Sam Harris Free Will Thought Experiment

Tooling around youtube I came along this video of a an exercise Sam Harris offered as a practical refutation of free will.

The exercise Harris advocates is essentially this: He asks you to think of a city, any city, in the world, without any constraints. Once you have done so, Harris claims that this choice, if anything, would be an example of the exercise of free will. He then proceeds to debunk the choice as free by arguing that it wasn't really free. I won't rehearse all the reasons he provides (the video is only about 6 minutes), but his arguments all boil down to showing that the choice must have had a cause, even if we are unaware of the cause. For instance, you may have chosen Paris as your city because it happened to bubble up out of your subconscious, and that bubbling was a function of the fact that you once travelled to Paris and have fond memories. The point is that we mistakenly think the choice was "free" because we think we chose it arbitrarily, when in actuality the cause was driven by psychological factors of which we were simply unaware.

Harris's exercise involves a typical misunderstanding of what is meant by "free will", or rather, what the classical philosophers meant by calling man free. They did not mean that human will is an uncaused caused, which is what Harris seems to think it must mean. That would simply be to mistake man for God, Who is the only possible uncaused cause.

Man's will is classically understood to be free not because it is uncaused, but because it can have rational causes rather than irrational ones. Specifically, man can rationally judge means and the relationship of means to ends, and choose a course of action based on that judgement. (This is what Plato meant by saying "the truth shall make you free.") It is in the exercise of rationally considered action that man's freedom is manifest, not in the allegedly arbitrary choice of a meaningless selection as in Harris's exercise. A classical philosopher would not dispute that the choice made by a person in Harris's exercise is not free - in that sense, Harris is not showing anything new. But they would point out that they never thought such a choice was free in a significant sense in any case.

To flesh these points out, consider the difference between a beaver building a dam and a man building a dam. The beaver builds a dam by instinct. When it hears the sound of running water, it attempts to stop the sound by piling sticks and mud on it - even in cases where it makes no sense to do so. (For example, playing the sound of running water beneath a concrete floor will cause beavers to pile mud and sticks over the sound on the dry concrete). The beaver builds the dam the same way every time, by piling up sticks and mud, and will keep building them the same way.

The beaver is not free in its dam building. It's not free when it builds the dam (the end), because it simply starts building a dam at the sound of running water, nor is it free in how it builds (the means), for it does it the same way every time by piling up mud and sticks.

Now consider man building a dam, for example Hoover Dam. Man did not build this dam because he happened to hear the sound of running water once and automatically started piling sticks on it. The dam was built after a long, rational consideration of ends that might be achieved with the dam - hydroelectricity and the recreational possibilities of Lake Mead among others. Once the end was selected, the means were then considered. The dam could be build out of a variety of materials and in a variety of places. Concrete for the material was selected and a particular spot on the Colorado river was chosen - and not because an engineer picked the location "freely" by just letting a location pop into his head, but as the result of a detailed investigation of hydrology and the anticipated consequences of various locations.

Eventually the construction began and the Hoover Dam was built and it stands as a monument to the freedom of man, which means the freedom to know the truth and to act according to it. It doesn't mean to act in some purely arbitrary manner. That is the degenerate freedom that has unfortunately become the vision of freedom of that has captured the imagination of modern man.

Know the truth and it shall make you free.

Harris, Faith and Science. Commentary on Waking Up Part 5

This is the fifth part of my commentary on Sam Harris's Waking Up.

A theme that Harris repeatedly emphasizes in Waking Up is that the Eastern spirituality he advocates does not necessarily require any belief in a faith-based system (which Harris thinks is pernicious) or subscription to any metaphysical dogmas. According to Harris, it can be approached entirely empirically. For these reasons it is allegedly superior to Western spirituality, in particular Christian-inspired spirituality.

But Harris's proposed spirituality does in fact require faith, or at least faith as it has been understood in the Christian tradition. This differs from the currently popular understanding of "faith", which just means willed belief in propositions without evidence. The traditional understanding of "faith" is closer in meaning to what we think of as trust; as in we believe in something because we trust the person proposing it, and have reason to think he is in a position to know the truth of it. This understanding of faith is, in fact, not restricted to religion but is how the mass of individuals are related to, for instance, science. The average man cannot duplicate the experiments of the trained scientist or perhaps even understand the details of the scientist's theories. But he believes what the scientist proposes to him because he has reason to believe that the scientist knows what he is talking about when it comes to science. The average man is rightly impressed with the technological wonders that are based on science and sees them as confirmation of the scientist's theories. Trust is involved because, not understanding the science and therefore the true connection between science and technical wonders, the average man must take the scientist's word for what the science truly is and what it implies.

With respect to Christianity, and specifically with respect to the Catholic Church, faith does not mean believing propositions without evidence, but in trusting  that the Church is a true witness to what it claims to have witnessed - the Resurrection of Christ. That witness, and its ratification by Christ Himself,  is the basis of the authority of the original Apostles, and that authority has been passed on through history to the generations of bishops. The average man's relationship to the bishops is much like that of his relationship to scientists. He must trust the bishop, as he does the scientist, to communicate to him the true meaning and significance of that which he is in no position to fully understand.

The big difference, of course, between the bishop and the scientist is that the bishop does not have the full spectrum of modern technical wonders with which to impress the average man. But he does have, perhaps, the occasional miracle, and he certainly has the ordinary witness of saints. The impressive lives of saints like Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Francis Xavier, and many others, testify to the effect of Christ in their lives and through that testimony support the witness of the Church.

What is the nature of the faith involved in Sam Harris's spirituality? He claims there is none, but in fact the prospective meditator is taking it on faith that meditation will have the effects that Harris claims it will. In the extreme, Harris claims that meditation will reveal the illusion of the self, but even if this is true, it will be experienced only after many years of meditation. The person who spends years meditating just to discover if the claims about meditation are true so he can take up meditating, has of course already answered his question. Skeptics rightly make the same point with respect to some Christian apologists who claim prayer can be tested empirically. When prayer doesn't soon have the evidential effect that was hoped, the apologist counsels patience that God works in his own time (which He does). But asking someone to pray for an indefinite period as a way to establish that prayer is a worthwhile activity in the first place is hardly a reasonable request.

Sam Harris is asking us to trust that meditation will have the evidential effect he says it will - specifically, that it will bring one to perceive the illusion of the self. Harris implicitly admits this by spending considerable time bringing in science in an attempt to support this belief (which I have addressed in earlier posts.) Such preliminaries would not be necessary if Harris weren't writing a check he promises to cash later.

But the same thing is true of "faith-based" Christian spirituality. The Church claims that through prayer, fasting, and reception of the Sacraments, the Christian will discover a relationship with Christ that fulfills all the promises that the Church makes about Him. Such a promise must be taken on trust (faith) but, like Harris, the Church does not demand that anyone believe this promise without evidence, but marshalls evidence in support of its promise - just as does Sam Harris.

The Self, Immanuel Kant, and Sam Harris. Commentary Part 4

In this fourth part of my commentary on Sam Harris's Waking Up, I will continue with his chapter The Mystery of Consciousness and on into the next chapter The Riddle of the Self.  Both these chapters provide the opportunity to bring in Immanuel Kant, the great Enlightenment philosopher.  Kant was a deep, thorough and disciplined thinker who thought through the implications of modern philosophical premises to a level that is still often underappreciated. Modern materialists like Harris still haven't come to terms with Kant.

In the latter parts of chapter 2 and into chapter 3 Harris attacks the unity of conscious experience and the subjective experience of an "I" (the latter of which he does think is an illusion, in contrast to consciousness itself). Harris distinguishes between consciousness itself and its contents:

Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness itself and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood in neurophysiological terms. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object: Its color, contours, apparent motion, and location in space arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus, when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball's roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of the ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of "binding" can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is at least intelligible - because synchronous activity seems just the sort of thing that could explain the unity of a percept.

This work suggests, as many other finding in neuroscience do, that the contents of consciousness can often be made sense of in terms of their underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why such phenomena should be experienced in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full.

He then goes on to discuss the division of the brain into hemispheres, and circumstances under which the hemispheres appear to have their own individual consciousness:

What is most startling about the split-brain phenomenon is that we have every reason to believe that the isolated right hemisphere is independently conscious... The consciousness of the right hemisphere is especially difficult to deny whenever a subject possesses linguistic ability on both sides of the brain, because in such cases the divided hemispheres often express different intentions. In a famous example, a young patient was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up: His left brain replied, "A draftsman," while his right brain used letter cards to spell out "racing driver." In fact, the divided hemispheres sometimes seem to address each other directly, in the form of verbalized, interhemispheric argument.

What Harris is after is undermining the notion that there is some unified self, soul, or "I" that is behind human nature. Consciousness is real for Harris, but any unified experiencer of consciousness is not.

Much of what makes us human is generally accomplished by the right side of the brain. Consequently, we have every reason to believe that that disconnected right hemisphere is independently conscious and that the divided brain harbors two distinct points of view. This fact poses an insurmountable problem for the motion that each of us has single, indivisible self - much less an immortal soul. The idea of a soul arises from the feeling that our subjectivity has a unity, simplicity, and integrity that must somehow transcend the biochemical wheelworks of the body. But the split-brain phenomenon proves that our subjectivity can quite literally be sliced in two... However, the most important implications are for our view of consciousness: It is divisible - and, therefore, more fundamental than any apparent self.

Harris is anxious to show that science suggests that the self is an illusion because that is the same place he is going with Eastern spirituality.  For Harris, science tells us the truth about the objective world, while Eastern meditation can reveal to us the truth about the subjective world - specifically, that the self or "I" is an illusion. Since consciousness is not merely subjective but is itself part of the objective world, consciousness is the meeting place between science and meditation. Like a good medieval theologian, Harris rejects any temptation of a "double truth" about consciousness - the truth discovered by meditation and the truth discovered by science, which might possibly disagree. For Harris they must agree and, he argues, in fact they do.

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion - and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

And the benefits of realizing this, moment to moment, is, according to Harris, peace of mind.

Harris, however, in attempting to hold on to the truths (allegedly) revealed both by modern science and Eastern meditation, is trying to have his cake and eat it too. We can see this by turning to Kant, who saw the problem in his analysis of the thought of David Hume. Hume, like Harris, did not think there was any unified self undergirding our experience, for the simple reason that we do not directly encounter any such self in experience. Such a self would be one and the same through all our experiences, but we have no experience of anything that persists invariably the same, so the self must be merely an illusion.

We don't need to go into the details of Hume's thought other than to remark on its resemblance to the position Harris takes. Kant was not particularly concerned about saving the idea of a persistent self, but he was concerned with saving the idea of empirical science, and he saw that the Hume/Harris position threatens the very possibility of science. For science requires scientists, and if there is no persistent self, how can there be a scientist to pursue science? Kant, who respected Hume as the man who "awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers", wondered how he could save science in light of the Humean view of the self and Humean epistemology. Specifically he asked: What are the minimum requirements, rationally speaking, to get science up and running?

Let's consider one of the famous experiments at the origin of modern science: Galileo's investigation of acceleration by rolling balls down ramps. What is necessary for this experiment? Beyond the physical equipment of balls, ramps and timing mechanisms, there is the necessity of a scientist to conduct the experiment. Consider what Galileo must be capable of for the experiment to work.

At time t1 Galileo releases a ball at the top of the ramp. At some later time t2, when the ball reaches the bottom of the ramp, Galileo marks that time and, at a yet later time t3, he calculates the difference between t1 and t2 and deduces from that difference some conclusions about acceleration. What is Galileo doing at time t3?

He is recalling what he did at time t1 (release the ball down the ramp) and considering it in its relationship to what happened at time t2 (when he recalls that the ball reached the bottom of the ramp.) So at time t3 Galileo is experiencing the remembered experiences of t1 and t2 and uniting those memories in his consciousness at time t3. Now, as Clint Eastwood might say, we have to ask ourselves a question: Just what is the object of science? Is the object of science the real balls, ramps and events that happened "out there" at times t1 and t2, i.e. is it about objective reality itself? Or is science only about our experiences of reality and not reality itself? Specifically, are the conclusions that I arrive at during time t3 about something more than merely the memories I have of what happened at times t1 and time t2?

Let me table this question for a moment and consider what Kant showed regardless of how that question is answered. For Galileo's scientific project to work, whether we think science is about reality itself or only about our experience of it (both now and remembered), certain things are necessary. For starters, no conclusions about what was going on at t1 and t2 are possible unless they are united in what might be called "a unified field of rational inquiry." (These are not Kant's terms but my interpretation of what Kant is getting at.) This simply means that t1 and t2 must be viewable from some one rational perspective. If you remember what was going on at t1 but not t2, and I remember what was going on at time t2 but not t1, and we don't talk to each other, the science can't get on. Either I have to remember what was going on at both t1 and t2, or you have to tell me what went on at t1 (assuming I remember t2). Either way, the events at t1 and t2 must appear to some one rational viewpoint for any scientific analysis of them to occur. And this rational viewpoint must be capable of supporting the meaning of the relationship between t1 and t2. It must underwrite the meaning that t2 is "after" t1 and that such a difference is measurable as precisely some number of seconds.

Furthermore, the rational viewpoint must also underwrite the spatial relationships that constitute the substance of the events at t1 and t2. Galileo was standing at the top of  the ramp at the start of the experiment, which he experienced as here at that moment and the bottom of the ramp as there. Later, he moved to the bottom of the ramp to catch the ball, which he then experienced as here and the top of the ramp as there. Yet later, when analyzing the experiment, Galileo is able to identify the top of the ramp as the same identical spot in space despite it having been here at one moment and then there at a later moment, and similarly with the bottom of the ramp. Just like the experience of the times t1 and t2, it doesn't really matter if Galileo himself both released the ball and then caught it. Someone else might have released the ball and Galileo caught it, but the science can't happen unless the man who released it tells Galileo exactly where he was when he released it. The point is that the ball's place at the start of the experiment - call it p1 - and its place at the end of the experiment - call it p2 - must be united in some one field of rational inquiry capable of seeing and analyzing the geometrical relationship between the two points. And beyond that, this rational viewpoint must be capable of uniting the geometrical considerations in the relationship between p1 and p2 with the temporal considerations of the relationship between t1 and t2. p1 happened at t1 and p2 happened at t2 and all four of those elements can be united in a single theory of acceleration in a single rational field of inquiry.

We might see the problem Hume would have here. If I am nothing more than merely the passing parade of experience from moment to moment, then there is nothing to unite that experience in a single rational field of experience to make science possible. That passing parade must somehow be integrated across time and space, and integrated in a way that makes it mathematically tractable, for science to happen.

Now I have been careful not to identify the "rational field of experience" that makes science possible with the "soul", the "self", or the "I" or - and this is what materialists miss - the "brain". I haven't done that because Kant didn't do it. Kant restricted himself to elaborating the purely rational requirements for the possibility of science and he found no warrant in that purely rational consideration to go beyond the "formal" requirement of an integrated field of rational experience to an identification of what, in reality, the substance of that field actually is. He can, strictly speaking, only say that such a field of integrated experience, whatever it's ultimate nature might be, is necessary for science.

It is at this point that we return to the question I tabled earlier: What is the object of science? Is it the balls and ramps themselves that are "out there" in objective reality? Or is it merely our experience of those things with all the qualifications alluded to above? Kant refused to go beyond what he could justify with strict rational necessity, and he held that science is about our experience of reality but not reality itself, which is the basis of his famous distinction between the noumenal (how things truly are in themselves) and the phenomenal (how they appear to us).

But suppose we want to go beyond Kant and hold that science is about reality itself and not merely reality as it appears to us as conditioned by our cognitive apparatus? This is only possible if the rational field of inquiry required by science supports such a move. Galileo's cognitive apparatus must have enough integrity so that at time t3, when he remembers what happened with respect to the ball and ramp at times t1 and t2, he can have the rationally justifiable confidence that his memories reflect reality itself at those times and places. Furthermore, he must have the rationally justifiable confidence that his analysis of the relationship between times t1 and t2, and places p1 and p2, reflect reality as well.

On what basis can Galileo justify such confidence? It is hard to see how such justification could be arrived at in terms of the Hume or Harris views of the self or mind (which, of course, is why Kant never went there). Since we are talking about the rational justification of science itself, we can't call on scientific conclusions to do the work without begging the question. The only other available basis of justification is pre-scientific common sense. By "pre-scientific" I don't mean temporally prior, i.e. what was thought to be common sense prior to the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I mean logically or "existentially" prior. The scientist takes for granted that his telescope is in reality what it appears to him in his sight and touch; that it behaves more or less the same as long as its nature isn't changed; and that the things he views through his telescope will not change their behavior without some cause. And, of course, he will assume that his spatial and temporal intuitions (here and there, before and after) reflect reality itself and not merely a reading into reality of the conditions of his own cognition.

But the intuition of an enduring self is just as much a pre-scientific common sense intuition as are our intuitions about space and time. We might, indeed, say that the intuition of self is even more fundamental that the intuitions of time and space since it is only in reference to a self that time and space have meaning (space - here and there - has meaning only in reference to a self which is here and something else is there and time only has meaning in reference to a self to which before and after appear.) So if we are going to take our common sense intuitions about space and time, and what appears in space and time, as reflective of reality - and this seems the only way to underwrite a science that is about reality itself rather than merely the human perception of reality - then we must accept our common sense intuition about an enduring self to be reflective of reality as well.

All this is to the point that when Harris wishes to invoke neuroscience or brain science in general to undermine the notion of an enduring self or "I", and in particular our common sense notion of an enduring self, he has sawed off the limb on which sit the brain sciences themselves sit. Brain science can get going only if there are brain scientists who, like Galileo, can be rationally confident that their scientific intuitions about the "brain" actually reflect reality itself rather than merely their experience of reality conditioned by their cognitive apparatus. And, again, such confidence cannot be a product of brain science itself without begging the question.

Typically, thinkers like Harris fail to see this problem. They think they can blithely invoke science to undermine common sense, including common sense notions of the self, without effecting the rational foundations of science, as though scientists do not share the same human nature as the rest of us. So when he makes statements like

The idea of a soul arises from the feeling that our subjectivity has a unity, simplicity, and integrity that must somehow transcend the biochemical wheelworks of the body.

we can respond that any scientific talk about biochemical wheelworks is only possible if there is subject around with the unity, simplicity and integrity to support it.

Commentary on Waking Up by Sam Harris, part 3

At this point I would like to jump ahead to Harris's chapters 2, the Mystery of Consciousness. I'll come back to the intervening parts later (or maybe not).

In chapter 2, Harris struggles with coming to terms with the fact and nature of consciousness in terms of modern materialist philosophy.

And the question of how consciousness relates to the physical world remains famously unresolved... Whatever the ultimate relationship between consciousness and matter, almost everyone will agree that at some point in the development of complex organisms like ourselves, consciousness seems to emerge. This emergence does not depend on a change of materials, for you and I are both of the same atoms as a fern or a ham sandwich. Instead, the birth of consciousness must be the result of organization. Arranging atoms in certain ways appears to bring about an experience of being that very collection of atoms. This is undoubtedly one of the deepest mysteries given to us to contemplate.

Harris's perplexity is a function of the materialist philosophy he takes for granted. This philosophy, having its origin in the Enlightenment, holds that reality is composed of bits of brute matter (or energy fields or whatever) banging together, the "clockwork universe" thought to have been implied by Newton's discoveries. What's important here is that one of the points of this philosophy was to banish Aristotle's formal and final causes from nature. These causes are fundamental to our experience of consciousness. My thoughts are "directed" at their object as an arrow to a target (an example of final causality). And I can understand why the angles of a triangle must add to 180 degrees (which is to understand the formal causality of a triangle). Aristotle thought this "directedness" was a basic feature of nature itself, which was why consciousness did not seem to him the scandal that it is to modern philosophy. Fire is "directed" to heat, acorns are "directed" to grow into oak trees, and minds are "directed" to understanding. And our ability to understand formal causality is simply a reflection of the fact that formal causality is part of nature itself.

But how are such experiences to be understood in the clockwork universe of the materialist? As Edward Feser's pithy expression puts it, formal and final causality were "swept under the rug of the mind." The directedness of nature is not something we discover in nature but is rather read into nature by the mind. This creates a problem, however, when we try to understand the mind itself in terms of the clockwork universe. For our experience of the mind just is those experiences of formal and final causality that were banished in principle from the materialist universe. This makes the mind more than merely a mystery for the materialist; it makes it a scandal. The difference being that a scandal is not in principle solvable in terms of the fundamental principles of a philosophy, while a mystery is in principle intelligible, even if practically it may never be fully illuminated.

The temptation in the face of scandal is to deny its basis, and this has been done by some modern philosophers who simply deny the reality of the mind (e.g. Daniel Dennett), dismissing it as an illusion of the material brain (a position that does not make sense - more on that later). Harris, to his credit, is unwilling to simply dismiss the significance of our experience of consciousness: "Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."

The next few pages of Waking Up consist of Harris further wrestling with the incongruity of consciousness in a materialist universe:

First there is a physical world, unconscious and seething with unperceived events; then, by virtue of some physical property or process, consciousness itself springs, or staggers, into being. This idea seems to me not merely strange but perfectly mysterious... To simply assert that consciousness arose at some point in the evolution of life, and that it results from a specific arrangement of neurons firing in concert within an individual brain, doesn't give us any inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle.

Harris, again to his credit, refuses to accept the empty answer that time, genetic mutation and natural selection are responsible for consciousness. Even if they are, no light has been shed until it is explained how they account for it. It is like claiming that gravity is responsible for the movement of the planets without providing any theory that accounts for planetary orbits in terms of gravity (e.g. Newton's theory of gravitation).

I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have suggested that perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere - generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Perhaps consciousness presents an impasse of this sort.

When brute facts are invoked, you know you are at the point of a philosopher waving the white flag. A chain of explanation that ends in a brute fact isn't really a chain of explanation at all, since you might as well have invoked the brute fact at the start of the explanation as at the end. In any case, if Harris's first sentence is amended to "... perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in materialist terms" he might be on the way to a breakthrough, or at least a breakout, from the materialist prison in which finds himself without realizing it.

One of the charges against philosophy is that it makes no progress. Philosophers have been arguing over the same basic questions that they always have. While this is true, it is not true that this eternal philosophical conversation is fruitless. For it is a good clue that a particular philosophical school is fundamentally mistaken when it gives up attempting to account for something after having struggled with it for a long time. Materialist philosophers have been trying to find a place in their philosophy for the fact of consciousness - a fact, Harris concedes, that is undeniable - for a long time, with little success even by their own lights. They are now at the point of simply giving up on the project. The alternative to giving up on explaining consciousness, of course, is to abandon the philosophy that makes such an explanation impossible and go in search of another one.

Commentary on Waking Up by Sam Harris, part 2

On pages 12 and 13, Harris makes some good points about happiness and the variability of existence (points that are standard fare in classical philosophy) but are well-made nonetheless:

We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside. And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain?... is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one's desires are gratified, in spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pin, old age, disease and death?

This is well-said, and Harris goes on to draw out the logic of the situation:

If there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying one's desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness should be available to a person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions, and gone off to a cave or some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations.

The first thing to note is that Harris is looking for merely psychological well-being. But what of well-being simpliciter? We are more than merely our psychology, and the question may be asked if psychological well-being is a good when our overall human well-being is not. Tony Soprano, for example, sought help from a psychologist to overcome his panic attacks. It turned out that treating the panic attacks involved a more comprehensive psychological analysis of Soprano's life - the life of a mafia boss and killer. Can a mob killer be "psychologically healthy" yet remain, and be comfortable with, his life of crime? This was the question that bedeviled Soprano's psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, and raises the question of the relationship of the psychological sciences to an evaluation of human character.

In the book Artificial Happiness, physician Ronald Dworkin discusses the widespread use of psychotropic drugs to give people a feeling of well-being they don't really deserve. While such drugs are appropriate in some cases of genuine psychological illness, they are increasingly administered to people who are simply unhappy, and often for very good reasons. They are unhappy because they have messed up their lives through poor choices, alcohol, simple irresponsibility or unfortunate circumstances (e.g. a woman staying with an abusive husband.) Their feelings of unhappiness could be a spur to a reconsideration of their lives. Instead, they seek and are sometimes granted drugs that merely make them feel better, derailing any motivation they had to change themselves or their situations. The man who can't keep a job because he's too lazy to consistently get to work on time feels just cool with that; the woman with the abusive husband abandons any plans she had to leave him and thinks things are fine because she feels content with what is going on.

Psychological well-being is not a good thing if it doesn't reflect genuine well-being. Why does Harris focus on it? It is because he is captured by the scientistic mindset that does not permit a deep philosophical analysis of human nature. Such an analysis presupposes that some views of human well-being are better than others and, even more significantly, that they can be objectively ranked through philosophical investigation. And that implies that the truth about human nature, including its end or purpose, is also a philosophically available truth. The Enlightenment tradition of which Harris is a modern exemplar holds that such truth simply isn't available to us. We can pursue "happiness", but of what happiness consists - in terms of desires and their fulfillment - isn't something that can be objectively determined. We cannot say precisely in what absolute human well-being consists; but we can at least say in what psychological well-being consists.

The classical philosopher, as exemplified by Aristotle, is not afraid to rank desires or to insist that the truth concerning human nature, including its end, is a philosophically available truth.  That truth is that man is by nature a rational animal, and that fulfillment for him involves ordering his being to reason. Psychological well-being is not the primary goal here, it is merely a by-product of a deeper transformation, a transformation of character. Well-being for man means well-being in terms of virtue. The good man (the man who is truly "well") is courageous, temperate, just and wise, all virtues conditioned by reason. Man will experience pleasure at the result - psychological well-being - but that well-being is simply delight in the true good he possesses. Pursuing psychological well-being as an end in itself is, on this view,  to mistake the by-product for the product.

Modern thinkers are wary of speaking of human nature classically understood - that is, in terms that go beyond the restrictions of science to a philosophical consideration of man as such. Psychological well-being has the advantage that it sidesteps questions of the nature of man in terms of man's end or purpose, but for that very reason, will not turn out to be what an unsatisfied man is really looking for.

Commentary on Waking Up by Sam Harris, part 1

I'm reading Sam Harris's new book Waking Up, A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Harris, you may remember, is one of the New Atheists and is the author of, among other books, the popular The End of Faith. Less well-known is that Harris is an advocate of Buddhist meditation, and in this book he discusses meditation in terms of its benefits and its relationships to religion in general and atheism. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Harris is a pleasant author to read because of his straightforward style and obvious sincerity. I think he is sincerely wrong about many things, but one of his virtues is that he has the courage of his convictions and tells you exactly what he thinks in plain language. As I was reading along I noticed that he wrote so many things of which I felt the urge to respond that my space in the margins filled up. So instead of writing there, I'm going to write here. This will not be a book review or essay on Harris's work, simply my comments on Harris as I read through the book.

Here goes.

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In the first chapter, pages 4 and 5, Harris describes the results of his experimenting with the drug MDMA (Ecstasy) in 1987:

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal - and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love - I love you because... - now made no sense at all. 

The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what was common to them all. 

The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing but of it no longer being obscured. Love was - as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages - a state of being... It would take many years to put this experience into context... I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.

Harris writes that what happened was a shift in "perspective" and not driven by "any change in the way I felt", but its significance is calculated in terms of how felt about his best friend, and how he would feel about a total stranger walking through the door. And at the end of the passage, he understands that he found an important psychological truth. Love, then, for Harris is a psychological experience and the state of being he mentions is a psychological state.

We may contrast that with the traditional Christian understanding of love, which is not so much a feeling or psychological state but an action. When Christ teaches what it means to love your neighbor as yourself, he teaches it in terms of parables like the Good Samaritan, a story that tells us what the Samaritan did and very little about what he felt. Harris and his friend take Ecstasy and sit around having warm feelings for each other and the world in general. All very nice, but where does that get Harris or anyone else?

Love, for the Christian, involves a state of being, but that state is much more than psychological and is dynamic rather than static. "Being" is an action word, and a man who is actually in a state of love must actually be doing something based on it. In fact, from the Christian perspective, simply having warm feelings about others that does not issue in action is very dangerous, since it invites one to mistake a mere psychological experience for the genuine state of love.

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On page 6, Harris notes that:

Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.

Admissions like this are one of the things that makes Harris worth reading, since he doesn't deny the obvious as many atheists do. For them, religion must be a malignant force through and through with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. If it were, why have so many people followed it? There must be something about religion that accounts for its persistence over millennia. The typical atheist response here is to account for religion in terms of evolution or some reassuring but false consolation it provides. This isn't good enough either, as it is obvious that, whatever else may be said about it, religion has produced some remarkable people who have managed to transcend the ordinary human condition in some way - the Buddhist monk serene in his contemplation being an example. 

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page 9:

Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience - self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light - constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.

That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call "I" is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is - the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at ta world that is separate from yourself - can be altered or entirely extinguished.

It's clear that Harris arbitrarily limits experience here. For example, while Harris does not accept revelation, there is nothing logically impossible about it. Someone could experience a private revelation from God through which God reveals certain truths to him inaccessible by other means. That experience being private, of course, means that it need not carry cognitive weight for anyone else, but that does not rule out the possibility that it could be genuinely meaningful for the person who experiences it. But in any case, Christianity has always depended on public witness rather than private revelation. The Apostles proclaimed the Gospel based on their witness of the risen Christ, a witness that involved him speaking to them, touching them, and eating their food. Subject experiences of ecstasy or love have nothing to do with. Today, the Church carries on the public witness of the Resurrection of Christ that was handed on to them through the ages starting with the Apostles. Now you may not buy that witness - as many did not buy it in the first century - but that is where the game is, not in subjective experience.

The doctrine that the self is an illusion involves profound consequences, and it will be interesting to see where Harris goes with it.

Sam Harris and the Moral Landscape

Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is several years old at this point but is still generating controversy. Ross Douthat's recent take on it is here. For my part,  Harris is worth reading because of the straightforward, transparent manner in which he argues his case; Harris is an honest atheist and sincerely wishes to rationally persuade his audience. He also has a certain philosophical naivete, such that he does not always perceive the philosophical consequences of his positions, consequences that atheists have long struggled to avoid. I think this latter aspect of Harris's writing accounts for the not quite friendly response he has gotten from some secular reviewers. But more on this later.

Harris has issued a challenge to critics, offering a cash award for the best criticism of his book and an even larger cash award if that criticism persuades him. (Given that Harris is by definition the judge of the latter, it's not too much of a leap to suppose that prize is in no danger of being won.) I might submit an essay to this challenge just to see what happens. If I do, the essay will run along ideas like the following.

Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape acknowledges a fundamental challenge to his attempt to determine human values through science: If it is through science that human values are to be determined, how is the value of science itself to be determined? Harris recognizes the only possible answer: Science cannot  determine its own value, so that value must be recognized pre-scientifically:

Science is defined with reference to the goal of understanding the processes at work in the universe. Can we justify this goal scientifically? Of course not. Does this make science itself unscientific? If so, we appear to have pulled ourselves down by our bootstraps. (p. 17 - all references to paperback edition)

In the chapter "The Future of Happiness", he argues in this way:

It seems to me, however, that in order to fulfill our deepest interests in this life, both personally and collectively, we must first admit that some interests are more defensible than others. Indeed, some interests are so compelling that they need no defense at all. (p. 191)

The interest of finding truth through science is, of course, the principal interest Harris has in mind. In the Afterword to the paperback edition, Harris puts the matter in a way that makes the philosophical implications clear:

The fatal flaw that Blackford claims to have found in my view of morality could be ascribed to any branch of science - or to reason generally. Certain "oughts" are built right into the foundations of human thought. We need not apologize for pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps in this way. It is better than pulling ourselves down by them. (p.201-202, emphasis mine)

The italicized sentence is the one that will cause heartache in Harris's secular critics, for although Harris appears not to know it,  it is a foundational principle of traditional natural law philosophy, something modern philosophers have been hoping to discredit since the Enlightenment. Indeed, the typical modern philosopher thinks natural law philosophy was discredited at the dawn of the Enlightenment with the "discovery" of the fact-value distinction. This is why Harris's secular critics sometimes, like Colin McGinn, simply repeat the fact-value distinction and think they are done - for the fact-value distinction is a foundational principle of modern philosophy and functions as something of a litmus test. Denying it serves to identify oneself as one of those naive pre-modern philosophers who still believes in things like the natural law, and therefore may be justifiably and summarily dismissed (which is what McGinn does).

As I say, one of the attractive features of Harris is his relative philosophical innocence with respect to the larger philosophical battles waging around him. He simply calls things as he sees them, and does not hedge his views or couch them in obscurity for the sake of broader philosophical consequences. In this case, Harris acknowledges what is obviously true, that there are certain values (certain "oughts") that are self-evident to human reason and need no other justification. He does this because he sees the self-evident value of scientific inquiry. What he doesn't see (which his secular critics recognize with horror) is how much of modern philosophy is undermined, and classical philosophy affirmed, with that simple acknowledgement.

For starters, the Kantian project is shown to be misguided. For Kant's premise is that nothing can be truly known without a prior evaluation of the range of human reason - a "critique" of reason that defines its powers and limits. But if the value of something (in this case science) can be immediately known absent a prior critique, then the Kantian project is shown to be unnecessary and even counter-productive, since it may result in the obscuring of truth that can be immediately known yet might not survive a critique.

Harris doesn't see that the consequentialism he favors - and is popular amongst modern philosophers - is put in danger by acknowledgement of fundamental natural law principle:

Here is my (consequentialist) starting point: all questions of value (right and wrong, good and evil, etc.) depend upon the possibility of experiencing such value. Without potential consequences at the level of experience - happiness, suffering, joy, despair, etc. - all talk of value is empty. Therefore, to say that an act is morally necessary, or evil, or blameless, is to make (tacit) claims about its consequences in the lives of conscious creatures (whether actual or potential). (p. 62)

But Harris has already given us an instance of where the talk of value without respect to potential consequences is not empty: Talk about the value of science itself, which is based on an "ought" built into the foundations of human thought, not demonstrated via its consequences. Given that Harris acknowledges the existence of at least one pre-consequentialist "ought", he must acknowledge the possibility that there might be others (maybe there isn't, but the possibility can't simply be dismissed without investigation). And if there are other pre-consequentialist "oughts", they must be discovered and understood and consequentialist conclusions evaluated in light of them rather than vice-versa.

Another way of saying the point is this: Harris recognizes that "certain oughts are built right into the foundations of human thought." He has in mind the value of science. We "ought" to prefer truth to falsehood and science is the best way of distinguishing between the two. His project is to recognize the value of science pre-scientifically, then use science to bootstrap a comprehensive theory of good and evil. All well and good.

But he fails to see certain consequences of this view. The first is that it is clear that the most important values are the ones known pre-scientifically, for it is on the pre-scientific value of science itself that Harris's whole project is based. All other values stand or fall on it. The second consequence is that there may be other pre-scientific values other than the value of science itself, other "oughts" built right into the foundations of human thought. Simply because Harris only recognizes the value of science and simply ignores any other possible pre-scientific values does not mean that they are not there (and, incidentally, violates Harris's oft-stated distinction between "no answers in practice" and "no answers in principle" p.  3)

It is no good to critique other possible pre-scientific values based on the results of Harris's scientific inquiry into morality: For those other potential pre-scientific values compete with science at the level of science's own value. To take the value of science for granted, then evaluate other potential pre-scientific values in light of science's conclusions, is simply to beg the question against other pre-scientific values that might compete with the value of science. Those other candidate's for value must be evaluated the same way the value of science was: Pre-scientifically.

What I have been just discussing exposes a typical misunderstanding of natural law philosophy found in writers like, well, Sam Harris. Traditional opposition to things like abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage and contraception comes in for rough treatment by Harris in The Moral Landscape, where he writes as though his scientific morality case against traditional views is conclusive almost before he states it. What he doesn't understand is that his case for his scientific morality on those questions begs the question against traditional natural law opposition to them: For that natural law opposition operates at the level of pre-scientific value, "oughts" built right into the foundation of human thought itself, and is susceptible to criticism of the "scientific morality" sort only to the extent that the question is begged.
The natural law opposition may be opposed, but it must be done in the same way that the pre-scientific value of science was defended - not through science, but a philosophical case.

The irony of Harris's project, an irony that I think his modernist critics recognize and want to distance themselves from, is that to the extent Harris is right he must leave off the scientific criticism of the things he most wants to attack (traditional moral views on matters sexual and life-related) and fight them on the traditionalists own turf in the arena of natural law. For the game is all about those pre-scientific values - by Harris's own account the most important ones - that he acknowledges exist but modern philosophers have been struggling to banish to the realm of mythology since the sixteenth century.

The Moral Landscape is, I think, a case of needing to be careful what you wish for.

I will have more to say about Harris's book and its relation to traditional thinking on morality in subsequent posts.

Sam Harris and Free Will

I just finished reading Sam Harris's Free Will, a brief defense of Harris's view that free will is an illusion. Harris is worth reading because he is an excellent writer, with a clear and succinct style. He doesn't hedge or avoid the more disturbing logical implications of his position, but addresses them head on and with confidence.

Free Will is also worth reading because Harris, unintentionally, reveals the weaknesses of the modern understanding of free will while leaving the classical understanding entirely unscathed. In fact the classical understanding becomes all the more attractive in comparison to Harris's conception. (By "classical" I mean mainstream philosophy up to roughly St. Thomas Aquinas, with Aquinas representing the pinnacle of the classical tradition).

The key to understanding the classical conception is that it is inextricably linked with the intellect. The intellect and will in classical philosophy are almost two sides of the same coin, and it is difficult to make sense of one without the other. Freedom is found in the interplay between the two.

Harris writes at the start of his chapter "Changing the Subject:"

It is safe to say that no one was ever moved to entertain the existence of free will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea. The endurance of this notion is attributable to the fact that most of us feel that we freely author our own thoughts and actions (however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms). Thus the idea of free will emerges from a felt experience. (p 15)

The fact that Harris is likely true about this says more about the poor state of contemporary popular philosophical reflection than any failure of the promise of free will as an abstract idea. The old notion of free will did not arise out of any felt experience, but simple empirical observation, and it issued in an idea (aren't ideas by nature abstract?) straightforwardly intelligible. Men observed that inanimate objects  like stones are acted on but have no interior principle of action. In that sense they are entirely unfree. They also noticed that plants, unlike rocks, can initiate their own actions like sinking roots into the soil or growing toward the sun, and so are in that sense freer than rocks. Animals, beyond plants, have the ability to perceive their environment and pursue their desires as well as flee from their fears. An oak tree can't move itself to better soil or run away from a forest fire, but a wolf is free to find better hunting grown or flee a conflagration. In that sense, the wolf is yet more free than the oak tree.

Man, alone in physical nature and by the power of his intellect, can know the truth about himself and the universe, and so perceive his own good through that truth and pursue it as such. The wolf will devour raw meat because it perceives it as desirable and it reacts on that basis. Man also perceives meat as desirable, but he also knows the truth that meat is good for him because of its nutritional value, and the end of nutrition is health, and so he may not devour meat even if his animal nature desires it if he decides it is not healthy for him (e.g. he is cutting down on red meat to lower his cholesterol). Man, then, is free in a way that no other earthly creature is because freedom for him means the power to act in light of the truth and in pursuit of the good as such.

It's easy to see why the classicals stressed the relationship between intellect and will. Free will in the classical sense means a will enlightened by the intellect with truth; absent the intellect's knowledge, the will has no object and becomes impotent. It becomes reduced to an animal or plant will that merely responds immediately to perceived desire or fear.

We can also see that the classical conception of freedom is dynamic. It depends on knowledge, and as our lives move between the poles of ignorance and knowledge, so our will moves between the poles of slavishness and freedom: A philosophically primitive barbarian is in a very real sense not as free as Socrates, but may become so to the extent that he is educated. Thus the classical aphorism that "the truth shall make you free."

The classical conception also recognizes that our behavior is derived from both rational and non-rational sources. I may conclude that it is good for me to lose weight and so begin a diet (a rational cause). But I may have difficulty staying on it because my desire for cheesesteak subs (a non-rational cause) overwhelms my rational determination to diet. The moral life consists, in part, in training the non-rational side of our nature to follow the rational side.

Finally, it is important to see that the classical conception of freedom does not involve rescuing free will from a chain of causation. The free will is caused just like everything else is caused. The difference is that the will becomes free when it is moved in the chain of rational causes rather than the chain of non-rational causes. Why did I write "4" to the answer "What is 2+2?" Because it is true, and mathematically provable, that two added to two is four. This is an explanation in terms of rational causes. There is a parallel explanation in terms of non-rational causes as to how that "4" got written: My brain sent an electrical signal to my hand which moved a pencil to write a symbol of the shape "4." But no matter how detailed this account, it has no bearing on the truth of the account in terms of rational causes that is the basis of freedom: I wrote "4" because 2+2=4.

The modern version of free will differs from the classical insofar as it separates the will from the intellect. This had its origin in the early modern's dazzlement by the advances of science. Science seemed to provide an account of the world entirely in terms of dumb matter and irrational causes - Newton's clockwork universe. Rational causes - Aristotle's formal and final causes, and which are at the heart of the classical understanding of free will and intellect - were not so much refuted as simply left out of the account, having lost respectability in the non-rational account of nature provided by science. The classical intellect and will simply disappeared from view as invisible to modern science.

The result was that free will, which was not particularly mysterious for classical philosophers, became an impenetrable mystery for modern philosophers, for what could freedom mean in a clockwork universe devoid of rational causation? The issue of causation becomes the central focus of modern thinking about the will because the only way moderns can conceive of freedom is as some sort of escape from the chain of non-rational causation (which is why free will can only be felt rather than demonstrated, because demonstration necessarily involves an account in terms of causes, and for moderns free will is a mysterious uncaused cause).

Sam Harris puts great stock in experiments like the Libet experiments that detect neural evidence of our decisions before we are actually conscious of making the decision:

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a "clock" composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made. More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person's decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it. 

These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. (p. 8-9)

They are certainly difficult to reconcile with modern attempts to find some space for freedom within the clockwork universe thought to be heralded with the advent of modern science. Those attempts, e.g. those of Descartes or Kant, attempted to save freedom by removing it to a realm beyond the reach of science, either in an immaterial soul mysteriously attached to the body (Descartes), or another realm beyond the reach not only of science but of rational inquiry altogether (Kant). They are all, in the end, attempts to rescue free will as some sort of spontaneous uncaused cause. It is not surprising that this conception of freedom would fall apart as soon as human choice was shown to be susceptible to physical causes (something, incidentally, the classical philosophers never denied because they had no need to.)

But experiments of this type say nothing about the classical understanding of free will. I am free to the extent that I act in light of the truth. Suppose I take a math test, and write down the answer "0" to the question "What is the limit of 1/x as x goes to infinity?" I am free because the answer to the question "Why did I write down 0" is "Because it is true." It is entirely irrelevant that Benjamin Libet could detect my impulse to write the answer down a few milliseconds before I actually decided to move the pencil. And it means nothing that someone could predict with 100% accuracy what my answers will be to a simple math test before I take it. They can safely predict that I will get nearly all the answers right because I am educated enough to know the answers to simple math questions.

It is fascinating, and revealing, that all the examples Harris cites in his book to refute free will involve non-rational decision making, i.e. they do not involve the engagement of the intellect with the will that is the foundation of the classical conception of freedom. In the above cited case, subjects were asked simply to press a button based on a visual cue; in other words, a test suitable for a monkey. That the resulting decision is something that might be explained in terms of purely physical causation is nothing that would surprise Aquinas or Aristotle, for it is only when we consciously act in light of rational causes that we are free in the sense of human freedom.

Here is another example of free will in terns of non-rational causes that does not survive Harris's deconstruction:

I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea - sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have 'changed my mind' and switched  to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. (p. 8)

But as we have seen, the really relevant distinction crucial to free will isn't between conscious and unconscious causes, but between rational and non-rational causes. From the classical perspective, the decision to choose tea over coffee (unless it involved a rational deliberation about the good) was never really an instance of free will in the first place. It was on the level of a dog choosing which bowl of food from which to eat; something entirely explainable in terms of the physical chain of causes involving non-rational desires and stimuli.

Here are some of the other putative examples of free will Harris examines:

"For instance, I just drank a glass of water and feel absolutely at peace with the decision to do so. I was thirsty, and drinking water is fully congruent with my vision of who I want to be when in need of a drink.  Had I reached for a beer this early in the day, I might have felt guilty; but drinking a glass of water at any hours is blameless, and I am quite satisfied with myself. Where is the freedom in this? [Nowhere, because there is no freedom in water buffalos going to the watering hole, which this essentially is. DT] It may be true that if I had wanted to do otherwise, I would have, but I am nevertheless compelled to do what I effectively want. And I cannot determine my wants, or decide which will be effective, in advance. My mental life is simply given to me by the cosmos. Why didn't I decide to drink a glass of juice? The thought never occurred to m. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? [italics in original] Of course not. (p 19)

Harris has essentially described the life of a bear or a fish. Animals are driven by their desires, not rational consideration of the good, and so are not free. What's interesting about this example are the words in italics at the end, which present the possibility of recovering something of the classical understanding of freedom. The will cannot choose that which is not presented to it as an object; the will cannot choose that which we do not know. So the more we know, the more freedom we may have as the range of our options increases. This, again, is why knowing the truth can make you free - and why the best way to keep someone a slave is to keep him ignorant.

Again:

Thoughts like 'What should I get my daughter for her birthday? I know - I'll take her to a pet store and have her pick out some tropical fish' convey the apparent reality of choices, freely made. (p. 32)

and:

For instance, in my teens and early twenties I was a devoted student of the martial arts. I practiced incessantly and taught classes in college. Recently, I began training again, after a hiatus of more than 20 years. Both the cessation and the renewal of my interest in martial arts seem to be pure expressions of the freedom that Nahmias attributes to me. I have been under no 'unreasonable external or internal pressure.' I have done exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to stop training, and I stopped. I wanted to start again, and now I train several times a week. All this has been associated with conscious thought and acts of apparent self- control. 

However, when I look for the psychological cause of my behavior, I find it utterly mysterious. Why did I stop training 20 years ago? Well, certain things just became more important to me. But why did they become more important to me...?" (p. 43)

and the final and clearest example of an attempt at non-rational free will:

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 one is compelling me to do this. 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. 

But paying attention to my stream of consciousness reveals that this notion of freedom does not reach very deep. Where did this rabbit come from? 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 the cause of either choice. (p. 65)

This is a perfect example of the muddle into which modern thinking about free will has gotten itself. The search for a truly free act is seen as the search for an act immune to any intelligibility; somehow an act can only be free if we can't find any reason for it, rational or otherwise. This is freedom as the Uncaused Caused, i.e. a freedom only God could possibly have.

Thomas Aquinas would be baffled at this understanding of human freedom. Surely the best evidence of Harris's free will would not be the random insertion of words into the text - again, something a well-trained monkey could do - but rather the intelligible content of the book as a whole. Harris's freedom is expressed in his attempt to grasp the truth about free will and communicate it to the rest of us, something monkeys, trees and rocks are not free to do.

Free Will is a relatively short book (82 pages), but then the case against freedom in the scientistic worldview of Harris is straightforward and brief:

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them. (p 5)

This is surely true if you only recognize as causes non-rational efficient causes. But if the reality of rational causes (Aristotle's formal and final causes) is acknowledged, then we can be responsible for our actions, and our actions be free, even if they occur within a chain of rational causation. Socrates made the distinction a long time ago in the Phaedo:

I felt very much as I should feel if someone said, 'Socrates does by mind all he does'; and then, trying to tell the causes of each thing I do, if he should say first that the reason why I sit here now is, that my body consists of bones and sinews, and the bones are hard and have joints between them, and the sinews can be tightened and slackened, surrounding the bones along with flesh and the skin which holds them together; so when the bones are uplifted in their sockets, the sinews slackening and tightening make me able to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I have bent together and sit here; and if next he should give you other causes of my conversing with you, alleging as causes voices and airs and hearings and a thousand others like that, and neglecting to give the real causes. These are that since the Athenians thought it was better to condemn me, for this very reason I have thought it better to sit here, and more just to remain and submit to any sentence they may give. For, by the Dog! these bones and sinews, I think, would have been somewhere near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried by an opinion of what is best...