Sam Harris on "Free Will"

So you all know Sam from his first book, *The End of Faith*, that put him on the map. Uh, and as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or the non-apocalypse, I guess it would be, along with, uh, Dennett, and Dawkins, and Hitchens, and Harris. Like a law firm, Sam has the unique ability to translate difficult subjects into really crystal-clear writing, an economy of words. And *A Letter to a Christian Nation* was the embodiment of that, a perfect statement of those arguments, and a nice, short addition. And then *The Moral Landscape* laid out his his arguments as he presented it here on stage last year on the, uh, sort of foundations, using science for some sort of moral reasoning. And now he's moved on to *Free Will*. Uh, and I want to note, it's a great read. I've already read it, and you can tell it's a, it's a thin read. Well, so the future of publishing is moving more toward, uh, get to the point, which is good, uh, because a lot of authors ramble on too long. Sam can say in, you know, 10,000 words what it takes a philosopher like 400,000 words to do, right? So, uh, this is, uh, I think is a good sign. It's, uh, uh, of sort of cutting through all the obfuscation and getting straight to the point. Uh, and so with that, please help me welcome Sam Harris.

[Applause]

Thank you, Michael. Um, first, let me say that was a great debate. That was a lot of fun, and I thought a, a, um, a really good format for a debate. And I want to thank Michael, and Dinesh, and Sean, and Ian for, for letting me tag along for this event. And you'll have to forgive my cold. I've got, uh, more cough medicine on board than is, uh, advised. And, um, so if I do anything very strange over the course of the next hour, like convert to Christianity, you'll know what happened.

Now, as many of you know, I, I spend a fair amount of time arguing that there's a conflict between religion and science. And the conflict is deep and unavoidable and worth taking seriously. And I think science must simply win the argument in the end, without any apologies. But the truth is that science has far more inflammatory things to say about religion than we tend to admit. It's, it's always struck me as very odd that the, the point of conflict between science and religion for nearly a century, actually over a century now, has been the subject of evolution. Why does anyone care about evolution? Yes, it renders the account of human origins in Genesis false, and therefore, by association, casts the, the rest of scripture into some doubt. But nothing about our day-to-day lives depends upon our not acknowledging that we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. I can, can sort of understand why religious people are uncomfortable with the fact that our ancestors made it with the ancestors of chimps, and not just once, for a million years. Took us a million years to get those chimps out of our system, apparently. So that's a little embarrassing. Uh, but apart from that, it's hard to see why anyone would care.

Now, I want to speak today about a far more sensitive subject. And it is, in fact, sensitive to many atheists, and that's the illusion of Free Will. And I want to talk about this because the, uh, illusion of Free Will is as certain a fact as the truth of evolution in my mind. And unlike evolution, understanding this truth about the human mind has the potential to change our, our sense of, of, uh, moral goodness and what it would mean to, to create a just society. The question of Free Will touches nearly everything people care about: religion, public policy, politics, the, the legal system, feelings of personal accomplishment, emotions like guilt and pride and remorse. So much of, of, of human life seems to depend on our viewing one another as conscious agents capable of free choice. So if the scientific community were ever to declare Free Will an illusion, as I think we eventually must, I think it would precipitate a culture war far more acrimonious than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution.

Now, I hope to do two things in this talk. I hope to convince you that Free Will is an illusion. And so I hope to take up the challenge that Dinesh laid down in the debate. And it's worse than an illusion; it's actually a totally incoherent idea, uh, which is to say, it's impossible to describe a universe in which it could be true. Not only is it untrue, it's, it's, it's hard to make sense of what's even being claimed to be true. Uh, and I also hope to convince you that understanding this truth about the human mind actually matters, and that it can change the way we view morality and, and questions of justice.

Now, the, the popular conception of Free Will seems to rest on two assumptions. The first is that each of us was free to behave differently than we did in the past. You became a fireman, and yet you could have become a policeman. You chose chocolate, but you could have chosen vanilla. It certainly seems like this is the world we're living in. The second assumption is that we are the conscious source of our thoughts and actions. And so that, the, your experience of wanting to do something is, in fact, the proximate cause of your doing that something. You feel that you want to move, and then you move. Okay, you are doing it. You, the conscious witness of your life.

Now, unfortunately, we, we know that both of these assumptions are just untrue. The first problem is that we live in a world of cause and effect. And there's no way of, of, of thinking about cause and effect that allows us to say that the buck stops here. Okay, the buck never stops. Okay, it either our wills are determined by prior causes, a long chain of prior causes, and we're not responsible for them, or they're the product of chance, and we're not responsible for them, or there's some combination of chance and determinism. But no combination seems to give you the Free Will that people cherish.

Now, consider a generic serial killer. Okay, his, his choice to commit his last murder was determined by neurophysiological events in his brain, which were in turn, in turn determined by prior causes: bad genes, the developmental effects of an unhappy childhood, a night of lost sleep because a car alarm was going off down the street. These, these events precede any conscious decision to, to act. So, what, what does it mean to say that this murderer committed his crime of his own free will? Okay, if this statement means anything, it must mean that he could have behaved differently. He could have resisted the impulse to commit the murder, or he could have declined to feel the impulse altogether. And, and not on the basis of some random influences over which he had no conscious control, but, but because he was actually the, the conscious author of his thoughts and actions.

Now, the problem is, no one has been able to describe a way in which mental and physical events could arise that would make sense of this claim of freedom. Now, when we assume that violent criminals have such freedom, of course, we reflexively blame them for their actions. But when we, when we look at this wider net of causality, the basis for placing blame seems to evaporate. The moment we catch sight of a stream of causes that reach back into childhood and beyond, the, the sense of his culpability begins to disappear. And to say that he would have done otherwise, or could have done otherwise, had he chosen to, is, is simply to say he would have lived in a different universe had he been in a different universe.

As sickening as I might find such a person's behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with him, Adam for Adam, I would be him. There, there's no extra part of me that could, could resist the impulse to victimize innocent people. And, and even if you believe that every one of us harbors an immortal soul, this problem of responsibility remains. I cannot take credit for the fact that I don't have the soul of a psychopath. So, if I, if I had truly been in this person's shoes, if I had his genes and life experience and an identical brain, or an identical soul in an identical state, I would have behaved as he did, and for the same reasons. Nobody picks their parents or the society into which they were born. Nobody picks the, the life influences that shape the development of their nervous system. You are no more responsible for the, the micro-structure of your brain at this moment than you are for your height.

So, so the role of luck in our lives appears decisive. One has to be very unlucky to have the mind, mind, and brain of a psychopath. Now, but, but the significance of luck is very difficult to admit because it seems to totally destabilize our sense of, of morality. And yet, in specific circumstances, it's, it's very easy to admit. So, if you imagine this murderer was discovered to have a brain tumor in, in the appropriate spot in his brain that would explain his violent impulses, well, then that is obviously exculpatory. Then he is just a victim, or we view him as a victim of biology, and our moral intuitions shift automatically. But I would argue that a, a brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. Okay? And if we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer's brain, that would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it. If we could see how the, the wrong genes were being relentlessly transcribed, if we could see how, how this person's genome and, and entanglement with other people and ideas and events throughout life had sculpted the micro-structure of his brain so that it would, was guaranteed to produce violent states of mind and violent behavior, the basis for placing blame in the sense that we usually do would disappear.

Now, of course, this is a problem that scientists and philosophers are well aware of. And many people think they have arguments that allow us to keep Free Will in play, even in light of, of these facts. And I'll, I'll talk about some of those. But I want to suggest to you that the problem of Free Will is actually deeper than this. It's deeper than the problem of cause and effect. And most people think that we, we have the problem is we, we have a subjective experience of free will, but it can't be mapped onto physical reality. You, I'm about to argue that Free Will doesn't even correspond to any subjective fact about us. And, and if you pay attention to your experience closely, you can notice this. If you pay attention, you can see that you no more decide the next thing you think than the next thing I say. Thoughts simply appear in consciousness, very much like my words may. What, what are you going to think next? What am I going to say next? I could, I could suddenly start talking about the pleasures of snowshoeing. Where did that come from? From where? From your point of view, it came out of nowhere. Okay? But the same thing is happening in the privacy of your own mind. You, you've all made an effort to be here and to stay this extra hour to hear, presumably, to hear what I have to say about free will. But there's also a voice in your head that is just saying things. Haven't you noticed? And, and, and many of these things have nothing to do with what I'm talking about. You're struggling to, to follow my train of thought, but there's competition. You're, you, you suddenly start thinking things like, "I should probably stop drinking diet soda." Thoughts just emerge in consciousness. We are not authoring them. To, to that would require that we, we think them before we think them.

[Laughter]

If you can't control your next thought, and you don't know what it's going to be until it arises, where is your freedom of will? Now, at this moment, many of you are thinking, "What the hell is he talking about?" Here, here's what I'm talking about. You didn't pick that thought either. We'll come back to this point. Okay?

So now, of course, in a sense, we do think our thoughts before we think them, or at least our brain does. And much of this thinking is, is something we never hear about. We're conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment. And we continually notice changes in our experience in thoughts and moods and sensations and behavior. But we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that, that produce those changes. We consider the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. You feel free to try this. There's no shame in this. The, the contact appears simultaneous. Okay? But we know at the level of the brain that it can't be. We know that, that the input reaches from the finger reaches sensory cortex after the input from the nose. And this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. If, if you're of a, a mind to experiment, it works with your toes also. So, our brains correct for this timing discrepancy by clearly buffering the inputs in memory and then delivering the apparent simultaneity to consciousness. So, so your, so our experience of the present moment is, in, in a very real sense, a memory of the present moment. And even the simplest conscious sensations are built upon unconscious mechanisms and unconscious processing, of which we are fundamentally unaware.

Needless to say, this unconscious machinery also governs what we think and feel and do and intend, as well, not, not just perception. And that is where notions of Free Will and moral responsibility begin to get squeezed. And many people have now demonstrated in a lab that a person's choices, behavioral choices, can, voluntary choices, can be detected some moments, sometimes seconds, before they are consciously aware of, of having made the choice. So the physiologist Benjamin Libet quite famously did this with EEG. But this basic paradigm has been replicated with fMRI and even direct recordings from the cortex in surgical patients. In each of these experiments, people are given a very simple task: to push a left button as opposed to a right button, or to move their left hand versus the right hand. And they just have to watch a clock and decide when they were first consciously aware of, of committing to the left or the right. Okay? And you do this, and, and, and several experiments over the years have shown that people can go back and forth as much as they want. They become consciously aware of when they've, when they're committed, they make their choice. And yet, the experimenters, by scanning the brain through one modality or another, know some half a second, a second, depending on what the decision is, even several seconds before they do what they're going to do. Okay? So, so as a result of this work, it is, is actually scientifically uncontroversial to say that some moments before you were aware of what you are going to do in a simple, in making a simple voluntary action, at a time at which you appear to be subjectively free to do whatever you want, your brain has already determined what it is you will do. And then you become gradually aware of this decision while, while you still think you're in the process of making it.

Needless to say, this, this is very difficult to reconcile with a conventional notion of free will. Because this timing discrepancy demonstrates that it would be possible for someone to know what you're going to do before you do, and while you still think you're free to make up your mind. But the truth is, I think, actually too much has been made of this research. The truth is, even if there were no time lag, even if a conscious intention were truly simultaneous with its neurophysiological underpinnings, there would still be no room for free will. Because you still wouldn't know why it is you do what you do. And again, this is a, a fact you can notice about yourself directly. Let's, let's run a little experiment. Think of a city, any anywhere in the world. You can choose any city you want. You know, of course, I, I could have primed you. I could have artfully placed cues in my speech in the last few minutes that would make you more likely to think of Las Vegas, for instance. So, just to be on the safe side, don't pick Vegas. But pick a city, any city. And, and just be, pay attention to what this conscious process is like. Now, the first thing to notice about this is, this is as free a decision as you are ever going to make in your life. Okay? You have all the cities in the world to choose from, and I'm just asking you to pick one. Now, several cities have probably occurred to you. And just focus on one. So, everybody got a city? Well, I'm, I'm sorry to say that you all picked the wrong city. Uh, don't ask me how I know this, but I do. So, I just want you to do this again, just so you can see what the process is like. Pick another city. Can't be the first. And notice what that experience is like. Okay, did you see any evidence for free will? Now, we better be able to find it here. If it's not here, it's not anywhere. So let's look for it. First, let's set aside all those cities whose names you don't know, and therefore could not have picked. Okay? Because you, you couldn't have picked one of those if your life depended on it. There's no freedom in that, obviously. Okay? And then there are many other cities whose names are quite well known to you, but which simply didn't occur to you to pick. I, for instance, perhaps Cairo didn't occur to you. You absolutely know that Cairo is a city, but for whatever reason, your Cairo circuits were not engaged. Okay? As, as a matter of neurophysiology, Cairo was not in the cards. So I want you to think about this: were you free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose? Right? Based on this, on the state of your brain a few moments ago, Cairo was not coming. Where is the freedom in that? Of course, if you did think of Cairo, you should consider yourself a genius.

Now, so you probably thought of several cities, and then you, let's say you thought of Paris, and New York, and Tokyo. Then you, then you thought, "I love Paris. I'm going to go with Paris." And last minute, you thought, "No, no, Tokyo. Tokyo. I'll go with Tokyo." And now this is the sort of decision that motivates the idea of free will. This is, you've got two or more choices, and you're picking between them, and it's just you and your thoughts. There's no coercion from the external world. You are doing it, apparently. But when you look closely, I think you'll find that you are in no position to know why you picked what you picked in this case, why you chose Tokyo over Paris. I, you might have some additional story to tell about it. You might think, "Well, I had Japanese food last night, and so I, I remembered it, and I, I picked Tokyo." Now, of course, we know from psychology that these kinds of stories are, are rather often false. Whenever people are manipulated in a lab, they always have some tale to tell about why they did what they did, and it, it never bears any relation to the actual variables that, that, that cause them to behave that way. So, if you give people, you can cause people to like one person more than another, or to, to cooperate more in economic games, by simply giving them a hot beverage to hold as opposed to a cold one, and they never tell you that the reason they were biased as they were was because they were, because the temperature of the cup in their hands. Okay? Their psychology is replete with evidence that we are very poor judges of, of why is we retrospectively, why it is we, we do what we do. But even if you are right in this instance, okay, even if your choice of Tokyo over Paris is based on your memory of having Japanese food last night, okay, you still can't explain why you remembered having Japanese food last night, or, or why the memory had the effect that it did. Why didn't it have the opposite effect? Why didn't you think, "Well, I, I just had Japanese food last night, so let's go with something new. Let's go with Paris." The thing to notice about this is that you, as the conscious witness of your inner life, are not making these decisions. You can only witness these decisions. I mean, you, you no more picked the city you settled on in subjective terms than you would have if I picked it for you.

So, there was this first moment, I said, "Pick a city," and there's this hiatus where nothing has occurred to you, and then the names of cities start to get promoted into consciousness for reasons you can't inspect, and you can't choose the, the cities you think of before you think of it. It's almost like me saying, "Tel Aviv, Vancouver, Paris," and you simply hearing the words in consciousness. So, if you, if you pay attention to how thoughts and intentions arise and how decisions get made moment to moment, I think you can see that there's no evidence for free will. That actually, our experience in life is compatible with the truth of determinism.

Now, it's also important to recognize that the case I'm building against Free Will does not depend upon philosophical materialism, the idea that reality is at bottom physical. Now, there are, there are very good reasons to believe that the mind is at bottom physical, or certainly most mental events are the product of physical events. I mean, the brain is a physical system entirely beholden to the laws of nature. But even if we have souls, even if the human mind were made of soul stuff that we don't understand, nothing about my argument would change. The, the unconscious operations of a soul grant you no more freedom than the unconscious neurophysiology of your brain does. If you don't know what your soul is going to do next, you're not in control of your soul. And this is obviously true where people behave in ways that they wish they wouldn't. You know, so you think of all the committed Christians whose souls just happen to be gay. This is, that's obviously not an argument for free will. But it's also true when you do exactly what you wish you had done in retrospect. The soul that allows you to stay on your diet is just as mysterious as the soul that tempts you to eat a hot fudge sundae.

So, I think it's safe to say that no one has ever argued for free will because it holds great promise as an abstract idea. The endurance of Free Will as a philosophical problem in need of a solution is born of the fact that that most of us feel that we freely author our thoughts and intentions and actions. Therefore, however difficult it may be to make sense of this in logical or scientific terms, and the idea, so the idea of Free Will emerges from a felt experience.

Now, the, the moment, the only philosophically respectable way to defend Free Will in light of what we know to be true scientifically is to endorse a view that's usually termed compatibilism in philosophical circles, and to argue, in essence, that Free Will is compatible with the truth of determinism. Now, compatibilists generally claim that a person is free as long as he's free from any outer or inner compulsion that would prevent him from acting on his actual desires and intentions. So, if, if a man wants to commit murder and he does so because of this desire, well, then that's all the free will you need. But from a, both a moral and scientific point of view, this seems to me to just miss the point. Where is the freedom in doing what one wants, when one's wants are the product of prior causes which one cannot inspect and therefore could not choose, and, and one had absolutely no hand in creating? I, from my point of view, compatibilism is essentially the, the dictum: "A puppet is free as long as it loves its strings."

Now, compatibilists, it's true that compatibilists push back here, and they say that even if our thoughts are the product of unconscious causes, they're still our thoughts and actions. Okay? Anything that your brain does or decides is something that you have done or decided. So, on this account, the fact that we can't always be aware of the, the causes of our conscious thoughts and, and actions does not negate, does not negate free will. Because your, your un, the unconscious neurophysiology of your brain is just as much you as your conscious thoughts are. But this seems to me to be just a bait and switch. This trades a psychological fact, the subjective experience of being a conscious agent, for a conceptual understanding of ourselves as persons. The psychological truth is that people feel identical to and in control of a certain channel of information in their conscious minds, and they are mistaken about this. The, the compatibilist comes in and says, "Actually, you're much more than that. You are the totality of unconscious processing in your brain as well." Okay? But this is like, it's like saying you're made of stardust, which of course you are. But, but you don't feel like stardust. And, and the knowledge that you're stardust is not driving your moral intuitions or determining our, our system of criminal justice. You can't honestly take credit for your unconscious mental life. In fact, you're making countless decisions, quote, "decisions" with organs other than your brain at this moment. Are, are you making red blood cells at this moment? Now, hopefully your body is. But if it decided to stop, you wouldn't be responsible for that change. You would be a victim of that change. There are more bacteria in your body than human cells. 90% of the cells in your body are microbes like E. coli. 99% of the functional genes in your body belong to them. You, you don't feel identical to these creatures. And, and many of them perform necessary functions. They are you in some larger sense, because your, your well-being depends on them. So, to, to say that you are responsible for everything that goes on inside your skin because it's all you, is to make a claim that bears absolutely no relationship to the, the actual experience that has made free will a problem for philosophy. The truth is, we, we feel or presume an authorship over our, our own thoughts and actions that is illusory. If I could detect all of your conscious thoughts and intentions and subsequent behaviors with a brain scanner some moments before you were aware of them, you would be rightly shocked, because it would undermine your sense that you are the, the prime mover of your inner life. How can we be free as conscious agents if everything we, we consciously intend was caused by events in our brain which we did not intend and over which we had no control? We can't.

So, what does this mean? Well, first, here is what it doesn't mean. Okay? The, the fact that our choices depend upon prior causes does not mean that choice doesn't matter. This is one point of confusion that people have. They, they confuse determinism with fatalism, and they think, "Well, if, if it's all determined, why should I do anything? Why not just sit back and see what happens?" To, to sit back and see what happens is also a choice that has its own consequences. And it's, it's very difficult to do. You just try, just try staying in bed all day waiting for something to happen. You, you'll very quickly feel the urge to get up and do something. And resisting this impulse will actually take more effort than going with it. It actually becomes harder to do nothing than to do something, very quickly. So, you can't, you can't step out of this stream of choices and efforts. And this is, and, and clearly choice and effort is the, is a, is part of the causal chain of life. If I hadn't decided to write a book on Free Will, it wouldn't have written itself. So, effort and discipline and willpower, these are, these are all causal states of the brain that, that beget their own behaviors and, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. So, the choices we make in life are as important as most people think. But the next choice you make will come out of a wilderness of prior causes that you can't see and did not bring into being.

So, well, it's true to say that a person would have behaved differently in the past had he chosen to, this doesn't give the kind of free will that, that most people seem to want. Because from the perspective of your conscious mind, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think and therefore do than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. You, you have not built your mind. And in moments where you seem to build it, where you make an effort to learn a new skill or to improve yourself, okay, you, the only tools at your disposal are those which you've inherited from moments past. Now, I'm not even slightly suggesting that we all just blame our parents for everything that has gone wrong in our lives and do nothing. It is possible to change. In fact, from my point of view, viewing oneself as an open system, open to myriad influences, makes change seem even more possible. Okay? You are by no means condemned to be who you were yesterday. In fact, you can't be that person. The, the self is, is a process. This is what makes growth possible. The self is not a stable entity. But subjectively speaking, the unfolding of our lives is a fundamentally mysterious process. None of us know how it is we came to be in this moment, and we don't know what's going to happen next on, really, on any level. We don't know what we're going to think and feel next.

Now, this might sound scary to some of you, but I think recognizing this can be quite liberating. The, the present moment is a mystery. No matter how much you know about the world, the present moment is still a mystery. You are simply discovering what your life is in every moment. I mean, you may think you're doing something, but you again, don't know what you're going to do next. So, our, our choices matter. And there are, there are clearly paths toward making wiser ones. I, there's no telling how much a, a conversation with a smart person could change you. But we can't choose what we choose in life. And, and when it seems that we choose what we choose, perhaps when going back and forth between two options, we don't choose to choose what we choose. There is a regress here that, that ends in darkness. We, we have to take a first step or a last one for reasons that are subjectively mysterious. And, and therefore, to, to think the thought, "I could have done otherwise," is really just to think, "I could have done otherwise after doing whatever I, in fact, did." And so, and what I'm going to do next remains a mystery that is fully determined by a prior state of the universe and the laws of nature, including whatever contributions come from chance, quantum mechanical or otherwise. Quantum mechanics doesn't get you Free Will. And to declare my freedom in this context is really just another way of saying, you know, "I'm not sure why I did that, but I, I, I don't mind doing it."

So, I don't mean to belabor this point, but in my experience, people have a really hard time with this. Just think about the context in which your next decision will occur. I mean, a decision of any size: to get married or not, to go to graduate school or not, to wear the red shirt or the blue shirt, anything that you could decide. Okay? You didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes. You didn't pick the interactions or the effect they had upon you of, of every event and conversation and exposure to ideas you had in life. And where is, where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want, even now. But where do your wants come from?

Okay, so let's return to this issue I raised at the beginning of the talk. Because the great worry, obviously, is that any honest discussion of the underlying causes of human behavior seems to leave no room for moral responsibility. In fact, the Supreme Court of the United States has said, has just come out and said this, that Free Will is incompatible with our, or rather, inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system, and that it's a, a universal and persistent foundation for our system of law. So, this idea of Free Will is actually doing work in our world. This is not just an academic discussion.

Now, the problem, obviously, is that if we begin to view people as neuronal weather patterns, of a sort, it becomes very difficult to make sense, or seems to become difficult to make sense, of notions of right and wrong and, and good and evil. Well, happily, I think we can maintain a very strong sense of morality and an effective criminal justice system without lying to ourselves about the causes of human behavior. What, what do we most condemn in people, both morally and legally? It's, it's really the conscious intention to do harm. Now, why is the conscious intention to, to victimize another person so blameworthy? Well, consciousness is, is the place where you, where most of your mind seems to be active, where the global properties of your mind get invoked. Consciousness is where your beliefs and desires and prejudices and goals get together. Our conscious, premeditated behavior says the most about us and about what we're likely to do in the future. If you decide to kill your neighbor after weeks of library research and debate with your friends, okay, well, then killing your neighbor really says a lot about you. But the point is not that you are the sole independent cause of your actions. I mean, after all, you didn't make yourself. The point is that, for whatever reason, you have the mind of a murderer. Now, you're not ultimately responsible for having this mind. In fact, when we look at the details, we see that you're not even partially responsible for it. In the same way that a grizzly bear isn't responsible for the fact that it's a grizzly bear. But a bear really is a bear, and it really will eat you if you see one in the parking lot. It's worth worrying about. But you can worry about it without ever attributing free will to it, and you can take defensive action without doing so.

Now, certain criminals are clearly more dangerous than bears, and we have to lock them up for a very long time, in many cases, forever, or till the end of their lives, to keep them from harming us. And the moral, the moral justification for this is entirely straightforward: everyone is better off that way. But retribution, on this view, doesn't make much sense. We, we don't, we don't seek retribution against bears. The, the idea of punishing people because they deserve it doesn't make much sense. And, but I would argue that dispensing with the illusion of Free Will allows us to focus on the things that actually matter: mitigating harm, assessing risk, deterring crime, all of the variables that, that, that govern the well-being of people. And so, I'm not arguing that everyone is not guilty by reason of insanity, and that we just have to empty the jails. Okay? And there's clearly a difference between voluntary and involuntary action, and there's a difference between the moral responsibilities that we can, we can demand of an adult and those of a child. But you don't need free will to make sense of these differences. These are differences about, that, that relate to the global property of individual minds and of what it's reasonable to expect of those minds in the future. There are 13-year-olds serving life sentences in this country, not based, because not based on the idea that we have determined that rehabilitation in their case is impossible, but based on this, on, on the fact that some judge or jury felt they really deserved this punishment, that they were the, the true locus of their behavior.

Now, it seems to me that certain moral intuitions begin to relax the moment you see this wider picture of causality. And once we recognize that even the most terrifying people are, in some basic sense, unlucky to be who they are, the logic of hating them as opposed to merely fearing them goes away. And once again, this is true even if you believe that, that everyone harbors an immortal soul. I mean, anyone born with the soul of a psychopath is profoundly unlucky.

So, one consequence of, of viewing this world, viewing the world this way, is that it reduces hatred, which I think, all things being equal, is a very good thing. It also increases empathy and compassion. We take one of the, the worst people who've ever lived, take, you know, my current candidate is Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday Hussein. He really is about as odious a person as I can think of. This is a guy who, when he would see a wedding in progress in Baghdad, would descend with his thugs and rape the bride. In some cases, he killed and tortured and killed the bride. He did this more than once. I mean, the fact that he couldn't be, he couldn't be captured, and therefore the fact that we killed him, I think is a very good thing. If, unless you are a total pacifist, you have to admit that this is what guns are for: to kill people like Uday Hussein. Okay? But, but simply walk back the timeline of his life. Think of him as a four-year-old boy. You know, he might have been a strange child. He could, could have been a scary child. I mean, there are actually psychopathic children. But he was also a very unlucky child. He had Saddam Hussein as a father. How unlucky can you get? He was the four-year-old boy who was destined to become the psychopath Uday Hussein. If we could have intervened at any point in his life, at four or five or six or seven, and helped him, that would have been the right thing to do, and compassion would have been the right motive. So, on my view, this is actually a doorway into feeling compassion for even the worst people who have ever lived. So, ironically, to, to Dinesh's concern, if you want to be like Jesus and love your enemies, or at least not hate them, one way of doing it is to take a larger picture of scientific causality into account.

Now, I'm also not arguing that it would be easy to adopt this perspective if you were someone you love has been the, the victim of a violent crime. It's perfectly natural to hate the person who has victimized you. But I'm talking about how we need to view the world in our more dispassionate moments, when we, and this is the place from which we make public policy and do science, obviously. To see how fully our moral intuitions would need to shift. Just imagine what would happen if, if we had a cure for human evil. If we fully understood psychopathy, its neural underpinnings, and we could cure it. And just imagine, for argument's sake, that this cure is, is trivially easy to administer. It's safe, it's painless, it's just, you can just drop it into the food supply like vitamin D. Okay? So, now evil is just a nutritional deficiency. Now, now imagine, imagine this cure for evil exists, and imagine the moral logic of withholding this cure from a murderer as part of his punishment. That makes no sense. Imagine, imagine withholding surgery from a murderer with a brain tumor when we know that the brain tumor was actually the cause of his violent behavior, as a punishment. Withholding that surgery, that makes no sense. So, I would argue that this reveals that our urge for retribution is actually an artifact of our not seeing the causes, the true causes of human behavior.

So, this, this leads me, in conclusion, to the subject of religion. Because, of course, God's justice is purely a matter of retribution. Religions like Christianity and Islam entirely depend on this notion of free will. It's not an accident. This is the only answer they have given to the problem of evil. As in, you know, why is it that a good God would allow Nazis to kill millions of innocent people? God, in all his omnipotent goodness, couldn't intervene because people have free will. This is the, the usual line. Now, obviously, this doesn't cover all the other mayhem born of tsunamis and epidemics and, but this is the best religious people have to justify the otherwise psychopathic morality of God. And Free Will is also what makes sense of this idea of sin. You, our religions tell us that, that sin is what justifies eternal punishment in the next life. So, that's why this is, to my mind, the, the mother of all culture war issues. But this is where science really pulls the keystone out of, out of religion. See, just recall the general picture. We, we've all inherited original sin because Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve misused their Free Will. Okay? And then for eons, God, God gave us no guidance whatsoever. And then he wrote a few uneven books that were filled with rumors of ancient miracles. And then he holds us responsible for the slightest doubt we have about his existence on the basis of these books, though he has stacked the deck against us by giving us a faculty of reason and, strangely, an ability to write better books than the ones he's supposedly written. And, and we are deemed the ultimate source of our turning away from him by our own free will. We are the cause of our doubts. "I am the self-sufficient cause of my lack of faith."

Now, again, this, this is not only untrue, it seems impossible to describe a universe in which it could be true. Beliefs are the product of prior causes, either determined or random. And there's no way of, of turning those dials that gets you standing on the hot spot where you are the ultimate cause of your beliefs. So, without free will, this actually does the, the, the, the worldview of monotheistic religion, this idea of God's eternal justice, stands revealed for what it is: a completely sadistic and insane view of the world. Now, and ironically, one of the fears that religious people have, that you hear about over and over again, is that, that a complete understanding of us in scientific terms would dehumanize us. Okay? Rather, I think it, it humanizes us. What could be more dehumanizing than the view that that most of the people, people most of the time, by virtue of the fact that they were born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, given the wrong theology, exposed to the wrong intellectual influences, were nevertheless crucially responsible for the fact that they, they didn't believe in God, or believed in the wrong God, and therefore, as a result, deserve to be burned in fire for eternity?

So, to conclude, I just want to bring this back to the, to our direct experience of consciousness in this moment. Now, it's generally argued that Free Will presents us with this compelling mystery. On the one hand, we know we've got it. On the other, we can't seem to map it onto the world. Again, I think this is a sign of our confusion. The problem is not merely that Free Will doesn't make sense objectively; it doesn't make sense subjectively either. Okay? Not only are we not as free as we think we are, we don't feel as free as we think we do. So, so on my view, the, the illusion of Free Will is itself an illusion. But that there is no illusion of Free Will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do?

Now, some of you might think this sounds very depressing. Okay? This, it seems to take something away from us. It does. It takes away an egocentric view of life. But I think this can be tremendously liberating. Okay? We are not truly separate. We are linked to each other and to our past and to history. We are part of a system. And therefore, what, what we do matters. You can't take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So, so pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analysis, but they weren't much fun anyway. These are isolating emotions. What does make sense is a commitment to well-being and to, to improving your life and the lives of others. Love and compassion make sense. And of course, nothing that I've said reduces the value of political freedom or, or social freedom. I mean, having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying. Wherever intentions come from, but the idea that we, as conscious beings, are deeply responsible for the character of our own minds is just impossible to map onto reality. And if we want to be guided by reality rather than by

The the the the Fantasy Life of our ancestors. I think our views on this topic have to change. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

So we have a few minutes for a Q&A, maybe 15, 20 minutes. If you want to line up here. The format for the rest of the day is, immediately after the questions, uh, behind the curtain are, uh, books and Sean, myself, and Sam will be signing your books. You can get them there afterwards, or you can pick them up now. Uh, so let's go ahead and get started. Go ahead, sir.

Yes. Hello. Hello. Yep, just go ahead. It's, it's on. Yes. Uh, I agree with you completely. And of course, let me be the first to make the joke. Of course, I didn't have a choice. But, um, I'd like to actually take it a step further. And that is that, um, uh, you know, you could see how you can have a neural network with random firing. There's random elements in its firing potentials and has so many complex inputs coming into us. I mean, in the state that we are developed at now, and it's such a complex network, and there's so many possible connections that it's, it's, you know, there's some random element. But basically, it's, it's pre-programmed in in our, in our, uh, output, which is these thoughts. Um, but I maintain that not only is our, the Free Will an illusion, but Consciousness itself is therefore an illusion.

Well, yeah, it depends what you mean by by Consciousness. I, I think what I mean by Consciousness, Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that, that can't be an illusion. It, it's Consciousness is the fact of experience, the fact that, that, that something is happening. You know, the fact that the lights are on in some basic sense, even if we don't understand anything. And so that's the, so even if I'm a brain in a vat, what I'm calling Consciousness is still a manifest fact of reality and is the, is the basis for every other fact that I would would experience or adduce or, or otherwise bring into the conversation. So I think Consciousness can't be an illusion. Um, the self, however, is an illusion. Um, I hate to break it to you, uh, but yeah. So the sense of the sense of the ego, the sense that you are sort of in your head, riding around, the driver of your experience, is that you're not that you're having an experience, you're appropriating the experience from a position inside that is separate from the experience. This sort of dual, this dualistic sense that you, there's your experience on the one hand, and you on the other, that is a, a, a construct, uh, which makes no neurological sense and, and ultimately no experiential sense, though it's a, obviously we feel it very strongly, most of us, most of the time.

Let's go over here. My question is a, a wee bit off topic, but it has to do with the, um, length of your recent, uh, work. Is, uh, I enjoy reading your books a lot. And, um, the last two books have both been relatively short. Yeah. So I was wondering, uh, when's the next time that a book might emerge out of your Consciousness that's nice and long, like three, 400 pages, maybe?

Um, good question. It's actually, it's a, um, I don't know. I mean, I have one that I'm, I'm supposed to write. Um, it's actually on the subject of, of, uh, the self and its, uh, elcer, um, and which is what, how, how you scientifically can understand the notion that the self is a, is an illusion. Um, the truth is, as a both as a reader and a writer, I'm now just a real fan of short books. I like, for, for many reasons. I, I find just as a reader, there's so much competition for the bandwidth of my own attention, and I'm now so fickle as a reader that, um, unless somebody is just killing it over the course of 10 pages, I begin to feel the con, the, um, the competition of, of all the other books, all the other books I'm never going to get to. You know, everything is in competition with everything else. And, um, so, uh, and I often wonder why someone needed to go on for 300 pages if I could really get their argument in 50. And with all, with the, and so obviously not every discussion is amenable to a short treatment. You know, if you're going to write the history of England, you're not going to do it in 100 pages, you need a thousand pages, otherwise it wouldn't be the history of England. But, but so there's room for big books. But if it's an, if it's an argument that you're making, I feel like most of the time books are too long. And they're, and just as a point of interest, if you don't happen to be in the publishing business, you, there's no reason you would know this, but books are as long as they are because Publishers have to find some way of charging $30 for books. You can't, so they can't, they can't stay in business publishing just 100 page books. So, um, it is an artifact of the business model of, of, of traditional publishing to some degree. But, um, I'm sure I'll write longer books than, than, uh, than this one. Um, but there is, there's also something satisfying as a writer knowing that if someone actually starts the book, they're very likely to finish it because it only takes an hour to finish. Okay? Whereas when, I mean, I can't tell you how much anguish I have felt over all the people who think they have read the end of Faith or the moral landscape because they read the first 100 pages of, of either, and then just pillory me for, like, in the end of, I get pilloried by, by people who think I know nothing about self-transcendence or religious experience, or I just, I just have written it all off as completely valueless, and they claim to have read the end of Faith, and clearly they just didn't get to the end of the book. And I, I, I know what it's like not to get to the end of a book. But, um, so anyway, writing short books is a, is a prophylactic against being totally misunderstood, I suppose.

Thank you. Let's go over here. Um, I guess a more personal question. I was wondering what experiences you'd say led you to this train of thought and this kind of opinion. I'm just curious on the, on the, um, Free Will, um, well, too, both objective, classically objective, third person scientific and subjective. It's just from a third person point of view, a philosophical point of view. I more mean, where did it start for you more personally?

Not, well, so the, the personal side is when I really paid attention to the, what it's like to be me. I mean, even now, in this, in this moment, you know, the TR, I don't know how I get to the end of this sentence sometimes. I do, and it works, and sometimes I fail to, and that's, that's also a surprise. I mean, there's just, there's no, you know, how you parse the sounds that are coming out of my mouth as English, all of that's happening unconsciously. It's just, there's our conscious life is riding at top mysterious processes that we can understand in some, in some ways through science, but as a moment-to-moment fact of our conscious experience, we are, we are witnessing a display of, of energy and change. Uh, you, the cont of Consciousness, um, and our own intentional life is part of that display. And even the moments where you think, no, no, I'm really going to take control now. You know, I'm going to go on a diet, and I'm going to get a personal trainer, and I'm going to get a life coach, and I'm going to read. All of that, where, I mean, that suddenly comes out of nowhere from, from the perspective of Consciousness. And so this is actually something that can be witnessed about yourself moment to moment.

I think you touched up on this, but I'll let you further clarify. Does quantum indeterminism present a challenge to these ideas?

No, no. I mean, so, so it's just people for the most part, people who think this are not physicists. I mean, people grab something, there's something spooky about quantum mechanics, and deepo choa types grab that spookiness and say, well, this spookiness cashes out all the spookiness that now I want to talk about. And that's, and that, to some degree, that's been done in the Free Will debate. Um, it's true that that that random, if, if there is an unavoidable, uh, aspect of Randomness in our experience, well, then Randomness would make our, make our behavior unpredictable at some level, even. But, but you don't even need Randomness for that. Just, just sheer complexity in a deterministic system would make it functionally unpredictable. And that's what chaos is. So, you know, the weather is not perfectly predictable, not because it has free will, or because quantum mechanics is determining the, the, the weather, but they're just enough billiard balls colliding that we just can't, it's computationally intractable, we can't predict it, uh, as well as we would want. So, um, and now I'm getting the distinct sense that the, the, the cough medication is answering the rest of this question, which obviously doesn't attach to my Free Will. Um, but yeah, it's just Randomness. You can think of Randomness. So think of determinism as just, you know, there's just a clock, there's clockwork in the brain that's determining behavior, and it's just, you know, for, for argument's sake, just Newtonian physics. And then introducing Randomness is just like introducing, you know, the role of the dice into that process occasionally. Um, that doesn't get you. I mean, random events are precisely those events for which we can claim no responsibility. You know, if I roll the dice to make decisions, I can't say, well, that's really me doing it. It's just, it's, it's how the dice determine what I'm going to do. So thank you.

Y we'll do, uh, three more. Uh, I'll just preface with a, a quick comment that I, uh, um, personally very persuaded by your argument. I don't think that it would result in any mass chaos, uh, if we lost the concept of free will, and you already started down the path of showing how that would be so, because you still need to do something about dangerous people and so forth. Yeah. Um, but my question is along these lines, um, in the debates about mental versus physical worlds, there, some of the people who were favored a strictly materialistic world kind of ridiculed the, the whole dichotomy between the mental and the physical by talking about the homunculus that resides in the body, or the man in the machine, right, or the ghost in the machine, I should say. The ghost being the mind, the spirit that inhabits the body and pulls the levers of the body, with, of course, leaving open an explanation of how a ghost entity or a spiritual entity, right, could actually grab physical levers, which has been talked about a number of times, yeah, even today. But, isn't, isn't there a parallel between that, uh, whole, uh, analog of, of the mental versus the spiritual, and this whole argument here about Free Will? Is it, is it part of your analysis that in the same way that the mental physical dichotomy can be ridiculed as a ghost in the machine, and there's a problem between the linkage between the ghost operating levers, do we have a similar concept of the mind or the ghost making decisions, pulling the left lever, pulling the right lever, but you challenge the, the concept in the same way? You're not really, it, it's an analog of the ghost and the machine. Does that, yeah, does that make any sense?

I don't really see that because it, it, um, there's no self that's like the ghost in the mental physical analog. There's no ghost sitting there that chooses between the levers. Doesn't have free choice to move the believer. Yeah. That's true. I mean, I'm not, I, I don't actually subscribe to all the moves that people who make that argument against dualism make in the end. I mean, I think there's, there's a little bit more to be said about there not being a ghost than is usually said. And I, and so for one thing, that does not run through for me at all is, um, a concern that was just raised by the, a few questions before, the idea that consciousness could be an illusion. I mean, Consciousness, what we mean, or should mean, by Consciousness, really can't be an illusion. I, that's just to talk nonsense. Um, so, uh, but I don't, I don't actually see the connection you're making. I think, I think this, nothing truly important changes, Ian, or nothing, nothing that we really want to need is lost when we give up this, the illusion of free will. But a few things change, and they're actually, I think, important changes, and either benign or, or very salutary changes. I mean, they are, they change, it really is an antidote to hatred. You know, so, so there's, there's an example I talk about in the book, um, that came from Jared Diamond, who wrote, he wrote a great article in, in, um, The New Yorker a while back on the, on the our psychological need for vengeance, and just the, the dividends paid when we exact vengeance for a wrong, and what happens to us when we fail to do it, and, and just, and the price we pay psychologically for, for those failures. And so he compared the experience of his friend in New Guinea, I think his name was Daniel, who's a, a New Guinea Highlander, who lived in this, you know, purely tribal vendetta culture, where if you killed my uncle, I'm going to kill you, or your uncle, or, or your brother, it doesn't matter who. I mean, just instrumental violence was just the way they, they settled these disputes. Um, and so Dan, so someone killed his uncle, and then he schemed for years and finally went to the next village and murdered the guy and felt immense relief, just a completely uncomplicated sense of having done the right thing, and just slept like a baby for the rest of his life, presumably. Um, whereas, uh, Diamond's father-in-law was a Holocaust survivor, and had, um, when he got out of, of Auschwitz, or, uh, some, some concentration camp, and joined, um, it's a slightly involved story, but anyway, he, he, he managed to find the person who was responsible for rounding up his family in his home village and killing everyone. Um, and rather than kill that person himself, he turned him over to the police, and this person went to jail, and only spent a year in jail and was released. And Diamond's father-in-law spent the next 60 years of his life just racked by guilt. I mean, it was the worst thing, it's just, it was the thing that destroyed the rest of his life, he never got over it. Now, I would suggest to you that that is a kind, it's completely understandable, but is a, is a kind of moral illusion. It is a psych, is an ultimately an unnecessary psychological illusion that produces that much pain. Because if he had, if he had just found out that the person who murdered his family was actually suffering from some, from a relevant brain tumor that explained his behavior, or, you know, some virus attacking his, his orbital frontal cortex, and had been a perfectly moral and non-anti-Semitic person until this thing took hold of him, he would, he'd still be unhappy his family was killed, but he wouldn't have lived the rest of his life, uh, tortured by not having satisfied his urge for vengeance in the same way that he wouldn't if his family has been killed by an elephant, or, or CER, or any other agent that we don't, we don't, uh, deify in the same way that we do other human selves. And, and so it is kind of, it is an antidote to, to hatred. And I think it's, um, if you can get a hold of it, it's, it's worth doing.

Thank you. Last two questions here and here. Go ahead. My question concerns the, uh, experiments that were done with your Consciousness not, um, registering the ideas before your brain does. Uh, I, I subscribe to the determinism idea, so I'm not really arguing against, against free will, but I'm just trying to understand better the relationship between Consciousness and the unconscious brain. Um, so for example, somebody that has a sleeping disorder where they sleepwalk and would, uh, maybe drive a car while sleepwalking, which there's been cases, right? Or somebody that drinks to the point of blacking out and not being conscious of what their actions are, they may perform actions that they would, well, conscious. So what does that say about Consciousness on the effect of decision making and your actions?

Well, so some of those cases are, are a little hard to parse because it's very difficult to, and I think ultimately impossible, to distinguish a lack of Consciousness in these cases from a failure of memory. You know, so, so I mean, one, one, uh, concern about general anesthesia over the years is, is are people really unconscious when we're operating on them, or do they just forget all the pain they were in? I mean, have we just given them a perfect, um, amnesia drug? And, um, you know, I'm, I'm reasonably confident that that people are not, uh, being tortured every time they, they, uh, get surgery, but the difference between being tortured and then having no memory of it, and there being nothing that it was like to be you during surgery, is, is a problem that visits all of these cases. So, so, you know, if you're on, if you take a, a bunch of Ambien and then you go into the kitchen and eat all the ice cream, and then you come back the next morning and you just see empty cartons of ice cream and you say, I was completely unconscious, you can't distinguish a failure of memory from having been unconscious during that time. But the other side is clearly a lot of our decision-making is made unconsciously. I mean, it's made, it's made, we know the time, we know that in the moment, uh, there's just no way to get a hold experientially of what's going on, and it's, it's going on. So like in a priming experiment, if we put you, we, if we flashed pictures, uh, to you that were subliminal, you know, they, there, it's called a backward masking paradigm, where you show someone a picture for 30 milliseconds, and then you mask it with a, like, like a gray screen. Consciously, they can't perceive the picture you just showed them, but it, but we know experimentally, it can influence their subsequent decision-making. So if you show them pictures of beautiful women, or horrible car accidents, or, or provocative words versus boring words, all of this modulates subsequent decision-making. And, and it's getting in, there's no question it's getting in. And yet people can't tell you what they, what they just saw. Um, so I, I think that gets only part of your question. But apologies.

Um, yeah, so my question is more of, um, when, how you feel about the implications that this idea leads to, which I do agree with, by the way. But if you look at it from, what maybe a futuristic point of view, or futurist, uh, idea, that, you know, when you mentioned that maybe we'll have a drug that can, you know, cure evil. I don't think that that's like such a crazy idea. I think that with, you know, neurotechnology and, I'm sorry, nanotechnology, and things like that, there may become a day where we do have the technology to prevent, you know, things that we deem objectively, hopefully, as evil. And so what then, when that, um, that happens and that occurs in our society, what happens then to identity? And how does that affect us as human beings if we're able to kind of eradicate all the bad things, and all we're left with is just the good things?

Well, it's, you know, it's, we have a long way to go. So I'm not, I would, true, I would, uh, tuck in for the present and, and, uh, expect a little more evil. But, um, I think it's just, yeah, we, certain things that seem bizarre to change about ourselves, given the, a, a, a painless and, and relatively risk-free way of changing them, will just, those changes will not only seem benign, um, in that people should just be free to do it, do it, but some of them will just seem, it'll seem immoral not to make those changes in yourself, in your children. Ian, it's just like, it's like orthodonture. I mean, orthodonture is kind of a bizarre thing, right? But, you know, people get braces and they get, I don't know when that started, but I got, I had braces, and, you know, if my daughter needs braces, I'll give her braces. And, and yet, it is a sort of, you know, you could imagine someone from another culture or another planet coming and saying, well, what the hell is going on here? Um, and there are many other, you know, if you needed surgery to correct your teeth, then you, it would, it wouldn't be worth the risk, etc. But if we had a truly, and that's one of the problems with, with psychopharmacology at the moment, is it's all of our mood-altering drugs have so many side effects, and, um, and they're not so good that, so unequivocally good in that they solve the problem that they're targeted toward, that, uh, so the, it's easy to see someone's misgivings about, you know, taking a drug to alter mood, say. But if, if they, if they really worked, and they, and they really were without consequence, then we get into an interesting, uh, conversation about what it means to change our, our. I just imagine, forget about, uh, changing evil. Imagine being able to change what strikes you as evil. I mean, imagine like judgments of, of good and evil. Like, what is, what is good? Good? You know, imagine if it was possible just to change us into a kind of a perfectly matched island of sadists and masochists, you know, and like, and so like, ask me, I don't want to live in that world. But, but what if you could? I could put on some goggles and actually experience what it's like to want to live in that world for half an hour, and then take off the goggles, and then you have to, then I have to have a conversation about what is true now. If you know anything about my, my last book, The Moral Landscape, I don't think that erodes moral truth. I think there's still, I think you still can talk about there being a universal moral truth in that context. But it's, it's, we have to think about what it means to play with our, our experience of, of morally salient facts, because I think that's probably coming. Um, so thank you. Thank you all. It has been a pleasure. You can line up here to get your book signed. Just give us one minute to get the curtains open and the, uh,