Kind: captions
Language: en
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
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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
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 friedman podcast and here is my
conversation
with sam harris i've been enjoying
meditating with the waking up app
recently
it makes me 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 uh
subjectively they appear to come from
nowhere
right i mean it's just 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 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
know you're not unless you
you're schizophrenic or 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
selfhood
associated with them and
people readily identify with them they
feel like what you are i mean this is
the thing
this is the spell that gets broken with
meditation
our default state is to feel identical
to the stream of thought right which is
fairly paradoxical because 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 that just
springs into into conscious view
but and you know 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
this first moment where
you know just anyone listening to us or
watching us now could
perform this experiment for themselves i
mean just imagine
something or remember something and just
just pick a memory any memory
right you've got 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're four years old whatever it is
right it first it wasn't there
and then it appeared and
that is not a i'm sure we'll get to the
topic of free will
ultimately uh that's not evidence of
free will
right why are you so sure by the way
it's very interesting
after no no free will of my own yeah um
everything just appears right but what
else could it do
and so that's that's the subjective side
of it objectively
you know we have every reason to believe
that many of our thoughts all of our
thoughts are
[Music]
uh at bottom what some part of our brain
is doing
neurophysiologically i mean that these
are the products of some kind of neural
computation and neural um representation
when you're talking about memories is it
possible to pull 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 the firing of the cells or is
it a useless pursuit to dig that
to dig into that direction well you can
get
closer to many many subtle
contents in consciousness right so you
can notice things more and more clearly
and have a landscape of mind open up and
become more
differentiated and more interesting and
if you take psychedelics
you know it opens up you know why
depending on what you've taken 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 as something 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 tend to start out you know whether
it's
in meditation or or in any kind of
self-examination
or you know taking psychedelics we start
out
with this default point of view of uh
feeling like we're the kind of on the
the rider on the horse of consciousness
or we're the
we're the man in the boat going down the
stream of consciousness
right but we're so 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 that
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 is no depth ultimately everything
is right on the surface everything
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
but there's in some sense that doesn't
represent
a position of depth versus the continuum
of depth versus surface
has broken apart so 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 i'm just asking for a friend so that
we can
build it in our artificial intelligence
systems
yeah well it remains to be seen if we
can if
we will build it uh purposefully or just
by accident
this is a major ethical problem
potentially uh that i mean
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 a murder right and we will be
convinced
by that uh 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 so they're just going to seem
they're going to advertise their
consciousness
in every glance and every utterance
but we won't know and we won't know in
some deeper sense that it make
then 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 role that
role the dice
um in terms of
how intelligent and conscious systems
emerged in in the wet wear of
of brains like ours right so it it's not
parsimonious for me to think that i
might be the only conscious person or
even the only conscious primate
you know is i 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
not really clear the question 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 it's just so clear
and um the problem that the confound
with consciousness is that
yes we can seem to interrupt
consciousness you can give someone
general anesthesia and then you
wake them up and you ask them what was
that like and they say nothing i don't
remember anything
but it's hard to
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
it's just obvious that you know you
disrupt the right neural circuits and
you know you've disrupted speech so if
you have to bet all your money
on one camp or the other would you say
do you earn a side of
pan psychism where consciousness is
really fundamental to our
to all of reality or more on the other
side which is like
it's a nice little side effect a useful
like
hack for us humans to survive where
on that spectrum where do you land when
you think about consciousness
especially from an engineering
perspective i'm truly agnostic on this
point i mean i think i'm you know it's
kind of in coin toss
mode for me i i don't know
and pan psychism is not so
compelling to me again it just seems
unfalsifiable i wouldn't know how the
universe would be
different if pan psychism were true just
to remind people pan psychism is this
idea that
consciousness may be pushed all the way
down into the most fundamental
constituents of matter so there might be
something that's like to be an electron
or
or you know a cork but
then you wouldn't expect anything to be
different at
you know the macro scale or at least i
wouldn't expect anything to be different
so it may be unfalsifiable 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's there could be some kind of
neutral monism at the bottom and this
you know this
idea doesn't originate with me this is
this goes all the way back to
bertrand russell and and others you know
100 plus years ago
but i just feel like that the concepts
we're using
to divide consciousness and
and matter it may in fact be part of our
problem
right where the rubber hits the road
psychologically here
are things like well what is death right
like
do we any expectation that we survive
death or any part of us survives death
that really it seems to be the the um
many people's concern here 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
because it feels like death could be the
very thing
like our knowledge of mortality could be
the very thing that creates the
consciousness
yeah well then you're using
consciousness differently than than i
am so so for me consciousness is just
the fact
that the lights are on at all that
there's an experiential
quality to anything so so 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's not associated with this
qualitative
sense that there's something that's like
to be that part of
the mind doing that mental thing
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 is like to
be us
there's something something seems to be
happening right and
this seeming in our case is broken into
vision and hearing and and
proprioception and and
taste and smell and and thought and
emotion and
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 that when we're
quote conscious and
even if we're confused about them even
if you know we're asleep and dreaming
and we're really inward 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 like you can't say that
consciousness itself might be an
illusion
because on this account
it just means that things seem anyway at
all
i mean even like if this you know 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 seaming 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 then
it's it's also the context in which
certain illusions can be
cut through because we're not we can be
wrong about what it's like to be us and
we can
uh i'm not saying 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
assumptions to be overturned but um
this kind of consciousness is something
that i would think
it doesn't just come online when we get
language
it doesn't just come online when we form
a concept of death or
the the finiteness of life it doesn't it
doesn't require a sense of self
right so it doesn't it it's it's prior
to a differentiating self and other
uh and i wouldn't even think it's
necessarily
uh limited to people i mean i do think
probably
any uh mammal has this
but 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 very safe
assumption even though it we can't
even 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 i don't know
you know phylogenetically i don't know
how far
back to push that you know it's there
people you think
single cells might be conscious or that
you know flies are certainly conscious
they've got
something like uh a hundred thousand
neurons in their brains and it says
it's just that's a there's a lot going
on even in a fly
right uh but i i don't have intuitions
about that 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'm not sure i believe
this but it
in 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
in that construction so it's do you
think 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 yeah because you're saying the
complete opposite which is it's like
fundamental to to
signal cell organisms and trees and
and so on right well yes i i don't i
don't know how far down to push it i
don't have intuitions that
single cells are likely to be conscious
but
but they might be and i just again i
could be unfalsifiable
um but as far as babies not being
conscious or
like you're not you don't become
conscious until you can recognize
yourself in a mirror or
you have a conversation 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 like it's
got to perceive language
to some degree and you can interrogate
this for yourself
because you can put yourself in various
states that are
rather obviously not linguistic you know
meditation allows you to do this you can
certainly do it with psychedelics where
it's just
your capacity for language has been
obliterated
and yet you're all too conscious in fact
uh yeah
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 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
how how we have 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 would be very surprised to see you
know wild animals in here or a waterfall
or you know
there are things i'm not expecting but
i can know i'm not expecting them or i'm
expecting their absence because
of my capacity to be surprised once i
walk into a room and i see a you know
a live gorilla or whatever so
there's there's structure there that we
have put in place based on all of our
conceptual learning and language and
language learning and
it causes us not to one of the things
that happens when you take psychedelics
and you just look as though for the
first time
at anything it becomes
incredibly overloaded with uh it can
become overloaded with meaning
and and um uh
just the the torrents 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 as you're coming down
right have you done psychedelics have
you ever done
acid or not acid mushroom
and that's it and also edibles but
that's
that there's some psychedelic properties
to them but right but yeah
mushrooms uh several times and always
had an incredible experience
it 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
right because even just the most basic
things were beautiful in the way that
i wasn't able to appreciate previously
like trees and nature and so on
yeah and the the experience of coming
down
is an exp is an experience of
encountering the futility of of
capturing
what you just saw a moment ago in words
right like especially if you have if any
part of your
your self concept and your your ego
program is to be able to capture things
in words and if you're a writer or a
poet or
or a scientist or someone who wants to
just
encapsulate the profundity of what just
happened
the the the
total fatuousness of that enterprise
when you really have got when you have
taken a you know a whopping dose of
psychedelics and you begin to
even gesture at cat describing it to
yourself you know so that you could
describe it to others
uh it's just it's like trying to you
know
thread a needle using your elbows i mean
it's like you're you're trying something
they
can't it's like the beer gesture proves
its impossibility uh and it's um
so yeah so that i mean that for me that
that suggests just
empirically on the first person side
that it's possible to put yourself in
a condition where it's clearly not about
language uh structuring your
experience and you're having much more
experience than you
you tend to so the primacy of language
is primary for
some things but
it's certainly primary for certain kinds
of concepts and certain kinds of
semantic understandings of of the world
but
it's uh it's clearly more to mind than
you know the conversation we're having
with ourselves or that we can have with
others can we go to that world of
psychedelics for
for a bit sure where do you think um
so joe rogan apparently and many others
uh meet
apparently elves when they on dmt
a lot of people report this kind of
creatures that they see
and again it's probably the failure of
language to describe that experience but
dmt is an interesting one
there's uh as as you're aware there's a
bunch of studies going on in psychedelic
psychedelics currently mdma um
uh south side and uh
john hopkins and a bunch of other places
but dmt they all speak of as like
some extra super level
of a psychedelic yeah do you have a
sense of where it is our mind goes
on um on psychedelics but in
in dmt especially well unfortunately i
haven't taken
dmt so unfortunately or fortunately
unfortunately
unfortunately 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 i've wanted to take it i
haven't been i had an opportunity that
was presented itself that where it was
obviously
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 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
by this phenomenon which is which is
unlike virtually any other psychedelic
experience
which is your your it's not just your
perception
being broadened or changed it's you
according to terence mckenna feeling
fairly
unchanged but catapulted into a
a different circumstance you may have
been shot elsewhere
and find yourself in relationship to
other
entities of some kind right so so the
place is populated with
with things that seem not to be your
mind
so it does feel like travel to another
place because you're unchanged yourself
of course again i just have this on the
authority of the people who have
described their experience
but it sounds like it's a pr it's pretty
common it sounds like it's pretty common
for people not to have the full
experience because it's
apparently pretty 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
self-transforming machine elves
that appeared to him like jeweled you
know faberge egg like ba
self dribbling basketballs that were
handing him uh
completely uninterpretable reams of
profound knowledge
it's a it's an experience i haven't had
so i just have to
accept that people have had it
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 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 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'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 episodic memory
uh or even your expectations
that reality won't undergo wholesale
changes a moment
after you have closed your eyes right
like you
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 someplace you couldn't physically
be you can fly
and even that's not surprising right so
it's
you've lost your mind but relevantly for
this
or found it you found some i mean lucid
dreaming is very interesting because
then
then you can have the best of both
circumstances and it's
uh that then it can be kind of
systematically explored
but what i mean by found just to start
to interrupt is like
if we take uh this 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
the full capacity of your cognition when
you dream or when you do psychedelics
you're stepping outside the the little
human cage the cage or the human
condition
to get open the door and step out and
look around and then go back in
well you've you've definitely stepped
out of something and into something else
but you've also lost something
right you've lost certain capacities
well just
yeah in this case you literally didn't
you don't you don't
have enough presence of mind in the
dream in the dreamy city or even in
the psychedelic state if you take enough
uh
did you have there's no psychological
there's very little
psychological continuity with your life
such that you're not surprised to be
in the presence of someone who should be
you should know is dead or you should
know you're not likely to have met
by normal channels right you're you know
you're now talking to some celebrity
and it turns out you're best friends
right and you're not even
you have no memory of how you got there
you know like how did you get into the
room you're like how did
did you drive to this restaurant you
know you have no memory and none of
that's surprising to you so you're
you're kind of brain damaged in a way
you're not reality testing
in the normal way the fascinating
possibility is that
there's probably thousands of people
who've taken psychedelics of various
forms and
have met sam harris on that journey
well i would put it more likely in in
dreams not you know because
in psychedelic with psychedelics you
don't tend to hallucinate
in a dreamlike way i mean so dmt is
giving you a
an experience of others but it's it
seems to be
non-non-standard it's not like it's not
just like
dream hallucinations but but
to the point of coming back to dmt
the people want to suggest and
terence mckenna certainly did suggest
that because
these others are so obviously other
and they're so vivid well then they
could not possibly be the
the creation of my own mind but every
night in dreams
you create a a compelling or what is to
you
at the time a totally compelling
simulacrum of
another person right and uh that's
uh that just proves the mind that's
capable of doing it now it's it's uh
the the phenomenon of lucid dreaming
shows that the mind isn't capable of
doing everything you think it might be
capable of even in that
space so one of the things that
people have discovered in lucid dreams
and i i haven't done
a lot of lucid dreaming so i've i can't
confirm all of this so i can
confirm some of it um
apparently in every house in in every
room in the the mansion of dreams
all light switches are dimmer switches
like if you go into a dark room
and flip on the light it gradually comes
up it doesn't it doesn't come up
instantly on demand uh because you know
apparently this is covering for the
brain's inability to
produce from a you know a standing start
visually rich imagery on demand so
there's i haven't confirmed that but
that was
people have done research on lucid
dreaming
claim that it's all dimmer switches uh
but one thing i have noticed and
you know people can check this out is
that in a dream
if you look at text you know a page of
text
you know or a sign you know or a
television that has text on it
and then you turn away and you look back
at that text the text
will have changed right there's no the
total is it's just a
chronic instability graphical
instability
of text uh in the dream state and i
don't know if that you know maybe that's
someone can confirm that that's not true
for them but that's whenever i've
checked that out that has been true for
me it keeps generating it
like uh real time yeah from a video game
perspective
yeah it's render it's rendering it's
re-rendering it
for some reason what's interesting i
actually i don't know how i found myself
in this sets of uh that part of the
internet
but there's quite a lot of discussion
about what it's like to do
math on lsd because apparently
one of the deepest thinking processes
needed is those of mathematicians or
theoretical computer scientists
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 and so they're
always looking for ways to
like is there is there any sparks of
creativity that could be injected and
apparently out of all the psychedelics
the the worst
is lsd because it completely destroys
your ability to do
math well and i wonder whether that has
to do with
your ability to 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 but
again 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 by different
psychedelics
or dream states and so on and how's that
different how much does it overlap with
reality
and what is fundament what is reality is
there a waking state reality
or is it just a tiny subset of reality
and we get to take a step in
other versions of it we tend to think
very much
in a space-time 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 traveling is something like we
do with psychedelics and 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
or what if memories is traveling 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 excellent conversation
when uh donald hoffman
yeah yeah he's 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
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're only ever experiencing
consciousness and its contents
and then the question is how does that
circumstance relate to quote 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 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 i mean that you know a
picture of idealism for 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
western philosophy
you have to add to that idealistic
picture all kinds of epic cycles and
kind of weird coincidences and to get
the to get the predictability of our
experience and the success of
of materialist science to make sense in
that context right so the fact that we
can
what does it mean to say that there's
only consciousness
at bottom right nothing outside of
consciousness because no one's ever
experienced
anything outside of consciousness as no
scientist has ever done an experiment
where they were contemplating data
no matter how far removed from our sense
bases you know whether it's they're
looking at the
hubble deep field or they're they're
smashing atoms or whatever that whatever
tools they're using
they're still just experiencing
consciousness and its
various deliverances and
layering their concepts on top of that
so
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
need to 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 all together
certain it's going to work
right they're performing an experiment
they're wondering what's going to happen
they're wondering if their calculations
around the yield are off by orders of
magnitude some of them are still
wondering whether the entire atmosphere
of earth is going to
kind of combust right that the
the the the nuclear chain reaction is
not going to stop
and lo and behold
there was that energy to be released
from within 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
and they are the processes that allowed
us to to emerge
you know from prior life forms in the
first place
to say that it's all a mass 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
the moon as a moon isn't there if no
one's looking at it i'll grant that
because
that's already a kind of fabrication
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
just a 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 so
if if we're indeed living in a
simulation
which i find a compelling thought
experiment uh is it's possible that
there is a kind of
rendering mechanism but not in a silly
way that we think about in video games
but in some kind of more fundamental
physics way
and we have to account for the fact that
it renders
experiences that no one has had yet
that no one has any expectation of
having
it can violate the expectations of
everyone lawfully right and then
some lawful understanding of how why
that's so
it's like um i'm just to bring it back
to mathematics something like certain
numbers are prime
whether we have discovered them or not
right like there's there's there's the
highest prime number
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 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 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
it's okay if reality is bigger than what
we experience
you know and and it has structure that
we can't anticipate and that isn't just
um i mean
again there's a co there's there's
certainly a collaboration between our
minds
and whatever is out there to produce
what we call
you know the stuff you know of life but
um it's not the idea that
it's uh i don't know i mean
there are there are a few stops on the
train of idealism
and kind of new age thinking and and
eastern philosophy that i don't
philosophically i don't see a need to
take i mean the place
experientially and scientifically i feel
like it's it's
it you can get everything you want
acknowledging that consciousness has a
as 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 uh
and you can explore it with with
different degrees of rigor
and 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 about ourselves
from a third person side
neuroscientifically or in any other way
but to me the question is
what if reality the sense i have from
this kind of
you put you play shooters no there's a
physics engine that generate that's
probably
just first person shooter games yes yes
sorry uh not often but yes i mean
there's a physics engine that generates
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 and 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 out there and so the uh the
physics engine
of the universe is just maintaining the
useful
physics the useful reality quote-unquote
uh for us to have a consistent
experience as human beings
but maybe we descendants of apes are
really only understand like 0.0001
of actual physics of reality like this
we can even just start with the
consciousness thing
but maybe our minds are just we're just
too
dumb by design yeah i i i
that truly resonates with me and i'm
surprised it doesn't resonate more with
most
scientists that i talked to but when you
just look at
you look at how close we are to
chimps right and chimps don't know
anything right clearly they have no idea
what's going on right
and then you get us but then you it's
only a subset of human beings
that really understand much of what
we're talking about on any you know
in any area of specialization and if
they all died in their sleep
tonight right you'd be left with people
who might take a thousand years
to rebuild the internet you know or if
ever
i mean literally it's like like you know
and you know i i would i would
extend this to myself i mean there there
are areas of scientific specialization
where i have either no
discernible competence i mean i've spent
no time on it i have not
acquired the tools it would just be an
article of faith for me to think that i
could acquire the tools to actually make
a breakthrough in those areas
um and i mean you know your own area is
one i mean
like you know i i've never spent any
significant amount of time trying to be
a
a programmer but
it's pretty obvious i'm not alan turin
right it's like like if if that were if
that were my capacity
i would have discovered that in in
myself i would i would have found
programming irresistible
my few fault my first fall starts in
in learning i think it was c um
it was just you know i bounced off like
this was not fun i hate
trying to figure out what what you know
the syntax error that's causing this
thing not to compile
was just a fucking awful experience i
hated it right i hated every minute a
minute of it
so it was not um
so if it was just people like me left
like when do we get the internet again
right and we lose
we lose you know we lose the internet
when do we get it again right when do we
get a
anything like a proper science of
information
right you need a claude shannon or an
alan turing
just to plant a flag in the ground right
here and say all right can everyone see
this
even you don't quite know what i'm up to
you all have to come
over here to to make some progress
and you know there are you know hundreds
of topics where that's the case
so we're bare we barely have a purchase
on making anything like discernible
intellectual progress in any generation
and yeah i'm
just a max tegmark makes this point he's
one of the few
people who does in physics
if you if you just to take the
the truth of evolution seriously right
and and
realize that there's nothing about us
that has evolved
to understand reality perfectly i mean
we just we're just not that
kind of ape right there's been no
evolutionary pressure along those lines
so what we are making do
with tools that were designed for
fights with sticks and rocks right
and it's amazing we can do as much as we
can i mean we just you know that you and
i are just sitting here on
on the back of having received an mrna
vaccine
you know that uh certainly changed our
life given what the last year was like
like and it's going to change the world
if rumors of coming miracles are
are borne out i mean if it's now um
seems likely we have a a vaccine coming
for malaria right which has been killing
millions of people a year for as long as
we've been alive
i think it's down to like 800 000 people
a year now because
we've spread so many bed nets around but
it was like two and a half million
people
every year it's amazing what we can do
but yeah i have if in fact the you know
the answer the book of nature
the back of the book of nature is you
understand
0.1 percent of what there is to
understand and half of what you think
you understand is wrong that would not
surprise me
at all it is funny to look at our
evolutionary history
even back to chimps i'm pretty sure even
chimps thought they end
under stood the world well so at every
point
in that timeline of evolutionary
development throughout human history
there's a sense like there's no more you
hear this message over and over
there's no more things to be invented
but a hundred years ago there were
there's a famous story i forget which
physicist
told it but there was there were
physicists telling
their their undergraduate students not
to go into
to get graduate degrees in physics
because basically all the problems had
been solved and this is like around
you know 1915 or so turns out you were
right i'm going to ask you about free
will oh
okay uh you've recently released an
episode 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
yeah yeah
that is as brief and clear
uh so allow me to summarize the summary
tlgr
and 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 what
am i am i good in my summary yeah
this is a this is a line that's a little
hard to
scan for people i i say that it's not
merely that free will
is an illusion the illusion of free will
is an illusion right like there is no
illusion of free will
and that is a unlike many other
illusions
uh that's a
a more fundamental claim it's like
it's not that it's wrong it's it's not
even wrong i mean that's i guess
that was uh i think wolfgang paulie who
derided one of his uh
colleagues or enemies with that uh
um aspersion about his theory
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 we just know it's not a vertical
experience 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 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 it's not 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 vertical way of looking
at it
so there are subject there are kind of
inward
correlates to this and i would say that
the um
[Music]
the sense of self a sense of self and
free will are closely related 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 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 wouldn't call the
illusion of self and 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's totally
compatible
with an absence of free will you don't i
mean coming back to the place we started
you don't know what you're going to
think next you don't know what you're
going to intend
next you don't know what's going to just
occur to you
that you must do next you don't know you
don't know how much you're 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 going to arise you
didn't know that was going to 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 going
to be our anniversary in one week
thought right give him the cascade of
fear
uh give him give him this brilliant idea
for the thing he can buy that's going to
take him no time at all in this this you
know overpowering sense of relief
all of our experiences 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 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
to 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 ration rationale
that is most compelling and therefore
deliberate
behaviorally um
effective uh and
just this and this can drive
some people a little crazy so i i
usually preface
what i say about free will with the
caveat that if thinking about
your mind this way makes you feel
terrible well then
stop you know get you get off the ride
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
just to recognize this about the mind
because
one it re one you realize that you're i
mean
cutting through 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
because when you when you think about
the experience 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 kn