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Two replies to Sam Harris regarding free will

If our choices are predetermined by a preconscious process, as Sam Harris believes, then the experience of desire and will would be redundant, for our brain could direct our actions without engaging our conscious desire or will at all.  Their appearance would be an example of evolutionary inefficiency.

Evolution is sometimes wasteful, or at least untidy, but often the forms that evolve are there precisely because they are adaptive.  Assuming that the acts of desiring and of willing are adaptive rather than superfluous, then it would seem that the desire and choice that we experience contribute something to our action that could not have been accomplished through preconscious processes.  That is, we rather than some underlying mechanism do the choosing.  The objection proposed by Sam Harris and others to free will is thus undermined.

One way to avoid the thrust of this counterargument is to say that the freedom that we seem to experience in choosing is illusory, but this illusion is adaptive.  That is, it is evolutionarily advantageous to imagine falsely that the conscious part of our nature directs our actions.  But that brings us to another problem, to which I'll turn.

If it plausible that causes hidden to the subject of experience cause the illusion of choice, then there could also be causes hidden to the same subject causing him to think that he is knowing when he isn't really doing so.  For example, it really seems to me that I know that 3 + 4 = 7, but perhaps I don't really know that this is true.  Perhaps I just have a really good hunch that it is so: a hunch that is good enough to enable me to survive and thrive. After all, imagining that one knows when one doesn't gives the would-be knower the courage to act; hence this epistemic illusion is adaptive.

The claim that humans are deceived into thinking that their hunches are knowledge has enormous consequences, for it implies that the claim to scientific knowledge is merely wishful thinking. Epistemic confidence would be the manifestation of a trait that increases the owner's likelihood of the survival, but not an indicator of knowledge.

Interestingly, many base their rejection of free will on the basis of laws of nature, for these laws are thought to tell us what happens necessarily, and that necessity makes no room for the contingency that characterizes free will acts.  But if our purported knowledge of such laws is really just a hunch, then this basis for denying free will seems to be undermined as well.

There is more to criticize in Harris's notion of free will--specifically, what he says about the Benjamin Libet's experiment, but that's something for another day.

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