Changing the Subject

This section appears to be the center of the Harris/Dennett debate, and the first place I find myself at odds with Harris on occasion. He also gets into the notion of free will as something that is felt

People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about.

There is the tricky implied conscious/unconscious divide again, where 'their thoughts and actions' are somehow independent from the agent. This is also addressed in the chapter:

The psychological truth is that people feel identical to a certain channel of information in their conscious minds.

Once again we are faced with this rather abstract usage of the verb to feel. And yet again, this statement seems to equate 'people' with their conscious mind, so this statement might as well be recast as: the conscious mind feels identical to the conscious mind. When parsed this way, much of the chapter is rendered tautological.

This section contains Harris' description and discussion of the philosophical schools of thought on free will, including compatibalism, and he mentions Dennett by name several times:

Compatibilists generally claim a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions.

That seems... far too ludicrous to be true. That is basically just arguing for a particular meaning of the word free. I'm not in a position to judge the accuracy with which Harris renders Dennett's views, and I'm happy to assume they are heavily simplified. So I can sympathize with Dennett for wanting to set the record straight, but he was still quite a douchebag (in that particular exchange), and furthermore didn't succeed in the least. I checked my bookshelf, and the aforementioned Dennett book I didn't finish is indeed Consciousness Explained. I still don't intend to finish it--it struck me as a  lot of philosophical wanking on a topic that has become science.

There are a lot of interesting things to parse from the section, and Harris does begin to address the moral consequences of his stance. Though I'm not impressed with some of his statements (particulars to come), I assume these will be fleshed out more later.

The Unconcious Origins of the Will

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment... The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness--rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it.

I love the way he put that. Harris is clear in this chapter that physical determinism is irrelevant to his thesis, due to the above. This is where one typically gets into trouble, identifying the will or even the self merely with conscious thought. Consider, for instance, this from the Wikipedia page on consciousness:

As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."

What a complete waste of pixels. Not only does it not say anything, in that statement they are clearly using the pronoun we to only refer to conscious thought, completely identifying the self only with the conscious process. Whereas it's quite clear, as Harris briefly but effectively discusses, that almost all behavior originates unconsciously. Obviously, to make any sense of this we must decide: what it is we call consciousness?

When searching for such clarity be careful: don't assume there is such a thing, a concrete referent, or a Platonic ideal, that we are trying to attach a word to. Rather, decide what the word refers to and stick with it. First we need to recognize that the mind is modular: there are distinct, relatively independent functions, and consciousness is one of them. My favorite description of consciousness, and the one I find most operationally useful, comes from an approach in Pinker's book How the Mind Works. He approached the question from a perspective of reverse engineering: what cognitive problem did consciousness evolve to solve?

The hardware (or wetware) of the brain is a massive associate matrix of nodes with analog inputs and digital outputs. What sort of computations is this hardware good at? Fuzzy pattern matching. You can train the outputs to fire more-or-less if the inputs match a certain pattern more-or-less. The visual system is probably the most salient example of this.

But when does one encounter limitations of the hardware's capability? Problems with combinatorial complexity. How do you choose items for dinner from the grocery store? The possible combinations are astronomical... pattern matching is hopeless. You need to form a narrative: what do you like? What have you had recently? What looks fresh? What do you usually combine with that.? You need a serial process of elimination. The conscious mind is a simulation of a serial process running on parallel hardware.

Free Will

In the first section Harris sets the stage:

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?

There is a lot to unwrap in that question. We might start with the fact that this book (or essay) seems aimed at the philosophically inclined laymen, as apposed to an academic philosopher. So at this early stage I don't think we need to delve into just what it is to "make sense" of a life (I would say a life is not the sort of thing one makes sense of), or the more interesting question of what it means to hold someone accountable for their choices. I think this is the topic Harris probably devotes most of the essay to, and what I'm most interested in exploring later. The last point, as to what counts as conscious or unconscious, he gets into in the next section.

It's nice to see my main contention addressed at loc 122:

Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent.

I would argue for less. What is an illusion? Something that appears to be there but isn't. Does free will even appear to be there? One might say one "feels" like they are free to make choices, but this is not the sort of feeling that comes from the limbic system. It's more an unawareness of where one's acts of volition arise, which the conscious confabulator fills with a self of the gaps.

The Objection

I had an email exchange with Tom S. revolving around what Sam Harris states was the most common objection to his free will thesis:

If there is no free will, why write books or try to convince anyone of anything? People will believe whatever they believe. They have no choice! Your position on free will is, therefore, self-refuting. The fact that you are trying to convince people of the truth of your argument proves that you think they have the very freedom that you deny them.

To which I responded:

It does not. This is simply a false assertion. I can try to convince someone that determinism is true and there is no free will while admitting that whether or not they believe me, or whether or not I try to convince them in the first place, is completely determined.

Here is the flip side from Epicurus, 2300 years ago:

The man who declares that everything happens of necessity can have no fault to find with the man who denies that anything happens of necessity, for he is saying this very denial is made of necessity. (Sententiae Vaticanae p 45 from Bailey: Epicurus, Text and Translation, Oxford, 1925)

 So why write a book on the subject? Obviously, he had no choice!