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Feb. 13th, 2014 02:20 pmMore Harris controversing, on free will, this time surely heralding a falling out between him and Dennett:
http://www.samharris.org
The Jan. 26 piece by Dennett is what he's responding to in the Feb. 12 one and should be read first. Dennett's responding to a pamphlet on free will by Harris that you have to pay to read, but you'll get the gist from Dennett's block quotes from it and Harris' defense. I'm skeptical and then some of Harris's assertions that one can subjectively experience the absence of free will (and of self) through meditation, but they don't matter here. On the merits it seems to me to be a rout - Dennett's allegiance is to terminology, and Harris correctly points out that even if for some reason we couldn't split up the terms in question (e.g. into "will free from interference" and "will free from both caused and random determination"), letting "free will" mean what Dennett wants it to may cause more harm than exposing its traditional meaning's dangerous incoherence. Dennett has room to disagree with that, but that's where his argument should have gone from the start and never really did. At the very least Dennett was bending over backwards to not understand what Harris was saying, and that's beyond uncool.
Though I'm not at all sure about Harris' approach, here as with Greenwald, of telling someone who's being dickish exactly how dickish they're being, which to many comes across as mere escalation, i.e. as more dickish still. It's not that he's wrong, but it's something that to many will make him look wrong. I'm not clear whether he does this for temperamental reasons or as part of his total honesty experiment. My own instinct would be to just switch over to the facts, as he does do in the second part of his response, and let the other arguer's excesses shame themselves in the light of those. But perhaps that's cowardice. Of course at some point a line is crossed, which is, and this is probably the extent of their shared novelty, the New Atheists' argument for aggressively attacking religion - the dangerously ridiculous requires ridicule. But Dennett's not exactly that, just obfuscatory and condescending, presumably from disliking that Harris has a case.
http://www.samharris.org
The Jan. 26 piece by Dennett is what he's responding to in the Feb. 12 one and should be read first. Dennett's responding to a pamphlet on free will by Harris that you have to pay to read, but you'll get the gist from Dennett's block quotes from it and Harris' defense. I'm skeptical and then some of Harris's assertions that one can subjectively experience the absence of free will (and of self) through meditation, but they don't matter here. On the merits it seems to me to be a rout - Dennett's allegiance is to terminology, and Harris correctly points out that even if for some reason we couldn't split up the terms in question (e.g. into "will free from interference" and "will free from both caused and random determination"), letting "free will" mean what Dennett wants it to may cause more harm than exposing its traditional meaning's dangerous incoherence. Dennett has room to disagree with that, but that's where his argument should have gone from the start and never really did. At the very least Dennett was bending over backwards to not understand what Harris was saying, and that's beyond uncool.
Though I'm not at all sure about Harris' approach, here as with Greenwald, of telling someone who's being dickish exactly how dickish they're being, which to many comes across as mere escalation, i.e. as more dickish still. It's not that he's wrong, but it's something that to many will make him look wrong. I'm not clear whether he does this for temperamental reasons or as part of his total honesty experiment. My own instinct would be to just switch over to the facts, as he does do in the second part of his response, and let the other arguer's excesses shame themselves in the light of those. But perhaps that's cowardice. Of course at some point a line is crossed, which is, and this is probably the extent of their shared novelty, the New Atheists' argument for aggressively attacking religion - the dangerously ridiculous requires ridicule. But Dennett's not exactly that, just obfuscatory and condescending, presumably from disliking that Harris has a case.
