Sunday, July 15, 2012

Sam Harris and the Free-Willin' Blues

            Sam Harris, if you’re not familiar with him, is a brilliant orator and writer who goes after the “big stuff”.  Stuff like God, morality, free will, etc.  As an atheist he’s generally considered a contemporary of Hitchens and Dawkins, but his lack of virulence in this regard sets him at least some distance apart.  His arguments nearly always sink the moneyball, but his recent attempt relieve us of the “illusion” of free will rattled out, and I’d like to waste your time and mine by blogging about it.
            I’ll state his position as concisely and clearly as I can.  This, in fact, isn’t difficult to do, because it’s based on a very simple notion of determinism.  The current state of the universe was determined by the previous state of the universe and will in turn determine the next state of the universe.  Our minds (or souls, selfs, however you take it) are not free from this process.  We only think that we are free from it, and that very thought is a product of the process which renders it false.  All of our opinions, ideas, tastes – in a word, all of our brain states – come into existence via experiences in the world, and memories of those experiences, and as we are not masters of the world we cannot claim mastery over ourselves.  We are vastly more complex than a rock, but our complexity doesn’t mysteriously make us immune to the environment over time.  Genetics, trauma, childhood memories – these things all construct a very rigid and confined space through which consciousness is forced to travel.  In a talk he gave at [????] (link below), Harris emphasized this point by asking the audience to think of a city.  This, he says, is an act that we would consider to be quintessentially free; if in choosing to think of any city for any reason we are not free, then we never are.  So think of a city, he says, and now consider all the cities you don’t know, and now consider all the cities you do know but which didn’t occur to you to think of.  As it’s impossible to have chosen any of those cities, your “freedom” to choose “any” city is already significantly restricted, and it’s not hard to imagine that a few other restrictions inevitably reduced you to a “choice”.
            As this is by no means a new idea, there are several well established objections to this line of thought, and rebuttals to those objections and so forth.  In this space it is sufficient to say that Harris fields them all with his usual poise, save one.  This would be roundly impressive if it wasn’t the most obvious and important, and he didn’t simply shrug it off as a nonstarter.
            The biggest problem that determinism like this faces is the relationship between the brain state and consciousness.  You can think of this relationship in whatever terms you want, i.e. the body/soul, the brain/mind, the physical/metaphysical – the referent is the same.  We are talking about the distance between thinking and thinking about thinking.  It’s an enormous distance.  Computers think, ants think – you could, after a bit of stretching, imagine that any object in existence that depends on the interaction of atoms and molecules is thinking to a certain extent – but they are not thinking about thinking.  That is the realm of consciousness, and it is a mysterious one to religion and philosophy and science alike. 
            Sartre is useful here, when he says that consciousness is what it is not.  This sounds cryptic not quite helpful, but the idea it espouses is perfectly sensible.  Think of existence as full throttle raging positivity.  Of it we can say  it is and nothing more.  It’s a fire that burns without thought or direction; it simply is, and it is itself through and through and it burns.  Now think of all the stuff that makes up the sun and the earth and the mountains and you, and realize that this stuff is nothing more or less than that fire.  The raging, replete positivity that put stars in the sky put cities on Earth.  It is and we are and there is nothing more to say about it or us.  This picture, though its texture is different, is similar to if not the same as the one that Harris paints.  But what Sartre says next is what renders Harris impotent – that in this picture we lose consciousness itself.  If we are no more than slices of this raging positivity, and our brains are glorified rocks, then we cannot be conscious of it.  We are full – there is no space for thought to occupy.  If we are fully immersed in the flame, if we are the flame through and through, then we cannot know that we are the flame.  We can only be the flame. 
(This falls in line with a widely held view in physics called the Uncertainty Principle.  The Uncertainty Principle states that the act of measuring the universe changes the universe; and therefore, by virtue of being a part of the universe, we can never have complete knowledge of it.)
Here is where Harris and other determinists falter, because even they will not dispense with cogito ergo sum.  It at least remains impossible to doubt the act of doubting.  And right where their position starts to crumble is where Sartre’s begin to shine.  Consciousness is what it is not.  If existence is full throttle positivity, mind is the negative.  It is the primal “not gate”.  In order to be conscious of something, it is required that you not be that thing.  To be aware of these words, you first have to be separated from them; if there is no separation, there is no possibility of awareness.  And the same is true of the self.  To be conscious of the self, or to think about thinking, you must stand some distance away from it.  This may sound strange, but a simple analogy can help to visualize it.  Just think of your favorite painting, and then wonder if it would still be your favorite if your only experience of it had been pressing your eyeballs into the canvas.  Here’s the crux: the closer you are to the painting, the further you are from seeing it, just as the closer you are to your self, the further you are from being conscious of it.
And it’s that simple act of negation that I believe stops determinism in its tracks.  Consciousness can’t be reduced to a series of brain states because that reduction would obliterate consciousness.  And for a determinist to then say that doesn’t matter, that a particular consciousness is then just an effect caused by a particular brain state, is to miss the point entirely.  The separation has occurred.  Consciousness is not bound by the parameters of the instrument that created it.  It may freely reflect upon determined states of the brain.  A final picture will illustrate this quite plainly.  When we talk about consciousness and free will we tend to think of ourselves in a wide open space where all directions and distances are possible.  The determinist correctly denies this and begins erecting walls, walls that prohibit this path because of genetics, this path because of economics, etc.  They successfully and legitimately erect so many walls that the wide open plain becomes a rigid labyrinth, and they are fooled by it.  Their focus is wrongly placed on the obstructions rather than the myriad paths within them.  Causality has indeed reduced freedom from the infinite to the few, but we are nonetheless quite free to choose among the few.  In other words, our brain state is a labyrinthine construction that may very well be predetermined, but our consciousness allows us to navigate that labyrinth however we choose.  And this is not determinism with an asterisk, as these fews stack exponentially to become their own virtual infinity.
I don’t mean to belabor the point, as it’s been expounded by a whole lot of people who are a whole lot more knowledgeable than me, but I’ve never heard or read anything that even threatens to challenge it.  And when I saw that Harris was taking this position I thought, Ah! Here comes something.  No such luck.  He didn’t even acknowledge the objection.
And strangely, when he tries to salvage morality in the world without free will, he comes to all the conclusions I come to when I keep free will and ditch morality.  Makes me think the whole enterprise of philosophy might be a good old semantic gaff. 
meh