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.
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.