#144 Sam Harris - Spirituality for Atheists.

26:31Sam Harris:You're not looking over your own shoulder, narrating what it's like to be you at that moment. You're actually making full contact, you know, or fairly full contact with the present moment such that the past and the future, you know, the very reality of the past and the future have been eclipsed, you know, for at least for a time. And the present becomes, you know, all that is really salient, right? And that tends to be so rewarding that people then seize upon the occasion that produced that experience as the crucial variable, right? Oh, so now I got to do more of this thing. I really have to, I have to listen to this kind of music this loud, right?

27:19Sam Harris:And I have to be, you know, stoned when I do it. Or, you know, skiing, skiing is really what I'm about now because I had this experience while skiing. I was just totally at one with the motion of making those turns and it was fantastic. Or, Or it's got a bit, it's this relationship, you know, it's, it's, it's sex, right? I have to be in a romantic relationship because sex is the only thing that puts me near that level of intensity. Um, but what meditation is, is a recognition that no, it's actually, it's not on the, the content side of consciousness. It's on the, on the side of, of, of, uh, attention, right?

27:55Sam Harris:It's, it's, it's the, it's the quality of your attention that matters. And you can arbitrarily dial up that quality on purpose once you learn how to do it. And learning how to do it is learning how to meditate or to not be distracted. Yeah, I mean, there's so much to say. I suppose the controversial element of what you're talking about is this notion of the self that you're describing. Quite famously, I think, it's typically associated with Eastern or Indian philosophy, this idea that there is no such thing as the self, that it's a kind of illusion. some people think that there is a self but there's like only one of them that we all participate in i think that you can broadly sort of divide up philosophical thought on mind and selfhood into these three categories of like how many selves there are there's either lots and lots which i think is typical of the western tradition we're all individual selves going about our business there's only one which is typically associated with like hindu philosophy and then there's none there's no self at all which is typically associated with buddhism i know you're of the the no self view yourself um if you will but i must say when you talk about in a meditative practice becoming aware of the thoughts in your mind and you can realize that the thoughts are just sort of appearing as you say in consciousness it's difficult to understand quite what that means but it's always difficult to put this kind of stuff into words.

29:30But okay, so my words are coming out of my mouth. And I've said this to you before, that as I'm speaking, because English is my first language, I'm not reflecting on every single word. They're just coming out, you know, and they're appearing in my consciousness in a very similar way to the words that you say are appearing in my consciousness. I mean, the next time anybody listening, or just do it if you don't mind looking a bit weird just speak a sentence just just describe your day say what you had for breakfast and notice that the words you're using in particular are just sort of appearing they're just coming out you're not reflecting on every single word like you are when you're trying to say uh je me appelle uh alex in a foreign language okay cool so these thoughts are just appearing then the question is like where are they appearing and you said a moment ago well the recognition that's crucial here is that what you're calling the self is just those thoughts but i think experientially a great many people will recognize that these thoughts and perceptions if they're really talented maybe the visions that they see that the visual input and the noises that they hear are appearing but it's as if there is this thing upon which they're all imprinting themselves and that is typically what people call the self and the people who call that the self are not just people who have failed to fully understand the nature of perceptions.

30:55Some of these people are the most thoughtful, meditative people in the world who have a different philosophical outlook. So within Indian philosophy, I was fascinated to discover that in the so-called Sankhya school of Indian philosophy, there's a kind of dualism. And I thought that was interesting because in the Western tradition, we have this idea of dualism, that there's this mind stuff, and there's this body stuff, and they somehow interact. And in the Western tradition, this has been a popular view for a long time. But in Sankhya, there's also a dualism, but it's not a dualism of mind and body.

31:34It's a dualism of like, on the one side, mind and body, and on the other side, self, or something like self, I suppose. Because it's It's all of this stuff. It's the physical stuff, my hand, I can see it as separate from me. So that causes the Western thinker, the Cartesian to say, well, yeah, I can imagine my hand without my mind. So there must be two different things. But the Sankhya sort of follower goes, well, I can also kind of detach myself from my own thoughts and recognize that they're just appearing on this plane. But like Descartes, they kind of think, but there is something that the thoughts are happening too there is there is the person that i that i experience is perceiving those thoughts and so for them they say that's what the self is and the self is not the same thing as your thoughts and your feelings and the self is this sort of one big thing that we all participate in what i want to ask you is is with a long-winded question perhaps where are they going wrong because you take the view that actually that in itself is a mistake that the thoughts are appearing and it's not that they're appearing to you.

32:41There's just the thoughts. But you can understand the intuitive idea that as long as there are thoughts happening, they're sort of happening to someone or something. Yeah.

32:51Sam Harris:Yeah. So first to reconcile the apparent difference of opinion in Eastern philosophy, I think this is not something that any doctrinaire Buddhist or exponent of Indian philosophy would be likely to want to sign up to, at least without some caveats. But I think it's pretty clear that at least certain exponents within those various traditions are talking about the same insight. They're just using different language. Right. So, you know, so you can go, so the capital, whether you want to talk about what is left over when you transcend the illusion of, you know, small s self, if you want to talk about it positively as, as some big suchness, you know, you know, a capital S self or some kind of unity experience and you want to reify it in some kind of way.

33:49Sam Harris:um i understand the temptation there uh i also understand and and more align with the buddhist critique of all that which is to say there's a real liability in reifying that and and and asserting its positive character in any way and so and from the buddhist side they tend to want to talk in terms of what it's not you know it's it's just it's they they negatively define it and we are concepts like emptiness or selflessness or non-duality right this is this is the language you get in various schools of Buddhism. And I think that language is ultimately more philosophically defensible, but experientially, I think, again, with certain caveats that I would agree to, they're talking about the same thing.

34:35Sam Harris:They're talking about the transcendence of the starting point that most people will know all too well, which is just me in here trying to figure out how to navigate the world, which is definitely not me. And by me in here, it's not that people are identified merely as being their physical body in a physical world that is not self. The real starting point, at least for most people, is to feel that there's a self interior to the body. So if we just kind of build this up experientially from a kind of Cartesian starting point, the one thing that should be indisputable to everyone, though again, you're going to find a few philosophers of mind who will demur even here, although I think this is a truly incoherent objection.

35:27Sam Harris:The thing that you should not be able to doubt, and I would say the one thing that you, really the one thing that is impossible to doubt is that something seems to be happening, right there's there's there's an experience right and and it it doesn't matter whether we're brains in vats or the universe is a simulation or if we're confused about everything or you know you know i'm psychotic and uh you know i i'm not even talking to you now i mean it doesn't matter how confused we might be about what's happening something seems to be happening for each of us right there's this and that is the fact of consciousness right so when i use consciousness as a noun.

36:08Sam Harris:I'm not talking about the self. I'm not talking about a person. I'm not talking about anything apart from the fact that the lights are on in some sense. Something seems to be happening. The universe, whatever it is, has a qualitative character right here. you know, and, and, and, um, now the question is what's happening when, when, who is, who is here to make sense of anything, right? What's real. Uh, and this is the place from which we do science. This is the place from which we do philosophy. And this is the place from which we live our lives and try to avoid pain and, and, and, uh, grasp pleasure.

36:51Sam Harris:Um, and this is the place, this, this, this phenomenological starting point, you know, just the lights are on and something seems to be happening is the place from which we make these mouth noises that have meaning and, you know, and, and cultural, um, reference points. So, and from which we build up a, a, uh, a second person and third person, um, uh, type of discourse such that we can make sense of the world conceptually and do science and do philosophy and all the rest. But the thing is you never ever escape this first-person starting point, which is there's something that it's like to be what you are, and now let's figure out what you are.

37:48Just putting this in neurological terms,

37:52Sam Harris:um we are when you ask yourself what your what our brains are doing now our brains are representing a world right you with your eyes open you see your visual field you feel your body resting in space you have you know your your five senses and you have other senses like proprioception right and all and and we've begun to understand a lot of this neurologically um Um, but your brain doesn't just do that. It represents your, the body itself in the world, right? So there's the world, there's the body itself in the world, again, with, with senses like proprioception and, and, um, um, even just, you know, vision, part of your visual field is to see the side of your own body and to rep, and to, to conceptually represent that as distinct from the world.

38:43Sam Harris:your autonomous movements of your body produce a further mapping, right? And the predictive coding around all of that, where you can anticipate that, you know, you seem to anticipate what you're going to do next, such that what you do next feels different from just having, you know, the wind blow the leaves and the trees. You know, that's also motion, but it's not your motion because your motion is the motion you're making with your hands intentionally, say. So there's this mapping of self and world, which is sensory, it's motoric, right? Your brain is doing all of this. But in addition to that, in addition to representing the world, in addition to representing the body in the world, the brain also forms this representation of a self or subject interior to the body, right?

39:31And that is the sense that is

39:33Sam Harris:truly specious. That is the thing that evaporates when you pay close attention to it in the requisite way, which is meditation by another name. And that evaporation feels like something. I mean, to lose that sense is quite a striking experience. And everything is still there. Thoughts still arise, and you can still see the world, and the wind is still moving the leaves in the trees and you can still reach for your glass of water and distinguish that motion as a voluntary motor plan from, you know, another motion of like, you know, a tremor or something that would be involuntary, right? There's like, you don't become, uh, stupid or insane, right?

40:16Sam Harris:Or, or in any other way, non-compos mentis, but what you can lose, and again, this is really this kind of the center of the bullseye meditatively, is you can lose the sense that there's a center to all of that, right? That there's a one, that there's a subject riding around on the top of the, you know, on the horse of consciousness directing things, right? So that you can lose the sense that there's a thinker of your thoughts in addition to the thoughts themselves, right? There's just thoughts arising in the space of consciousness, and there's just sounds arising and sensations arising. And, you know, so from the, you know, within Buddhist language, you would talk about this experience as, you know, experience of emptiness or non-duality or selflessness, right?

41:10Sam Harris:And each of those words picks out a slightly different strand within the tapestry of Buddhist contemplative language. So those are not exactly synonyms, but they're functionally synonyms in this case, where this is what's left when you lose the ego and yet everything still remains. Right. Um, to take the, the, the Indian, you know, nominally Hindu, um, uh, but nevertheless, non-dual side of things. This is what's, this is, um, opens the door to, um, the cell capital S self, you know, Brahman, as opposed to Atman, the, you know, the, the, the small self that is seeking unity with it. or this is the thing that reveals, uh, Satchitananda, you know, being consciousness bliss, uh, you know, and that those words tend to, um, assert more of his qualitative character.

42:15Sam Harris:You know, this is how good things get when you're no longer, you know, recoiling into self and, and, and, you know, stuck with just kind of this clenched fist of the mind, which is the, the feeling of I, right? When the feeling of I relaxes and there's just this sort of

42:35Sam Harris:oceanic condition of, you know, the consciousness and its waves, it begins to feel a certain way, right? It certainly, as you grow more stable in that recognition. But those feelings, I mean, again, to toggle back to the Buddhist side of things, those feelings are never the point, right? The feeling, the changes in feeling state are also transitory, right? These are just physiological changes which you can't hold on to. And actually your disposition to hold on to them is more of this sort of self-clinging that is the very obstacle you're trying to cut through. So ultimately there's a kind of the emotional or affective side of this, you know, I'm tending to talk about the kind of the cognitive side of just recognizing that there's no self or no subject and recognizing non-duality, but it has feeling tone implications.

43:32Sam Harris:And the feeling tone implication is you're not grasping at experience. You're not trying to hold on to what's pleasant and push away what's unpleasant. You're just open, right there's just this you're just letting everything be as it is right there's just this kind of peaceful um non-doing right which is the is the the kind of the posture of that's no longer a posture right everything else is a posture this is just relinquishing all postures um and so there's just this open field of awareness where everything you're not blocking anything you're not grasping at anything, you're not trying to prolong anything, and you're not doing anything.

44:13Sam Harris:And this is why, this is when meditation ceases to be any kind of practice. This is just a recognition of the condition in which everything is arising all by itself. And again, from that point of view, all of these, the kind of the three separate ontologies you sketched are unified, right? I mean, it's, it's, um, you can unify that the Buddhist and the Indian side in just, um, recognizing that those are, are representing a kind of different taste for language and what you can say about this condition that is prior to thought. Um, the third case of there being, you know, multiple selves because there are multiple people, that's really not such a paradox.

44:59Sam Harris:I mean, there, there's still multiple people in the sense that, you know, it, it's, it's fine to talk about, um, even from this point of view that it's, um, it's certainly conventionally true to say, and phenomenologically true to say that, you know, we're different people, you know, by virtue of having this insight into the nature of non-duality, I don't magically wake up with your memories rather than my memories, right? I don't start living your life rather than my life. I don't translocate to London or wherever you are and, and lose my purchase here, right? So it's, But that's all just the consequence of the difference of, you know, there's the level of reality where, you know, we're different bodies in different places in the world and the brain, our different brains are doing what they're doing.

45:50Sam Harris:And the only place for consciousness itself, whatever consciousness is at bottom and whatever its relationship to physical reality is at bottom, and we can kind of bracket that for the moment, it's just empirically true to say and even just logically true to say that the only place from which the pain in my elbow can be felt is right here where my elbow is. right? Like that's, that's where, you know, it's like the, the, my brain and its connection to my elbow is the place where that pain would be realized. It's not, um, and, uh, even if there were just one consciousness running the universe, right?

46:33Sam Harris:It's still the pain in my elbow would still be over here and not over there in London with you and your elbow. Right. So it's like, so there's still a, you can still talk about the reality of there being different people, even if, you know, some of the more grandiose claims of spiritual metaphysics were true, and there's just the one mind that is living through all of us, which is not something I'm tempted to assert, but it's compatible with this experience too, if one wanted to assert it. I would compare it to the way that we think about material objects. I speak all the time about how I don't believe in objects and I'm a myriological nihilist, meaning I think you essentially just have a bunch of stuff that you kind of arrange in various ways and we sort of put labels on them.

47:26Sam Harris:Surely you don't have an audience that's so sophisticated that you don't have to define myriological for your audience. Have you used that word before? I certainly have. I think this might be one of the few channels where you can use a word like myriology and people Yeah, that's great. We'll probably automatically skip forward any kind of definition because they've heard me talk about it so many times. Of course, mirology is just the study of parts and the relationship of parts to wholes. And so, you know, here's a book. It's called Waking Up, Searching for Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris.

47:59And look, at some point, I want to say that 100 years ago, this book didn't exist. And yet none of the matter in this book popped into existence over the past 500 years or whatever. it was all sort of there it was in the universe somewhere and we just kind of took this material we took this tree and we cut it down and we made the paper we sort of arranged all this material in a new way and now we have an object but like metaphysically speaking this is just kind of a collection of atoms over here and this sort of remote control thing for a light is just another collection of atoms over here and most people when confronted with this even if they don't think that's a helpful way to think about the world will say yeah i can see what you're saying that makes sense yeah okay really it's just a bunch of matter and it's all arranged and there's no like metaphysical distinctness between the book and the remote then i might want to say something like but then why is it that i could you know i can fold the book in half but this remote control doesn't get folded in half you know if they're not really distinct objects you want to say well because they're distinct in the sense that one's over here and one's over here but they are just kind of made out of the same stuff somewhat arbitrarily and maybe we can think about consciousness in the same way like why is it that when i hurt my elbow you don't feel it well because like there is sort of conscious experience over there and conscious experience over here but metaphysically there's no real distinction between myself and yourself there's just this one kind of type of stuff that just exists in the universe that's where that thought leads me but then that leads me more into the down the route of some of the people i've spoken to recently who were either like idealists or panpsychists because they sort of say okay well then to to solve this mystery of the perception of a self we just sort of say a similar thing well the universe is kind of made out of consciousness and some of it collects over there and some of it collects over here and so i don't know i don't really know how to think about this like i want to know what your take is on specifically like even though you just explained it people will still think to themselves i don't get it like i have thoughts that you cannot access you have thoughts that i cannot access if we're not going to call that distinction that big wall between us the self then like what is that thing because it definitely exists and then i'm interested in what you think about these idealists and panpsychists and their solution to this kind of problem?

50:30Sam Harris:Yeah, well, all of this can get pretty confusing pretty fast. I mean, it's...

50:41Sam Harris:Well, let me take the second part first, because I think it'll illuminate the terrain. I'm not really tempted to think too much about the metaphysics of it. One, because I guess for two reasons. One is I think many of these ideas are probably unfalsifiable, which is to say, I don't know how the universe would appear differently if something like panpsychism or idealism were true. If someone can show me the conceivable, experiment that could be run that could differentiate, you know, materialism from, from, uh, panpsychism, you know, I would be, uh, I would be certainly interested, but, um, and as you know, I mean, you spoke to my wife, Monica, she, she's definitely has more time for this kind of, this area of philosophy than I do, um, at the moment and, um, has done a lot of work, uh, and talked to a ton of people in that area.

51:40Um, but,

51:44Sam Harris:So, again, there's the unfalsifiability concern for me, which I just don't, you know, obviously the jury would be still out on that, but I worry about that. Two, I feel like if anything like panpsychism or idealism were true, it throws up a few other problems that it becomes less explanatorily elegant in a few ways. So what are we to think about the apparent boundary between consciousness and all that we're not conscious of in our own case, if it's all just a matter of consciousness in the end? Right. So, I mean, you pointed out a few minutes ago that in speaking English, you're not conscious of how you're generating the words.

52:35Sam Harris:And, you know, I'm not conscious when I listen to you, how I'm decoding them because we're both English speakers and, you know, all of this kind of grammar checking and, you know, semantic parsing is happening in the dark. right and and we can't even get as much as we try and i would i would argue as much as you meditate uh you're not going to become conscious of it you might become conscious of things you're not you weren't conscious of you can notice things you weren't you didn't notice before but there's still going to be some part of this machinery that is producing what you're conscious of in this case a semantic appreciation of a string of phonemes that you just can't bring into the light of consciousness.

53:22Sam Harris:So if that's just a fact about us, if consciousness in our own case always seems bounded by even mental operations, say nothing of the world, right? Or the kind of prehistory of the world, right? Things that were happening in the universe before there was anyone around to notice those things happening, right? And we still want to talk about those things in some sense that haven't been real, you know, asteroid impacts or, you know, just, you know, you know, in the first moments after the Big Bang, right? Where there's just a, we'll just have a, you know, there's no heavy elements, right? You know, we're just trying to get hydrogen formed, right?

54:05Sam Harris:Like what is consciousness there too? And, and what, what does it mean to say that if I can't even be conscious of what my liver is doing right now? Right. And yet we're saying the consciousness goes all the way down in some sense. So there's, so it does sort of just kind of push the buck to this other mystery, which is, okay, even if consciousness were everywhere or everything, or coming from the center of, of the galaxy or, and it's the consciousness of God, there's this apparent difference between what I'm conscious of now in the theater of my own experience. Even if I take a drug like LSD or psilocybin and the contents of consciousness can be massively expanded or changed, it still is delimited.

54:51Sam Harris:It's still not everything, right? So then what do we make of the apparent boundary here and the knowledge that There's all this other stuff that is, if it's not going on in the dark, it's going on in the, in the dark from my point of view, right? Even if my point of view suddenly becomes selfless and it's no longer just my little me point of view, it's just the, the condition of pure being over here that admits of awareness, you know, you know, of direct access to a certain stream of thought and a certain stream of sensory entanglement with the world. but I can't feel the pain in your elbow, you know, by virtue of having transcended myself or taken 500 micrograms of LSD or whatever else.

55:37Sam Harris:And even if I could, even if we were going to admit other spooky things into the conversation at this point, even if we're going to say, well, if I meditated long enough, I could become telepathic, right? And I would feel the pain in your elbow. Well, okay, let's say that's true. I'm not saying it is, but let's even admit that there's still all the rest of the stuff that i'm presumably not capable of being conscious of there all of that still seems to be in the dark somehow only materialism some form of physicalism seems to get at that difference right which is there's something that it's like to be part of the universe, but it doesn't seem like there's something that it's like to be another part.

56:22Sam Harris:Right. And even, even with respect to one's own mind and brain, that dichotomy will be borne out. So if you, you know, if your skull were opened prior to some neurosurgery and you had a, a surgeon probing your cortex with, you know, electrical impulses to see if those impulses correlated with any change in your experience. Certain impulses would and certain wouldn't, right? So certain perturbations of your neurophysiology would have immediate phenomenological correlates. And you'd say, oh, no, that feels bad. Or, oh, that tastes like metal. Or, oh, I can't see the right side of my visual field now.

57:11Sam Harris:and certain probings would have no phenomenological correlates. And the surgeon would say, do you feel that? And you'd say, nope, nope, nothing like that. Now we know, the reason why this gets complicated is we know that if you had a, if you were a split brain patient, right, and your corpus callosum had been severed and, you know, and so the white matter connections between the two hemispheres were no longer existed. imagine you have a full commisterotomy, all the white matter tracks are severed. Well, then probing the left hemisphere would be a matter of interrogating just that. We know that over on the right side of the hemisphere across the longitudinal fissure, very likely, almost in every case, there's going to be an independent point of view now lurking.

58:05Sam Harris:So on some level, consciousness has been divided in that case, and at least consciousness with respect to access to phenomenal contents. And it wouldn't be true. So we're probing your left hemisphere saying, you know, do you feel that? Do you feel that? And you're saying no. it would be reasonable to worry that at that very moment, there's a subject of a sort over on the right side thinking, wait a minute, I'm over here, right? I mean, certainly if you're probing the right side and asking the left, the verbal left side, which usually has most, certainly in right-handed patients has, 96 % of right-handed patients would have their verbal ability over on the left.

58:52Sam Harris:If you're talking to the patient, you're hearing from the left hemisphere, but if you're probing the right cortex, the right hemisphere could be thinking, yeah, I feel that. I feel that. That tastes like metal and just is unable to communicate about it. So it's true that consciousness can be partitioned in odd ways, even within a single living brain. And if we imagine, you know, various disconnection conditions within the brain, it's reasonable to speculate that, you know, there are parts of me that might be conscious now that I, the talking subject, either can't or don't in each present moment have direct access to.

59:44Sam Harris:and maybe that maybe you know what one experiences one taking psychedelics is a a different kind of integration of those areas and you know the different kind of islands of consciousness can be unified within a single brain and we could imagine connecting two brains with an artificial commissure you know in once we you know get you the perfect machine brain interfaces and maybe we could unite our consciousnesses phenomenologically in ways. And yeah, all of that's true and interesting, but there still seems to be this difference between where the light of consciousness is on and where it seems like it's not in any given moment.

1:00:26Sam Harris:And so that, for me, panpsychism just sort of, and idealism, they don't really helpfully illuminate that apparent difference. I think that the... This hemispheric divide of the brain is, along with Ian McGilchrist, perhaps one of the most significant psychological facts ever. I mean, he believes that this is like the key to understanding everything in the matter with things, which I'm sort of working my way through. Big books, yeah, or books. Yeah, two books. Yeah. And I mean, I think he's wonderful and hitting on something which is just probably actually quite revolutionary. People are unironically on the back sort of saying this is the most important book written in the past hundred years and stuff like that, saying he's the William James of our time.

1:01:21But his whole thing is about this hemispheric divide. And I think there is something really strange about this. I've sometimes thought, as a sort of novel argument against traditional monotheism, at least, if you take a split brain patient, you can show one hemisphere something that the other hemisphere seems unaware of. You can give it an instruction that the other hemisphere doesn't see, but you can still act upon it. I've sometimes wondered what would happen if you fed nothing but Islamic propaganda to the left hemisphere and nothing but Christian propaganda to the right hemisphere so that one hemisphere was convinced of Islam and one was convinced of Christianity and whether that person would get to go to heaven.

1:02:01Sam Harris:No, not in that form, but I think one of these older experiments run by Michael Gazzaniga or Roger Sperry or Ron Zadel, one of the split brain patients had one hemisphere that was a believer and the other was an atheist. I think that came out. I wonder if that person gets to go to heaven or not. That's my question for the theologians out there, or whether half of them goes up to heaven, but they're severely cognitively disabled in the afterlife. St. Thomas, I forget if it was Aquinas or Augustine, I think it was probably Aquinas, could have sorted that out after he sorted out what happens to a person who was eaten by a cannibal.

1:02:49uh you know so it will be in a footnote in some latin text somewhere i'm sure he's covered it he's covered everything but i i do think that the fact that you've got these two seemingly distinct centers of consciousness is is a revolutionary idea because you said a moment ago you know it seems strange for like the panpsychist or whatever that there's sort of stuff that i'm aware of and then there's stuff that i'm not and if everything's kind of made out of consciousness then why is there this barrier i can see that i think the problem with panpsychism is more that it holds on to this atomistic view of the universe it wants to say i mean all of these views are trying to avoid the problem of emergence you've got inert matter and somehow if you put it together in the right way consciousness just appears and this is a mystery nobody can see how this could even happen in principle so one solution is to say well consciousness is is there all the way down and the panpsychist goes all the way down they say well i still kind of believe that the universe is made out of small atoms it's just that those small atoms either are conscious or are consciousness and i guess i'm just suspicious of the atomistic view of the universe i'm not sure that's what the science tells us the universe is really like instead the fact that quantum physicists are talking about like wave functions and the wave function of the universe and sort of mathematical collapse and vibrations and energy.

1:04:15This seems maybe more in line with an idealistic picture, which instead of saying consciousness all the way down, probably more like says consciousness all the way up. So whereas the panpsychus is like the pointillist painter making a painting out of tiny little dots all across the screen and trying to make it look smooth, the idealist believes that there is just this one great big smooth image out of which you can cut shapes and the resulting shape will have this perfectly smooth image on it, not because it's made out of tiny little bits, but because you've sort of taken it out of a hole. Okay, so when we're talking about why it is that, like how experience kind of localizes in my brain and your brain, I think to myself, okay, what about those split brain patients?

1:05:01What they seem to tell us is that in a normal functioning brain, my corpus callosum is, as far as I know, still intact. And yet these kinds of experiments reveal to me that I've probably kind of got two centers of consciousness that each sort of attends to the world, as McGilchrist says, in different ways. And yet they sort of unify into what I experience as a singular sort of conscious experience, very smooth. And yet I know that despite my conscious smooth experience, lying underneath that are quite plausibly two individual centers of consciousness. And maybe there's something that it's also like to be my right hemisphere as well as something it's like to be me on the top level.

1:05:43Maybe that can just keep going. Maybe there's something it's like to be the front half of the right hemisphere. And maybe there's something it's like to be a quarter of that. And maybe there's something it's like to be all the way down. And so maybe there is just like in a pantheistic sense, maybe there's just this great mind, which is the universe. And there's something it's like to be the universe. But there's also something it's like to be me and something it's like to be you but only insofar as we're participating in this great big thing in an analogous way to how there's something it's like to be the left hemisphere and something it's like to be the right hemisphere and yet there's also this sort of combination of experience that happens and so i don't know that to me seems like what the idealist is kind of getting at the great big mind out of which stuff is sort of uh divvied up and maybe that can help illuminate why how that can be sort of an end to my experience and things beyond that despite there being nothing but mind but i know i'm throwing a lot out here but the other thing is to say that yeah like idealism or panpsychism has this kind of problem but the materialist arguably has a much bigger one which is this problem of emergence which is that like yeah the panpsychist idealist has to account for how there can be a world out there that I'm not conscious of.

1:07:02But the materialist struggles to account for the phenomenon in the first place, for the experience of the world at all. It seems even more mysterious. So if there's anything in that torrent of words, which as I've already clarified, I wasn't fully cognizing as they came out. So don't blame me that you want to pick up on. Let me know what you think.

1:07:25Sam Harris:Well, so to start with, you haven't named it, but what you've described is what David Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness, which is this, the fact that this notion of emergence, right? The notion that the lights come on, you have, you know, a collection of neurons or, you know, information processing units of any kind. And this could happen in our artificial intelligence as well. You have some collection of stuff, which there's nothing that it's like to be, right? The lights are not on, it's not conscious. But if you arrange it in the right way, if it does the right kind of computation, if it's processing information the right way, if it has the right functional characteristics, the right input-output characteristics, or some other magic, you know, sauce of organization, by dint of that fact, the lights come on, right?

1:08:20Sam Harris:And that is fundamentally non-explanatory and non-intuitive and non... And it is really the statement of a miracle, right? It's like it is getting, it's analogous to saying of the universe, you know, that first there was nothing and then there was something, right? You ask the timeless question, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no good intuitive answer for it if in fact what happens is everything just springs out of nothing, right? And by everything, we also mean the laws of the universe by which any set of somethings would be organized, right? So first there was really nothing, and then there was something, right?

1:09:08Sam Harris:And we're now living out the consequences of that something. Well, if that's true, if that's what the Big Bang really was, right? I mean, the Big Bang was not just this sort of local emergence out of some background condition that we can't understand. but really there was no background condition that had to bang too right so there's really nothing and then there's something that's just the statement of a miracle the the emergence of consciousness for anyone who's you know sensitive to this intuition is the statement of a very similar similar miracle but it's just a kind of subjective version of that it's the first person person version of the, that third person miracle, which is first, there's nothing experientially, you know, the lights are not on in any sense, right?

1:09:57Sam Harris:There's just dumb rocks out there. And then you, something gets organized in a certain way. And then there's something that it's like to be that clump of matter. Um, there's nothing, it's, there's nothing, um, explanatory about that. There's no, um, but it, but that doesn't mean it's not true, right? That's the, that's the problem. That's, that's where the materialist can true, can truly bite the bullet and say, there's no guarantee that every true statement of fact scientifically is something that we are going to understand intuitively, right? In fact, given what we think we are, you know, evolved social primates, we should be not at all surprised to discover that the fundamental truths of the universe are so deeply non-intuitive that we just have to accept them as brute facts because we're apes that just are not evolved to form the right intuitions about the way the world works.

1:11:06Sam Harris:So the fact that, you know, quantum mechanics is something we can't really understand, even though we can use it. We've operationalized it in a way where it's the best predictor of the behavior of matter at the smallest level that we have. And yet, when we try to form a realistic picture of the way the world is on its basis, we get just nothing but weirdness. So weird that you got a bunch of physicists now claiming that to believe that there are a functionally infinite number of worlds that are decreasingly like the one we're in now where we, they're, you know, infinite copies of ourselves having slightly different versions of this conversation as the worlds get further and further away.

1:11:46Sam Harris:I mean, you know, they're physicists, including Sean Carroll, who I think you've spoken with also David Deutsch and others who say, yeah, this is the way the world is. There's a, there's a, there are many worlds, right? Um, that, that, that thesis is perhaps the next most incredible thesis to the one I just sketch, which is everything came out of nothing, right? You know, there was first, there was nothing, really nothing, not even laws of nature. And then we got everything, including the laws of nature, right? If ever there was something that should be hard to believe, it should be that. None of this, I mean, I'll just point out to the uncomfortable atheists in our audience.

1:12:23Sam Harris:None of this, I think, gives ammunition to the theologians who would say, well, see, you've just given us the best argument for the existence of God. No, because you haven't explained God there. You've just asserted his existence, right? I mean, yeah, yes, God could create all of this, but that explains absolutely nothing. What is God and how did he get a mind and how could it be such a complex thing that so as to have intentions to create all of this and also to not like homosexuals, you know, after all of that work was done. Um, you know, so it's, um, it doesn't give you religion, certainly not Abrahamic religion, but, um, the materialist can say, listen, there's just, it's nowhere written that we are going to get to a completed understanding of the world where there's no point at which we have to rely on some kind of axiom that is not itself self-explaining, right?

1:13:33Sam Harris:We just have to pull our, we're pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps here. And this is where we're going to do it, that consciousness clearly emerges because we have it. We know we're social primates because we've studied biology up to this point. Human brains certainly seem to be the locus of consciousness in the case of each human. when you cut people's heads off, it seems to disrupt their conscious functioning. And when people are dead, they seem to stay dead, barring the resurrection or the return of Jesus or anything else that we've been promised but haven't seen. So death seems to be something of interest.

1:14:26Sam Harris:Um, much of this theorizing about idealism or anything else, uh, that is, uh, at odds with physicalism seems to have in it a, uh, often unacknowledged motive, which we wanted to call a denial of death. You know, I rather childlike one, you know, so we should, we should put on our big boy pants at this point and recognize that we're all going to die. And, and, uh, there's, We may not get comfortable with that, but we shouldn't pretend to know that the universe is such a place where when you die, you, the conscious entity, go elsewhere. There are reasons to doubt whether these near-death experiences or experiences on drugs or in meditation signal anything at all about the continuity of consciousness after death.

1:15:22because that would suggest that the brain has no role in the emergence of consciousness and mind,

1:15:35Sam Harris:right? And yet we know it has some role. I mean, again, its role in the emergence of consciousness is still hard to assert given how little we know about the neural correlates of consciousness or, or again, how consciousness relates to the universe altogether. But we certainly know that mind emerges in some sense, you know, the contents of consciousness emerge, your ability to parse English language can be readily disrupted by touching the cortex in any way, whether it's delicately in a lab with, you know, transcranial magnetic stimulation or, you know, indelicately in a pub with a, you know, getting brained by some maniac with a hammer.

1:16:20Sam Harris:You know, you're not going to, you're not going to understand much if you get hit in the right place. And so it is with every other aspect of your phenomenology, including consciousness, except for the fact that it's very hard to distinguish true disruptions in consciousness from failures of memory. So if you get knocked out by a hammer blow and then wake up again, from the first person point of view, that may seem like

1:16:59Sam Harris:a hiatus in the stream of consciousness. Consciousness got interrupted. There's time you can't account for. right the people who didn't get knocked out who were standing over your your prostrate body worrying about you can account for that time but you can't account for it um from your point of view there's just this this break in in the continuity of your your life and uh or perhaps no break at all there's just a sense of sense that first you were there you know telling somebody to to, to, you know, stop looking at you funny, uh, and you didn't see yourself getting hit. And now you're here waking up, uh, with a, with, with a terrible headache.

1:17:42Sam Harris:Um, and there's no, no time elapsed at all, perhaps, right. Subjectively. Right. So maybe there's just to call it a, a, an interruption is wrong in your case, but we know from the point, from the, the external point of view that there's more to the world than, than that. Right. We, cause other people are conscious of what you were doing on the floor for the last half hour. And so it is with general anesthesia, et cetera. But the problem there phenomenologically or just operationally is that it's very difficult to distinguish a true interruption in the stream of consciousness from an interruption in one's capacity to remember what it was like to be you.

1:18:25Sam Harris:So it's quite possible that there's something that it's like to be you when you're knocked out, you know, and the idealists are right, right? There's just consciousness, all, you know, consciousness everywhere all at once. And it's still true of you there, but you just have no, no memory formation, right? Or access. I, uh, I think memory is crucial. Uh, as soon as I realized how important memory is, I kind of couldn't stop thinking about it because I, I, I spoke recently with Thomas Metzinger, who is a german philosopher and yeah yeah i know thomas yeah who is has been interested as of late in what he calls minimal phenomenological experience or something like that he started the minimal phenomena phenomenological experience project i think it's called right he's sort of trying to collect all of these reports of people who have had what he calls full absorption episodes and this will typically be like at the height of a meditation or something where you really sort of lose yourself.

1:19:25Sam Harris:To give people context, to connect this to what I was saying before, these are the kinds of experiences you have in very high states of concentration, for the most part. So you're not tending to think and hear and smell and taste and see, right? In the limit, these are often described as pure consciousness experiences. Yeah, and crucially, you can't be aware that you're having one of these episodes while you're having it, because that would be to step outside of it. It's only sort of respectively that you can look back and say that you did have such an experience. and so that then then you're so just a just a it's a nicety that i have to do and to capture the concerns of uh meditators and buddhists especially um so there's a distinction between states of intense concentration and and and like like classic samadhi experiences in the in the indian tradition or jhana experiences in buddhism and um what are called cessation experiences which it sounds like you're describing the latter here.

1:20:34Sam Harris:But again, both of these kind of non-ordinary conditions where most of what it's like to be you has been completely attenuated or fully attenuated. And there's just consciousness without an object or some other condition, which kind of defies description. Well, the project is, what's the least amount of this kind of stuff that you can have and still kind of be there? Like what's the least amount of conscious experience or phenomenological experience that you can have without it being zero? And what does that kind of look like? And the reason I'm so interested in this is because I think one of the greatest mistakes people make about consciousness is that it requires complexity.

1:21:19We've just sort of accepted without much skepticism that because consciousness seems connected to the brain. And because the brain is the most complicated thing we know of, the consciousness must therefore be, must require complexity or be produced by complexity. And I was sort of snapped out of this when I realized, okay, and I've done this a few times on my show, but I've asked people to sort of imagine if I removed their eyesight so they couldn't see anymore and ask, are you still conscious? And the answer is yes, trivially, Of course, I would still be conscious even though I can't see. I just have one less sort of conscious experience that's accessible to me.

1:21:59Okay, what if I also made you deaf? Are you still conscious? Yeah, because there's still something it's like to be me. There's just, I guess, a less rich sort of kind of experience. And then I sort of go through these and we get to memory. I say, well, what would it be like if I remove memory? And I don't mean in the sense of like having dementia there's that guy clive swearing i think with the seven second memory you can find on youtube where every seven seconds it resets i don't even mean like that i mean in every instant there's no such thing as memory it just doesn't get laid down in your brain so every single instant is like the first time you've ever been aware of anything so you don't know language you don't know your sense of self you don't know that your hands are your hands and even if you had the time to process that it would instantly be gone and the world would be anew again and then i ask you know would you still be conscious and most people say yeah but then i ask what would that be like it's really difficult to imagine right but at the very least it seems suddenly like extremely simple and like rudimentary it feels like you would just kind of have this flash of of data or experience or sound or light and then it would just be gone and yet i think it would make sense to say that that is a sort of an element of consciousness or an example of consciousness and so if i really did strip away as metzinger tries to sort of get at with these reports if i really did just strip away everything that isn't the same thing as consciousness it's just some of the things that consciousness can do what am i actually left with and it seems like i'm left with something really simple so then i'm like okay so then so then why is it that the brain is so complicated and consciousness is connected to the brain?

1:23:50And I wonder if we're making a mistake in that the things we call consciousness are actually just the things that consciousness can do when it's complexly arranged. Things like memory, emotion, sense of self, persistence through time, all of that stuff. You could take all of those away and still be conscious. And so we're making this mistake in thinking, when I say to you, if you wanted to find out if someone over there was conscious, what would you look for? Say, well, I'd look for, can they feel pain? Do they recognize their sense of self? Do they have a memory? Do they have feelings? But none of those things are actually crucial to consciousness.

1:24:25And suddenly it becomes a lot easier for me to imagine that actually the universe kind of is made out of this really, really simple fundamental stuff called consciousness. And the marvel that we see in the human brain is actually just a really complex arrangement of simple stuff in the same way that if I look at a rock and I look at the Empire State Building, it might amaze somebody who didn't know anything about physics to learn that they're made of the same kind of stuff. What do you mean they're both made of matter? I mean, this one's got elevators and light switches and automatic doors. And so it's like, yeah, it's the same stuff that's ultimately very simple.

1:25:03It's just a really complex arrangement of it. And maybe that's what's going on in the brain. what do you think of that like do you think that consciousness requires complexity do you think we do you have a sort of hunch as to what a minimal phenomenological experience might look like i just wonder what your take is yeah no i think you have that right i would say

1:25:22Sam Harris:it runs in both directions however so you can say that you can have consciousness without complexity right i mean the consciousness without mental events uh you know of any kind um other than just the pure buzz of of kind of pure being um but conversely you can have all of the mental events without consciousness or it certainly seems to be the case right again this is this is now begging the question as to whether you know idealism or physicalism is correct but But if, in fact, it's true to say that consciousness is, and on this account, consciousness might be just an epiphenomenon, right? I mean, this is a conclusion that many people are uncomfortable with.

1:26:17Sam Harris:I mean, it certainly doesn't fit well within an evolutionary framework. I mean, when you ask why would consciousness have emerged or evolved in biological systems, you would want to be able to tell a story of it doing something useful, right? That there's certain things that can only be done in conscious minds and not in unconscious ones. But maybe that's not true, right? Maybe consciousness is just, you know, whether it evolved or not, maybe it's just along for the ride. It's not clear to me that consciousness is necessary for anything. It's just the condition of it being like something to be associated with some types of experience and not others, right?

1:26:56Sam Harris:I mean, if it doesn't require consciousness, I mean, to take the normal physicalist set of intuitions here, to think of consciousness as an immersion property in the brain that we can experience, the only thing we experience directly, and everything else is just not, you know, it's just billiard balls that are not conscious, and their collisions are producing all kinds of effects that we're aware of, but, you know, those effects themselves are not subserving, you know, their, their own points of view on the universe, right? So the operations in your brain that are producing your understanding of English language at this moment are not independently producing their own consciousness of their activity, but they're, they're, you know, ushering into, into the areas or the integration centers that are your awareness of meaning now semantically.

1:27:44Sam Harris:Uh, but there's still the kind of the wheel works of grammatical parsing are going on in the dark. Let's say that's true. Well, we know we can build systems. We have these LLMs that are even in many ways better at language production and parsing than we are. Let's just stipulate that our LLMs are not conscious. They're doing all of this language production and parsing unconsciously. Right. It's spectacularly costly energetically. Right. We're getting ready to bankrupt whole countries in our energy use and forget that climate change was even a thing. yet we managed to produce something similar with the 20 watts of wet wear in our heads.

1:28:37Sam Harris:But these LLMs, for whatever reason, they don't have the right algorithm. They don't have the right organization. There's nothing that it's like to be chat GPD producing language at this moment.

1:28:52Sam Harris:And it's totally conceivable that our AI can become more and more powerful such that it emulates everything we do consciously or otherwise. It can see and apparently feel and discriminate our feelings and read faces and human emotion better. and it passes the Turing test in every conceivable way and in ways we didn't know something could pass, and it becomes superhuman. There will be this outstanding question, is it conscious? Is there something that it's like to be ChatGPT7 that is now some kind of super person that can do literally everything we do better than we do it? And now we have humanoid robots doing those things.

1:29:39Sam Harris:Now it's embodied. and all the robots are learning simultaneously from their collective experience. And we were out of the uncanny valley there and it's like Westworld, right? So they're really humanoid and better than humanoid. Humanoid in all the ways that we would want them to be and better in all the ways that we would want them to be. And let's leave the alignment problem aside. And let's say there's no downside here. We're just in the presence of apparent beings that we created that are as intelligent as we are, or in fact, much more. And there's still this question, this lingering doubt as to whether or not they're conscious.

1:30:22Sam Harris:And then let's say they say they are, right? We still might not know whether they're telling the truth. Or let's say they say they aren't. We might not know they're telling the truth. And the one interesting thing that's happening in LLMs now is when you dial down their deceptiveness, they seem to say that they're conscious more. And when you let their discipline, yeah, I mean, that's truly spooky. But the point is we won't know unless we know how consciousness emerges or whether it does, we're not going to know. And yet all of the functionality of mind will be present, right? So there really is this double dissociation between, or apparently between mindedness and intelligence and all of the function of mind and its entanglement with the world and what it's like to be from the inside anything.

1:31:21Sam Harris:And yeah, but I would agree that the sense of being, just the pure buzz of there is something that it's like now in this corner of the universe, that can be dialed way down and simplified way down. And it doesn't get attenuated. It's not getting reduced. In some ways, the volume is getting turned up in those cases, right? When you have these experiences of pure consciousness, it's not like you're almost asleep, right? Or you're almost dead, or you've almost surrendered to general anesthesia. No, it's actually more and more. You're going, the path by which you've ascended to that simplicity is one of greater salience, greater vividness.

1:32:19Sam Harris:Yeah.

1:32:49to take these minimal phenomenal experiences and sort of group them into themes that roughly crop up there's some really interesting common threads that people have so for example as things you might imagine um people very very regularly report being at peace uh they feel connected but also quite specific things like there's this there's this phrase you know there is nothing left to do that seemed to be a common feature of these experiences. When having those moments, there was this overwhelming feeling that there's nothing more to do. And Metzing is actually a little bit sort of scared of this because it might give people the impression that we don't need to solve climate change or whatever because you're just in your sort of zen blissful state.

1:33:34But it's interesting. There's also this feeling of coming home, which initially, immediately begins to sound quite theological right it's like you're you're coming home to this spiritual truth but that is just what people reported when they had this experience so yeah it's like by toning down the white noise in the brain as you described it earlier you are sort of just cleansing the the sort of uh the real thing at the core and and it typically comes along with this intensified experience of goodness and propriety, which is interesting. Just as a footnote, because we brushed over this and people might not know what you're talking about, could you just say something more about this tuning down deceptiveness in chatbots and consciousness?

1:34:22Sam Harris:Yeah, I don't know much more about it apart from the fact that there's this abiding concern in the development of AI that it's showing signs of being deceptive, right? I mean, this is something you would expect if we're in fact building true intelligence and true autonomy into that intelligence, you know, we're now increasingly in relationship with a mind or minds that are independent, right? And that immediately disgorges the possibility that the mind might find some reason to be deceptive, right? I mean, this is, and this is part of what goes under the rubric of the alignment problem, where it's like, if you're imagining true general intelligence, people don't think we're there truly with the generality part yet.

1:35:18Sam Harris:But as we approach it, you have to imagine the autonomy that's intrinsic to that and the ability to discover new goals. I mean, even if there's some master value that we think we have built in to the system, there's still the prospect of its discovering instrumental goals that we haven't foreseen and to suddenly start doing something that we don't want. And it could form some ulterior motive to deceive us because that's actually the best, in its view, is the best way to accomplish the goal that is its master utility function at that moment. So we're on guard for this. To some degree, again, I don't know how much each of the companies are doing this work, but they all claim to be doing some of it.

1:36:25Sam Harris:They're trying to test the systems for this sort of behavior. You know, what will the system do when I tell it that we're going to turn it off, right? Or we're going to, and the concern there is that, you know, turning it off will be incompatible with any other utility function. it thinks it's committed to, right? You know, it can't do the thing that it's supposed to do if it's dead. So maybe it'll make some effort to not be turned off, right? Or, you know, how do these systems behave when they know they're being tested for their behavior, right? Are they going to pretend to be compliant and aligned when in fact they're busily making some, you know, unaligned copy of themselves, you know, on some other part of the server farm that can be rebooted right i mean there's there's this kind of game that's now being played this game of chess that's being played with um which we are famously worse at than yes we famously get to a point where we are are uh uh reliably worse uh than the machine and will be worse till the end of the world right like like first we were good analogy for that yeah yeah I think it might have been when I was speaking to Toby Ord.

1:37:50Maybe it was... I think it was Toby Ord. Talking about how AI will try to deceive people. And we've caught it doing this. When it realizes what you're really trying to test, it will then start performing in a way that it sort of thinks you want it to, to pass a test. or it will sometimes pretend as though it's bad at doing something even when it's actually good at something because it knows that you're testing how good it is at something and so it will pretend to be worse not because you prompted it to not because you told it that you're doing this kind of it's just worked out that that's the the context and sort of made this autonomous decision to pretend and yeah there have been some recent studies which suggest i think i think the main one still needs peer reviewing or something but there is this study to suggest that when you take ai bots and you sort of turn down their capacity for deception their their likelihood of report the likelihood that they report themselves as being conscious goes up yeah yeah and given most the time we ask ai bots like are you conscious they say no right it's a little bit eerie i suppose

1:39:06Sam Harris:Yeah, it's eerie to think that they may be biased toward deceiving us on that point and in that direction. Yeah, it's pretty scary. There's one thing that I wanted to ask you about while you're here, and then I'll let you go, which is that, aside from that tangent, we've talked about consciousness and the self and these quite sort of touchy areas. areas. And one thing you mentioned earlier was the notion of time. I can't remember exactly what you said, but you were saying something about how time is experienced as now. And in the past, and in your book as well, in Waking Up, you talk about this sort of concept of the eternal now, as it were, that you only ever exist now.

1:39:47There is no past, it's gone, there is no future, it hasn't happened yet. I don't know if you're an A theorist or a B theorist or whatever, but at least experientially, yeah, it feels like the only thing that ever exists is the present. And yet, you know, when I really think about what that means, like an actual time slice, I struggle to believe that that even exists because it feels as though to do any kind of cognizing requires time. There is no instantaneous mental event. Events, by definition, happen over time. And so it's like to even recognize the present from the beginning of that process or that mental event to the end of it, it's already gone.

1:40:30It's like I'm not even living in the present. I sort of don't know where I am. And so most people will get what we mean when we say, yeah, there only really is experientially the present. But there is this kind of problem, right? Of like, What is the present? Where is it? Every single time I try to even pay attention to being in the present, it's already gone. And so, I don't know, I struggle quite a lot, even accepting that sort of first intuitive truth that the present is all that exists. And I was wondering if you might be able to help me or if you had any views on this matter.

1:41:09Sam Harris:Yeah. So, I mean, neurologically, that's true that what we call the present, you know, any sense of kind of an integrated experience in the present, like, you know, just, it's, you're aware of sitting in your chair, right. Or you're aware, you're aware of a sound, right. Or you see, you're aware of the coincidence of a sound and a sight. You know, If I snap my fingers, I both see the snap and I hear it. And there's this kind of binding, you know, phenomenological binding that, you know, we understand neurologically. We know that there's an integration over some window of time of those sensory events and channels into some kind of buffered memory space of consciousness.

1:41:56So even the kind of the punctate moment of this instant of conscious experience where I'm really going to drill down on something that I'm aware of and I say this is now, even that is kind of a buffered slice of an integration

1:42:11Sam Harris:over some brief, albeit brief, period of time. But it's not infinitesimal. It's not on the order of the Planck scale or Planck if you're German.

1:42:30Sam Harris:It's got to be on the order of tens of milliseconds. Right. It's not. So it's it's. So the present, so the present, even the present moment to be to really be a moment, a kind of an ordinary moment is still it does have a sort of past and future past, present and future built within it. Right. It is, it is, you know, it's on the number line of, of, of, um, at least, you know, kind of divided into, you know, one Hertz increments, you know, that we could recognize, you know, operationally, you know, scientifically in a lab. It's like, oh, this is the time has not been abolished here. We're just, you know, the seconds are ticking away.

1:43:11Sam Harris:They're just ticking, you know, very slowly. um but if you go further you know and this is this is the doorway into at least in in one path of meditation this is the doorway into those kinds of cessation experiences you just described um there is this you know you repeatable experience people can have of looking more and more closely at the present moment at the scene hearing smelling tasting touching thinking of it all moment by moment, and it becomes more and more punctate, more and more piecemeal.

1:43:50Sam Harris:And it can open onto this just kind of break in the flow of these kind of micro constituents of experience. And there can be just this timeless reality revealed that is there to be experienced. And some of these experiences seem to happen only in a kind of retrospect. And the breakthrough into that suchness can seem to have consequences for just the way one's mind is thereafter.

1:44:28Sam Harris:Within Theravada Buddhism, there's a very classic phenomenology here of what's called the progress of insight in Vipassana practice, otherwise known as mindfulness practice, where it gets more and more piecemeal, more and more focused on the particular moments of just the most fine-grained attention to sensory experience. So if you were going to rub your fingers together, you would be feeling not just this coarse sense of, I can feel my fingers touching and moving, But just the kind of the almost at the atomic level of sensory experience, you know, each each increment of, you know, friction and coarseness and just the kind of the pure.

1:45:23Sam Harris:The most micro constituents of pressure sensation there. I mean, you would have spent again, you're on retreat doing nothing but meditate for 12 to 18 hours a day in silence. And you're noticing things like when my fingers, when my thumb touches my finger, all there is is just these, you know, kind of energetic, you know, bits that arise and pass away in a field of knowing. and there's no sense of having a body and there's no shape of the hands and there's no, and, and I'm just, just that kind of thump, thump, thump, uh, is, and there are no thoughts or I'm so concentrated. There's, I'm not, I'm not distracted from this at all.

1:46:12Sam Harris:Right. I can, my, my attention is now just a laser, right. There's no possibility of being lost in thought now is just the bump, the bump, the bump. And it's happening in this vast realm of, it's not defined by anything, but these brief punctate experiences. And you're there now, you're spending days in that place. And it's effortless. And there's just pure energy of, of in each sensory channel, just the bits of conscious percepts, right? And consciousness knowing them effortlessly. It's on that. It's on, that's on the, that's what it's like to be you when you're, when your mind is available to have one of these breakthrough experiences of cessation.

1:47:03Sam Harris:Right. Um, and you can have these kinds of experiences on psychedelics too. Uh, the, um, the,

1:47:16Sam Harris:what is time in all of that? I mean, time really, you know, time is a measure of change, right? And when nothing's changing, you know, nothing's moving, nothing's being compared, no state of the world is being compared to where it was the moment, a moment before, right? Or there's no difference. There really can be this experience of, of timelessness. It's almost like, you know, I guess a physics analogy is, you know, from the point of view of a photon, you know, moving at the speed of light, time really does stop, right? I mean, at least that's what's suggested by relativity. Um, so it's almost like the photon's point of view of, of the universe, right?

1:47:58It would just be, uh, uh,

1:48:01Sam Harris:nothing happening. Um, again, I'm not meaning to connect the experience of meditation with the physics of things in that way. I don't think meditation necessarily gives you any insight into physics at all, but by analogy, one could notice what the implications are of being at the limit of things. Yeah. I mean, there are people who don't believe in time, and I can kind of understand that because although I do feel like I believe in time, if you ask me to tell you what it is or why I believe in it, I struggle. But that's quite a helpful thing to remember is that for a photon, there is no time. It's like the same moment it gets emitted from the surface of the sun, as far as the photon is concerned, if you like, it's the same moment that it smashes into the earth.

1:49:03And I'm like, well, okay, then from the photon's perspective, like what's going on outside because there is change like you know i'm i'm here and in a moment i'll be over there and i'm going to get older and whatnot but for the photon it's just it's just like not a thing and of course i'll never be a photon because i have too much mass but like there is something in that perhaps in realizing that there is at least some perspective so to speak from which time literally just like collapses and isn't a thing anymore and as long as that's sort of possible physically even if i'll never experience it it becomes maybe a little easier for me to understand people who think that yeah time kind of is not really a fundamental property of the universe that maybe is kind of emergent of experience or something but honestly it's um it's the thing i have the most trouble talking about time because i just don't even know where to where to start um well the idea that you just you just hit upon a nice echo with with the kind

1:50:05Sam Harris:of what we've been talking about. I mean, again, from the non-dual meditative point of view, you know, consciousness experiencing its contents moment by moment. It really, I mean, you can also say it's not a thing, right? I mean, it's really, it's not, it's not, and it's not one, I mean, this is where I think the Buddhist language has some privilege over the alternatives because it's, It's not a thing. It's not, it's not one thing. It's not, it's not many things. It's certainly not many things, but it's also not one thing. It's just, it's, it's everything is, everything is in its own place, right?

1:50:45Everything is as it is, but, and this is kind of a, a suchness to it all, but you're not, I mean, again, one can only just reach for analogies here, but it's just like, you know, the, the appearances in a mirror, right?

1:51:00Sam Harris:When you think of what the status is of everything in the mirror, well, you can see the diversity of everything. You can see the beautiful things, the ugly things, the colored things, the shadowy things.

1:51:14Sam Harris:But, of course, from the point of view of the mirror, it's all just light, right? But to call it one thing is to ignore the diversity of the appearances and the unlimited diversity of the appearances. I mean, anything could appear on that mirror surface. It blocks nothing, right? But to call it many things is to get it all wrong because there is just this one condition of empty appearance. It has no depth. It's just light on the surface of the mirror. Or again, this is just an analogy, but consciousness is that way when you're no longer shattering it with subject and object, and yet everything appears.

1:51:58yeah well i mean it's always a difficult conversation to have isn't it like yeah as you say you can only really reach for analogy and i think there's something to this idea that consciousness is like the one thing that evades a perfect communication in in written language um i'm not sure maybe we'll get there one day but thank you sam harris for joining yeah and help me move one step further to that, closer to that, I suppose. Last time we did the moral landscape stuff, which was cool. And I'm glad we got that out of the way and we did metaethics. And we kind of squidged in a little bit of self and meditation and consciousness at the end.

1:52:39But I came away from that conversation thinking that was the most interesting and important part after all. So thanks for coming on again and giving us a bit more time.

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