The twilight of the skeptics

A few years ago, I was working on an idea for a story—still unrealized—that required a sidelong look at the problem of free will. As part of my research, I picked up a copy of the slim book of the same name by the prominent skeptic Sam Harris. At the time, I don’t think I’d even heard of Harris, and I was expecting little more than a readable overview. What I remember about it the most, though, is how it began. After a short opening paragraph about the importance of his subject, Harris writes:

In the early morning of July 23, 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, two career criminals, arrived at the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in Cheshire, a quiet town in central Connecticut. They found Dr. Petit asleep on a sofa in the sunroom. According to his taped confession, Komisarjevsky stood over the sleeping man for some minutes, hesitating, before striking him in the head with a baseball bat. He claimed that his victim’s screams then triggered something within him, and he bludgeoned Petit with all his strength until he fell silent.

Harris goes on to provide a graphically detailed account, which I’m not going to retype here, of the sexual assault and murder of Petit’s wife and two daughters. Two full pages are devoted to it, in a book that is less than a hundred pages long, and only at the end does Harris come to the point: “As sickening as I find their behavior, I have to admit that if I were to trade places with one of these men, atom for atom, I would be him: there is no extra part of me that could decide to see the world differently or resist the impulse to victimize other people.”

I see what Harris is trying to say here, and I don’t think that he’s even wrong. Yet his choice of example—a horrifying crime that was less than five years old when he wrote Free Will, which the surviving victim, William Petit, might well have read—bothered me a lot. It struck me as a lapse of judgment, or at least of good taste, and it remains the one thing that I really remember about the book. And I’m reminded of it now only because of an excellent article in Wired, “Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought,” that neatly lays out many of my old misgivings. The author, Robert Wright, documents multiple examples of his subject falling short of his professed standards, but he focuses on an exchange with the journalist Ezra Klein, whom Harris accused of engaging in “a really indissoluble kind of tribalism, which I keep calling identity politics.” When Klein pointed out that this might be a form of tribal thinking in itself, Harris replied: “I know I’m not thinking tribally.” Wright continues:

Reflecting on his debate with Klein, Harris said that his own followers care “massively about following the logic of a conversation” and probe his arguments for signs of weakness, whereas Klein’s followers have more primitive concerns: “Are you making political points that are massaging the outraged parts of our brains? Do you have your hands on our amygdala and are you pushing the right buttons?”

Just a few years earlier, however, Harris didn’t have any qualms about pushing the reader’s buttons by devoting the first two pages of Free Will to an account of a recent, real-life home invasion that involved unspeakable acts of sexual violence against women—when literally any other example of human behavior, good or bad, would have served his purposes equally well.

Harris denies the existence of free will entirely, so perhaps he would argue that he didn’t have a choice when he wrote those words. More likely, he would say that the use of this particular example was entirely deliberate, because he was trying to make a point by citing most extreme case of deviant behavior that he could imagine. Yet it’s the placement, as much as the content, that gives me pause. Harris puts it right up front, at the place where most books try for a narrative or argumentative hook, which suggests two possible motivations. One is that he saw it as a great “grabber” opening, and he opportunistically used it for no other reason than to seize the reader’s attention, only to never mention it ever again. This would be bad enough, particularly for a man who claims to disdain anything so undignified as an appeal to the amygdala, and it strikes me as slightly unscrupulous, in that it literally indicates a lack of scruples. (I’ll have more to say about this word later.) Yet there’s an even more troubling possibility that didn’t occur to me at the time. Harris’s exploitation of these murders, and the unceremonious way in which he moves on, is a signal to the reader. This is the kind of book that you’re getting, it tells us, and if you can’t handle it, you should close it now and walk away. In itself, this amounts to false advertising—the rest of Free Will isn’t much like this at all, even if Harris is implicitly playing to the sort of person who hopes that it might be. More to the point, the callousness of the example probably repelled many readers who didn’t appreciate the rhetorical deployment, without warning, of a recent rape and multiple murder. I was one of them. But I also suspect that many women who picked up the book were just as repulsed. And Harris doesn’t seem to have been overly concerned about this possibility.

Yet maybe he should have been. Wright’s article in Wired includes a discussion of the allegations against the physicist and science writer Lawrence Krauss, who has exhibited a pattern of sexual misconduct convincingly documented by an article in Buzzfeed. Krauss is a prominent member of the skeptical community, as well as friendly toward Harris, who stated after the piece appeared: “Buzzfeed is on the continuum of journalistic integrity and unscrupulousness somewhere toward the unscrupulous side.” Whether or not the site is any less scrupulous than a writer who would use the sexual assault and murder of three women as the opening hook—and nothing else—in his little philosophy book is possibly beside the point. More relevant is the fact that, as Wright puts it, Harris’s characterization of the story’s source “isn’t true in any relevant sense.” Buzzfeed does real journalism, and the article about Krauss is as thoroughly reported and sourced as the most reputable investigations into any number of other public figures. With his blanket dismissal, Harris doesn’t sound much like a man who cares “massively” about logic or rationality. (Neither did Krauss, for that matter, when he said last year in the face of all evidence: “Science itself overcomes misogyny and prejudice and bias. It’s built in.”) But he has good reason to be uneasy. The article in Buzzfeed isn’t just about Krauss, but about the culture of behavior within the skeptical community itself:

What’s particularly infuriating, said Lydia Allan, the former cohost of the Dogma Debate podcast, is when male skeptics ask how they could draw more women into their circles. “I don’t know, maybe not put your hands all over us? That might work,” she said sarcastically. “How about you believe us when we tell you that shit happens to us?”

Having just read the first two pages of Free Will again, I can think of another way, too. But that’s probably just my amygdala talking.

Do novelists have free will? Part 1

Recently, as part of a writing project I’m hoping to finish within the next couple of months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of free will. Free will, like consciousness, is a phenomenon that seems perfectly obvious in our everyday life but increasingly elusive the more we try to pin it down. As David Eagleman points out in his book Incognito, science has long since established that much of what we think of as our own intentions and behavior arise from parts of the brain that aren’t immediately accessible to conscious thought. In the famous Libet experiment, for instance, subjects were told to flick a finger at the time of their choosing, while recording what they perceived as the exact moment at which they decided to move. What Benjamin Libet discovered was that readiness potentials associated with muscle movement could be detected in the brain about half a second before the subjects were conscious of having made the decision. Later tests have found similar brain activity as much as seven seconds in advance—which implies that consciousness, at least under some circumstances, is really just a way of retrospectively rationalizing actions we’ve undertaken before we’re even aware of it.

To some extent, we all know how this feels. This morning, for instance, while mulling over today’s blog post, I brushed my teeth, showered, shaved—and then brushed my teeth again. Why? I don’t know. My eye happened to fall on the toothbrush by the sink, and without any conscious input whatsoever, my “brushing my teeth” subroutine was absentmindedly activated for the second time in twenty minutes. Later, I made coffee and my morning omelet, and it’s safe to say that I was operating mostly on autopilot: I was watching my daughter and thinking about what I was going to write at the same time, so I was more than happy to outsource my breakfast to a different part of my brain. This kind of automation is a necessary part of survival, as well as basic happiness: I’d go crazy if I had to consciously think over each step of such routine activities, much less to remind myself to breathe twelve times each minute. It’s far less comfortable to acknowledge that higher levels of our actions and behavior may be equally out of our control, but the more we try to grasp what we mean by free will, the more it seems to slip through our fingers.

Opponents of free will certainly have a strong case on their side. Every human thought or action arises from the firing of the brain’s neurons, which in turn are governed by the laws of physics, and attempts to explain consciousness by reference to quantum mechanics are really just a way of replacing one mystery with another. Go down far enough and we’re nothing but physical processes, and any event in the brain, big or small, can be traced back to another. Even if we’re willing to entertain the existence of a soul, this doesn’t solve the underlying problem of the unconscious roots of our influences and intentions, as Sam Harris notes in his little book Free Will: “If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control.” Harris writes elsewhere that most attempts to salvage the idea of free will begin with the premise that they want to prove, and that such efforts have more in common with theology than science or philosophy. And although Harris’s case is in some ways irrefutable, one is still tempted to respond to it in the same way that Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life, replied to the doctrine of idealism:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—”I refute it thus.”

It might seem equally quaint to point to one’s subjective perception of free will and say: “I refute it thus.” But that’s really all most of the arguments in favor of free will can do—and make no mistake, it’s a powerful piece of evidence. What Daniel Dennett has called “our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions” is something we can’t easily dismiss. And although it’s far outside this scope of this blog to make a case one way or the other, I think it’s worthwhile to consider it through one particular lens: that of creative activity. At first glance, the act of writing a novel—or composing a symphony or executing a fresco—seems like a strong demonstration of willed, conscious activity: each book is a series of choices, executed over a long period of time and with a lot of reflection, constrained only by the artist’s ability. As much as any action in which human beings engage, the novel is an exercise in sustained consciousness that can take years to complete, and the result, however flawed it may be, can only be something that the author meant to do. Or can it? Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at the process of writing as an act of free will, and try to consider how much, or how little, it really explains.