Sam Harris giving us the typical 13 year old’s take on free will

If your notion of free will requires the logically impossible — that the universe be neither deterministic nor random — then perhaps you have a terribly incoherent notion of free will.

Sam Harris is still making high school level mistakes in thinking about free will (and responsibility). Click through to Twitter to see him describing the standard line that free will cannot exist because either the universe is deterministic (no free will) or random (not free will either).

https://x.com/markchangizi/status/1766100930921988571?s=46&t=3U-fDJVwddwRltwRU5YL8Q

If your notion of free will requires the logically impossible — that the universe be neither deterministic nor random — then perhaps you have a terribly incoherent notion of free will.

The consensus across humankind is that there is free will, because what we actually mean by it in a trillion meaningful conversations and predictions and blamings and explanations has nothing whatsoever to do with the abstruse armchair metaphysical issue about whether there is or is not some space between determinism and indeterminism.

I discuss this in the context of culpability in mass hysterias in this early Science Moment episode, # 91 from June 8, 2021.