Sam Harris is WRONG! about free will.

Hi. I’m Lone Candle, and Sam Harris is WRONG! about free will.

Okay, our differences might just be semantic, but let’s get into it.

Sam says that everything is determined, meaning that the rules of physics are the rules of physics, and every piece of matter and energy at time A is located and moving the way that it is, and all this matter and energy follows the rules of the universe so that what will happen in time B is inevitable.

So, if we could know all the fine laws of the universe, and where everything in the universe is and how it is moving, we could plot exactly what would happen five hundred or five million years from now. This means your existence, everything you say, do, and think, is 100% predictable. How can you have free will in such a situation?

You might throw in quantum mechanics or some other form of randomness into the rules of the universe, and while this could make prediction harder, it doesn’t help free will. Randomness isn’t you choosing what you do, it is randomness. Adding probability to determinism doesn’t make room for your decisions to change the world.

I agree with Sam on determinism. At the big bang everything that was going to happen was set into motion. It couldn’t have happened any other way because the laws of the universe had already determined how things would develop. We can never make such predictions because we can’t know where every piece of energy and matter is, but nevertheless, they exist, and in the…