Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was looking forward to Harris's new book The Moral Landscape, but it was pretty disappointing. It made me embarrassed to have recommended his previous books to friends. The guy doesn't know much of anything but gets a big kick out of fabricating arguments. Strong evidence that Harris is a pundit and not a scientist (he's recently been pretending to be a scientist), he spends about 3 pages talking about his own research on belief and the brain, compared to about 10 pages making fun of Francis Collins for believing in God. The take home message from Sam's research: Looking at brains with expensive magnets isn't precise enough to distinguish factual and ethical beliefs, therefore there's no difference between these beliefs. Really? Looking at planets and stars without a telescope might make them indistinguishable, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing. Maybe this would get a passing grade for a middle school science fair project, but buying credentials from UCLA is apparently possible without being much of a scientist. Also troubling, he talks about brain science as though he believes that it is magic, p. 54 "As we better understand brains, we will increasingly understand all the forces--kindness, reciprocity, trust, openness to argument, respect for evidence," the list goes on as though pictures of these things will be found hidden inside brains if we look close enough. I also have a PhD in neuroscience, and Harris is either a blubbering idiot or a first rate liar. We can only find neural correlates of categories we 1) already believe in or 2) expect to find, making the material of brains not much better than a complicated mirror vaguely reflecting human ideas which exist before we go looking. I'm all for neuroscience, and expect impressive advances, but Harris worships neuroscience like an idol that he doesn't begin to understand, and attributes all sorts of impossible conclusions to future research. If you think that studying brains will tell you whether or not to be a good person, you have been sold a dirty pile of rhetoric. The claim that science can determine human values should trigger your gag reflex like the Nazi flag that officially waved over the first iteration of this proposal some 75 years ago. I'm not calling Sam a Nazi, he's probably just an arrogant jackal who doesn't know the history of the ideas he's promoting. "Determining values from science" and evolutionary theory was precisely the justification for eugenics, mass genocide, cruel experimentation on people, and other horrendous abuses. One simple reason science can't "determine human values" as the title proposes, is that evolutionary theory is exactly as useful at justifying rape, murder, cannibalism, and torture as it is at justifying cooperation and kindness, which is to say that it's completely useless for moral guidance. Good values come from the intersection of compassion and reason. The first is independent from science, and the second is more fundamental than science. At one point (p. 55) Harris says, "Because moral virtue is attractive to both sexes, it might function as a kind of peacock's tail" without a hint irony or apparent recognition that this kind of explanation (known as sexual selection) undermines "morality" as a silly tail that's useless except for getting laid. How noble and inspiring Mr. Harris. Science can tell us how being a "moral" person is all about fooling people into having sex with us. [Just for the record, the sexual selection theory of peacock's tails was debunked a few years ago. Not that it matters for his argument, because there are other candidate examples, but it's troubling that someone who uses science as his almighty authority idol really doesn't understand science or check the facts.] On the last page (p. 191) Harris concludes, "If our well-being depends upon the interactions between events in our brains and events in the world, and there are better and worse ways to secure it, then some cultures will tend to produce lives that are more worth living than others." This obtuse statement summarizes the book extremely well: A slapped together exercise in poor logic and lame platitudes.