Is Sam Harris a Legitimate Neuroscientist?

There’s some irony in making a comment about not making a point about credentials and authority via an email that contains all your credentials at the end :slight_smile:

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Thank you for the clarification and my apologize for reading too much into your statements.

In any case, evaluating the claim of the moral landscape itself is more interesting than evaluating whether Harris is a scientist or not. I would love to hear your response to my post Can Science Demonstrate Racism or Genocide is Morally Wrong? - #49 by PdotdQ and @jongarvey’s post Can Science Demonstrate Racism or Genocide is Morally Wrong? - #58 by jongarvey in the original thread.

Note that

That science has a place in the discussion of morality is not new, and indeed is a trivial consequence once one adopts utilitarianism. This is also not the central claim of the moral landscape. The central claim of the moral landscape is that the is-ought gap can be bridged and that the entirety of the field of morality, including the axioms of morality (e.g. why pick utilitarianism over deontological ethics, and why one choose a particular utility function) can be obtained through science.

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That was a mistake because I sent my reply by email from my phone, but thanks for the snark. Super helpful.

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I was only making a joke.

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Right. I certainly don’t follow him all the way there, and I agree that he hasn’t done a ton to clear up what could be the major shortfalls of this idea, that many others have you pointed out. I hope no one thinks that I’m a zealous disciple of him or his ideas on morality, but he definitely made me think differently about the role of science in this discussion and I’m glad he did.

Also, someone in the thread maligned him for his work on psychidelics and meditation, but I would say that he is helping to bring some important ideas into the mainstream. Both psychedelic drugs and meditation (and other ego-quieting techniques) are showing great promise in the treatment of certain mental illness and the general maintenance of mental health. In general, I think very few of us engage methods to “quiet our minds” often enough. Some religious practices generally do this well (meditation, certain forms of prayer, contemplative worship, etc.) and so I think it’s very important that there are secular alternatives for those that aren’t interested in religion. I wish I could carve out time to meditate and I keep saying I will. But I do get this effect a little bit when I run. When I really work at it (and when I run in a peaceful place where I don’t have to be alert or make decisions), I can really quiet my mind so that I really “veg out” and I’m not actually thinking about anything. I can get to that point for 10-15 minutes at a time sometimes and it’s extremely satisfying and rejuvenating when I do. I’m sure the endorphins and endocannabinoids help with that euphoric feeling, too. Anyway, there are plenty of things that Sam does and says that make me cringe, but he has some merit as a public intellectual as well.

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9 posts were split to a new topic: What is the Vocation of the Scientist?

I am curious, if you did not go “all the way there” into his conclusions that

Then how far did you go? It seems to me that said conclusion is the essential thing that separates Harris from the many utilitarian/consequentialist before him. How can you claim that your views are shaped by the moral landscape if you reject its central thesis?

I said he made me think differently. Can you ask your question without putting words in my mouth or exaggerating what I actually say?

Before I answer, my main point is that

I believe that the fetishizing of scientist in society is the cause of scientists reaching beyond their expertise to make naive statements about philosophy/morals/politics/etc with false authority.

That said,

If she does not work in science anymore, then no, she is not a scientist. A car mechanic that moves to become an admin is not a car mechanic still.

Again, in my view scientist is a profession, not a label that one gets for life.

I don’t know what these books are, and how much science is in it. If he is still engaging in science, then he is still a scientist. One does not need to work at a lab to engage in scientific work. I am a theoretical physicist. I have not been in a lab for over half a decade.

I apologize, I have then misinterpreted your previous statements:

My thinking on this has been impacted by Sam Harris’s work and I urge you to read “the moral landscape.”

this is grounded in scholarship on moral philosophy and it came to me through the writings of Sam Harris, a neuroscientist

But the question stands:
If you did not go “all the way there”, then how far did you go? Do you affirm anything more than the typical utilitarianist/consequentialist? If so, then science cannot demonstrate that racism or genocide is morally wrong.

I’m annoyed by credentialism, but do not think that this the clearest way to demonstrate that Harris is a pretender. It is most clear in considering this two alternatives:

  1. Is Harris employing science as a tool to promote a personal agenda with the falsely claimed authority science?
  2. Or is Harris advancing science as a public good that is for all people?

If Harris is #2, he is a friend of science. Regardless of his particular credentials and accomplishments, he would be serving the common good. Even if he is making mistakes, it will be easy to come alongside him and help him do better.

If Harris is #1, he is a pretender who is doing far more damage to science than Ken Ham. By using science as a tool for atheism, he is excluding good people from science, because of his personal religious agenda. He is posing as scientist for the purpose of promoting a divisive personal view, and he is able to do this a way that poisons the well of mainstream science. Everyone knows that Ken Ham is biased outside the scientific community. Harris, however, is biased while pretending to be one of us.

So which one is he? Harris seems obviously to be #1. He is does not yet know that science is greater than him. Allowing people like this to use science as a weapon instead of a place of common ground is dangerous. I have no respect for it.

I can’t claim to be particularly familiar with Harris’ work on the relationship between science, morality, and atheism, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him “exclude good people from science” or “use science as a weapon”.

Apparently Harris believes that science has something to say on the issue of secular vs religious morality, and he talks about it. Why does that earn him your distain?

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What makes you say that Harris is doing this? I don’t get that feeling when I hear him speak, fairly often. Looking at the preview and afterword of his book on morality, I don’t see it either. Nor on the About page of his blog.

No. Scientists would do that anyway – because they are human.

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Are you familiar with this? New Atheism - Wikipedia.

It seem that @NLENTS likes Harris because he is making a place for science in conversations about morality. I’d agree with @PdotdQ that this has been well known for a long period of time. That is an important point, and I have no quarrel with that.

The bigger problem is that he is trying to argue a type of pseudoscientific version of positivism, in that science can govern questions of morality. This betrays fundamental misunderstandings about both the nature of science and the nature of ethics. Of note, @NLENTS does not go this far with him, but that is the precise point of his book. This is his major contribution to New Atheism:

Popularized by Sam Harris is the view that science and thereby currently unknown objective facts may instruct human morality in a globally comparable way. Harris’ book The Moral Landscape [80] and accompanying TED Talk How Science can Determine Moral Values [81] propose that human well-being and conversely suffering may be thought of as a landscape with peaks and valleys representing numerous ways to achieve extremes in human experience, and that there are objective states of well-being.

This is not only pseudoscience, it is also divisive and dangerous.

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I’d say that it is more a matter of “people who think like scientists” rather than people who know a lot about science.

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With the concept of the Four Horsemen? Of course.

I don’t see at all how this is equivalent to “employing science as a tool to promote a personal agenda”. He’s making an argument, and has done so at length in book form.

Most of the preview can be read here:

Why shouldn’t he make this argument? I don’t understand that at all.

I can’t see how you get this from that brief statement either.

Maybe I am being hard on him. I just think we need better. Science is a public good and those of us with scientific training, in my view, have a duty to serve the common good, including those with whom we disagree.

I think that’s what he’s trying to do. What he seems to be saying to me is that there are scientific facts about morality which potentially can be accessed. Is that dangerous? I’ve heard him talk about his utilitarian views often and never heard anything shocking. Maybe I’ll have to give the book a look! I don’t think science is ever going to govern our reading of morality personally, and I’m not sure if he’s saying that.

The most controversial aspect of Harris’ book is not that there are scientific facts about morality. Science of course can determine good and bad actions once you pick a particular brand of utilitarianism. What I believe is the most controversial claim of the moral landscape is the statement that the is-ought gap can be bridged. Further, he claimed that not only a bridge across the is-ought gap possible, but he had constructed such a bridge, and what do you know the bridge is exactly his preferred form of consequentialism. Note that he did this while not engaging with any previous literature from the moral philosophy community.

In my reading of his arguments, I think it is clear that he does claim that science should be used to “govern our reading of morality”.

Is this a dangerous idea? I think the most dangerous part of his idea is him convincing the public that science has solved morality and that the whole field of moral philosophy can be discarded - especially those such as virtue ethics or deontology that do not agree with him.

Given @swamidass’ burning hatred of utilitarianism and positivism :smile: he probably can come up with other reasons why this idea could be “dangerous”.

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Harris’ is the precisely same logic as the Nazi’s final solution, eugenics, and Machiavellian depots everywhere. Utilitarianism justifies sacrificing the few for the benefit of the many. This is precisely the lesson of history. All we need to do to justify great evil is to change our utility function.

The disturbing error here is that he ignored the lessons of the last three centuries. Utilitarianism is not a coherent moral philosophy. It can justify all sorts of evil, but also calm our conscience too. Their are many simple rebuttals to his work. One of the easiest is: “Tyranny of the Majority.” He really needs to read John Stuart Mills.

In many ways, this argument is equally as bad as Bill Nye’s ignorant rant against philosophy. Harris has not even considered the basic entailments and risks of his proposal.

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