The Sam Harris puppet show: unraveling the paradox of free will in a deterministic universe

Sam Harris recently had a clip of him discussing free will and consciousness going around Twitter. I wanted to comment on some of those claims.

Sam Harris:

So, consciousness is just the ground truth, and yet it's very hard to operationalize and study neuroscientifically or in any other way, right? And, and it's, you know, there are reasons why that's the case, and they're interesting, but it's, it's just, so, that's consciousness. Free will is a very different case.

I think free will is, is an incoherent idea. I mean, I very much agree with Sapolsky that it's, we know that it doesn't exist, and we know that what people think they have is an illusion.

And, it just doesn't make any sense no matter how you construe causality in this universe, whether you think it's determined, everything's determined, or you think there's some bit of randomness thrown in, and, you know, there's quantum indeterminism, some stochastic process added to the clockwork, or it's all clockwork, you know, however y…