Making Sense with Sam Harris - #39 — Free Will Revisited

Episode Date: July 4, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with philosopher Daniel Dennett about free will. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Well, I just got back from Banff, where I attended the TED Summit. I brought a portable recording device to the conference on the odd chance that I might find someone worth talking to who wanted to record a podcast. Needless to say, there were many people worth talking to, but not much time to sit down and do a podcast. But I did record one conversation with the philosopher Dan Dennett, who probably needs no introduction here. As many of you know, Dan and I have been brothers in arms for many years, along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, as the so-called New Atheists, or the Four Horsemen, after a video by that name that we recorded in Hitch's apartment some years back. Dan and I once debated together on the same team along with Hitch at the Ciudad de las Ideas conference in Mexico, where we were pitted against Dinesh D'Souza and Rabbi Shmuley Botiak and

Robert Wright, I believe, and Nassim Taleb got in there somehow. I hope it doesn't seem too self-serving or contemptuous of our opponents to say that we came out none the worse for wear on that occasion, and needless to say that video is online for all to see until the end of the world. But as many of you know, Dan and I had a very barbed exchange on the topic of free will some years later, and that was a little over two years ago, and we never resolved it. I came out with my short book on free will, and Dan reviewed it, and then I responded to his review, and the matter was left there in a way that no one found satisfying, least of all our readers. There really was an outpouring of dismay

over the tone that we took with each other. And I must say that was totally understandable. I want to begin by reading the first few paragraphs of my response to Dan's review, which includes a quotation from him. So you can hear how vexed and vexing things got. And if you're interested, you can read the whole exchange on my blog. In fact, when I post this podcast on my website, I'll provide the relevant links. So this is near the beginning of my response, written as a letter to Dan. I want to begin by reminding our readers, and myself, that exchanges like this aren't necessarily pointless. Perhaps you need no encouragement on that front, but I'm afraid I do.

In recent years, I've spent so much time debating scientists, philosophers, and other scholars that I've begun to doubt whether any smart person retains the ability to change his mind. This is one of the great scandals of intellectual life. The virtues of rational discourse are everywhere espoused, and yet witnessing someone relinquish a cherished opinion in real time is about as common as seeing a supernova explode overhead. The perpetual stalemate one encounters in public debates is annoying because it is so clearly the product of motivated reasoning, self-deception, and other failures of rationality. And yet we've grown to expect it on every topic,

no matter how intelligent and well-intentioned the participants. I hope you and I don't give our readers further cause for cynicism on this front. Unfortunately, your review of my book doesn't offer many reasons for optimism. It is a strange document, avuncular in places but more generally sneering. I think it fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for 20 pages running. And now I have a quotation from Dan's review here. This is Dan. I'm not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable. I am grateful to Harris for saying

so boldly and clearly what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves. I've always suspected that many who hold this hard determinist view are making these mistakes. But we mustn't put words in people's mouths, and now Harris has done us a great service by articulating the points explicitly. And the chorus of approval he's received from scientists goes a long way to confirming that they have been making these mistakes all along. Wolfgang Pauli's famous dismissal of another physicist's work as, quote, not even wrong, reminds us of the value of crystallizing an ambient cloud of hunches into something that can be shown to be wrong. Correcting widespread misunderstanding is usually So this is back to me. I say, I hope you will recognize that your beloved Rapoport's rules have failed you here.

As an aside, I should say, for those of you who are not familiar with them, these rules come from Anatole Rapoport, the mathematician, game theorist, and social scientist. And Dan has been a champion of these rules of argumentation for years. And they are, one, attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, thanks, I wish I thought of putting it that way. Two, list any points of agreement, especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement. 3. Mention anything you have learned from your target. 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

So those are the rules, and Dan has often said that he aspires to follow them when criticizing another person's point of view. So back to my text. I hope you will recognize that your beloved Rappaport's rules have failed you here. If you have decided according to the rule to first mention something positive about the target of your criticism, it will not do to say that you admire him for the enormity of his errors and the recklessness with which he clings to them despite the sterling example you've set in your own work. Yes, you may assert, quote, I am not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable, end quote. But you are, in fact, being disingenuous. If that isn't clear,

permit me to spell it out just this once. You are asking the word valuable to pass as a token of praise, however faint. But according to you, my book is, quote, valuable for reasons that I should find embarrassing. If I valued it as you do, I should rue the day I wrote it, as you would had you brought such value into the world. And it would be disingenuous of me not to notice how your prickliness and preening appears. You write as one protecting his academic turf. Behind and between almost every word of your essay, like some toxic background radiation, one detects an explosion of professorial vanity." So that's how snide things got, and I must say that this is really a problem with writing rather

than having a face-to-face encounter. If any of you have ever had the brilliant idea of writing a long letter or email to a friend to sort out some relationship crisis rather than just have a conversation, you've probably discovered how haywire things can go through an exchange of texts. And the same can be true for intellectual debates among philosophers and scientists. And it's especially likely to happen if either or both of the people involved are writers who get attached to their writerly maneuvers. I remember writing that quip about Downton Abbey, and it made me laugh at the time. I knew it would make many readers laugh, and so I kept it in. But lines like that just amplify the damage done. So as I told Dan at the end of our podcast, I very much regret

the tone I took in this exchange, and I'm very happy we got a chance to have a face-to-face conversation and sort things out. I don't think we resolved all the philosophical issues, but we spoke for nearly two hours, but there were several important topics that never came up. As you'll hear, we were speaking in a bar using a single microphone, and this was at the end of a long day of conferencing. So this isn't us at our most polished or prepared, but I thought it was a very good conversation. I think those of you who are interested in the problem of free will and its connection to ethics will find it useful. I still think there's some sense in which Dan and I are talking past one another. The nature of our

remaining disagreement never became perfectly clear to me. So perhaps you guys can figure it out. And now I give you Dan Dennett, in a bar, overlooking the Canadian Rockies. So I'm here with Dan Dennett at the TED Summit in Banff, and we have stolen away from the main session, and we are in a bar and about to have a conversation about the misadventure we had in discussing free will online in a series of articles and blog posts.

I mean, you and I are part of a community, and a pretty visible part of a community and a pretty visible part of a community that prides itself on being willing to change its opinions and views more or less in real time under pressure from better arguments and better data. And I think I said in my article in response to your review of my book, Free Will, that this is a very rare occurrence. I mean, to see someone relinquish his cherished opinion more or less on the spot, under pressure from an interlocutor,

that's about as rare as seeing a supernova overhead. And it really shouldn't be, because there's nothing that tokens intellectual honesty more than a willingness to step away from one's views once they are shown to be an error. And I'm not saying we're necessarily going to get there in this conversation about free will, but there was something that went awry in our written exchanges, you know, tonally, and neither of us felt good about the result. And so, again, we'll talk about free will as well, but I think this conversation is proceeding along two levels where

there's the thing we're talking about philosophically, which is free will, but then there's just the way in which I want us to both be sensitive to getting hijacked into unproductive lines that make it needlessly hard to talk about what is just a purely intellectual, philosophical matter. And one of great interest, a surprisingly great interest to our audiences. There's no topic that I've touched that has surprised me more in the degree to which people find it

completely captivating to think about. And I know you and I both think it's a very consequential topic. It's unlike many topics in philosophy. This one really does meet ethics and public policy in a way that is important. So one thing you all should know in listening to this is that we have one microphone. Perhaps this is a good thing because we really can't interrupt each other. And we're just going to pass this microphone back and forth. and I now give you Dan Dennett. Thanks, Sam. This is a beautiful setting. If we can't agree on some things here, we shouldn't be in this business.

I want to go back one step further in how this got started. You sent me the manuscript of your book, Free Will, and asked me for my advice. And I didn't have time to read it. I just told you, no, I'm sorry, I don't have time. And then when the book came out, I read it and said, oh, I wish you'd, I forgot that we'd had that exchange. I said, I wish you'd showed it to me because I think you made some big mistakes here. And I would love to have tried to talk you out of them.

Too late. And then we, time passed and then we had the, you said you wanted me still to say what I thought the mistakes were. And that's when I wrote my piece for your blog and for Naturalism. And it certainly struck you wrong and I guess I regret a few bits of tone there, but I think everything I said there is defensible. And in particular, I did use Rappaport's rules, contrary to what you say. If you look at the first paragraph of my piece,

I applaud the book for doing a wonderful, clear job of setting out a position which I largely agreed with. And then I said you went off the rails a little later. So I did try to articulate your view, and I haven't heard you complain about that articulation of your view. And I said what we agree about. And I even said what I've learned from that book. So I did follow Rappaport's rules quite well. But we can just set that aside if you want and get down to what remains of the issue. One thing in particular,

which I know it came off awfully preachy, but I really think it was most unwise of you to declare that my position sounded like religion, sounded, you know, sounded like theology. You have to know that you're insulting me. And that was a pretty deliberate insult. And that was in the book. And I thought, come on, Sam. So you can't expect kid gloves. If you're going to call me a theologian, then I'm going to call you on it and say, as I said, I tell my students, when a view by a apparently senior, you know, an author worth reading looks that bad, maybe you've misinterpreted it. And of course, the main point of my essay was, yes, you have misconstrued my brand of compatibilism. You've got a sort of a caricatured version of it.

And in fact, as I say late in the piece, you are a compatibilist in all that name. You and I agree on so many things. You agree with me that determinism and moral responsibility are compatible. You agree that a system of law, including punishment and justified punishment, is compatible with determinism. That's, we're just that close to compatibilism. I've actually toyed with the idea, in part provoked by you and some others, Jerry Coyne and others,

to say, all right, I don't want to fight over who gets to define the term free will. As I see it, there are two completely intention themes out there about what free will is. One is that it's incompatible with determinism, and the other is that it's the basis of moral responsibility. I think it's the second one that's the important one. That's the variety of free will worth wanting. And I think the other one's a throwaway. And I agree with you. Indeterminist free will, libertarian free will is a philosopher's fantasy. It is not worth it. It's just a fantasy. So we agree on so much.

We have no love for libertarian indeterminism, for agent causation, for all of that metaphysical gobbledygook. We're both good naturalists. And we both agree that the truths of neuroscience and the truths of physics, physics doesn't have much to do with it actually, are compatible with most of our understanding, our everyday understanding of responsibility, taking responsibility, being morally responsible enough to be held to our word. I mean, you and I both agree that you are competent to sign a contract.

Me too. are competent to sign a contract. Me too. Well, you know, if you go and sign a deed or a mortgage, very often if it's notarized, the notary public will say, are you signing this of your own free will? And I recently did. I said, yeah, I am. That's the sense of free will that I think is important.

I have it. There are a lot of people that don't have that free will, and it has nothing to do with indeterminism. It has to do with their being disabled in some way. They don't have a well-running nervous system, which you need if you're going to be a responsible agent. I think you agree with all of that. nervous system, which you need if you're going to be a responsible agent. I think you agree with all of that. So I certainly agree with most of that. I think there's some interesting points of disagreement on the moral responsibility issue, which we should talk about. And I think that could be very interesting for listeners for us to unpack those differences. I am, needless to say, very uncomfortable with the idea that I have misrepresented

your view. And if I did that in my book, I certainly want to correct that here. So we should clearly state what your view is at a certain point here. But I want to step back for a second before we dive into the details of the philosophy of free will. What I was aware of doing in my book, Free Will, and again, I would recommend that our listeners just go back and you don't actually have to read my book, but you can read Dan's review of it on my blog and you can read my response, which is entitled The Marionette's Lament, I believe. Then you can see the bad blood that was generated there. And I don't know if, Dan, if you're aware of this,

you don't squander as much of your time on social media or in your inbox, but I heard from so many of our mutual readers that they were just despairing of that contretemps between us. It was like, you know, mom and dad fighting and it was totally unpleasant. The thing that I really regret, which you regret that you didn't get a chance to read my book before I published it, which that would have been a nice thing for both of us. But what I regret is when you told me that you were planning to write a review of it, I kept urging you and ultimately badgering you to not do that and have a discussion with me. with me because I knew what was going to happen, at least from my point of view, is that you would hit me with this 10,000 word volley, which at a dozen points or more, I would feel you had misconstrued me or gone off the rails. And there would be no chance to respond to those.

And to respond in a further 10,000 word volley in a piecemeal way would just lead to this exchange that was very boring to read and yielded a much bigger sense of disagreement than what was necessary, right? So if I have to spend 90% of my energy taking your words out of my mouth, then this thing begins to look purely adversarial. So one thing I've been struggling for in my professional life is a way of having conversations like this, even ones where there's much less goodwill than you and I have for one another, because you and I are friends and we're on the same side of most of these debates. And so we should be able to have this kind of conversation in a way that's productive. But I've been engaging people who, you know, think I'm a

racist bigot as a starting point. And I want to find ways of having conversations in real time where you can be as nimble as possible in diffusing unnecessary conflict or misunderstanding. And writing is an especially bad way to do that. Certainly writing the 10,000-word New York Review of Books piece than someone has to react to in an angry letter, you know? So in any case, I wish we'd had that conversation, but we're having it now, and this is instructive in its own way. Feel free to react to that, but I guess I want you to also express

what compatibilism means to you, and if you recall the way in which I got that wrong, feel free to say that, but I'll then react to your version of compatibilism. feel free to say that, but I'll then react to your version of compatibilism. Well, my view of compatibilism is pretty much what I just said, and you were nodding. And you were not considering that a serious view about free will, although you were actually, almost all of saying this is like theology, it smells of theology. Well, as soon as you said that, I thought,

well, you just don't understand what compatibilism is. It's the opposite of theology. It's an attempt to look at what matters, to look at the terms and their meanings, and to recognize that sometimes ancient ideology gets in the way of clear thinking, so that you can't just trust tradition. If you trusted tradition and the everyday meanings of words, we would have to say all sorts of silly things. We've learned. In fact, one of the abiding themes in my work is

there are these tactical or diplomatic choice points. You can say, oh, consciousness exists. It just isn't what you think it is. Or you can say, no, consciousness exists. It just isn't what you think it is. Or you can say, no, consciousness doesn't exist. Well, if you've got one view of consciousness, if it's this mysterious, magical, ultimately insoluble problem, then I agree, consciousness in that sense doesn't exist. But there's another sense, much more presentable, I think, which of course

consciousness exists. It just isn't what you think it is. That was a central theme in Elbow Room with regard to free will and in Consciousness Explained with regard to consciousness. My view, my tactic, and notice those two views, they look as if they're doctrinally opposed. They're not. They're two different ways of dealing with the same issue. Does free will really exist? Well, if free will means what Dennett says it means, yes. And you agree.

If it means what some people think, then the answer is no. Yeah, I understand that. But I would put to you the question, And you agree. If it means what some people think, then the answer is no. Yeah, I understand that. But I would put to you the question, there is a difference between explaining something and changing the subject. So this is my gripe about compatibilism, and this is something we'll get into. But I assume you will admit that there is a difference between purifying a real phenomenon of its folk psychological baggage, which I think this is what you think compatibilism is doing, and actually failing to interact with some core features that are just ineliminable from the concept itself.

Let me surprise you by saying, I don't think there's a sharp line between those two. from the concept itself. Let me surprise you by saying, I don't think there's a sharp line between those two. And I think that's quite obvious. That whether I'm changing the subject, I'm so used to that retort about any line along this. So, no, I think that's just a debater's point.

We should just set that aside. Saying you're just changing the subject is a way of declaring a whole manifold, a whole variety spectrum of clarificatory views, which you're not accepting because you're clinging to some core part of what free will is. You want to claim that free will, the core of free will, is its denial of determinism. And I've made a career saying that's not the core. In fact, let me try a new line on you. Because I've been thinking, why doesn't he see this the way I see it? And I think that the big source, the likely big source of confusion about this is that when people think about freedom in the context of free will,

they're ignoring a very good and legitimate notion of freedom, which is basically the engineering notion of freedom, when you talk about degrees of freedom. My arms, my wrist, my shoulder, my elbow, those joints, there's three degrees of freedom right there. And in control theory, it's all about how you control the degrees of freedom. And if we look around the world, we can see that some things have basically no degrees of freedom, that rock over there, and some things, like you and me, have basically no degrees of freedom, that rock over there, and some things like you and me have uncountably many degrees of freedom because of the versatility of our minds, the capacity that we are,

we can be moved by reasons on any topic at all. This gives us a complexity from the point of view of control theory which is completely absent in any other creature. And that kind of freedom is actually, I claim, at the heart of our understanding of free will, because it's that complexity, which is not just complexity, but it's the competence to control that complexity. That's what free will is. What you want, if you've got free will, is the capacity, and it'll never be perfect, to respond to the circumstances with all the degrees of freedom you need to do what you think would be really the right thing to do. You may not always do the right thing, but let's take a dead simple case. Imagine writing a chess program which, stupidly,

it was written wrong so that the king could only move forward or back or left or right, like a rook, and it could not move diagonally. And this was somehow hidden in it, so that it just never even considered moves, diagonal moves by the king. Completely disabled chess program. It's missing a very important degree of freedom, which it should have and be able to control and recognize when to use and so forth. What you want...

I mean, let me ask you a question about what would be ideal from the point of view of responsibility. What does an ideal responsible agent have? Mainly true beliefs, a well-ordered set of desires, the cognitive adroitness to change one's attention, to change one's mind, to be moved by reasons, the capacity to listen to reasons, the capacity for some self-control. These things all come in degrees, but our model of a responsible adult,

someone you would trust, someone you would make a promise to, or that you would accept a promise from, is somebody with all those degrees of freedom and control of them now what removes freedom from somebody is if either the degrees of freedom don't exist they're blocked mechanically or some other agent has usurped them and has taken over control. A marionette and a puppeteer. And so I think that our model of a free agent says nothing at all about indeterminism. We can distinguish free agents from unfree agents

in a deterministic world or in an indeterministic world. Determinism and indeterminism make no difference to that categorization, and it's that categorization which makes the moral difference. So, yeah, I agree with almost all of that. I just need to put a few more pieces in play here. I think there is an important difference. Nevertheless, I agree that there is no bright line between changing the subject and actually purifying a concept of illusions

and actually explaining something scientifically about the world. But in this case, the durability of free will as a problem for philosophers and now scientists is based on people's first-person experience of something they think they have. People feel like they are the authors of their thoughts and intentions and actions. And so there's a first-person description of this problem, and there's a third-person description of this problem. And I think if we bounce between the two without knowing that we're bouncing between the two,

we are losing sight of important details. So people feel that they have libertarian free will. And when I get emails from people who are psychologically destabilized by my argument that free will doesn't exist, these are people who feel like something integral to their psychological life and well-being is being put in jeopardy.

And I can say this from both sides because I know what it's like to feel that I could have done otherwise. So let me just, for listeners who aren't totally up to speed here, libertarian free will is this, is anchored to this notion of I could have done otherwise.

So if we rewound the universe to precisely as it was a few moments ago, I could complete this sentence differently than I did. You know, whether you throw indeterminism or determinism or some combination thereof, there's no scientific rationale for that claim. If you rewound the universe to precisely its prior state with all relevant variables intact, whether deterministic or indeterministic, these words would come out of my mouth in exactly the same order. And there would be no change. I would speak this sentence a trillion times in a row with its errors, with its glitches. So people feel that if they rewound the movie of their lives, they could do differently in each

moment. And that feeling is the thing that is what people find so interesting about this notion that free will doesn't exist. Because it is so counterintuitive psychologically. Now, I can tell you that I no longer feel that subjectively. My experience of myself, I'm aware of the fact that it is a subjective mystery to me how these words come out of my mouth. It's like I'm hearing these words as you're hearing these words, right? I'm thinking out loud right now. I haven't thought this thought before I thought it, right? It's just coming.

And I am subjectively aware of the fact that this is all coming out of the darkness of my unconscious mind in some sense. There's this sphere of my mind that is illuminated by consciousness, for lack of a better word, and I can be subjectively identified with it. But then there's all the stuff that is simply just arriving, appearing in consciousness, the contents of consciousness, which I can't notice until I notice them,

and I can't think the thought before I think it. And my direct experience is compatible with a purely deterministic world, right? Now, most people's isn't, or they don't think it is. And so that's where, when you change the subject, so the analogy I used in my article that responded to your review, which I still think captures it for me, I'll just pitch it to you once more, is the notion of Atlantis. So people are infatuated with this idea of Atlantis. I say, actually, Atlantis doesn't exist. It's a myth. There's nothing in the world that answers

to the name of Atlantis. There was no underwater kingdom with advanced technology and all the rest. And whoever it was, Plato was confused on this topic or just spinning a yarn. And you, compatibilism, your variant and perhaps every variant takes another approach. It says, no, no, actually there is something that conserves much of what people are concerned with about Atlantis.

And in fact, it may be the historical and geographical antecedent to the first stirrings of this idea of Atlantis. And there's this island of Sicily, the biggest island in the Mediterranean, which answers to much of what people care about with Atlantis. And I say, well, but actually what people really care about is the underwater kingdom with the advanced technology. And that is a fiction. So you and I are going to agree about

Sicily. 99% of our truth claims about Sicily are going to converge. But I'm saying the whole reason why we're talking about Atlantis in the first place is there's this other piece that people are attached to, which by you purifying the subject, you're actually just no longer interacting with that subjective piece. Yeah, that's well put. I think the analogy is, well, it's instructive. I don't think it's entirely fair, but let's leave it at that. Your position is that you can see very clearly that what people really care about is that free will should be something sort of magical. And you're right, a lot of people, if you don't think free will is magical, then you

don't believe in free will. And that's what I confront and say, well, I got something which isn't magical, which is perfectly consistent with naturalism and gives us moral responsibility, justification for the way we treat each other, the distinctions that matter to us, like who do we hold responsible and who don't, who do we excuse because they don't have free will. It gives us all of the landmarks of our daily lives and explains why these are what matters. And indeed, though, if the mystery, if the magic is that important to people,

I agree with you, that magic doesn't exist. And if we're going to tie free will to that, then I would say, no, free will doesn't exist. Now, you said something very interesting. You said that the reason people believe

in this is because they feel it, or they think they do. They sort of intuit they could have done something different in exactly the same situation. I agree with you that they that's what they think.

But I don't think that it is a forlorn task to show them that that's not really what they should think about this, about the very feelings they have. Their sense that they are, as Kant says, acting under the idea of freedom. That's right. They are. And that's the only way an agent can be. This is a fairly deep point that an agent has to consider some things fixed and some things not fixed.

You can't decide. Otherwise the whole setting of decision-making depends on there being that kind of freedom and so it's no wonder in a way that people who are impressed with that decide that what they experience is a sense of utter freedom. They don't need utter freedom. What they need and can have is the sense that in many very similar circumstances, circumstances which differed maybe only in a few atoms, they would have made another decision. And as soon as you allow any tiny change

when you rewind the tape, the whole business about determinism falls out of the picture. And that's why in actually several places, When you rewind the tape, the whole business about determinism falls out of the picture. And that's why in actually several places, I've gone to considerable length, probably too long, to trot out examples where we have a decision maker, which is in a demonstrably deterministic world. It's playing chess, and it loses the game, and its designer says, well, it could have castled. What do you mean it could have castled? What the designer means is it was just the luck of the draw.

A chess program, like any complicated program, is going to consult a random number generator or a pseudo-random number generator at various points. And this time it chose wrong. However, it chose wrong because when it got a number from the pseudo-random number generator, it got a one rather than a zero. Flip a single bit and it would have made the other choice. generator got a one rather than a zero. Flip a single bit and it would have made the other choice. In other words, it's not a design flaw. An agent could be, as it were, impeccably designed. You couldn't improve the design of the agent. So that's what justifies saying, yeah, I could have done otherwise. Half the time or more, it would have done otherwise.

This is just bad luck on this occasion. Normally, it would have done otherwise. So I agree with all that. I think you're not acknowledging, however, how seditious those facts are, the degree to which they undermine people's felt sense of their own personhood. So if you tell me that but for a single charge at a synapse, I would have decided I didn't want to have this conversation with you, or I wouldn't have proposed to my wife, right? And my entire life would be different. Acknowledging the underlying neurophysiology

of all of those choice points and how tiny a difference can be that makes the crucial difference, that suddenly brings back the marionette strings. Now, no one's holding the strings. The universe is holding the strings. But that is not what people feel themselves to be. This feeling that if you had had just one mouthful more of lunch,

something very different, you would make a radically different decision six hours from now than you are going to make. That is a life that no one, virtually no one, feels they're living. Oh, this is going in good directions. I think you're largely right and exactly wrong in what you just said. I think you're right that this is a subversive idea to many people. They're so used to the idea that unless they're completely, absolutely undetermined, then they don't have free will. Now, the trouble with that is, if you look closely at

that idea, you see, if they were absolutely undetermined, that wouldn't give them free will either. So that's a red herring. So let's look at what does matter. It's interesting that you say that if I thought that some tiny atomic change would have altered the course of some big important life decision, let's look closely at that. Because what I think we should say is it is indeed true that there are times when a decision is a real toss-up.

When you've thought about it, thought about it, thought about it, you're going to have to act pretty soon and you just can't make up your mind. In cases like that, and it may be something that's morally very important, the idea that when you do make the decision, had the few atoms been slightly different, you would have made the other decision, I don't find that upsetting at all. Because that's one of those situations. at all. Because that's one of those situations.

And it doesn't mean that when the evidence and the reasons are preponderantly on one side, no, then you'd have to make a very large change in the world for a different decision to come out. Sometimes the indeterminists, the libertarians, in fact, it's a sort of signature of a lot of their views, say that there has to be an absolutely undetermined choice of some importance that's somewhere in the causal chain of your life for your action to be responsible. Now, thus, I had long thrust into their faces the example of Luther who says, I can do no other. He's not ducking responsibility.

He's saying, believe me, it wasn't, had the light been different or the wind not been blowing, I would have, no. He's saying, I was determined to do this. And yet, he's not saying it's not a free decision. They, some of them, amazingly to me, fall for the bait and say, oh, well, that's only because it must have been the case. That somewhere in Luther's life, there was a moment, it might have been in his childhood, when there were two paths, A and B, and he chose A, which led to him putting,

nailing the theses on the door. And at that moment, it was absolutely undetermined that he'd choose A. I think that's the craziest fantasy imaginable. It doesn't depend on that. So I agree with you that when we think about how chance, luck, enters into our lives, that can be very unsettling. to our lives, that can be very unsettling. And we should not hide from the fact that there are times when it's a toss-up and we may rejoice in the

decision we make or we may bitterly regret it. And the fact that we couldn't do that it was not in our control it's maybe it's a tragic fact but it's not a fact which disables us for responsibility you're playing chess to take a deliberately trivial case. You, considering two possible moves, for the life of you, you can't see what the better one is. You sort of mentally flip a coin. You don't know.

Works out great. You're like, yeah, that's right. That's what I... You're very likely to retrospectively decorate that with the claim that that's what you've determined. Nah, you're kidding yourself. You're just taking responsibility for a little bit of lucky random coin flip in your decision process. in fact, not only does that not disable you for free will, I think an important human point about free will is that free responsible agents recognize that when they act, they're going to be held responsible whether or not they are in complete control of the, and they can't be in complete control of the

decision-making that goes to making up their minds. Well, now I think we're getting into some very interesting territory where we might actually disagree because I think perhaps your notion of moral responsibility is something that I don't agree with. I think I can do a kind of compatible answer. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free

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