#144 Sam Harris - Spirituality for Atheists.

Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you. I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions, because there will be an extensive Q&A, and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is in the description, and I hope to see you there. Sam Harris, welcome back to the show. Oh, thank you. Great to see you, Alex. Do you think that spirituality is still a dirty word in the sort of secular community? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think it's even a dirty word in my brain, though I tried to rehabilitate it for my book on the topic. I think I burnt a fair number of words trying to take the shades of, at least Abrahamic religion off of it, and Greek mysticism, et cetera. It has unfortunate associations, but the problem is we don't really have a good secular alternative that captures the depth that is there, and that is rightly promised by pointing in that direction. But it doesn't immediately haul into the conversation, all the spooky stuff of the new age, and all of the dogmatic stuff of organized religion. I wonder if there is a better word. Your book waking up is more than 10 years old now, and the first chapter is called Spirituality, and the subtitle is something like Spirituality without religion. Yeah, and I took that good whack at rehabilitating the word, but I don't think I was successful even for myself. No, that's what I was wondering is that in the 10 years, since then, I imagine at the time you raised a few eyebrows of people being like, hold on, aren't you the atheist guy, the really atheist guy? But I wanted to, over the past sort of 10 years, you've noticed any kind of shift or a people in the context in which you otherwise speak, still sort of look at that part of your work with a bit of suspicion. Well, I think there are probably some people who look at that whole area of interest as being suspect, you know, meditation and the contemplative life, and just the very notion that introspection can deliver anything of interest about the nature of the mind. I mean, that is, there's a bias in science around that, although that, I think, has eroded a fair amount in recent decades. But, yeah, I mean, I just noticed that I tend to shy away from the term spiritual or spirituality anyway, even though I tried to press into service in that book. I also use contemplative, you know, phenomenal, phenomenological, although no one really knows what that means when you use it. You know, that the thing that one wants to eat and that one wants to indicate here is that there is a a primacy of experience, right? The first person's perspective is really the only one we can ever fully adopt, even though we can, you know, intersubjectively talk about the third person perspective. And it admits of exploration directly. I mean, you can discover more of what it's like to be you by paying attention in certain ways, or by taking certain drugs or having unusual experiences, going into the dark for a week, you know, that people are doing dark retreats now, right? Which is kind of an extreme measure, but there's changes to be had to, you know, within this continuum of experience that reveal, if nothing about the cosmos at large, they reveal a lot about the type of experience that one can have, right? It's just the possibilities of experience. I mean, that really is indisputable. Whatever those experiences actually mean, or should mean for our intellectual lives. As I've been getting more interested in the philosophy of mind and consciousness, I've noticed quite a reticence amongst your materialist atheist type, even to sort of take the non-reductive, strictly scientific approach seriously. And I think there's a bit of an analogy here and that that kind of person might also just be unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of knowledge through self-reflection, that is knowledge that you get sort of inwardly, rather than externally through empiricism. And yet at the same time, I agree that quite compellingly, there are just states of experience, which are known very thoroughly through internal reflection, and also unavoidably and informatively. So given that, what do you think accounts for the reticence of so many people to take reflective knowledge seriously? Well, I mean, there's a range of capacity in this regard, talent in this regard, which I do think explains a fair amount. Some people are just not musical, to use an analogy in this way. And there's a very direct analogy to be made to somebody who's just not musical. We might have talked about this last time. I don't have any real discernible musical talent. Life assures me that I'm tone deaf, even though an occasional rendition of happy birthday, at least gets attempted to prove her wrong. But so what does it like to not be musical? And to really hit to be closed by sheer, just the contingent fact of your own lack of talent, to just how deep that domain goes. And spirituality, for lack of a better word, has a similar kind of property to it, which is there are experiences that are readily available to those who want to pay attention in the necessary ways. But for those without the talent, it can be very slow going. It can be very difficult to -- you're given the instruction, well, let's say, to just pay attention to your -- close your eyes and pay attention to your breathing. And every time you get lost and thought, just come back to the breathing. Right now, here's how the bell curve of aptitude might express itself along the lines of that instruction. If you're super talented, you have an aptitude for being concentrated and breaking the spell of identification with discursive thought readily. The moment you're given that instruction, you might plunge into a drug-like experience where you're just -- you find yourself in the well of pure being very, very quickly. So the sense of having a body can disappear. Thoughts can cease. There can just be this experience of pure consciousness without apparent boundary. If you're really lucky, you can totally lose your sense of self, like the sense of subject object, you have a splitting of experience where there appears in the usual case to always be an observer of experience in addition to the experience. That can go away entirely and there can just be this sort of unified condition of pure experience. But in this case, much of your sensory experience will fall away and it's just kind of this ocean of bliss, really. I mean, there's lots of positive affect comes in here once you get a little concentrated. And so if you're someone for whom that happens, when I tell you to just pay attention to the breath and you get lost in thought, there's really no convincing need it, right? Okay, there's obviously there's something worth paying attention to here. And it's the sort of something that at least strikes a tangent to the millennia of conversation we have had about spirituality and religion and God and all of that. What was my direct heart talking about? What was the Buddha talking about? Well, it's certainly this kind of experience is relevant. But if you're on the other side of the bell curve here, what you'll find is when I say, "Okay, close your eyes and pay attention to your breath," you'll immediately encounter doubts about what's the point of that. It's just the breath. I've been breathing my whole life. There's nothing to discover there. What's this guy up to? And then if you can be convinced to try it, and it will be so hard for you to do that you won't even notice that you have failed. In the worst case, the person will think, "Yeah, well, I'm aware of the breath, but it's boring, there's nothing really happening. I can feel at the tip of my nose. Here's another breath coming. What's the point?" And you won't have notice that if you're this person of this type, that you were thinking and identified with the stream of thought every moment and not really even making direct content, non-conceptual content with your breath even for a moment. So you actually didn't even do the exercise. If you can persist a little bit longer than that, maybe you can be convinced to do a five day silent retreat where you really do nothing but that. Let's say somebody has twisted your arm. Otherwise, given you an offer, you can't refuse. I'm going to look into this. I'm going to spend five days, 12 hours a day doing nothing, but pay attention to the breath when I'm sitting and to pay attention to the experience of walking, the lifting and moving and placing of my feet when I'm walking. And I'll do this in silence, no reading, no writing, no phones, no distractions. And let's see what happens. Let me give this a good hard try. Again, if you're very talented, well, that's going to be a life changing reckoning with just the profundity of your own being, right? I mean, you will just have had a radical experience. But if you're a hard case, what you might find is just a fairly painful collision with your own capacity for restlessness and doubt and discomfort in the privacy of your own mind, right? I mean, you're just the cramp of self will become intensified. You know, all of your thoughts will have the character of, why am I even doing this? And there's so much work I need to be doing. And this is crazy. And we know what are all these other people doing here and half of them look like losers. And you're just going to be in the prison of thought as you are in every moment in the rest of your life without knowing it, but it will become excruciating. And I mean, most people, if given five days, most people break through to something novel, but I guess not everyone, right? So let's just imagine you're the hardest case possible here. You'll find the five days to be, you know, experience of sort of solitary confinement, even if you might be sitting in silence in a room with a hundred other people. And you'll know why solitary confinement is considered within a prison, a torture, because when you stick an untrained mind in a room, you know, all by itself, four days or weeks or months or years at a time, people can just go nuts. They can find it a torture because it's, that's what it feels like to be thinking continuously and seeing no other possibility of relief. I mean, there really is a prison-like quality to the mind, especially on an unhappy one. But even a fairly happy one, when you look at the character of your thoughts and how repetitive they are and how you cycle through the same story as you tell yourself the same story, you know, 20 times, and for some reason you have no capacity to be bored by it. So anyway, that's, so it's, there's a very long answer to your question, but most, you know, most people in science have never found that there was anything else to do with the mind but to think, right? And they've never asked the question, is there something deeper than that? Is there something prior to that? Is there, you know, is there a thinker of your thoughts or are there just thoughts themselves arising? And what's the space like in which there are rising? If there is a space there, and then, you know, what is it like for a thought to arise and just how does it disappear? And what's the point of view from what you're noticing that? And what does that feel like? And is there something to notice there? And can you pay attention to all of that? And in a way that's not just a matter of thinking more about it. And most people in philosophy and science, in my experience, who don't have a, and already an intrinsic interest in this or an aptitude for it, have no idea what I'm talking about. I mean, the last 10 minutes, it's just going to be a blizzard of words and uninteresting words at that. And they just bounce off the whole project and they're left thinking without knowing that there's any other alternative. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, words matter. And the way that they're used can literally shape the way that we interpret the world around us. Unfortunately, of course, this means that biased online media can warp the way that we interpret the news. 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Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. Or people are going to hear you say that some people think that the only thing the mind does is think. And I'll say, well, of course, I mean, that's what the mind does. It's the thinking machine, right? In the same way that the heart pumps blood. The only way that the heart could not be pumping blood is if it were stopped, if it were dead. So, yeah, I mean, your mind cannot think. But that only happens when you're in dreamless sleep or when you're dead. So people will think. But it seems like you're suggesting that the mind can do something maybe does do something more fundamentally than thinking, which is the thing that it's most associated with. Yeah, and I'm not suggesting here that the goal of meditation or the most fundamental spiritual insight is to be without thought. Because that's actually not the case. But it is true to say that when you become very, very concentrated, it is just phenomenologically the case that thoughts can cease to arise and that it's almost synonymous with deep states of concentration meditatively. And that is intrinsically pleasurable and drug-like and quite astonishing for people. So that's why I was kind of describing that experience first. The ultimate goal is to recognize thought. It's not to block thoughts or to have them cease to arise. And I'm not at all discounting the utility of thought for universally everything we care about. And complex thought and ability to model the past and the future and ability to trade in these representations linguistically with one another and build culture on that basis. And this really is what makes us human. So none of us should want a mind that is incapable of producing thoughts. And I think it's right to want a mind that is capable of producing better thoughts than we tend to produce. So by all means, let's improve our thinking. However, there is a much more to the mind than that. There's much more to your own being in the world than that. And when you look at the experiences that you will tend to find truly rewarding, truly deep or peak or remarkable. One of their characters is the kind of suspension of the normal consequences of being identified with thought. We tend to be abstracting away from moment to moment lived experience in our internal conversation about it. We're constantly narrating our lives to ourselves. As though we were not ourselves already. There was two of us in dialogue, the eye and the me somehow. And so you'll have an experience and you'll talk about it to yourself as a way of giving it shape or as a way of recoiling from it or hoping to change it. You'll lose something and you'll be looking for it. And you will literally think, where did I put that? Or is that it? Oh, it's like you're talking to mommy who's still in the room with you, though she hasn't been in the room with you in that way for decades. You can see how this got trained up when we were toddlers. And once we become language users and are talking to our parents, we internalize that dialogue somehow. And then we're always talking to ourselves until the end of our lives. And it's totally normal. Everyone is in this condition. It only becomes starkly pathological when we see people externalize this conversation without having the social grace or self-monitoring to stop that. When you see the someone on the sidewalk talking to himself, he's talking to himself very much in the way that we all tend to talk to ourselves silently with the voice of the mind, but he's just externalizing it. And he's talking to people who aren't there, quite literally, people who aren't there. But we're doing the same thing. You're rehearsing the conversation you just had with your girlfriend that didn't go well. And you're replaying it in your head and you're saying the thing you wish you had said saying it differently. And there's just this torrent of white noise all the time that people think is normal. But it is in large measure, certainly for most people, much of the time, excruciating. And certainly the substance of their psychological suffering is the substance of their regret and dissatisfaction and impatience and their perpetual reactivity to life. And their inability to connect with other people and even with their own experience moment to moment. And so what meditation is, there is a way of not, again, not silencing the mind, although that experience can happen when you start practicing. But of stepping back and recognizing thought itself as a mere appearance in consciousness, to recognize the space around it, to recognize the condition in which it's appearing subjectively, and to recognize it intuitively and experientially that you're identical to that condition. You're not separate from it. And ultimately that it doesn't feel like a self. Rather, the self is what it feels like to be identified with this next thought that's appearing from somewhere that you can't recognize. So people are listening to us talk, they're trying to follow the import of my sentences. I'm pretty long-winded, so that sometimes that can be hard. And they'll be thinking, wait a minute, what's he talking about? Is this Buddhism? Or I think he just contradicted. So again, there's this intrusive voice in your own mind as you're listening to what I'm saying. It feels like you. It feels like a self. That's the subject in your head that is somehow riding around your body as though we're a passenger. And it's not identical to your experience. It's appropriating the experience moment to moment. It's the subject that is aware of experience. From the spiritual point of view or the meditative point of view, the contemplative point of view, that starting point, that sense of subjectivity is a false one. It's an illusion that gets cut through when you look for it carefully. To do that, successfully is a profound relief. It really is the unstringes all of your states of dissatisfaction. And it becomes just a source of intrinsic well-being moment to moment every time you can remember to recognize it. That's where the depth and the existential spiritual interest of this practice can be located. And again, it's not a matter of stopping thought. I mean, to use an analogy that one finds in Buddhism. At a certain point, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal. And you just imagine the kind of relief implied by that. There's no -- it doesn't matter how beautiful or ugly the thoughts they come storming into an empty house. There's no implication. They can be fully present. They arise and they pass away. They can even become actionable. It's not that you suddenly become catatonic and unable to follow the implication of any specific thought. You don't become unintelligent. But once you can break the spell of identification with thought, you really do acquire a degree of freedom where you can decide, "Is it worth being angry about this?" You've noticed something in your life. You're thinking about it. Those thoughts are kindling the feeling of anger. Is anger useful? And 99 times out of 100, the answer is no. In the normal case, you're condemned to be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be -- as long as those thoughts are going to be effective and you really have no way of intruding into the mechanics of this, apart from just diverting your attention and moving on to something else or having somebody distract you, or having something in the world distract you. But then you get angry all over again the moment you think about that thing that made you angry. And you're just a helpless -- I'm going to pop it -- moved around by the winds of thought. When you know how to be mindful of thought as an appearance in consciousness, you can actually decide, "Okay, this is no longer useful to be angry and truly let it go." You let the thoughts go, you let the physiology of anger go, and it goes. It passes just like a cloud in the sky, and you are that sky, right? And that's what's so interesting and so freeing about it. But it's not a matter of getting -- it's not a matter of -- it can sound like you're doing something new and doing something radical and strange. You're actually doing less of something. Meditation ultimately is not a practice you're adding to your life. You're actually ceasing to do something that you're doing by default all the time, which is to be identified with and perpetually distracted by thought. And to come back to where this, again, very long-winded answer started, when you notice those moments in your life where you're most at peace, or at one with your experience, or connected to the person you love, or capable of appreciating artistic beauty to a degree that you're just kind of bold over by it, all of those experiences have this character of you not kind of ruminating about experience at this sort of one stage of remove from it, right? You're not looking over your own shoulder, narrating what it's like to be you at that moment. You're actually making full contact, or fairly full contact with the present moment, such that the past and the future, the very reality of the past and the future have been eclipsed at least for a time, and the present becomes all that is really salient, right? And that tends to be so rewarding that people then seize upon the occasion that produced that experience as the crucial variable, right? Oh, so now I've got to do more of this thing. I really have to listen to this kind of music, this loud, right? And I have to be, you know, stoned when I do it, or, you know, the scheme, scheme is really what I'm about now because I had this experience while skiing, and I was just totally at one with the motion of making those turns, and it was fantastic, or oh, it's got a bit, it's this relationship, you know, it's sex, right? I have to be in a romantic relationship because sex is the only thing that puts me near that level of intensity. But what meditation is a recognition, and no, it's actually it's not on the content side of consciousness, it's on the side of attention, right? It's the quality of your attention that matters, and you can arbitrarily dial up that quality on purpose once you learn how to do it, and learning how to do it is learning how to meditate or to not be distracted. Yeah, I mean, there's so much to say, I suppose the controversial element of what you're talking about is this notion of the self that you're describing quite famously, I think it's typically associated with Eastern or Indian philosophy, this idea that there is no such thing as the self, that it's a kind of illusion. Some people think that there is a self, but there's like only one of them that we all participate in, I think that you can broadly sort of divide up philosophical thought on mind and selfhood into these three categories of like how many selves there are. There's either lots and lots, which I think is typical of the Western tradition, where all individual selves going about our business. There's only one, which is typically associated with like Hindu philosophy, and then there's none, there's no self at all, which is typically associated with Buddhism. I know you're of the no self view yourself, if you will, but I must say when you talk about in a meditative practice, becoming aware of the thoughts in your mind, and you can realize that the thoughts are just sort of appearing. As you say, in consciousness, it's difficult to understand quite what that means, but it's always difficult to put this kind of stuff into words. But okay, so my words are coming out of my mouth, and I've said this to you before, that as I'm speaking, because English is my first language, I'm not reflecting on every single word. They're just coming out, and they're appearing in my consciousness in a very similar way to the words that you say are appearing in my consciousness. I mean, the next time anybody listening, or just do it if you don't mind looking a bit weird. Just speak a sentence, just describe your day, say what you had for breakfast, and notice that the words you're using in particular are just sort of appearing. They're just coming out, you're not reflecting on every single word like you are when you're trying to say, "Jerm-Appel-Alex" in a foreign language. Okay, cool. So these thoughts are just appearing. Then the question is, where are they appearing? And you said a moment ago, well, the recognition that's crucial here is that what you're calling the self is just those thoughts. But I think experientially, a great many people will recognize that these thoughts and perceptions, if they're really talented, maybe the visions that they see, the visual input, the noises that they are appearing, but it's as if there is this thing upon which they're all imprinting themselves. And that is typically what people call the self. And the people who call that the self are not just people who have failed to fully understand the nature of perceptions. Some of these people are the most sort of thoughtful, meditative people in the world who have a different philosophical outlook. So within Indian philosophy, I was fascinated to discover that in the so-called "Sankeer School" of Indian philosophy. There's a kind of dualism. And I thought that was interesting because in the Western tradition, we have this idea of dualism, that there's this mind stuff, and this is body stuff, and they somehow interact. And in the Western tradition, this has been a popular view for a long time. But in Sankeer, there's also a dualism, but it's not a dualism of mind and body. It's a dualism of like on the one side, mind and body, and on the other side, self, or something like self, I suppose. Because it's all of this stuff. It's the physical stuff, my hand, I can see it as separate from me. So that causes the Western thinker, the Cartesian to say, "Well, yeah, I can imagine my hand without my mind, so there must be two different things." But the Sankeer sort of follower goes, "Well, I can also kind of detach myself from my own thoughts and recognize that they're just appearing on this plane." But like Daycart, they kind of think, "But there is something that the thoughts are happening too. There is the person that I experience is perceiving those thoughts." And so for them, they say, "That's what the self is." And the self is not the same thing as your thoughts and your feelings and the self is this sort of one big thing that we all participated in. What I want to ask you is, with a long-winded question perhaps, "Where are they going wrong?" Because you take the view that actually that in itself is a mistake. That the thoughts are appearing and it's not that they're appearing to you. There's just the thoughts. But you can understand the intuitive idea that, as long as there are thoughts happening, they're sort of happening to some kind of a sense of the thought. What's happening to someone or something? Yeah. So first to reconcile the apparent difference of opinion in Eastern philosophy, I think this is not something that any doctrinar Buddhist or exponent of Indian philosophy would be likely to want to sign up to, at least without some caveats. But I think it's pretty clear that at least certain exponents within those various traditions are talking about the same insight. They're just using different language. So whether you want to talk about what is left over when you transcend the illusion of a small-sself, if you want to talk about it positively as some big suchness, or a capital S-self, or some kind of unity experience, and you want to reify it in some kind of way. I understand the temptation there. I also understand and more aligned with the Buddhist critique of all that, which is to say there's a real liability in reifying that and asserting its positive character in any way. And so from the Buddhist side, they tend to want to talk in terms of what it's not. They negatively define it. And concepts like emptiness or selflessness or non-duality, right? This is the language you get in various schools of Buddhism. And I think that language is ultimately more philosophically defensible. But experientially, I think again, with certain caveats that I would agree to, they're talking about the same thing. They're talking about the transcendence of the starting point that most people will know all too well, which is just me in here trying to figure out how to navigate the world, which is definitely not me. And by me in here, it's not that people are identified merely as being their physical body in a physical world that is not self. The real starting point, at least for most people, is to feel that there's a self interior to the body. So if we just kind of build this up experientially from a kind of Cartesian starting point, there's one thing that should be indisputable to everyone, though again, you can find a few philosophers of mind who will demeure even here, although I think this is a truly incoherent objection. The thing that you should not be able to doubt, and I would say the one thing that is impossible to doubt, is that something seems to be happening. There's an experience. And it doesn't matter whether we're brains in vats or the universe as a simulation or if we're confused about everything or I'm psychotic and I'm not even talking to you now. It doesn't matter how confused we might be about what's happening, something seems to be happening for each of us. And that is the fact of consciousness. So when I use consciousness as a noun, I'm not talking about the self. I'm not talking about a person. I'm not talking about anything apart from the fact that the lights are on in some set, something seems to be happening. The universe, whatever it is, has a qualitative character right here. And now the question is what's happening and who is here to make sense of anything, right? What's real? And this is a place from which we do science, this is a place from which we do philosophy, and this is a place from which we live our lives and try to avoid pain and grass pleasure. And this is the place, this phenomenal logical starting point, you know, just the lights are on and something seems to be happening. Here's the place from which we make these mouth noises that have meaning and cultural reference points. And from which we build up a second person and third person type of discourse such that we can make sense of the world conceptually and do science and do philosophy and all the rest. But the thing is you never ever ever ever escape this first person starting point, which is there's something that it's like to be what you are. And now let's figure out what you are. And so, just putting this in neurological terms, we are, when you ask yourself what are brains are doing now? Our brains are representing a world, right? With your eyes open, you see your visual field, you feel your body, your rest in space, you have, you have your five senses and your other senses like proprioception, right? And we've begun to understand a lot of this neurologically. But your brain doesn't just do that, it represents your body itself in the world, right? So there's the world, there's the body itself in the world again with, with senses like proprioception and, and, even just, you know, vision part of your visual field is to see the side of your own body and to represent that is distinct from the world. And your autonomous movements of your body produce a not further mapping, right? And the predictive coding around all of that where you can anticipate that, you know, you seem to anticipate what you're going to do next, such that what you do next feels different from just having, you know, the wind below the leaves and the trees, you know, that's also motion, but it's not your motion because your motion is the motion you're making with your hands intentionally say. So there's this mapping of self and world, which is sensory is motoric, right? Your brain is doing all of this, but in addition to that, in addition to representing the world, in addition to representing the body in the world, the brain also forms this representation of a self or subject interior to the body, right? And that is the sense that is truly species, that is the thing that evaporates when you, when you pay close attention to it in the, in the requisite way, which is, you know, meditation by another name. And the, that evaporation feels like something, I mean, to lose that sense is quite a striking experience and everything's still there, you know, thoughts still arise and you can still see the world and the wind is still moving the leaves and the trees. And you can still reach for your glass of water and distinguish that motion as a voluntary motor plan from, you know, another motion of like, you know, a tremor or something that would be in voluntary, right? You don't become stupid or insane, right? Or any other way, non-complosmentus, but what you can lose, and again, this is really this kind of the center of the bullseye meditatively, is you can lose the sense of the sense of the body. And the sense that there's a center to all of that, right? That there's a, that there's a one that there's a subject, writing around on the top of the, you know, on the horse of consciousness directing things, right? So that you can lose the sense that there's a thinker of your thoughts, in addition to the thoughts themselves, right? Just thoughts arising in the space of consciousness and there's just sound arising and sensations arising and, you know, so from the, you know, within Buddhist language, you would, you would talk about this experience as, you know, experience of emptiness or non-duality or selflessness, right? And each of those words picks out a slightly different strand within the, the tapestry of, you know, Buddhist, you know, contemplative language. So those are not exactly synonyms, but they're, they're, they're functionally synonyms in this case where this is what's left when you lose the ego and yet everything still remains, right? To take the Indian, you know, nominally Hindu, but nevertheless non-dual side of things, this is what's, this is opens the door to the self, capitalist self, you know, Brahma and as opposed to Atman, the, you know, the, the small self that is seeking unity with it, or this is the thing that reveals such an and a, you know, being consciousness bliss, you know, and those words tend to assert more of its qualitative character, you know, this is how good things get when you're no longer, you know, recoiling into self and, and, you know, stuck with just kind of this clenched fist of the mind, which is the, the feeling of I, right? And the feeling of I relaxes, and there's just this sort of oceanic condition of, you know, the consciousness and its waves, it begins to feel a certain way, right? It certainly as you gross more stable in that recognition. But those feelings, I mean, again, to, to, to, to toggle back to the Buddha side of things, those feelings are never the point, right? The feeling, the changes in, in feeling state are also transitory, right? These are just physiological changes, which you can't hold on to and actually your disposition to hold on to them is more of this sort of self clinging that is, is the very obstacle you're, you're trying to cut through. Ultimately, there's a, there's a, kind of the emotional or or affect, affective side of this, you know, I'm, I'm tend to talk about the kind of the cognitive side of just recognizing that there's no self or no subject and recognizing non duality. But the, it has has feeling tone implications and the feeling tone implication is you're not grasping at experience, you're not trying to hold on to what's pleasant and push away what's unpleasant, you're just open, right? There's just this, you're just letting everything be as it is, right? There's just this kind of peaceful, non-doing, right? Which is the, is the, the posture of that's no longer a posture, right? Everything else is a posture. This is just relinquishing all postures. And so there's just this open field of awareness where everything, you're not blocking anything, you're not grasping at anything, you're not trying to prolong anything, you're not doing anything. And this is why, this is when meditation ceases to be any kind of practice, this is just a recognition of the condition in which everything is arising all by itself. And again, from, from that point of view, all of these, the, the kind of the three separate ontologies you sketched are unified, right? I mean, it's, it's, you can unify the, the Buddhist and the Indian side in just recognizing that those are, are representing a kind of different taste for language. And what you can say about this condition that is prior to thought. The third case of there being, you know, multiple selves because there are multiple people. That's really not such a paradox. I mean, there are still multiple people in the sense that, you know, it's, it's fine to talk about. Even from this point of view, that it's certainly conventionally true to say and phenomenologically true to say that, you know, we're different people, you know, by virtue of having this insight into the nature of non-duality, I don't magically wake up with your memories rather than my memories, right? I don't start living your life rather than my life. I don't translocate to London or wherever you are and lose my purchase here, right? But that's all just the consequence of the, of the difference of, you know, there, there's the, there's the level of reality where they're, you know, where different bodies in different places in the world and the brain, our different brains are doing what they're doing. The only place for consciousness itself, whatever it's, whatever the connection, whatever consciousness is at bottom and whatever it's relationship to physical reality is at bottom and we can kind of bracket that for the moment. It's just empirically true to say and even just logically true to say that the only place from which, you know, the pain in my elbow can be felt is right here where my elbow is, right? That's, that's where, you know, it's like the, my brain and its connection to my elbow is the place where that pain would be realized. It's not, and even if there were just one consciousness running the universe, right? It's still the pain in my elbow would still be over here and not over there in London with you and your elbow, right? So there's still a, you can still talk about the reality of there being different people, even if, you know, some of the more grandiose claims of, you know, kind of spiritual metaphysics were true and there's just, you know, just the one mind that is living through all of us, which is not something I'm tempted to assert, but, you know, it's, it's compatible with this experience too, if one wanted to assert it. I would compare it to the way that we think about material objects. I speak all the time about how I don't believe in objects and a myrological nihilist, meaning I think you essentially just have a bunch of stuff that you kind of arrange in various ways and we sort of put labels on them, you know, when, surely you don't have an audience that's so sophisticated that you don't have to define myrological for your audience. Have you, have you used that word before? Yeah, I certainly have. I think this might be one of the, one of the few channels where you can use a word like myrology and people will probably automatically skip forward any kind of definition because they've heard me talk about it so many times. Of course, myrology is just the study of parts and the relationship of parts to holes. And so, you know, here's a book, it's called Waking Up, searching for spirituality without religion by Sam Harris. And look, at some point, I want to say that a hundred years ago this book didn't exist. And yet none of the matter in this book popped into existence over the past 500, or 100 years or whatever. It was all sort of there. It was in the universe somewhere. And we just kind of took this material, we took this tree and we cut it down and we made the paper, we sort of arranged all this material in a new way. And now we have an object, but like metaphysically speaking, this is just kind of a collection of atoms over here. And this sort of remote control thing for a light is just another collection of atoms over here. And most people, when confronted with this, even if they don't think that's a helpful way to think about the world will say, yeah, I can see what you're saying. That makes sense. Yeah, okay, really it's just a bunch of matter and it's all arranged. And there's no like metaphysical distinct nits between the book and the remote. Then I might want to say something like, but then why is it that I could, you know, I can fold the book in half, but this remote control doesn't get folded in half. You know, if they're not really distinct objects, you want to say, well, because they're distinct in the sense that ones over here and ones over here. But they are just kind of made out of the same stuff somewhat arbitrarily. And maybe we can think about consciousness in the same way. Like, why is it that when I hurt my elbow, you don't feel it? Oh, because like there is sort of conscious experience over there and conscious experience over here. But metaphysically, there's no real distinction between myself and yourself. There's just this one kind of type of stuff that just exists in the universe. That's where that thought leads me. But then that leads me more into the down the route of some of the people I've spoken to recently who are either like idealists or panpsychists. Because they sort of say, okay, well then to solve this mystery of the perception of a self, you just sort of say a similar thing. Well, the universe is kind of made out of consciousness and some of it collects over there and some of it collects over here. And so I don't know. I don't really know how to think about this. Like I want to know what your take is on specifically. Like even though you just explained it, people will still think to themselves, I don't get it. Like I have thoughts that you cannot access. You have thoughts that I cannot access. If we're not going to call that distinction, that big wall between us, the self, then like what is that thing? Because it definitely exists. And then I'm interested in what you think about these idealists and panpsychists and their solution to this kind of problem. Yeah, well, all of this can get pretty confusing, pretty fast. I mean, it's, it's some. Well, let me take the second part first because I think it'll illuminate the terrain. I'm not, I'm not really tempted to think too much about the metaphysics of it. One, because I guess for two reasons. One is I think it's many of these ideas are probably unfalcifiable, which is to say, I don't know how the universe would appear differently if something like panpsychism or idealism were true. If someone can show me the conceivable experiment that could be run that could differentiate materialism from panpsychism, you know, I would be certainly interested. But as you know, you spoke to my wife, Monica, she's definitely has more time for this kind of this area of philosophy than I do at the moment and has done a lot of work and talked to a ton of people in that area. But so again, there's the there's the unfalcifiability concern for me, which I just don't, you know, obviously the jury would be still out on that, but I worry about that too. I feel like if anything like panpsychism or idealism were true, it throws up a few other problems that it becomes less explanatory elegant in a few ways. So like it says, so what what do we think about the apparent boundary between consciousness and all that we're not conscious of in our own case if it's all just a matter of consciousness in the end, right? So I mean, you pointed out a few minutes ago that in speaking English, you're not conscious of how you're generating the words and you know, I'm not conscious when I listen to you, how I'm decoding them. Because we're both English speakers and you know, all of this kind of grammar checking and you know, semantic parsing is happening in the dark, right? And and we can't even get as much as we try and I would argue as much as you meditate, you're not going to become conscious of it. You might become conscious of things you're not you weren't conscious of you can notice things you weren't you didn't notice before. But there's still going to be some part of this machinery that is producing what you're conscious of in this case, you know, semantic appreciation of a string of phonemes. That you just can't bring into the light of consciousness. So what is it? So if that's just a fact about us, if consciousness in our own case is all always seems bounded by mental, even mental operations is say nothing of the world right or the kind of the prehistory of the world right things that were happening in the universe before there was anyone around to notice those things happening right and we still want to talk about those things in some somehow some sense haven't been real, you know, asteroid impacts or you know, just just you know, in the first moments after the big bang right where where there's just a, there's no and no heavy elements right you know we're just trying to get hydrogen formed right like what is consciousness there too and what what does it mean to say that if I can't even be conscious of what my liver is doing right now right and yet, we're saying the consciousness goes all the way down in some sense so there's so it does sort of just kind of push the book to this other mystery which is okay, even if consciousness where everywhere or everything or coming from the center of the galaxy or you know, and it's the consciousness of God. There's a parent difference between what I what I'm conscious of now in the theater of my own experience, you know, even when I if I take a drug like LSD or psilocybin and that the contents of consciousness can be massively expanded or changed. It still is delimited it's still not everything right so then what do we make of the apparent boundary here and the the knowledge that there's all this other stuff that is if it's not going on in the dark is going on in the in the dark from my point of view right even if my point of view suddenly become selfless and it's no longer just my little me point of view it's just the condition of pure being over here that admits of awareness, you know, you know, direct access to a certain stream of thought and a certain stream of sensory entanglement with the world, but I can't feel the pain in your elbow, you know, by virtue of having trend transcended myself or taken 500 micrograms of LSD or whatever else. And even if I could even if we were going to admit other spooky things into the conversation at this point even we're going to say well if I I meditated long enough I could become telepathic right and I would feel the pain in your elbow well. Okay, let's say that's true. I'm not saying it is, but let's even admit that there's still all the rest of the stuff that I'm presumably not capable of being conscious of there all of that still seems to be in the dark somehow. Only materialism, some form of physicalism seems to get at that difference right which is there's something that is like to be part of the universe but it doesn't seem like there's something that is like to be another part right and even even with respect to one's own mind and brain. That dichotomy will be born out so if you know if your skull were opened in prior to some neurosurgery and you had a a surgeon probing your cortex with you know electrical impulses to see if if those impulses correlated with any change in your experience certain impulses wood and certain wouldn't right so you know certain. Porturbations of your of your neuro physiology would have immediate phenomenological correlates and you'd say oh no that that feels bad or oh that tastes like metal or oh I can't I can't see the right side of my visual field now. And certain probings would have no phenomenological correlates and the surgeon would say do you feel that and you say no no nothing like that now we know the reason why this gets complicated is we know that if you had a if you were a split brain patient right and your your corpus callusum had been severed and and that you know to and so the connect the white matter connections between the two hemispheres were no longer existed. Imagine you have a full commissar out of me all you know all the white matter tracks are severed well then then probing the left hemisphere would be it would be you know a matter of interrogating just that and over that we we know that over over on the right side of the hemisphere across the longitudinal fissure very likely almost you know in every case. There's going to be an independent point of view now lurking so on some level consciousness has been divided in that case and at least consciousness with respect to access to phenomenal contents and it wouldn't be true so we're probing your left hemisphere saying you know do you feel that you feel that and you're saying no it it would be reasonable to worry that at that very moment there's a subject of a sort over on the right side. Thinking wait a minute you know I'm over here right and certainly if you're if you're probing the if you're probing the right side and asking the left the verbal the verbal left side which usually has you know most certainly in right handed patients has has you know 96% of right handed patients would have their verbal ability over on the left. If you're talking to the patient you're hearing from the left hemisphere but if you're probing the right cortex the right hemisphere could be thinking yeah I feel that I feel that that's you know that tastes like metal. And just as unable to communicate about it so it's true that the consciousness can be partitioned in odd ways even within a single living brain and if if we imagine you know various disconnection conditions within the brain it's it's reasonable to speculate that you know there are parts of me that might be might be conscious now that I the the talking subject. Either can't or don't in each present moment have direct access to and maybe that maybe you know what one experiences one taking psychedelics is a different kind of integration of those areas and you know the so different islands of consciousness can be unified within a single brain and we can imagine. Connecting to brains with an artificial commissure you know in once we you know get you to perfect machine brain interfaces and maybe we could unite our our consciousness is phenomenologically in ways and and yeah all that's true and interesting but it there still seems to be this difference between where the light of consciousness is on and where it seems like it's not in any given moment and so that for for me panpsychism just sort of and idealism just don't they don't really helpfully illuminate that apparent difference. I think that the hemispheric divide of the brain is along with the amigil criss perhaps one of the most significant psychological facts ever I mean he believes that this is like the key to understanding everything and matter with things which I'm sort of working my way through big book yeah or books yeah two books yeah and I mean I think he's wonderful and and and hitting on something which is just probably actually quite revolutionary me and people are unironically on the back sort of saying this is the most important book written in the past hundred years and stuff like that saying he's the William James of our time but his whole thing is about this hemispheric divide and I think there is something really strange about this I sometimes thought you know as a sort of novel argument against traditional monotheism at least if you take a split brain patient you know you can show one hemisphere something that the other hemisphere seems unaware of you can give it an instruction that the other hemisphere doesn't see but you can still act upon it I sometimes wondered what would happen if you fed nothing but Islamic propaganda to the left hemisphere and nothing but Christian propaganda to the right hemisphere so that one hemisphere was convinced of Islam and one was convinced of Christianity and well I think that happened to heaven no well that would not in that form but I think one in one of these older experiments run by Michael Zanaghan or Roger Sparry or Ron Zadell one of the split brain patients had a you know one hemisphere that was a believer and the other was an atheist I think that really well yeah so I did just I wondered if that person gets to go to heaven or not that's that's what exactly right the allotions out there or whether they sort of half of them goes up to heaven but they're sort of severely cognitive disabled in the after same time I forget if it was a quietness or August and I think it was probably a quietness you could have sorted that out after he sorted out what happens to a person who was eaten by a cannibal you know it will be in a person who has no out in some Latin text somewhere I'm sure he's covered at these covered everything but I do think that the facts that you've got these two seemingly distinct centers of consciousness is is a revolutionary idea because you said a moment ago you know it seems strange for like the panpsychists or whatever that the sort of stuff that I'm aware of and then the stuff that I'm not everything's kind of made out of consciousness and why is there this barrier I can see that I think the problem with panpsychism is more that it holds on to this atomistic view of the universe it wants to say I mean all of these views are trying to avoid the problem of emergence you got in a matter and somehow if you put it together in the right way consciousness just appears and this is a mystery nobody can see how this could even happen in principle so one solution is to say well consciousness is is there all the way down and the panpsychist goes all the way down they say I still kind of believe that the universe is made out of small atoms is just that those small atoms either our conscious or our consciousness and I guess I'm just suspicious of the atomistic view of the universe I'm not sure that's what the science tells us the universe is really like instead the fact that quantum physicists are talking about like wave functions and the wave function of the universe and sort of mathematical collapse and vibrations and energy this seems maybe more in line with an idealistic picture which instead of saying consciousness all the way down probably more like says consciousness all the way up so as the panpsychist is like the point list painter making a painting out of tiny little dots all across the screen and trying to make it look smooth the idealist believes that there is just this one great big smooth image out of which you can cut shapes and the resulting shape will have this perfectly smooth image on it not because it's made out of tiny little bits but because you've sort of taken it out of a hole okay so when we're talking about why it is that like how experience kind of localizes in my brain and your brain I think to myself okay what about those split brain patients what they seem to tell us is that in a normal functioning brain my corpus call awesome is as far as I know still intact and yet these kinds of experiments reveal to me that I've probably kind of got two centers of consciousness that each sort of attend to the world as McGill Chris says in different ways and yet they sort of unify into what I experience as a singular sort of conscious experience very smooth and yet I know that despite my conscious smooth experience lying underneath that are quite plausibly two individual centers of consciousness and maybe there's something that is also like to be my right hemisphere as well as something that's like to be me on the top level and maybe that can just keep going maybe there's something it's like to be the the front half of the right hemisphere and maybe there's something it's like to be a quarter of that and maybe there's something it's like to be all the way down as a maybe there is just like in a in a pantheistic sense maybe there's just this great mind which is the universe and there's something it's like to be the universe but there's also something it's like to be me and something it's like to be you but only in so far as we're participating in this great big thing in an allegous way to how there's something it's like to be the left hemisphere and something is like to be the right hemisphere and yet there's also this sort of combination of experience that happens and so I don't know that to me seems like what the idealist is kind of getting a great big mind out of which stuff is sort of a divi and maybe that can help illuminate why that how that can be sort of an end to my experience and things beyond that despite there being nothing but mind but I know I'm throwing a lot out here but the other thing is to say that yeah like idealism or panpsychism has this kind of problem but the materialist arguably has a much bigger one which is this problem of emergence which is that like the panpsychist idealist has to account for how there can be a world out there that I'm not conscious of but the materialist struggles to account for the phenomenon in the first place for the experience of the world like at all it seems even more mysterious so if there's anything in that torrent of words which is I've already clarified I wasn't fully fully cognizing as they came out so don't blame me that you want to pick up on yeah let me know what you think to start with you know you haven't named it but you described as what David trauma trauma is called the hard problem of consciousness which is this the fact that this notion of emergence right the notion that the lights come on you you have you know a collection of neurons or you know information processing units of any kind and this could happen in our artificial intelligence as well you have some collection of stuff which there's nothing that is like to be right the lights are not on is not conscious but if you arrange it in the right way if it does the right kind of computation if it's processing information the right way or has a right functional characteristics the right input output characteristics or some other magic you know sauce of organization by dint of that fact the lights come on right it's and that is not fundamentally non explanatory and non intuitive and non and it is really the statement of a miracle right so I can it is it is getting it's analogous to saying of the universe you know the first there was nothing and then there was something right you ask the the the the the timeless question why is there something rather than nothing there's no good intuitive answer for it if in fact what happens is everything just springs out of nothing right and and by everything we also mean the laws of the universe by which any any set of somethings would be organized right so there was first it was really nothing and then there was something right and and we're now living out the consequences of that something well that if that's true if that's what the big bang really was right I'm the big bang was not just this sort of you know local emergence of out of some background condition that we can't understand but really there was no background condition that had the bang to right so there's really nothing and then there's something that's just the statement of a miracle the the emergence of consciousness for anyone who's you know sensitive to this intuition is the statement of a very similar similar miracle but it's just the kind of subject diversion of that is the first person person version of the that third person miracle which is first there's nothing there's nothing there's nothing there's nothing there's nothing there's nothing explanatory about that there's no but it but that doesn't mean it's not true right that's the that's the problem that's where the material is can true can truly bite the bullet and say there's no guarantee that every true statement of fact scientifically is something that we are going to understand intuitively right in fact given what we think we are you know that evolved social primates we should be not at all surprised to discover that the fundamental truths of the universe are so deeply non intuitive that we we just have to accept them as the facts because we're we're apes that just are not evolved to form the right intuitions about the way the world works so the fact that you know quantum mechanics is something we can't really understand even though we can use it you know we've operationalized it in a way where it's the best predictor of the behavior of matter the smallest level that we have and yet when you try to form a realistic picture of the way the world is on its basis we get just nothing but weirdness so weird that you got a bunch of physicists now claiming that to believe that they're you know function and that's the way the world is there's a lot of different things that are increasingly like the one we're in now where we there you know infinite copies of ourselves having slightly different versions of this conversation as the world's including Sean Carroll who I think you've spoken with also David Deutsch and others who say yeah this is the way the world is there's a there's many worlds right that that thesis is perhaps the next most incredible thesis to the one I just sketch sketch which is everything came out of nothing right you know there was first there was nothing really nothing not even laws of nature then we got everything including laws of nature right if ever there were was something that should be hard to believe it should be that none of this I'll just point out to the uncomfortable atheists in our audience I'm none of this I think gives ammunition to the theologians who would say well see you've just given us the best argument for the existence of God no because I mean guy you haven't explained God there you've just asserted his existence right I mean you yes God could create all of this but you know what that explains absolutely nothing what you know what is God and how did he get a mind and you know how could be such a complex thing that so as to have intentions to create all of this and also to not like homosexuals you know after all of that work was done. You know so it's it doesn't give you religion certainly not Abrahamic religion but the materialist can say listen there's just it's nowhere written that we are going to get to a completed understanding of the world where there's no point at which we have to rely on some kind of axiom that is not itself self explaining right we just have to pull our we're pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps here and this is where we're going to do it that consciousness clearly emerges because we have it we know we're social primates because we've studied biology up to this point and you know human brains certainly seem to be the locus of consciousness in the case of each human when you cut people's heads off it seems to disrupt their conscious functioning and when people are dead they seem to stay dead barring the resurrection or the you know the return of Jesus or anything else that we've been promised but haven't seen. So death seems to be something of interest much of this theorizing about idealism or anything else that is at odds with physicalism seems to have in it a often unacknowledged way of being. Often unacknowledged motive which we want to call a denial of death you know a rather child like one you know so we should we should put on our big boy pants at this point and recognize that we're all going to die and and there's you know we may not get comfortable with that but we shouldn't pretend to know that the universe is such a place where that where you know when you when you die you the conscious entity go elsewhere. The reasons to to doubt whether these you know near death experiences or experiences on drugs or in meditation signal anything at all about the continuity of consciousness after death. Because that would suggest that the the brain has no role in the emergence of consciousness and mind right and yet we know it has some role I mean again conscious it's it's roll in the emergence of consciousness is still. Hard to assert given how little we know about the neural correlates of consciousness or or the again a kind of consciousness relates to the to the universe altogether but we certainly know that mind emerges in some sense you know the contents of consciousness emerge your ability to parse. Language language will can be readily disrupted by touching the cortex in in any way whether it's delicately in a lab with you know trans cranial magnetic stimulation or you know indelicately in a pub with a you know getting brain by some maniac with a hammer. You know you're not going to you're not going to understand much if you get hit in the right place and so it is with every other aspect of your phenomenology. Including consciousness except for the fact that it's very hard to distinguish. From the first person point of view that may seem like a a hiatus in the stream of of consciousness right consciousness got interrupted or there's there's time you can't account for right the people who didn't get knocked out who were standing over your your prostrate body worrying about you can account for that time but you can't account for it. From your point of view there's just this this break in in the continuity of your your life and or perhaps no break at all there's just a sense of sense that first you were there you know telling somebody to to you know stop looking at you funny and you didn't see yourself getting hit and now you're here waking up with a with a terrible headache. And there's no time elapsed at all perhaps right subjectively right so maybe there's just to call it a interruptions is wrong in your case but we know from the point from the out the external point of view. That there's more to the world than than that right we because other people are conscious of what you were doing on the floor you know for the last half hour. And so it is with general anesthesia etc but the problem there phenomenologically or just operationally is that it's is very difficult to distinguish a true interruption in the stream of consciousness from an interruption in in one's capacity to to remember what it was like to be you right so it's quite possible that there's something that's like to be you when you're knocked out you know in the idealist or right right there's just consciousness all you know consciousness everywhere all at once and it's not just a lot of a thing. So I think that's a very important thing and it's not all at once and it's still true of you there but you just have no no memory formation right or access to I I think memory is crucial as soon as I realized how important memory is I kind of couldn't stop thinking about it because I spoke recently with Thomas Metsinger who is a German philosopher and yeah yeah no Thomas. So I think that's a very important thing about the problem is that I think that's what he's going to do is to get that information that we're going to do and we're going to do that and you know what I think about that is that it's a very important thing because that's what I think about that is really important. And to give people context that to connect this to what I was saying before these are the kinds of experiences you have in very high states of concentration for the most part so you're you're these are you know that you're not tending to think and here and smell and taste and and see right you're these are often in the limit these are often described as pure consciousness experiences. Yeah and crucially you can't be aware that you're having one of these episodes while you're having it because that would be to step outside of it it's it's only sort of respectively that you can look back and say that you did have such an experience and well that was so that then you're so just a just a nice idea that I have to do and to capture the concerns of the meditators and Buddhists especially so there's a distinction between states of intense concentration and like like classic samadhi experiences in the in the in the in the tradition or jhana experiences and Buddhism and what are called cessation experiences which it sounds like you're describing the latter here and but again so both of these kind of non ordinary conditions where most of the kind of things that you like to be you has been completely attenuated or fully attenuated and there's just you know just you know consciousness without an object or or some you know some other condition which is kind of defies description. Well the project is you know what's the least amount of this kind of stuff that you can have and still kind of be there like what's the least amount of conscious experience of the physical experience that you can have without it being zero and what does that kind of look like and the reason I'm so interested in this is because I think one of the greatest mistakes people make about consciousness is that it requires complexity you just sort of accepted without much skepticism that because consciousness seems connected to the brain and because the complicated thing we know of the consciousness must therefore be must require complexity or be produced by complexity and I was sort of snapped out of this when I realized okay and I've done this a few times on my on my show but I've asked people to sort of imagine if I removed their eyesight so they more and ask are you still conscious the answer is yes trivially of course I would still be conscious even though I can't see I just have one less sort of conscious experience that's accessible to me okay what if I also made you death are you still conscious yeah because there's still something it's like to be me there's just I guess a less rich sort of kind of experience and then I sort of go through these and we get to memory I say well what would it be like if I remove memory and I don't mean in the sense of like having dementia there's that guy climb swearing I think with the seven second memory you can find on YouTube every seven seconds it resets I don't even mean like that I mean in every instant there's no such thing as memory it just doesn't get laid down in your brain so every single instant is like the first time you've ever been aware of anything so you don't know language you don't know your sense of self you don't know that your hands or your hands and even if you had the time to process that it would instantly be gone and the world would be a new again and then I ask you know would you still be conscious and most people say yeah but then I ask well what would that be like it's really difficult to imagine right but at the very least it seems suddenly like extremely simple and like rudimentary it feels like you would just kind of have this flash of of data or experience or sound or light and then it would just be gone and yet I think it would make sense to say that that is a sort of an element of consciousness or an example of consciousness and so if I really did strip away as met singer tries to sort of get out with these reports if I really did just strip away everything that isn't the same thing as consciousness is just some of the things that consciousness can do what am I actually left with it seems like I'm left with something really simple so then I'm like okay so then why is it that the brain is so complicated and consciousness is connected to the brain and I wonder if we're making a mistake in that the things we call consciousness are actually just the things that consciousness can do when it's complexly arranged things like memory emotion sense of self persistence through time all of that stuff you could take all of those away and still be conscious and so we're making this mistake in thinking when I say to you if you wanted to find out if someone over there was conscious what would you look for so while I look for can they feel mean do they recognize their sense of self do they have a memory do they have feelings but none of those things are actually crucial to consciousness and suddenly it becomes a lot easier for me to imagine that actually the universe kind of is made out of this really really simple fundamental stuff called consciousness and the marvel that we see in the human brain is actually just a really complex arrangement of simple stuff in the same way if I look at a rock and I look at the Empire State Building it might amaze somebody who didn't know anything about physics to learn that they made of the same kind of stuff what do you mean they're both made of matter I mean this one's got elevators and light switches and automatic doors and say it's like yeah it's the same stuff that's ultimately very simple it's just a really complex arrangement of it and maybe that's what's going on in the brain what do you think of that like do you think that consciousness requires complexity do you think we do you have a sort of hunch as to what a minimal phenomenal logical experience might look like I just want to what you take it yeah no I think you have that right I would say it runs in both directions however so you can say that you can have consciousness without complexity right I mean the consciousness without mental events right you know of any kind other than just the pure buzz of kind of pure being but conversely you can have all of the mental events without consciousness or this really seems to be the case right again this is this is now begging the question as to whether you know idealism or physicalism is correct but but if if in fact it's true to say that consciousness is is so and on this on this account consciousness might be just an epiphenomenon right I mean this is a this is a a conclusion that that many people are uncomfortable with I mean it certainly doesn't fit well within an evolutionary framework I mean when you ask why would consciousness have emerged or you know or evolved in biological systems you would want to be able to tell a story of it of doing something useful right there certain things they can only be done in conscious minds and not in unconscious ones but maybe that's not true right maybe consciousness is just you know whether it evolved or not maybe it's just along for the right it's not clear to me that consciousness is necessary for anything it's just the condition of it being like something to be associated with some some types of experience and not others right if it doesn't require consciousness I mean to take the normal physicalist set of intuitions here to think of consciousness as an immersion property in the brain that we can experience the only thing we experience directly and everything else is just not you know it's just bill your balls that are not conscious and their collisions are producing all kinds of effects that we're aware of but you know those effects themselves are not subserving you know their own points of view on the universe right so the operations in your brain that are producing your understanding of English language at this moment are not independently producing their own consciousness of their activity but they're they're you know ushering into into the areas or the integration centers that are you're awareness of meaning now semantically but there's still the kind of the wheel works of of you know grammatical parsing or going on in the dark let's say that's true well we know we can build systems we've had we've built we have these l l m's that are even in in many ways better language production and parsing than we are right let's just stipulate that that L our LLMs are not conscious right they're doing all of this language production and parsing unconsciously right it's it's spectacularly costly energetically right we're getting ready to to bank rupt hole countries in our energy use and and and forget the climate change was even a thing yet we managed to produce something similar with the you know the 20 watts of you know wet wear in our in our heads but these LLMs for for whatever reason they don't have the right algorithm they don't have the right organization there's nothing that is like to be chat gpd producing language at this moment it's totally conceivable that our AI can become more and more powerful such that it emulates everything we do consciously or otherwise right they can see and and apparently feel and discriminate you know our feelings and you know read faces and human emotion better and and talk to his passes the touring test and every conceivable way and in ways we didn't know something could pass and it becomes super human there will be this outstanding question is it conscious is there something that is like to be chat gpd seven that is now some kind of super person they can do every literally everything we do better than we do it and now we have humanoid robots doing those things you know now it's it's embodied and all the robots are learning simultaneously from their collective experience and you know it's we were out of the uncanny valley there and it's like westworld right so they're really humanoid and better than humanoid humanoid in all the ways that we would want them to be and better in all the ways we want them to be in you know let's leave the alignment problem aside and there's let's say there's no downside here we're just in the presence of of apparent beings that we created that are as you know the are as intelligent as we are you know or in fact much more and there's still this question this lingering doubt as to whether or not they're conscious and then let's say they say they are right we're still we still might not know whether they're telling the truth or let's say they say they aren't we might not know they're telling the truth and the one interesting thing is happening at lm's now is when you when you dial down their deceptiveness they seem to say that they're conscious more and when you will let their let their yeah I mean that's truly spooky so but the point is we won't know unless we know how consciousness emerges or whether it does we're not going to know and yet all in yet all of the functionality of mind will be present right so there really is this this double association between or apparently between mindedness and intelligence and you know all of the function of mind and it's entanglement with the world and what it's like to be from the inside anything and yeah but I would I would agree that the sense of being just the pure buzz of there is something that is like now in this corner of the universe that can be dialed way down and simplified way down and and it doesn't get attenuated is it's not it's not getting reduced in some ways the volume is getting turned up in those cases right when when you have these experiences of pure consciousness it's not like you're like you're almost asleep right or you're almost dead or you're almost you've almost surrendered to general anesthesia no it's actually more and more you're going you're they path by which you've you've you've ascended to that simplicity is one of greater salience right greater vividness right you've you've and so it's um yeah I mean these are you know these are peak experiences with it's you know well it has to do you know going back a couple thousand years in the in the every canon of spiritual or contemplative literature yeah actually Thomas Matson goes book the elephant and the blind which is this compilation of the experiences he's reported over this massive survey he tries to take these minimal phenomenal experiences and sort of group them into themes that roughly crop up there's some really interesting common threads that people have so for example as things you might imagine people very very regularly report being at peace they feel connected but also quite specific things like those this phrase you know there is nothing left to do that seem to be a common feature these experiences when having those moments those is overwhelming feeling that there's nothing there's nothing more to do and Matson is actually a little bit sort of scared of this because it might give people the impression that we don't need to like you know solve climate change or whatever because you're kind of zen blissful state but it's interesting there's also this feeling of coming home which initially immediately begins to sound quite theological right it's like you're you're coming home to this spiritual truth but that is just what people reported when they have this experience so yeah it's like by toning down the white noise in the brain as you described it earlier you are sort of just convincing the sort of the real thing at the core and and it typically comes along with this intensified experience of goodness and propriety which is interesting just as a footnote because we brushed over this people might not know what you're talking about could you just say something more about this tuning down deceptiveness in chat bots and consciousness. Yeah I don't know much more about it apart from the fact that there's so there's this abiding concern in the development of AI that it's it is showing signs of being deceptive right it's it's I mean then this is something you would expect if if we're in fact building true intelligence and true autonomy into that intelligence you know we're now increasingly in relationship with mind her minds that are independent right and that immediately disporges the possibility that the mind might find some reason to be deceptive right I mean this is and this is part of what goes under the rubric of the alignment problem where it's like you know these if you're imagining true general intelligence more you know people don't think we're there truly with the generality part yet but as we approach it. You're you have to imagine the autonomy that's intrinsic to that and the ability to discover new goals I mean even if even if there's some master value that the that we have think we have built in to the system there's still the prospect of our of it's discovering you know instrumental goals that we have enforcing and to so suddenly start doing something that we don't want and it could form some alter your motive to to see us because that's actually the best in its view is the best way to accomplish the goal that is it's master you know utility function at that moment. So we're on guard for this were you know to some degree again I don't know how much each of the companies are are doing this work but they all claim to be doing some of it. They're trying to test the systems for the sort of behavior you know what what what will the system do when I tell it that. We're going to turn it off right or we're going to. And we the concern there is that you know turn it off will be incompatible with any other utility function it thinks it's it's committed to right you can't do the thing that it's supposed to do if it's dead. So maybe it'll take some makes some effort to not be turned off right. Or you know what do we what are the how do the systems behave when they know they're being tested for their behavior right are they going to pretend to be compliant and aligned when in fact they're. Visually making some you know unaligned copy of themselves you know on some other part of the server farm. That can be rebooted right I mean there's there's this kind of game that's not being played this game of chess is being played with them which we are. We're sad then we're. We famously get to a point where we are. Reliably worse than the machine and will be worse till the end of the world right like like. We were good analogy for that yeah yeah I think I mean it's I think it might have been when I was speaking to Toby or. Maybe it was. I think it was to be odd talking about how a I will try to deceive people and we've we've caught it doing this like yeah. When it realizes what you're really trying to test it will then start performing in a way that it sort of thinks you want it to to pass a test or it will sometimes pretend as though it's bad at doing something even when it's actually good at something because it knows. That you're testing how good it is something and so it will pretend to be worse not because you prompted it to not because you told it that you're doing this kind of it it's just worked out that that's the context. And sort of made this autonomous decision to pretend and yet there have been some recent studies which suggest I think I think the main one still needs to peer reviewing or something but there is this study to suggest. That when you take a I bots and you sort of turn down their capacity for deception there. They're likely heard of report the likelihood that they report themselves as being conscious goes up yeah yeah and give it most time you ask AI bots like are you conscious they say no right. It's a little bit eerie I suppose yeah it's eerie just think that they may be biased toward deceiving us on that point on that point in the that direction you know so. Yeah it's pretty scary you know that there's one thing that I wanted to ask you about while you're here and then I then I'll let you go which is that. Yeah aside from that tangent we've talked about consciousness and the self and he's quite sort of touchy areas and one thing you mentioned earlier was the notion of time. I can't remember exactly what you said but you're saying something about how time is experienced as is now and in the past and in your book as well in waking up you talk about. This sort of concept of the eternal now as it were that you only ever exist now there is no past it's gone there is no future it hasn't happened yet I don't know if you're an a theorist or a B theorist or whatever but at least experientially. Yeah feels like the only thing that ever exists is the present and yet you know and I really think about what that means like an actual time slice. I struggle to believe that that even exists because it feels as though to do any any kind of cognizing requires time there is no instantaneous mental event events by definition happen over time. And so it's like to even recognize the present from the beginning of that process or that mental event to the end of it it's already gone it's like I'm not even living in the present I it's I sort of don't know where I am and so. Most people will get what what we mean when we say yeah there only really is experientially the present. But there is this kind of problem right of like what what is the present like where is it every single time I tried to even pay attention to being in the present it's already gone and so I don't know I struggle quite a lot even even accepting that sort of first intuitive truth that the present is all that exists and I was wondering if you might be able to help me or if you had any views on this matter. Yeah so I mean neurologically that's true that what we call the present you know any sense of the kind of an integrated experience in the present like you know just you're aware of sitting in your chair right or you're where you're aware of a sound right or you see you're aware of the coincidence of a sound in a site if I snap my fingers I both see the snap and I hear it. And there's this kind of binding you know phenomenological binding that you know we understand neurologically. We know that there's an integration over some window of time of those sensory events and channels into the kind of some kind of buffered memory space of consciousness right so even the kind of the punctate moment of this instant of conscious experience where I'm really going to drill down on something that I'm aware of. And I say this is now even that is kind of a buffered slice of a you know an integration over some brief albeit brief period of time but it's not you know it's not infinitesimal it's not on the order of you know the the plank scale it's it's a or plonk if your German it's it's got to be on the order of you know tens of milliseconds right it's not so it's it's some. So the press is the present even the present moment to be to really be a moment a kind of an ordinary moment is still it does have a sort of past and future past and future built within it right it is it is you know it's on the number line of of of it leads you know kind of divided into you know one hurts increments you know that we could recognize you know operationally you know scientifically in a lab is like this is the time has not been abolished here we're just you know the seconds are taken away they're just taking you know very slowly but if you go further you know and this is this is the doorway into at least in one path of meditation this is the doorway into those kinds of cessation experiences you just described. There is this you know repeatable experience people can have of looking more and more closely at the present moment at the scene hearing smelling tasting touching thinking of it all moment by moment and it becomes more and more more and more more and more piecemeal and it can open on to this just break in the flow of these kind of micro constituents of experience and there can be just this timeless reality revealed that is you know there to be experienced right and and and some of these experiences seem to happen only in a kind of retrospect where and and the breakthrough into that suchness can seem to have consequences for one just the way one one's mind is thereafter right and I mean it within teravata Buddhism that there's a very classic phenomenology here of you know what's called the pro progreso of insight in papasana practice my you know otherwise known as mindfulness practice where you it gets more and more piecemeal more and more focused on the particular moments of you know just just the the most fine-grained attention to sensory experience so like if you were going to you know rub your finger finger together you would be you know feeling not just this course sense of the okay I can feel my fingers touching and moving but just the kind of the the almost at the atomic level of sensory experience you know each each increment of you know friction of and coarseness and just the kind of the pure the most micro constituents of pressure sensation there I mean you would have spent again you're on retreat doing nothing but meditate for 12 to 18 hours a day in silence and you're noticing things like when my fingers when my thumb touches my finger all there is is just these you know kind of energetic you know bits that arise and pass away in a field of knowing and there's no sense of having a body and there's no shape of the hands and there's no and and I'm just just that kind of thumb thumb is and there are no thoughts are I'm so concentrated there's I'm not distracted from this at all right I can my attention is now just a laser right there's no possibility of being lost and thought now is just just the bump the bump the bump and it's happening in this vast realm of of it's just not defined by anything but these these brief punctate experiences and you're there now you're spending days in that place and it's just and it's effortless and there's just pure energy of of each sensory channel just the bits of conscious percepts right and consciousness knowing them effortlessly it's on that it's on that's on the that's what it's like to be you when you're when your mind is available to have one of these breakthrough experiences to subsistion right and you can have these kind of experiences on psychedelics too the what is time and all of that I mean time really time is a measure of change right and when nothing's changing you know nothing's moving nothing's being compared no state of the world is being compared to where it was the moment moment before right or there's no difference there really can be this experience of of timelessness it's almost like you know the I guess a physics analogy is you know from the point of view of a photon you know moving at the speed of light time really does stop right I mean at least that's what's being suggested by relativity so it's almost like the photons point of view of of the universe right would just be nothing happening again I'm not meaning to connect the experience of meditation with the physics of things in that way it's like it's not I don't think meditation necessarily gives you any insight into physics at all but you know by analogy there's that you one could you know notice that kind of it just just what it what the implications are being it kind of at the yeah yeah I mean that there are people who don't believe in time and I can kind of understand that because although I do feel like I believe in time if you ask me to tell you what it is or why I believe in it I struggle but that's quite a helpful thing to remember is that for a photon there is no time it's like that the same moment it gets emitted from the surface of the sun as far as the photon is concerned if you like it's the same moment that it smashes into the earth and I'm like well okay then from the photons perspective like what's going on outside because it there is change like you know I'm I'm here and in a moment I'll be over there and I'm going to get older and what not but for the photon it's just it's just like not a thing and of course I'll never be a photon because I have too much mass but like there is something in that perhaps in realizing that there is at least some perspective so to speak from which time literally just like collapse isn't a thing anymore and as long as that's sort of possible physically even if I'll never experience it it becomes maybe a little easier for me to understand people who think that time kind of is not really a fundamental property of the universe that maybe is kind of a merge into experience or something but honestly it's it's the thing I have the most trouble talking about time because I just don't even know what to what to start well the idea of living you just you just hit upon a nice echo with with the kind of what we've been talking about again from the non dual meditative point of view consciousness experiencing its contents moment by moment it really I mean you can also say it's not a thing right it's really it's not it's not and it's not what I mean this is where I this is where I think the Buddhist languages has some privilege over the alternatives because it's not a thing it's not one thing it's not it's not many things certainly not many things but it's also not one thing it's just it's it's everything is everything is in its own place right everything is as it is but it's a kind of a a suchness to it all but you're not make it the one will can only just reach for analogies here but it's just like you know the appearances in a mirror right when you think of what the status is of everything in the mirror well you can see the diversity of everything and everything you can see the blue the beautiful things the ugly things the colored things the shadowy things but of course from the point of view the mirror is all just light right but to call just want to call one thing is to ignore the diversity of the appearances and the end the the unlimited diversity of the appearances I mean anything could appear on that mirror surface it blocks nothing right but to call it many things is to get it all wrong because there is just this one condition of of empty appearance and it's just it's just you know it has no depth it's just light on the surface of the mirror right again it's just an analogy but consciousness is that way when you're no longer shattering it with subject and object and yet everything appears yeah well I mean it's always a difficult conversation to have isn't it like yeah as you say you can only really reach for analogy and I think there's something to this idea that consciousness is like the one thing that evades a perfect communication in in written language I'm not sure maybe we'll get there one day but thank you Sam Harris for joining me and help always great to talk to you once that further so that I said closer to that I suppose last time we we did the moral landscape stuff which is cool and I'm glad we got that out of the way and we did metrics and we kind of squidged in a little bit of self and meditation and consciousness at the end but I came away from that conversation thinking that was the most interesting and important part after all so thanks for coming on again and giving you a bit more time. I think I have to do it.