So the silver lining is the elevation of Ron DeSantis over Donald Trump as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican candidate for President. We will have to grit our teeth through another two dangerous and nasty years, but the light at the end of the tunnel is a leader of the free world who can make a speech like this: -

Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, thank you so much. Over these past four years, we’ve seen major challenges for the people of our state, for the citizens of the United States, and above all, for the cause of freedom. We saw freedom in our very way of life and so many other jurisdictions in this country wither on the vine. Florida held the line. We chose facts over fear. We chose education over indoctrination. We chose law and order over rioting and disorder. Florida was a refuge of sanity when the world went mad. We stood as a citadel of freedom for people across this country and indeed across the world. We faced attacks, we took the hits, we weathered the storms, but we stood our ground. We did not back down. We had the conviction to guide us and we had the courage to lead. We made promises. We made promises to the people of Florida, and we have delivered on those promises.

And so today, after four years, the people have delivered their verdict. Freedom is here to stay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, thanks to the overwhelming support of the people of Florida, we not only won an election, we have rewritten the political map. Thank you for honoring us with a win for the ages. I want to thank all of our campaign staff, from campaign manager [inaudible 00:02:45]. This was the best-run campaign in the history of Florida politics. I want to thank all of our wonderful volunteers who worked so hard to get out the vote. Your support means the world to Casey and I. God bless you and thank you.

Now, it’s a lot easier to run a good campaign when you got a great record to run on, and I would not have been able to see the level of accomplishments that we saw unless I had outstanding personnel working in the executive office of the governor, as well as heading state agencies. These folks worked hard to implement our agenda. They believed in our agenda and the results have been historic. Thank you for your support and work. Thank you to Miami-Dade County. Thank you to Palm Beach County. Now, we’re still tallying the votes, but it’s clearly apparent that this election we will have garnered a significant number of votes from people who may not have voted for me four years ago. And I just want to let you know, I am honored to have earned your trust and your support over these four years.

And most important of all, thank you to the greatest First Lady in all 50 states for being a great wife, giving unwavering support, being a tremendous mother to our three young children, and serving as an example for women throughout this state, especially going through the battle of cancer. She is remarkable. Now, today is the culmination of the 2022 fall elections. But in reality, Americans have been voting for many years now. They’ve been voting with their feet, and the results of that behavior has been just as stark as our landslide victory today. States and cities governed by leftist politicians have seen crime skyrocket. They’ve seen their taxpayers abused, they’ve seen medical authoritarianism imposed, and they’ve seen American principles discarded. The woke agenda has caused millions of Americans to leave these jurisdictions for greener pastures.

Now, this great exodus of Americans, for those folks, Florida, for so many of them, has served as the promised land. We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die. People have come here because our policies work. Leadership matters. We refuse to use polls and put our finger in the wind. Leaders don’t follow. They lead. We set out a vision, we executed on that vision and we produced historic results. And the people of this state have responded in record fashion. Now, while our country flounders due to failed leadership in Washington, Florida is on the right track. I believe the survival of the American experiment requires a revival of true American principles. Florida has proved that it can be done. We offer a ray of hope that better days still lie ahead.

I am proud of our achievements in this state. I am honored by your support and I look forward to the road ahead. I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race in this first term, and I have kept the faith. We’ve accomplished more than anybody thought possible four years ago. But we’ve got so much more to do and I have only begun to fight. God bless you all. Thank you very much. Thank you for a historic landslide victory.

It was one of several public encounters between the two that focused on the question: How do we establish a universal morality for modernity that will minimize suffering and maximize well-being? Their divergent answers to that question are sincerely driven by their personal and professional experiences and grounded in their prodigious scholarship, but they both flounder on their inability to derive moral values from facts (an OUGHT from an IS), a deficiency that bedevils all of our moral philosophers but one.

Bret Weinstein introduced the debate with the following comment: -

“We are existing in a moment where all of the systems that have helped us make sense are breaking down, [the political parties are breaking down,] the university systems are breaking down, journalism is breaking down. Alternative systems are beginning to arise, and we have a network of people who are trying to make sense in an alternative way, and I have to say I think [we are] beating the odds for the moment. So, here's the problem. That network is not entirely [in] agreement with itself about some significant issues, and Sam and Jordan have some differences that have proved very difficult.”

Sam Harris began the debate by agreeing “with 90% of Jordan’s position”, and he looked forward to sorting out the 10% of disagreement.  Jordan Peterson began by presenting Sam Harris’s argument, to make sure he understood it correctly: -

“If I understand you correctly, you want to ground a structure of ethics in something solid.  And there's two things you want to avoid, two catastrophes let's say, one is the catastrophe that you identified with religious fundamentalism, and the other is the catastrophe that's associated with moral relativism - is that reasonable?”

Sam Harris agreed that Jordon Peterson had described his position reasonably.  Jordan Peterson said that he agreed with that aim too, except that as a psychiatrist he saw the fundamentalism/relativism alternative as an order/chaos pathology, but that they were on the same axis.  The two public intellectuals also agreed that the purpose of ethics should be to see “less undue suffering in the world”, and more well-being. Jordan Peterson added: -

“I think it's easier perhaps to gain initial agreement between people on what might constitute a generalised ethic to concentrate on what we don't want. I'm not saying that what we do want is unimportant, but it seems to me to be harder than to get a grip on what we don't want. We don’t want Auschwitz; we don't want the Gulag Archipelago.  

Sam Harris agreed, and added an important implication: -  

“Closing the door to moral relativism, … those who do want Auschwitz are wrong! I'm a realist, a moral realist. Realism means that there are right and wrong answers to questions of this kind. And you cannot know what you're missing, in fact we almost certainly don't know what we're missing, on questions of human values, and our job is to discover just how a good life can be, and just what variables are making it needlessly horrible, and to mitigate all of that and live in a better and better world.”

So, the two public intellectuals agreed that values/morals/oughts, should move the world away from suffering towards wellbeing, and that they go wrong in two contexts: -

1.    Moral relativism (a subjective morality).

2.    Religious fundamentalism or “arbitrary moral injunction” (an intrinsic morality).   

The debate that followed included discussions of animal violence, primitive tribal violence, terrible religious and secular dogmas, interpretations of holy scriptures, the importance of free speech, etcetera. Then, halfway through the debate, the following exchange occurred: -

Sam: “We should be able to have a 21st century ethics like everything else”.

Jordan: “tracking the path from a fact to a value is an impossibility. You can’t interpret facts without a value.”

Sam: [But the Bible doesn’t help], we can't read it literally because it either makes no sense or it makes barbaric sense, right?  [And] as you move away from the text your interpretation gets less and less constrained. …

Jordan: “OK, so look, you have made the case … that you want to ground the world of values in something that's TRUE, we could say objectively true, but let's just say true for a minute. And I share that desire - but the problem is that I can't see, and you actually state this in your book, I can't see how you can interpret the world of facts without an a-priori interpretive structure, and this is an old philosophical claim, it's not unique, it’s the claim of Kant for example, that you can't get directly from the fact to the value, because there's an interpretive framework that mediates between you and the facts.  So, first of all I'd like to know if you accept that proposition? And then the second question would be, if you do accept the proposition, then what's your understanding of the nature of the interpretive framework? Because I think it's best understood, at least in part, as a personality, or as a story for that matter.” 

Sam: “I think our intuition of truth, the intuition that there's a difference between fact and fiction or fact and fantasy, the intuition that …we live in relationship to a common reality, about which our understanding can converge, provided we are looking in the same direction with the same tools. I think that is certainly deeper than religion. it's not best captured by stories. …Even if you could, as a matter of historical fact, point to its roots in story and myth and religion. That's not an argument that it's now in the 21st century best captured by story and myth and religion. I think it is a fundamental intuition to which our sanity both personally and intersubjectively is anchored.  To lose a sense of objective reality is to lose the platform on which you can communicate with anyone, and/or rationally expect anything to happen a moment from now.  To think that your memory represents something about a prior state of the world and your beliefs represent something about a possible state in the future, all of this is anchored to a sense that there's a difference between knowing something really and just imagining it. Right?  There is a difference between perception and hallucination.  All of these distinctions are born of this intuition….  Clearly, we have fundamental intuitions, which are either impossible to analyse or can be analysed with respect to only other intuitions, which we did, which we deem more rudimentary, upon which everything else we do as a matter of knowledge gathering and sensemaking is built.”

Sam goes on to give examples of how we have intuitions that 2+2=4, and other such intuitions that give us mathematics, and generalizations, and etcetera, “which again are unanalyzable, but, so there is just this fact that we do pull ourselves up by our (epistemological) bootstraps and that's not embarrassing”. Then Jordan talked about intuitions and Kant and “G E More’s argument of infinite regress”.

Both Jordan and Sam are honest enough to admit that they have a fundamental problem about how to get started on establishing objective facts and values, since they need values to establish facts and facts to establish values, and they can’t get the one from the other. Jordan settles for the “truth” that arises out of stories (combining facts and values), starting with the stories of the Bible, which present states of good and bad as our options. Sam settles for the truth of “intuitions” (combining facts and values), starting with the value of avoiding the worst suffering for everybody being an agreed thing to value away from. But Jordan won’t agree that Sam’s intuition has established an objectively verifiable fact. He thinks that Sam is “2/3s of the way to a landscape of hell and heaven”. Sam doesn’t accept that. (Sam’s “intuitions“ remind me of Rene Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas”, which he used for the same reason that Sam uses “intuition”, to get himself out of the dead end that his philosophe had led him into.)

To sum up: To establish a morality that promotes human wellbeing, avoiding the disasters of moral relativism and religious fundamentalism, our intellectuals offer us: -

1.    Jordan Peterson: Personalities and STORIES, (particularly Bible stories), that present us with the wisdom of the ages, when he re-interprets them for the enlightened, scientific, modern world.

2.    Sam Harris: INTUITIONS that we use to build math and generalizations and science, turned to the task of establishing values/morals/oughts that will lead us away from suffering towards wellbeing in the enlightened, scientific, modern world.

These are valiant attempts to arrive at a basis for a truthful ethic that will achieve pro-human wellbeing. Sam emphasizes that an ethic for an enlightened 21st century should be post-faith and pro-reason, post-revealed-word and pro-discovered fact, and Jordan agrees that these are laudable objectives.  They both emphasize that a modern ethic must be anti-suffering and pro-human-wellbeing.  But neither has found a philosophy that gets us off the ground with SOLID OBJECTIVE FACTS that are TRUE, from which MORAL VALUES can be derived. They can’t get an OUGHT from an IS.  Consequently, Jordan has concluded that he must get truth and values from stories which he rationalizes into something that he conceives is acceptable in the modern world.  And consequently, Sam has concluded that he must get truth and values from “intuitions” that he conceives to be acceptable in the modern world. But Jordan’s method employs rationalizations to make stories fit pre-conceived modern oughts. And Sam’s method employs pulling pre-conceived modern oughts up by their own bootstraps. So where did the pre-conceived modern values come from? From what SOLID, FACTUAL, OBJECTIVE, TRUTH?

What Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and the world, are screaming for, is a source of values and oughts that is neither fundamentalist nor relative, neither religious nor woke, neither dogmatic nor permissive, neither intrinsic nor subjective, but OBJECTIVE!  We desperately need a means of establishing universal values for human beings, a means of getting moral values from the facts of reality, a means of getting an OUGHT from an IS. As Jordan Peterson said at one point, almost in despair: “it keeps coming up. We keep coming back to this point, that we can't get an ought from an is.”. And no modern philosopher can help with that despair - except the 20th-century philosopher who wrote: -

“In answer to those philosophers who claim tha t no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life.  Thus, the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’”

For there to be a value there has to be a valuer and something to gain and or keep, and only a living entity has something to lose – its life.  What every living entity IS, determines what it OUGHT to value and do, IF it is to live! (If it isn’t driven to live, no values are possible, and no actions are required.)  To repeat, whatever the nature of a living entity IS, that’s what determines what it OUGHT to do, IF it is to live.  A seagull OUGHT to fly, a rose bush OUGHT to turn its leaves to the sun, a lion OUGHT to hunt zebra, and a zebra OUGHT to run away, in order to live.  In other words: IF it is to live, a bird OUGHT to value (i.e. act to gain and/or keep) flight, a rose bush OUGHT to value sunlight, a lion OUGHT to values meat, and a zebra, like all living entities, OUGHT to value its life. But these living entities don’t need to learn about oughts or values or morals, because they have no choice but to pursue their pro-life OUGHTS.  Humans, on the other hand, do need to learn what they OUGHT to value and do because they do have to choose. (Regarding Sam’s theory, see my post FREE WILL.) We don’t have to choose to make our hearts beat, or to feel thirsty, or to integrate sense data into percepts, or to do many other things we OUGHT to do to stay alive.  But our unique and primary means of survival, our reason, operates by (free) CHOICE, so we do need to learn that we OUGHT to think rationally, which is our unique means of identifying and commanding reality. That is our primary task, our competitive advantage, our great responsibility, and our glory – choosing to think rationally.

Since the capacity to reason IS the critical aspect of our human nature, we OUGHT to value reason as our primary value, and since our reason must be activated by choice, rationality is our primary virtue. Since rationality IS our primary virtue and IS the function of our individual minds, INDEPENDENCE is a virtue; and since it IS our rational judgments that must direct our actions in the world, INTEGRITY is a virtue; and since reality IS ruled by natural laws and can’t be faked, HONESTY is a virtue; and since our wellbeing IS dependent on our ability to create rational values, PRODUCTIVITY is a virtue; and since it IS trade with others that multiplies our individual productivity, provided no force is involved, JUSTICE is a virtue; and since virtue IS what makes a person capable and worthy of living well on earth, PRIDE (moral ambitiousness) is a virtue. On the other hand, since the imposition of physical force IS what nullifies our means of survival, the initiation of force is a vice, and society must bring our right to counter with retaliatory force under objective control, to protect our individual rights to LIFE, LIBERTY, PROPERTY, and pursuit of HAPPINESS.

The above are not deductive proofs, but they sketch out what can be proved OBJECTIVELY by logical integration of the FACTS induced from REALITY.  And yes, there IS A REALITY out there, independent of the conscious minds that identify it.  And yes, the tree in the quad would still be there when there’s no one there to see it, even if there were no minds anywhere to see anything. How do I know that? Well, I don’t know that that particular tree is right there; but I do know self-evidently that something is somewhere, and that you can’t contradict that without acknowledging it is there in so doing. And yes, we do have the means of identifying what IS really there.

If you are interested in the metaphysical and epistemological premises that the morality sketched above rests on, and/or how those values and virtues, and vices are validated, read or re-read the works of Ayn Rand, and: Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, by Leonard Peikoff.

This is the way he put it:-

“I didn't make myself…I didn't make my genes, I'm exactly the machine I am right now through no fault of my own … I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environmental influences here, and yet those are the only things that could contrive to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behaviour.”

I am sure Dr. Harris knows what he’s talking about and is sincere - but I am also sure he is wrong. In addition to his genes and his environment, there is a third factor that makes Sam Harris what he is: his free will.  Because, unless he is a different species to me and you and the rest of homo sapiens, or has some sort of brain damage, Sam plays it again only if he chooses to – he is not bound to play what Rick or the big kahuna or the big bang and its effects demand, because he freely chooses how his genes and environment affect his thoughts and actions. (Strictly speaking the “freely” is redundant - there is no such thing as an un-free choice).  Sam’s choices may not constitute the free will that Sam is convinced he doesn’t have; but what he has is real freedom to make real choices that contribute the most critical dimension to the machine that will produce his next thought or impulse or moment of behaviour – that could have been otherwise. Both that next thought and the alternative thought it could have been would have premises supplied by his genes and environment, it’s not as if Sam could choose to sing a Swahili secret fertility song; but at any given moment there are numerous possible thoughts that he could choose - in a manner I will get to. Sam disagrees:-

“There is no description of any conceptualisation of causes that precedes my conscious experience that sounds like what people think they have when they think they could have done otherwise, and that they really [are a] conscious agent [that] is really in charge, right?

Right. That is what my free will implies: that I could have thought and acted otherwise because I had conscious agency.  My free will doesn’t precede my conscious experiences - my capacity to choose precedes my conscious experiences, but my actual choices obviously occur once I’m conscious.  I wake up and automatically see, hear, taste, smell or feel sensations that are automatically integrated into percepts in my mind; then I choose to think conceptually (in a manner denied to non-human animals) - unless I don’t. Once I have chosen to think, I may choose to act as my thought A. directs, or redirect my thoughts and act as thought B. directs.

Sam explains why he thinks I have no such freedom:-

“Like, if you don't know what you're going to think next, right, and you can't help but think it, take those two premises on board, you don't know what it's going to be, [and] you can't stop it from coming, and … you can't stop yourself from fully living out its behavioural or emotional consequences.”

 I take Sam’s two premises X and Z, and insert a Y factor in between that makes all the difference – I will get to how that works. I obviously can’t know what I’m going to think next because if I knew it I would have already thought it. Sam presumes that because he can’t find any Y factor between that X state and his next thought, it must have been determined by“genetics and the environmental influences”. And those genetics and the environmental influences were presumably caused by preceding genetic and environmental influences, and those by a line of causes and effects that extends all the way back to the big bang.  How does Sam know this? He says that if my thought is not determined or random there’s nothing else it can be, but that’s just his assertion. Why can’t there be an observable Y factor that decides amongst all the genetics and environmental influences available to my mind? I submit that there is, but before I identify how the Y factor works, it is necessary to clarify how the law of cause and effect works.  

CAUSE AND EFFECT AND FREE WILL

Sam says:-

“If the laws of nature don’t strike most of us as incompatible with free will, that is because we have not imagined how human behavior would appear if all cause-and-effect relationships were understood. “
[Harris, Sam. Free Will (p. 11). Free Press. Kindle Edition.]

I disagree. Firstly, there is a common misconception about the law of cause and effect that has to be dispensed with. Using the classic billiard table to illustrate, a thrust from a cue causes the effect of a billiard ball rolling to hit another ball, which causes the effect of that ball rolling to hit another ball, which causes the effect of that ball rolling etcetera. The misconception is to think of this process as one motion causing another motion, as Dr. Leonard Peikoff explains:-

“Since the Renaissance, it has been common for philosophers to speak as though actions directly cause other actions, bypassing entities altogether. For example, the motion of one billiard ball striking a second is commonly said to be the cause of the motion of the second, the implication being that we can dispense with the balls; motions by themselves become the cause of other motions. This idea is senseless. Motions do not act, they are actions. It is entities which act - and cause. Speaking literally, it is not the motion of a billiard ball which produces effects, it is the billiard ball, the entity, which does so by a certain means. If one doubts this, one need merely substitute an egg or soap bubble with the same velocity for the billiard ball; The effect will be quite different.”
[Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand, by Leonard Peikoff (OPAR) p.16]

A valid law of cause and effect states that:-

“Cause and effect … is a universal law of reality. Every action has a cause (the cause is the nature of the entity which acts); and the same cause leads to the same effect. (The same entity, under the same circumstances, will perform the same action.).”   
[OPAR p15]

And when it comes to human action, it is a law of cause and effect that a human entity will act according to its nature, which includes its free will. 

It is the nature of the billiard ball, specifically its smooth spherical shape, in the context of being hit while on a flat surface, to roll in the direction of the thrust.  It is the nature of bears, specifically their instincts, to hibernate in the context of winter. It is the nature of human beings, specifically their automatic temperature control mechanisms, to perspire in the context of warm temperatures. And it is in the nature of human beings, specifically their free will, to make (free) choices (in a manner to be identified).

So, since human beings have free will, my freely chosen action, let’s say to wear a white Panama hat, is no more of a violation of cause-and-effect than a bear instinctively hibernating in winter, or a billiard ball rolling in the direction it was poked on a billiard table.  All three of us, me, the bear, and the ball, are acting, given our respective contexts, in accordance with our natures.  It just so happens, however, that one of us has a nature that includes free will. Consequently, my choice (in a manner I’m getting to) to wear my white Panama could have been different, I could have worn my black bowler or no hat at all. Doesn’t that make us humans unique? Didn’t we always know that we were? Just look around!

Our free will has a specific and unique nature. It doesn’t give us the capacity to think and do anything we want to. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t determined genetic and environmental factors in play. It doesn’t account for all the differences between Sam and me, our genes and environment also account for differences. It isn’t randomness. It isn’t mystical, or a phenomenon that can only be accepted by faith. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t antecedent premises that have to be in place before a particular thought and act could occur. It doesn’t mean that a “human agency must magically rise above the plane of physical causation,” it’s not magical and it doesn’t violate a valid law of cause and effect. In what sense, then, is free will free, and how does it operate?  

Our primary free choice, according to the Objectivist theory of free will as I understand and observe it, is to think or not.  More precisely, it is to focus the mind on reality, as it is manifested to us through our senses, as remembered from previous encounters with it, and as we have previously identified it conceptually.  At nearly every conscious moment, all humans except babies and the insane can choose to focus their minds or to let them drift in the direction that the most immediate stimuli pushes them, or to actively evade reality. This free will is not like a binary on/off switch, it is more like a focus-dial that we can turn to thoughtless drift, or ratchet up to relaxed focus, or all the way up to full focus, or all the way down to a state of evasion in which reality is blurred beyond the recognition of conceptual thought. It is our chosen level of focus that determines which external and internal experiences and premises come to bear and how thoroughly they are integrated and how logically connections and integrations and judgments and conclusions are made, i.e. how rational we choose to be. We don’t have to choose to be in full focus on all of reality all the time, in fact, that would be impossible – focus takes effort and energy, which has to be conserved if not needed.  So one of our downstream choices, once we’ve made the primary choice to focus, is to choose what aspect of reality we should focus on, at what degree of concentration, and at what level of abstraction. This is the way I think my free will works; you may have a different way of identifying it; but whatever way you recognize it, it is your human capacity of free will, i.e. your choice to focus your mind, that directs your thoughts, and consequently your actions, and consequently your life. And it is this sui generis phenomenon of human nature that is your great responsibility and your competitive advantage.

When I say our choice is to think, I’m talking about purposeful, conceptual, thought (in words or images), by focusing the mind sufficiently on relevant premises in order to induce knowledge and deduce applications. This can be done fleetingly or thoroughly, superficially or profoundly, accurately or erroneously, depending on the focus level we choose to activate. Fully focused thought is not a process that can accommodate contradictions or the blanking out of inconvenient facts, a mind has to go at least partially out of focus to do that, and every individual can choose to do that at any time, or to focus his or her mind. That is the hub of his or her free will - and that is the hub of rational thought too. Freedom and reason - neither can exist without the other. It is the chosen level of focus in the present that decides which premises come to bear on the subject at hand, and it is the chosen level of focus in the past that produced the billions of thoughts that made those premises that are now available for consideration in the present. So, I submit you, me and Sam have free will at every normal moment that we are awake, in the form of a choice to focus and think - and our thoughts and actions flow from there.  If we don’t choose to think, to that extent it is only our genes and environment that have agency. But a choice not to choose to focus and think is a (free) choice too.

DETERMINISM, FREE WILL, AND PROOF

I can’t prove to Sam that I have free will.  If I say, for instance, that it was my free will that led me to be an atheist rather than a Christian as I was brought up to be, Sam would always be able to surmise that my genetically endowered temperament led me to rebel against my parents’ convictions, or that the environment of my scientific education determined my atheism, or whatever. If I say I freely chose to wear my Panama, Sam will be able to surmise that the closer proximity of my Panama than my bowler or the brightness of the day determined that I wore it. By the same token, Sam can’t prove to me that he is determined (regardless of how passionate and interminable his assertions that he is), because no matter what chain of events he lays out to account for him being the machine he is that would decide to drink a glass of water, I could always surmise choices along the way that made him that machine, and surmise that if he had chosen differently, he would be a different machine, that chose a different career and drank only whisky.  

Neither can free will be proved by logical deduction, because free will has to be assumed in any proving process.  But whereas free will is self-evident, determinism is self-refuting. This is the way Leonard Peikoff explains the situation: -

“If man's consciousness were automatic, if it did react deterministically to outer or inner forces acting upon it, then, by definition, a man would have no choice in regard to his mental content; He would accept whatever he had to accept, whatever ideas the determining forces engendered in him. In such a case, one could not prescribe methods to guide a man’s thoughts or ask him to justify his ideas; the subject of epistemology would be inapplicable. One cannot ask a person to alter or justify the mentally inescapable, any more than, in physical terms, one can ask him to alter or justify his patellar reflex. In regard to the involuntary, there is no alternative but to submit - to do what one must, whatever it is.

The concept of “volition” is one of the roots of the concept of “validation” (and of its subdivisions, such as “proof”). The validation of ideas is necessary and possible only because man's consciousness is volitional. This applies to any idea including the advocacy of free will.  To ask for its proof is to presuppose the reality of free will.

Once again, we have reached a principle at the foundation of human knowledge, a principle that anticedes argument and proof. How, then do we know that man has volition? It is a self-evident fact, available to any act of introspection.”

[OPAR pp69-70]

While I can’t prove that Sam has free will, I can point out that his theory disqualifies itself from being considered true. His theory is that every idea that he has and that I have will be determined, e.g. his anti-free-will idea and my free-will idea. So our determined ideas can’t both be right. So determined ideas can’t make any claim to truth – they are just what we have no choice about believing. We can each present our case and try to convince the other by logical argument, but that presumes we are free to choose between them, if we are both determined to believe what we believe, the argument is just a determining link in the chain of events that is going to lock us into whatever we were destined to believe.

I know I have free will by introspective observation! (In a similar way to how I know I feel joy and sadness, want to run from snarling dogs and embarrassing scenes, feel pain and prefer the taste of mango to avocado, all of which are self-evident to me even though I have no way of proving those truths to others.  My free will is self-evident, and I know that my fellow human beings have free will too, because they are of the same species as me, and because free will is the only explanation for everything I know about that species.

Consider, for instance, the differences between the lives of determined life forms and free-willed humans. Animal behaviour and lifestyles don’t keep changing like human lifestyles and behaviour does: within lifetimes, between individuals, between cultures, and throughout history.  Other animals do what their parents did - change occurring only by natural selection across millions of years. There is nothing in the lives of any other life form that is comparable to the trials and errors, creations and destructions, stupidity and genius, chopping and changing, dark ages and renaissance, wasting and accumulations of values. Ockham’s razor if nothing else suggests that humans are not simply carrying out an inevitable script, but are engaged in a much less predictable process.  Non-human animals can’t be purposely self-destructive unless their sacrifice is needed for the survival of the colony or species, evolution keeps them on a life-sustaining path; only humans purposely follow suicidal paths that contradict what evolution would mandate as their survival path. Other species rarely get their pro-life course wrong, because they can’t choose to disregard their determined means of survival – humans get it wrong all the time because they can choose not to engage their primary means of survival.  But it is the fallibility of our method that is also our great advantage because it empowers us to consider an unlimited number of ideas, which we can judge as true or false, good or bad, helpful or harmful, in our minds, rather than waiting for evolution to find useful mutations by killing billions of individuals with harmful mutations across millions of years. That is how humans keep coming up with better and better ways of living, and why, when they make serious mistakes due to lack of knowledge or lack of focus, humans can reassess and correct a mistake before it destroys the whole species (so far at least). It is this volitional process of rational thought that is our great responsibility, and our glory.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF FREE WILL.    

Consider a simplified example of a free will choice. Let's say my best friend’s wife comes to my room and kisses me seductively. My thought might be any one of these: 1. I want to have sex with her. 2. She must be driven by sexual desire for me, a gentleman wouldn’t deny her. 3. She can’t be turned on by my sex appeal, I’ve never had that effect before.  4. I wonder why she wants to have sex with me, maybe she wants to punish her husband, so she will tell him, and I’ll lose my best friend. 5. Before I have sex with her, I’d better make sure she won’t tell her husband, so I won’t lose my friend. 6. Even if she doesn’t tell her husband, I’ll know I’m deceiving him, so our friendship will never be the same. That’s at least six thoughts that my genetically made hormones and the environmental circumstances could elicit, and it would be my level of focus that would direct which thought came to mind long enough to be acted on.  That, I submit, is a simplification of the way free will works.  I choose my level of focus, which determines whether I consider only selected facts, or more facts, or the full reality of the situation, which leads to my actions, that could have been otherwise if I had chosen to focus on a different level.

Sam would not accept that I would have any such (free) choice.  Whichever one of the six thoughts I acted on (due to the level of focus I chose), he would say it was the inevitable effect of the environmental stimulus on my genetically endowered response mechanisms. If it were choice 1, he would ascribe it to a determined: kiss + hormones = sex (and I would be off the hook – no blame or shame.) If it were choice 6, he would ascribe it to: kiss + conscience = abstinence (and I would gain no credit for my willpower – no choice being involved, just a determined reflex to a determined morality.)

Sadly, my choices are more mundane and more cluttered and complicated. Nevertheless, if I introspect, I discover my mind engaged in such processes. (You will too.) I notice, for instance, what happens when I crave a diet-braking chocolate.  I am aware on the periphery of my mind as I reach for the chocolate, that I can’t afford to go full focus, because full focus would include the realization that the momentary pleasure of the chocolate will be outweighed by the later despair at breaking my diet and staying fat – only by choosing to stay out of full focus can I indulge my vice.  (I have even caught myself eating faster in order to finish the chocolate before my focusing mind stops my eating pleasure and restores my anti-chocolate pledge.)  On the other hand, by focusing, I can resist the chocolate and enjoy the satisfaction of being loyal to my diet. If I were a Mafia boss, my evasions would be much more difficult to accommodate. For example, in order to maintain discipline and ward off competitors, I would have to react with indignant fury at any sign of dishonesty or disloyalty towards me, while acting dishonestly and disloyally to my underlings and prey – which would require a lot of no-go zones in my mind to evade around lest the contradictions involved mess with my game plan.  If I go into a daydream, let’s say on a bus, I am aware that I could find something to engage my mind in a more taxing thought process, such as solving a conundrum, or committing the shops I pass to memory, but I choose not to, while choosing not or go completely out of focus, lest I miss my stop - which happens. When I get off the bus and face the downtown traffic, I choose to go full focus - or not, in which case I risk getting run down. 

Armed with a valid understanding of cause and effect and free will, all of Sam’s examples of determinism turn into examples of free -will. E.g. he claims that because we are constrained by our grammar, and different cultures have different grammar, this demonstrates that our thinking is determined by this aspect of our environment. And it is true that some cultures help our quest for truth better than others. But different cultures with different grammar e nd up with the same facts (unless one of the alleged facts is a demonstrable mistake). There are no situations in which, say, the Greek culture establishes that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, but the Egyptian grammar determines that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the cube of the other two sides. Because if they did, the Egyptian pyramids would keep falling down, until they corrected their demonstrably mistaken geometry and grammar to help them discover reality rather than distort it. The point being that our free will doesn’t give us the freedom to contradict reality and escape the consequences. As Sir Francis Bacon put it: nature to be commanded must be obeyed.

Sam’s example of different cultures reacting differently to the idea of eating dogs, was supposed to demonstrate that we are determined by our culture’s mores, but it does no such thing.  It demonstrates that we are influenced by our culture, but that if we choose to think about it we would realize that there are different ways that dogs can be valued (e.g. as pets, or sheep herders, or as food), and that by thinking further (thanks to free will) we can re-evaluate whether an initial reaction to one of those uses is valid. If, after thinking the issue through, you decide that eating dog is bad, you have endorsed your abhorrence of seeing dog on the menu.  If you decide it is a legitimate option, you will be able to change your abhorrence – not necessarily with the snap of your fingers, or a twitch of your nose, but to expect that would be a Bewitched conception of free will.

The above examples were delivered off-the-cuff in an interview, so let’s take one more from Sam’s book.

My choice to write [this book] was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being. Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.* Therefore, while it is true to say that a person would have done otherwise if he had chosen to do otherwise, this does not deliver the kind of free will that most people seem to cherish—because a person’s “choices” merely appear in his mind as though sprung from the void.^ From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. ~
[ Harris, Sam. Free Will (pp. 34-35). Free Press. Kindle Edition.]

So * You decided it and intended it and willed it to reach your goals, but it came out of the undecided un-intended, un-willed darkness? ^ So, you chose it, but it sprung from the void? ~ So, you chose it but have no more responsibility for it than you had for being born?

This is simply the fallacy of equivocation applied to the word “choice” (Sam equivocates on the word “volition“ in the same way).  A determined choice is a contradiction in terms. Either it is a determined determination or response or reflex or reaction - or it’s a chosen or decided or intended or willed or free choice.

FREE WILL, CHARACTER AND CULTURE

For living entities with consciousness, it is their primary means of identifying reality, which is their primary means of sustaining and propagating their lives. Animals gain a lot of knowledge by way of their senses, as mediated by inherited mechanisms of their bodies and instincts. One species has an additional attribute called reason – which operates by choice. This is the rational animal’s primary tool of survival.  The rational animal doesn’t have the claws or agility of a cat, the sense of smell and teeth of a dog, the instincts and mobility of a bird, the digestive system of a cow or the resilience of a sponge; so if it doesn’t choose to use reason it doesn’t have much going for it.

To be a reliable tool of cognition the human brain must be activated purposefully. When so activated it is the most potent mechanism on earth. But a human’s choice not to activate his or her brain purposefully and logically commits that human to a suicidal course. If that default persists, the only way the defaulter can survive is by parasitizing or praying on other rational animals who have chosen to use their reason in order to produce life-sustaining values. If none of the rational animals chose to use their reason, or if they were trapped in a situation where they were not able to act on their judgements, they wouldn’t stand a chance against the other better-armed and determined species, from viruses to vipers. 

To the extent that we human beings exercise our free will, and act accordingly, we become self-made men and women. Genes and environment set the parameters, within which we can make ourselves, but success or failure within those parameters is our responsibility, and the kind of person we make ourselves into is our achievement. Someone born with above average physical and mental capacities, in North America, to rich and devoted parents, can obviously achieve much more by focusing than someone born with below average physical and mental capacities, in Africa, to poor and negligent parents, can achieve by focusing just as well. But both will live the best life possible to them by focusing on their reality, and both achieve the same moral status by so doing, and both will destroy values and themselves by not focusing on reality or by evading it.

To the extent that we choose to make the effort to be in focus, reality comes to bear on our thoughts and actions, and we succeed in dealing with it as best as our genes and environment and prior choices will allow.  To the extent that we have been focused in the past, our concepts are likely to correspond to reality, and our stored knowledge is likely to be comprehensive and integrated. To the extent that we have been out of focus, our concepts are likely to be out of sync with reality, and our stored knowledge is likely to be compromised and disintegrated.  So past choices make it easier or harder to focus on reality in the present. Consequently, individuals develop patterns of thought and traits of behaviour – indeed they make up most of what we call a person’s character.  A person’s character is an indicator of his or her future choices and behaviour – but it doesn’t determine them.  A bad character can (with difficulty) focus rationally and virtuously and act accordingly.  And a man of good character can choose to go out of focus and commit an out-of-character bad deed. The fact that these are much less common than bad people doing bad things and good people doing good things is not a negation of free will, it is a confirmation of the fact that good (full focused) choices have long-range beneficial effects including making it easier to make good choices in the future, while bad choices make it harder to make good choices in the future.

Where a group of people share similar genes (as in a family or race), or a similar environment (as within a country, culture, or sub-culture) typical patterns of thought, or traits of behaviour, can be observed.  But these traits don’t determine the character of the individuals in the family or sub-culture, each member can freely choose whether to go out of focus and be swept along by the groupthink or focus on all the facts of reality to check whether the groupthink is true (in accordance to all the facts) or flawed (not in accordance to all the facts).  Every individual in a lynch mob can choose to go out of focus and be swept along, or focus his mind sufficiently to recognise his actions as murder, and to say no.  Every individual devoted to a team effort can choose to slack off and let the team down.  And every adult member of a political party, clan, subculture, or religion, can focus, examine, and decide that what his group stands for is what he finds to be true, and so to be rejoiced, or not true, and so to be rejected - or partly true and partly untrue.   

In any culture or subculture, there can be heroic or villainous individuals who buck cultural norms, for good or ill. These heroes and villains are rare because genes and environment are powerful influences that constrain potential villains from rebelling against virtuous cultures and restrain potential heroes from rebelling against villainous cultures.  But heroes (think Ayaan Hirsi Ali) and villains (think Jeffrey Edward Epstein) are not so rare that we can’t find examples on all levels of society if we look. The belief in determinism denies heroes and villains justice, and the rest of us too.  It denies heroes the acknowledgement of the virtues that produced their achievements, for which they should feel pride.  And it denies villains the blame for the vices that produced the destruction of values, for which they should feel ashamed.  And the belief in determinism denies the rest of us the justice that encourages the pro-human-life achievements that benefit us all and discourages the anti-human-life destruction of values that deprives us all.

FREE WILL: BLESSING OR CURSE?

Sam thinks that it’s a good thing that we don’t have free will because once we realise that we have no choice about what we think and do, we will have a much more tolerant society, and we won’t have to curse ourselves and feel guilty when we do the wrong thing. Sam is a neuroscientist and I am not, but I find it hard to accept that belief in determinism is the best way of relieving negative emotions about thoughts and actions of the past. But even if Sam is right about that, consider the cost!  For a start, if belief in determinism relieves us of guilt or regret for doing the wrong thing, it also relieves us of satisfaction and pride for doing the right thing. Which obliterates motivation to correct our erroneous thoughts and bad behaviour and build on our rational thoughts and good behaviour, because we don’t believe we have control over that, all we are left with is: what will be will be!  If we jettison free will, we jettison: regret and guilt, satisfaction and pride, motivation and morality, truth and justice, drama and adventure, values and dis-values and chosen loves, because in the final analysis determined entities choose nothing, everything is chosen for them, all they can hope for is the luck of the draw. If a wife asked: “Why did you marry me, darling?” The honest and complete answer of a determinist would have to be: “For the same reason I put my socks on this morning and did everything else: because my genes and environment determined that I did so.’’  Que sera sera!

Sam implies that everybody who thinks about it scientifically becomes a determinist, but I have yet to meet a determinist who acts as if he or she were determined - Sam certainly doesn’t. My guess is that people who act as if they were determined are in jails or asylums. Existentialists agree with me that we have free will, but agree with Sam that free will is a terrible thing. This sets them wailing that: life is hell and then we die. Many Christians agree with me that we have free will, but agree with Sam that it is an inexplicable phenomenon - a conundrum that they resolve by having faith that it is a miraculous gift of God. Some other Christians, such as Calvinists, believe in a determinist theory called predestination - the belief that all humans are stamped at birth for heaven or hell after they die. I’m sure Sam wouldn’t want to be associated with that horrible theory in any way, but it does accentuate what it would be like to think that our futures are all set in stone and there is not a damned thing we can do about it.  Muslims believe in predestination too: “Allah knows the future as well as the present and the past, all things are pre-destined, everything has been decreed and fixed from all eternity by the divine will, even to the final fate of every soul, Allah not only knows from eternity who will be saved, but sends whom he will astray, and guides whom he will.” Philosophers have argued back and forth on the issue since Plato - but all societies throughout history have tacitly presumed free will as the basis of their systems of justice. Some societies have tacitly presumed determinism in their tribalist or racist beliefs, e.g. the belief in the predetermined supremacy of their race or tribe, and that other races or tribes are determined to think and act differently. This racism (and other forms of epistemological apartheid such as between the sexes) is promoted explicitly and ruinously by postmodernism and woke.

Sam is consistent enough to carry his theory to its logical conclusions, e.g. that according to determinism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jeffrey Epstein, Abraham Lincoln, Adolph Hitler, Isaac Newton, and Pol Pot are morally equal, deserving of no more condemnation or praise than each other because none of them could have acted any differently than they did - they were just doing what they had to from the day they were born to the day they died. Sam insists that determinists would still want criminals jailed for everyone else’s safety - but that retributive justice would be unfair since none of us could help but do what we were determined to do. He says it’s okay to distinguish the acts of your legs walking to the store and your hands strangling the cat, as in a different category to the acts of your heart pumping blood and your stomach digesting food (my examples), as long as you remember that you had no more agency over the former than you did over the latter, your genes and environment determine both, they just used different routes to deliver their orders. (Sam sometimes confuses the issue by calling the former ”voluntary” and the latter involuntary, but he equivocates on ”voluntary” so that it can be determined.)

None of the above is to suggest that we should believe in free will because it is better for us that we do so. Good or bad, free will is either a fact of our human nature, or we are determined to believe what we believe (including belief in determinism) and to do what we do. However, according to Sam, there may soon be a way to settle the issue once and for all, with a device that measures brain waves.  He says that such a device could predict what he will do before he thinks to do it, which will prove that he is determined. But once again I must respectfully disagree with the sincere and intelligent doctor. That device won’t settle the issue, but it may well lend weight to my theory of the way free will works. Because the brain waves that the device measures may well be caused by the level of focus that has been chosen, which would determine how much data would come to bear at what degree of intensity, which could indicate what thought would result. Be that as it may, you and I don’t need to wait for that device to be invented to settle the issue, at least for ourselves. Each of us can verify free will for ourselves by focussing on what goes on in our minds, at the moment, over the last week, and over a lifetime. In other words, all we need to do is choose to think.

© John Dawson 2022

“I want to come back, and I want my daughters to be able to come back, and I want them to be able to bring their daughters or sons to visit the [Great Barrier] Reef, and I want [it to still be]there 50 years from now.”
President Barack Obama, at the University of Queensland, 14th November 2014.

President Obama was reflecting back the belief that has been spread around the world that the Great Barrier Reef is being destroyed by Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW), because Australian scientists have been dining out on such stories for decades, stories that are embellished by climate alarmists, and amplified by the mainstream media around the world.  As a response to such alarms, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) was set up in 1985 with the funds to monitor the coral cover, which it has been doing ever since.  As the alarms grew so did the streams of money flowing to institutes, organisations and universities that could tag their projects with the aim of investigating damage done to the Reef. This was of particular interest to global warming alarmists, because corals were thought to be not only as delicate as canaries but so vulnerable to the warming of the seas, that they would act like canaries in a coal mine, warnings of what was to happen to the rest of the ecosystems and the globe as it warmed. The streams of taxed funds grew into rivers, and they were joined by tributaries from virtue-signalling companies like Coles and BHP.  As the CAGW crusade gathered momentum the alarms got ever more frenzied - here is a sprinkling of the headlines since 2000:-  

2000: “The Great Barrier Reef faces destruction within the next century,”|
UQ News, The University of Queensland.

2005: “Of all the oceans ecosystems, none is more diverse nor… more replete with beauty of color and form than a coral reef; and none, the climate experts and marine biologists tell us, is more endangered by climate change.” Professor Tim Flannery; Chapter 11 of The Weather Makers, The Great Stumpy Reef? 

2009: “Reef-building corals are under increasing physiological stress from a changing climate and ocean absorption of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
National Centre for Biotechnology Information.

2012: “Half the Great Barrier Reef gone in under 30 years, says AIMS study. The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral in the past 27 years, [since monitoring began] the devastation caused by a deadly combination of disasters.”
Environmental Reporter Malcolm, News.com.au

2014: “The Great Barrier Reef faced with irreversible damage.”
Peter Hannam, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6th March.

2016: “50% of The Great Barrier Reef is Now Dead or Dying…This is the worst coral bleaching episode in Australia’s history, with reports of coral dying in places that we thought would be protected from rising temperatures,”.
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director of Global Climate Change Institute, in a statement to the University of Queensland. Reported by Forbes 24th April.

2017: “Large sections of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are now dead.”
New York Times, March.

2017: “Half the size of Texas, spanning 1400 miles, Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on the planet, it is rich in beauty and diversity, but it is dying, as the ocean waters warm. …The only thing that's going to deal with this global coral bleaching problem …[is] regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. So what if we do nothing to slow climate change? Coral reefs as we know them will not exist in the next ten, twenty, thirty years. We could single handedly be responsible for the extinction of an entire ecosystem.”
PBS News Hour 23rd of March.

2018: “The Great Barrier Reef Nearly Died 5 Times. This Could Be Its Last Chance. I have grave concerns about the ability of the reef in its current form to survive.”
Joe McCarthy and Erica Sánchez,  Global Citizen, 30th May.

2018: “Global warming is killing the Great Barrier Reef, study says.”
CNN 18th April.    

2019: “David Obura: We are not doing enough to combat the decline of coral reefs. Dealing with greenhouse gas emissions and overexploitation is key to sustainability.”
The New York, Times

2020: “The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching again. Bleaching is said to occur when plants that live on the reef die and deprive the underlying coral of food”
The New York Times, April.

2020: “Australia's Great Barrier Reef has lost more than half of its corals since 1995 due to   warmer seas driven by climate change, a study has found. Scientists found all types of corals had suffered a decline across the world's largest reef system…. There is no time to lose - we must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions ASAP, the researchers said.”
Proceedings of the Royal Society, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Queensland. Reported by BBC 14th October.

2021: “Barrier Reef doomed, as up to 99 per cent of corals at risk; The Great Barrier Reef is all but doomed, with between 70 and 99 percent of corals set for destruction unless immediate ‘transformative action’ is taken to reverse global warming, according to a new report.” 
Nick O’Malley and Mike Foley; Sydney Morning Herald, 1st April.

2021: “The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its corals”
The New York Times, June.

2021: “The reef today is about 70% or more dead as a result of repeated bleaching episodes, and the scientists tell us that if we get to 1.5 degrees above the pre industrial average the reef is going to be mostly dead and if we go up to two degrees it'll be 99.8% dead, so we know that there's a lot at stake.” Australia’s Climate Councillor, Tim Flannery, in his Talbot Oration, broadcast on the ABC’s Radio National Science Show, 17th July at 12.05pm. [NOTE: The same corals that thrive in Southern GBR thrive in Northern GBR, where the sea is 2.4oC warmer, and on reefs further north where the seas are much warmer.]

2022: “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, threatening its very existence.”
(c) 2022 Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

2022: “$1b plan to save Great Barrier Reef will fail without climate change action, expert says….Dr Jodie Rummer says the reef will be doomed without more action on climate change.”
 Zilla Gordon and Travis Mead; ABC News, 28th January.

2022: “Dire Warning for Great Barrier Reef.  As UN inspection begins: climate council briefing, Australia’s reefs and marine ecosystems are at grave risk of mass bleaching and extinction, a marine heatwaves research briefing from the Climate Council has found.”
Climate Council Media Release, 21.03.22

2022: “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef and coral reefs worldwide.  Climate change is caused by global emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas).” 
The Australian Government.
 

2022: “Global warming is killing the reef, it will consume and destroy it. As well as 60,000 jobs that depend on the reef”
Adam Bandt, MP, Leader of the Australian Greens, 3rd August.

  In 2021 Netflix made a documentary about the state of the Great Barrier Reef featuring International Naturalist David Attenborough and Coral Reef Scientist Terry Hughes. The following excerpts cover the main points of the alarms about the alleged threat to coral reefs, which are expected to be the first casualties of CAGW.

David Attenborough: “Corals bleach when the waters around them get too warm, something that's happening with increasing frequency and intensity, as a consequence of global warming.”

Terry Hughes: “In big thermal extremes like we've been seeing during mass bleaching events in recent decades, they can actually die very very quickly - they cook. The footprint of a bleaching then is 10 times bigger than the most extreme category five tropical cyclone, so they're off the scale in terms of the size of the impact, and in terms of how frequently they are occurring.”

Attenborough: “Bleaching events used to be localized and rare but over the past two decades marine heatwaves have caused widespread bleaching. Three of the five biggest bleaching events have occurred in the past five years.”

Hughes: “We're worried about that shrinking gap between one bleaching event and the next one. We've already seen back-to-back bleaching event that occurred for the first time on the Great Barrier Reef in two consecutive summers in 2016 and 2017.”

Attenborough: “Those gaps are critically important if the corals are to recover. Half the reefs corals have already died.” 

 [NOTE: Attenborough here claims that half the Great Barrier Reef’s corals had died - not just bleached, died! According to Terry Hughes in a Ted talk, dead corals take between 10 and 100 years to recover, depending on the species.] 

Surveyor flying over the reef: “There's so much white coral… Just about everything is bleached.”

Hughes: “Those surveys have now been done five times… the last three in 2016, 2017 in 2020, it's a job I'd hoped I'd never have to do, because it's actually very confronting,”

Hughes had to stop talking in order to bring his distress under control. Maybe he asked that his catharsis be deleted from the documentary. If he did, the Netflix producer didn’t oblige – crying over bleached coral is alarmist gold.

Attenborough: “We're heading for a future in which the Great Barrier Reef is a coral graveyard.”

Terry Hughes: “The climate modellers are telling us, the biologists, that business as usual carbon emissions will result in back-to-back bleaching events every consecutive summer by the end of this century. We've gone past the tipping point for coral bleaching. Scientists and colleagues like myself have been talking for decades now about global warming, and it has been frustrating that we haven't been listened to.”

Has any man, woman, boy, girl or any in-between Australian NOT heard alarms about the imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef, and the loss of 60,000 jobs that depend on it, and the billions of tourist dollars that will be lost if the Reef is lost? I doubt that there are many people in any other alarmist country that haven’t heard about the Great Barrier Reef being in peril either - or that it’s already dead. I’m sure that if any of them had a magic wand they would fix the Reef for Terry. Come to think of it, one of them might have done that - what else could explain the Reef’s miraculous recovery in a few months?  This is the headline of the AIMS Long-Term Monitoring Program - Annual Summary Report of Coral Reef Condition 2021/2022.

June 2022: “Continued Coral Recovery Leads to 36-Year Highs Across two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef.”

The 36 years were those that had been monitored, so as far as we know the coral cover of the northern and middle thirds of the reef is as high as they have ever been.  Very little bleaching remained in the southern third either, (in fact, when margins of error are factored in, it equals the highest recorded coral cover).  But the southern third was not as well covered in coral as the northern two-thirds because it was recovering from an attack by starfish. And, ironically, given the weeping and gnashing of teeth over the projected one or two degrees of global warming in one or two centuries, corrals recover faster in the warmer northern seas than in the southern seas that are 2.7C cooler.

The following is the first paragraph of the AIMS Summary Report:-

“In 2022, the GBR continued to recover, registering the highest level of coral cover yet recorded in the Northern and Central regions over 36 years of monitoring. While recovery continues on many Southern GBR reefs, regional coral cover declined slightly due to ongoing outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish in the Swain reefs. Importantly, the trends in coral cover are highly variable across the GBR, and most reefs had between 10% and 50% hard coral cover.”

So, in 2021, according to Attenborough, half the coral had recently died, which meant no more coral on that half for 10 to 100 years. But in 2022 there is more coral than has ever been recorded!  The second paragraph of the AIMS summary seems to be offering an explanation for getting their alarms so wrong right up to March of 2022.

“Above-average water temperatures led to a mass coral bleaching event in 2021/22, the 4th event since 2016 and the first recorded during a La Nina year, when conditions are typically cooler. The peak of this bleaching event was in March, and the accumulated heat stress, measured is Degree Heating Weeks (DHW), reached levels expected to result in widespread bleaching but not extensive mortality. In-water and aerial bleaching surveys recorded widespread bleaching across the GBR, with the most severe bleaching on reefs in the central GBR.”

So, after years and years of alarm after alarm, declaring the worst coral bleaching, then even worse coral bleaching, then even worse than even that worst coral bleaching, past tipping point after tipping point, past declarations of doom then more certain declarations of even worse doom, towards one of the greatest environmental catastrophes our country has ever seen, declared by Australia’s Climate Councillor, which will lead us to “a future in which the Great Barrier Reef is a coral graveyard,” according to the world’s most loved and trusted naturalist, unreservedly and relentle. ssly, up until the unprecedented reef bleaching of March 2022.  Then three months later we have unprecedented coral cover!  Nearly all the accumulated bleaching and killed-off corals had gone, to give us the best ever coral cover. Who would have thought such a thing could occur?

Well - on the 27th of July 2017, as the world reverberated with predictions of doomed reefs, Alan Jones interviewed Professor Peter Ridd, on his 2GB Radio program, about a chapter he had written for Climate Change The Facts 2017.  His chapter was titled: “The Extraordinary Resilience of The Great Barrier Corals, and Problems with Policy Science.” The interview went like this: -

Allan Jones: “Professor Peter Rid [is] a professor of physics at James Cook University with particular interest and knowledge in coastal oceanography including human impacts on coral reefs.  He has published over 100 papers in international science journals. His chapter ends in a way that the global warming alarmists wouldn't like, when he talks about the lack of quality assurance in science, and he quotes the editor of the prestigious Lancet, one of  medicine's most important journals,  saying, quote: ‘the  case against science is straightforward, much of the scientific  literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.’ The Lancet, the editorial, says science has taken a turn towards darkness.  Not Alan Jones or Professor Ridd, the Lancet, [and] nowhere is this darkness more evident than in what Professor Peter Ridd tells us about the Great Barrier Reef, and he's on the line. Professor Ridd, good morning to you.”

Professor Peter Ridd: “Morning.”

Jones: “Thank you for your time. You've addressed all these issues, you begin by saying the claimed imminent peril faced by the Great Barrier Reef has captured the public imagination,… you say, quote ‘a visiting architect to my university revealed that his daughter, on discussing the latest reef bleaching event at school, came home depressed that she would probably never be able to see the Great Barrier Reef.’ And this myth has passed into received wisdom. You make the point that, explain to my listeners that every decade or so, abnormally high seawater temperatures can cause corals to bleach, but what we are not told is that they recover.”

Ridd: “They certainly do, and you know they did certainly crash last year, and the year before, but in fact, when you look at it there's actually more coral, there's three times more coral on the southern Great Barrier Reef, than there was about five years ago when we had a big cyclone going through, the northern part, which was hit by the bleachings. [They] had a reduction, but overall there's about the same amount of coral, probably quite a lot more, than there was five years ago, in about the same amount as we have on average on the reef. The scientists make hay when it dies in a spectacular way, but they are very quiet when it quietly recovers….”

Jones: “Absolutely. Well in this complicated argument about all of this, we can express this in pretty simple language, but there is one rather complicated word which [we] will get out of the way here, which explains everything and you do this brilliantly in your chapter, you talk about symbionts, SYMBIONTS, now these are things, are they not, that live inside a particular species of coral.”

Ridd: “Yep that's right.”

Jones: “And you say there's a large variety of them. You make this point in your essay. And some species of these symbionts inside the coral allow the coral to grow faster but will make them more susceptible to unusually warm conditions, other species of symbionts will give slower growth rates, but the corals are then less sensitive to bleaching. … the corals can select the species of symbionts that give them the ability to adapt to the prevailing conditions.”

Ridd: “Exactly, and that's why all the corals on the Great Barrier Reef [are] actually growing much faster in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Thailand where the water is much hotter, and they just juggle these symbionts.” [Southern GBR waters average 25oC, Northern GBR 27. 4oC, Indonesian reef waters above 29 oC]

Jones: “So there’s no problem there, but your issue is, when there's no problem… we see on the television these white skeletons of bleached coral, and as you say they make graphic and compelling images to demonstrate the perils of climate change, but as you said this only happens when the water gets hotter than normal and then the coral grows back.”

Ridd: “Exactly, exactly what happens. In fact when you look at corals they actually have a little thermometer built in them so when you actually take a core of them from many many years ago. We know what the temperature was on the Great Barrier Reef when Captain Cook was sailing up the coast, it was actually about the same temperature then as it is now. It was colder about 100 years ago, but it's actually recovered from that, so the temperatures on the reef are not even significantly warmer than average over 100 years.”

Jones: “I'm speaking to Professor Peter Ridd,… one of the most significant things you've said, the point about bleaching corals that undergo bleaching in one year, will be relatively un-susceptible to similar high temperatures in the following year.  In other words, the bleaching forces the coral to take on board, your words,‘a better adapted strain of symbionts,’ so corals have learnt a thing or two about dealing with temperature swings over 200 million years. Aye?” …

Ridd: “Exactly, and the problem is that we can no longer rely on our science institutions, and this is a very sad thing. I often say we [are] like a ship on the ocean without a compass when our science fails, and we [have] got to do something about this! And in the U S we have Scott Pruitt, the head of the EPA then, who wants these red teams and blue teams so when a group comes out and says the reef is dying, that science will actually be checked. At the moment this science is almost never checked.”

James Cook University was not happy about the Jones interview, or about Professor Ridd making similar comments on Sky to Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt, for example:-

“A lot of this science that is coming out is not properly checked, tested or replicated, and this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions, and the fact is I don't think we can anymore.”

In May of 2018, James Cook University fired Professor Peter Ridd.  His alleged offence was “breaching his employment’s code of conduct,” by being “un-collegial”, which brought the university into disrepute. The university insisted it wasn’t denying academic freedom, but how can you identify shoddy scientific practices without being “un-collegial” enough to bring the shoddy practitioners into disrepute?  Ridd charged the University for wrongful dismissal in the Federal Circuit Court and won $1.2 million compensation for the dismissal. James Cook University appealed the decision, and after a costly battle (for Ridd and supporters and the taxpayers who fund the university), the High Court of Australia ruled in the University’s favor.

The High Court’s decision must have sent a chilling message to every scientist in every university and scientific institution in Australia.  If an academic of impeccable credentials, prodigious accomplishments, and courteous presentation like Professor Ridd can be chopped down for telling and proving facts that may be deemed “un-collegial” by his embarrassed employer, their only course, if they want to forge a career in science, is to virtue-signal their adherence to the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming doctrine and avoid facts that contradict it. 

Peter Ridd found supporters at Quadrant, Sky, The Murdoch Press, and crowd funding, and the Institute of Public Affairs made him an Adjunct Fellow to lead its Project for Real Science. But he was told that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the ABC) would not report anything he had to say, and the rest of the alarmist media treated him like a religious heretic. This is one of the disgraceful misrepresentations produced by his Inquisitors:-

2019: “Great Barrier Reef expert panel says that Peter Ridd is misrepresenting science. Exclusive: Panel head Ian Chubb compares the roadshow of Doctor Ridd to tobacco industry strategy defending smoking.”

Adam Morton and Ben Smee; The Guardian; 28th August.

What Peter Ridd was saying has now been unequivocally vindicated. This demands an unequivocal apology.

Peter Ridd congratulated AIMS for not fudging the report like some reports have been and “for its work across many decades,” that “has paid off as it demonstrates that the reef cycles through periods of high and low coral cover. This is natural.” But natural has not been the assessment of the climate alarmist establishment. By highlighting every bleaching and coral death, and going quiet about every recovery, it has trumpeted ever louder the myth that CAGW is destroying the reef. This was the way Peter Ridd summed up the message of the 2021/2022 AIMS report:-

“This result is proof many science institutions have been misleading the public about the state of the reef. They claimed we had four devastating and unprecedented bleaching events since 2016. So much bleaching, death and destruction supposedly has never happened before and is because of climate change – and now we have record high coral cover”

The Weekend Australian, 5th August 2022.

So, what happens now? Do we get an admission that corals have never-before-realized capacities of rejuvenation?  Or that 36 years of alarms about coral destruction have been exaggerated out of all proportion?  Or do we start a new round of alarms every time the coral cover drops below this record high benchmark, always to be blamed at least in part on CAGW? Whatever way (and it is pretty obvious which path those with reputations and billions of dollars dependent on climate alarmism will take), we, the taxpayers who fund the climate alarm industries, deserve an explanation as to how so many scientists and institutions could get it so wrong for so long? 

As the Lancet quote, and half a century of climate alarms (beginning with 1970s alarms about Anthropogenic Global Cooling) attest, groupthinks that turn out to be dead wrong are not an uncommon phenomenon. When erroneous groupthinks occur in private companies, it is the owners who pay the price, as more self-critical competitors encroach on their territory. But government funded institutions, like the ABC and most scientific institutions, are subject to no such checks on their groupthinks and guild-protection-rackets.  Universities have always been particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. Who was it that said this?

“If the authority to which he is subject resides in the body corporate, the college, or university, of which he himself is a member, and in which the greater part of the other members are, like himself, persons who either are, or ought to be teachers, they are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbour may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own.”

That was said by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.

It takes a brave and self-confident participant in a “collegial” groupthink to step out of its protection to become its target. But until someone has the integrity to do so, and the means of surviving with a voice, misdirecting groupthinks will be self-perpetuating – see the ABC and the Universities.  Peter Ridd has some ideas about how misdirecting groupthinks in our scientific institutions can be rectified. He should be listened to, before the greatest groupthink and guild-protection-racket of our time, the CAGW doctrine, turns the alarms of imminent doom into self-fulfilling-prophesies for the West, while dictatorships laugh all the way to fossil fuelled supremacy.

But for now, we may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing that our beautiful reef is doing just fine, and is going to be fine for a long long time to come. Because regardless of how bad future back-to-back bleachings are, we now know that the reef can recover and adapt, as Peter Ridd explains:- 

“Old frail people easily can be killed by diseases such as flu that more robust people will easily survive. This is also true for ecosystems. If the reef were on its last legs because of climate change and pollution, it would not recover as strongly from stresses. The decades of AIMS data have shown the reef is strong, resilient, and fabulous.”

The Weekend Australian, 5th August, 2022.

And if, as climate alarmists have been claiming, corals are the canaries in the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming coal mine, the same can be said for the rest of the ecosystems, and for the planet.

John Dawson is the author of the Kindle book: Climate Alarmism; And its Delinquent Children: the Green New Deal and the Great Reset.

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