Sam Harris rejects free will

Last updated on: June 2, 2011 at 4:07 pm by Dave Griffey

Sam Harris rejects free will 2011-06-02T16:07:00-04:00 Dave Griffey

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He can’t help himself! Heh heh, I just had to say it. Anyway, Harris takes neurology in hand and examines everything through the prism of neurology. That’s not unusual In most scholarship, folks can’t resist using their pet subject as the all explaining answer to everything. So a neurologist sees everything as being explained by neuroscience. A biologist sees it explained with biological theory. A physicist, physics. A sociologist, sociological factors. And anthropologist explains everything anthropologically. You get the point.

So Harris uses neuroscience to explain why we really don’t have free will. Basically, it’s just the same old same old that folks have wrestled with for eons, or at least centuries. One valiant reader braves the scorn to point this out:

The Scholastics knew much of life is automatic. Aquinas wrote that habits and customs could predetermine the will long before Harris came along.

Liberum arbitrium is better translated as free judgment. The will is the intellective appetite. It is impossible to desire what we do not know. The will is determined toward what is perfectly known. E.g.: that 2 2=4 is perfectly known, so the will must assent. But that “This program will help the poor” is not perfectly known, and so the will is indeterminate toward it. Some other program may work better. There is “play,” which is all “free” really means.

In short, as much as Harris may hate to admit it, once again he has taken a caricature of what people mean when they say free will, dismissed it as well he should, proceeded to explain what most people mean when they say free will (if, in fact, they say it at all), and declared it a bold, new revelation.

Of course some theological traditions scoff at the notion of free will. Most, however, have some form of understanding of free will, though usually not quite so superficial as Harris’s tale would suggest. In fact, many of the musings sound very close to what Harris is trying to say, they simply use terms that are not confined to the world of material science.

So, in the end not much here. Just trying to take what religious folks have been kicking around for centuries, removing any but the metaphysical he seems willing to accept, and then repackaging it for those who believe there is no divine reality. OK. Fine. Have at it. I often find it amusing that so much of what Harris does is merely religious talk for the non-religious. But then, what can you do with a fellow who dogmatically believes that dogmatic beliefs are a foundational problem in history, and wants to eliminate all the religions he disagrees with because he sees them as evil because of all the religious people in history who wanted to eliminate all the religions they disagreed with.

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