The Sam Harris Delusion Quotes

“Our definition of an atheist as someone who denies perfection has an immediate corollary; he is also someone who denies meaning. If you think about it, meaning is entirely invested in perfection. We expect a perfect being to know the meaning of existence, and be capable of telling us. We expect a perfect evolutionary process to culminate with we ourselves being perfect and knowing everything. Our pursuit of perfection/God is the meaning of life. To be an atheist
is to reject perfection, hence reject meaning. That’s why we brand all atheists as nihilists. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t believe in meaning. And that makes them no different from machines. They are not living beings, or they refuse to be living beings. They are unquestionably high on the autistic spectrum, and they see themselves and the universe as machines rather than living, evolving organisms, getting more and more perfect.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Our definition of an atheist as someone who denies perfection has an immediate corollary; he is also someone who denies meaning. If you think about it, meaning is entirely invested in perfection. We expect a perfect being to know the meaning of existence, and be capable of telling us. We expect a perfect evolutionary process to culminate with we ourselves being perfect and knowing everything. Our pursuit of perfection/God is the meaning of life. To be an atheist
is to reject perfection, hence reject meaning. That’s why we brand all atheists as nihilists. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t believe in meaning. And that makes them no different from machines. They are not living beings, or they refuse to be living beings. They are unquestionably high on the autistic spectrum, and they see themselves and the universe as machines rather than living, evolving organisms, getting more and more perfect.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“If the principle of sufficient reason means that everything that happens has a reason why it is thus and not otherwise, the opposite is things happening for no reason at all – randomness! This is the entire basis of the scientific “explanation” of existence. Science is a formally irrationalist system opposed to the principle of sufficient reason. That’s why it’s astounding when people such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris claim to be on the side of reason. They plainly don’t know the meaning of the word.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Science is ideologically committed to empiricism, materialism and positivism, and the Copenhagen interpretation is the most consistent with this philosophy. Science didn’t blink when this interpretation demanded the end of determinism, which had previously been the central basis of classical science (“God does not play dice.” – Einstein). It’s astounding that science underwent a 100% volte-face – saying overnight that black is in fact white – without worrying that it had thereby made itself a joke subject, a subject with a 100% range. Science has proved that what it tells you today is 100% true, it might tell you tomorrow is 100% false. What kind of madman would place any reliance on such a subject? It’s worse than religion!

Science, if it wanted to save determinism, had to embrace rationalism rather than empiricism, and it refused to do. Science is now pure philosophy and even a religion, a way of thinking designed to protect at all costs the holy status, the sanctity, of the scientific method, which is a strictly antirationalist, empiricist method. Of course, the biggest problem with the scientific method is that it’s 100% irrelevant with regard to mathematics, the 100% rationalist engine that powers science, and without which science would be voodoo.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“A consensus by itself is meaningless. It was once the consensus that the earth was flat, that the sun orbited the stationary earth, that the Catholic Church was the source of all Truth, that Jesus Christ was God, and that classical physics was almost perfect, bar a fee minor details. All great advances have come about by overturning the consensus. That’s actually the definition of a great advance! To say that no one should be allowed to challenge or doubt the consensus is just about the most serious anti-science statement that anyone can make. That’s turning science into religion, a faith that no one is allowed to question!
It’s a simple fact that no matter what the scientific consensus is – and science has been wrong about countless things in its history, and even defines itself according to the principles that all of its claims must be capable of falsification or verification, hence it always places a doubt over itself – the consensus can be completely misguided and mistaken. The dogmatic assertion that it is wrong to spread “doubt and confusion” after “a scientific consensus had been reached” is simply chilling. This is the quintessence of the paradigmatic, blinkered scientific thinking attacked by Thomas Kuhn.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“There are no “innocent” theories in science. All of them are ideologically, dogmatically, paradigmatically designed to deny idealism, rationalism and any hint of religion. There is not a single scientific theory that is not wholly predicated on the denial of idealism, rationalism and religion. You would not be allowed to be a scientist if you ever openly advanced any idealist, rationalist or religious arguments. If you did, you would be fired, or marginalised, or called a crank. Your funding would definitely be cut. All of this makes science a pseudoscience, a quasi-religion, a Church of Meaninglessness, a faith in purposelessness, a cult of irrationalism. Outside mainstream religion, it’s the most closedminded subject in the world. It’s the opposite of what its propaganda trumpets. It’s as bad in its own way as Islam.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“No one denies that we are influenced by genes and environment. What is denied is that we are determined by our genes and/or environment, that we are literally puppets that cannot act differently, that we have no moral agency, no personal accountability, that we are mere machines. No one who accepts the eternity of the soul can regard our current body, and current environment, as what makes us what we are. Only atheists and materialists hold such ideas. To deny free will is to deny the soul. Without the soul, we would indeed be machines. To put it another way, the reality of free will is the proof of the existence of the soul (since free will is impossible otherwise).
People such as Sam Harris require free will to be false because, if it isn’t, his materialist belief system is false.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“The very fact that we believe ourselves free, means, by the strict application of Occam’s Razor, that we are free. To argue otherwise is to make the insane claim that the real world, for no conceivable reason or purpose, invents illusions. If that were true, we could never know anything at all because absolutely everything could be an illusion. We would be living in the fantasy world created by Descartes’ malevolent demon. In rather similar terms, fundamentalist materialists propose that a more rational alternative to the concept of “God”, which they say explains nothing, is scientific randomness. However, randomness also explains nothing since it operates via miracles happening for no reason, and is even more of a mystery than God!”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Harris expects us to dismiss free will as an illusion, whilst he fails to comprehend that he has generated a much greater mystery, namely, if matter can’t be free, how on earth can it suffer from delusions and illusions that it is free? Why are illusions of free will more scientifically plausible than free will? Where’s the scientific theory for this? There simply isn’t one. Harris has proposed that the “rational” alternative to free will is collections of atoms subject to mental illness.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Is the theory that lifeless, mindless atoms (obeying either deterministic laws or probabilistic laws of indeterminism) produce weird, unfathomable, ineffectual, pointless, mental illusions supposed to be more convincing than that we have genuine free will? The whole notion that a world made exclusively of matter, as materialist fundamentalists such as Harris insist, can suffer from illusions, delusions, hallucinations, mental illness, mental breakdowns, mental disorders, is so spectacularly silly that no sane person could ever take it seriously.
Harris, in his pathological determination to rid us of free will, has posited instead a world of delusional atoms in need of psychiatric help! What, do electrons hallucinate? Do protons have delusions of grandeur? Do quarks imagine themselves free? Are 1D-strings narcissistic? If none of these things is true, how on earth does Sam Harris propose that if humans are made of atoms alone, we can suffer from such illusions? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Harris doesn’t offer any evidence at all!”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“All scientific theories are required to be “falsifiable” and that ipso facto means that none can be true since Truth, by definition, is unfalsifiable. Equally, all scientific theories are required to be verifiable, but nothing can ever definitively verify any scientific theory, and Truth is not in any case something that requires any synthetic a posteriori verification, only analytic a priori proof – the complete opposite!
Science is a pragmatic, instrumental subject. It’s the science of appearances, not the science of ultimate reality, of things as they are in themselves, beyond appearance. Only ontological mathematics can address that noumenal, hidden reality. Science is undeniably good at producing theories that allow us to manipulate the “seen world”, but it’s just as bad at producing theories that allow us to manipulate the “unseen world” – which is the religious world in which humanity has always been most interested.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Freedom is not freedom from causation. It’s freedom from causation that is not your own. What could be more obvious?”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Harris is conceiving of freedom as something that cannot be determined in any way, including by ourselves for our own reasons. He wants freedom to be something like the Multiverse version of reality where everything that can happen will happen, where everything not forbidden is compulsory, i.e. we can randomly explore any possibility at any time, without any constraints, most especially from our own history, environment and fundamental nature. We must, according to Harris, be free not to act according to our own reasons that reflect who we are! We must be free not to have the desires we have, the will we have, the nature we have, the character we have and the personality we have.

If any of that were true, if we could change all of those things at any time, we would not be “us” at all, but chameleon, random beings, with no identity ... indeterministically leaping from one possible reality to the next, with no continuity. Harris, a Buddhist sympathiser and “meditator”, requires us, in order to satisfy his belief of what freedom is, to have no essential self and be able to be anything at any time, and if we cannot achieve that then we unfree in his book.

Well, we’re perfectly happy to have no freedom if that’s what freedom is. However, freedom is nothing like that. Freedom is simply doing what we want for our own reasons, whether our own conscious reasons or unconscious reasons. No free person has any desire to be free to have a different soul, a different self.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“The entire basis of science is to find ways to deny meaning. What is Darwinism? It’s how to replace a designed universe with a random, purposeless universe that evolves to no end. What is the Multiverse? It’s a way to avoid explaining this universe by asserting that every random universe is possible. What is indeterministic “wavefunction collapse”? It’s a way to avoid explaining causation and determinism. What is the claim that free will is illusory? It’s a way to avoid explaining subjective agency, avoid explaining the autonomous mind – the soul. There are no “innocent” theories in science. All of them are ideologically, dogmatically, paradigmatically designed to deny idealism, rationalism and any hint of religion. There is not a single scientific theory that is not wholly predicated on the denial of idealism, rationalism and religion. You would not be allowed to be a scientist if you ever openly advanced any idealist, rationalist or religious arguments. If you did, you would be fired, or marginalised, or called a crank. Your funding would definitely be cut.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“There is nothing more mystical, miraculous and magical than scientific randomness, where existence jumps out of non-existence for no reason.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“We can freely imagine several teleological futures before we act, each with a roughly equal likelihood of being enacted, and then evaluate them and reach our decision as to which is best. The smarter, the more imaginative and creative we are, the more futures we can conceive. Until we carry out our evaluation of the futures that we have freely conceived, we cannot know what we will do. An android cannot conceive futures, and carries out a program written for him by its Creator (programmer). Sam Harris keeps slipping into the tacit claim that humans are programmed machines rather than free people.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Without free will, we have no more ability to judge, care or change than a crocodile.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“We are a totality – a whole comprising our unconscious and conscious. If our unconscious takes a decision, are we to disown it? Our unconscious is as much “us” as our conscious is – in fact, arguably more so. Our unconscious can be seen as our true, immortal Self, and our conscious as a contingent, mortal persona – a mask we wear during this lifetime.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Everything Sam Harris says comes from the empiricist, materialist, atheistic, scientific perspective. Therefore, every single conclusion he arrives at can be completely reinterpreted from a rationalist, idealist, religious, spiritual, mathematical perspective. Absolutely nothing he says about ultimate reality is true. That’s what happens when you’re a Sophist rather than a Philosopher.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Darwinism is the most primitive version of evolution
you can get, and doesn’t make any formal sense since it mixes indeterminism (random mutation) and determinism (natural selection). A truly randomist system could never give rise to natural selection in the first place. Nothing would ever be selected according to any teleological criteria. Things would be selected at random, leading to no progress and no evolution at all! If you believe in random genetic mutation, why don’t you also believe in random natural selection? How on earth does a process come into existence out of nothing that looks exactly like teleological breeding?”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“We need an Age of Philosophers, of Enlightenment, an Age of Reason and Intellect, of Logic and Ontological Mathematics. Only then will we have the launchpad that can make Gods of us, and bring to fruition a Star Trek world where we travel through the galaxies to the heavens themselves. There’s nothing in the dreary, nihilistic, atheistic vision of scientific sophistry peddled by the likes of Sam Harris that could ever transform the human race. Humanity needs the right experts to lead it, not the wrong ones: not the charlatans, gurus and glory hunters.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Our definition of an atheist as someone who denies perfection has an immediate corollary; he is also someone who denies meaning. If you think about it, meaning is entirely invested in perfection. We expect a perfect being to know the meaning of existence, and be capable of telling us. We expect a perfect evolutionary process to culminate with we ourselves being perfect and knowing everything. Our pursuit of perfection/God is the meaning of life. To be an atheist is to reject perfection, hence reject meaning. That’s why we brand all atheists as nihilists. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t believe in meaning. And that makes them no different from machines. They are not living beings, or they refuse to be living beings. They are unquestionably high on the autistic spectrum, and they see themselves and the universe as machines rather than living, evolving organisms, getting more and more perfect.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion