Is Sam Harris overrated? He seems highly intelligent and articulate to me. He never seems to be grasping for straws, it always makes very rational sense and is very nuanced.
You may object to him based on his lack of hard STEM knowledge but he doesn't present himself as someone who has that so it's pointless
Why don't people like him?
Criticism of him tends to come more from Veeky Forums types who don't like that he dabbles in philosophy. I don't think anyone really hates him because of his science work.
> Science work
He is the right wing equivalent of niggas saying we need to do POMO math or some shit.
His astounding lack of self awareness when considering the morality of modern American society. He seems to criticise American society in a very insincere way, while defending some of its worst aspects in a way that lacks nuance but seems entirely sincere. In this sense, it's really not surprising that he's friends with Elon Musk who believes "the marketplaces all problems" while simultaneously benefiting directly from Government investment, development and Keynesianism.
* "the market solves all problems"
Fucking auto correct.
When you say that "people" hate him, what groups of people are you referring to?
From my experience he is generally well recived.
he's a blatant apologist for western imperialism. also, he used his family's influence to produce a phd that is dubious in scientific value and furthermore has nothing at all to do with what he's talking about. look at the 'debate' he had with omer aziz. he comes off as a complete hack.
also this
I'd love for you to provide anything where he says we need to do post modern math.
It's okay to dabble in philosophy. It's not okay to make claims as if they're fact.
He makes a lot of plausible claims, but they're still only claims.
I generally agree with him. My mom often agrees with me. It doesn't mean very much.
>he's a blatant apologist for western imperialism.
This is true, however if one takes into consideration that historically many celebrated intellectuals had a knack for being Stalinists, nazi sympathizers, and apologists for all manner of brutal regimes, Sam's blithe occidentalism seems almost palatable by comparison. Its par for the course. I dont agree with you that he is insincere. He actually believes "were the good guys", and as embarrassingly naive as that may be, morally it's less reprehensible.
His political instincts are shit to begin with and The Trump phenomena seems to have melted the brains of every centrist lib, and after spending time on /r/samharris im beginning to suspect that hyperrational technocrats are incapable of understanding the nature of politics, like how some just cant understand poetry.
Ill say one thing for sam though. His positions are a lot more nuanced and measured than most people realize and he is often misunderstood. His problem is the inherent messiness of speaking plainly about complex ideas to a large audience. Almost every discipline has technical terminology that serves to rarefy the conversation. A laymen filter essentially. Its useful to not give people the impression that everyone's opinion is on equal footing when discussing something like the moral underpinnings of immigration policy. A topic which seems accessible and intuitive but is actually fatally complex. Then again cretins and middling intellects will chime in with or without invitation.
>sam Harris
literally who?
>Harris' practice developed from Vipassana and Dzogchen. He states the key meditation aim is to see that self is an illusion.
> Harris contends that the only moral framework worth talking about is one where "morally good" things pertain to increases in the "well-being of conscious creatures".
>Harris says the idea of free will "cannot be mapped on to any conceivable reality" and is incoherent. According to Harris, science "reveals you to be a biochemical puppet."
He sounds like a real fucking tard
>I don't think anyone really hates him because of his science work.
He literally bought a phd and his dissertation was a disaster scientifically.
he did get published though. his papers got a fair number of citations
Fuck white people.
...
Have you actually read his thesis? It's complete garbage
Sam Harris uses some solitary neuroscience studies in his writing and takes them as fact in order to argue his points. EVEN IF you suppose that his arguments are philosophically valid (premises readily flow into the conclusions), there is a massive question of the soundness of his arguments, (that what he is saying is actually grounded in reality).
I will argue that they are not. He's a hack. He is not a neuroscientist since he does not actually participate in research aside from his nearly fraudulent phd thesis and he is not a philosopher, since there are a ton of holes in his arguments and no other philosopher worth their salt takes him seriously.
yeah im not saying hes a neuroscientist just he did actually publish a paper that got quite a few citations.
what are his worst arguments?
>no other philosopher worth their salt
Nice weasel words there.
In his book "Free Will", he cites essentially a single neuroscience experiment in which neuroscientists found parts of the brain associated with an action lit up before the "user" became consciously aware that they were going to do that action. The implication is that the brain tells us what to do before we decide we want to do it.
He uses this study as his springboard into basically saying that we have no choice over our actions, since the brain just tells us what to do. Therefor, free will must be an illusion.
There are problems with this argument.
1) The methods and devices for measuring this kind of activity are not at the level they should be yet in order to make these kinds of claims. Neuroscientists have also shown that a DEAD salmon has brain activity when shown various images. Their study served to point out the flaws in neuroscience experiment design
2) Free will is not binary. There are multiple philosophical points of view and this is one of the oldest philosophical topics. As it currently stands, it CANNOT be answered by science, because we still ultimately do not understand what consciousness even is, let alone all the possible factors that could affect one's actions in the universe.
So the problem is that his arguments, in philosophical terms, are neither valid, nor sound, nor even address the thousands of years of philosophy that came before him. He's so far from answering the question, one could say that his argument in this regard is "not even wrong".
Also his thesis was about hooking up atheists and Christians to MRI machines, assuming that a certain part of the brain was associated with rationality, and showing that Christians don't have this. This is the same MRI machines that showed a dead salmon has thoughts when it sees images.
Can you see why this is a bad experiment?
Are you worth enough salt to have your judgments on other philosophers taken seriously?
Like it or not, in order to be a philosopher, you have to be taken seriously by other philosophers. This extends to mathematicians, physicists and other scientists. If you just write a bunch of BS and no on in the community is convinced by it, you are a C R A N K.
Right now I'm trying to convince the members of a chinese cartoon forum the value of Sam Harris. It's up to you to decide if my posts have merit. I am not speaking to philosophers, about philosophers. I am speaking to autists on an image board.
Yes you are speaking about philosophers when you say none of them take Sam Harris seriously. You don't need to be a philosopher to judge the esteem a certain person (who is also not a philosopher) holds for other philosophers.
free will doesnt really make sense as a concept.
im actually more toward his side than yours.
plus im pretty sure you're misusing that dead salmon study to cast away the validity of neuroscience experiments. Also, i didn't like his study but not for the reasons you said, and the way youve just worded it shows that you actually dont understand what the experiment was trying to do.
>he's a blatant apologist for western imperialism
You act like this is a bad thing... commie scum
>free will doesnt really make sense as a concept.
which concept of free will are you referring to?
He is my favorite Jew.
Your points do not actual call the validity of his reasoning into question. If the study is bogus - fine, but irrelevant, since his arguments remain phrased in their "if-then" form. And your second point is a problem of definitions. Harris frames the terms he uses quite clearly; he describes what he means and what he does not, in order for there to be minimal confusion of terms. And within that framework, his reasoning is quite solid. It doesn't matter that other philosophers have defined free will or consciousness differently.
he talks about shit he doesn't understand and makes moderate immediate assumptions that sometimes don't even mean anything.
it's like listening to my marijuana smoking cousin pretend to know about politics because he just spent three hours watching the young turks
although it is an overused blanket term, sam harris is legitimately pseudo-intellectual tier
he only gets money from it because atheist types don't have much to cling on when it comes to "intellectuals"
this
the idea of being free from deterministic causes, the idea of being a self-determining homunculus.
what is your actual qualms with that experiment? i dont see its problem; it makes sense that we can predict what people are going to do from brain activity. your brain is deterministic.
so what about all the other concepts of free will?
Not him, but at best the experiment says that make CERTAIN TYPES of decisions without conscious input, not all of them. To say otherwise is to be intellectually dishonest.
>The second big issue is the common one with all of these experiments: as noted above, they are testing decisions that are, in fact, mostly subconscious in the first place. We don’t reason out choosing something at random. But free will is all about the choices we make when we reason out decisions, not instinctive or gut reactions or random choices. So, for libertarians, we’re interested in being able to make choices for legitimate reasons, and these experiments test cases where we are told to choose something for no reason. There’s no reason to think that these experiments say anything interesting about those sorts of cases.
ofcourse we make lots of decisions for legitimate reasons and conscious or not, all of these decisions are determined and can be traced in transients of brain activity. i think obviously that experiment is quite constrained and it was a simple task but i think for any choice you're going to get brain activity that predicts it which you arent conscious of per se. people come out with facts or thoughts or things all the time and they dont even know how they got them. what determines our attention in the visual field is something we arent conscious of but its encoded in brain activity. come to think of it its quite strange i think to constrain free will only to conscious activity
You're right actually, the problems I have are with people's claims of what the experiment's results actually prove, not with the experiment itself.
>come to think of it its quite strange i think to constrain free will only to conscious activity
Maybe, maybe. Whether or not you consider unconscious choices to be as much of an expression of free will as conscious choices probably depends on one's idea of the self.
He provides the dumbest and most arrogant bridging of the is-ought gap.
You're right on this. I really don't like Sam Harris, so I was getting a bit passionate. The validity of his arguments is not that bad, but the soundness, I think, is quite bad, and I will say that it stems from how poorly he defines free will and the studies he uses as a springboard to his thought experiment on choice.
>Why don't people like him
Because Zoolander 2 was such a big disappointment
>Why don't people like him?
Christfags hate him because he exposes their laughable beliefs better than anyone since Hitch.
THIS
>grasping for straws
people don't grasp for straws any more, Grandpa
>You may object to him based on his lack of hard STEM knowledge but he doesn't present himself as someone who has that so it's pointless
Why the fuck is this on Veeky Forums? is that way.
The main part of his argument against free will isn't based on neurological studies though, the studies are merely a minor supporting sidenote of the argument. The critical part of the argument is these two things:
A) We live in a universe where free will doesn't physically make any sense. On macroscopic scales the universe follows the iron laws of hard determinism, and on microscopic scales the universe is ruled by probability, neither determinism or randomness gives you free will.
B) Free will doesn't make sense subjectively. You're unaware of the process by which your thoughts are formed. As you are thinking, thoughts merely appear in your consciousness already formed, and you cannot control what the next one will be. You can prove this for yourself experimentally: What is your next thought?
As a long time meditator, Harris focuses mostly on point B, and that's also where most people encounter their difficulty with the idea of free will. People feel like they have it, but that feeling disappears if you spend a bit of time examining your own mind.
If free will doesn't exist there's no point arguing about it, I can spew fallacies at you and I didn't do anything wrong, nobody is ever even "correct" it's just a coincidence that they typed correct things, you can't blame murderers, you can't blame lazy people, you can't praise accomplished people, our entire civilization breaks down.
If it were "scientifically proven" so to speak that free will didn't exist, people would start acting differently because they wouldn't care about consequences as much. This has been experimentally proven. We don't want this.
Basically everything gets a lot more absurd and there becomes no point having any discussions on anything because "point" doesn't even make sense, nothing here matters it's just a coincidence that we're having this conversation
Based on this explanation I think Occam's Razor should lead us to believe free will clearly does exist even if we don't understand why yet
>If free will doesn't exist there's no point arguing about it, I can spew fallacies at you and I didn't do anything wrong, nobody is ever even "correct" it's just a coincidence that they typed correct things,
People can be rational without free will, because rationality has great utility as a tool for surviving and enhancing your well-being. Logic doesn't require free will, take computers as an example where this is implemented.
>you can't blame murderers, you can't blame lazy people, you can't praise accomplished people, our entire civilization breaks down.
Of course you can blame murderers, and still take all the same actions you otherwise would to protect society from them. The thing which changes is that you no longer have a basis to hate people for their actions, similarly to how its irrational to hate a hurricane, a bear, or a malfunctioning robot even though those things can be harmful to people.
>If it were "scientifically proven" so to speak that free will didn't exist, people would start acting differently because they wouldn't care about consequences as much. This has been experimentally proven. We don't want this.
The argument "we should decide it's not true because we don't want it to be true" is kind of a nonstarter.
>I really don't like Sam Harris, so I was getting a bit passionate.
And there you have it. If you where charitable enough to attempt an unprejudiced reevaluation of ben stiller's arguments you might discover that his thinking is quite rigorous actually. Dan Dennet once made a hyperbolic accusation similar to ones you often see in these threads. He called sam's concept of free will "a museum of mistakes". But when Dennet sat down with Harris to parse his beef. Dennet's "a museum of mistakes" quickly got whittled down to "I agree with you on everything except some terminological minutiae". This is the kind of vanity of petty differences that pedantic ennui nourish themselves on.
>If free will doesn't exist there's no point arguing about it,
>Based on this explanation I think Occam's Razor should lead us to believe free will clearly does exist
Listen, at some point you have to entertain the possibility that you're just not bright enough to understand the nuances of the point at issue.
I understand the nuances, you don't
If free will doesn't exist then people have no choice but to write fallacious arguments, and you had no choice but to write that argument, and fish are slippery therefore free will exists
You have no REASON to try and refute that as if it matters, as if I've committed a logical flaw. But I guess I can't hold you accountable for trying to refute it when you're missing my point because if free will doesn't exist you can't help but try and refute it
But I think it exists so I hold you accountable.
And according to you, I can't help but think it exists. And according to me, I'm alright to think it exists. So there's no refutation here, there's no disproval - this is an inherently unfalsifiable issue.
I've expounded on this topic on some other forums but I won't link here because you could identify me
>If free will exists and you think it doesn't -> you're wasting your time and were wrong all along
>If free will exists and you think it exists -> you're all good in the neighborhood bro
>If free will doesn't exist and you think it doesn't exist -> you couldn't help but think what you did so it doesn't matter
>If free will doesn't exist and you think it does exist -> you couldn't help but think what you did so it doesn't matter
Are there any other cases? No. There's only the reality of the situation, and what you think the reality is. And I've enumerated all 4 cases and the implications of each, and in this enumeration these is no situation in which discussing and trying to figure out the problem if free will resolves anything or is in any way useful. So it isn't useful, and we may as well stop thinking about it and take Occam's Razor and say "it exists because we feel like it does" because consciousness is inherently subjective and that's all we can do.
You are thinking this issue is more nuanced than it is. Please point out which situation I've failed to enumerate - there are none.
Maybe you're very young or english isn't your first language (in which case fine), but a statement like
>Based on this explanation I think Occam's Razor should lead us to believe free will clearly does exist
Is just an obvious red flag that there is too much going over your head. Your combative attitude is just adding insult to injury.
Youre like person that doesn't realize they've fallen in a pit and shoo's away anyone approaching to throw you a rope.
>And according to you, I can't help but think it exists. And according to me, I'm alright to think it exists. So there's no refutation here, there's no disproval - this is an inherently unfalsifiable issue.
You don't need anons on an image board to disprove it to you, you can do that for yourself experimentally (assuming you have enough intellectual honesty to actually be interested in the truth instead of just reiterating your naive beliefs):
Simply notice how your mind operates. There is a stream of thoughts which you cannot shut off and which you aren't the conscious author of, you merely experience the sensation of having those thoughts with ability to control what the next thought will be or where the train is going.
That's my claim. If you want to prove you have free will, then explain the mechanism by which you decide what your next thought will be before you think it. If you can't decide what your next though will be, then how are you deciding anything at all? I'm claiming that you're not in conscious control over decisions, and that nobody is.
Of course, even if you could explain how you create your thoughts before you think them, there is still the whole issue about how no mix between physical determinism and quantum randomness gets you anything resembling free will. But we can deal with that after you have explained how you decide what your next thought will be before you think it.
Why do you have to know what your next thought will be before you think it in order for free will to exist? Please substantiate this claim
You just BLACKED my brain, man
Because presumably free will has something to do with being in control of ones decisions. How can you claim to have a choice if you can't control your thoughts? If thoughts, and thus choices, are being made subconsciously, then the "free" in free will doesn't make any sense.
All these discussions are difficult without a rigorous definition of what "free will" even is, which I have yet to see. I'm using the term in a common sense kind of way here.
1.) He never published anything worth shit
2.) He wrote a few shitty books trying to break into meme tier philosophy
3.) Everyone calls him Sam instead of Dr.Harris, it's weird as fuck.
4.) See pic.
>neuroscience without neuroimaging
it's trash
>>He makes a lot of plausible claims, but they're still only claims.
Insightful.
What is plausible is necessarily probable.
I call this property "Prausibility"
Sam Harris makes a lot of prausible claims. They are useful in that If Sam Harris makes a plausible claim of fact it is probable that the claim is indeed factual.
So go tell your mom about Prausibility, I'm trying to spread the word.
>. He seems to criticise American society in a very insincere way, while defending some of its worst aspects
You really strike me as someone who doesn't listen to Sam Harris's podcasts
>If free will doesn't exist there's no point arguing about it, I can spew fallacies at you and I didn't do anything wrong, nobody is ever even "correct" it's just a coincidence that they typed correct things, you can't blame murderers, you can't blame lazy people, you can't praise accomplished people, our entire civilization breaks down.
There is no contradiction with the absence of free will and a functioning society. All that is required for the blame game is what we have already observed - an appearance of free will (or illusion, if you will). It obviously feels right to ascribe independent choices as causes for actions, so that's how our society is structured. That feeling can be said to serve an evolutionary purpose - social cohesion, ambition, action.
Any closer look at your own thought processes will reveal that you are a slave to whims, instincts and spontaneous ideas. And there is no room for a driver's seat in which free will can fit. No fallacious appeal to consequences will change that.
Just because his dissertation is shit doesn't mean anything. Most are. The world is filled with PhDs that make great sandwiches. Doesn't mean you get to spit on their contributions after the fact.
you should listen to this guy an is isn't an ought.
and it isn't a coincidence because there is clearly a reason why people do things. and no people might act abit differently in experimental situations but i doubt it in real life. i certainly don't. it doesn't change my instincts, my gut feelings, how i think people should act.
you seem to have come across your first existential crisis.
your occams razor thing doesn't follow. i feel like youre just grasping for straws.
god i hate dennet.
theres no objectivity in this world. even our perception of the world is not objective. we don't base our ideas on objectivity. we don't hold people accountable because they are, its because we choose them to be. its culturally determined partly.
>inherently unflasifiable
but free will itself doesn't make sense
do you know anything about neuroscience? there are tonnes of important work without neuroimaging, arguably more important than neuroimaging and many things in neuroscience wouldn't even be known or proved without studies that didnt use neuroimaging.
that's only true for certain definitions of free will
Name one (or a few). I'm genuinely curious.
So is your statement objectively true or subjectively true?
LOL
Typical Philosopher saying "You cannot know nuthin"
im not saying you cant know nothing am i, im just saying knowledge is contextualised. our knowledge doesnt have a linear relation to the outside world. im talking more of indirect realism than subjectivism. baskarian free energy. "how do we know whats out there?" "we dont have to"
you slag.
Pretty bad mischaracterization of the exchange. Peterson is an idiot.
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I would like to know, too.
Bump.
Because he doesn't think people should be legally required to think and say certain things.
but all those things are more or less the most accurate thing we have.
By every philosophical or scientific criteria, the self in the way we typically imagine it is illusory.
The only door we have into ethics is our self-perception and our consciousness; otherwise, all things are without meaning, and then, without ethics. The well-being of things that can be aware of their well-being then provide the only means for judging moral good.
And free will isn't compatible with any currently known physics.
Wanna tell me why this is wrong?
>SJeWs
Everyone who uses this term is a Poe or a genuine fucking moron. Which are you?