The next chapter was a brief one, and so I will try to be brief as well. The upshot is that Harris shows (and I think he does show) that quantum indeterminate events in the brain cannot be a foundation for free will. If everything is determined, then the cosmos is a locomotive on the only tracks that are, and not an all-terrain vehicle. An all-terrain vehicle does not give you free will if the throttle is stuck and there is no driver. Randomization at the bottom does not give us freedom at the top.
I don’t fault Harris for arguing that, given his premises, we have no free will. I fault him for taking with his left hand what he has given with the right. I fault him for arguing against free will with an argument that presupposes it.
“In physical terms, we know that every human action can be reduced to a series of impersonal events” (p. 27).
What that would be like is a trillion billard balls rocketing all over an infinite plane of green velvet. If we look closely enough, some of those billiard balls appear to be writing a series of books. One of those books chides Christian billiard balls for bouncing around in the hidebound and superstitious way they do. Heh. Pardon me for not paying stricter attention.
I will no doubt develop this further later, but Harris has faceplanted in the fallacy of nothing buttery. In physical terms, what is there when I make a decision? There is nothing but atoms banging around. That is where the fatal step is taken. If the material world is all that is, then you have defined everything else right out of existence — immaterial things like souls and spirit, fairies in the garden, or minds (as opposed to brains). Not only have you exiled all such things, you have also banished a little something called information.
How much does information weigh? What color is it? How many square yards is it? What is its force? Velocity? Can you find it anywhere?
A sign on the wall says no smoking. A gentleman lights up a mundungus stogie anyway, and when the proprietor taps him on the shoulder, he defends himself by saying that the sign is “nothing but” paper and ink. He defies anybody to find anything else there. And you know — he can win that argument, but only so long as he is allowed by definition to exclude the only real thing that matters in the discussion. There is nothing but paper and ink if we drastically truncate the discussion in the ways of high silliness.
My paperback Hamlet is “nothing but” paper and ink. My promise at my wedding was “nothing but” disturbances in the air caused by sound waves. Girl with a Pearl Earring is “nothing but” paint and canvas. And my grandchildren are “nothing but” protoplasm. Some of us might be forgiven for thinking that a man shouldn’t dump out everything priceless onto the floor and then argue that all he has is an empty box. His feet are covered with treasures.
The reason his arguments about our free choices fail is that he is leaving out our soul. And if he could photograph it, or get it to stand on the scales, it wouldn’t be a soul.
It will not do for him to say that he doesn’t believe in souls because he doesn’t believe in immaterial things. He wrote a book filled with immaterial things. Let me drive the point home with a sheetrocker’s hammer. Information is a profoundly spiritual, and Sam Harris has written a book chock full of such spiritual realities. The physical world was created to carry information — the spirit world rides piggy-back everywhere that matter goes — and this book called Free Will is no exception.
If he really wanted to write a book consistent with what he is saying the cosmos is like, he should have written the way Jackson Pollock painted, or John Cage composed. He should have had some friends strap him in a chair, with his fingertips superglued to the keyboard, and then had some other friends taser him periodically. That would be a book worthy of the cosmos he thinks we are in!
Ah, that would be consistent. But, of course, because consistency is only a virtue in the world God actually created, he would have to do something else to be consistently inconsistent, or inconsistently consistent. Either way, I don’t think it matters. Trying to get your affirmations to line up with the world as it is would be a Christian virtue — not up there with faith, hope and charity, but a good thing just the same.
You can run but you can’t hide.