Sam Harris Blows Your MIND on Life After Death, Consciousness, and the Mystery of Existence| Sam Harris EP 694

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0:34Make sure to get your tickets right now and step into greatness with us at the Summit of Greatness 2024. Head over to lewishouse.com slash tickets and get your tickets today and I will see you there. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:57What do you believe happens when we die? I don't know. I just, I don't know. That would require that we understand exactly how consciousness arises, and we don't understand that yet. I mean, there's certainly good reason to doubt that you, as you experience yourself most of the time, as the English-speaking person or subject who has the episodic memories you have of your life, that that entity floats off the brain and goes elsewhere. And that's the expectation that most people have who believe in souls. And when you hear people use so-called near-death experiences to justify a belief in an afterlife, it's that kind of arithmetic that's being done.

1:49They say, well, I saw myself in a tunnel of light, or I rose up off the table that they were performing surgery on me. I could see myself. but then I realized I was not connected to my body and then there's some story about how they met entities or even met members of their own family who had died. If you can recognize your grandma and still understand English and then still have a memory of the life you're leaving, all of those are modes of cognition that we know a fair amount about at the level of the brain now and we know they can be disrupted piecemeal in life, right? We know that if you get a stroke or if you go into the lab and they do TMS on you, transcranial magnetic stimulation, they can interrupt certain functions which really are no longer there anymore just because that neural real estate has been perturbed.

2:46So the proposition here is that if you interrupt one part of neuronal function, you lose, let's say, your capacity to understand English, right? But if you destroy the brain at death, everything about yourself that's familiar persists, right? That doesn't make a lot of sense. So we know a lot about mind being dependent on the brain. Any function you could point to in yourself. Mind versus brain, what's the difference? Well, I mean, the mind on some basic level is what the brain is doing. And if the brain stops doing that, it's reasonable to expect that the functions of mind will stop. But consciousness is the fact that it's like something to be associated with that information processing.

3:34And that is still fundamentally mysterious. I mean, there's a lot that our brain is doing that seems unconscious, right, and seems unavailable to consciousness in principle. And so, and it's, these unconscious processes are delivering the contents of consciousness in each moment, right? So you and I are having a conversation. I can see you. I can hear you. I can, you know, there are things that are stable that I can inspect because they're among the contents of consciousness. But how all of this stuff is showing up is being unconsciously mediated and really can't be inspected. So, you know, like I'm, I mean, the example I always use is, you know, because I'm always talking when I have to use an example.

4:19But like to some degree, you know, however imperfectly I am managing to follow the rules of English grammar without knowing how I do that. Sure. And you're able to effortlessly interpret. Effortlessly understand, yeah. Yes. And in fact, you don't even have a choice. If I say the word pigeon, right, you can understand it. I mean, provided you're a native English speaker and that's in your vocabulary, you can't help but understand it. You can't, it's like you can't say, whatever that next word is going to be, I'm just going to block the semantics of it. The semantics just come in, right? And so your brain is doing all of this unconsciously.

4:53And you can't get to a place where you are standing upstream of the parsing of the sounds I'm making. I'm just making a bunch of small mouth noises, right? And you know the difference when you're in the presence of someone who's speaking a language of which you know not a single word, right? You know, whatever that is, Thai, say. It just sounds like pure gibberish. And the surprising thing there is that it's very hard to even imagine that anyone can decode those sounds and extract meaning at all, right? It just sounds like, well, it's amazing that that's a language, right? And yet, once you know the language, you can't help but decode it.

5:33So all of that's unconscious. and yet the fundamental mystery of our being and the most important thing in the universe really I would argue the only important thing in the universe is the fact that the lights are on in and as what we are here subjectively which is consciousness if the lights were off if there was no distinction between biological systems and this table if there was nothing that it was like to be you and there could never become something that it was like to be you or any other physical system, well then there is no important distinction between the wet stuff we have in our heads and rocks and the water and the ocean.

6:19I mean, it's all just stuff that can have no interests. It can't suffer. It can't experience happiness. It can't be deprived of happiness. It can't be creative. So the good thing about this universe is consciousness. Your life is as your consciousness is in each moment. And all you have is your experience and your possible experiences.

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7:45Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.