Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #185

1. 0:00 – 1:48

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, one of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time. He's the host of the Making Sense podcast, and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. He also has a meditation app called Waking Up that I've been using to guide my own meditation. A quick mention of our sponsors: National Instruments, Belcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Sam has been an inspiration to me, as he has been for many, many people, first from his writing, then his early debates, maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith, his conversations with, uh, Christopher Hitchens, and since 2013, his podcast. I didn't always agree with all of his ideas, but I was always drawn to the care and depth of the way he explored those ideas, the calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult, at times controversial discourse. I really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to for many hundreds of hours, would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast, and more that he thought I had a unique voice that added something to this world. Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special, and truly grateful to be able to do this thing, and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words. Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Sam Harris.

2. 1:48 – 7:49

   Where do thoughts come from?

   1. LFLex Fridman1:48

      I've been enjoying meditating with the Waking Up app recently. It makes me, uh, think about the origins of cognition and consciousness. So let me ask, where do thoughts come from?

   2. SHSam Harris2:01

      Well, that's, that's a very difficult question to answer. Um, subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right? I mean, it's just, they, they, they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively, right? So, which is to say that if you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next, right? Now, you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it, right? You, you, you know, you're not, unless you, you're schizophrenic or you, you have some kind of thought disorder where you, where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you, they do have a, a kind of signature of, of self-hood associated with them, uh, and w- people readily identify with them. They feel like what you are. I mean, this, this is the thing, this is the spell that gets broken with meditation. I mean, the, our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought, right? We, which is fairly paradoxical, 'cause how could you, as a mind, as a self, you know, if there, if there were such a thing as a self, how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image, uh, that just springs into, into conscious view? Uh, but, and, you know, p- p- meditation is ultimately about examining that, that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the, the freedom that's on the other side of that identification. But the, um, subjectively, thoughts simply emerge, right? And you don't think them before you think them, right? There's, there's this first moment where, you know, I mean, just, anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves and just imagine something or remember something. You know, just, just pick a memory, any memory, right? You've got a, a storehouse of memory. Just promote one to consciousness. Did you pick that memory? I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday, or you remembered what you said to your spouse before leaving the house, or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night, or you remembered something that happened to you when you were four years old, whatever it is, right, it, first it wasn't there, and then it appeared. And that is not a, I mean, I'm sure we'll get, get to the topic of free will ultimately, uh, that's not evidence of free will, right? I mean, that-

   3. LFLex Fridman4:33

      L- why are you so sure, by the way? It's very interesting.

   4. SHSam Harris4:36

      Well, well, (laughs) through, through n- no, no free will of my own.

   5. LFLex Fridman4:38

      (laughs)

   6. SHSam Harris4:38

      Yeah. Um, everything just appears, right? I mean, what else could it do? And so that, that's, that's the subjective side of it. Objectively, you know, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts or all of our thoughts are, uh, at bottom w- what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically. I mean, th- these are the products of some kind of neural computation, a neural, um, representation, when you're talking about memories.

   7. LFLex Fridman5:06

      Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts to try to get to its root? To try to dig in past the, the obvious surface subjective experience of, like, the thoughts pop out of nowhere. Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of, from the j- the firing of the cells? Or is it a useless pursuit to dig that, uh, to dig into that direction?

   8. SHSam Harris5:32

      Well, y- you can get closer to many, many subtle contents, uh, in consciousness, right? So you can notice things more and more clearly and have a, a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated and more interesting. And if you take psychedelics, you know, it, it opens, uh, up, you know, wide, depending on what you've taken and, and, and the dose, you know, it opens in directions and to an extent that, you know, very few people imagine would be possible but for having had those experiences. But...This idea of you getting closer to something, to the, the datum of, of your mind, or such, something of, of interest in there, or something that's more real, is, um, is ultimately undermined because there's no place from which you're getting closer to it. There's no your part of that journey, right? Like, we- we- we- we tend to start out, you know, whether it's in meditation, or, or in any kind of self-examination, or, uh, you know, taking psychedelics, we start out with this default point of view of, uh, feeling like we are the kind of on the, the rider on the horse of consciousness, or we're the, we're, uh, the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness, right? But we're- we're- so we're- we're differentiated from what we know cognitively, uh, introspectively. But that feeling of being differentiated, that feeling of being a self that can strategically pay attention to some contents of consciousness is what it's like to be identified with some part of the stream of thought that's going uninspected, right? Like, like, it's a false point of view. And when you see that and cut through that, then this sense of this, this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart, because really there- there is no depth ultimately. Everything is right on the surface. Everything. There- there's no center to consciousness. There's just consciousness and its contents. And that those, those contents can change vastly. Again, if you drop acid, you know, the, the contents change. Um, but there's, in some sense, that doesn't represent a position of depth versus... the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart

3. 7:49 – 25:21

   Consciousness

   1. SHSam Harris7:49

      because-

   2. LFLex Fridman7:49

      So, y- you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and you're riding it, and the actual riding is very shallow. This is all surface. So let me ask about that horse. What's up with the horse? What, what is consciousness? From where does it emerge? How like fundamental is it to the physics of reality? How fundamental is it to what it means to be human? And, uh, I'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems.

   3. SHSam Harris8:23

      Yeah, well, that remains to be seen if we can, if we will build it purposefully or just by accident.

   4. LFLex Fridman8:30

      (laughs) .

   5. SHSam Harris8:30

      It's a major ethical problem potentially, uh, that, I mean, my, my concern here is that we, we may in fact build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test, which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and, and demonstrates that, but we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious. We will have built it to seem conscious. And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics, we won't actually know that these systems are conscious, right? We'll just, you know, they may say, you know, "Listen, you can't turn me off because that's murder," right? And we will be convinced by that dialogue because we will, we will, you know, just in the extreme case, who knows when we'll get there, but you know, if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are, so we're basically in, you know, a Westworld-like situation, there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness from those machines. They're just going to seem, they're just going to advertise our consciousness in every glance and every utterance. But we won't know, and we won't know in some deeper sense than it may... than, than we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people. I mean someone could roll that back and say, "Well, you don't, you know, I don't know that you're conscious or you don't know that I'm conscious, we're just passing the Turing test for one another." But that kind of solipsism isn't justified, you know, biologically or... I mean, we just... Anything we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and I are part of the same, you know, roll, roll of th- roll of the dice, um, in terms of, um, how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in, in the wetware of, of brains like ours, right? So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate, you know. It's, I would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness from other apes, uh, and even other mammals ultimately. And, you know, once you get beyond the mammals, then my intuitions are, are not really clear. The question of, of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain and ultimately the question of whether it emerges is still uncertain. You can, you know, it's not, it's not fashionable to think this, but you can certainly argue that, that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing, even though everything else that we recognize about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge, like an ability to process language, that clearly is a matter of information processing, because you, you can disrupt that process in, in ways that is, um, is just so clear and, um, the problem that the confound with consciousness is that, yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness, and you can even give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them, "Well, what was that like?" And they say, "Nothing. I don't remember anything," but it's hard to, uh, differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness, whereas it's not with, you know, interrupting speech, you know, we know when we've done it and it's, um, it's just obvious that, you know, you disrupt the right neural circuits and, you know, you've disrupted speech.

   6. LFLex Fridman12:01

      So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other, would you say, do you err on the side of panpsychism where consciousness is really fundamental to our...... to all of reality, or, or is more on the other side, which is, like, it's a nice little side effect, a useful, like, hack for us humans-

   7. SHSam Harris12:22

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman12:22

      ... to survive? Where ... On that spectrum, where do you land when you think about consciousness, especially from an engineering perspective?

   9. SHSam Harris12:30

      Yeah, I'm truly agnostic on this point. I mean, I think I am ... You know, it's, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me. I, I, I don't know. And, and panpsychism is not so compelling to me. Uh, I mean, again, it just seems unfals- falsifiable. I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if panpsychism were true. Let me just r- remind people. Panpsychism is this idea that consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental consti- constituents of matter, so they, there might be something that it's like to be an electron or, or, um, you know, a quark. But then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the, at, you know, the macro scale, or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different. Um, so it may be unfalsifiable. It, it just might be that reality is not something we're as in touch with as we think we are, and that if ... At its base layer, to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done ontologically, is to misconstrue it, right? I mean, there, there's ... There could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom, and this, you know, this obvi- idea doesn't originate with me, this is, uh, this goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell and, and others, you know, 100-plus years ago. But I just feel like the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and, and matter, uh, may in fact be part of our problem, right? Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here f- are things like, well, what is death, right? Like, do we, uh ... Any expectation that we survive death or any part of us survives death, that really seems to be the, the, um, many people's concern here.

   10. LFLex Fridman14:20

       Well, I tend to believe, just as a small little tangent, like, I'm with Ernest Becker on this, that there's some ... It's interesting to think about death and consciousness. Which one is the chicken, which one is the egg?

   11. SHSam Harris14:32

       (laughs)

   12. LFLex Fridman14:32

       Because it feels like death could be the very thing, like, our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing that creates the consciousness. That this-

   13. SHSam Harris14:39

       Yeah, well that ... Then you're using consciousness differently than, than I am. I mean, so, so for me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, that there's an experiential quality to anything. And so, so, uh, the ... Much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now seems, certainly seems to be happening in the, in the dark, right? Like, it, it's not associated with this qualitative sense-

   14. LFLex Fridman15:06

       Mm-hmm.

   15. SHSam Harris15:06

       ... that there's something that it's like to be that part of the, the mind doing that mental thing. Um, but for other parts, the lights are on and, and we can talk about and, whether we talk about it or not, we can feel directly that there's something that it's like to be us. There's something, something seems to be happening, right? And it, this seeming i- in, you know, our case, is broken into vision and hearing and, and proprioception and, and, um, taste and smell and, and thought and emotion. I mean, there, there's, there are the contents of consciousness, uh, that we are familiar with and that we can, we can have direct access to in any present moment, th- when we're, quote, conscious. And even if we're confused about them, even if, you know, we're asleep and dreaming and we really, and we're ... it's not a lucid dream, we're just totally confused about our circumstance, what you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness. That like, you can't say that consciousness itself might be an illusion, because on this account, it just means that things seem any way at all. I mean, even ... Like, if this ... You know, uh, it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table. Now, I could be wrong about that. It could be a hologram, I could be asleep and dreaming, I could be hallucinating. But the seeming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of being an illusion. It's, it's not, uh ... Something seems to be happening, and that seeming is the, is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed. And the, and the, it's, it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through, because we're not, we can be wrong about w- what it's like to be us and we can, uh ... I'm not saying we're, we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience. But, for instance, this, you know, many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will, and, you know, I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that and that you can, you can cut through those experiences, and then things seem a different way, right? So it's not that, it's not that things don't, there aren't discoveries to be made there and, and assumptions to be overturned. But, um, this kind of consciousness is something that I would think, it, it, it doesn't just come online when we get language. It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death or, you know, the, the finiteness of life. It doesn't, it doesn't require a sense of self, right? So it doesn't ... It, it, it's, it's prior to differentiating self and other. Uh, and I, I wouldn't even think it's necessarily, uh, limited to people. I mean, I do think probably any, uh, mammal has this. I mean, certainly if you're going to, if you're going to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this, right? And that's a, a very safe assumption, even though it, we can't-... even though the, uh, you can argue the jury is still out to some degree, then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps, you know, or chimps and, and, you know, rats even, in the end, given the underlying neural, uh, similarities. So, um... And I- and I- I don't know, you know, phylogenetically, I don't know how far back to push that. You know, it's- there are people who, you know, think single cells might be conscious or that, you know, flies are certainly conscious. They've got something like, um, 100,000 neurons in their brains. I mean, so it's- it's just- that's a- there's a lot going on even in a fly, right? Uh, but I- you know, I don't have intuitions about that.

   16. LFLex Fridman18:55

       But it's not, in your sense, an illusion you can cut through. I mean, to push back, the alternative version could be, it is an illusion constructed by- just by humans. I- I'm not sure I believe this, but i- and part of me hopes this is true because it makes it easier to engineer, is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality, and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness, that- like the- the rich lights-on experience. So the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until after birth, uh, in that construction. So it's- do you think-

   17. SHSam Harris19:33

       You know, the-

   18. LFLex Fridman19:33

       ... it's possible, that that is the case, that it is a sort of construct of the way we deal, almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world, the social interaction with other humans? Or is-

   19. SHSam Harris19:47

       Yeah, there-

   20. LFLex Fridman19:47

       ... 'cause you're saying the complete opposite, which is it's like fundamental to- to single cell, uh, organisms and trees and- and- and so on.

   21. SHSam Harris19:54

       Right. Well, yeah, so I- I don't- I don't know how far down to push it. I don't have intuitions that single cells are- are likely to be conscious. But, um, but they might be. I- and I just- and I- again, I- could be unfalsifiable. Um, but as far as babies not being conscious or you- like, you're not- you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or, you know, have a conversation or- or treat other people. First of all, babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have, uh, traditionally given them credit for, and they certainly do it before they- they have language, right? So it's- it's a la- it- it's gotta precede language, uh, to some degree. And, I mean, you can interrogate this for yourself because you can put yourself in various states that are, uh, rather obviously not linguistic, you know. Uh, uh, you know, meditation allows you to do this. You can certainly do it with psychedelics, where it's just n- your- your capacity for language has been obliterated, and yet you're all too conscious. In fact, uh, e- yeah, I- you- I think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way, that there's something about language and- and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience, that- that- that we're- we're- we are potentially much more conscious of data, sense data and everything else, than we tend to be, and we have trimmed it down based on the- how- how we have, um, acquired concepts. And so, like, when I walk into a room like this, I know I'm walking into a room. I have certain expectations of what is in a room. You know, I- I would be very surprised to see, you know, wild animals in here or a waterfall or, you know what I mean? So, eh- uh- you know, uh, there are things I'm not expecting, but I can know I'm not expecting them or I'm expecting their absence because, uh, of my capacity to be surprised once I walk into a room and I see a, you know, alive gorilla or whatever.

   22. LFLex Fridman22:01

       Mm-hmm.

   23. SHSam Harris22:02

       So there's- there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning and language- and- and language learning, and it causes us not to... And one of the things that happens when you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything, it becomes i- i- incredibly overloaded with, uh, it can become overloaded with meaning and- and, um, uh, just the- the torrents of- of sense data that are coming in, in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people. And it- that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically and- and as you're coming down... Right? Have you done psychedelics? Have you ever done acid or mushrooms?

   24. LFLex Fridman22:52

       Uh, not acid. Mushroom and that's it (laughs) .

   25. SHSam Harris22:56

       (laughs)

   26. LFLex Fridman22:56

       Uh-huh. Uh, a- and also edibles, but that's- that- there's some psychedelic properties to them, but-

   27. SHSam Harris23:01

       Right.

   28. LFLex Fridman23:01

       ... um, but yeah, mushroom- mushrooms, uh, several times and always had an incredible experience. I- i- e- exactly the kind of experience you're referring to, which is, if it's true that language constrains our experience, it felt like I was removing some of the constraints.

   29. SHSam Harris23:19

       Right.

   30. LFLex Fridman23:19

       Because even just the most basic things were beautiful in a way that I wasn't able to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on.
4. 25:21 – 34:44

   Psychedelics

   1. SHSam Harris25:21

   2. LFLex Fridman25:21

      Can we go to that world of psychedelics for, for a bit?

   3. SHSam Harris25:26

      Sure.

   4. LFLex Fridman25:26

      Wh- what do you think, um... So Joe Rogan apparently and many others, uh, meet apparently elves when they... On, uh, DMT. A lot of people report these kind of creatures that they see-

   5. SHSam Harris25:40

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman25:41

      ... and, uh, th- and again, it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience, but DMT is an interesting one. There's, uh, as m- as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on on psychede- psychedelics currently, MDMA, um, uh, psilocybin, in, uh, Ho- John Hopkins and a bunch of other places. Uh, but DMT they all speak of as, like, some extra super level of a psychedelic. Do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes on, um, in psych- uh, uh, on psychedelics, but in, in DMT especially?

   7. SHSam Harris26:20

      Well, unfortunately I haven't taken DMT, so I can't-

   8. LFLex Fridman26:22

      Unfortunately or fortunately?

   9. SHSam Harris26:23

      Unfortunately.

   10. LFLex Fridman26:24

       Okay, unfortunately.

   11. SHSam Harris26:25

       Uh, although it's... I presume it's in my body as it is in, uh, everyone's brain and in many, many plants apparently. But, um, I've wanted to take it. I ha- I haven't been... I had an opportunity that would... presented itself that... where it was obviously the, the right thing for me to be doing. Uh, but, you know, for those who don't know, DMT is, is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting. I mean, you smoke it and it's, it's basically a 10-minute experience or a, or a three-minute experience within, like, a 10-minute window, uh, that you... wh- and when you're really down after 10 minutes or so. Um, and Terence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT. That was, that was his, you know, the center of the bullseye for him, psychedelically apparently. Um, and it does, it is characterized it seems for many people, uh, by this phenomenon, which is, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is you're, you're... It's not just your perception being broadened or changed, it's you, according, according to Terence McKenna, feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted into a, a different circumstance. You maybe have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some kind, right? So it's, uh, the place is populated with, with things that seem not to be your m- mind.

   12. LFLex Fridman27:54

       So it does feel like travel to another place because-

   13. SHSam Harris27:56

       Yeah.

   14. LFLex Fridman27:56

       ... you're unchanged yourself.

   15. SHSam Harris27:58

       Accord- th- again, I ha- I just have this on the authority of the people who have described their experience. But it sounds like it's a pre- it's pretty common. I, I... It sounds like it's pretty common for people not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty, uh, unpleasant to smoke. So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot out of the, the cannon, uh, and land among the, uh, what McKenna called s- s- self-transforming machine elves.

   16. LFLex Fridman28:25

       Yeah.

   17. SHSam Harris28:26

       Um, that appeared to him like jeweled, you know, Faberge egg, like ba- self-dribbling basketballs that were handed him, uh, uh, uh, completely uninterpretable reams of, of profound knowledge. Um, it's a, it's an experience I haven't had, so I just have to accept that people have had it. Um, I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others on demand that are totally compelling to us, right? There's no, th- there's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest. I mean, we... every night we go to sleep. You know, some of us don't remember dreams very often, but, um, some dream vividly every night, and just think of how insane that experience is. I mean, you, you, you've forgotten where you were, right? That's the strangest part. I mean, this is psychosis, right? You're, you have, you have lost your mind, you have lost your connection to your, uh, episodic memory, uh, or, or even your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes, right? Like, you, you're, you're in bed, you're, you know, watching something on Netflix, you're waiting to fall asleep, and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible and you're not surprised, right? You're talking to dead people, you're hanging out with famous people, you're, you're, uh, some place you couldn't physically be, you can fly and th- even that's not surprising, right? So it's, it's y- you have lost your mind, but relevantly for this...

   18. LFLex Fridman30:10

       Or found it.

   19. SHSam Harris30:12

       You found so-... I mean, it... Lucid dreaming is very interesting, 'cause then, then you can ha- have the best of both circumstances and it, and it's, uh... Th- that then it can be... become systematically explored. But-

   20. LFLex Fridman30:23

       But what I mean by found, just, uh, sorry to interrupt-

   21. SHSam Harris30:24

       Yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman30:25

       ... is like if we take, uh, this, uh, this brilliant idea that language constrains us, grounds us, language and other things of the waking world ground us, maybe it is that you've found the full s-... the full capacity of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics. You're stepping outside the-

   23. SHSam Harris30:45

       Hmm.

   24. LFLex Fridman30:45

       ... the, the little human cage, the cage of the human condition to ge- open the door and step out and look around and then go back in.

   25. SHSam Harris30:54

       Well, you've, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else-

   26. LFLex Fridman30:57

       (laughs)

   27. SHSam Harris30:57

       ... but you've also lost something, right? You've lost-

   28. LFLex Fridman30:59

       What's that?

   29. SHSam Harris31:00

       ... certain capacities-

   30. LFLex Fridman31:01

       Memory?
5. 34:44 – 51:40

   Nature of reality

   1. SHSam Harris34:44

      some reason.

   2. LFLex Fridman34:44

      What's interesting, I actually... I don't know how I found myself in this sets of, uh, that part of the internet, but, uh, there's quite a lot of discussion about what it's like to do math on LSD-

   3. SHSam Harris34:56

      Uh-huh.

   4. LFLex Fridman34:57

      ... because apparently one of the deepest thinking processes needed is... Those of mathematicians or theoretical computer scientists are b- basically doing anything that involves math is proofs, and you have to think creatively but also deeply, and you have to think for many hours at a time.

   5. SHSam Harris35:15

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman35:15

      And so they're always looking for ways to, like... Is there, is there any sparks of creativity that could be injected in? Apparently, out of all the psychedelics, the, the worst is LSD because it completely destroys your ability to do math well.

   7. SHSam Harris35:31

      Hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman35:31

      And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability to vi- visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind and hold them there and stitch things together, which is often what's required for proofs.

   9. SHSam Harris35:43

      Mm-hmm.

   10. LFLex Fridman35:44

       But, uh, again, this, (laughs) it's difficult to kind of research these kinds of concepts, but it does make me wonder where... What are the spaces? How's the space of things you're able to think about and explore morphed by different e- by different psychedelics or dream states and so on, and how is that different? How much does it overlap with reality? And what is fundame- what is reality? Is our waking state reality or is it just a tiny subset of reality and we get to take a step in other versions of it? W- we tend-

   11. SHSam Harris36:19

       Mm-hmm.

   12. LFLex Fridman36:19

       ... to think very much in a spacetime four-dimensional, there's a three-dimensional world, there's time, and that's what we think about reality. And we think of traveling as walking from point A to point B in the three-dimensional world. But that's a very kind of human surviving, trying not to get eaten by a lion conception of reality. What if-

   13. SHSam Harris36:44

       ... traveling is something like we do with psychedelics, we meet the elves? What if it's something... What if thinking, or the space of ideas as we kind of grow and think through ideas, that's traveling? Mm-hmm. Or what if memories is traveling? I don't, I don't know if you have a, if you have a favorite view of reality or if you're... You had, by the way, I should say, a ex- excellent conversation with, uh, Donald Hoffman. Yeah. Yeah, he's- Uh- ... interesting. ... is there any inkling of his sense, in your mind, that reality is, uh, very far from actual... Like, objective reality is very far from the kind of reality we imagine, we perceive, and we play with in our human minds? Well, uh, the first thing to grant is that there... We are never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is, unless that reality is consciousness, right? So we, we, we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents. Right. And then the question is, how does that circumstance relate to "reality" at large? And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate, well, maybe there isn't a reality at large. Maybe it's all just consciousness on some level. And that, that's interesting. That runs into, t- you know, to my eye, various philosophical problems that, um... Or at least you have to do a lot... You have to add to that, uh, picture in that, you know, picture of idealism for me. I mean, that's usually all the, all the whole family of views that would just say that the universe is just mind or just consciousness at bottom, you know, we'll go by the name of idealism in, in Western philosophy. Um, you have to add to that idealistic picture all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences and t- to get the, to get the predictability of our experience and the success of, of materialist science to make sense in that context, right? I'm so... The fact that we can... What does it mean to say that there's only consciousness at bottom, right? Nothing outside of consciousness 'cause no one's ever experienced anything outside of consciousness. There's... No scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data, no matter how far removed from our sense basis, you know, whether it's they're looking at the, the Hubble Deep Field or they're, they're smashing atoms or whatever the, whatever tools they're using. They're still just experiencing consciousness and its various deliverances, uh, and layering their concepts on top of that. So, um, that's always true, and yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture the, um, the character of our continually discovering that our materialist assumptions are, are confirmable, right? So you take, take the fact that we, we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom, right? You know, we... First, we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible, right? We, you know, come back to Einstein. There's a lot of energy in that matter, right? And what if we could release it, right? And then we perform an experiment at, in this case, you know, the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico where the people who are most adequate to this conversation, people like Robert Oppenheimer, uh, are standing around not altogether certain it's going to work, right? They're, they're performing an experiment. They're wondering what's gonna happen. They're wondering if their calculations around the yield are off by orders of magnitude. (laughs) Some of them are still wondering whether the, the entire atmosphere of Earth is gonna, gonna combust, right? That, the, the, the re- the, the nuclear chain reaction is not gonna stop. Um, and lo and behold, there was that energy to be released fr- from within the, the nucleus of an atom. And that could... So it's, it's just... What, what... The picture one forms from those kinds of experiments and just the knowledge, it's just our understanding of evolution, just the fact that the, the Earth is billions of years old and life is hundreds of millions of years old, and we weren't here to think about any of those things. Um, and all of those processes were happening, therefore, in the dark, uh, and they are the processes that allowed us to, to, to emerge, you know, from prior life forms in the first place. To say that it's all a mass, that, that nothing exists outside of consciousness, conscious minds of the sort that we experience, it just seems, um, it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim, uh, you know, analogous to, you know, the Moon isn't there if you're not- if no one's looking at it, right? I mean, say, th- the Moon as a moon isn't there if no one's looking at it. I'll, I'll grant that 'cause that's already a kind of fabrication, uh, born of concepts. But the idea that there's nothing there, that there's no... nothing that corresponds to what we experience as the Moon unless someone's looking at it, that just seems, um, just so... uh, way too parochial way to set out on this journey of discovery. There is something there. There's a computer waiting to render the Moon when you look at it. The capacity for the Moon to exist is there. Right. So if, if- Right. ... we're indeed living in a simulation, which I find a compelling thought experiment, uh, it's, it's possible that there is this kind of re- rendering mechanism-

   14. LFLex Fridman42:49

       ... but not in the silly way that we think about in video games, but in some kind of more fundamental physics way. Uh-

   15. SHSam Harris42:55

       And, and, and we have to, uh, uh, account for the fact that it renders experiences that no one has had yet, that no one has any expectation of having. Uh, it can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully, right? And then there's some lawful understanding of h- why that's so. It's like, um... I mean, just to bring it back to mathematics,

   16. LFLex Fridman43:18

       Yeah.

   17. SHSam Harris43:18

       ... like, certain numbers are prime whether we have discovered them or not, right? Like there's, there's, there's the highest prime number we, that anyone can name now, and then there's the next prime number that no one can name, and it's there, right? So it's like it's, it's, uh, to say that our minds are putting it there, that what we know as mind in ourselves is in some way, in some sense putting it there, that... like that, that, that the base layer of reality is consciousness, right? You know, that we're, we're identical to the thing that is rendering this, this reality. There's some, you know... hubris is the wrong word, but it's like there's some... it's like i- i- it's okay if reality is bigger than what we experience, you know, and, and, uh, has structure that we can't anticipate and that isn't just, um... I mean, again, there's a col- there's, there's certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever is out there to produce what we call, you know, the stuff, uh, you know, uh, uh, of life. But, um, it's not, uh... the idea that it's, uh... I don't know. I mean, there, there are, there, there are a few stops on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking and, and Eastern philosophy that I don't, uh, philosophically, I don't see a need to take. I mean, the, the, the play-

   18. LFLex Fridman44:43

       Right.

   19. SHSam Harris44:43

       ... experientially and scientifically, I, I feel like it's, it's, it... you can get everything you want acknowledging that consciousness has a, has a character that can be explored from its own side so that you're bringing kind of the first-person experience back into the, into the conversation about, you know, what is a human mind and, you know, what is true. Um, and you can explore it with, with different degrees of rigor. And there, there are things to be discovered there, whether you're using a technique like meditation or psychedelics, and that these experiences have to be put in conversation with what we understand or about ourselves from a third-person side, neuroscientifically or in any other way.

   20. LFLex Fridman45:27

       But to me the question is, what if reality... (laughs) The sense I have from this kind of... you know, you play, you play shooters?

   21. SHSam Harris45:34

       No.

   22. LFLex Fridman45:35

       (laughs) There's a physics engine that generate... that's pretty-

   23. SHSam Harris45:37

       Oh, do... I have... you mean F- first-person shooter games?

   24. LFLex Fridman45:40

       Yes, yes.

   25. SHSam Harris45:40

       Okay, yeah.

   26. LFLex Fridman45:41

       Sorry.

   27. SHSam Harris45:41

       Uh, not often, but yes.

   28. LFLex Fridman45:43

       Oh, I mean, there's a physics engine that generates-

   29. SHSam Harris45:45

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman45:45

       ... consistent reality, right? My sense is the same could be true for a universe in the following sense, that our conception of reality as we understand it in, now in the 21st century is a tiny subset of the full reality. It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there, the moon being there, is, uh, not there somehow. It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually-
6. 51:40 – 1:50:25

   Free will

   1. SHSam Harris51:40

   2. LFLex Fridman51:40

      Turns out you were right, I'm gonna ask you about free will.

   3. SHSam Harris51:42

      Oh, okay. (laughs)

   4. LFLex Fridman51:44

      Uh, you've recently released an episode of, of your podcast, Making Sense, for those with a shorter attention span, uh, basically summarizing your position on free will. I think it was under an hour and a half.

   5. SHSam Harris51:56

      Yeah, I think, yeah, yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman51:57

      Uh, it was, (laughs) it was, it was brief and clear. Uh, so allow me to summarize the summary TLDR, and, uh, maybe you tell me where I'm wrong. So free will is an illusion, and even the experience of free will is an illusion. Like, we don't even experience it. Where... Am, am I, am I good in my summary?

   7. SHSam Harris52:21

      Yeah, I mean, th- this is a, uh, this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people. I, I say that it's, it's not merely that free will is an illusion. The illusion of free will is an illusion, right?

   8. LFLex Fridman52:35

      Right.

   9. SHSam Harris52:35

      Like, there is no illusion of free will, and that is a... Unlike many other illusions, uh, that, that's a, a more fundamental claim. It's like as- it's not that it's wrong, it's, it's not even wrong. I mean, that's I guess the... Uh, that was, uh, I think Wolfgang Pauli who derided one of his, uh, colleagues or enemies with that, uh, um, aspersion about his theory o- in quantum mechanics. Um, it's... So there are things that you... There, there are genuine illusions, there are things that you do experience, and then you can kind of punch through that experience, or you can't. You can't actually experience... You can't, you can't experience them any other way, it's just, um, it's just... We just know it's not a veridical experience. You just take like a visual illusion. There are visual illusions that, you know... A lot of these come to me on Twitter these days. There's these amazing visual illusions-

   10. LFLex Fridman53:30

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SHSam Harris53:31

       ...where like, you know, that every figure in this GIF seems to be moving, but nothing in fact is moving. You can just, like put a ruler on your screen and nothing's moving. Um, some of those illusions you can't see any other way. I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects of the visual system that are just eminently hackable and you, you know, you, you have to use a ruler to, to convince yourself that the thing isn't actually moving. Now, there are other visual illusions where you're taken in by it at first, but if you pay more attention, you can actually see that it's not there, right? Or, or it's not wh- h- how it first seemed. Like the, uh, like the Necker cube is a good example of that. Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube, of a transparent cube which pops out one way or the other, the one, one face can pop out and the other face can pop out. But you can actually just see it as flat with no pop-out, which is a more veridical, uh, way of, of looking at it. So there are subject... There are kind of inward correlates to this, and I would say that the, um, the sense of self... A sense of self and free will are closely related and I often describe them as, as two sides of the same coin, but they're not quite the same in the, their, their spuriousness. I mean, so, so the sense of self is something that people, I think, do experience, right? It's not a very clear experience-... but it's not... I, I wouldn't call the illusion of self an illusion. But the illusion of free will is an illusion in that, as you pay more attention to your experience, you begin to see that it, it's totally compatible with an absence of free will. You don't... I mean, coming to back to the place we started, you don't know what you're gonna think next. You don't know what you're gonna intend next. You don't know is- what's going to just occur to you that you must do next. You don't kn- you don't know how much you are going to feel the behavioral imperative to act on that thought. If you suddenly feel, "Oh, I don't need to do that. That's... I can do that tomorrow," you don't know where that comes from. You didn't know that was gonna arise. You didn't know that was gonna be compelling. All of this is compatible with some evil genius in the next room just typing in code into your experience, just like this, "Okay, let's give him the, uh, 'Oh my God, I just forgot it was gonna be our anniversary in one week,' thought," right? "Give him the cascade of fear. Uh, give him-"

   12. LFLex Fridman55:59

       Yeah.

   13. SHSam Harris55:59

       "... give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy that's gonna take him no time at all, and this, this, you know, overpowering sense of relief." All of our experience is, is compatible with, with the, the script already being written, right? It's... And I'm not saying the script is written. I'm not saying that fatalism is, you know, is, um, the right way to look at this. But we just don't have even our most deliberate voluntary action, where we go back and forth between two options, you know, thinking about the reason for A and then, then reconsidering and going, uh, to, uh, yeah, thinking harder about B and just going eeny, meeny, miny, moe until the end of the hour. However laborious you can make it, there is a utter mystery at your back finally promoting the thought, or intention, or, or ration- rationale that is most compelling and therefore deliberate, uh, um, behaviorally, um, effective. Uh, and just be j-... Uh, this c- and this can drive some people a little crazy. So I, you know, I- I usually preface what I say about free will with the caveat that if, if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible, well then stop. You know, get, get off the ride. You know, sw- switch the channel. You don't have to go down this path. But for me and for, for many other people, it's incredibly freeing to s- to recognize this about the mind, because one, it r-... One, you realize that your... I mean, it's... Cut into the illusion of the, of the self is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons that, that we can talk about separately. But losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me. One is it totally undercuts the basis for, psychological basis for hatred, right? Because when you, when you think about the experience of, of hating other people, what that is anchored to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions. I mean, that someone is doing something that you find so despicable, right? Let's say they're, you know, targeting you unfairly, right? They're maligning you on Twitter or they're, you know, they're, they're suing you or they're, they're doing something. They, they broke your car window. They did something awful, and now you have a grievance against them. And you're relating to them very differently emotionally in, in your own mind than you would if a force of nature had done this, right? Or if it's... if it'd just been, you know, a virus or if it had been a wild animal, uh, or a malfunctioning machine, right? Like, to those things, you don't attribute any kind of freedom of will, and while you may, you may suffer the consequences of g- catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal or having a, you know, your car break down or whatever, it may frustrate you, you don't slip into this mode of hating the agent in a way that completely commandeers your, your mind and deranges your life. I mean, you just don't... I mean, there are people who spend decades hating other people for what they did, and it's, it's just pure poison, right?

   14. LFLex Fridman59:18

       So it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy.

   15. SHSam Harris59:20

       Yeah, yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman59:21

       But the question is, say that this call... what, what was it? The horse of consciousness? Let's call it the, uh, the consciousness generator black box that-

   17. SHSam Harris59:30

       Mm-hmm.

   18. LFLex Fridman59:30

       ... we don't understand, and is it possible that the script that we're walking along, that we're playing, that's already written, is actually being written in real time?

   19. SHSam Harris59:45

       Mm-hmm.

   20. LFLex Fridman59:45

       It's almost like you're driving down a road, and in real time, that road is being laid down.

   21. SHSam Harris59:50

       Yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman59:50

       And this black box of consciousness that we don't understand is the place where the script is being generated. So it's not... It is being generated. It didn't always exist. So there's something we don't understand that's fundamental about the nature of reality that generates both consciousness... Let's call it maybe the self. I don't know if you wanna distinguish between those.

   23. SHSam Harris1:00:11

       Yeah, I definitely would, yeah.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:00:13

       You w- you would?

   25. SHSam Harris1:00:14

       Yeah, yeah.

   26. LFLex Fridman1:00:14

       Because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to. There's the illusion of free will, there's the illusion of self, and there's the illusion of consciousness. You're saying... I think you said there's no... You're not as willing to say there's an illusion of consciousness. You're a little bit more-

   27. SHSam Harris1:00:29

       I, I... In fact, I would say it's impossible.

   28. LFLex Fridman1:00:30

       Impossible.

   29. SHSam Harris1:00:31

       Yeah, yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman1:00:31

       You're a little bit more willing to say that there's a, an illusion of self.

Episode duration: 3:17:19