Image from skeptically.org

In my ongoing efforts to convince others that free will is an illusion, I have found an argument vector that I’ve not yet encountered:

If you believe in cause and effect, i.e. that all outcomes are the result of previous conditions, and you accept that all causes existed before you were born, then it impossible to believe that any choice you can make is truly free.

Think about that. How could one make a free choice in a cause and effect world if every factor that determined the outcome of your choice existed before you were born? To believe that is to believe in magic.

Let’s try it in deductive form:

1. The universe is governed by cause and effect.
2. The physical components of all possible causes existed before you were born.
3. Any outcome must be the result of those causes and those causes alone.
4. Therefore the proposition of human authorship of outcomes must be false.

I welcome challenges to the logic and/or help with formalizing it.

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This is the single best presentation of Harris’ argument that I’ve ever seen him make. He finally addresses common counterarguments, such as:

Well, I can decide to do x right now—and then I can change my mind–or even change my mind again! This proves I have free will.

This is the first time I’ve seen Harris address this line of argument directly. He also goes into the significant and positive repercussions of seeing the world this way.

I honestly see this video as one of the most important things one can do with an hour. We’re talking about nothing less than realizing that 99% of the world is fundamentally confused about the nature of reality.

Accepting the narrative put forward by Harris here is akin to waking from a sleep for the first time. This applies to how we see ourselves as people, how we are connected to others, and why we should be build a society that reflects this perspective.

Please. Watch this in its entirety. It might, without hyperbole, literally change your life.

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Sam Harris’s book on free will came out today and I read it during dinner (it’s a short read). Here’s what I had to say about the book back in December when he announced it:

I basically anticipate an extremely high-quality summary of my numerous articles, posts, and debate interactions on this topic.

Without arrogance or humility I can only say that I called it exactly as it fell: http://danielmiessler.com/blog/sam-harris-free-will-book-coming-in-february

That aside, I’ve been having a long-running email debate on the topic with two friends, and I found it to have a number of areas where it advanced the discussion. For example, I found the fact that he precisely identified and referenced the nature of his disagreement with Dennett (the current compatibilist flag-bearer) to be highly significant. I also thought that he had a few n-liners that were particularly strong, such as:

Why didn’t I decide to drink a glass of juice (rather than water). The thought never occurred to me. Am I free to do that which does not occur to me to do? Of course not. And there is no way I can influence my desires–for what tools of influence would I use? Other desires? To say that I would have done otherwise had I wanted to is simply to say that I would have been in a different universe had I lived in a different universe.

Brilliant.

Interestingly, there is also a remote chance that my influence on Harris actually affected the text, as the link I sent him (which he loved and tweeted out) was the two-lever argument you guys are so tired of familiar with. Anyway, something strikingly similar/familiar made it into his text:

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).

Sound familiar? It’s like I wrote it! — down to the addition of chance as one of the laws, which appeared in the version of the text I sent him.

I obviously don’t mean to say that he stole it; creators often confuse sources while contemplating a topic, and the argument is quite similar to others before it, but I do find it interesting that this is the same exact argument that I sent to both him and Galen Strawson (who also approved of it).

Anyway, enough of my celebration and delusions of significance. I will simply say that I was not surprised at all by his arguments (or how well presented they were). I actually find them to be so strong as to be obvious. I will fully admit, however, that this conviction is reaching the point of being vulnerable to confirmation bias, so I’m trying to keep that in check.

TL;DR: Bought it. Read it. Loved it. Exactly what I expected.

A number of people recently have asked me about how my position on free will integrates with a practical society, e.g. how do you get up in the morning if you know you don’t make your own decisions?

I answered this recently in an email, and here’s the response:

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>On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 5:10 AM, JM wrote:

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He (Same Harris) also says: “Happily, we will find that we need no illusions about a person’s place in the causal order to hold him accountable for his actions, or to take actions ourselves.” So Sam Harris also disagrees with you. As far as I remember, he elaborated in this in “The Moral Landscape” (I can’t find the book, nor his blog posts about it on the internet right now). Let’s see what he says in “Free Will”. :-)

My opinion (which probably has been influenced by Sam Harris), is that we are not actually responsible for crime, for example, but it is a good idea for society to assign responsibility, because this amounts to a positive environmental influence (we will be less likely to do the crime if we feel responsible and/or there are consequences in the form of prison). So we get moral responsibility because society decides to assign it. We can call it “assigned (moral) responsibility”. We agree that it’s not actual responsibility, but it’s still a good concept for the society.

Agree or disagree?

Hi JM,

Yes, I do agree. My stance on this has always been that we should intellectually acknowledge that free will (and therefore moral responsibility) is an illusion, but that we should mostly function as if it were real.

This means making decisions as if you had true choice, and it means “holding people responsible” for their actions in most practical situations.

But it means that when it comes to designing a society’s criminal justice system, and system of taxation, and philosophy on welfare, and structure of public education, etc. — all these things are done with the knowledge that inputs create outputs, i.e. no free will exists, and that nobody “deserves” to be rich or poor.

In other words, I advocate a clear duality in our treatment of the matter. We functionally behave as if we have free will because consequentialism still yields fruit based on incentivizing good and bad behavior, but at an intellectual level we understand that this is in place for practical reasons rather than absolute.

TL;DR: Embrace the duality of behaving as if you have it while knowing you don’t. Do this because it’s the only way we as humans can function practically while remaining intellectually honest.

Before going into my qualms with Daniel Dennett’s capability/evitibility-based free will, I want to point out that most supporters of Daniel Dennett’s brand of free will don’t realize that he agrees that we don’t have my brand of free will. What brand is that you ask? The absolute kind. The kind where people are free to step outside of a deterministic world and do something other than what follows from the inputs (which they don’t control).

Dennett knows this is impossible. The image above is from a talk he did in Edinburgh where he was very clear about this. He accepts the world to be effectively deterministic (meaning we gain no freedom from quantum randomness) and he has an elegant way of illustrating it through the slide below.

Here he cleanly captures the fact that the main type of free will that people have been talking about for centuries is simply not real, and goes on to say that the one that is real–the one we experience each day–is actually not real. He even goes on to say in the lecture that, “the fake stuff is actually pretty good”, or something to that effect.

So that’s one point: that he’s agreeing with we incompatibilists on our type of free will. But that’s not the part that bothers me. What bothers me is his claim that his species of free will is useful in some way that matters, i.e. from a blame and praise standpoint. To state this another way, if he accepts that the universe is deterministic, and that all outcomes are the result of inputs and laws, then I fail to see how he makes room for moral responsibility.

In my view, his talk of evolutionary biology, competence, evitability, and future creation are all handwaving. Surely these things are true, and surely we’re more evolved in these ways than other animals, but he fails to explain how they provide an escape from physics.

These things ride on top of physics–not below. They are products of it. They are outcomes. And once he has accepted that the physics itself is determined then he must know that all actions we make are determined as well. And he does know this. In fact he embraces it — that’s why he’s a compatibilist.

How then does he salvage moral responsibility from this? Let’s assume one being is more or less “capable” to predict future, or to make a proper decision. He claims this will determine its ability to avoid things, and thus as we evolve we get better at doing so.

Great. Well done. So what?

One’s capabilities are a function of inputs that he did not control. One’s ability to predict future is precisely the same. None of the components that make up the agent were in the control of the agent. So when a decision is made using one’s “capabilities” they are simply doing what they can with with what they have.

Someone. Anyone. Please explain to me how we get moral responsibility from this. I simply cannot see how he could conjure that interpretation.

I throw myself at the feet of the Internet. Show me what I’m missing.

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There was a recent article on the New York Times regarding free will. I posted it here earlier and I just finished posting a comment in the thread. It follows below:

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The author succeeds in bringing life back to the debate, but he doesn’t make any new progress. The issue, as a few commenters have touched on, is much simpler than it appears from all this handwaving.

Quite simply, somebody explain how a choice can be free if one doesn’t control the inputs to the choice. I capture this in a semi-formal argument here: http://danielmiessler.com/arguments/free_will/two_lever_argument/

Some, like Dennett, agree that we don’t have the free will described in that argument but say it doesn’t matter because we can do things like choose menu items at a restaurant, or dodge spears in the jungle. I agree, of course, and that’s all very nice, but it shouldn’t be confused with true choice.

I attempt to clearly define the difference between the two here: http://danielmiessler.com/blog/absolute-vs-practical-free-will

For those who don’t wish to follow links within comments (understandable, but regrettable) practical free will lets us make choices from within our confines of not controlling the inputs to our decisions. We don’t control our physical makeup, and we don’t have full control of our environment — hence, in order to show that we have TRUE choice we must show that we can choose OUTSIDE of those influences.

This to me requires one of two things: either 1) a completely new way of looking at how the universe works, or 2) the supernatural. I simply reject both until I see evidence, and I am stunned this isn’t the default and obvious position for anyone considering themselves to be skeptical and scientifically literate.

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