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
