- Harris tends to define morality as that which maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering. I can't improve on Derek's articulation of the problems with this reasoning.
- He gets notably unscientific when speaking of some assertions, such as ESP and reincarnation. I share James Randi's disappointment.
I also found this passage off putting:
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The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it.
I'm not sure what he's getting at here. Any reasonable scientist will admit we know very little of what there is to know about consciousness. But I don't see how there's any reason to believe it exists anywhere but in our heads.
I do agree with his assertion that our experience with brains is qualitatively different than our experience as brains, and both paths are necessary to figure out how this thing works. And it's certainly possible that we will never figure it out (my guess is we will some day). But that's no reason to find traditional scientific methods inadequate for its investigation.
And it certainly lends no credibility to ESP or reincarnation, for Pete's sake.
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Yeah, his views on ESP and reincarnation are pretty whacked out.
That bit about consciousness I don't remember, though. He did emphasize "produce", not "brains". I need to dig out my copy and see what comes after that passage. Maybe he's talking about emergence? Another possibility is a school of philosophical thought called eliminative materialism which holds that many folk psychological concepts are basically illusions, and that consciousness is one of those. But I don't think that's what Harris was saying. I'm not sure what he was saying.
Here's the thread from Harris' forums on the subject:
http://www.samharris.org/forum/viewthread/8000/
Although it looks like the formatting tags are screwed up on most of the posts and it's not a very useful discussion anyway.
However, there was another exchange between Harris and Randi:
http://www.randi.org/jr/2007-06/062907.html#i5
Yeah I'd already read some of that, although Harris' response published on Randi's site I had missed. Thanks for the links.
Here's the part of Harris' response I find the most troubling:
The fact that I have not spent any time on this [authenticating research into the paranormal] should suggest how worthy of my time I think such a project would be. Still, I found these books interesting, and I cannot categorically dismiss their contents in the way that I can dismiss the claims of religious dogmatists.
He goes on to say he's not as uncertain of these claims as he is of most dogmatic religious claims. Fair enough. But I don't see why they carry any more weight than unauthenticated claims of UFO sightings, bigfoot, or the Loch Ness Monster. I guess he just finds the others more "interesting"?
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