The absolute weirdness of a deterministic universe

Back in 2012 a short book by neuroscientist and philosopher, Sam Harris, was published. The book has a bit of an odd title - "Free Will". Odd, because Harris does not believe that human beings have free will. He is a hard-core determinist.

Sam Harris is often referred to as one of the 'new atheists' and is included along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and the late Christopher Hitchkens, as one of 'the four horsemen of the anti-apocalypse'. As well as being the author of a number of other best-selling books, a speaker, and the co-founder of Project Reason, Harris has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience.

Obviously he is an intelligent man, but then again . . .

Harris leaves the reader in absolutely no doubt that he believes that determinism represents the true state of the universe: " . . . we know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behaviour, is true" (p. 16), ". . . the future is set – and this includes all our future states of mind and our subsequent behaviour" (p. 29), "You will do whatever it is you do and it is meaningless to assert you could have done otherwise", (p. 43).

Perhaps the most pointed and telling of the many similar assertions in "Free Will" is found on page 37, "You are not in control of your mind . . ."

Wow. Such a claim surely demands a significant pause and a few rereads – "you are not in control of your mind".

And of course Harris is right, if determinism is true. If "unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware," (p. 16), then we cannot possibly have any control over our minds. "Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behaviour – but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control", (p. 29).

But could it possibly be the case, given our actual experience of the world that we live in and indeed, given what Harris himself writes, that he is correct?

Note that he says that "you", i.e. we the readers, "are not in control of your mind". Now it could be that Harris does not include himself amongst those who have no control over their minds - perhaps seeing himself as some sort of superior being from a different dimension - but he doesn't make such a claim and presumably would definitely not see himself in that way. Thus, apparently, he believes that he too has no control over his mind.

Now this is when things get really, really seriously weird.

Here we have an author who has no control over his own mind writing for readers who, equally, have no control over their minds. "The next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience did not bring into being" (p. 34). Thus, according to Harris, the words of that sentence, along with every other sentence of the book, just loomed unintentionally and unbidden out of "the darkness of prior causes" and made their way, via his fingers onto a keyboard and into the book.

Wow, again. The really curious thing is that, somehow despite there being absolutely no control over the whole process ("seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously" p. 6), the letters that happen to be typed seem to form into recognisable words, the words form into syntactically correct sentences, and the entire book forms a comprehensible (albeit bizarre) whole.

It seems as though Harris, despite lacking any control over what he is writing, is somehow transmitting an intelligible message to the readers of the book. However, if his thesis that determinism is true is correct, then that cannot actually be the case at all.

Consider: if we should be in the mountains when an avalanche creates a noise that clearly sounds like, Kill Jack! would it be correct to conclude that the mountain is communicating a message to us? No. No matter how much it may have sounded like meaningful words it would merely have been noise created by falling rocks and ice. Uncontrolled sound is always nothing but meaningless noise or static.

The same principle would apply should some clouds spontaneously form into the shape of, Kill Jack! – these "words" would just be visual static, not information-bearing symbols. Clouds, like avalanches, are the product of unconscious laws of physics interacting with mindless matter. Any shapes or noise that these phenomena happen to produce are just that, meaningless shapes and noise.

In the same way, the words in Harris's book, coming as they do from a mind that is not in control of what it is producing, are, all appearances to the contrary, not information-bearing "words" at all, but merely marks on paper. Everything that flows forth from Harris, whether it be in the form of print or sound, is solely the end-product of a long chain of events involving the unconscious laws of physics interacting with mindless matter. Thus his words have no more information content than do either the shapes of clouds or the noises of avalanches.

The reader of Harris's book may however feel that the words really are communicating a message, but again, in a deterministic universe, the thoughts that come into the mind of the reader are just whatever the laws of physics interacting with matter happen to throw up at that point, and nothing else.

If determinism is true we are all essentially uncontrolled, noise-making puppets with our strings pulled mindlessly by the physical universe. Because we always remain part of the universe we can never cut our strings and step outside the universe in order to objectively evaluate anything, including our own words. We effectively communicate nothing and know nothing.

Clearly then, Harris's thesis of determinism being true is self-defeating. If one asserts that there are valid, comprehensible reasons for believing that determinism is true, as Harris does, then in doing so he shows that determinism must necessarily be false.

Everything in our experience of life shouts at us that human beings do have free will. Even Harris, despite his denial of free will, repeatedly contradicts himself in the book, even within the one sentence: "Dispensing with the illusion of free will allows us to focus on the things that matter", p. 53. No Sam, if we have no free will, no control over our minds, we cannot choose to dispense with, or focus on, anything. "Where people can change, we can demand that they do so", p. 62. But don't you remember Sam, you said on p. 29 that "the future is set"?

Our whole lives are based on the premise that humans are genuine free agents yet most philosophers strongly deny that such agency exists. Nevertheless, we hold each other largely accountable for our actions (philosophy professors still mark their students' papers!). Indeed, critics of this article may deride me for rejecting determinism but then their derision can only truly make sense if determinism is false.

So why do people like Harris deny human free?

Could it be because free will would seem to be possible only if there is something more to human beings than just their physical bodies? That there has to be something non-material in our being that enables us to deliberately override the otherwise inexorable consequences of prior physical states? But if humans do have a non-physical element in our make-up, how could that have come about? Of more particular concern for atheistic philosophers, what does the allowance for a non-material element in human beings open the door to?

There we have it. Even though denying human free will flies in the face of life as we know it; even though arguments for determinism are ultimately self-defeating, many atheistic philosophers like Sam Harris will bite the bullet of absolute weirdness and say things like, "You are not in control of your mind."