Book Review: Free Will by Sam Harris
Well known atheist and New York Times bestselling author Sam Harris has authored a new book entitled Free Will
Do we live in a deterministic universe? Is each future state of the universe determined absolutely by a prior state? Or is the opposite true? Can a certain state of the universe come into existence without absolute dependence on the constitution of the prior state? The key word is absolute. If, for example, in any new state of the universe, a random element is introduced, then that state is not absolutely dependent on the prior state. This view of the universe is labeled as indeterminism.
The problem with the notion of free will, in the eyes of many people, including Mr. Harris, is that it is apparently incompatible with either form of universe. Mr. Harris lays out the reasons for this very clearly. This understanding of free will is labeled as incompatibilism.
A close analysis however proves that free will is compatible with both forms of universe. In the final analysis, one requires free will, and its implied vocabularies of will, choice and decision. if one is to choose to make an argument that free will is an illusion. If 'will' exists, if the individual is to be capable of doing anything at all, then without question, as will be shown below, it is free indeed.
First, free will must be defined and as Mr. Harris points out, that definition can vary and change over time from person to person.
NYU Professor of Philosophy Ned Block
Tufts University Professor of Philosophy Daniel Dennett further refines a compatibilist view.
University of Reading Professor of Philosophy Galen Strawson’s argument against free will
So, all of these philosophers have accepted the theists proposition, that free will implies responsibility. However, The concept of free will has nothing whatsoever to do with responsibility. This should be repeated. Free will, in and of itself, does not imply that one is responsible for ones actions. Why then do we tend to feel that the two go hand in hand?
This can be because of humanity’s psychological legacy. It is a constraint of fear, injected into our subconscious when we were children, from notions arising out of ancient ideas of a punishing God to whom we are all ultimately responsible, a God who creates devils and hell for unbelievers. This condition can be difficult to fully eradicate, even for the committed atheist. It is a form of cosmocaecia, blindness to the universe. In the case of the fundamentalist, and by social or cultural inheritance, other theists and atheists, the specific form is sociofgraphofocosmomencacia
However, there is a psychological technique one can use to battle against these false notions of God: When deciding to spend some time to think about God, close your books and, using the feminine pronouns, define God as the thinker who created the conditions under which autonomous thinkers of free will, such as us, could begin to exist. Give her a different name. I call her Thea but you are free to give her any name you like. This is the key to the battle against sociofgraphofocosmomencacia, to think of our creator as female. This is not to say that she is female, none of us know the truth of this or even whether she exists at all. We only know that if she does exist she can be whatever she wishes to be whenever, and for whomever, she wish to be, even if for only for the love of you yourself.
You will find that if you do this for an hour or two, or a day or a week or a season, all of your preconceived notions simply disappear. The effects of sociofgraphofocosmomencacia dissolve to dust, blown away with the lightest of fortunate winds. You are now free to observe the universe in a new light, to see what you can learn about God. And every one of us can now see the decisions of God. And from these decisions we all can see that there has never existed the Abrahamic version of a punishing God, nor any similar God who creates hell, or commands worship, or subjects disbelievers to floods and earthquakes or to become victims of commanded wars. One becomes free from the psychological fears and illusions and can begin to see clearly the true nature of God, if God does indeed exist.
Some people have great difficulty with this, to consider God as female. It seems to be disrespectful to ones culture or family, and dishonorable to the work carried out by one's ancient ancestors. But if they were wrong, if they have always been wrong, how can you know this if you do not question the things that they said and wrote? And you cannot gain a state of mind to rationally evaluate what has been written unless you can eradicate as many psychological fears and illusions as possible. Yes, it can require courage but this is your own private contemplation, you are not required to publish your private conclusions to your family, culture, or society.
Some of you reading this are truly trapped. You are trapped within a culture that will punish you for drawing conclusions from the decisions of God that we all can see. You might find that you wish to teach your new knowledge to your children but you are constrained by a culture that commands unquestioning respect and blind belief in local interpretations of ancient writings. The leadership of your local culture might be filled with irrational people who will not hesitate to punish your children if they show disrespect for one interpretation of scripture or another. You can see clearly now that such people are ill. They are suffering from a psychological condition and, to the great sadness of many, they are heavily armed. There is no simple cure for this, but there is a cure. It might require a passage of many generations to fully eradicate. So, keep your new found truths to yourself for now, and wait. The people of the free world are evolving, they are beginning to understand that the inheritance of freedom arrives with a certain responsibility and they are working on a plan to free you from this captivity. You might have to be patient for your entire life, it might be only your children that start to see the bearing of the fruit.
And to the people of the world who live in the free states it is asked: Is the freedom you inherited to be locked up in a safe forever or instead extended forever to all of the children of man? What then is the plan?
And to you, all of you, who are leaders within your cultures, you who are well armed, who upon reading these words now understand that you have been made ill by enforced beliefs, it is recognized that it is not so easy for you to change your behavior. You exist in a brotherhood of men who are ill, who will strike you down if you begin to speak of this. Yes, even if you are the local leader of your brotherhood, you dare not speak a word. How can you possibly begin, as a people, to cure yourselves? It is not as easy as overthrowing a dictator, you have to overthrow yourselves somehow. You will have to use the highest form of your intellect, but most of all, you will have to wish for, more than anything else, the emancipation of your people, because you can see that they are hopelessly trapped by the very thing that traps you yourselves. And that thing is not a living thing, it is thing that is not really there at all. It is a thing that dissolves to nothing every time you pause to think of her as female because you find yourself loving her as dearly as she loves you. But you cannot speak of it, it is almost maddening, is it not? Do you wonder why she does not lend a hand to help you out? I think sometimes we all cry the same tears at thoughts like this until we look astonished to see once again she has delivered a newborn child to man and we understand at once that we can each become repositories of trust.
We are absolute beginners, evolving to understand, clearing a path through a jungle of darkness, a single spark of light in the distance ahead, loving the generations of man. Keep your eyes on that spark of light, it widens to a door.
Does Thea exist? In this world, the world we can see that she created, (if she does exist) we can see that she did not wish to impose herself into our world. She wants us to live as we see it is best to live, to arrive at good behavior through our own ideas.. We can see that she does not discourage atheism. We can believe in her existence if we wish, and we can see that if she does exist we are overwhelming loved by her and we can create our own, personal, internal moral code to live by to return our own, personal love to her. Or we can be quite content as atheists and create our own rationale for getting along with each other. She leaves it up to us; she does not command belief or worship. We can see this with our own eyes, without Bibles or Torahs or Qurans and or any opinion of man, not matter how ancient or contemporary or formerly respected out of fear or sense of honor or duty.
Having dissolved this legacy of fear, let us now define free will with clarity. First we must discard another common but erroneous definition: Free will is the power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will. In this definition, the effects of sociofgraphofocosmomencacia have once again crept in to man’s court of reason and committed perjury.
All choices are constrained by the physical laws of the universe. For example, if one is starving and finds two bushes of berries, one red and the other blue, he must make a decision as to which one of them, if any, is safe to eat. He must eat, and his choices are restricted, but he is free to make a choice. This is absolute freedom in every sense of the word. He is not compelled by prior circumstances to choose red over blue or vice versa. He can flip a coin, or perhaps he can feed some of the berries to animals to observe their effect.
The ‘free’ in free will refers not to the quantity or quality of choices. It refers to the individual’s capacities to make a choice and to carry it out. If, in the example above, only red berries were found, the choice remained to eat no berries at all and to press on instead for more reliable food. Yes, death is the risk, but death is the risk of life itself.
To repeat, there is no responsibility attached to the notion of free will. The thinker, however, can, if he so wishes, create a moral code that will provide a framework over his decision making processes as they pertain to his treatment of his fellow man and if he does, then he is responsible for his decisions within his own court of reason. He can judge himself, he can use reason to argue that his decisions were correct or not, he can learn from his mistakes and he can carry on. He can share his reasons with his fellow man and reach agreements and create free societies. But the concept of free will itself is unrelated to such a decision except that such a decision can be made and carried out. And history is replete with examples of beautiful and courageous men and women who waivered not from their moral code even at the point of death.
Definition of Free Will
Free will is the collection of the following four capacities of man:- The capacity to observe the present: options exist out of which one or more can be chosen.
- The capacity to observe the past: to use ones memory in the evaluation of the current options.
- The capacity to conceive of the future: to predict the probable net effect on future states of the different choices that might be made.
- The capacity to carry out a selected choice.
The net effect of the possession of free will, in a deterministic or indeterministic universe, is to act in conjunction with the physical laws of the universe to predict and cause the existence of a selected future state. The will of man becomes a physical law of the universe. In a non created universe, the physical laws of the universe have dictated that new physical laws will come into existence and we see them arise with each newborn child. In a created universe we see the same thing and more, for we see our children as the continuous gifts of a loving creator who entrusts with their care. Are they not all newborn kings and queens, entitled to freedom of thought and peace on earth?
The autonomous thinkers of free will, alive today on our planet, can share our reasons and create the rationale and an enactment that will cause to exist a selected future state of word freedom and peace if we can discard all irrational notions of God and embrace fully our free will and our capacities of reason to make it happen.
You are a physical law of the universe, created or evolved, you can move the ancient mountains, in faith or in resolve.
