Don 39;t Starve Together Unblocked

[Nadal Braymiller]

Greatread. Found the Jean-Paul Sartre example about the French boy very interesting. His framing of the two choices I disagree with, it ignores the possibility of the brother choosing to honor his lost brother through fighting, making a free choice to respect the micro and macro at the same time through one choice. And also honoring his mother; even if she feels it disrespectful

During a lecture at Cal Tech in 2012, Sam Harris invited his listeners to \u201Crun a little experiment.\u201D

You can replicate the experiment yourself in the next ten seconds or so. \u201CPick a city, anywhere in the world\u2026any city.\u201D

OK, have the name of a city? Very good. You\u2019ve done the experiment. We can check the results.

But when we examine our experience, we\u2019ll see that it wasn\u2019t a free decision. To start with, you weren\u2019t free to choose any of the cities you don\u2019t know about\u2014you couldn\u2019t have picked one of those cities \u201Cif your life depended on it.\u201D Nor were you free to choose one of the cities that simply didn\u2019t occur to you. But what about the ones that did occur to you?

Even there, Harris thinks, there\u2019s no free will, since if you honestly reflect on your experiences you\u2019ll realize that you don\u2019t even know why you felt like picking one city rather than another in the moment of decision. You might tell yourself, for example, that you picked Tokyo because you had Japanese food last night \u201Cbut we know from psychology that these kinds of stories are rather often false.\u201D When people are \u201Cmanipulated in a lab,\u201D they \u201Calways have some story to tell about why they did what they did and it never bears any relationship to the actual variables that cause them to behave that way.\u201D

So we have no control of what thoughts enter our heads, and none over why we act on the ones we act on. We\u2019re being pulled around by psychological forces which we don\u2019t even know about, and the idea of \u201Cfree will\u201D is nonsense. Accordingly, any moral conclusion that rests on the idea that people bear responsibility for those actions over which they have meaningful control needs to be tossed out since there are no such actions.

Some of you are probably nodding along right now. It\u2019s a fun argument, it rests on some observations that resonate, and Harris is a legitimately talented communicator. If you\u2019re temperamentally or ideologically inclined toward skepticism about free will in any case, you might be inclined to sign onto what he\u2019s saying here without too much more thought.

But look a little closer at his example. Is this really \\\"the sort of decision that motivates the idea of free will\u201D?

Like\u2026really?

Has anyone ever thought that we\u2019re free in the sense of being free to decide things like which city-names will float up to the surface of our minds or strike our fancy in response to a prompt that could be reasonably rephrased as, \u201COpen your mind to whatever random whim comes along and then report it to me\u201D? The whole point of a prompt like that is to take us outside of the sphere of reasoning and planning altogether.

Whether or not free will is anywhere else, of course it\u2019s not there.

To see the point a little more vividly, contrast Harris\u2019s example with a classic example of free will from Jean-Paul Sartre. In his 1946 lecture Existentialism as a Humanism, Sartre talks about how we\u2019re \u201Ccondemned to be free.\u201D Since there\u2019s no God, no fate or karma or cosmic plan\u2014and to Sartre, this is a terrifying fact about the human condition\u2014it\u2019s up to us to shape the future on our own. We\u2019re \u201Cthrown into this world\u201D without being consulted about it and we\u2019re nevertheless responsible for our actions. To illustrate this cosmic \u201Cstate of abandonment,\u201D he tells a story about a student of his who came to him for advice during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.

His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a \u201Ccollaborator\u201D; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her one consolation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother and helping her to live. He fully realized that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance \u2013 or perhaps his death \u2013 would plunge her into despair. He also realized that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother\u2019s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. For instance, to set out for England he would have to wait indefinitely in a Spanish camp on the way through Spain; or, on arriving in England or in Algiers he might be put into an office to fill up forms. Consequently, he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed towards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous \u2013 and it might be frustrated on the way. At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debatable validity. He had to choose between those two.

We\u2019re not talking about an arbitrary whim. The student is deliberating based on reasons for and against various courses of action. That strikes me as \u201Cthe sort of decision that motivates the idea of free will.\u201D

When the world was young and I was in grad school, Harris was one of the \u201CFour Horsemen\u201D of New Atheism. Along with his fellow horsemen Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he rode around proclaiming the non-existence of God and battling the Religious Right.

Later on, he was a charter member of a different group of culture-war flamethrowers\u2014the Intellectual Dark Web. His allies this time around included a religious fundamentalist who believes there shouldn\u2019t be a Palestinian state because God promised the entire Land of Israel to the Jewish People (Ben Shapiro) and a deeply strange Jungian psychologist incapable of giving a straight answer to the question \u201Cdo you believe in God?\u201D (Jordan Peterson). All that was beside the point, though, because this round of the culture war wasn\u2019t about religion. The IDW\u2019s enemies were censorious green-haired college kids who cared too much about safe spaces and pronouns.

A couple years ago, Harris fell out with his IDW friends over their predilection for conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines and the 2020 election. A segment of his audience was deeply disappointed. They thought he\u2019d changed, but I actually don\u2019t think that\u2019s true.

Since I\u2019m going to spend the rest of this essay giving him a hard time, I want to take a minute here to say one nice thing about him.

Sam Harris may be one of the most consistent and least audience-captured people in media. As far as I can tell, his beliefs and sensibilities in 2023 are indistinguishable from what they were when his first book, The End of Faith, came out in 2004. He\u2019ll sound off on whatever subject happens to swim into the public consciousness at any given point in time, and cheerfully hang out with whoever agrees with him about that subject and then part ways with them when they disagree with him about the next thing, but I see no evidence that he particularly gives a shit what either his collaborators-of-the-moment or his audience thinks about any of it.

His has the worldview of a technocratic-centrist sort of West Coast liberal. He reveres science and expertise and distrusts the energies and passions of people who didn\u2019t go to college. He votes for Democrats, practices meditation, and takes it for granted that the U.S. military is a force for good in a dangerous world.

None of this is even a little bit surprising for a man of his background, education, class position, and cultural context. Honestly, you can\u2019t throw an empty Starbucks cup in Santa Monica without hitting someone who would check every single one of those boxes.

And Harris\u2019s impatience with the \u201Cdelusion\u201D of free will is a perfect fit with these sensibilities. He sees people as walking bundles of utility, not autonomous agents responsible for their own decisions. Morality and justice are a matter of managing the bundles so as to maximize good consequences and minimize bad ones.

I know that a lot of people whose politics are a lot closer to mine than Harris\u2019s would still endorse some of the philosophical premises I just mentioned. For the record, I think that\u2019s a mistake.

I\u2019ve had an essay half-written in my head for a while now called \u201CBeing a Leftist Without Being a Utilitarian or a Skeptic About Free Will.\u201D With any luck, you won\u2019t have to wait too many Sundays for that one.

But until then let\u2019s put a pin in the politics of belief or disbelief in free will. Hell, today I won\u2019t even try to convince you of the Definitively Correct Theory of Free Will. I\u2019ll just settle for debunking Harris.

Let\u2019s start with just a little bit of Positions on Free Will 101. If you already know about all this stuff, skip to the next section with my blessing. Some of what comes later refers back to how it\u2019s being set up here, but Philosophy for the People readers are clever people. You\u2019ll figure it out.

OK, now that those nerds are gone:

We can ask two kinds of questions about free will\u2014a conceptual question about what would count as free will and an empirical one about whether anything in reality matches that description.

There are a few different reasons why philosophers in different eras have worried about whether we have free will, but for now let\u2019s stick to the dominant modern worry, which is causal determinism\u2014the idea that everything that happens is ultimately a result of complex chains of cause and effect where the later links in such chains are inevitable given the earlier ones.

A fun way to explain determinism is by thinking about the total state of the universe\u2014the current position of every molecule in existence, for instance\u2014at any moment of time. Causal determinism is the claim that, given the total one any particular \u201Ctime slice\u201D of the universe is, there\u2019s only one possible way for future time slices to be, since the future is causally baked into the present.

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