Who Are You?
What makes you “you”?
I heard a conversation between Sam Harris and Scott Kaufman in Kaufman’s The Psychology Podcast with Scott Barry Kaufman. I read Transcend by Kaufman and have listened to his podcast for a while. He’s humorous and insightful as he interviews his guests. I learn a lot from him. :)
In this particular episode, Kaufman interviewed Harris and they were talking about free will. Harris does not believe in free will. He contends that free will is an illusion. He also argues that we can understand and endure suffering better if we adopt determinism rather than free will. Kaufman takes a different view though. I’m not going to expound on the ins and outs of the episode but I do want to bring up one specific topic: a relationship between identity and free will.
Kaufman’s basic stance on identity and free will is that what makes you “you” is knit together with free will. When you are free to make decisions about the future, that’s what makes you who you are. In other words, the ability to author your life and its future is very human feature psychologically and that’s what makes us human. That’s what makes us uniquely human. And that’s what makes us “us.” No other animal species are disciplined enough to do something that they don’t want to do. No other living creatures choose to do something that they don’t want to do or that doesn’t really benefit them in any way.
So once that free will is taken away, it’s hard to distinguish human from other species. Free will, not in a libertarian sense (doing whatever you want!), allows us to do what we care to do, what we want to do and what we choose to do. Free will makes us who we are and enables us to express what we value as important.
- What you chose to do yesterday made you who you are today.
- What you choose to do today makes you who you will be tomorrow.
- And it is these choices that we make day in and day out that make us our true selves.
Who do you choose to become?
