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The Sam Harris Delusion

Book by Mike Hockney · 6 quotes · Free Will, Science, Sam Harris

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The Sam Harris Delusion Quotes

“We can freely imagine several teleological futures before we act, each with a roughly equal likelihood of being enacted, and then evaluate them and reach our decision as to which is best. The smarter, the more imaginative and creative we are, the more futures we can conceive. Until we carry out our evaluation of the futures that we have freely conceived, we cannot know what we will do. An android cannot conceive futures, and carries out a program written for him by its Creator (programmer). Sam Harris keeps slipping into the tacit claim that humans are programmed machines rather than free people.”

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“All scientific theories are required to be “falsifiable” and that ipso facto means that none can be true since Truth, by definition, is unfalsifiable. Equally, all scientific theories are required to be verifiable, but nothing can ever definitively verify any scientific theory, and Truth is not in any case something that requires any synthetic a posteriori verification, only analytic a priori proof – the complete opposite! Science is a pragmatic, instrumental subject. It’s the science of appearances, not the science of ultimate reality, of things as they are in themselves, beyond appearance. Only ontological mathematics can address that noumenal, hidden reality. Science is undeniably good at producing theories that allow us to manipulate the “seen world”, but it’s just as bad at producing theories that allow us to manipulate the “unseen world” – which is the religious world in which humanity has always been most interested.”

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“If the principle of sufficient reason means that everything that happens has a reason why it is thus and not otherwise, the opposite is things happening for no reason at all – randomness! This is the entire basis of the scientific “explanation” of existence. Science is a formally irrationalist system opposed to the principle of sufficient reason. That’s why it’s astounding when people such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris claim to be on the side of reason. They plainly don’t know the meaning of the word.”

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“Our definition of an atheist as someone who denies perfection has an immediate corollary; he is also someone who denies meaning. If you think about it, meaning is entirely invested in perfection. We expect a perfect being to know the meaning of existence, and be capable of telling us. We expect a perfect evolutionary process to culminate with we ourselves being perfect and knowing everything. Our pursuit of perfection/God is the meaning of life. To be an atheist is to reject perfection, hence reject meaning. That’s why we brand all atheists as nihilists. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t believe in meaning. And that makes them no different from machines. They are not living beings, or they refuse to be living beings. They are unquestionably high on the autistic spectrum, and they see themselves and the universe as machines rather than living, evolving organisms, getting more and more perfect.”

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