I think the main point that people are missing here is that Sam Harris is an experienced meditator with years of intensive retreat practice. This means that he likely routinely enters states where the perception of any “doer” or “observer” in subjective experience goes away, states where no “decision” is ever taken, but events “just happen” on their own. This is why Harris has such strong opinions on free will, advanced meditation practice will directly show you how the appearance of decisions and free will is being constructed moment-by-moment, no need for any philosophical arguments about determinism when you can simply look at your immediate experience and see it lacking any free will. I suspect he wrote the book because he couldn’t just say “trust me, if you meditate for 5000 hours you’ll see you have no free will”, even though that would likely be a more honest answer.
I am an experienced sleeper with years of intensive practice for hours every night. I routinely experience states where the perception of anything at all goes away, states where not only “no decision” is ever taken, but where nothing even “happens”.
But I do not mistake this for a deep insight into the nature of the mind. It just tells me that it can turn on and off.
Meditators, it seems, have learned to shut off parts of their mind, while leaving enough still running to be able to report on the experience afterwards. That does not mean that those parts do not exist. It just means that they have turned them off.
FWIW, I do also meditate from time to time, although I am not sure that the thing that I do that I am calling meditation is the same as the things that other people do that they call meditation (or that the things that other people do are the same as each other). Be that as it may, I don’t see any more reason to credit the diminished, enhanced, or weird states that some report with any insight into reality, any more than I would credit drug experiences with the same, spontaneous episodes of religious revelation (see the case of John C. Wright), or “strokes of insight” (Jill Bolte Taylor).
The difference with sleep is that meditation increases perceptual clarity instead of decreasing it. The experience of seeing your mind turn off and on while seeing clearly everything that is happening is actually one of the most profound things that can happen in meditation because you can see in real time the different parts of the mind shutting down one by one, giving you insight into what those parts actually are.
Experiences of a lack of free will are relevant to understanding the nature of the mind because the usual presumption is that free will is somehow a property of decision-making itself, not a weird tacked-on module of the brain that can easily be dispensed with. If free will is just a thin coat of paint over the decision making module, then it’s not really free will at all. Advanced meditation lets you experience making eggs in the morning, taking a jog, talking to your spouse, writing your emails all without the experience you might usually have called “free will”. What was intuitively thought to be a crucial part of decision making is seen to be not necessary at all. But it’s more than that, because it doesn’t feel like “the free will module stopped”, it feels more like “what I thought was the free will module is actually 5 other different modules, and my lack of perceptual clarity was kind of blending the 5 together in a confused mess”.
Does a “free will” module in a brain make any more sense than a “speed” module in a car?
How do you tell from within whether you have shut down a module or merely averted your mental eye from the phenomenon? “There is no light,” says the sceptic, turning it off. “See?”
The car does have a speed module that happens to be a good analog for a hypothetical free-will module in humans. The speedometer produces an output based on the internal workings of the vehicle. It is also an excellent example of how maps can give outputs that are not necessarily grounded in the state of the territory.
How many conditions can you think of where a driver should ignore the report of the speedometer?
It sounds like you put a higher weight of probability on “meditators can turn off or ignore a brain module that let’s them sense their free will” than “meditators can learn to turn off or ignore a brain module that applies a narrative of free will to a deterministic process”.
I don’t put any weight of probability (including 0) on either of these. Both depend on presuppositions about brain “modules” that I judge to be so far from making sense that taking either of them seriously would be privileging the hypothesis.
Meditation might show that one model of free will is false. Specifically, the idea of the an inner essential self which is the originator of all actions, a kind of Central Puppeteer. A self whose boundaries stop at the conscious mind, and which imagines it controls things by pre-determining them, the only kind of control Harris allows.
People are often surprised at the absence of a central Puppeteer as revealed by meditation, so it has some currency. But Harris is making a much bolder claim that disproving one, naive notion of free will. He is claiming to disprove all concepts of free will, including less naive and less demanding concepts.
The Central Puppeteer is a mirror image of the notion of selfhood that Dennet deconstructs in Consciousness explained , the Central Scrutinizer where all perceptions come together in a single definitive draft.
Dennett, in his work on consciousness, separately from his work on free will, argues that there is no central place where conscious perceptions come together in a single definitive version...no “Central Scrutinizer”. Nonetheless, a kind of compatibilism is possible: the brain as a messy distributed system can , in some messy, approximate way, perceive an external world. There is perception even without an inner perceiver, and an external self—just the John Smith, social security number so-and-so, address so-and-so—that is known to the world at large. So maybe there is some compatibilism possible if one accepts the claim that there is no central Puppeteer.
And that self, just the total person, could be the self who is making decisions aside from the Central Puppeteer. And, indeed, decision-making still occurs. If it occurs without duress , the there is compatibilitist free will. Meditation does not show that one is always under duress!
Voluntary action of some sort is implicit in the very idea that Sam Harris is a meditator. The ability to stick to a schedule of meditatating for so many hours a day indicates that Harris does have control in some sense , he his ego or conscious mind, makes the decision to meditate, and he sticks to it, which means that he resists impulses to get up and do something else … which itself means that having thoughts and desires and impulses present themselves in consciousness does not make him a helpless puppet of them.
People with no impulse control can’t function as adults. And refraining, filtering, selecting amongst promptings and impulses is a kind of control … the other kind of control that Harris does not explicitly consider.
I think the main point that people are missing here is that Sam Harris is an experienced meditator with years of intensive retreat practice. This means that he likely routinely enters states where the perception of any “doer” or “observer” in subjective experience goes away, states where no “decision” is ever taken, but events “just happen” on their own. This is why Harris has such strong opinions on free will, advanced meditation practice will directly show you how the appearance of decisions and free will is being constructed moment-by-moment, no need for any philosophical arguments about determinism when you can simply look at your immediate experience and see it lacking any free will. I suspect he wrote the book because he couldn’t just say “trust me, if you meditate for 5000 hours you’ll see you have no free will”, even though that would likely be a more honest answer.
I am an experienced sleeper with years of intensive practice for hours every night. I routinely experience states where the perception of anything at all goes away, states where not only “no decision” is ever taken, but where nothing even “happens”.
But I do not mistake this for a deep insight into the nature of the mind. It just tells me that it can turn on and off.
Meditators, it seems, have learned to shut off parts of their mind, while leaving enough still running to be able to report on the experience afterwards. That does not mean that those parts do not exist. It just means that they have turned them off.
FWIW, I do also meditate from time to time, although I am not sure that the thing that I do that I am calling meditation is the same as the things that other people do that they call meditation (or that the things that other people do are the same as each other). Be that as it may, I don’t see any more reason to credit the diminished, enhanced, or weird states that some report with any insight into reality, any more than I would credit drug experiences with the same, spontaneous episodes of religious revelation (see the case of John C. Wright), or “strokes of insight” (Jill Bolte Taylor).
The difference with sleep is that meditation increases perceptual clarity instead of decreasing it. The experience of seeing your mind turn off and on while seeing clearly everything that is happening is actually one of the most profound things that can happen in meditation because you can see in real time the different parts of the mind shutting down one by one, giving you insight into what those parts actually are.
Experiences of a lack of free will are relevant to understanding the nature of the mind because the usual presumption is that free will is somehow a property of decision-making itself, not a weird tacked-on module of the brain that can easily be dispensed with. If free will is just a thin coat of paint over the decision making module, then it’s not really free will at all. Advanced meditation lets you experience making eggs in the morning, taking a jog, talking to your spouse, writing your emails all without the experience you might usually have called “free will”. What was intuitively thought to be a crucial part of decision making is seen to be not necessary at all. But it’s more than that, because it doesn’t feel like “the free will module stopped”, it feels more like “what I thought was the free will module is actually 5 other different modules, and my lack of perceptual clarity was kind of blending the 5 together in a confused mess”.
Does a “free will” module in a brain make any more sense than a “speed” module in a car?
How do you tell from within whether you have shut down a module or merely averted your mental eye from the phenomenon? “There is no light,” says the sceptic, turning it off. “See?”
The car does have a speed module that happens to be a good analog for a hypothetical free-will module in humans. The speedometer produces an output based on the internal workings of the vehicle. It is also an excellent example of how maps can give outputs that are not necessarily grounded in the state of the territory.
How many conditions can you think of where a driver should ignore the report of the speedometer?
It sounds like you put a higher weight of probability on “meditators can turn off or ignore a brain module that let’s them sense their free will” than “meditators can learn to turn off or ignore a brain module that applies a narrative of free will to a deterministic process”.
Is that correct? If so, why?
I don’t put any weight of probability (including 0) on either of these. Both depend on presuppositions about brain “modules” that I judge to be so far from making sense that taking either of them seriously would be privileging the hypothesis.
Where is the “speed” module in a car?
Pointer to connected thread
Meditation might show that one model of free will is false. Specifically, the idea of the an inner essential self which is the originator of all actions, a kind of Central Puppeteer. A self whose boundaries stop at the conscious mind, and which imagines it controls things by pre-determining them, the only kind of control Harris allows.
People are often surprised at the absence of a central Puppeteer as revealed by meditation, so it has some currency. But Harris is making a much bolder claim that disproving one, naive notion of free will. He is claiming to disprove all concepts of free will, including less naive and less demanding concepts.
The Central Puppeteer is a mirror image of the notion of selfhood that Dennet deconstructs in Consciousness explained , the Central Scrutinizer where all perceptions come together in a single definitive draft.
Dennett, in his work on consciousness, separately from his work on free will, argues that there is no central place where conscious perceptions come together in a single definitive version...no “Central Scrutinizer”. Nonetheless, a kind of compatibilism is possible: the brain as a messy distributed system can , in some messy, approximate way, perceive an external world. There is perception even without an inner perceiver, and an external self—just the John Smith, social security number so-and-so, address so-and-so—that is known to the world at large. So maybe there is some compatibilism possible if one accepts the claim that there is no central Puppeteer.
And that self, just the total person, could be the self who is making decisions aside from the Central Puppeteer. And, indeed, decision-making still occurs. If it occurs without duress , the there is compatibilitist free will. Meditation does not show that one is always under duress!
Voluntary action of some sort is implicit in the very idea that Sam Harris is a meditator. The ability to stick to a schedule of meditatating for so many hours a day indicates that Harris does have control in some sense , he his ego or conscious mind, makes the decision to meditate, and he sticks to it, which means that he resists impulses to get up and do something else … which itself means that having thoughts and desires and impulses present themselves in consciousness does not make him a helpless puppet of them. People with no impulse control can’t function as adults. And refraining, filtering, selecting amongst promptings and impulses is a kind of control … the other kind of control that Harris does not explicitly consider.