kkeefner

Sam Harris is trying to promote some radical change in human life. He's not much of a philosopher and he usually doesn't get down to fundamentals, so we'd have to say he is riding the wave of other materialist thinkers going back to antiquity. But he has his own agenda though: 1. Stop giving credit to successful people for their achievements. 2. Stop blaming/punishing criminals. 3. Get people to accept that they don't really know themselves. 4. Use brain scans to figure out what would make people happy. 5. Get society to adopt a vague notion of wellbeing as its standard of value. The foreseen and unintended psychological ramifications of determinism are both enormous. Accepting it all the way down would cause people to stop looking to their beliefs and life strategies as an explanation of their behavior. Furthermore, Harris' version of determinism (neural determinism) doesn't even relate in any direct or obvious indirect way to life events, as does Freud's theory. He says that our preferences, if we look deep enough, come out of "the darkness." Truly believing this would at first lead to an impersonal way of viewing oneself ("Hm, I lost my temper again, must be some activity in the old sigmoid reticulant lobe. I'll have to get that looked at.") Eventually it would lead to despair. I knew a girl in college who believed we were nothing but atoms. She was promiscuous and a heavy drinker. (I know that's not proof of anything, but it's a good anecdote.) When I saw that Harris had written a book arguing against free will, I knew I had to do something. I had written about the subject before and given it a lot of thought, so I gave Harris' book a close reading and wrote a response. http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Response-Harris-ebook/dp/B00869S35Q/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=2NGPU7HEEF07Z&coliid=I3U8XD7KP2NBQ7 I feel very strong about this subject. If Brave New World becomes a reality, Sam Harris will have been one of its founding fathers.