Free Will by Sam Harris

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Steve Mays

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. Mr. Harris is a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

A lot of my reading over the last few years has touched on the idea of free will. Real or illusory? I’ll confess that it sure feels as though I have free will. But the more I read about the subject… and think about it… the less certain I am.

The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness — rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.

Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next — a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please — your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are are in the process of making it.

I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises.

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions — and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware.

The next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.

You are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefor do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.

You can decide what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

My choices matter — and there are paths toward making wiser ones — but I cannot choose what I choose.

What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery — one that is fully determined by the prior state of the universe and the laws of nature (including the contributions of chance).

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime — by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this?

You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.

“All self-images are false”

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Steve Mays

“Intuition is direct, subjective knowledge of an aspect of the present moment — knowledge by direct contact with the experience. Knowing you plan to be awake at 9am tomorrow is conceptual knowledge, thinking-based knowledge. Recognizing that you are awake right now is intuitive knowledge.”

David Cain clearly explains things I can barely get my mind around.

Jesus, Interrupted

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Steve Mays

The full title of the book is: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them). The author, Bart D. Ehrman, began studying the Bible and its original languages at the Moody Bible Institute and is a 1978 graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois. He received his PhD and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under Bruce Metzger. He received magna cum laude for both his BA in 1978 and PhD in 1985.

I have not read the Bible and — before reading this book — knew almost nothing about it from an historical, scholarly perspective. Here are a few excerpts I highlighted:

The New Testament, consisting of twenty-seven books, was written by maybe sixteen or seventeen authors over a period of seventy years.
…
A Christianity dependent on the inerrancy of the Bible probably cannot survive the reality of the discrepancies.
…
Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Continue reading →

Words create words, reality is silent

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Steve Mays

Most of the words I utter in the course of a day just aren’t that necessary. Sure, I have to communicate with co-workers and friends, but that requires far fewer words than I was using. A lot of my recent reading has tugged me in this direction, most recently a collection of conversations titled, I Am That. An excerpt:

“The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and interdependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind. Words create words, reality is silent.”

If that’s too woo woo for you, here’s George Carlin:

“More than half of what comes out of your mouth in that client presentation is mindless, pointless, idiotic sounding, space-filling blather. Don’t you want meetings to be shorter? Aren’t you sick of fake words that mean nothing? Wouldn’t you rather be actually creating something rather than killing it with the boatload of words you throw at it before you ever show it to the client? Of course you would. So stop talking like an idiot.”

I’d love to have a transcript of every conversation I had for 24 hours. I’d highlight just the stuff that needed to be said. What percent do you think that might be?

Scott Adams: Ideas

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Steve Mays

“According to my robot perspective, ideas are the most important force. Humans merely serve as incubators, filters, and transmission facilities for the ideas. It’s a symbiotic relationship because wherever you see the healthiest environments for ideas, humans are usually thriving too.

In this context, I see myself as a collector, combiner, and broadcaster of ideas, both good and bad. I spray ideas into the universe and let the ideas fight for their own survival. With the help of their human hosts, the best ideas will evolve and reproduce, and the worst ideas will go to their resting places on the Internet.

The ideas I unleashed yesterday are already waging a guerrilla war with the status quo. The ideas are hopping from host to host, and if any are worthy, they will evolve and survive.

I see life as a process, not a goal. If my goal had been to create world-changing ideas that worked right away, I would be a complete failure. But I don’t have that goal. Instead, I have a process that involves seeding the universe with ideas and waiting for the strongest to evolve and make a difference. The worst case scenario is that my ideas cause the eventual best ideas to compete harder and evolve to even better forms.”

— From essay by Scott Adams

When experts don’t seem so “expert”

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Steve Mays

This is an excerpt from a post by Terry Heaton, one of the handful of thinkers I look to first for an understanding of what’s happening in the world. The link to his post is below, but the following paragraphs can stand on their own.

Our culture is based upon hierarchical layers of “expertise,” some of it licensed by the state. This produces order, which Henry Adams called “the dream of man.”

It also produces elites, the governing class, those who call the shots for others not so fortunate as to occupy the higher altitudes. This is the 1% against which the occupiers bring their protests, their dis-order.

We used to think that elites and hierarchical order were necessary for the well-being of all, but that idea is being challenged as knowledge — the protected source of power (and elevation) — is being spread sideways along the Great Horizontal. It’s not that we’re so much smarter than we used to be; it’s that the experts don’t seem so “expert” anymore, because the knowledge that gave them their status isn’t protected today. Anybody can access it with the touch of a finger.

This is giving institutions fits, and each one is fighting for its very life against the inevitable flattening that’s taking place. Medicine wants no part of smart and informed patients and neither does the insurance industry. The legal world scoffs at the notion that they’re in it for themselves as they occupy legislatures and create the laws that work on their behalf. Higher education increasingly touts the campus experience over what’s being learned, because they all know that the Web has unlimited teaching capacity. Government needs its silos to sustain its bureaucracy, but the Great Horizontal cuts across them all.

I added the emphasis in graf 3. For me, this is The Big Idea of the early 21st century. The high-speed smart phone in my pocket means you don’t necessarily know more than I do, so why the fuck should you be in charge?

What an exciting time to be alive. And sure to get exciting-er.

Scott Adams: You are what you learn

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Steve Mays

“It’s easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.”

The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self by Julien Baggini

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Steve Mays

Excerpts from The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self by Julien Baggini

We all tend to think there’s a connection between the four-year-old child on our first day of school and us now. What makes us the same is we believe we’re the same. Sense of self over time is therefore the story that we tell ourselves that keeps us together. pg 39

The Ego Trick – The remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singlular thing underlying it. pg 123

There is an Ego Trick, but it is not that the self doesn’t exist, only that it is not what we generally assume it to be. pg 151

Consciousness of self emerges from a network of thousands or millions of conscious moments. pg 40

We are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner biographies coherent. pg 40

The self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction. pg 41

We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world. pg 49

“I have a belief that dementia actually makes you more like yourself, so rather than rob you of your self, it robs you of all the exterior things that you pile on through life, all the baggage that you carry and the layers. What you’re left with at the end of the day with dementia is the core person, the soul, or whatever term you want to put on it. We’ve described it as an onion. If you peel an onion, from the brown skin outwards, you’ve got lots and lots of layers. When you get right to the centre of the onion you get to a little pearl in the middle and you can’t peel any more off it. It seems to me that is the real essense of the person.” – pg 54

We are nothing but our parts, but we are more than just our parts. pg 69

The self is not a single thing, it is simply what the brain and body system does. pg 83

18th century philosopher David Hume: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure, colour or sound, etc. I never catch myself, distinct from some such perception.”

(Baggini) Our minds are just one perception or thought after another, one piled on another. You, the person, is not separate from these thoughts, the thing having them. Rather you just are the collection of these thoughts.

(Hume again) “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” pg 119

“non-reductive physicalism” — The self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does. In other words, we are made up of nothing more than physical stuff, but to describe our true nature, you need more than just a physical vocabulary. You cannot full describe what it is to be a person in the language of biology; but that does not mean a person has non-biological parts. pg 120-121

“The Buddha’s idea of self therefore is something we create. Your identity, your sense of being a person is formed through your actions, and that is only possible becasue there is not a fixed self. There is no unchanging essence or substance to which those attributes are then attached at all.” — Stephen Batchelor pg 148

“The existence of the self as an independent, eternal and atemporal unifying principle is an illusion.” — Thupten Jinpa pg 148

The self is not an illusion. What is illusory is an idea of self which sees it as an unchanging, immortal essence. pg 148

The self is an illusion, but not just an illusion. But still, I would prefer to do away with talk of illusion altogether. Talk of illusion suggests there is a way of perceiving onself free from that illusion. But there isn’t. pg 150

The solidity of self is an illusion; the self itself is not. pg 152

“We are responsible for our actions not because they are our products but because they are us, because we are what we do.” — Christine Korsgaard pg 168

The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self

God as software engineer

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Steve Mays

“When we make these virtual worlds in the future —worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options— it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations. So I would begin there. For some technological people, that makes the faith a little more understandable.”

— From a piece titled “Geek Theologian” Kevin Kelly talks with Christianity Today’s Katelyn Beaty.

Difficult to noodle on such things and not recall the scene with The Architect in the later Matrix films.

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“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” —Michel de Montaigne

Category Archives: Philosophy