Review of Sam Harris’ Free Will
2012, New York: Free Press.
By Prof. Emmy van Deurzen
(Middlesex University and New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London)
Preliminary remarks
Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and philosopher of science who writes books that aim to challenge established opinion and provoke a strong response. There is no problem with that in principle, but it becomes disturbing when he overstates his case, creating a caricature of reality. Though he might claim he has played devil’s advocate and that his intention is to bring us to thought, I suspect that many of his readers will simply take his word for it and follow his mechanical materialism uncritically. It is unfortunate then that this little pamphlet lacks in factual accuracy and is philosophically naïve and misleading. Harris is simply getting it wrong.
I read the book The Moral Landscape by Harris, before I came upon Free Will and had similar problems with that book as well, but I will stick to his Free Will in this commentary, as the latter shows up the fault lines in Harris’ argumentation so well. Harris confidently extrapolates from neuroscience in a manner that is not warranted and not advisable. He also ignores most of the history of philosophy whilst setting himself up as a moral philosopher who might end the need for further speculation about the discipline of morality. Free Will sets out his views with simple strokes and with unstinting boldness and assurance. His entire argument is rooted in the mechanical view that life is limited to matter. Ironically in order to maintain his position he resorts to assertion rather than to demonstration and argumentation. This is regrettably much like the strategy of religious fundamentalism.
Let me correct any suggestion that my dislike of Harris’ work stems from its origins in neuroscience. Though I was trained as a continental philosopher in France in the seventies and completed a doctorate in continental philosophy many decades later in London, in between these times I also trained and worked as a clinical psychologist and later as a psychotherapist. After working for five years in psychiatry, my first academic job was in neuroscience, at the Science Department of Bordeaux University, where I worked under Prof. Bernard Cardo, who was the French champion of research on the reward system, particularly on the MFB or medial forebrain bundle of the hypothalamus, near the nucleus accumbens (Acb), a well known part of the neural network of gratification. In spite of my moral qualms I learnt much from placing electrodes in mice and rats’ brains with stereotaxic operations, watching these poor animals become addicted to self-stimulation at the expense of all else. I found it all rather unsavoury, especially when ideas were too easily extrapolated to human experience. I realized from the outset that big distinctions needed to be made between neuroscience experimentation and the reality of awareness and consciousness, especially where reflective thought comes onto the scene. I realized that many neuro-scientists become alienated from the evolution that human beings have been through over the past centuries in their capacity for understanding and self reflection. While much of my career was focused on helping human beings to live better lives by using that capacity for understanding and change, I was confronted with the neuro-science line of approach once again when I became honorary professor at Sheffield University in the ninety nineties. I was attached to the medical school and I watched the rush towards fMRI research in my department from nearby. I found it fascinating that the same issues were still at the foreground, though the investigative technology had so much advanced. It was a pleasure getting to know people like Sean Spence, who was always particularly receptive to ideas from clinical practice to inform his neuro-scientific research. But Sean was an exception, whose work I esteemed, as I do the neuroscience based work of my own husband, Prof. Digby Tantam, an expert on autism.
I much enjoyed reading the recent book Brainwashed by psychiatrist and psychologist team Satel and Lilienfield, who, like myself, are worried about the tendency of overestimating the knowledge provided to us by neuro-science. Their book is sound, factual and modest in its conception. It sums up nicely why people ought to be a little more cautious in evaluating the truth-value of Sam Harris’ contribution. They attack the all too often misleading features of the public presentation of neuroscience or rather of what they term ‘neuromania’, with the increasingly frequently distorted media attention it is given. They warn against the tendency of the wider public to be gullible about neuroscience because of their lack of knowledge from which to evaluate the facts. They ask the question of whether eventually bureaucrats will be replaced by neuro-crats and while they intend this as a humorous quip, I think that people like Sam Harris already believe that they can substitute philosophy and social science with the science of the brain. Of course in this Harris is wrong and misleading, as a read of the Satel and Lilienfield book will show you. Nevertheless Harris’s work will have many more readers than the Brainwashed book. His influence is far reaching and his public profile will distribute his ideas wide and far. I am somewhat surprised that Harris, as a scientist, allows himself to build a new mechanistic philosophy on fairly superficial findings. Nothing that we have discovered in neuroscience warrants such extrapolation. The facts can and have been explained and understood in other ways. Although it appears that Harris also has a degree in philosophy, he does not seem to set much stake by the history of philosophy and its established ways of constructing a logical argument after defining one’s terms. He builds his views on the non-existence of Free Will entirely on his own computations of neuro-science data, without seriously considering alternative interpretations.
Harris’ thesis
All this is important. As Harris states so accurately at the outset: ‘The question of free will touches nearly everything we care about’. He then goes on to argue that if scientists could declare free will an illusion there would be an outrage and cultural war greater than the one ‘waged on the subject of evolution’. This is blatantly wrong as his argument is very much in line with the Darwinian and neo-Darwinian battle with creationism and does not really add anything new to either enlighten or calm that particular conundrum. In fact by arguing from proclamation and opinion he rather undermines the evolutionists’ usual minimum requirement of sticking with the facts of observation. Harris introduces misleading elements into the debate, which appeal to irrationality rather than building a case for a rational appraisal of human nature. Harris’ contention is that neuroscience will explain all of human behaviour and has accumulated sufficient knowledge to authoritatively dispense with the illusory notion that human beings have any kind of free will. His argument is based on flimsy evidence and is circular. It is mostly made by assertion and re-assertion of his opinions, which are based in an essentially neuro-centric view of the world.
Most of his pamphlet is polemic rather than factual and it is a shame to make it look like a treatise on philosophy, when it is only the expression of a very one-sided and wilfully extremist view. It seems as if Harris has chosen to tackle this issue to weigh in on an eye-catching controversy, but that he is doing so not just without having adequate knowledge of the existing debates on the philosophy of freedom, but also without having a new view to add into that debate. He briefly refers to existentialism, but only to show his ignorance of it, and he argues with Dennett’s compatibilist views, which are actually not all that far removed from his own, though at least they leave room for reasonable doubt and modesty of opinion (see my review of Dennett’s Intuition Pumps, 2013, below). It is not hard to come to the conclusion that Harris has published this booklet simply because he has the audience and the publishers’ backing and can get away with it. Had any novice author submitted this document to a serious publishing company they would have been eliminated after peer review, which would have found this work wanting in a myriad of ways. So why does Harris’ writing nevertheless find such a large audience and reach such a wide market? It is a puzzle and a worry. I would argue it may be because pragmatism in the USA leads to national pride in scientists and an inclination to overrate their capacity for moral guidance. Harris does a great job of making it look as if his arguments are based in factual knowledge and outstrip any other form of philosophy. His work provides a sobering counterweight to the wishful thinking of some American humanistic psychology, though it could chime in quite easily with a certain type of positive psychology. He reminds people that their brains are part of their bodies and that these lumps of flesh are essentially all we amount to.
Harris is very aware of the game he is playing. He says ‘the stakes are high’ and he is willing at all times to raise the game and the temperature. He enters into the fray by telling the story of a heinous crime: an attack during which the criminals injure and bind the father and end up raping and strangling the mother and burning her and her two young daughters after terrorizing and assaulting them in their home, having emptied their bank account. It is the stuff of nightmares. According to Harris, if he were to trade places with one of these criminals, atom for atom, he would become them and act exactly as they did. He says we cannot take credit for not having the soul or mind of a psychopath. I do not think he has proven or even argued that point in any way at all. He has not given us any evidence that these criminals acted as they did because of their brain function or dysfunction. Nor has he shown that they had no other options open to them in the moment they made their choices. He merely entices us into the belief that this is the case, by making it sound as if he knows this to be so. In truth the current state of neuroscience does not enable any body to demonstrate that these criminals behaved as they did because their brains were irreversibly and inexorably conditioned to do so. Indeed I doubt that neuroscience will ever be able to do so. But of course, since Harris wishes to argue that human beings do not have any free will, he starts with a story, which is so horrific that we find it easy to accept that such an event is predetermined by the malfunction of a brain rather than it being the act of a thinking human being. In a sense we want to believe him, for it takes the pressure of morality out of the equation. Courtrooms around the world have struggled with this problem for many decades and indeed centuries. When working as an expert witness it is however important to stick with factual information and weigh up the capacity of a person to take responsibility. And sometimes, but in my experience very rarely, a person commits a crime without the conscious capacity to prevent it. The plea of insanity is recognized worldwide, but it would not be an advantage for society if that plea became taken over by the plea of genetic or neurological disability in the face of crime. Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists have had to think very carefully about all this and rarely fail to argue that responsibility and free will come in degrees rather than as a black or white, either/or. One has to draw the line somewhere and ask people to account for their actions, something we would no longer do were we to accept Harris’ line of argument. If we went along with Harris, while we may, as he points out, find sympathy with the other’s determined brain, it will confuse our judgements about their character and their capacity for judgement and judicious choice making. The fact that some people lose their capacity for exercising responsibility does not extrapolate to the establishment for the lack of free will, but rather confirms it.
Problems with the thesis
As I was reading the book I kept wondering whether Harris entirely believed his own position or intended no more than a bold and provocative thought experiment, for which I could forgive him. From the start Harris’ examples appear to be used for impact rather than for accuracy purposes. He loosely speaks of forgiving criminal behaviour if we discover that people have brain tumours, when criminal behaviour in people with brain tumours is actually extremely rare, probably because brain tumours either incapacitate the person or leave enough neural network functional enough for the person to still correct their behaviour by moral standards even when they are out of touch and confused. The human spirit of free and responsible will and careful consideration tends to find a way regardless of handicap.
As mentioned Harris overrides such considerations by proceeding by assertion and he repeatedly acclaims his position with the purpose of making his case. So, he says things like: ‘given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds’, without having given a hint of evidence for such an enormous statement about one of the controversies in his field. When Freud argued the same, hundred twenty years ago, he was a lot more careful to make a case and most of us no longer believe him. On page 5 Harris asserts that: ‘Free will is an illusion’, with the emphasis on ‘is’, as if this is a fact that has already been shown to be true. It would have been wiser and more accurate to stick with something more modest and appropriate like: ‘I shall aim to demonstrate that free will is an illusion’. He makes beginners’ mistakes by not defining his terms and declares boldly that: ‘our wills are simply not of our own making’, without defining ‘will’ or explaining what exactly he means by ‘own’ or ‘making’. It is very dispiriting to read a book on a philosophical topic that fails to make the effort to do proper philosophy.
He goes on to argue that: ‘either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them’. This is not a sound argument as: a.) we may be responsible for our wills (whatever that means) in spite of being influenced or even determined by prior causes, b.) if our wills are the product of chance we may yet be able and willing to claim responsibility for what we do with these wills in the future, c.) there is no reason why both of these things could not apply at the same time. We may very well be determined to some extent by prior causes and also be the product of chance and at the same time exercise some amount of free will to make it all work out. We may be active agents of change and have a task to combine these various givens and create a project of our own whilst taking these limitations into account.
It is very difficult to follow an author who so blatantly disregards any evidence that goes against his own statements and who does not even check the logic of his own declarations. Again on page 6 he puts forward the thesis that: ‘the popular concept of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present.’ Once again this statement leaves him wide open to contention. These two assumptions about ‘the popular concept of free will’ are not based in any factual evidence. If it is based in Harris’ own experience, he does not say, but I can say categorically from my own forty years of experience in working with people who have difficulties in exercising any kind of free will, that even they do not assume these things. They usually accept that they knew no better in the past and that their mistakes are forgivable and similarly they accept that there are limits to their exercise of choice and free will in the present. Their main preoccupation is the extent to which they can a.) know their own will, b.) exercise it in the face of akrasia or weakness, c. ) how to gradually become strong enough to feel they can take charge of their life rather than experience themselves like automatons, who are at the mercy of the determinations of the past, the environment, their genes, circumstances, other people or their own current lack of motivation. None of them ever seek to deny some level of determinism and are well aware that the laws of nature, of society and of survival require them to work within clear boundaries. The facts of life are not in question; it is the extent to which they can go beyond the givens of their existence that is at issue. I don’t think I have ever come across anyone who believed that they were the source of most of their thoughts and actions. But nor have I ever been able to help anyone make something of their life who did not first accept their responsibility for it. What I find in practice is that people make progress in making something of themselves and their lives to the extent that they become aware of their capacity to exercise their free will in a world that is full of obstacles and external causes. I wonder whether Harris takes his own authority so much for granted that it blinds him to the lack of free will and authority in others who need to work very hard to marshal it, but who come to value it as much as he appears to deny it.
The illusion of total freedom
There is no question of total freedom. It is a fantasy and illusion and most people know that. But the other extreme is equally true: the idea of a mechanically driven world, which has not evolved enough to allow for the necessary change and variation to drive evolution is also absurd and contradictory in terms. When Harris denies the existence of any free will he is denying the very core of our humanity and capacity for reflection. What he overlooks is the small margin of freedom that we establish as we evolve, not just as a human race, but also as individual human beings. As a neuroscientist he ought to know better that the human brain keeps developing after birth and requires much learning to complete its initial wiring. The maturation of our neural network only really happens at the end of adolescence and until then that margin of free will has not yet been established. Criminal activity for that reason is much higher in the young as for some people neural development is delayed and leaves room for a lack of exercise of caution, consideration, reflection and choice. In all of us the brain continues to evolve and develop and rewire itself according to our circumstances. Our capacity for free will becomes greater as we get better at evaluating, overseeing and understanding situations. Free will is generated out of the human capacity for learning, adaptation and evolution. It is not a given from the start but something we have to acquire and become better at as we practice and affirm it. The modicum of free will that we acquire in the process is based in our capacity for understanding and reflection, part of the higher functions that do not, like the lower functions Harris keeps talking about, operate by reflex action. It is not helpful for an expert to confuse people about themselves for the sake of argument. He does not even do a good job in explaining about the various networks and their disparate functions.
His illustrations of the way in which we do many things unconsciously and without reflection are pretty well accurate, but he fails to address any of the many times when we do the opposite and reflect carefully about dilemmas, conflicts or options we have before us as we make pondered decisions. If human beings were really wired the way Harris is alleging we would not have any use for the judiciary, for politics, for the United Nations, for Universities, for conflict resolution or mediation or psychotherapy. We also would not need any books, nor would I have decided to respond to his words for that matter. The neural networks would already have taken care of the synchronization of knowledge.
Is Harris in bad faith?
I am sure Harris is an intelligent person who really knows all these objections. He must realize that he uses conman tactics and that there is a constant assumptive sleight of hand at work in this little work. For instance on page 7 he says: ‘we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them’ (i.e. our experiences). The sentence slyly assumes that it has already been proven that the causality goes in this direction, i.e. that neurophysiological events cause experiences, rather than the other way around. This is simply not the case. Harris never proved it, nor did anyone else. We are still working out the models and they will change as we discover more. The only thing we know is that there is a correlation between the experiences we have and the consumption of oxygen in certain structures of the brain while we are having these experiences. Harris dispenses with the evidence and launches forward as if he has proven that neurones produce experience, rather than simply being the vehicle, or instrument of experience or indeed rather than being the product of such experience, all of which are possibilities. Generations of debate on these issues are wiped aside with one self-righteous gesture.
He asks why impulses arise one morning and not another and proceeds to conclude we cannot know, when actually many people can trace back the start of an impulse and get good at becoming aware before it takes them over. In fact the practice of psychotherapy is very much based on that slow effort of getting to know ourselves and our impulses and actions, before they ‘just happen’. We can educate our prefrontal lobes through meditation and self-observation and we get better as we learn. There are people who are expert at this type of educational research. Some of them use fMRI scans to show the effects. Harris is clearly unfamiliar with these practices.
He refers to Libet’s well known work (page 8), which showed that activity in the motor cortex can be detected 300 mil seconds before a person’s decision to move. He does not discuss the fact that many people describe the making of a decision in exactly that way: that there is a dawning, gradual leaning into a decision, before a decision to do something is actually made. The brain is being warmed up for the action required in the same way in which people are ‘making up their minds’ to move. When he says such findings are hard to reconcile with the sense that we are conscious authors of our actions he overstates his case: they are compatible with the notion that our decisions are like emerging properties of our deliberations. They show us that decision-making is not an on/off activity and that free will is not the way American humanism describes it, i.e. it is not a conscious or sudden willing, but rather a consideration of possibilities and a gradual leaning into one particular orientation. When working with addicts an understanding of such passive choice making, such sliding into action, is very important. Sartre described it rather well in his books on emotions and in his notebooks for an ethics (1938,1939). Harris refers briefly and dismissively to Sartre, but shows a profound lack of understanding of existentialism itself, claiming it to be about interpreting the meanings of our life, when it is actually very much about how we choose to live and act in the world. Harris would do well to read Sartre and learn about bad faith and the way in which it allows us to fool ourselves. He needs to consider that whole experience of slumping into self-indulgent believing that we know something when we have not yet investigated it or when we conveniently forget that we know something that does not fit our preferences. I think it would be very relevant as much of his writing seems to lean towards bad faith. Harris has clearly missed out on the debates around free will by people like Camus (1951), Kierkegaard (1844), Nietzsche (1969), Heidegger (1962, 1985), Jaspers (1971), de Beauvoir (2004) and even his countrymen like Fromm (2001) and May (2007), talking about how easy it is to hide your freedom of choice to yourself, including by blaming your body or brain for your situation. All these authors have struggled with the idea of free will in the face of determinism and scientific progress and could teach him a thing or to if he were interested to exercise his free will to find out. I suspect though that he is not that way inclined, because he already knows and his brain will not cause him to change his mind. Perhaps he might be persuaded to read at least the work of Hannah Arendt (1958), warning him of the kind of slippage societies can slide into when they deny the existence of freedom.
Denial of change and plasticity
Perhaps it is an exaggerated overrated notion of Free Will with capitals that Harris is fighting. If so, he may have struck a blow for freedom against such insanity as thinking that anyone can decide anything at any moment. Perhaps this needed stating, but it does not help to confuse the issue by ignoring the complexity of possible arguments.
There is no question that there are images of free will that are excessive. But Harris is forgetting that the freedom we acquire as we mature is based on slow understanding of our own abilities and shortcomings and the limits and opportunities that the world affords us. Mature ideas about freedom are that freedom is always relative and never total. As Sartre concluded at the end of his career, we only ever have a margin of freedom, being constrained by circumstances, politics, race, society and personal genetic make up included. But we always have to respond to the givens offered to us and define our actions in the situations we find ourselves in. We can respond like Harris’ automatic brain based zombie (although it is perhaps more like Dennett’ Zimbo) but we have the ability to respond in a way that creates greater openings for the future rather than to foreclose the situation with foregone automatic conclusions. Harris strongly denies such a need for the exercise of existential freedom and responsibility. It is down to our brains and they decide how we will act, that’s all there is to it. What he forgets is that a brain is nothing without an environment and that the experiences it has determine the ways in which its neural networks will adjust and operate. Part of that environment is created by the people who designed it and operate and change it. And as they change it their own brains change with them. It is called plasticity.
Harris sometimes reminds me of Skinner in his early days of behavioural conditioning and at other times of Freud in his most grandiose days of belief in the Unconscious and drives as the real motivators behind all our actions. What all these theories have in common is the desire to explain the complexity of human existence with a one size fits all explanation and to reduce all of our daily struggles to one simple causal point of origin. Such simplistic reductionist solutions inevitably fall short of the mark and cannot account for the complexity of reality and human experience in the long run.
Harris’ philosophical stance
Harris’ philosophical heritage is clearly not that of continental philosophy. He appears to have studied philosophy of science and philosophy of mind but to have rather stinted on the classics. These philosophies have very short roots and are in some ways the handmaidens of AI and neuroscience. They do not always encourage critical thinking about these matters. But the most worrying aspect of Harris’ tone and way of writing is that he appeals to authority and belief in truth. These are the usual ingredients of fundamentalist religious views, or those of superstition. The only difference is that Harris asks us to place our faith in the brain and in science and in his authority to preach the gospel of materialism. He forgets that science is nothing without careful argumentation and clarity of understanding.
He tells us how much he has learnt from following the path of determinism and we don’t doubt it as he quotes himself as being able to feel more empathy for the criminal, knowing that the criminal can’t help committing the crime.
The trouble with this is that what he is speaking of is not empathy, which requires us to engage with the point of view of the person we empathize with in order to be able to help them change it. It is rather sympathy or even human pity he speaks of and this takes us back to a more primitive way of dealing with other people, when we have spent centuries in the human and social sciences to struggle beyond such a primitive attitude.
Harris does not show any regard or understanding of the complexity of the human mind and seems to believe it is all down to simple wiring. In actual fact he should know as a neuroscientist that plasticity of the brain is one of the most important aspects of it. Wiring is never set in stone and is altered according to necessity. Clinical observations about this are astonishing and speak volumes. Similarly there are many different pathways in the brain and different levels of operating and the kind of impulsive criminal behaviour that he took as his example in the first chapter is fortunately both extremely rare and based in destructive chain reactions which society aims to avoid by education and training, by morality and ethics. Society is much more successful at doing so than Harris argumentation allows for. In the world of neuro-centrism that he seems to favour there is no room for thoughtfulness and deliberation, for options and choices, reflection and self-reflection, or anything remotely resembling a social conscience. As Harris himself would know only too well: if people really were programmed in the way he is suggesting, there would be no use for much of our brains. Our brains are very refined instruments and capable of much more complex operations than Harris allows for.
Turning to the actual evidence
I have worked with people who struggle with their base instincts, their negative impulses, their obsessions, their compulsions and past histories that make them prone to depression, anxiety, addiction or violence at the drop of a hat. But fortunately they and I put the work in to expand their human capacity for reflection and choice and self-determination. There is no way that positive psychology is on the right track when it claims that happiness is something you can achieve by simply deciding to be happy. That is a most naïve assumption that is immediately proven wrong as soon as you start working with psychiatric patients who have lost their appetite for pleasure. I am with Harris in his rejection of such a primitive faith in humanism and acts of free will.
Free will is a slow process that has been acquired by humanity over many long centuries and that is always competing with the forces of causality and determinism, but which often uses these, though it can never be taken for granted. Our small margins of freedom have to be earned by hard work and careful consideration every day by every single person. We are all inclined to let the automatisms of our programmed brains take over. And as Harris points out in many ways we do not have a choice in the matter. Our brainstem and hypothalamus together with our organs are constantly beavering away to make our systems function. Long may that ingenious brain continue with that job without our intervention. And it is also true that our background and education regulate our early settings in many higher ways and in relation to many of our daily habits. But these can be changed when we have to, though we tend to prefer going on automatic pilot until a crisis happens.
Harris as a world traveller must be aware that his diurnal cycles are slowly reset by his body as soon as he changes to a different time zone. Funnily enough we can work with our bodies and facilitate this process if we know how to. But it is not true that the body initiates the choice to do so. On the contrary it responds to what we impose on it and does so to the best of its ability. With our conscious capacity for understanding this we can learn to work with the process or oppose it. So it is with many things in the body, including the aging process. The biological processes are given and pre-loaded, but we have the capacity to interact with them rather than be passively reactive to them.
Where the higher functions are concerned they are almost entirely wired through use or lack of use. The skills we learn and the habits we create are laid down in the brain as we mature and are taught by our parents, other adults, peers and circumstances. All the evidence is that the more we learn and generalize this learning by repeating and remembering our learning, the more our capacity for choice making improves and increases. We make little pockets of free will for ourselves and our brains respond to this. Ironically this freedom can become a problem too and many people come for psychotherapy when they feel overwhelmed or paralysed in the face of dilemmas they cannot resolve or moral choices they are afraid of making. No quick brain decisions available. They have to really think it through to liberate themselves and release their brain’s capacity for stalling and obstructing them. There are others who have come to therapy because they become panicked in the face of having to make even the smallest of choices, such as deciding what to eat in a restaurant. All these people can restore their confidence in themselves and their ability to exercise their margin of freedom by considering things from different perspectives and by seeing both the limits and advantages of creating their lives and exercising their right and ability to give those lives direction.
Conclusion
Harris may have intended this book in a tongue-in-cheek way that is lost on me. I sincerely hope that it is my lack of understanding of a particular way of making a point that has defeated my imagination. But if he is serious about his contentions then we have a real problem. If people believe his kind of argument, they will be inclined to minimize the importance of creative and reflective thinking and living. If I believed his thesis I would not much want to take the trouble to be as responsible and careful in my actions as I currently am. If I truly thought that my life were determined by the great algorithms of my brain alone, I would give up on the effort of being moral and dutiful and trying so hard to contribute to society. Fortunately I don’t believe Harris for a moment and I do not even think that he does so himself, as his free flowing prose seems to experiment in a rather adolescent way with the liberation of letting himself smell the power of deciding to write one word rather than another. Perhaps he really could not help himself for writing this in the way he did, but I doubt it. And while none of us can be sure that his brain will let him, it would be nice to know that Harris, upon reflection, might decide that it is time to think and write a little bit more carefully next time and exercise his freedom and capacity for reflection.
His primitively mechanistic view of the world does not do justice to everything human beings have developed and evolved over the years. The facts of life are not just laid down in brain-cells, but are also embodied by the arts, the feelings, the human interactions, the aspirations and values that we live with. We cannot leave these out of the debate, for as Harris himself remarked at the start of his booklet: in summary: they are all that really matters to us.
References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Beauvoir, S. de (1944), “Pyrrhus and Cinéas”, in Philosophical Writings, M. A. Simons, M. Timmerman, and M. B. Mader (eds.), Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Camus, A. (1951) The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt trans. A. Bower 1954 New York: Vintage
Dennett, D. C. (2013) Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, New York: Norton.
Frankl, V E. (1946) Man’s Search for Meaning, London: Hodder and Stoughton 1964.
Fromm, E. (2001) The Fear of Freedom, London: Routledge Classics.
Harris, S. (2010) The Moral Landscape, London: Bantam Press.
Heidegger, M. (1927a) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. S. Robinson, London: Harper and Row 1962 – (1971) Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, transl. Stambaugh J., Athens Ohio: Ohio University Press 1985: 11/9.
Husserl, E. (1938) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Carr D., Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970b
Jaspers, K. (1971) Philosophy of Existence, trans. R. F Greban, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938
Kierkegaard, S. (1844) The Concept of Anxiety, trans. R. Thomte, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1980.
May, R. – (1969) Love and Will, New York: Norton, 2007.
Nietzsche, F. (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books 1969.
Ricoeur, P (1966) Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press.
Sartre, J. P (1960) Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith, London: Verso/NLB 1982.
(1983) Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. D. Pellaner, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press 1992.
(1939) Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, London: Methuen 1962.
Satel S. and Lilienfeld S.O. (2013) Brainwashed: The seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, New York: Basic Books.