Sam: “Free will is making decisions independent of your neurochemistry, or other physical causes. A decision is made when an answer arrives in consciousness.”
You: “Free will is making decisions when you could have chosen otherwise, if your reasons or circumstances were different. A decision is made after a deliberative process, when you finally utter your choice, or have some feeling of having finally decided.”
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your definition, but I would guess there is no actual disagreement about the underlying physical world here.
It almost seems like a real, physical disagreement could be whether or not the conscious mind is involved in decision-making, but there’s obviously no way Sam would say something like “consciousness is causally disconnected from the rest of the universe, and can never influence future decision making processes in the brain.” He speaks the way he does because he’s using a different definition of “choice”/”decision” than you are. It’s, again, semantic. It’s not like he would disagree that the process you laid out in the section “Free Will As a Deliberative Algorithm” exists. You both agree about how the brain works, you just don’t agree with what to call things. I don’t agree that any of your “Final Cruxes” are non-semantic in nature. They either come from a difference in definition of the term “free will”, or the terms “choice”/”decision”.
The semantic nature of this debate is revealed when you say things like:
I don’t understand why he seems to place so much importance in ultimate authorship
This means, “Sam is using the term ‘free will’ to mean X, but I’d prefer if he meant Y.” The reason he places so much emphasis on it, by the way, is because some people feel they are able to escape determinism through the raw power of their consciousness, and it’s those people Sam is arguing against by showing that everything in consciousness is the result of some proximate, non-conscious input.
As for which version of the term “free will” we should use, I personally don’t care. I only really hear the term get used in free-will debates anyway.
there’s obviously no way Sam would say something like “consciousness is causally disconnected from the rest of the universe, and can never influence future decision making processes in the brain.”
But what does he say? I have not read him and I’m not about to (he does not by a long way make my own very short list of “people who are pretty much always right”), but the extracts in the OP sound epiphenomenalistic. Consciousness in his account only observes, never acts. It could be cut off without affecting the organism. This is as incoherent an idea as p-zombies.
He’s a neuroscientist and a materialist, and I don’t think he’s an epiphenomenalist.
In the excerpts in the OP, he gives an epiphenomenalistic vibe because he’s responding to people who think that free will allows a person to violate the laws of physics (or a person who thinks a lack of free will implies a complete lack of ability to make choices). He says, “You are part of the universe and there is no place for you to stand outside of its causal structure.” He tries to show that consciousness is entirely downstream of physical causes. This does not imply, however, that consciousness is not also upstream of physical effects. Here’s another excerpt where he mentions consciousness is part of a larger causal framework:
There is no free will, but choices matter, and this isn’t a paradox, your desires, intentions and decisions arise out of the present state of the universe, which includes your brain and your soul. If such a thing exists, along with all of their influences, your mental states are part of a causal framework.
Yeah, there’s not much disagreement about the physical world here. But I do think a framework that leads to distinctions between choosing orange juice and having a muscle spasm, and being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff, is a better framework (e.g. has more explanatory power) than one that doesn’t. So I was thinking these were also conceptual differences, in addition to semantic ones. Like I said in the other comment, I don’t see how his framework makes sense of the pathologies I mentioned.
Sometimes it seems like there’s an empirical difference regarding the conscious mind, but I also agree with you that he wouldn’t really make the claim that it does NOTHING, although at times he seems to.
Either way, I still think this matters for more than free will debates. It definitely has implications in law. The Radiolab episode Blame talks about some of these.
Sam: “Free will is making decisions independent of your neurochemistry, or other physical causes. A decision is made when an answer arrives in consciousness.”
You: “Free will is making decisions when you could have chosen otherwise, if your reasons or circumstances were different. A decision is made after a deliberative process, when you finally utter your choice, or have some feeling of having finally decided.”
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your definition, but I would guess there is no actual disagreement about the underlying physical world here.
It almost seems like a real, physical disagreement could be whether or not the conscious mind is involved in decision-making, but there’s obviously no way Sam would say something like “consciousness is causally disconnected from the rest of the universe, and can never influence future decision making processes in the brain.” He speaks the way he does because he’s using a different definition of “choice”/”decision” than you are. It’s, again, semantic. It’s not like he would disagree that the process you laid out in the section “Free Will As a Deliberative Algorithm” exists. You both agree about how the brain works, you just don’t agree with what to call things. I don’t agree that any of your “Final Cruxes” are non-semantic in nature. They either come from a difference in definition of the term “free will”, or the terms “choice”/”decision”.
The semantic nature of this debate is revealed when you say things like:
This means, “Sam is using the term ‘free will’ to mean X, but I’d prefer if he meant Y.” The reason he places so much emphasis on it, by the way, is because some people feel they are able to escape determinism through the raw power of their consciousness, and it’s those people Sam is arguing against by showing that everything in consciousness is the result of some proximate, non-conscious input.
As for which version of the term “free will” we should use, I personally don’t care. I only really hear the term get used in free-will debates anyway.
But what does he say? I have not read him and I’m not about to (he does not by a long way make my own very short list of “people who are pretty much always right”), but the extracts in the OP sound epiphenomenalistic. Consciousness in his account only observes, never acts. It could be cut off without affecting the organism. This is as incoherent an idea as p-zombies.
He’s a neuroscientist and a materialist, and I don’t think he’s an epiphenomenalist.
In the excerpts in the OP, he gives an epiphenomenalistic vibe because he’s responding to people who think that free will allows a person to violate the laws of physics (or a person who thinks a lack of free will implies a complete lack of ability to make choices). He says, “You are part of the universe and there is no place for you to stand outside of its causal structure.” He tries to show that consciousness is entirely downstream of physical causes. This does not imply, however, that consciousness is not also upstream of physical effects. Here’s another excerpt where he mentions consciousness is part of a larger causal framework:
(https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/making-sense-with-sam-harris/241-final-thoughts-on-free-will)
This doesn’t sound different from OP’s view, at a physical level.
Yeah, there’s not much disagreement about the physical world here. But I do think a framework that leads to distinctions between choosing orange juice and having a muscle spasm, and being convinced by an argument and falling off a cliff, is a better framework (e.g. has more explanatory power) than one that doesn’t. So I was thinking these were also conceptual differences, in addition to semantic ones. Like I said in the other comment, I don’t see how his framework makes sense of the pathologies I mentioned.
Sometimes it seems like there’s an empirical difference regarding the conscious mind, but I also agree with you that he wouldn’t really make the claim that it does NOTHING, although at times he seems to.
Either way, I still think this matters for more than free will debates. It definitely has implications in law. The Radiolab episode Blame talks about some of these.