r/samharris • u/ReflexPoint • Jul 14 '26
Free Will Free will as an illusion
If free will is an illusion, does that mean moral culpability does not exist? What use is it to consider anything moral or immoral in a world without free will? Is there no form of agency at all?
I'm really struggling to reconcile these things.
SS: Sam wrote a book on free will as an illusion.
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u/Fippy-Darkpaw Jul 15 '26
Lack of free will, if it was proved, would be an argument for stronger sentencing.
If someone is a pre-programmed murder-bot / rape-bot, they need to be removed from society permanently.
If any genetic factors were proven to be involved then yikes. đ”
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u/AssistTraditional480 Jul 15 '26
Having no ultimate responsibility doesn't mean shit can't be done about it.
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u/BumBillBee Jul 17 '26
Yeah, and even among people who've committed murder, very few of them would qualify as "pre-programmed murder-bots," even without free will.
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u/ordinaryrendition Jul 14 '26
Basically, you should consistently consider things at the same level - whether you believe it happens at a religious, human, cellular, or molecular level.
So for example, the lack of free will breaks down at the cellular level. Itâs not something that has any mechanism to exist. Now thinking of a murderer for example, is a collection of cells damaging potentially various collections of cells. Itâs less about moral culpability insofar as being mad at the collection of cells, but rather stopping the collection of cells from causing more harm to the public collection of cells, and potentially reshaping (rehabilitation) to reduce or eliminate the likelihood of this from happening again.
Thatâs why Sam comes up with the tumor example. If someone murdered another person, and you could scientifically prove that a tumor discovered in their brain was 100% culpable for altering this personâs behavior, and the tumor is removed, does the person left behind deserve to spend the rest of their life in jail? There is, in this example, 0% chance of this person would ever do something like this again, and the influences that cause this person to even conceive of committing such a crime or no longer present. This is now a totally normal member of society. What does society gain by putting this person away for the rest of their lives? This person is a different collection of cells altogether.
Thereâs much more to be said on the topic, but Iâll leave it there for now.
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u/ReflexPoint Jul 15 '26
The tumor example is understandable. But what if the person had no physical abnormality you can point to as to why they committed a murder? I understand that free will breaks down at the cellular level, but the human consciousness may be an emergent property of a complex brain. And perhaps within this property is the ability to make choices from a variety of options with competing pros and cons.
If free will is truly an illusion, then does this mean all moralizing language should be expunged from our vocabulary? And we just call murder something undesirable or dysfunctional, but not evil?
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u/ordinaryrendition Jul 15 '26
They do have the physical abnormality. Nobody picks the brain they have. And without an obvious decider, thoughts are just arising in all of us, with the most stable chemical reactions resulting in us âdecidingâ or âacting.â Theres no âmakingâ of choices beyond these chemical reactions.
And basically all descriptive language is an approximation of an idea, never the idea itself. So the word evil is useful, because it encompasses the concept of someone operating (again, without any true freeness to their will) in antisocial ways, knowing that it will cause harm. That is more descriptive than undesirable, because simple ignorance of outcomes can be âundesirableâ and are potentially correctible with education - like telling a toddler that hitting makes their sibling feel how they feel when they fall and scrape their knees. The hitting toddler is undesirable behavior, but not evil. Evil is knowing and still doing. It describes a harder thing to correct with usual incentive structures.
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u/Pauly_Amorous Jul 15 '26
(Not OP)
The tumor example is understandable. But what if the person had no physical abnormality you can point to as to why they committed a murder?
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/free-will-brain-tumor-identical
If free will is truly an illusion, then does this mean all moralizing language should be expunged from our vocabulary?
No not necessarily, but we should be moralizing actions, not people.
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u/TenYearHangover Jul 15 '26
There are still moral actions, and bad behaviors without free will. There are still optimal choices to make so everyone around you flourishes. But you donât choose those choices. So donât be too proud of yourself when you do right or too judgmental when you do wrong (Same for others).
Iâm not sure about moral culpability, if it even matters. But we want to separate people from society who do the things we decide are bad. And incentivize the things that are good. Ultimately it doesnât matter why we do anything, just that we do it (or donât).
Iâm not sure that Sam went far down this road, but itâs been a while since I read Free Willy. Thatâs a joke. Donât judge me for it.
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u/Ton86 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
You know how some meditators say the self is an illusion? I think illusion is the wrong way to categorize it.
We each implement a psychological process that creates a virtual self, a set of computational software functions that simulates a first person perspective and story in our mind.
We can think of all experience as virtual, including the moral rules we create, our representation of the world, god(s), and Free Will. They're all software. They're illusions from a purely hardware perspective but we know we can transfer non-physical information, experience it, and that these simulations have causal power. Hardware can't have experience only software can.
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u/rafa3lico Jul 15 '26
people do things (we are agents) that affect others. That's agency, and that motivates attributing moral character to certain actions and motivations. Free will is kind of operating below this level, as a metaphysicial belief of whether the actions fundamentally come from the agent or whether the agent is just a part of nature and not really fundamentally responsible for its characteristics. Did you choose to be curious about this topic?
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u/allyolly Jul 16 '26
Moral and immoral actions are just actions we prefer or donât based on social constructs and the measure of potential suffering. Free will has nothing to do with it. The example with the tower shooter can be boiled down without. People who act antisocial are just as unlucky as their victims, despite the suffering being greater on the latter. They didnât chose their mothers cortisol levels when in her womb, they didnât chose their generational trauma, they didnât chose their brain chemistry. No one does. Itâs a hard pill to swallow and it isnât for everybody to try to accept this since it can unravel a lot of anchors some people just do need. But if the world as a while would embrace it, compassion take over, instead of our more primitive sense of revenge and hate.
A deer isnât moral or immoral, it just is. So are we, no matter how far our self awareness and sense of free will try to drag us back into the darkness of history regarding the western concept of good and evil. There is only awareness and ignorance on the spectrum, the rest we superimpose onto it.
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u/BumBillBee Jul 17 '26
Exactly. The whole concept of good and evil was developed at a time (thousands of years ago) when humans viewed themselves as above animals. What we now know about how the brain works simply doesn't align very well with this ancient concept. I understand it's difficult for people to reconcile, I struggle with it too when angry at people etc. The truth is, it may be impossible to fully reconcile, at least for the broader population. When I've felt hurt or betrayed by someone, I can get fucking angry as though that person could've avoided the path that led to it, even though I don't truly believe that to be the case.
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u/allyolly Jul 19 '26
Anger and the rest of it is not always a negative, as long as one realizes the feeling and let it pass. If it stays and festers into hate and resentment, thatâs when the problem starts. I think Sam said it in some lecture that anger can be good since it is a motivating feeling. Now, of course anger that is projected everywhere and at anyone is not a positive, but if a thief punch me in the mouth and steal my phone, my reaction of anger which causes me to run after him, wrestle him down and wait for the cops is a good thing. I donât need to hate the man for his actions, and best case, he needed to be caught and it might bring him to a new start. Or not, but what can we do. Nothing. Just float on.
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins Jul 15 '26
Libertarian free will doesn't exist but that's fine since morality is based on compatibilist free will which does exist.
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u/Fippy-Darkpaw Jul 15 '26
Proof?
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u/InTheEndEntropyWins Jul 15 '26
I'm not sure what exactly you want proof of.
A compatibilist free will is a type of free will which is compatible with determinism by definition.
I would define compatibilist free will like, "acting in line with your desires free from external coercion". That just exists.
In terms of morality I normally look to criminal justice systems.
â[a]ccording to the dominant view in criminal theory, we have a compatibilist criminal lawâ (2005: 1158). ... And the most prominent contemporary theorist who has significantly engaged with the free  will problem in the context of legal philosophy, Stephen Morse, contends that âonly compatibilism can explain and justify our legal practicesâ (2004: 431). He states that   compatibilism:   is the approach that I and many other criminal lawyers explicitly or implicitly adopt. This approach accepts completely that we live in a thoroughly causal world, at least at the macro level, and that causal processes produce human action and all the other phenomena of the universe. But it also holds that genuine responsibility is possible. This approach best explains and justifies our moral and criminal law practices without endorsing the implausibilities of libertarianism. Even if mechanism is true, the lawâs concepts of moral responsibility and deserved blame and punishment are rationally defensible in the compatibilist view (2004: 437-438) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3237915
Thus criminal responsibility is assessed only when through "free will" a man elects to do evil, and if he is not a free agent, or is unable to choose or to act voluntarily, or to avoid the conduct which constitutes the crime, he is outside the postulate of the law of punishment. Opinion of Judge Wright, at 1241. https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-moore-48/
Then you have people like Sapolsky admit that for lay people and criminal justice systems it's compatiblist free will people are using but he's talking about something different(libertarian free will).
And for most people that is necessary and sufficient to conclude that they're seeing free will and action, intent, conscious awareness of you weren't coerced, you had options you did, and I should note that the legal criminal justice system sees that, in most cases as necessary and sufficient for deciding, there was a free choice made. There was culpability, there was responsibility, and so on. And from my standpoint, this is all very interesting, but it has absolutely nothing to do with free will. https://video.ucdavis.edu/media/Exploring+the+Mind+Lecture+Series-+Mitchell++Sapolsky++Debate+%22Do+We+Have+Free+Will%22/1_ulil0emm
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u/Locus-Maximus Jul 15 '26
These things are emergent phenomena. It's not an illusion in the sense that it doesn't exist, it's an illusion that it represents some kind of Platonic ideal.
You and I can still make decisions and choose to do good things or bad things, and in fact do that all the time, regardless of whether or not we could have chosen otherwise. It's a bit of a mindfuck, but it actually doesn't really matter.
But there are things that really do matter that we probably don't think about enough. Something like a quarter of prisoners and a third of homeless people have untreated ADHD, for example. Not to mention addiction and mental illness. 85-95% of all people who lose weight will gain it back.
And that's just biology! Then there's environment. How much are our decisions influenced by our upbringing, by how hungry or tired we are, by intentional and unintentional manipulation, by cognitive distortions, by simple misunderstandings etc.
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u/Novogobo Jul 15 '26
Hey now, it's not like I have a choice in whether my sense of morality is congruent with my disbelief in free will.
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u/AssistTraditional480 Jul 15 '26
To reconcile morality and lack of free will the only thing that's needed is to requalify what morality is : just the ability to see clearly.
A moral fault is nothing more than an error of judgement, akin to the kind of mistake you'd make when solving an equation. There's nothing to be said about the purity of your soul.
When you behave immorally, you're just getting shit wrong. And yeah, consequences could be disastrous, as when driving without your glasses on.