How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
Interpretation
The quote questions the concept of free will by suggesting that our intentions are shaped by unconscious brain processes beyond our control.
Sam Harris raises a fundamental issue regarding the nature of free will and consciousness. He argues that if our conscious intentions are merely the result of neurological events that we are unaware of and did not choose, then true freedom may be an illusion. This challenges the traditional view of autonomy in decision-making, suggesting that what we perceive as conscious thought may actually be influenced by underlying brain activity that we cannot access or control.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about free will during a college seminar.
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.
The core of science is not a mathematical modeling--it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization.
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.
A new understanding of power is replacing our old understanding of power as the ability to manipulate and control. The old understanding of power has become counterproductive to our evolution. What used to be good medicine has become poisonous. Pursuit of the ability to manipulate and control now produces only violence and destruction.
If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies.
One always pulls the trigger out of self-interest and quotes history to avoid responsibility or pangs of conscience.
Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.
How can it be "mutually beneficial" to sell at world market prices the raw materials that cost the underdeveloped countries immeasurable sweat and suffering.
There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.
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