08.12.11
Sam Harris, the worst kind of guru/the free will question
Harris is quite the guru and has a new video: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/ask-sam-harris-anything-2/
also here:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/ask-sam-take-two/
As gurus go Harris is close to being the worst kind, beware. This man is smart/stupid: the new type created to promote scientism. They are polished, slick, and, well, suspected of trading veracity for celebrity, but in any case, mediocre minds. Nota bene.
The question of free will is a fixation with Harris: he has no intelligent reason for such dogmatism, not even scientific consistency, given the history of this subject.
I think a dialectical approach should be adopted here. Negate, and affirm free will.
Note: it is doubtful if Harris has even read the literature on this issue, instead taking the oversimplification of reductionist science as a answer to everything. Smart people like Harris should be helping people through a Kantian approach. Instead we get his second-rate (uneducated) take on a complex subject. If you want a large audience of idiots, this is the way to go: reductionism. Like Darwinism, designed for instand comprehension.
The religions have their faults, but they have always addressed the issue of free will and supported it. We can now see the reason why that is important. The destruction of beliefs in free will would harm society greatly, so we have to wonder what these fellows are about???
The question of free will is very hard, very simple: we should make an operationally assumption in the existence of free will, and challenge the dogmas of physics.
We can always debate the question, but be wary of these ‘scientists’: they won’t allow debate. They will tryto control public opinion, as with Darwinism, and after that dissent is an uphill struggle for intellectuals who will shut up to conform, and keep their jobs. I doubt that could happen with the free will question, but it might.
The best approach is the Kantian one, or variants. We should consider that ‘free will’ has a noumenal and phenomenal aspect, and that the action of free will stands beyond space and time, perhaps (with a temporal component). Does that infuriate scientists? Good, laugh at them, but be critical of such thinking yourself, and keep working on its.
Destroying belief in free will is also an attack on your dignity, freedom, autonomy, and makes you what scientists want: a controllable item.
Free will is not a completely coherent question: if it was, it would be mechanizable, and no longer free will.
The indirect proof of its reality lies in what happens when we negate it.
The idea of ‘faith’ has been so wrecked by Xtians that we can no longer used it. Use the idea of ‘operational assumption’ instead. We cannot easily do without such an assumption, however we take it.
But here’s the kicker: if we could prove anything about free will, reductionist science would take control of it and unwittingly destroy it, so to speak. The point: free will as a question is undecidable, we need a quite of faith in it to proceed.
Don’t be seduced by confused thinkers like Harris, subtlety is beyond their capacity. He is totally bound by his success: he cannot deviate from that without losing his celebrity. And he cannot deviate from his scientism because he knows what would happen if he did.
The other issues in this video can be discussed later, but don’t amount to much.
Note that Harris wishes to destroy buddhism, negate the reality of enlightenment, and deny the legacy of knowldege about rebirth. By any standard that should describe a kook.
That should be a reminder that he is simply off the wall.
The question of free will has two aspects, physics, and history. The causal assumptions of physics tend toward negation, history toward affirmation. The question of history makes no sense without assuming free agency. Try reading a history book in your mind’s eye that consider the whole of history to be a mechanical event.
The Gurdjieff Con » The worst kind of guru said,
August 12, 2011 at 1:01 pm
[...] http://darwiniana.com/2011/08/12/sam-harris-the-worst-kind-of-guru/ [...]
Ron Krumpos said,
August 13, 2011 at 12:26 pm
“Free will” is really quite limited, despite belief that we control ourselves and our lives. We think we have endless choices…until we try to make them. Each decision must not only be based on what we “want to do,” but also on our own capabilities and what is expected of us. Nature and society imprison us, whether we like it or not. The key to release is mystical realization. All in One and One in All, the divine unity, opens the gate between heaven and Earth…between a universal consciousness and most people’s constrained awareness.
nemo said,
August 15, 2011 at 6:19 am
This is true enough, but the issue is to see that whether we use our free will or not, the potential there for it.
Luke Rondinaro said,
August 17, 2011 at 10:55 am
Hi John – I will say one thing about the Sam Harris/Free Will/science issue. The cult of scientism creates one set of problems on the free will discussion. But problematic philosophy easily creates the other half. Just witness new age confusions over “consciousness” in history and mistaken religious views vis-a-vis free will as the distinct power of spiritual agencies in a supernatural sense (i.e., Christian theism).
I recently had the opportunity of watching on Youtube the uploads of various atheists debating the Christian apologist William Lane Craig, including Harris. The trouble? Their points weren’t especially earthshaking or special for the most part. They said what they usually say, with some like Louise Antony and Austin Dacey making better points. However, for Craig – whose ideas I must say are frankly abysmal – to have gone as far as he has, on what I see to be grade school theism and post-graduate level rhetoric without Harris or Hitchens able to actually counter him, that doesn’t bode well either of atheist thought today or for our present luminaries in the philosophy of science. …
Why are these people falling so easily to the intellectual stray shooting of WLC?
I think I know why. It comes down in large part to these questions of causal metaphysics in nature and history. Scientists know epistemologically and empiriologically, that “FREE WILL” (traditionally understood and intuitively-grasped as an object of so-called common sense) doesn’t make sense with what we’ve learned about the cosmos and through classical philosophy. But the need for “Free Will” [so-defined as a miraculous spiritual capacity in humans to make change in their world as if by magic] is so strong that in spite of its obvious logical difficulties and flaws as an idea, people still cling to it as they would the notion that a ghost rests in their heads directing their movements as individuals.
So how are right thinking scientists/secularists supposed to get around that one without coming up short and looking like they’ve been intellectually refuted on these issues, when in fact they’re just plain flabbergasted by these religious mythologies? And, who’s really the worse-off for positing the volitional capacity in this way? … I think that the religious and the metaphysicians are!
The “Will” is “intellectual appetite”, the capacity of the human psyche to direct its ends to its goals in life. Yet, in this way, is it more authentically “causal” or is it “responsive” … ? Is it behaving as a “true, ontological cause” or is it “reacting” in fact to other “causes”? That the question.
Answering “yes” to that question up-ends philosophy to magical thinking in the style of Plato’s “Third Man” … So how far in the series do we want to be going with this? … Forever, or until we get tired of positing “Forms” of “Forms” upon “Forms”? Better just to note the infinite regression in mathematical terms and leave it at that.
“Free Will” isn’t a deus-ex-machina. It has parameters, it has limits. It may in fact exist, and I’d grant it that on conditional terms. But, it’s not an open-ended CAUSE as much as is a freely-chosen RESPONSE within human beings to the causal determinants of the natural world. It has no power of “ACTUALIZATION” on and of its own accord, merely the “POTENCY” to act.
Saying that it “has” this power negates the very “causality” that the argument to “Free Will” seeks to grasp. “Causal Determination” is impossible in a world where “Free Will” can merely overturn it on a metaphysical whim.
Free Will requires re-defining; not re-assertion on super-natural terms or spiritualistic ones. We’ve had enough of that already. It doesn’t work. Even Scholastic Theology, from the very beginning, in Catholic thought acknowledged that one. Time to move on already; Free Will as a miraculous, mystical power is passe … But as a function of “mind” and “nature”, it has its definite merits.
Nuff said.
Darwiniana » Comment on ‘free will’ question said,
August 17, 2011 at 11:43 am
[...] http://darwiniana.com/2011/08/12/sam-harris-the-worst-kind-of-guru/comment-page-1/#comment-358766 Interesting, but, to me, the shoe is on the other foot. Trying to explain free will in terms of current science fails, so the science is wrong. [...]
Brad said,
August 18, 2011 at 7:56 am
I just have to say that I am so happy to have stumbled upon this site – there are some like minds here. I am so very tired of this new breed of science writer… they get rid of traditional religion only to replace it with another – scientism. I am glad that more people (though still in the minority) are starting to recognize this. For me, science has its hands tied with free-will: it is trying to use its epistemological method of empirical reductionism in a traditional way where views humans as objects. But the problem of free-will and consciousness suggests that we are both objects and subjects. This is where we must begin to rely on metaphysics. But the faith in scientism would see no need for it and the laypersons buying these popular science books would have a difficult time ever seeing a problem with that.