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

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. 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?

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-