Sam Harris Quotes

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit a person's freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results.

There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Free will...it's all the rage these days

I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.

Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

I find it significant that, even though contemporary philosophy tends towards forms of determinism, in the wider culture people are deeply into naming, shaming and blaming each other. So we haven't lost that sense of conscience.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.

But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe ? Another act of willing?

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.

If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you'd see you are a totally determined being.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.