The Skinnerian Robot’s Guide To Conditioned Behavior

[Note: This is a book review of Sam Harris's "Free Will," which I also posted at Amazon.com and my Facebook group page, Electrical-Hermetic Christianity.]

I used to think that Ken Wilber (see my two-star review of “The Fourth Turning” and three-star reviews of “Integral Psychology” and “A Brief History of Everything”) was the most overrated living philosopher, but I was wrong. Very wrong. Sam Harris, not Ken Wilber, is hands-down, the king of the hill in the very lucrative field of pseudo-punditry. Truly, I can’t imagine a dimmer bulb than Harris attempting to enlighten the masses about reality (see my two-star review of Harris’s “Waking Up”).

Thank God (yes, I’m not an atheist), or at least my lucky stars (yes, I’m an ex-professional astrologer), that I received this pseudo-book (which I read in about twenty minutes) for free, because it is an utterely worthless piece of philosophical pabulum that a college sophomore could write. In fact, I minored in philosophy in college, and for one of my philosophy classes, our assignment was a paper on free will. Too bad I didn’t save my paper; it was considerably better than Harris’s essay.

In his essay, Harris simply regurgitates old arguments, and anyone with a background in philosophy (I’m now a professional philosopher) will shake their head wondering how this clown can rake in big bucks for peddling pathetic pieces of sophomoric crap, like this pseudo-text. The pontificating Harris, anointed by the Powers that Be as the High Priest of Scientific Materialism, proves once again that it’s not what you know, but what you can sell, that counts.

Innumerable philosophers have rebutted Harris’s contra-free-will argument, and if you Google the subject you’ll find some of their arguments. Because this is just a review, I cannot pick Harris apart piece by piece (as I do with Eckhart Tolle in “Beyond the Power of Now”), but I will present just a very brief reubuttal to his thesis. And if someone wants to offer me a large grant, I will gladly carve up and spit out the hare-brained Harris in a protracted essay.

Harris writes: “Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Unbeknownst to Harris, even though thoughts and impulses seem to arise without rhyme or reason from our subconscious, we can, according to our individual degree of free will (or will power) consciously choose to act or not act upon them. And in reality, what arises from our subconscious is a lawful karmic (cause and effect) reflection of our past conditioning. But because we (to a degree commensurate with our consciousness evolvement) possess will power (and there can be no “will” that isn’t free, because then it wouldn’t be “will,” but rather a conditioned response), we can consciously choose to act or not act in response to what arises, and we can choose to consciously act (and consciously initiate new action) that will change, or recondition, our conditioning and karma.

Free will is a simple self-evident reality, but to an off-the-assembly-line academic, a sheep-skin-factory Skinnerian robot like Harris lost in the recesses of his convoluted brain, it is a complex impossibility.