I agree with you that compatibilism is correct and Harris isn’t doing a good job of dealing with the best arguments from academic philosophy, even though he has Dennett to explain things to him. But I am not sure this gets at the issue.
The most interesting claim Harris makes is that we not only don’t have free will (however understood) but that we don’t even seem to have free will - even though it seems like we seem to have it. The only way to make sense of that claim is to take seriously Harris’s claims to Buddhist meditation traditions. He is saying if we attend to our own phenomenology we will notice that mental events, including volitions, come unbidden. There is clearly a paradox here since the whole point of meditation training is to give us reasons to attend to our phenomenology differently.
Thus Harris takes up what Marx says is Feuerbach’s attitude of only regarding the thing as an “object of contemplation”, except that he also views his own consciousness this way.
It is only in abandoning the contemplative for the active that it makes sense to talk about a “will”, free or otherwise. If we are engaged in productive activity, then we are always implementing prior ideas in a relationship with nature. These have to be susceptible to reasons so we can coordinate what we are doing with others. And others have to be able to give us reasons to act, which we have to also have the capacity to reject.
In other words freedom (the ability to act on the basis of reasons that we accept but could reject) arises, if at all, in a historical process of social labour, which is also how unfreedom arises.
Great read. Found the Jean-Paul Sartre example about the French boy very interesting. His framing of the two choices I disagree with, it ignores the possibility of the brother choosing to honor his lost brother through fighting, making a free choice to respect the micro and macro at the same time through one choice. And also honoring his mother; even if she feels it disrespectful
I agree with you that compatibilism is correct and Harris isn’t doing a good job of dealing with the best arguments from academic philosophy, even though he has Dennett to explain things to him. But I am not sure this gets at the issue.
The most interesting claim Harris makes is that we not only don’t have free will (however understood) but that we don’t even seem to have free will - even though it seems like we seem to have it. The only way to make sense of that claim is to take seriously Harris’s claims to Buddhist meditation traditions. He is saying if we attend to our own phenomenology we will notice that mental events, including volitions, come unbidden. There is clearly a paradox here since the whole point of meditation training is to give us reasons to attend to our phenomenology differently.
Thus Harris takes up what Marx says is Feuerbach’s attitude of only regarding the thing as an “object of contemplation”, except that he also views his own consciousness this way.
It is only in abandoning the contemplative for the active that it makes sense to talk about a “will”, free or otherwise. If we are engaged in productive activity, then we are always implementing prior ideas in a relationship with nature. These have to be susceptible to reasons so we can coordinate what we are doing with others. And others have to be able to give us reasons to act, which we have to also have the capacity to reject.
In other words freedom (the ability to act on the basis of reasons that we accept but could reject) arises, if at all, in a historical process of social labour, which is also how unfreedom arises.
Great read. Found the Jean-Paul Sartre example about the French boy very interesting. His framing of the two choices I disagree with, it ignores the possibility of the brother choosing to honor his lost brother through fighting, making a free choice to respect the micro and macro at the same time through one choice. And also honoring his mother; even if she feels it disrespectful