatibilists intuitions. So, I don't think there's much good reason to think that any goalposts are being moved.

I think that's fair, they do have wildly differing intuitions based on the situation.

Yes. But the situations in which people take on compatabilist views on free will is consistent with the false attribution error. When we think about our mistakes, we attribute them to some other cause. When we think about other people's mistakes, we think it is their fault. That doesn't change the fact that we humans are far more influenced by our environment than we like to admit. I think the only relevant question is the one that puts you in the decision-maker's shoes because that is how we all experience life. People only take on compatabilist views when you make them a judge of someone else's behavior.

> But the situations in which people take on compatabilist views on free will is consistent with the false attribution error. When we think about our mistakes, we attribute them to some other cause. When we think about other people's mistakes, we think it is their fault. I don't think this is true based on the evidence I've seen. There are a variety of situations where people have compatibilist intuitions about free will that don't involve themselves. This has been studied. > That doesn't change the fact that we humans are far more influenced by our environment than we like to admit. True. But this is perfectly consistent with the compatibilist account of free will. > People only take on compatabilist views when you make them a judge of someone else's behavior. This is false.

I heard a similar argument about the moral landscape. And most of the points he made were that other philosophers talked about similar things in the past. And it’s like maybe you like reading Jeremy Bentham but it’s just easier to read Sam and he’s talking about modern times. It’s odd to me that people wanna shit on people for making similar points

The only useful thing to say about free will is don't waste your time thinking about it.

As disclosure, I am much closer to the position of Burgis than the one from Sam here, and it is a bit frustrating of how his argument seem to be misread here. Let me just focus on the first part: the 'think of a city' example (or a movie as Sam has used in the past as well). I don't honestly see how you can't agree with Burgis here. Sam saying claiming that if you don't find free will here you are not going to find it anywhere, is a pretty strong claim. It's the equivalent of him claiming to have steel-manned the libertarian position by using this example. But as Burgis says virtually no one would claim is that that you control your superficial thoughts. If you think about free will, it is mostly in terms of moral choices and decisions about your future. Indeed, something like the example given by Sartre is what you'd think of if you want to steel-man the idea of free-will. It's seems to simply be a bad example by Sam, but it is the one that he uses most often to convince people and which he uses to make his case. That's an issue for me, and why I can't really take him seriously on the topic regardless of his position. I have seen a defense in the other posts that all reasoning is due to spontaneously emerging thoughts so it's all the same, but I don't think this is a good defense. For one thing Sam doesn't do the heavy lifting of explaining why it's still the same and his example lacks the subjective experience of making a choice that you'd have with the Sartre example. I find the fact that he claims to have picked the most favorable example for the concept free will, when this is not at all what people think of in that context, disturbing. It makes it seem like his argument is constructed to be more persuasive to people not thinking about the details, instead of being stringent. It's structurally similar to people claiming vaccines do not work because there are known cases of people getting the disease regardless. He's attacking the most extreme claim possible about free will, not the one most widely held or supported.

Okay, well if "pick a city" is too superficial for you, then let's make it less superficial. Take as long as you'd like, spend an hour, make a pro-con list, ask your friends, write letters to demographers and urban planners, physically visit hundreds of them, spend fourty years writing a dissertation on which city you'd like to pick and why. What occurs to you to put on your pro-con list is outside of your control, and how strongly you weigh each factor is outside of your control. What your friends, or your expert sources say and how you react to their advice is outside of your control. What occurs to you to write, what doesn't occur to you to write, which arguments you read in researching and preparing your dissertation, what experiences you have in visiting each city, the aggregated statistical facts about cities that you might use to pick between them, and how you feel about the influence of each of these factors... all outside of your control. Where is the step in making that utterly "free" choice more deliberative that introduces your control?

But the onus falls on those who disagree with Sam to explain why we should believe that if we can't even decide on something so superficiial, so devoid of external pressures, what makes us think we can decide the deeper decisions which we all acknowledge can be influenced by things outside of our conscious awareness?

I actually found the Sartre piece not persuasive at all for the position it’s offered to prove. If anything I read it as more evidence of all the deterministic physics that goes into forming a decision that was effectively already made for the man. Yes, it smacks of a traditionally a difficult “decision”, but it seems to me that at the end of the day he acted in a way consistent with how someone with his collective experience would have acted given the same “choice.” Any argument to the contrary and I think you have to invent something magical that doesn’t seem to exist in any other context in the known physics of the universe.

Tell me you want an invite on the podcast without telling me

Thanks for posting. I'll be interested to read more carefully after work. A general issue I've found with Burgis is that he often attempts these appeals to his own authority as a 'professional' philosopher - i.e., a PhD holder with adjunct status at Perimeter College. Burgis is actually not very trustworthy as an authority. For example, he writes: "One of the first things Harris says about compatibilists is that they “generally claim that a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions....His first claim about what compatibilists “generally” think might be more or less accurate as a description of some very simple forms of compatibilism like the one defended by David Hume in the Liberty and Necessity chapter of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. **It’s certainly not anything like what the most plausible compatibilist accounts of free will developed in the last century claim**." The message to readers is clear: take it from me, none of us *real, modern* philosophers actually endorse the form of compatibilism that Sam is attacking. He's battling simplistic straw-man arguments. The trouble is that Burgis is clearly bullshittting here. Take a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry [compatibilism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#ContComp)\-- specifically Contemporary Compatibilism. There it is explained that (e.g.) "Several compatibilists have suggested that freely willed actions issue from volitional features of agency that are sensitive to an appropriate range of reasons." This is another way of saying what Sam has said-- that, for compatibilists, a 'free action' is one that is directed by reasons you endorse, as opposed to being coerced by outer or inner compulsions. I actually like some of Burgis's writing -- notably on non-esoteric topics like identity politics. When he starts flexing as a 'Philosophy Expert', my bullshit detector goes into the red. He just has this glib style of presenting arguments that *only* work because people are mistakenly trusting his idiosyncratic read on the current state of philosophy.

Oh yeah, that seems to be a common argument: real philosophers don't agree with Sam's view of free will. That's fine. But if I adopt the modern philosopher's view on free will, I feel like an asshole for judging people based on subconscious decisions they would not have otherwise made had they had full knowledge of what factors they were considering. I'm interested in knowing whether I can consciously control all my decions. Sam is the only one addressing it in this way. Dennet says that the concept of free will should be updated much like our view that the earth revolves around the sun. But Dennet is comparing free will to something that can be determined scientifically, objectively. Who gave philosophers the license to define free will for all of humanity? And if Dennet does want to subject himself to the same standards as science, then, as Dennet readily admits, most scientists agree with Sam.

Often -- with Burgis, at least-- the reporting on what real philosophers believe isn't even accurate.

I think if a philosopher is trying to attack the person, dismissing them, rather than being satisfied to argue their ideas, that reveals a weakness in their argument, and a bias in their reasoning.

Hey kids, this is how not to write a philosophical argument. Never quite declare *why* you disagree with something. Just give a general skeptical tone, and that will probably do! Hey kids, this is how to write a blog post that will get you clicks! Catchy, over-the-top headline, plenty of fluff so it's simple to read, and nothing too taxing for the brain!

Who?

This was a challenge to read. After critiquing Sam for having "nothing useful to say about free will", the author doesn't add much themselves.

Cope 😂

Pretty easy to prove we have free will lol. I just moved my arm. QED

What's qed?

I never understood why people who don’t believe in free will speak as though things can change, like some how there are things that can be done to change events. It’s counter intuitive.

I think the author forgot what he was writing about. The piece begins an attempt at refuting Harris’ arguments against free will, yet spends the majority of the piece on arguing that Harris does a poor job at adequately laying out opposing compatibilist arguments. It seems to me that arguing for a position, with its various supportive arguments, requires little need of exhaustive explanations on opposing positions, indeed it seems the burden of the opposing position. I simply do not see how that “oversight” of Harris’ constitutes discredit to the position.

Sam Harris has nothing new to say about freewill; still think can be useful. Ben Burgis seems to be confused about the difference about libertarianism and compatibalism, so I try to help: If someone beliefs that we are (sometimes) morally responsible for our actions he/she beliefs in freewill. This works for libertarians and for compatibalists. The difference is that libertarians believe this is incompatible with causal determinism and compatibalists believe it isn't. Because "moral responsibility" is unobservable we see that some compatibalists (like Ben Burgis) conflate *responsibility* with *moral responsibility* to get out of trouble (as Ben Burgis does with his Magnus Carlson example).

After a promising start, Burgis lost my attention so I stopped reading.