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.
What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift.
In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.
The door to the invisible must be visible.
Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.
Today we all speak, if not the same tongue, the same universal language. There is no one center, and time has lost its former coherence: East and West, yesterday and tomorrow exist as a confused jumble in each one of us. Different times and different spaces are combined in a here and now that is everywhere at once.
This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
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