Sam Harris and the "free will delusion"

Liberals usually understand that every person represents a confluence of forces that he did not will into being

Sammy fell into the deep dark well of scientism and is stuck there.

Another one dimensional mental speculator .......

There are several other angles that are particularly amazing to consider.

Truth has variations.

Excuse or not, Dostoyevsky sure was right when he noted we all have criminal minds. We just haven't evolved far enough to reconcile the unconscious and conscious portions of the brain.

I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good or of every evil which may befall me; therefore I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.

And "everything" is the result of "cause and effect."

A liberated soul is free from all Karma and never makes a mistake although a conditioned soul will "see" it as a mistake due to projecting it's own delusion onto the world outside of itself.

A liberated soul is free from all Karma and never makes a mistake although a conditioned soul will "see" it as a mistake due to projecting it's own delusion onto the world outside of itself.

smart money seems to be on determinism

free will and determinism...

or, free will is a kind of magic

Herr Braun's answer confirms he believes Jesus and Buddha obtained enlightenment.

I think people would be shocked if they clearly understood how determined they really are, and how difficult it is to get a little separation from our own patterns. I have found it to be very difficult.

The real work is in the secondary function of focusing on this aspect or that aspect of the geyser till up bubbles what we were looking for or what we feel is appropriate to the story I am telling.

we have to make choices that exercise "free will"

Free will adherents at first glance seem to have no way to prove their position

this is not proof that would stand up in a court of law.

However, show me the physicalist who would ever say that, if ALL the data was in, after the fact, we could still not reverse-engineer an effect or behavior to a link in the causal chain that, despite not being known beforehand, could after-the-fact be shown to determine every outcome with just as much causal determination as the second hand on a clock.

To say that we are not largely determined by our genetic makeup, personal histories, and real-time situations is just silly and wildly inaccurate. Likewise to say every hold that I ever grabbed was the inevitable outcome of the past, with a little randomness thrown in for flavah, is equally absurd no matter if you can get the math to say so.

I think people would be shocked if they clearly understood how determined they really are, and if they realized how difficult it is to separate from our patterns.

have been measured in detail, and match what would be expected if small thermal variations, generated by quantum fluctuations of matter in a very tiny space, had expanded to the size of the observable universe we see today.

he should realize that it is not my fault that I wrote this post.

I have not read his books on religion, but he appears to be after freedom from brain process entrapment and freedom from Religion, and that can't be done without free will, can it?

The Christmas issue of the New Statesman, guest-edited by Richard Dawkins, includes an essay by the neuroscientist and atheist author Sam Harris on the illusion of free will. Here, for Staggers readers, is a sneak preview.

Even though we can find no room for it in the causal order...

Evidence of a diseased mind? Or poor fund of knowledge?

However, show me the physicalist who would ever say that, if ALL the data was in, after the fact, we could still not reverse-engineer an effect or behavior to a link in the causal chain that, despite not being known beforehand, could after-the-fact be shown to determine every outcome with just as much causal determination as the second hand on a clock.

Or, are we far more than we can imagine we are? We can't imagine it because we didn't really create it? THAT is the causal chain that we cannot follow as of yet.

F*#k off. -McKal's Navy

BUT, can't we stear our own causal determinist path, the human path

He found that the unconscious mind made decisions up to 7 seconds before the conscious mind was aware of them.

And we are capable of directing the unconscious mind, it is there as a tool for us.

Determinism is often erroneously equated with fatalism, which is the true opposite of freewill. Under fatalism the will is ineffectual, no matter how much it struggles. Under determinism there is no limit to how effectual the will can be. Causality determines the nature of will, but does not prevent any action which is not in violation of physical law. A will is not unfree by virtue of the causal roots of its origin and existence (heredity and environment). Causality creates a will, but does not subject the will to ongoing compulsion.

However, given a new challenge, one that is not a part of our history, our response is not deterministic. Many different responses are possible and probably all of them are enacted. To the extent that these challenges persist long enough to effect survivability, those behaviors that result in successful reproductions will in time out compete those that do not...

...this is still a statistical statement. But one can see that as we reduce the population to one, and remove the evolutionary concept of success, that our individual behavior is deterministic in common situations, and that individually we may be confronted with entirely new challenges that are not something which are evolutionary determined behaviors where determined to confront.

Our response to these challenges are probabilistic.

If you want to call this "free will" that is probably apt, it might not completely capture what is actually going on.

But that all is a speculation...

The Transcedentalists had no ladder

"Did I really become a crow? I mean would anyone seeing me have thought I was an ordinary crow?"

"No. You can't think that way when dealing with the power of the allies. Such questions make no sense, and yet to become a crow is the simplest of all matters. It is almost like frolicking; it has little usefulness. As I have already told you, the smoke is not for those who seek power. It is only for those who crave to see. I learned to become a crow because these birds are the most effective of all. No other birds bother them, except perhaps larger, hungry eagles, but crows fly in groups and can defend themselves. Men don't bother crows either, and that is an important point. Any man can distinguish a large eagle, especially an unusual eagle, or any other large, unusual bird, but who cares about a crow? A crow is safe. It is ideal in size and nature. It can go safely into any place without attracting attention. On the other hand, it is possible to become a lion or a bear, but that is rather dangerous. Such a creature is too large; it takes too much energy to become one. One can also become a cricket, or a lizard, or even an ant, but that is even more dangerous, because large animals prey on small creatures."

The Transcedentalists had no ladder

All of our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge. In the 1980s the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated that activity in the brain's motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Another lab recently used functional magnetic resonance imaging data to show that some "conscious" decisions can be predicted up to ten seconds before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one's thoughts and actions.

"Werner is by several yardsticks the most solid person posting here, though you might need to know him beyond this thread to realize that."

Nice edit.

"The technique may be defined as turning the attention inwards towards the subtler levels of thoughts until the mind transcends the experience of the subtlest state of the thought and arrives at the source of the thought. This expands the conscious mind and at the same time brings it in contact with the creative intelligence that gives rise to every thought."

"A thought-impulse starts from the silent creative centre within, as a bubble starts from the bottom of the sea. As it rises, it becomes larger; arriving at the conscious level of the mind, it becomes large enough to be appreciated as a thought, and from there it develops into speech and action."

"Turning the attention inwards takes the mind from the experience of a thought at the conscious level . . . to the finer states of the thought, until the mind arrives at the source of thought. . . . This inward march of the mind results in the expansion of the conscious mind."

"A thought-impulse starts from the silent creative centre within, as a bubble starts from the bottom of the sea.

seems to me that consciousness can manifest itself in humans only.

To me, the whole neurological response delay would be entirely keeping with this view.

Harris says the idea of free will is incoherent and "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality". Humans are not free and no sense can be given to the concept that we might be.[68] According to Harris, science "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet."[69] People's thoughts and intentions, Harris says, "emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control." Every choice we make is made as a result of preceding causes. These choices we make are determined by those causes, and are therefore not really choices at all. Harris also draws a distinction between conscious and unconscious reactions to the world. Even without free will, consciousness has an important role to play in the choices we make. Harris argues that this realization about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

Commenting on Harris's book Free Will, Daniel Dennett disagrees with Harris' position on compatibilism, and asks if Harris is directing his arguments against an unreasonably absolute or "perfect freedom" version of compatibilism, which Dennett would describe as an incoherent, straw man version

You can't reproduce either.

Learning from Wikipedia rather than primary sources reveals a lack of education and just plain laziness.