The Sam Harris Delusion

By Mike Hockney

There are two kinds of intellectual: Philosophers and Sophists. The former seek the absolute truth while the latter seek the “practical” truth that brings them worldly prestige and success. The weak-minded are far more influenced by Sophists than Philosophers, to the severe detriment of the intellectual progress of humanity. Philosophers have a position based on rationalism, idealism, metaphysics and mathematics, while Sophists hold a position reflecting empiricism, materialism, physics and science. One of the most prominent Sophists in today’s world is Sam Harris, an American controversialist who supports scientism, atheism, and the claim that free will is illusory. All of his positions are closely connected, and the purpose of this book is to expose the fallacies that lie at the heart of the Sophists’ worldview, and Harris’s in particular. Ultimately, the difference between Philosophy and Sophistry reduces to the difference between mathematics and science, and how each relates to ultimate reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326233730

Mike Hockney

Mike Hockney invites you to play the God Game. Are you ready to transform yourself? Are you ready to be one of the Special Ones, the Illuminated Ones? Are you ready to play the Ultimate Game? Only the strongest, the smartest, the boldest, can play. This is not a drill. This is your life. Stop being what you have been. Become what you were meant to be. See the Light. Join the Hyperboreans. Become a HyperHuman, an UltraHuman. Only the highest, only the noblest, only the most courageous are called. A new dawn is coming... the birth of Hyperreason. It's time for HyperHumanity to enter HyperReality.

Book preview

The Sam Harris Delusion

The Sam Harris Delusion

by

Mike Hockney

Published by Hyperreality Books

Copyright © Mike Hockney 2014

The right of Mike Hockney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

Table of Contents

The Sam Harris Delusion

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Copy Without An Original?

The Freedom Double Whammy

Mythos Madness

Mythos and Logos

The Denial

The Soul Atom

The Question

Free Will and Abrahamism

Christian Freedom?

The Science Delusion

Neuroscience

Where’s the Evidence?

Eastern Wisdom?

Free Will and Sam Harris

Sam Harris Contra Free Will

The Unconscious

Daniel Dennett

The Libet Experiment

The Language Deception

Living in the Past?

The Two-Stage Model of Free Will

The Free Will Illusion

Karma

Different Types of Atheist

Science versus Pseudoscience

The Betrayal of Reason

Capitalism and Science

Randomness

Seeing is Believing

The Cure for Science

The Design Flaw

What’s the Point?

Horizontal and Vertical Causation

The Karma Delusion

The Epistemic Fallacy

Revelation?

The Cosmological Argument

The Insult

Failure To Launch

Manmade Global Warming?

Scenario Fulfilment

An Inconvenient Truth

Aunt Sally

The Skeptics

The Useful Errors

Nietzsche on Cause and Effect

Atheism = Nihilism

The Parable of the Madman by Nietzsche

The Formula for Success

Ragnarok

The Hollow Men

The Proper Definition of Atheism

Mind Blindness

The Soul Equation

Nescience

The Perversion of Language

Souldust or Stardust?

Prophecy?

End the Madness

Mind Phase

Are you Enlightened?

Satisfaction?

The Smart Ones

Enlightenment

The Miracle

Video Games

The Mysterians

Peer Review

The Killers

The Scientific Inquisition

In the Name of God

The Four Ways

Monsters

The Cosmic Murderer

God’s Truth?

The Multi-Denial

Evil Atoms

The Wisdom of Murphy’s Law (Arthur Bloch)

Your Story

The Shooters

Mummies

Ritual

Zombie Ideas

The Tree of Life or Death?

The Abandonment

Teleology

Darwinism versus Hegelianism

Lamarckian Evolution

Dogs

Scientism

Kant’s Third Antinomy (of Freedom)

Evolution and Chance

The Unwisdom of Sam Harris

The Blind Leading the Blind

The Cult of Sam Harris

Rational Religion

Natural Selection?

Atheism and Chance

Kant on Compatibilism

What Kind of Person Are You?

Transcendental Freedom

Automata

The Newton of the Mind

The Sophists

The Darwinist Fallacy

The Causal Flow

The Existential Deception

Science = Sophistry

Natural Selection and Quantum Mechanics

C. S. Lewis

Life without Free Will

The Nature of Reason

Plato versus Science

The Harris Fallacy

The Two-Stage Model of Free Will

Behaviourism

Humans and Hidden Variables

Flying Transcendence

The Irrational Ones

The Disaster

The Error

Conclusion

Introduction

There are two kinds of intellectual: Philosophers and Sophists. The former seek the absolute truth while the latter seek the practical truth that brings them worldly prestige and success.

The Philosophers develop positions that rely on the highest intelligence and are as far removed as possible from the common sense of the mob. The common herd hold Philosophers in more or less complete contempt. The greatest Philosopher of all was Leibniz, a man unknown to the general public, and relatively obscure even within intellectual circles.

Sophists are those who are forever invoking common sense arguments, making direct appeals to the mob, producing arguments based on sensory evidence (which they regard as unarguable truth rather than highly arguable interpretation), and who rubbish all reference to an invisible noumenal world of things in themselves underlying the phenomenal world of appearances. Precisely for these reasons, the weak-minded are far more influenced by Sophists than Philosophers, to the severe detriment of the intellectual progress of humanity.

Philosophers have a position based on rationalism, idealism, metaphysics and mathematics, while Sophists hold a position reflecting empiricism, materialism, physics and science.

One of the most prominent Sophists in today’s world is Sam Harris, an American controversialist who supports scientism, atheism, and the claim that free will is illusory. All of his positions are closely connected, and the purpose of this book is to expose the fallacies that lie at the heart of the Sophists’ worldview, and Harris’s in particular.

Ultimately, the difference between Philosophy and Sophistry reduces to the difference between mathematics and science, and how each relates to ultimate reality.

Even many professional mathematicians perceive math as a weird abstraction with no connection to the real world, while science is seen as giving us substantive knowledge of reality. In fact, science is the systematic misinterpretation of mathematics through the distorting lens of the human senses.

Mathematics describes the world of noumena – things in themselves, shorn of any appearance. Science describes the world of phenomena – things as they appear to our senses. Science is nothing but sensory mathematics: mathematics processed, interpreted and understood via the senses. Mathematics is what underlies and underpins science, hence it’s no surprise to find mathematics at the core of science, and that the deeper science probes reality, the more mathematical it becomes. M-theory – a candidate for science’s theory of everything – is an enormously complex quasi-mathematical theory, more complex than mathematics itself!

The Absolute Truth of existence is what is left precisely when you remove the delusional, fallible, unreliable human senses from consideration, leaving nothing but hyperrationalist, a priori, analytic, noumenal, ontological, deductive mathematics, which reflects the eternal truths of reason and the principle of sufficient reason.

Sam Harris is on the side of science, empiricism and materialism, hence wholly opposed to the rationalist, mathematical worldview.

Many people believe that science and religion are the two great enemies. In fact, mathematics offers complete support for a transcendental religious view – predicated not on God but on the immortal, indestructible soul (the mathematical monad = a Fourier frequency singularity) – and mathematical rationalism is the true opposite of scientific empiricism.

In quantum mechanics (QM), a rigorous, rationalist mathematical treatment leads to a deterministic system based on analytic, mathematical hidden variables (involving complex numbers and autonomous, immaterial, monadic Fourier frequency domains outside space and time). The standard scientific view of quantum mechanics is, however, that there are no mathematical hidden variables of any kind, and scientific QM thus supports a fundamentally indeterministic worldview. (Ironically, the QM wavefunction itself is a formally unobservable hidden variable, but scientists never comment on this fatal logical contradiction in their worldview.) In other words, mathematics and science are 100% opposed and imply 100% different ontologies and epistemologies.

Mathematics, considered ontologically, is totally causal and deterministic. Modern science, on the other hand, is totally acausal and indeterministic. Logically, they have completely parted company with each other. Science needs to return to what it was classically – a deterministic subject – and that can be accomplished only by abandoning the failed ideology of empiricism and materialism, turning instead to rationalism and idealism, which means embracing rational, mathematical hidden variables. To adopt mathematical hidden variables is to leave science behind and switch to mathematics outright. That’s the only way to save science ... by converting it to ontological mathematics.

It’s intellectually offensive to find scientific empiricists and materialists such as Sam Harris laying claim to math and reason when in fact any philosophical analysis shows that the mathematical and scientific understandings of reality are diametrically opposed. Math is all about rationalism, while science is all about empiricism, and these two positions have been at war since the ancient Greeks (especially in the person of Plato, on the side of rationalism, and Aristotle on the side of empiricism). The conflict became even more polarised following the work of Descartes who famously divided the world into mind (unextended substance) and matter (extended substance). The rationalists and idealists took the mental domain as fundamental, and the material domain as its product, i.e. they got rid of Cartesian dualism by asserting that matter was really a particular manifestation of mind. The empiricists and materialists took the opposite view and regarded matter as fundamental, with mind as an illusion or epiphenomenon of matter.

Ontological mathematics lines up with the mental, intellectual worldview, and science with the material, sensory worldview, and thus they are direct enemies. The supreme irony, of course, is that science would be hocus pocus without math, and is wholly unable to explain why an empiricist subject predicated on observations of the world has as its engine the quintessential rationalist subject (math), which involves no observations of the world at all. This fundamental contradiction is immediately apparent to Philosophers, but the Sophists – such as Sam Harris – ignore it since they have no interest in the Truth, but only in what worldly success and power science can bring them.

There’s nothing more cynical than science, a subject that purports to tell the human race about reality, but can’t even explain what mathematics is and why an empiricist subject (science) relies on math, the most rationalist of all disciplines.

Sam Harris waffles on about free will being illusory and never once sees fit to challenge the central contradiction of science – the presence of unexplained mathematics at its core. How can Harris make any claims on behalf of science if he’s either unaware or heedless that ontological mathematics provides an entirely different conception of reality, without any of science’s fatal inconsistencies? This is the classic stance of sophistry – rushing forward to make populist arguments while failing to address any of the disastrous assumptions deployed by science in the first place.

To make comments on free will is to imply that you understand the ultimate way that reality is configured (because how can you make statements for or against free will if you are ignorant of how reality is constituted?), but this automatically means that you must be able to specify what role mathematics plays in reality. Neither science in general, nor Harris in particular, has ever defined what mathematics is ontologically. Given that the existence of free will, or otherwise, depends entirely on the ontology of mathematics, to know nothing about ontological mathematics is to have nothing valid to say about free will.

Gödel proved that all approaches to defining mathematics – other than that proceeding by way of ontology – are incomplete and/or inconsistent. Science itself is just a special kind of applied mathematics and it too falls into Gödel’s trap because it uses math, yet not in an ontological manner. This means that all statements made by science are incomplete and/or inconsistent. Indeed, the history of science shows that it’s an ever-moving target. Countless theories have come and gone, countless more will come and go, and there will never be any end to this process.

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.

All scientific arguments are mired in contingency, interpretation, hypothesis, conjecture, belief and opinion. If you find such arguments compelling, it’s because you too are a Sophist and not a Philosopher. Philosophers seek definitive, absolute, infallible knowledge. They aren’t interested in arguments predicated on human experiences, senses, feelings, faith, meditation and introspection. It’s reason or nothing. A rationalist will never find any empiricist argument convincing or compelling.

This book is about using philosophy and rationalism to obliterate Sam Harris’s sophistry and empiricism. He relies on science, and we rely on ontological mathematics. It’s the senses versus reason. Which side would you rather be on? Let battle commence!

The Copy Without An Original?

Can the universe simulate something that doesn’t exist? If the universe doesn’t know what freedom is (because freedom does not and cannot exist, as Harris contends), how can it create the illusion of free will? How can you create a simulation, copy or simulacrum of something if you don’t first have the thing itself?

Imagine that the world were entirely deterministic. How could you simulate indeterminism in such a system? The universe wouldn’t know what indeterminism was in the first place in order to have the capacity to create the illusion of it. Yet this is the type of lunatic assertion made by the likes of Harris when they argue that the illusion of free will is real while free will itself is unreal. In a world devoid of free will, how could the illusion of free will ever emerge? It has no conceivable basis or precedent. In a world purely of green things, how could the illusion of red things arise? It’s formally impossible.

Occam’s Razor forbids us from multiplying entities unnecessarily, yet this is what free will deniers do when they insist that free will doesn’t exist, yet the illusion of free will does. Rationally, if there’s no free will, there can be no illusion of it either. Equally, if there’s no determinism, there can be no illusion of determinism. If the universe isn’t rational, there can be no illusion that it is. And if the universe weren’t mathematical, it would be impossible for us to use mathematics to describe it so accurately.

A worldview such as that of Harris suggests that the universe, to use a postmodernist phrase, is making copies without originals. It’s simulating things that don’t exist. Where in any equation or law of science is this creative ability to fantasise and deceive? To deny free will while accepting the illusion of free will amounts to a kind of insanity. You can’t have copies without an original. You can’t have things that are like things that don’t exist. You can’t have illusions of things that don’t exist. It would be impossible to imagine that we are free if there is in fact no such thing as freedom. There could be no basis for the belief, no possible reality from which the illusion could be projected or take hold.

If we don’t have freedom, there is no way we could delude ourselves that we do. The concept wouldn’t occur to us. It would never enter the mind of a computer executing a program that it could do something contrary to its programming. That concept could not exist for it. There is no code for it. All arguments denying free will are specious and fallacious manipulations of language, attempting to demonstrate that a human program carrying out predetermined steps could conceive the belief that it might do something differently. On what basis would this belief arise? Where is there any scope for it or source for it? What circumstances could possibly trigger it? How can an entity inexorably carrying out pre-determined steps conceive the notion that there are other, non-determined steps it might execute? The deniers – such as Harris – never say.

Plato asserted that ultimate reality is all about perfect Forms. Everything in the sensible world was, he said, an inferior copy of a Form or Idea in the intelligible world. Sam Harris has abolished the perfect domain of Forms, yet has continued to endorse Plato’s imperfect simulacra in the sensible world. So, there is no Platonic Form of Free Will, but there’s a pointless, illusory copy of this non-existent Form! Work that one out.

*****

To reiterate, why would the universe create the illusion of something without the thing itself? How would it even know what illusion to create? What would the illusion be modelled on? What is Sam Harris’s illusion of free will an illusion of, given that he claims that free will doesn’t and can’t exist? How can something inherently unfree have the experience of being free? What does that claim even mean?

Freedom is such a singular, unmistakable thing, that the experience of freedom can only mean that freedom actually exists. This is a zero-sum game. If the experience of freedom exists, free will is true. If free will doesn’t exist, there can be no experience or illusion of free will either. Either you have freedom or you don’t. You can’t have the illusory experience of freedom in a world without freedom.

Go and ask anyone in jail if their imprisonment is just an illusion. After all, if freedom is an illusion, so is imprisonment, since if you don’t have true freedom nor can you have the true denial of freedom in a jail cell. It’s all just an illusory state of mind.

Would Sam Harris like to explain how everyone in jail is as free as everyone not in jail, since freedom is nothing but an illusion? Not many prisoners would agree with his arguments.

Simple Logic

If X doesn’t exist, not-X can’t exist either. If there were no belief in God, there could be no atheists either. If freedom does not exist, not-freedom cannot exist. The dialectic opposes a real antithesis to a real thesis. It doesn’t create antitheses to theses that don’t exist. Sam Harris claims that even though freedom does not exist, the illusion of freedom can exist. How? If freedom does not exist, on what is the illusion of freedom based? When people in a desert see mirages and hallucinate that there’s an oasis just ahead, they at least know that oases are real things, hence there really could be an oasis just ahead. How could you hallucinate freedom if there’s nothing in the world to which it corresponds? Just to contemplate freedom means that freedom exists since you could not contemplate such a concept if it were absent from the world. The same goes for God. You could not contemplate God unless there was some basis for this concept. The basis for a perfect God is in fact a perfect God Equation, defining perfect ontological mathematics.

Religion is simply the personification and anthropomorphication of perfection. Without actual perfection, there could never be any notion of God. As Descartes argued, a cause must have at least as much reality as an effect. For us to be able to contemplate perfection must mean that perfection exists; otherwise, thinking about perfection (the effect) would have no cause (perfection itself). We would be able to contemplate things that don’t exist, but, as Parmenides pointed out, it’s impossible to think or talk about what does not exist. Go ahead, try and think about something to which you can assign no properties or qualities because it doesn’t exist.

The error of mainstream religion is to see perfection in Mythos rather than Logos terms, as a person rather than as a system. All of the classical arguments concerning the proof of the existence of God can simply be redeployed to prove the existence of a God Equation. As soon as God is no longer conceived as an eternal, invisible Sky Being and Creator, it ceases to be intellectually offensive and simply becomes a consideration of analytic mathematics, the most rational enterprise you can undertake.

*****

Sam Harris attempts to contradict Descartes by claiming that we can think about free will (the effect), without there actually being any free will (the cause). In this case, an illusion is said to exist (the illusion of free will), but not the thing of which it’s an illusion (free will itself).

The Freedom Double Whammy

Sam Harris denies that free will exists and says that it’s an illusion. However, that means that he’s also claiming that whenever we do not feel free then that’s also an illusion. After all, if there’s no freedom then the notion that we are unfree must be just as illusory as the notion that we are free since you can’t feel unfree unless you’re comparing it with the state of being free. So, Harris has to explain not only why freedom is an illusion but why we can turn this illusion on and off, i.e. why is it that we only feel free sometimes (when we imagine that we ourselves are choosing what we do, although, of course, it’s Harris’s thesis that we are never in fact choosing anything and what we think we chose was inevitable all along), and at other times we feel unfree (when we imagine that we are being prevented from doing what we would otherwise choose to do).

If we are unfree at all times – because freedom simply does not exist – is it not then an extraordinary fact that sometimes we think we are free (when we are the supposed authors of the decisions that affect us) and sometimes we think we are not free (when others are plainly the authors of the decisions that affect us). Why should our illusion of freedom be so specific, so well matched to the set of circumstances? That is, why should we feel free when a particular set of criteria play out, and not when a different set apply? If free will is an illusion, corresponding to nothing real, why don’t we have a universal experience of this illusion of free will, i.e. why don’t we feel free no matter if we are deciding for ourselves, or others are deciding for us? After all, it’s all just an illusion, allegedly. Why is the illusion only turned on in certain situations, and why, astoundingly, is it turned off in others? How can an illusion have an on/off switch ... a very precise on/off button? Since when have hallucinators been able to turn off their hallucinations in an exact, systematic manner?

The reason why we experience dreaming and waking differently is that they are ontologically different states. If there is no difference between free and unfree states – because freedom does not exist – how have we managed to construct a systematic illusion that corresponds exactly to the philosophical position known as compatibilism, where free will and determinism can rationally co-exist without contradiction? All that is required for compatibilism to be true is that free will and determinism should both be governed by an identical equation, and this is exactly what ontological mathematics supplies via the God Equation. This operates individually (which is when it supports free will), and collectively (which is when it supports scientific determinism), and the two modes are of course compatible due to their underlying mathematical commonality. To be more exact, free will relates to autonomous, immaterial Fourier frequency domains (souls), outside space and time, while scientific determinism relates to the material Fourier spacetime domain that the monads collectively construct, and which no monad can individually, freely control (since it’s up against all other monads). The most it can do is direct the actions of the physical body it individually controls in spacetime.

Harris strenuously argues against compatibilism, yet is in fact arguing for his own illusory version of compatibilism, i.e. the illusion that we have free will must be compatible with the equal illusion that we do not have free will (when we are in jail, for example) because otherwise we would be insane, thinking ourselves free in situations where no rational person would ever say we were. Or is Harris arguing that if we are put behind bars, we suddenly and miraculously perceive the reality that we are not free and never have been? Yet, the illusion kicks in again as soon as we are released!

Imagine that we randomly (indeterministically) experienced the illusion of freedom. We could be sitting in a prison cell thinking ourselves unfree, and then, an instant later, be convinced we were in fact free. This illusion of free will – as it operates in reality – has to be remarkably consistent and know when to turn itself off, and it does so exactly in those situations where we could not objectively consider ourselves free.

Harris’s thesis is bizarre. Invoking Occam’s Razor, it’s much easier to conclude that when we experience freedom it’s because we are genuinely free, and when we don’t experience freedom it’s because we are genuinely not free. What could be simpler? We don’t have to invent any theories about the mysterious operations of illusions.

Harris can’t explain why if freedom is an illusion, that illusion does not apply permanently. If we are in fact as unfree out of jail as we are in jail, why should the illusion of freedom turn itself on when we leave jail? How can an illusion judge when to turn itself off, and, moreover, turn itself back on again, in exactly the right pattern that corresponds to what any rational person would regard as the genuine existence of freedom. This is the most complex illusion imaginable – and much harder to explain than actual freedom! But Harris is of course a fundamentalist scientific materialist atheist and nihilist who believes in a purposeless, meaningless, pointless world, and freedom totally contradicts everything he believes in, hence he has no option but to deny that it is real.

Harris reasons backwards. He starts with his materialist conclusion that freedom is false, and, from then on, he’s committed to explaining away our real experience of freedom as an illusion. It never once occurs to him to start from the position that freedom is actually true. No materialist with any degree of consistency can ever defend the concept of free will. Free will is true only in an idealist universe of eternal souls (inherently uncreated, uncaused causes), and no materialist will ever accept that worldview!

Mythos Madness

Aldous Huxley said, "Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic."

Man can’t see causes, so he invents theories of causation, or, in the case of the empiricism of David Hume and modern science, denies that causation exists at all, which in fact is just another theory of causation, namely anti-causation or non-causation.

Classical science was ultra deterministic and proposed rigid laws as the basis of causation. Modern science has replaced deterministic laws with statistical and probabilistic laws, in which causation has been formally eliminated, i.e. we cannot identify any specific cause and its specific, mandatory effect. Religion has provided the most insane theories of causation, including unseen spirits (animism), an unseen God (Abrahamism), unseen karma (Hinduism and Buddhism), and unseen love or cosmic consciousness (New Ageism).

Once a Mythos belief has been constructed and accepted, it’s then fantastically difficult to overthrow. As James Harvey Robinson said, Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

In philosophy, Schopenhauer replaced God with an invisible cosmic Will as the cause of everything. Nietzsche proposed an unseen Will to Power. In psychology, Freud gave causal agency to an unseen personal unconscious, and Jung extended that to an unseen Collective Unconscious.

Humanity has proved adept at inventing causes and inept at understanding actual causation. Actual causation derives entirely from noumenal, ontological mathematics. For the universe to be rational – which it is – it must be grounded in systematic, ubiquitous, flawless, rational causation, and only perfect analytic mathematics provides this. Modern science emphatically doesn’t, and it’s impossible to comprehend how science imagines it can explain an ordered, rational universe on the basis of randomness, chance, chaos, indeterminism, acausality and spontaneous creation (as opposed to causal creation).

It’s an unquestionable fact that we can’t perceive causation. It’s not sensible. It is, however, entirely intelligible, and thus we can work out what it is, and how it operates, via our mathematical reason. Causation is not mystical, emotional or sensory. It’s wholly rational, wholly mathematical ... wholly mental!

It’s easy to understand reality when you eliminate all Mythos explanations based on feelings and faith (Abrahamism), mystical intuition (Eastern religion), and the senses (science). All that remains is reason, and that’s the correct answer. Reason never errs, as long as it’s expressed mathematically, and is not pressed into the service of Mythos, of the feelings, mystical intuitions or the senses. As Virgil said, Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things. Only ontological mathematicians can be justifiably happy. All the rest of humanity are lying to themselves. They don’t want to see the truth, or are too stupid to see it.

It’s ironic that Harris refers to free will being illusory since the supreme illusion is in fact the scientific materialist one in which he believes. It generates its illusion by misinterpreting mathematics in terms of the contingent, fallible, delusional senses. The senses themselves are the authors of Maya ... illusion. Maya is overcome by overcoming our devotion to the senses, and then the Truth is revealed to our liberated, rational minds. That’s when we become enlightened.

Either free will or materialism is illusory and the task is to rationally work out the answer. Ontological mathematics supports free will as real, and shows that materialism is just a projection of Fourier minds, hence is illusory, albeit a well-founded, rational, mathematical illusion.

*****

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Strong men know that ontological mathematics defines causation. Shallow men – scientists – believe in luck (chance, accident). Religious men – hollow men – believe in Mythos causes and Mythos effects (magic, witchcraft, superstition, gods, demons and devils).

Are you deep or shallow? Go on, explain causation!

*****

Blaise Pascal said, Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it. Don’t kid yourself. There are no short cuts. There are no easy paths. Only hard, challenging, daunting mathematical reasoning can allow you to discover the truth of existence. Humanity has much preferred the easy path, the path of least resistance. All too often, humanity has chosen the Mythos, religious path: the path of stories, or feelings, or mystical intuitions. Or the scientific path of the senses. It has never accepted the mathematical path of Truth, the path paved with reason and logic.

Marcus Aurelius astutely said, He is a true fugitive who flies from reason. Everyone other than ontological mathematicians is a fugitive. Maya ensnares everyone who rejects Reason.

The Concept

The concept of the illusion of free will has all the same properties as the concept of free will, while simply removing the actuality of free will. Yet in a universe without any actual freedom, how could the illusion of freedom exist? How can we experience freedom if it doesn’t exist? It’s impossible. The notion that you can have the experience of freedom without the actuality of freedom is incoherent. When it comes to freedom, the experience of freedom is freedom. You can imagine an oasis that isn’t there. You can’t, however, experience freedom if freedom isn’t there.

Kant argued that the concept of a