The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: A Review of Free Will, by Sam Harris, Part III

Click here to see Part I of this review and here to see Part II

Much of Harris' argument against free will is fueled by assertions--assertions that simply assume what he is trying to prove. In fact, much of his case consists of sheer bluff, as if saying what he is trying to prove with enough bravado is sufficient to prove his case:

"There is," he says, "simply no intellectually respectable position from which to deny this." No denying this. Check. "There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events." No question. Got it. "My mental life is simply given to me by the cosmos." Right. Blessed be the Almighty Cosmos.

He argues that we are not aware of the neurological events that produce our thoughts, moods, perceptions, and behavior, and that, since we are not aware of them, they must produce our thoughts. Not only does this not logically follow, it simply assumes that these things are "produced" by neurological events, when this is the very point at issue.

He is singularly impressed with the evidence that neurological events seem to precede the thoughts they "produce":

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain's motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move ... More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict that 80 percent accuracy a person's decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.

"These findings," he adds, "are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions." Why? He argues that this shows that "some moments before you are aware of what you will do next, your brain has already determined what you will do." But before we can decide what we can infer from the evidence we have to ask exactly what the evidence is.

He appears to be saying that there are two chemical events being detected by scientific instruments: one which is the physical event that causes the decision, and one which is the physical event that constitutes our awareness that we are making the decision.

The first question is how we know which event--the one that Harris identifies as pre-determinative and the one that he identifies as the awareness of making the decision--is the decision itself. He seems to identify the latter event--the awareness of the decision--as the decision itself. But an awareness of a decision isn't necessarily the decision. In fact, on the face of it, it would make more sense to think that the awareness of making a decision is a separate act from the decision itself. The mental act of thinking about something and the mental act of thinking about your mental act of thinking about something would clearly be two mental acts.

In other words, by what reasoning does he say that the first chemical event is pre-determinative and the second what is pre-determined? Why couldn't the first event be the decision and the second the awareness that we have made the decision? Given Harris' penchant for making assumptions he has not justified, it seems like we are justified in being suspicious. There may be some reason to interpret it the way he does, but he does not give us enough information to know what it is. It is not even clear that he has considered any alternative interpretation than the one that favors his case.

So when Harris asks us what we should think about a situation (which he clearly considers possible) in which   experimenters could know, a split second before you made it, what your decision would be, we could simply ask what justifies them in thinking that the neurological event they had thought was the event which caused the decision was not the decision itself, and the latter the neurological event co-incident with awareness of the decision they had just made?

In fact, one question is whether we can ever reliably know the answer to this question at all.

And then Harris makes this rather strange statement:

Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors.

You would? Think of what would be necessary, if what Harris says here is true, to drive a car: You would need to be aware of all the factors that make the car go, and you would have to have complete control over them. Now I'm pretty sure most people on the road have no clue how their engine was put together or how it works, and they have very little control over how these factors work together at any given moment. But they seem to get around just fine. In fact, Harris' assertion here is just silly.

Then Harris makes statements which are simply ludicrous. He says, "If you don't know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control." Huh? You have to know what your decision is before you make it in order for it to be a free will decision? Why? And if this is the case, then what about the neurological event that Harris would say would have to constitute the knowledge of what the decision will be? Would we need to know what that knowledge would be before we had it too? How far back do we need to go?

Then there are the statements full import of which one must meditate on for long periods of time in highly oxygenated air in order to fully appreciate: "A voluntary action," he says, "is accompanied by the felt intention to carry it out." No kidding? Really? "We do not know what we intend to do until the intention arises." No! Get out!

And all this in preparation for the next chapter, in which we are told that it is those who believe in free will who are not being rational.

To be continued in Part IV.

The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It: A review of Free Will, by Sam Harris, Part I

This is the first part in a week-long series of posts on Sam Harris' recent book, Free Will:

In a recent article in Britain's New Statesman, Steven Poole lamented the glut of what he calls "neurotrash"--the attempt to explain every human thought and action in terms of neuroscience and cognitive psychology:

An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.

Free Will, by Sam Harris, must now take its place in this plague of panegyrics to the pre-frontal cortex.

The first thing we must get clear is something that Harris himself, given his thesis, must certainly agree with: he had no choice in writing this book. But it has little to do with the neurological state of his brain. He operates under a necessity only a little less deterministic: the necessity that follows on the nature of his dogma.

As an atheistic materialist, Harris really has no choice but to champion the idea that free will is a delusion. The materialist, said Chesterton, "is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." Materialists like Harris keep asking why we make the decisions we do, and what other explanation there could be than the physiological. The answer, of course, is the psychological, the philosophical, the whimsical, and about a thousand others.

But these violate the central tenets of his narrow atheistic dogma, and so have been dealt with severely by his materialistic philosophical Inquisition.

There is something ironic about the position of atheists like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state--including their position on this issue-- is the effect of a physical, not logical cause.

By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent which must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.

And this is not only a mortal consequence for Harris as the one trying to prove his point, it is also problematic from the reader's perspective: If we are convinced by Harris's logic, we would have to consider this conviction as something determined not by the rational strength of his logic, but by the entirely irrational arrangement of the chemicals in our brains. They might, as Harris would have to say, coincide, but their relation would be completely arbitrary. If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, that any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn't rational or irrational, it just is.

If what Harris says is true, then our assent to what we view as the rational strength of his position may appear to us to involve our choice to assent or not to assent to his ostensibly rational argument, but (again, if it is true) in truth cannot be any such thing, since we do not have that choice--or any other.

Indeed, it is hard to see how, if free will is an illusion, we could ever know it.

But this complication does not appear to have occurred to Harris, so let us confine ourselves on those that have occurred to him and see what we can make of them.

To be continued in Part II

How Morality "Seems" to Sam Harris: A review of The Moral Landscape

Alisdair MacIntyre points out that the only rational choices when it comes to a philosophy of morality are Aristotle and Neitzsche. Sam Harris, the atheist author of Letters to a Christian Nation, instead chooses Pollyanna.

In his most recent book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Determines Human Values, Harris claims to offer an argument for his position that science can objectively ground morality. While his method of proof is long on earnestness, it is short on argument. In fact, he seems to think that he can establish many of his conclusions by simply willing them.

All throughout the book, we encounter expressions that assure us in the most sincere terms that what follows them is true: terms such as "are bound to," "in my experience," "there simply must be," "cannot be," "it seems inevitable," "surely," "the good life must relate," "will necessarily," "cannot be denied," "science should one day," "most of them are surely wrong," "we must first acknowledge" "change will necessarily depend," "values seem to arise," "it seems to me," "it seems clear," "there is every reason to think," "is bound to be," "of course," "I believe," "there is simply no question," "there must be," "the inescapable fact," "we already have good reason to believe," "I consider," "almost surely," "we can be reasonably confident," "could also," "it seems quite possible," "this certainly appears," "do not seem to," "there is probably," "it is widely believed," "we all know this," "it is only reasonable," "at the very least," "I have no doubt," "I am nearly as sure," "I strongly believe," "it is quite clear to me," "it seems possible," "it is easy to see," "it also seems," "I suspect," "be assured," "apparently," "it seems quite clear," "we can imagine," "we can see," "it now seems," "it is reasonable to wonder," "there is no reason to think," "there is a sense in which," "there can be no doubt," "I cannot conceive," "it is also conceivable," etc., etc., etc.

You get the idea.

Real logical expressions like "for," "since," "because," and "therefore" don't stand a chance against the avalanche of seemses and musts and surelys. In fact, Harris' argument is powered largely by adverbs.

Just several pages in I started to notice this tendency to presume upon the reader's presumption. Then I kept noticing it, and I saw it again, and again, and again. I just started circling them as I encountered them, page after page. There were key components to Harris's "argument" which were just "supposed" to be clear to me: to be "undoubtedly" true, to be "reasonable," to be "probably" be this way, or "inescapably" that.

It is a rhetoric that fits the photograph--a photograph that graces all his books and captures the look of the Randian hero: confident, determined, and free of all doubt.

I finally realized that Harris just thinks that the main steps in his case that science can establish morality are obvious. He wasn't arguing with me, his reader, that his assumptions about these things were true, he was expecting me to simply acquiesce to their self-evident truth on the mere grounds of his confidence in his own assertions.

When you're setting forth a position, it's reasonable to assume what you're readers actually do assume. But when you are overturning 2,500 years of thought on an issue (really only about 400 years worth, since he only really tries to counter Hume--the prior tradition he ignores), it's probably not a good idea to assume what your reader does not actually take for granted.

One of the admirable things about St. Thomas Aquinas is that he always tried to put his opponents' arguments into a rational form, sometimes stating them more logically than they did. Since Harris himself won't do it for us, let's try to cast his argument into some kind of logical form. If we did, his main argument would run something like this:

Questions about well being can be scientifically understood
Moral questions are questions about well being
Therefore moral questions can be scientifically understood

Harris's whole argument hangs on his middle term: "well-being." If it means the same in his major (or first) premise as it does in his minor (or second) premise, then the argument has some plausibility: he can reasonably claim to have connected together the two ideas in his conclusion--morality and science. But if it doesn't, then he has committed the fallacy of equivocation, and the argument falls apart.

And his concept of well-being will have to have more support than Harris's own assertions of "seems" or "appears" or "I strongly believe."

What Harris does--wittingly or unwittingly--is bank on our traditional moral conception of "well-being" in his minor premise and then go on happily defining "well-being" in an entirely scientific and non-ethical way for purposes of his major premise, so that, by the time he gets done, he has two entirely different middle terms on his hands that cease to be able to keep the subject and predicate of his conclusion together. He has, fact, constructed his whole argument on this equivocation--and the term "well-being," being sufficiently vague, suits his purpose nicely.

It's a good try. But no one should be fooled.

Harris starts out by observing what he considers to be the two main schools of moral philosophy: the religious school that considers that moral truth exists because "God has woven it into the very fabric of reality"; and the evolutionary school that believes that moral values are culturally constructed. These are two of the three standard schools of ethics: the first is duty ethics, and the second consequentialism. Both, he says, are mistaken.

But the real bogey throughout the book is David Hume's "fact/value"distinction, a distinction which, given certain presuppositions (one's which Harris and other New Atheists share) prevents you from going from one to the other. Facts are things that are; values are things that should be; and things that are and things that should be are two entirely different kinds of things. To confuse them is commit what philosophers call a "category mistake."

To say that science, the study of what is, can have something to say about what ought to be is like applying the standards of what constitutes good music to determine how to bake a cake, or saying that the standards of good accounting practice can be used to determine the quality of a piece of music.

This distinction is assumed by most advocates of both schools Harris mentions: protestants assume it as much as secular philosophers, although it is largely rejected in Catholic thought. Harris is clearly aware of this problem, and articulates it competently in the introduction. The problem is that, once it is acknowledged, the then proceeds as if he had never heard of it.

Catholics (at least those in the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition) largely form the third school of ethics--virtue ethics, in which you can get around the distinction because of the prior distinction between man as he is and man as he would be if he achieved his telos or purpose. Both of these things are facts--the way man is and the telos which is the fulfillment of his nature, and ethics is simply the best way from one to the other.

But Harris does not believe in an objective telos--or that man has a particular nature to which this telos would correspond. So how does he get around the fact/value distinction? And this leads us to the second main argument of the book.

Harris argues that if factual statements and ethical statements both derive from similar brain processes, then they are the same kind of belief. He doesn't argue for this view, he just asserts it. And he seems to think that his assertion can be transformed into an argument by simply piling on evidence that both derive from similar brain states. But the problem in bridging the gap between the fact that a particular brain process occurs for two different kinds of belief and the conclusion that brain state to kind of belief is no less daunting then bridging the gap between facts and values.

Once again, we are forced to do Harris' work for him. Here is the argument:

Any belief that is produced by a certain brain process is the same kind of belief as any other belief produced by the same brain process
Factual beliefs and moral beliefs are both produced by the same brain process
Therefore, factual beliefs and moral beliefs are the same kind of beliefs

Harris spends all his time proving his minor premise, and simply assumes his major premise. He never attempts to prove it, yet it is precisely the assertion at issue.

"[B]eliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain," he says on p. 11. "The division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of underlying brain function," he asserts on p. 121.

He has tracked his seemingly divergent quarry and, following the trail to hole in the ground he calls the "medial pre-frontal cortex" (which he invests with the authority of scientific mysticism by crowning it with an acronym: MPFC), he calms the hounds and declares he has proven the objects of his hunt to be the same.

But why should anyone believe that a particular process--or a particular geographical location of the brain--dictates or limits the kind of thought or belief that occurs in it? Why does the nature or meaning of a statement have anything to do with the fact that it derives from a certain "brain process"? It is as if someone were to tell you that beef and milk are essentially the same thing, since they both derive from a cow, or that fried chicken and eggs easy-over were essentially the same kind of food because they are both the product of a chicken.

The same brain produces different kind of beliefs. Why shouldn't the same gland produce them?
He doesn't say. It apparently "seems" that way to him and "no doubt" must "appear" that it is "only reasonable."

If a particular brain process can only produce the same kind of thing, does that mean that if two contradictory statements derive from the same brain process (a contingency not precluded in Harris' account) that truth and falsity are fundamentally the same? Again, it all hangs on whether we are assured by those comforting adverbs.

It is the same old scientific reductionism that we constantly hear being invoked, and seldom hear being rationally justified. It certainly isn't in this book.

And this brings us to our third point concerning Harris' book. The most publicized passage in it truly sums up the book:

Throughout this book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call "the moral landscape"-- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving--different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.--will translate into movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing.

"Well-being" and "human flourishing" serve interchangeably as equivocal terms in Harris' argument. But this passage highlights another weakness in Harris' rhetoric: he employs metaphors that masquerade as arguments.

His rhetoric of "peaks" and "valleys" is an old weapon in the quiver of those who reject traditional morality, and the defense against it was articulated over 100 years ago. In his 1908 book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton describes the tactic as taking "refuge in material metaphors:

[I]n fact, is the chief mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high." It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.

Chesterton points to the same tendency in Nietzsche:

Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.

Harris' "peaks" and "valleys" serve the same role as Nietzshe's "higher" and "lower": they create the illusion of moral substance. He invokes them just like he invokes "well-being" and "human flourishing": as a sort of incantation he thinks will make the real problems with his argument go away. But we are never told exactly how it does this.

And so we are left with two different conceptions of well-being or flourishing, one a truly ethical conception which renders the minor premise of his first argument meaningful, and another a purely emotive or utilitarian conception which serves to establish his major premise. We are left devoid of any rationale for believing that the nature of a brain process dictates anything about the ontological or epistemological character of the judgments it produces.

And we are left with the feeling that, in the final analysis, his "moral landscape" with its "peaks" and "valleys" sounds attractive and plausible, but when you actually investigate it you find it doesn't show anything about how science determines human values, but is little more than the product of Harris' own imagination.

Finally, there is the whole issue of the legitimacy of Harris' project. What, if anything can science say about morality? How can a discipline devoted and designed only to tell us the how say anything the why or the whether? As Alastair MacIntyre has pointed out, the moral project of the Enlightenment has failed. Morality cannot be grounded in any of the things so many modern thinkers have thought it could be: the reason, the will, or the emotions. Kant, Kierkegaard, and Hume all come up short in their attempts to establish in on their respective bases. It defies any such analysis.

The only ethics worthy of the name was abandoned at the Renaissance: the classical conception which incorporates formal and final causality: that everything, including man, has a nature and a purpose, and that the approximation of that nature and the accomplishment of that purpose are what make him more truly what he really is. To say that a man is a "good man" is no fundamentally different than saying that dog is a "good dog" or a tree is a "good tree." Is it being what it really is and is it serving the purpose intrinsic to it? If it is, then it's good. If it's not, then it's not.

That's all you can say.

As to what the nature and purpose of human being is another matter, but it doesn't help in the task of determining these things to say that they don't exist. And those who say that they don't exist have the responsibility, if they want to cling to a notion of right and wrong, to provide an alternative account. So far, all such attempts have failed, and Harris' is not exactly one of the more impressive ones.