Being Sam Harris: Feeling the Power of Life

By Paul Chaplin

New York Times bestselling author Sam Harris is one of the most famous popular thinkers of our day. With a YouTube podcast channel Making Sense of almost half a million subscribers, and almost three million views of his debates with Jordan Peterson. The author of several books, and podcaster, Sam can be described for British audiences as Russell Brand with a neurology doctorate.
Being Sam Harris challenges the central ideas of Sam's works. Ranging through philosophy, logic, history, religion, the science of neuro-imaging, and more.
Sam is accused of being a one trick charlatan. A disingenuous showman who uses the technique of Singularity to generate a kaleidoscope of logically flawed and socially dangerous ideas. Despite their neo-liberal hippy patina, Sam's recipes for life demand suicide for the Self. All that remains is the autodidactic, synthesist benevolence of being Sam Harris.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G2 Entertainment
• Release date: May 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781782814016

Book preview

PREFACE

INTERRUPTING MYSELF

Well, I was supposed to be writing up Coronaphobia: Living With and Without It, as the sequel to Worlds Ends: Coronavirus, Frankenstein and Other Monsters.

While working on my Blog, Vlog and Pods at www.paulchaplin.life

I started seeing more of Sam Harris. I’ll run over his bio in the next chapter.

I was curious at first. An apparently plausible sounding public thinker, coming out with what appear to be considered analyses of contemporary trends in thought.

As I listened, I found myself wondering who had left the asylum door open? This is crackpot, neo-religious, nihilist, neo-conservative nonsense.

Then I noticed the incredible popularity of his views on YouTube. His ability to pack concert venues (before social distancing) on stage with Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, Douglas Murray.

The neoteric effect of Jordan Peterson’s work was obviously explained. He’s the dad you’d like to have. Erudite, witty, oozing compassion and with a spine made of steel.

I wouldn’t waste digital ink on debating Jordan’s encyclopaedically interesting views. I can agree with some of them and disagree with others. They are all ultimately harmless.

That’s because Jordan, as a psychologist, comes from a place of deep and unconditional investment in the sanctity of human life experience.

To Jordan, what matters most about what people think, is that each is an individual person thinking it. These are the monolithic pediments in a Stonehenge of common sense. There, we shake hands firmly across the altar stone, in mutual understanding.

But then I have to wave Jordan goodbye, as he wanders off into clerical conservatism, while seeking support in the myths of evolutionary biology.

What I find worth debating with Sam Harris, while I can1 are his ideas, which are not simply wrong, but wrong-headed. They are dangerously wrong. Their very popularity signals the degree of danger and the gravity of error.

Sam is not a Hitler, a Stalin or a Mao. But he is a Nietzsche. With the pseudo-rationalist constructionism of a Marx. To be a little kinder, Sam is a confused nihilist. He wants to have no cake, and eat it too. Building the paving stones over which those engines of destruction will one day roll. Petals of adoration shall be thrown upon those bloody stones by grandchildren in crowds, descended from the dispossessed and hopeful of today.

The millennials. The moderns. Dispossessed of every cultural signpost of meaning familiar to their grandparents, and cowed in hope that meaning will appear upon the horizon of their lives.

This was already a dangerous time. That 40 year chapter in the history of human kind, which began with the end of history had already closed with the collapse of globalisation.

The corona man cometh.

This chapter’s unexpected bookmark is the tombstone of coronaphobia. That coda to the end of the twentieth century.

The corona crisis has not revealed the governing classes worldwide, to be corrupt cabalists locked in conspiracy. With reptiles, if you like the cut of David Icke’s tracksuits.

It’s way worse than that. The corona crisis has revealed the political class to be utterly inept. They were elected for their supposed managerial skills.2 They have turned out to be utterly incompetent as managers of anything.

Coronaphobics, coronasceptics, all united in common revulsion at the grandiosity of incompetence. A class whose members managed to navigate a 45 year long cold war nuclear armageddon crisis, couldn’t handle a virus with a fatality profile strikingly similar to seasonal influenza.3

The riots which were bound to arise from Lockdown, the appeased reaction of the political establishment to Black Lives Matter. These are just the first froth on the riverine courses of social destruction at the waterfall.

I don’t enter upon a critique of the core strands of Sam Harris’ thought as a personal matter. My objective, in this book, is to make principals of those key themes of thought through Sam as an avatar. The Sammist of Sammism. Not to erect a straw man, but a wire figure. Like a classical chemistry model of an atomic structure, so we can see what connects to where. Then to add a predictive model of where that leads.

Sam’s poorly disguised neo-religious nonsense was little more than a sinister joke. Now the laugh is on the whole of humanity. A political landscape jolted into mass psychosis by the ineptitude of the managerial political class.

That psychosis has been fuelled by exactly the analytical structures of SamThought. Children are sitting masked in class, having been excluded for a year. Hospital systems that society was sacrificed to save have been emptied of patients. Stagflation stalks main street, yet inflation has been captured by a novel economic theory which denies its existence.

This is what happens when scientific elites get to operate the levers of societal power. An idiocracy, where the worst and least evidence-founded ideas dominate discourse.

Where dissent is reclassified as denial. A world of intolerance in which alternative narratives of facts are castigated as conspiracy.

This is the Sammist world where there are no values: only facts. Sam got the world he wished for earlier than he ever could have imagined. It’s a typically Taliban landscape. Where the micro-directions on how to not live your life emit from press conferences, instead of minarets.

It’s an ugly world. And Sam was the beauty queen who helped pave the way.

Tough On Nonsense: Tough on the Causes of Nonsense

I shall be scathingly rude about Sam’s theses, and his motivation in these following chapters. I will level direct allegation against him: that he is a charlatan; a con man; an egoist who lies and twists with the abandon of amoralism.

In making such allegations, I pay Sam the credit of intelligence. If Sam genuinely has no awareness of the logical and semantic chicanery which underpins his work, then he is simply more stupid than his ideas look.

I’d prefer this book to slide onto the self-help shelf, rather than press against the manuscripts of philosophy, because:

You can help your Self to feel the power of life.

There is power in You, which can protect your life experience against exploitation by bad ideas, promoted by those who seek power at your expense.4

With clarity, you can create the conditions of your own hope. You already have all that You need so as to not need the false promises of psychopaths and narcissists: which is what all the present class of elective managers actually are.

They divide that vat of sociopathy between themselves, then offer you snake-oil in sociopathic doses.

You can inoculate yourself with homeopathic clarity against mental and emotional poisons proffered by the false tribunes of popular democracy.

Through small efforts in self-recognition of clarity in your Self, you can feel the real potential of your life. As you come to feel the power of your life, you can dismiss the destroyers and create coalitions for building better.

I really hope you can. Because You are the only hope that humanity has.

~

This book is closely written. It is dense in its layering of concepts, and deliberately so.

Sometimes, it’s because I want you to experience a connection of feelings with thoughts, so that the ideas create harmonic resonance in your Slices dynamic. I want you to intuit meanings beyond the mere words.

Sometimes, it’s simply because I’m trying to communicate complex ideas in a concise way.

In either case, I do try to remember to post a translation, so that you can check back that I’m not pulling a conjuring trick on you.

In addressing Sammist ideas directly, I sometimes use a semi-Socratic dialogue style, to spice up the narrative, and focus attention. It’s another mode of translation.

~

As I have said before, I’m not going to accept the arbitrary rules of woke gender language. I’m as allowed to be offended by your novel absurdities as you are by my conventional scriptorals.

The reason you’re getting nowhere slowly is not because of patriarchy or history. It’s because ordinary people don’t like being told how to think their own sovereign thoughts.

And because you yourselves argue that modes of expression are both conditioned by history, and at the same time a-historical arbitraries. Sam’s with you on that.

Either way, you’re stuck on your own crucifix: that to deny modes of expression is always to deny expression itself. Which is what you’re complaining about in the first place.

We can share a democracy in ideas, or we can get the swastikas, and hammer & sickle flags out. I’m sure you could manage a nicely woke design for your bunting.

So, you write your thoughts your way, and I’ll do the same, and let the audience decide.

~

Is this a book just about not believing in bad ideas? I’m sure I don’t need to waste words in tautologies. There are ideas which can be put to serve dark purposes, and those which just can’t.

This is intended to be a book which celebrates paving stones of kindness, clarity and hope, in the life journey of You.

While pointing to the weeds growing up alongside, fertilised by Sammist ideas. And warning of feral outcomes which stalk the horizon, if you mistake those weeds for flowers: which carpet train tracks to destinations of darkness.

And remember: nothing that I say in this book is true. All truths are a negotiation between people. But I know that You are real, and that life is experienced in Your being.

All that I ever want is for You to live your life experience the better ways that You can. To feel the power of life, by realising the power of You.

Coda: A Sceptic’s CV

By offering a critique of Sammist thought, and prescriptions for Feeling The Power Of Life, the engaged consumer is bound to wonder from what department store this offering comes.

After all, it could hypothetically be a dispatch from a secret underground creationist bunker. An Islamic watering hole. A page torn from an anarchist cookbook.

The answer should appear pretty clearly be none of the above: for those who have got as far as reading the covers of I Want To Love But: Realising The Power Of You; or Worlds Ends: Coronavirus, Frankenstein And Other Monsters; or dipped even toe-deep into the Matrixial Healing suite of books: Matrixial Logic; Secret Self, The Matrixial Healing Handbook.

The Matrixial Brain proves, to a scientific standard, the reality of matrixial processes. More proof is the many people now helping themselves: with The Matrixial Healing Handbook Recipes.

That noted, it does not do to be coy with declaratory assurances of background intent, when essaying the courses of these discussions.

Accordingly here follows my formal repudiation of the following (non-exhaustive) alphabetical list of thought cages. Each of which represents a spectrum from the malign to the merely useless:

•Aliens on Earth

•Artificial Intelligence (as an independently capable entity)

•Astrology

•Christianity

•Classical Darwinism

•Climate change induced by human behaviour

•Communism

•Conspiracy Theories

•Coronavirus lockdown and social distancing policies

•Creationism

•Evolutionary Biology

•Fundamentalism

•God (singular or plural)

•Green Politics

•Homophobia and Transphobia (and any rules about sexual practices amongst consenting adults)

•Mind altering substances

•National Socialism

•Neo-Conservatism

•Neo-Darwinism

•Political Parties (any of the existing ones)

•Racism

•Religion of any denomination

•Revisionist History (of Holocaust Denier kind)

•Socialism

•Slavery

•Vegetarianism (save as a matter of taste, not principle)

•Victorian Values (rules of personal life: matrimony, monogamy, and so on)

•Vitalism

Everything else is a negotiation, founded in kindness, clarity and hope.

Paul Chaplin

1 Because the train tracks of his thought lead to a place where nobody outside the elect can. And this book will go to the bibliographic funeral pyre.

2 watch the series of films by Adam Curtis on this

3 Sam is, of course, a fully paid up member of the coronaphobia club: Making Sense With Sam Harris #207

4 Sam isn’t one of those: he just wants your money. The ones who follow in the footsteps of his thought surely are.

CHAPTER 1

THE POWER OF YOU

This Book seeks to shine a series of lights on the major themes inarticulated in Sam Harris’ writings and speeches.

For any readers who don’t know who Sam Harris is (which would, given the title, be a small but interesting number of people), you can read his bio online:5

•born 1967 to rich Hollywood parents

•dropped out from an English major at Stanford after taking psychedelics

•Spent a decade living off his rich mom, while exploring meditation around the world

•Waltzed back into Stanford 6 to complete a philosophy degree in 2000.

•Wrote The End Of Faith (2004) in response to the 9/11 attacks, which spent 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

•Got a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA in 2009, for his work in stuffing 14 people into an mFRI machine, and making up the results. 7

•Turned his thesis into his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Moral Values .

Published five other books: Letter to a Christian Nation

in 2006, the long-form essay Lying

in 2011, the short book Free Will

in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

in 2014, and, with British writer Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue

in 2015. Harris> work has been translated into over 20 languages.

Since September 2013, Sam has hosted the Making Sense podcast (originally titled Waking Up), which has a large8 listenership. In September 2018 Harris released a meditation app

, Waking Up with Sam Harris.

Sam is an idea-preneur. A preacher who makes his living selling sermons from fake science.

He’s Russell Brand,9 with a college degree. It sounds like what he’s saying is really smart. But it’s just semantic soup.

Sam plays fast and loose with every fact and every argument. Because truth is relative to everything except Sam’s absolute conviction of what the truth is. If only you, clouded by illusion, could see it.

There’s a simple secret trick, which underlays every con move Sam makes. This book will uncover that trick for you. You’ll see how Sam uses the same confidence trick in every area of debate.

You will, in these pages, see Sam admit openly his agenda for truth: his faith that an elite of (what he calls) scientists can tell not only what you’re thinking and feeling; but also should tell you what to think and feel.10

In The Moral Landscape (2011), Sam sets out his Samentific elite agenda. He sets out to dazzle you with his display of how a brain scanning machine11 can read your mind, in real time.

Sam declares that the technology will improve, even from this triumph, and soon Sammists will be able to read your whole mind, every thought and sensation: even before you realise those ideas in your head.12

Sam’s operating premise is that there’s no such things as morals and values. They are all just facts.

There, in your head, the essence of your life as a human being. Thoughts and feelings. Emotions and intuitions. Even the most profound and beautiful, the most shallow and evil. They are all just facts.

Science is all about facts. Science gets right answers. And facts answer to science, not thoughts or feelings.

Your obligation, as a reasonable person who hates to see suffering in the world, is to think, feel and act, as the scientific elite directs you.

Because there is such a thing as being right, and being wrong: about facts, about moral values, about everything.

The Samentific elite is always right. You can share in what is right, but only if you agree with them. It’s better than what you and I know as science. It’s Samsense.

Sure, there may be different peaks in the mortal landscape, as discovered by science. But just as science can tell you various things that are healthy to eat, and which are poisonous,13 so Samsense can for sure tell you things which are bad to think, and feel.

Spiritual Sam accepts that it’s not easy to surrender you Self. The Self who is you. But Sam can make it easy. That Self, all that free will: it’s just an illusion. The author of Free Will (2012) tell us blinkered ones that, apparently, it’s an illusion of an illusion.14

Just learn the lessons of Waking Up. It’s that Self, which is the problem. Listen to your Samguru, who spent a decade searching the mountains of Tibet for the paths to enlightenment.15

You too can surrender yourself. Just close your eyes. Breathe. Feel your essential one-ness with the universe of Samfact. There is no You, no Self. It’s just an illusion.16

When you surrender your useless, illusory, downright harmful Self, to the unity of the Samverse, the facts in your head and the facts out there in the world (which are just the same thing) can be guided by Samfacts.

Well, not guided. It’s not as if you have any choice in the matter. No free will in the matter. You just do as Samfacts direct. Because being amoral:17 that’s what the Moral Landscape is.

But you’re not a scientist. You need Sampriest to explore the Samverse and dictate unto you teachings which, when acted upon, shall bring Samvation from suffering.

But, this is the real world. So learn the raised arm salute properly. Pay for your prayer. And don’t you dare miss a podcast.

~

This book is a critique. I am not required by any convention of literature, philosophy or moral values,18 to present a positive case about anything.

I need do no more than shout as loudly as the non-myopic child, that the Samperor has no clothes.

If I do no more than inspire some readers to witness Sam’s shameless nakedness, I am satisfied.

I can make a positive philosophical case for a worldview which is neither traditionally religious, nor Samligious. You can read it later.19

If you’ve read I Want To Love But: Realising the Power of You

, then you could write the gist of that philosophy for yourself. Because it’s Yours. You the reader and every You that there is, and ever has been, including even Sam.

You feel the power of life, every moment of your life. You started feeling it in You and as You, from the moment You were born.

You are perfect. You were born as perfection by nature. That perfection is the engine of You, in the journey of your life. You’re both the passenger in the carriage of your journey and the driver.20

You: your Self. It’s not any kind of illusion. It’s the living map of your life journey, which re-draws itself along a continuum of infinity. It is as illusory as the force which binds an atom together, or binds people in love together.

That born perfection is the power of You. That’s the power I work with in Mztrixial Healing. The power which allows You to be more You.

You don’t need to trek off to some forsaken mountain top, with Ravi Samkar pulling your rope, to find a better You. The perfection you seek is there, inside you, all along. It is You.

That perfection is real. You can feel it, sense it, touch it, meet it in your thoughts. All I ever do in Matrixial Healing, is to help you to use your conscious thoughts to allow you to re-connect with your own perfection. With You.21

But, human lives lived together are complicated. Nature created You perfect. Nature doesn’t get to plan societies. We tell ourselves stories about the world we have to share. All sorts of stories that, acted out in reality, become politics and then history.

Some stories work for some people some of the time. That’s it. There’s no universal story. There can’t ever be. Because no You is the universe. And stories only get told by You.

You don’t need charlatans like Sam Harris to direct your life by reference to sham science: a stage magician’s illusion of science.

The privileged world is hurting. The under-privileged world always has. Save in the cash value of his own stage-show, the bizarre scientology of Sam used to mean less to society, than the bearded balderdash of Russel Brand.22

The manic, panicked governmental response to covid23 has ushered in the end of the 20th century. With the desperate dawn of a very ugly 21st century.

The lives of those who live in the metropolitan world, have been shattered. As for the rest of humanity, their desolation has been rendered even more dreadful and despairing.24

This is a deadly time for dangerous ideas. The most toxic weeds always spread the quickest, in desolated soil.

Every element of Sammism is pure poison. He rants against relativism, and negates nihilism. But it’s all phoney. Sam’s explicit agenda is to destroy everything that is you, and turn what’s left into an automaton. There to serve his god, his way.

Sam’s just the kind of guy, with his dry wit and utter conviction in his own faith-blinded dystopianism, to lead you to your scientifically allotted seat in the gas chambers of the 21st century.

After all, your Self is just an illusion. Once we get rid of that, well it’s just facts all the way down. And, once the disciples of Samsense decide that certain facts are not needed, or just getting in the way of better facts: off you go.

Hell is a place on earth, designed by people who believe they know what Heaven looks like. People who surrender their Selfs to Sam’s scientific jihad.

Please: with kindness, clarity and hope. Just be You instead.

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris

6 one of the most prestigious and expensive universities in the world. Not a patch on Oxford, of course

7 see Minding the Machine Chapter

8 250,000

9 Russell seems like an averagely nice guy. He’s very charming. His views can be entertaining. Anyone who takes any of them seriously, needs urgent admission to a kindergarten.

10 Sam is of course a self-appointed member of the elite.

11 no, it isn’t really, as you’ll see: but that’s how a charlatan seeks to get you to think of it

12 Free Will (2012); And see Appendix B4 TED Talk (22 March 2010) 2.1 million views on YouTube

13 except that almost all drugs are poisons

14 whatever that means. You see: semantic soup

15 I know: just like Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins (2005)

16 of an illusion

17 Sam’s word, not mine

18 well, I needn’t worry about that one: they are just facts

19 Appendix A1. the next bit is literature, not logical moral philosophy

20 Yes, I know it’s a blindingly obvious mystery that shyster Sam just cannot understand. Because he’s blinded himself to the reality of You.

21 Try some of the Matrixial Healing Handbook Recipes, and see for yourself

22 which is sincerely meant, and harmlessly entertaining. I loved his Adam Curtis discussion.

23 See Worlds Ends: Coronavirus, Frankenstein and Other Monsters

24 of course Hollywood Sam stridently articulates that saving American from (illusory) death is more important, morally, than the consequences of global lockdown for Yemen.

CHAPTER 2

THE MORAL MESS

Illustration

The really short version of this Chapter is: logical positivism comes to Hollywood. For those with a grounding in 20th century philosophy, that should make sense, as a critique.

Since I’m writing this book for those who don’t have that grounding, there’s no point: (i) getting bogged down in explaining the tenets of LogPos; (ii) then showing how Sammism is just a populist re-tread of that long-discarded, dead-end avenue.

LogPos was a synthetic confection of ideas, in world which had lost its culturally agreed signposts, and was manufacturing very nasty ways to make more. Let’s not go back there, even with sinister Sam leading us by the nose.

Sam’s Summary Geography25

Sam gave a speech in the Sheldonian, Oxford in 2011. It’s on YouTube. It’s such a succinct and captivating summary of his principal ideas, and some of their consequences, that I include the transcript as an Appendix.

Here’s the key foundational claim of Sammism:

Now I’m going to argue that this split between facts and values is an illusion and my claim is that, that values are a certain kind of fact, they are facts about the wellbeing of conscious creatures. They are facts about the kinds of experiences it’s possible to have in this universe. Now in claiming that value is reduced to the wellbeing of conscious creatures I’m introducing two concepts, consciousness and wellbeing.

…Okay, here’s the only assumption you need to make.

Imagine a universe, where every conscious creature suffers as much as it can for as long as it can, I call this the worst possible misery for everyone.

The worst possible misery for everyone is bad.

If the word bad is going to mean anything, surely it applies to the worst possible misery for everyone.

Now if you think the worst possible misery for everyone isn’t bad or that it might have a silver lining or there might be something worse, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And what’s more, I’m reasonably sure you don’t know what you’re talking about either.

The moment you admit this, the moment you admit that the worst possible misery for everyone is the worst outcome, okay, then you have to admit that every other possible experience is better than the worst possible misery for everyone.

So a continuum opens up and because the experience of conscious creatures is going to depend in some way on the laws of nature, there are going to be right and wrong ways to move across this continuum.

It will be possible to think you’re avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone and to be wrong about that and to fail to avoid it this is in some sense a navigation problem.

So, here is my argument for locating moral truth in the context of science.

Questions of right and wrong and good and evil depend upon minds. They depend upon the possibility of experience.

Minds are a natural phenomena. They depend upon the laws of nature in some way.

Morality and human values therefore can be understood potentially in the context of science because in talking about these things we really are talking about all of the facts that relate to the wellbeing of conscious creations.

In our case we’re talking about genetics and neurobiology and psychology and sociology and economics.

Now I view this space of all possible experience as a kind of moral landscape where the peaks correspond to the heights of wellbeing and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering.

And one thing to drop out of this analogy is the possibility of their being multiple peaks and may maybe there are many different but morally equivalent ways for, for in our case, human beings to thrive. But clearly there are many more ways not to thrive, there’ll be many more ways to not be on a peak.

I think it’s rather obvious that there are many more ways to suffer unnecessarily in this world and to be sublimely happy.

Now the Taliban are still my favourite example of a group of people who are struggling mightily to build a society that is obviously less good than the others on offer. The average lifespans for women in Afghanistan is 44 years, they have a literacy rate of 12%, they have almost the highest fertility rate in the world and almost the highest infant and maternal mortality in the world this is one of the best places on Earth, to watch women and infants die. They also have a GDP that’s lower than the world average in the year 1820. So it seems to me patently obvious that the optimal response to this situation which is to say the most moral response is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls for the crime of learning to read.

Now I think that is common sense, common sense it should be to everyone in the civilized world. But this is also of necessity, a claim about biology and psychology and sociology and economics. It is not unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality. In fact we have to say this the moment we admit we know anything at all about human wellbeing.

And, back into the room. If you’re confused, you may not need to read any further. If you’re convinced, you definitely do.

Determinate, Determinate26

The subtitle of Sam’s book is How Science Can Determine Human Values. Sam really does mean determine. Well, he wants the world to be a place where determine does what it means.

But Sam would, at worst, rather settle for a world in which science guides decision-making, rather than iron-age religious texts.

Sam has invented a conjuring-trick which underpins all the claims he then wishes to elaborate, and illuminate, by science.

I suspect that Ryle27 would have dismissed Sam’s whole enterprise as a category error.

The conjuring trick is so familiar in form, that it’s a little surprising Sam could stand before an Oxford philosophy audience, with nobody shouting look out behind you.28 Maybe it’s succeeded because of its familiarity. We should of course pay due credit to the artfulness of the conjuror.

As a side note on credibility, if you popped me under one of Sam’s fMRI machines and asked if I truly believe that he knows he’s conjuring, my answer would be No, he doesn’t realise. And the image patterns would correlate with a truthful response. Or me trying to play golf.29

Anyway, ignorance is a defence in history, but not in moral philosophy.

So, open the curtains, drum roll, and here we go. Let’s see Sam in his top hat and tails:

All this moral philosophy and religious dogma is way complicated. And we don’t need all that complication.

Because smart people can see that you can get all that stuff down to this common agreement. Then we can just build right up from there.

So, this thing we can all agree on, even the Taliban, goes like this:

There’s a hypothetical situation, a landscape: in which everyone is suffering the worst possible suffering we can imagine. Not just some. But everyone.

And so, it follows – and you just can’t argue about this30 - that everyone must agree that this universal suffering situation, is bad.

We can, and must, then draw these conclusions:

(1) that we want to do all we can, not to go to where we all agree is bad;

But note well, explicitly says Sam, that we can’t use the same syllogism for the idea of good;

(2) our common agreement must be founded in something, which can only be Facts, because only Facts are universal;

(3) science is the exploration of Facts; and so

(4) we only get away from the black-hole of bad, by propelling ourselves with science.

Top Hat Tales

Did you spot the trick? Sam does use the same trick repeatedly. It’s pretending to pursue a monist argument, when it’s just dualism in new emperor’s clothes.

Behaviouralism (Skinner et al), evolutionary biology, Dennett-type neurobiology. These are all classically Monist interpretations. You find a cause, then you track through its effects, irrespective of the apparent dimensions in which those effects manifest to us.

It’s perfectly legitimate linear reasoning. It’s just that it quickly collapses on its own premises, or becomes self-evidently ridiculous, when the cause is external to31 the domain of the appearance.

Sam seems to be sensitive to these problems. Which is why he has been brought to formulate his own dualistic disguise.

Because that’s what’s going on here. Sam’s argument is actually a neo-religious argument. That’s why Sam explicitly denies utility of the syllogism for the idea of good. There can be more than one possible good mountain top, declares Sam, and more than one scientifically determined way up each slope.

So, Sam declares a fundamental asymmetry between the ideas of bad and good". He then spends the rest of his writing and debating life violating that postulated asymmetry. But that’s because he wants to explore space, not merely spend his contemplative life in linear retreat from the black hole of bad.

Enough clues, let’s check out the false bottom under the rabbit-stuffed top hat.

Into the Black Hole

Let’s beam down to a planetoid inside the black hole.32 All the Humanoidian inhabitants,33 are undergoing the worst suffering that we, with our Star Trek insignia, can imagine.

So, we fiddle with our universal translators, and our landing party approaches the most attractive tightly clad female sufferer, who unfathomably sports a bee-hive hairdo.34

‘Gee,’ our fearless Captain says, ‘you guys are suffering a lot. A whole lot. I mean, the worst. You gotta agree, this is a bad place.’

‘Excuse me?’ replies the Humanoidian? ‘Are you selling something?’

‘Spock! Are our translators working properly?’

‘They appear to be, Captain.’

‘So what’s this lady talking about?’ The boldly going Captain tugs on his unform top. ‘Selling something’, huh!’

Spock raises half of one eyebrow, fiddles with the circuits, and then quenches the Captain’s enthusiasm, with his Vulcanoid rasp. ‘Captain. The equipment is working adequately. The problem appears to be linguistic.’

‘Huh? What’s that you say Spock?’

‘You see, Captain, this side of the black hole, there is no concept of ‘bad’. Or ‘good’ either.’ Spock raises the other eyebrow. ‘Or contemporary standards of coiffure.’

At which Dr McCoy butts in, with Sammite indignity: ‘But dammit man, I mean Vulcan, they must see they’re suffering the worst!’

To which Spock sombrely intones: ‘Unfortunately, doctor, these inhabitants have no conception of the words ‘worst’, ‘suffering’ and ‘bad’. At least, not in the linguistic universe we use and mean them.

‘Spock!’ the Captain enthuses, ‘it’s like an always-blind person who’s never seen light!’

‘Exactly, Captain.’

The Captain’s communicator flips open in Starfleet-approved irritation.

‘Three to beam up Scotty. And this time take us to a universe where our concepts of good and bad actually mean something.’

Cue light speed graphics and triumphant orchestral music.

Breakfast for Dinner

Fair enough, I went the long way round on that one. Forgive the indulgence, if it was an aid to understanding.

Tightening the knot on my Oxford philosophy bow-tie, let’s get formal.

The concepts worst, suffering and bad are relatives to their antonyms. It’s the landscape of that relativity, which provides meaning for the words. Set apart from that landscape, they have no meaning at all. They are just babble.

When you hypothesise a landscape which is denuded of all contours, then you are liberating any signpost in that landscape from any meaning.

It’s like imagining a planet that is all desert, and positing a signpost somewhere on it saying: desert this way. That’s kind of funny, because we know that the desert signpost has no functionality as a directional tool, in that desert landscape.

So, when Sam posits a landscape which is all suffering, and nothing else, he by the very act of doing so, denudes the suffering concept of its content.

We only get to ascribe that concept to that landscape, by being in cognition of, and outside of, that landscape.

Sam defines that suffering as being the articulation in actuality of whatever it is that bad means. Thus, he stuffs the rabbit into the hat, which he is then going to produce.

Of course, if that hypothesised suffering is the life experience of bad, then anyone who accepts the premises of logical reasoning must agree that such suffering is bad. And if all elephants are defined as having the property of being pink, and this is an elephant, then…

Sam’s monumental and monolithic premise reveals itself to be a trivial exercise in tautology.

The dualism is, by now, obvious. Sam stands with us as privileged observer of the sufferers, who cannot in their own universe of suffering, be aware of the concept of suffering, because awareness of the concept is excluded by the premises of the hypothesis. A plankton can’t know it’s in water. Or that there exists the air and the land.35

Sam could be standing, as Jesus amongst the unknowing sinners. With the difference that Jesus occupied the same moral landscape as the sinners. Whilst Sam floats as the Archangel Gabriel, the winged messenger of deified salvatory science.

Robbie Burns had Sam nailed, way back in 1786:36

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

So, our common agreement, with which we can only concur, and not otherwise,37 is that when you arbitrarily define the words worst and suffering by reference merely to each other, in a landscape denuded of all else, the only applicable epithet is bad and its synonyms.

For which you don’t need Sam. Any free online dictionary will provide the same tautology.

That worst and suffering and bad are cognates, is tautologically true, as a matter of English language use. Here is another set of cognates: definitional, tautological, and trivial.

Sam needs it to be a fact that we can all agree that worst and suffering and bad are cognates. Sure, it’s a fact. All definitions are definitely facts.

But, firstly, it is not science that determines or compels the fact. It is agreed linguistic-cultural usage. And some or all can agree entirely contrary usage, if we like.

Secondly, it’s a fact that leads nowhere. Sam’s definitional rabbit is just stuck in his carefully constructed top hat.

It’s a fact that dinosaurs were, well, big. The biggest sets of species ever to populate the earth. Except whales.38. So, like, the biggest. And to be the biggest, we can all agree, must be the best.39

Yeah, and then so what? We have simply used some words of relative description to define the category of dinosaurs. Which is perfectly circular, because to have been a dinosaur is to have been amongst the biggest sets of species ever to populate the earth.

And so, syllogises Sam, we can only use Science to determine our values about dinosaurs. Because being a dinosaur is a fact and we can agree about the agreement and that’s fact, and science is just exploring facts.

You Ought Not to Is That

Sam views Hume’s ought/is dichotomy as being false.

Sam proves its falsity by creating a landscape in which moral concepts, in the actuality of that landscape, have no meaning at all.

He thus:

(i) turns a set of ought concepts into is concepts which exclusively populate that landscape; 40 then

(ii) uses a set of moral values outside that landscape to pretend that such values still inhere in the artificial landscape of is, or indeed that such value can be applied to the