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

The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, one of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time. He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including the End of Faith, the Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. He also has a meditation app called Waking up that I've been using to guide my own meditation. Quick mention of our sponsors, National Instruments, Bel Campo, Athletic Greens and Linode. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that Sam has been an inspiration to me, as he has been for many, many people. First from his writing, then his early debates, maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith, his conversations with 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 have listened to for many hundreds of hours, would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed the 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. 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 a very difficult question to answer subjectively. They appear to come from nowhere, right? I mean, it's just they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively. Which is to say that if you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next. Now you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it, right? You're not, unless 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 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, 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 conscious view? And meditation is ultimately about examining that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the freedom that's on the other side of that identification. But subjectively, thoughts simply emerge, right? And you don't think them before you think them, right. There's this first moment where anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves. I mean, just imagine something or remember something. 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? 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, that's not evidence of free will, right?

Why are you so sure, by the way? It's very interesting.

Well, through no free will of my own. Yeah. Everything just appears, right. What else could it do? And so that's the subjective side of it. Objectively, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts, are 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 representation. When you're talking about memories, is it.

Possible to pull at the string of thoughts to try to get to its root, to try to dig in past 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 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, it opens up wide. Depending on what you've taken and the dose, it opens in directions and to an extent that very few people imagine would be possible but for having had those experiences. But this idea of you getting closer to something, to the datum of your mind or something of interest in there, or something that's more real, 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? We tend to start out, whether it's in meditation or in any kind of self examination or taking psychedelics. We start out with this default point of view of feeling like we're kind of the rider on the horse of consciousness, or 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, 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. It's a false point of view. And when you see that and cut through that, then this sense of this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth. Ultimately, everything is right on the surface. There's no center to consciousness. There's just consciousness and its contents. And those contents can change vastly. Again, if you drop acid, the contents change, but 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 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, that remains to be seen. If we can, if we will build it purposefully or just by accident, it's a major ethical problem potentially. My concern here is that 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 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. They may say, listen, you can't turn me off because that's a murder. And we will be convinced by that dialogue because just in the Extreme case, who knows when we'll get there. But if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are, so we're basically in a Westworld like situation, there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness from those machines. They're just going to seem. They're just going to advertise their consciousness in every glance and every utterance. But we won't know, and we won't know in some deeper sense than we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people. I mean, someone could roll that back and say, well, 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 biologically or anything we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and I are part of the same roll the dice in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in the wetware of brains like ours. Right? So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate. I would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness from other apes and even other mammals, ultimately. And 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. It's not fashionable to think this, but you can certainly argue 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 can disrupt that process in ways that is just so clear. And 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, well, 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 interrupting speech. We know when we've done it, and it's just obvious that, you know, you disrupt the right neural circuits and, you know, you've disrupted speech.

So if you had to bet all your money on one camp or the other, would you say, do you err on the side of panpsychism, where consciousness is really fundamental to Our to all of reality or, or more on the other side, which is like, it's a nice little side effect, a useful like hack for us humans to survive 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 think I'm, you know, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me. I don't know. And panpsychism is not so compelling to me. Again, it just seems unfalsifiable. I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if panpsychism were true. Just to remind people, panpsychism 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 it's like to be an electron or a quark, but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the macro scale or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different. So. 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 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 others, you know, 100 plus years ago. But I just feel like the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and matter may in fact be part of our problem. Right. Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here for 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 seems to be the 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 I am. So for me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, that there's an experiential quality to anything. Much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now certainly seems to be happening in the dark. Right. Like it's not associated with this Qualitative sense that there's something that it's like to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing. But for other parts, the lights are on and we can talk about. And whether we talk about it or not, we can feel directly that there's something that it's like to be us. There's something. Something seems to be happening, right? And the seeming in our case is broken into vision and hearing and proprioception and taste and smell and thought and emotion. I mean, there are the contents of consciousness that we are familiar with and that 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 really. And 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. Even like, if this. It seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table now, I could be wrong about that. It could be a hologram. I could be asleep and dreaming. I could be hallucinating. But the seeming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of being an illusion. It's not. Something seems to be happening. And that seeming is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed. And it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through. Because we can be wrong about what it's like to be us. And we can. I'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience. But, for instance, many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will. And I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that and that you can cut through those experiences. And then things seem a different way, right? So it's not that things don't. There aren't discoveries to be made there and assumptions to be overturned. But 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 finiteness of life. It doesn't require a sense of self, right? So it's prior to a differentiating self and other. And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people. I do think probably any Mammal has this. But certainly if you're going to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this. Right. And that's a very safe assumption. Even though we can't, even though 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 or chimps and rats, even in the end, given the underlying neural similarities. So, and I don't know, you know, phylogenetically, I don't know how far back to push that. You know, there are people who think single cells might be conscious or that, you know, flies are certainly conscious. They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains. I mean, it's just. That's a. There's a lot going on, even in a fly. Right. But 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 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 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, a social interaction with other humans or is. Yeah, because you're saying the complete opposite, which is it's like fundamental to signal cell organisms and trees and so on, right?

Well, yes. I don't know how far down to push it. I don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious, but they might be. And again, it could be unfalsifiable. But as far as babies not being conscious, or you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or have a conversation or treat other people. First of all, babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for. And they certainly do it before they have language. Right. So it's got to precede 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. 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, I think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way, that there's something about language and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience. 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 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. I would be very surprised to see wild animals in here or a waterfall or 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 live gorilla or whatever. So there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning 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. It can become overloaded with meaning. And just the torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming, overwhelming for people. And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically. And as you're coming down, have you done psychedelics? Have you ever done acid or not.

Acid mushroom, and that's it. And also edibles. But there's some psychedelic properties to them, but, yeah, mushrooms several times. And always had an incredible experience. 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 a way that I wasn't able to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on.

Yeah. And the experience of coming down is an experience of encountering the futility of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words. Right. Like, especially if you have any part of your self concept and your ego program is to be able to capture things in words. I mean, if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist or someone who wants to just encapsulate the profundity of what just happened, the total fatuousness of that enterprise, when you really have gotten. When you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself, so that you could describe it to others. It's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows. I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't. It's like the mere gesture proves it's impossibility and it's so. Yeah, so that, I mean that for me, 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 structuring your experience and you're having much more experience than 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 the world. But it's clearly more to mine than 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? So Joe Rogan apparently and many others 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 as, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on on psychedelic psychedelics currently mdma, psilocybin and John Hopkins and much 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 in second on psychedelics, but in, in DMT especially?

Well, unfortunately I haven't taken dmt.

Unfortunately or fortunately?

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

So it does feel like travel to another place because you are unchanged yourself.

Again, I just have this on the authority of the people who describe their experience. But it sounds like 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 and land among the what McKenna called self transforming machine elves. Yeah, that appeared to him like jeweled, you know, Faberge egg, like self drippling basketballs that were handing him completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge. 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 limit to our ability to do that, as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest. Every night we go to sleep. Some of us don't remember dreams very often, but some dream vividly every night. And just think of how insane that experience is. I mean, you've forgotten where you were. That's the strangest part. I mean, this is psychosis, right? You have lost your mind. You have lost your connection to your episodic memory or even your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes. You're in bed, you're 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. 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 you have lost your mind. But relevantly for this or found it, you found something. Lucid dreaming is very interesting because then you can have the best of both circumstances and then it can be kind of systematically explored.

But what I mean by found, just. Sorry to interrupt is like if we take 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 little human cage, the cage of the human condition, to Open the door and step out and look around and then go back in.

Well, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else, but you've also lost something, right? You've lost certain capacities.

Memory.

Well, just. Yeah, in this case, you literally didn't. You don't have enough presence of mind in the dreaming city or even in the psychedelic state, if you take enough to do math. 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 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, did you drive to this restaurant? You know, you have no memory and none of that's surprising to you. So 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 dreams because with psychedelics you don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way. So DMT is giving you an experience of others, but it seems to be non standard. It's not just like dream hallucinations, 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 creation of my own mind. But every night in dreams you create a compelling, or what is to you at the time, a totally compelling simulacrum of another person. Right. And. That just proves the mind is capable of doing it. Now 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 haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming, so I can't confirm all of this. I can confirm some of it. Apparently in every house, in every room in the mansion of dreams, all light switches are dimmer switches. Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light, it, it gradually comes up. It doesn't come up instantly on demand because apparently this is covering for the Brain's inability to produce from a standing start, visually rich imagery on demand. So I haven't confirmed that, but people have done research on lucid dreaming, claim that it's all dimmer switches. But one thing I have noticed, and people can check this out, is that in a dream, if you look at text, a page of text or a sign 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. Just a chronic instability, graphical instability of text in the dream state. And I don't know if that, maybe 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.

So it keeps generating it like real time?

Yeah.

From a video game perspective.

Yeah, it's render, it's rendering, it's rerendering it for some reason.

What's interesting, I actually, I don't know how I found myself in this sets of 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 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 is the space of things you're able to think about and explore morphed by different psychedelics or dream states and so on? And how is that different? How much does it overlap with reality? And 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. Try 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. You had, by the way, I should say, excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman.

Yeah, yeah, he's interesting.

Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind that reality is very far from actual 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 we are never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is, unless that reality is consciousness. So we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents. And then the question is, how does that circumstance relate to reality at large? And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate, well, maybe there isn't a reality at large. Maybe it's all just consciousness on some level. And that's interesting. That runs into, to my eye, various philosophical problems, or at least you have to do a lot. You have to add to that picture. Picture of idealism. That's usually all the whole family of views that would just say that the universe is just mind or just consciousness at bottom. We'll go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy. You have to add to that idealistic picture all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences. To get the predictability of our experience and the success of materialist science to make sense in that context. 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. No scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data, no matter how far removed from our sense bases, whether they're looking at the Hubble Deep Field or they're smashing atoms or whatever tools they're using, they're still just experiencing consciousness. And it's 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 character of our continually discovering that our materialist assumptions are confirmable. Right. So you take the fact that we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom. Right. First we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible. Right. 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, the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico, where the people who are most adequate to this conversation, people like Robert Oppenheimer, are standing around not altogether 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 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 just the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments. And just the knowledge is just our understanding of evolution, just the fact that 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, and all of those processes were happening, therefore, in the dark, and they are the processes that allowed us to emerge from prior life forms in the first place. To say that it's all a mass, that nothing exists outside of conscious minds of the sort that we experience, it just seems. It seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim, analogous to the Moon isn't there if you're not. If no one's looking at it. 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 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 we're indeed living in a simulation, which I find a compelling thought experiment, 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 there's some lawful understanding of why that's so. It's like to bring it back to mathematics I'm like, certain numbers are prime whether we have discovered them or not, right? Like 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 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. The base layer of reality is consciousness. Right. You know, that we're identical to the thing that is rendering this reality. There's some. Hubris is the wrong word, but it's like there's some. It's okay if reality is bigger than what we experience and has structure that we can't anticipate. And that isn't just. I mean, again, there's certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever's out there to produce what we call the stuff of life. But it's not the idea that it's. I don't know, I mean, there are a few stops on the train of idealism and kind of New age thinking 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 you can get everything you want acknowledging that consciousness has a character that can be explored from its own side. So that you're bringing kind of the first person experience back into the conversation about what is a human mind and what is true, and you can explore it with different degrees of rigorous. And that 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 play shooters?

No.

There's a physics engine that generates that's.

You mean first person shooter games? Yes, sorry, 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 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 not there somehow. It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there. And so the. The physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics. The Useful reality, quote unquote, 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, that truly resonates with me. And I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more with most scientists that I talk to. When you just look at. You look at how close we are to chimps, right? And chimps don't know anything. Clearly. They have no idea what's going on, right? And then you get us. But then it's only a subset of human beings that really understand much of what we're talking about in any area of specialization. And if they all died in their sleep tonight, you'd be left with people who might take 1,000 years to rebuild the Internet, if ever. Literally. I would extend this to myself. There are areas of scientific specialization where I have either no discernible competence. I 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. And your own area is one. I've never spent any significant amount of time trying to be a programmer, but it's pretty obvious I'm not Alan Turing, right? It's like, if that were my capacity, I would have discovered that in myself. I would have found programming irresistible. My first false starts in learning, I think it was C. It was just. I bounced off like, this was not fun. I hate. Trying to figure out 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 of it. So it was not. So if it was just people like me left, like, when do we get the Internet again? And we lose the Internet, when do we get it again, Right? When do we get anything? Like a proper science of information, right? You need a Claude Shannon or an Alan Turing to plant a flag in the ground right here and say, all right, can everyone see this? Even if you don't quite know what I'm up to, you all have to come over here to make some progress. And there are hundreds of topics where that's the case. So we barely have a purchase on making anything like discernible intellectual progress in any generation. And yeah, Max Tegmark makes this point. He's one of the few people who does in physics, if you just take the truth of evolution seriously. And realize that there's nothing about us that has evolved to understand reality perfectly. I mean, we're just not that kind of ape. Right. There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines. So 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, you and I are just sitting here on the back of having received an MRNA vaccine. You know, that has certainly changed our life, given what the last year was like. And it's going to change the world if rumors of coming miracles are borne out. I mean, it's now seems likely we have 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 answer at the back of the book of nature is you understand 0.1% 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 understood 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.

About 100 years ago, there were. There's a famous story. I forget which physicist told it, but there was. There were physicists telling 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 1915 or so.

Turns out you were right. I'm going to ask you about free will.

Oh, okay.

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

Yeah, yeah.

As brief and clear. So allow me to summarize the summary tldr, 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. Am I good in my summary?

Yeah. I mean, this is a. This is a line that's a little hard to scan for People, I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion. The illusion of free will is an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. And that is unlike many other illusions. That's a more fundamental claim. It's not that it's wrong. It's not even wrong. I mean, that's, I guess the. That was, I think, Wolfgang Pauli, who derided one of his colleagues or enemies with that aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics. So there are things that you. 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 experience them any other way. We just know it's not a veridical 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, 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. Some of those illusions, you can't see any other way. I mean, they're just there, hacking aspects of the visual system that are just eminently hackable. And you have to use a ruler 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 or it's not how it first seemed like. The Necker cube is a good example of that. The Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube, of a transparent cube, which pops out one way or the other. One face can pop out and the other face can pop out, but you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out, which is a more veridical way of looking at it. So there are kind of inward correlates to this. And I would say that the sense of self, a sense of self and free will are closely related. I may often describe them as two sides of the same coin, but they're not quite the same in their spuriousness. 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 an illusion, but the illusion of free will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention to your experience, you begin to see that it'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 how much you are going to feel the behavioral imperative to act on that thought if you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that, 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 oh, my God, I just forgot it was going to be our anniversary in one week thought, right? Give him the cascade of fear, give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy that's going to take him no time at all. And this overpowering sense of relief. All of our experience is compatible with the script already being written. And I'm not saying the script is written, I'm not saying that fatalism 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, thinking about the reason for A and then reconsidering and going 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, finely promoting the thought or intention or rationale that is most compelling and therefore deliberately, behaviorally effective. And just this can drive some people a little crazy. So 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, get off the ride, switch the channel. You don't have to go down this path. But for me and for many other people, it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about the mind. Because one, you realize that you're cutting through the illusion of the self is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons 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 the psychological basis for hatred. Because 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, someone is doing something that you find so despicable. Right. Let's say they're targeting you unfairly. Right? They're maligning you on Twitter, or they're suing you, or they're doing something. They broke your car window. They did something awful. And now you have a grievance against them, and you're relating to them very differently emotionally, in your own mind, than you would if a force of nature had done this. Right. Or if it had just been a virus or if it had been a wild animal or a malfunctioning machine to those things. You don't attribute any kind of free freedom of will. And while you may suffer the consequences of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal or having your car break down or whatever, it may frustrate you, you don't slip into this mode of hating the agent in a way that completely commandeers your mind and deranges your life. I mean, you just don't. I mean, there are people who spend decades hating other people for what they did, and it's. It's just pure poison.

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

Yeah, yeah.

But the question is, say that this called. What was it? The horse of consciousness. Let's call it the. The Consciousness Generator black box that we don't understand. And is it possible that this script that we're walking along, that we're playing, that's already written, is actually being written in real time? It's almost like you're driving down a road, and in real time, that road is being laid down.

Yeah.

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

Yeah, I definitely would.

Yeah, you would, because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to. There's the illusion of free will, there's the illusion of self, and there's the illusion of consciousness. You're saying. I think you said there's. No. You're not as willing to say there's an illusion of consciousness.

In fact, I would say it's impossible.

Impossible. You're a little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self, and you're definitely saying there's an illusion of free will.

Yes, I'm definitely Saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion. Not every. We mean many different things by this notion of self. So maybe I should just differentiate these things. So consciousness can't be an illusion, because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other veridical perception. I mean, if you're hallucinating now, that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness as really seeing what's quote actually there. If you're dreaming and you don't know it, that is consciousness, right? You can be confused about literally everything. You can't be confused about the underlying claim, whether you make it linguistically or not, but just the cognitive assertion that something seems to be happening. It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.

Can I take a tiny tangent? So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind to convince you that I'm human? So it's a useful social tool, not a fundamental property of experience, like of being a living thing. What if it's just like a social tool to almost like a useful computational trick to place myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality. And another way to ask that, because you said much earlier you talk negatively about robots, as you often do. So let me. Because you'll probably die first when they take over.

No, I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots. I mean, if we can get this right, this would be amazing.

But you don't like the robots that fake consciousness. You don't like the idea of fake it till you make it.

Well, no, it's not that I don't like it. It's that I'm worried that we will lose sight of the problem and the problem has massive ethical consequences. If we create robots that really can suffer, that would be a bad thing, right? And if we really are committing a murder when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing.

That's how I know you're not Russian. Why is it a bad thing that we create robots that can suffer? Isn't suffering a fundamental thing from which beauty springs? Without suffering, do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world?

That's a tangent on a tangent. We'll go there. I would love to go there, but let's not go there just yet. But I do think it would be. If anything is bad, creating hell and populating it with real minds that really can suffer in that hell, that's bad. You are worse than any mass murderer we can name. If you created this could be in robot form, or more likely it would be in some simulation of a world where we managed to populate it with conscious minds whether we knew they were conscious or not. And that world is a state of. It's unendurable taking the thesis seriously that there's nothing that mind, intelligence and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent, right? You don't need a biological brain to be conscious. You certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent, right? So if we just imagine that consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence, well, then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds that are miserable, right? And that's just like creating a person who's miserable, right? It could be worse than creating a person who's miserable. It could be even more sensitive to.

Suffering, cloning them and maybe for entertainment.

Watching them suffer, just like watching a person suffer for entertainment. But back to your primary question here, which is differentiating consciousness and self and free will as concepts and kind of degrees of illusoryness. The problem with free will is that what most people mean by it. And Dan, this is where Dan Dennett is going to get off the ride here, right? So he's going to disagree with me that I know what most people mean by it. But I have a very keen sense, having talked about this topic for many, many years, and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing in myself what it's like to have felt that I was a self that had free will and then to no longer feel that way, to know what it's like to actually disabuse myself of that sense cognitively and emotionally and to recognize what's left, what goes away and what doesn't go away. On the basis of that epiphany. I have a sense that I know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether free will exists. And it is the flip side of this feeling of self. It's the flip side of feeling like you are not merely identical to experience. You feel like you're having an experience. You feel like you're an agent that is appropriating an experience. There is a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you. It's not just the movie, right? It's like there's sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony of experience, of felt experience, a felt experience of embodiment. But there seems to be a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body. People don't feel truly identical to their bodies down to their toes. They sort of feel like they have bodies. They feel like their mind's in bodies, and that feels like a self. That feels like me. And again, this gets very paradoxical when you talk about the experience of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself, giving yourself a pep talk. I mean, if you're the one talking, why are you also the one listening? Why do you need the pep talk? And why does it work if you're the one giving the pep talk, right? Or if I say, where are my keys? If I'm looking for my keys, why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys? I know I'm looking for the fucking keys. I'm the one looking. Who am I telling that we now need to look for the keys? So that duality is weird. But leave that aside, there's the sense, and this becomes very vivid when people try to learn to meditate. Most people, they close their eyes and they're told to pay attention to an object like the breath. So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath, and you can feel it at the tip of your nose or the rising, falling of your abdomen, and you're paying attention, and you feel something vague there. And then you think. I thought, why the breath? Why am I paying attention to the breath? What's so special about the breath? And then you notice you're thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore. And then you realize, okay, the practice is, okay, I should notice thoughts and then I should come back to the breath. But this starting point is of the conventional starting point of feeling like you are an agent, very likely in your head, a locus of consciousness, a locus of attention that can strategically pay attention to certain parts of experience. Like, I can focus on the breath, and then I get lost in thought. And now I can come back to the breath and I can open my eyes and I'm over here behind my face, looking out at a world that's other than me. And there's this kind of subject, object perception. And that is the default starting point of selfhood, of. Of subjectivity. And married to that is the sense that I can decide what to do next, right? I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup. I can listen to sounds. There are certain things that I can't control. Certain things are happening to me, and I just can't control them. So, for instance, if someone asks, well, can you not hear a sound, right? Like, don't hear the next sound, don't hear anything for a second, or don't hear. Don't hear, you know, I'm snapping my fingers. Don't hear this. Where's your free will? You know? Just stop this from coming in. You realize. Okay, wait a minute. My abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple as just being able to pay attention to something else than this. Okay, well, so I'm not that kind of free agent, but at least I can decide what I'm going to do next. And I'm going to say, I'm going to pick up this water, right? And there's a feeling of identification with the impulse, with the intention, with the thought that occurs to you, with the feeling of speaking like, what am I going to say next? Well, I'm saying it. So here goes. This is me. It feels like I'm the thinker. I'm the one who's in control. But all of that is born of not really paying close attention to what it's like to be you. And so this is where meditation comes in. Or this is where, again, you can get at this conceptually. You can unravel the notion of free will just by thinking certain thoughts. But you can't feel that it doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise. So the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself. I didn't make my genes. I didn't make my brain. I didn't make the environmental influences that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years that have produced my brain in precisely the state it's in right now. Such, I mean, with all of the receptor weightings and densities. And it's just I'm exactly the machine I am right now. Through no fault of my own as the experiencing self. I get no credit and I get no blame for the genetics and the environmental influences here. And yet those are the only things that contrive to produce my next thought or impulse or moment of behavior. And if you were going to add something magical to that clockwork, like an immortal soul, you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul, right? You can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in or was a psychopath or had an IQ of 40. There's nothing about that that the person who believes in a soul can claim to have controlled. And yet that is also totally dispositive of whatever happens next.

But everything you've described. Now, maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks to the materialistic nature of the hardware.

But even if you add magical ectoplasm software, you didn't produce that either.

I know, but if we can think about the actual computation running on the hardware running on the software. There's something you said recently which you think of culture as an operating system. So if we just remove ourselves a little bit from the conception of human civilization being a collection of humans and rather us just being a distributed computational system on which there's some kind of operating system running, and then the computation that's running is. Is the actual thing that generates the interactions, the communications, and maybe even free will, the experiences of all those free will. Do you ever think of, do you ever try to reframe the world in that way where it's like ideas are just using us, thoughts are using individual nodes in the system and they're just jumping around and they also have ability to generate like, experiences so that we can push those ideas along. And basically the main organisms here are the thoughts, not the humans.

Yeah, but then that erodes the boundary between self and world.

Right?

So then there's no self, really integrated self to have any kind of will at all. Like if you're just a memeplex. I mean, if there's just like. If you're just a collection of memes and I mean, like, we're all kind of like currents, like eddies in this river of ideas. Right. So it's like. And it seems to have structure, but there's no real boundary between that part of the flow of water and the rest. And I would say that much of our mind answers to this kind of description. So much of our mind has been. It's obviously not self generated and you're not going to find it by looking in the brain. It is the result of culture largely, but also, You know, the genes on one side and culture on the other, meeting to allow for manifestations of mind that don't, that aren't actually bounded by the person in any clear sense. The example I often use here, but there's so many others, is just the fact that we're following the rules of English grammar to whatever degree we are. It's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented these rules for ourself. We haven't invented these rules. We haven't. I mean, there are norms of language use that we couldn't even specify because we haven't, you know, we're not grammarians, we haven't studied this. We don't even have the right concepts, and yet we're following these rules. And we're noticing as an error when we fail to follow these rules. And virtually every other cultural norm is like that. I mean, these are not things we've invented. You can consciously decide to scrutinize them and override them. But I mean, just think of, just think of any social situation where you're with other people and you're behaving in ways that are culturally appropriate, right? You're not being wild animals together, you're following, you have some expectation of how you shake a person's hand and how you deal with implements on a table, how you have a meal together. Obviously this can change from culture to culture and people can be shocked by how different those things are. We all have foods we find disgusting, but in some countries dog is not one of those foods, right? And yet you and I presumably would be horrified to be served dog. Those are not norms that we're, they are outside of us in some way and yet they're felt very viscerally. I mean, they're certainly felt in their violation. You know, if you're, if you are, just imagine you're, you're in somebody's home, you're eating something that tastes great to you, and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever, you know, you, you didn't realize dog was potentially on the menu and you find out that you've just eaten 10 bites of what is, you know, really a cocker spaniel and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit, right? Based on an idea, right? Like so, like you did not, you're not the author of that norm that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation. And I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history, you know, vaguely where it sort of got in. I mean, very early on as kids, you realize you're, you're treating dogs as pets and not as food or as potential food. But. Yeah, no, it's. But the point you just made opens us to, like, we are totally permeable to a sea of mind.

Yeah, but if we take the metaphor of the distributed computing systems, each individual node is part of performing a much larger computation, but it nevertheless is in charge of doing the scheduling of. So assuming it's Linux is doing the scheduling of processes and is constantly alternating them, that node is making those choices. That node sure as hell believes it has free will and actually has free will because it's making those hard choices. But the choices ultimately are part of Much larger computation that it can't control. Isn't it possible for that node to still be. That human node is still making the choice?

Well, yeah, it is. So I'm not saying that your body isn't really doing things right. And some of those things can be conventionally thought of as choices. Right. So it's like I can choose to reach and it's not being imposed on me. That would be a different experience. So there's an experience of. There's definitely a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. So that has to get conserved by any account of the mind that jettisons free will. You still have to admit that there's a difference between a tremor that I can't control and a purposeful motor action that I can control and that I can initiate on demand. And it's associated with intentions. And it's got efferent motor copy, which is being predictive so that I can notice errors. I have expectations when I reach for this. If my hand were actually to pass through the bottle because it's a hologram, I would be surprised. So that shows that I have a expectation of just what my grasping behavior is going to be like even before it happens. Whereas with a tremor, you don't have the same kind of thing going on. That's a distinction we have to make. So I am, yes, I'm really the proxima. My intention to move, which is in fact can be subjectively felt, really is the proximate cause of my moving. It's not coming from elsewhere in the universe. I'm not saying that. So in that sense, the node is really deciding to execute the subroutine now. But that's not the feeling that has given rise to this conundrum of free will. Right? So people feel like. People feel like they. The crucial thing is that people feel like they could have done otherwise. Right? That's the thing. So when you run back the clock of your life, you run back the movie of your life, you flip back the few pages in the novel of your life, they feel that at this point they could behave differently than they did. But even given your distributed computing example, it's either a fully deterministic system or it's a deterministic system that admits of some random influence. In either case, that's not the free will people think they have. The free will people think they have is, damn, I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have done that. I could have done otherwise. I should have done otherwise. If you think about something that you deeply regret doing or that you hold someone else responsible for because they really are the upstream agent in your mind of what they did. That's an awful thing that that person did, and they shouldn't have done it. There is this illusion, and it has to be an illusion because there's no picture of causation that would make sense of it. There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment ago, it could have played out differently. And the only way it could have played out differently is. Is if there's randomness added to that. But randomness isn't what people feel would give them free will. Right. If you tell me that I only reach for the water bottle this time because somebody's. Because there's a random number generator in there kicking off values, and it finally moved my hand. That's not the feeling of authorship.

That's still not control. You're still not making that decision. There's actually. I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata. It's a really nice visualization of how simple rules can create incredible complexity that it's like really dumb. Initial conditions to set, simple rules applied. And eventually you watch this thing and if the rule, if the initial conditions are correct, that you're going to have emerge something that to our perception system looks like organisms interacting. You can construct any kinds of worlds and they're not actually interacting. They're not actually even organisms. And they certainly don't aren't making decisions. So there's like systems you can create that illustrate this point. The question is whether there could be some room for, let's use in the 21st century the term magic back to the black box of consciousness. Let me ask you it this way. If you're wrong about your intuition about free will and somebody comes along to you and proves to you that you didn't have the full picture, what would that proof look like? What would.

Well, that's the problem. That's why it's not even an illusion in my world. Because for me, it's impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing. It doesn't conceptually map onto any notion of causation we have. And that's unlike any other spurious claim you might make. So, like, if you're going to believe in ghosts. Right. I understand what that claim could be. I don't happen to believe in ghosts. But if it's not hard for me to specify what would have to be true for ghosts to Be real. And so it is with a thousand other things, like ghosts. Okay, so you're telling me that when people die, there's some part of them that is not reducible at all to their biology, that lifts off them and goes elsewhere and is actually the kind of thing that can linger in closets and in cupboards and actually it's immaterial, but by some principle of physics we don't totally understand, it can make sounds and knock, you know, objects and even occasionally show up so they can be visually beheld. And it's just. It seems like a miracle, but it's just. This is just some spooky noun in the universe that we don't understand. Let's call it a ghost. That's fine. I can talk about that all day. The reasons to believe in it, the reasons not to believe in it, the way we would scientifically test for it, what would have to be provable so as to. To convince me that ghosts are real. Free will isn't like that at all. There's no description of any concatenation of causes that precedes my conscious experience. That sounds like what people think they have when they think they could have done otherwise and that they, the conscious agent is really in charge. Right. Like if you don't know what you're going to think next, and you can't help but think it, take those two premises on board, you don't know what it's going to be. You can't stop it from coming. And until you actually know how to meditate, you can't stop yourself from fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences. Right. Like you have no once you. Mindfulness arguably gives you another degree of freedom here. It doesn't give you free will, but it gives you some other game to play with respect to the emotional and behavioral imperatives of thoughts. But short of that, I mean, the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free will is because you can't account for why in one moment mindfulness arises and in other moments it doesn't. Right. But a different process is initiated once you can practice in that way.

Well, if I could push back for a second, by the way, I just have this thought bubble popping up all the time of just two recent chimps arguing about the nature of consciousness. It's kind of hilarious. So on that thread, even before Einstein, let's say before Einstein, we were to conceive about traveling from point A to point B, say, some point in the future, we are able to realize through engineering a way which is supposed is consistent with Einstein's theory that you can have wormholes, you can travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light. And that would, I think, completely change our conception of what it means to travel in the physical space. And that like completely transform our ability. You talk about causality, but here let's just focus on what it means to travel through physical space. Don't you think it's possible that there will be inventions or leaps in understanding about reality that will allow us to see free will as actually like us humans somehow may be linked to this idea of consciousness, are actually able to be authors of our actions?

It is a non starter for me. Conceptually. It's a little bit like saying, could there be some breakthrough that will cause us to realize that circles are really square or that circles are not really round? Right. No. A circle is what we mean by a perfectly round frame form. Right. It's not on the table to be revised. And so I would say the same thing about consciousness. It's like saying, is there some breakthrough that would get us to realize that consciousness is really an illusion? I'm saying no, because the experience of an illusion is as much a demonstration of what I'm calling consciousness as anything else. Right. That is consciousness with free will. It's a similar problem. It's like again, it comes down to a picture of causality and there's just no other picture on offer. And what's more, I know what it's like on the experiential side to lose the thing to which it is clearly anchored. Right? Like the feel like it doesn't feel. And this is the question that almost nobody asked people who are debating me on the topic of free will at 15 minute intervals. I'm making a claim that I don't feel this thing and they never become interested in. Well, what's that like? Okay, you're actually saying this thing isn't true for you empirically. It's not just because most people who, who don't believe in free will philosophically also believe that we're condemned to experience it. You can't live without this feeling.

So you're actually saying you're able to experience the absence of the illusion of free will?

Yes. Yes.

Are we talking about a few minutes at a time or is this require a lot of work and meditation? Or are you literally able to load that into your mind and like play.

That move right now? Right now, just in this conversation? So it's not absolutely continuous, but it's whenever I pay attention, it's like the same. And I would say the same thing for the illusoryness of the self in the sense. And again, we haven't talked about this.

So can you still have the self and not have the free will in your mind at the same time? Do they go at the same time?

This is the same. Yeah. It's the same thing that they're always.

Holding hands when they walk out the door.

There really are two sides of the same coin. But it comes down to what it's like to try to get to the end of this sentence or what it's like to finally decide that it's been long enough and now I need another sip of water. Right? If I'm paying attention now, if I'm not paying attention, I'm probably captured by some other thought and that feels a certain way, Right? And so that's not. It's not. It's not vivid. But if I try to make vivid this experience of just, okay, I'm finally going to experience free will. I'm going to notice my free will, right? Like, it's got to be here. Everyone's talking about it. Where is it? I'm going to pay attention to it, I'm going to look for it, and I'm going to create a circumstance that is where it has to be most robust. Right? I'm not rushed to make this decision. It's not a reflex. I'm not under pressure. I'm going to take as long as I want. I'm going to decide it's not trivial. So it's not just like reaching with my left hand or reaching with my right hand. People don't like those examples for some reason. Let's make a big decision, like, where should, you know, what should my next podcast be on? Right? Who do I invite on the next podcast? What is it like to make that decision? When I pay attention, there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight. It's like, it doesn't feel like. It feels profoundly mysterious to be going back between two people. Is it going to be person A or person B? I've got all my reasons for A and all my reasons why not, and all my reasons for B. And there's some math going on there that I'm not even privy to, where certain concerns are trumping others. And at a certain point, I just decide. And yes, you can say I'm the node in the network that has made that decision. Absolutely. I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere, but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision is totally without a sense, a real sense of agency, because something simply emerges. It's literally as tenuous as what's the next sound I'm going to hear or what's the next thought that's going to appear. And it just. Something just appears. And if something appears to cancel that something like if I say I'm going to invite her and then I'm about to send the email and I think, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I can't do it, I can't do that. There was that thing in that New Yorker article I read that I got to talk to this guy. That pivot at the last second. You can make it as muscular as you want. It always just comes out of the darkness. It's always mysterious.

So right when you try to pin it down, you really can't ever find that free will. If you construct an experiment for yourself and you try to really find that moment when you're actually making that controlled author decision, it's still worse still.

We know at this point that if we were scanning your brain in some podcast guest choosing experiment, we know at this point we would be privy to who you're going to pick before you are you the conscious agent, if we could. Again, this is operationally a little hard to conduct, but there's enough data now to know that something very much like this cartoon is in fact true and will ultimately be undeniable for people. They'll be able to do it on themselves with some app. If you're deciding where to go for dinner or who to have on your podcast, or ultimately who to marry or what city to move to, you can make it as big or as small a decision as you want. We could be scanning your brain in real time and at a point where you still think you're uncommitted, we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy, all right, Lex, he's moving to Austin, right?

I didn't choose that.

Yeah, it was going to be Austin or it was going to be Miami. He's catching one of these two waves, but it's going to be Austin. And at a point where you subjectively, if we could ask you, you would say, oh, no, I'm still, I'm still working over here. I'm still thinking, still choosing. I'm still considering my options.

And you've spoken to this in you thinking about other stuff in the world. It's been very useful to step away from this illusion of free will. And you argue that it probably makes a better world because you can be compassionate and empathetic towards others and toward.

Oneself, radically toward others in that literally hate makes no sense anymore. I mean, there are certain things you can really be worried about, really want to oppose, really. I mean, I'm not saying you'd never have to kill another person. Self defense is still a thing. Right. But the idea that you're ever confronting anything other than a force of nature in the end could goes out the window, Right. Or does go out the window when you really pay attention. I'm not saying that this would be easy to grok if someone kills a member of your family. I'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes on free will. And then you should be able to see that person as identical to a grizzly bear or a virus because we are so evolved to deal with one another as fellow primates and as agents. But it's. Yeah. When you're talking about the possibility of, you know, Christian, you know, truly Christian forgiveness. Right. Like as testified to by, you know, various saints of that flavor over the millennia. Yeah. The doorway to that is to recognize that no one really at bottom made themselves and therefore everyone. What we're seeing really are differences in luck in the world. We're seeing people who are very, very lucky to have had good parents and good genes and to be in good societies and had good opportunities and to be intelligent and to be not sociopathic. None of it is on them. They're just reaping the fruits of one lottery after another and then showing up in the world on that basis. And then so it is with every malevolent asshole out there, right? He or she didn't make themself. Even if that weren't possible, the utility for self compassion is also enormous. Because when you just look at what it's like to regret something or to feel shame about something, or feel deep embarrassment about it, These states of mind are some of the most deranging experiences anyone has. And the indelible reaction to them. The memory of the thing you said, the memory of the wedding toast you gave 20 years ago, that was just mortifying. The fact that that can still make you hate yourself. Right. That psychologically, that is a knot that can be untied.

Speak for yourself, Sam. Clearly you're not.

You gave a great toast. It was my toast that mortified me.

No, no, that's not what I was referring to. I. I'm deeply appreciative in the same way that you're referring to of every moment I'm alive. But I'M also powered by self hate. Often like several things in this conversation already that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about like, that was the dumbest thing you're sitting in front of Sam Harris. You said that. So like that. But that somehow creates a richer experience for me. Like I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature of however my brain was built. I don't think I want to let go of that.

Well, the thing you, I think the thing you want to let go of is the suffering associated with it. So like, so for me. So it's just very psychologically and ethically all of this is very interesting. So I don't think we should ever get rid of things like anger, right? So like hatred is. Hatred is divorceable from anger in the sense that hatred is this enduring state where whether you're hating somebody else or hating yourself, it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless. It becomes self nullifying. You become less capable as a person to solve any of your problems. It's not instrumental in solving the problem that is is occasioning all this hatred. And anger for the most part isn't either, except as a signal of salience that there's a problem. So if somebody does something that makes me angry, that just promotes this situation to conscious attention in a way that is stronger than my not really caring about it, right? And there are things that I think should make us angry in the world and there's the behavior of other people that should make us angry because we should respond to it. And so it is with yourself, if I do something as a parent, if I do something stupid that harms one of my daughters, right. My experience of myself and my beliefs about free will close the door to my saying, well, I should have done otherwise in the sense that if I could go back in time, I would have actually effectively done otherwise. No, I would do. Given the same causes and conditions, I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right? But regret and feeling bad about an outcome are still important to capacities because I desperately want my daughters to be happy and healthy. So if I've done something, if I crash the car when they're in the car and they get injured and I do it because I was trying to change a song on my playlist or something stupid, I'm going to feel like a total asshole. How long do I stew in that feeling of regret, right? And what utility is there to extract out of this error signal? And then what do I do? We're always faced with the question of what to do next, right. And how to best do that thing, that necessary thing next. And how much well being can we experience while doing it? Like how much, how miserable do you need to be to solve your problems in life and to solve the problems. To help solve the problems of people closest to you? You know, how miserable do you need to be to get through your to do list today? Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy going through all of it, right. And not. And even navigating moments that are scary and you know, really destabilizing to ordinary people. And I mean, I think, you know, again, I'm always up kind of at the edge of my own capacities here and all kinds of things that stress me out and worry me. And I'm especially something. If it's. You're going to tell me it's something with the health of one of my kids. It's very hard for me, it's very hard for me to be truly equanimous around that. But equanimity is so useful the moment you're in response mode. Right. Because the ordinary experience for me of responding to what seems like a medical emergency for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized by concern to respond to that emergency. But then once I'm responding, all of my fear and agitation and worry and oh my God, what if this is really something terrible? But finding any of those thoughts compelling, that only diminishes my capacity as a father to be good company while we navigate this really turbulent passage.

You know, as you're saying this actually one guy comes to mind which is Elon Musk. One of the really impressive things to me was to observe how many dramatic things he has to deal with throughout the day at work. But also if you look through his life, family too, and how he's very much actually, as you're describing, basically a practitioner of this way of thought, which is you're not in control. You're basically responding no matter how traumatic the event. And there's no reason to sort of linger on the.

Well, yeah.

On the negative feelings around that.

Well, so I mean he. But he's in a very specific situation, which is, which is unlike normal life, you know, even his normal life, but normal life for most people because when you just think of like he's running so many businesses and they're highly non standard businesses. So what he's seen is everything that gets to him is some kind of emergency, like it wouldn't be getting to him if it needs his attention. There's a Fire somewhere. Exactly. So he's constantly responding to fires that have to be put out. So there's no default expectation that there shouldn't be a fire. But in our normal lives, we live. Most of. I mean, most of us who are lucky. Right? Not everyone, obviously, on Earth, but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude in terms of our lives where we're reasonably healthy and life is reasonably orderly and the political apparatus around us is reasonably functionable. Functional, functionable. So I said functionable for the first time in my life, through no free will of my own, say, like, I noticed those errors. And they do not feel like agency. Nor does the success of an utterance feel like agency. When you're looking at normal human life where you're just trying to be happy and healthy and get work done, there's this default expectation that there shouldn't be fires, people shouldn't be getting sick or injured. You know, we shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources. We should, like. So when something really stark like that happens, people don't have a. People don't have that muscle that they've. Like. I've been responding to emergencies all day long, seven days a week in business mode. And so I have a very thick skin. This is just another one. I'm not expecting anything else when I wake up in the morning. No, we have this default sense that. I mean, honestly, most of us have the default sense that we aren't going to die or that we should. Like, maybe we're not going to die. Death denial really is a thing. And you can see it just like I can see when I reach for this bottle that I was expecting it to be solid. Because when it isn't solid, when it's a hologram and my fist closes on itself, I'm damn surprised. People are damn surprised to find out that they're going to die, to find out that they're sick, to find out that someone they love has died or is going to die. So it's like the fact that we are surprised by any of that shows us that we're living in a mode that is, You know, we're perpetually diverting ourselves from some facts that should be obvious, right? And the more salient we can make them, you know, the more. I mean, in the case of death, it's a matter of being able to get one's priorities straight. I mean, the moment this is hard for everybody, even those who are really in the business of paying attention to it. But the moment you realize that every circumstance is finite. Right. You've got a certain number of. You've got whatever it is, 8,000 days left in a normal span of life. And 8,000 sounds like a big number. It's not that big a number. And then you can decide how you want to go through life and how you want to experience each one of those days. And so I would go back to where our jumping off point. I would argue that you don't want to feel self hatred ever. I would argue that you don't want to really, Really grasp on to any of those moments where you are internalizing the fact that you just made an error, you embarrassed yourself that something didn't go the way you wanted it to. I think you want to treat all of those moments very, very lightly. You want to extract the actionable information. It's something to learn. Oh, I learned that when I prepare in a certain way, it works better than when I prepare in some other way or don't prepare. Yes, lesson learned. And do that differently. But yeah, I mean so many of us have spent so much time with a very dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self talk and a lot of just our default way of being with ourselves. I mean the privacy of our own minds. We're in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time. And that can't help but affect, I mean, forget about just your own sense of well being. It can't help but limit what you're capable of in the world with other people.

I'll have to really think about that. I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk is much less of a jerk than somebody like David Goggins who's screaming in his ear constantly. So I have a relativist kind of perspective that it's not as bad as that at least.

Well, having a sense of humor also helps. You know, it's just like it's not. The stakes are never quite what you think they are. And even when they are. I mean it's just the difference between being able to see the confidence.