Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning
Guests: Sam Harris
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents21 chapters
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The following is a conversation with Sam Harris,
one of the most influential
and pioneering thinkers of our time.
He's the host of the Making Sense podcast
and the author of many seminal books
on human nature and the human mind,
including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape,
Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up.
He also has a meditation app called Waking Up
that I've been using to guide my own meditation.
Quick mention of our sponsors,
National Instruments, Belcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that Sam
has been an inspiration to me
as he has been for many, many people,
first from his writing, then his early debates,
maybe 13, 14 years ago on the subject of faith,
his conversations with Christopher Hitchens,
and since 2013, his podcast.
I didn't always agree with all of his ideas,
but I was always drawn to the care and depth
of the way he explored those ideas,
the calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult,
at times controversial discourse.
I really can't express in words how much it meant to me
that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to
for many hundreds of hours,
would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast
and more that he thought I had a unique voice
that added something to this world.
Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special
and truly grateful to be able to do this thing
and motivated me to work my ass off
to live up to those words.
Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him
was one of the most memorable moments of my life.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
and here is my conversation with Sam Harris.
I've been enjoying meditating
with the Waking Up app recently.
It makes me think about the origins
of cognition and consciousness,
so let me ask, where do thoughts come from?
- Well, that's a very difficult question to answer.
Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right?
I mean, it's just they come out of some kind of mystery
that is at our backs subjectively, right?
So, which is to say that if you pay attention
to the nature of your mind in this moment,
you realize that you don't know
what you're going to think next, right?
Now, you're expecting to think something
that seems like you authored it, right?
You're not, unless you're schizophrenic
or you have some kind of thought disorder
where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you,
they do have a kind of signature of selfhood
associated with them, and people readily identify with them.
They feel like what you are.
I mean, this is the thing,
this is the spell that gets broken with meditation.
Our default state is to feel identical
to the stream of thought, right?
Which is fairly paradoxical,
'cause how could you as a mind, as a self,
you know, if there were such a thing as a self,
how could you be identical to the next piece of language
or the next image that just springs into conscious view?
But, and you know, meditation is ultimately
about examining that point of view closely enough
so as to unravel it and feel the freedom
that's on the other side of that identification.
But the subjectively thoughts simply emerge, right?
And you don't think them before you think them, right?
There's this first moment where, you know,
I mean, just anyone listening to us or watching us now
could perform this experiment for themselves.
I mean, just imagine something or remember something.
You know, just pick a memory, any memory, right?
You've got a storehouse of memory,
just promote one to consciousness.
Did you pick that memory?
I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday
or you remembered what you said to your spouse
before leaving the house,
or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night,
or you remembered something that happened to you
when you were four years old, whatever it is, right?
First it wasn't there and then it appeared.
And that is not a, I mean, I'm sure we'll get to the topic
of free will ultimately.
That's not evidence of free will, right?
- Why are you so sure, by the way?
It's very interesting.
- Well, through no free will of my own, yeah.
Everything just appears, right?
And what else could it do?
And so that's the subjective side of it.
Objectively, we have every reason to believe
that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts
are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing
neurophysiologically.
I mean, that these are the products
of some kind of neural computation
and neural representation,
and we're talking about memories.
- Is it possible to pull at the string of thoughts
to try to get to its root,
to try to dig in past the obvious surface,
subjective experience of like the thoughts
pop out of nowhere?
Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots
of where they come out of from the firing of the cells?
Or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction?
- Well, you can get closer to many, many subtle contents
in consciousness, right?
So you can notice things more and more clearly
and have a landscape of mind open up
and become more differentiated and more interesting.
And if you take psychedelics, it opens up wide
depending on what you've taken and the dose,
it opens in directions and to an extent
that very few people imagine would be possible,
but for having had those experiences.
But this idea of you getting closer to something,
to the datum of your mind,
or to something of interest in there,
or something that's more real,
is ultimately undermined because there's no place
from which you're getting closer to it.
There's no your part of that journey, right?
We tend to start out, whether it's in meditation
or in any kind of self-examination or taking psychedelics,
we start out with this default point of view
of feeling like we're the kind of on the rider
on the horse of consciousness,
or we're the man in the boat
going down the stream of consciousness, right?
But we're so we're differentiated
from what we know cognitively, introspectively.
But that feeling of being differentiated,
that feeling of being a self
that can strategically pay attention
to some contents of consciousness
is what it's like to be identified
with some part of the stream of thought
that's going uninspected, right?
Like it's a false point of view.
And when you see that and cut through that,
then this sense of this notion of going deeper
kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth.
Ultimately, everything is right on the surface.
Everything, there's no center to consciousness.
There's just consciousness and its contents.
And those contents can change vastly.
Again, if you drop acid, the contents change.
But in some sense, that doesn't represent
a position of depth versus,
the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart.
- So you're taking as a starting point
that there is a horse called consciousness
and you're riding it.
And the actual riding is very shallow.
This is all surface.
So let me ask about that horse.
What's up with the horse?
What is consciousness?
From where does it emerge?
How fundamental is it to the physics of reality?
How fundamental is it to what it means to be human?
And I'm just asking for a friend
so that we can build it
in our artificial intelligence systems.
- Yeah, well, that remains to be seen
if we will build it purposefully or just by accident.
It's a major ethical problem potentially.
That, I mean, my concern here is that we may in fact
build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test,
which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent
because it obviously is and demonstrates that,
but we begin to treat it as conscious
because it will seem conscious.
We will have built it to seem conscious.
And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges
from physics, we won't actually know
that these systems are conscious.
We'll just, they may say,
"Listen, you can't turn me off 'cause that's a murder."
And we will be convinced by that dialogue
because we will, just in the extreme case,
who knows when we'll get there.
But if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots
that are more intelligent than we are,
so we're basically in a Westworld-like situation,
there's no way we're going to withhold
an attribution of consciousness from those machines.
They're just going to seem,
they're just going to advertise their consciousness
in every glance and every utterance.
§02Transcript · 09:41–19:31
But we won't know, and we won't know in some deeper sense
than we can be skeptical of the consciousness
of other people.
I mean, someone could roll that back and say,
"Well, I don't know that you're conscious
"or you don't know that I'm conscious.
"We're just passing the Turing test for one another."
But that kind of solipsism isn't justified biologically
or we just, anything we understand
about the mind biologically suggests
that you and I are part of the same roll of the dice
in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged
in the wetware of brains like ours, right?
So it's not parsimonious for me to think
that I might be the only conscious person
or even the only conscious primate.
I would argue it's not parsimonious
to withhold consciousness from other apes
and even other mammals ultimately.
And once you get beyond the mammals,
then my intuitions are not really clear.
The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain.
And ultimately, the question of whether it emerges
is still uncertain.
You can, it's not fashionable to think this,
but you can certainly argue
that consciousness might be a fundamental principle
of matter that doesn't emerge
on the basis of information processing,
even though everything else that we recognize
about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge.
You know, like an ability to process language,
that clearly is a matter of information processing
because you can disrupt that process
in ways that is just so clear.
And the problem, the confound with consciousness
is that, yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness.
I mean, you can give someone general anesthesia
and then you wake them up and you ask them,
"Well, what was that like?"
And they say, "Nothing, I don't remember anything."
But it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory
from a genuine interruption in consciousness.
Whereas it's not, with interrupting speech,
you know, we know when we've done it.
And it's just obvious that, you know,
you disrupt the right neural circuits
and, you know, you've disrupted speech.
- So if you had to bet all your money
on one camp or the other,
would you say, do you err on the side of panpsychism,
where consciousness is really fundamental
to all of reality, or more on the other side,
which is like, it's a nice little side effect,
a useful, like, hack for us humans to survive?
On that spectrum, where do you land
when you think about consciousness,
especially from an engineering perspective?
- I'm truly agnostic on this point.
I mean, I think I'm, you know,
it's kind of in coin toss mode for me.
I don't know, and panpsychism is not so compelling to me.
Again, it just seems unfalsifiable.
I wouldn't know how the universe would be different
if panpsychism were true.
I mean, just to remind people,
panpsychism is this idea that consciousness
may be pushed all the way down
into the most fundamental constituents of matter.
So there might be something that it's like
to be an electron or, you know, a quark,
but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different
at the macro scale,
or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different.
So it may be unfalsifiable.
It just might be that reality is not something
we're as in touch with as we think we are,
and that if that is base layer
to kind of break it into mind and matter
as we've done ontologically is to misconstrue it, right?
I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism
at the bottom, and this idea doesn't originate with me.
This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell
and others, you know, 100 plus years ago,
but I just feel like the concepts we're using
to divide consciousness and matter
may in fact be part of our problem, right?
Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here
are things like, well, what is death, right?
Like, any expectation that we survive death
or any part of us survives death,
that really seems to be many people's concern here.
- Well, I tend to believe, just as a small little tangent,
like I'm with Ernest Becker on this,
that there's some, it's interesting to think
about death and consciousness,
which one is the chicken, which one is the egg,
because it feels like death could be the very thing,
like our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing
that creates the consciousness.
- Yeah, well, then you're using consciousness
differently than I am.
I mean, so for me, consciousness is just the fact
that the lights are on at all,
that there's an experiential quality to anything.
So much of the processing that's happening
in our brains right now certainly seems
to be happening in the dark, right?
Like, it's not associated with this qualitative sense
that there's something that it's like to be that part
of the mind doing that mental thing.
But for other parts, the lights are on,
and we can talk about, and whether we talk about it or not,
we can feel directly that there's something
that it's like to be us.
There's something that seems to be happening, right?
And the seeming, in our case, is broken into vision
and hearing and proprioception,
and taste and smell, and thought and emotion.
And there are the contents of consciousness
that we are familiar with,
and that we can have direct access to in any present moment
that when we're, quote, conscious.
And even if we're confused about them,
even if we're asleep and dreaming,
and we're just not a lucid dream,
we're just totally confused about our circumstance,
what you can't say is that we're confused
about consciousness.
Like, you can't say that consciousness itself
might be an illusion, because on this account,
it just means that things seem any way at all.
I mean, even like if this, you know,
it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table.
Now, I could be wrong about that.
It could be a hologram.
I could be asleep and dreaming.
I could be hallucinating.
But the seeming part isn't really up for grabs
in terms of being an illusion.
It's not, something seems to be happening.
And that seeming is the context
in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves
can be noticed.
And it's also the context in which certain illusions
can be cut through, because we're not,
we can be wrong about what it's like to be us,
and we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible
with respect to our claims
about the nature of our experience,
but for instance, many people feel like they have a self,
and they feel like it has free will,
and I'm quite sure at this point
that they're wrong about that,
and that you can cut through those experiences,
and then things seem a different way, right?
So it's not that things don't,
there aren't discoveries to be made there,
and assumptions to be overturned,
but this kind of consciousness is something
that I would think, it doesn't just come online
when we get language.
It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death,
or the finiteness of life.
It doesn't require a sense of self, right?
So it doesn't, it's prior
to a differentiating self and other.
And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited
to people, I do think probably any mammal has this,
but certainly if you're going to presuppose
that something about our brains is producing this, right,
and that's a very safe assumption,
even though we can't,
even though you can argue the jury's still out
to some degree, then it's very hard
to draw a principled line between us and chimps,
or chimps and rats even in the end,
given the underlying neural similarities.
So, and I don't know, phylogenetically,
I don't know how far back to push that.
There are people who think single cells might be conscious,
or that flies are certainly conscious.
They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains.
I mean, it's just, there's a lot going on,
even in a fly, right?
But I don't have intuitions about that.
- But it's not, in your sense,
an illusion you can cut through.
I mean, to push back, the alternative version could be
it is an illusion constructed by, just by humans.
I'm not sure I believe this,
but it, in part of me, hopes this is true
because it makes it easier to engineer,
is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality,
and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness.
That, like, the rich lights-on experience.
So the lights don't actually even turn on
in the way that you're describing
until after birth in that construction.
So do you think it's possible that that is the case,
§03Transcript · 19:34–30:43
that it is a sort of construct of the way we deal,
almost like a social tool to deal with the reality
of the world, a social interaction with other humans?
Or is, 'cause you're saying the complete opposite,
which is it's like fundamental to single-cell organisms
and trees and so on.
- Right, well, yeah, so I don't know how far down to push it.
I don't have intuitions that single cells
are likely to be conscious, but they might be.
And I just, again, it could be unfalsifiable.
But as far as babies not being conscious,
or you don't become conscious
until you can recognize yourself in a mirror
or have a conversation or treat other people.
First of all, babies treat other people as others
far earlier than we have traditionally
given them credit for.
And they certainly do it before they have language, right?
So it's got to precede language to some degree.
And you can interrogate this for yourself
because you can put yourself in various states
that are rather obviously not linguistic.
Meditation allows you to do this.
You can certainly do it with psychedelics
where it's just your capacity for language
has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious.
In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument
for things running the other way,
that there's something about language
and conceptual thought that is eliminative
of conscious experience.
That we're potentially much more conscious of data,
sense data and everything else than we tend to be.
And we have trimmed it down
based on how we have acquired concepts.
And so like when I walk into a room like this,
I know I'm walking into a room,
I have certain expectations of what is in a room.
I would be very surprised to see wild animals in here
or a waterfall or let me say,
there are things I'm not expecting,
but I can know I'm not expecting them
or I'm expecting their absence
because of my capacity to be surprised
once I walk into a room and I see a live gorilla or whatever.
So there's structure there that we have put in place
based on all of our conceptual learning
and language learning.
And it causes us not to,
and one of the things that happens
when you take psychedelics
and you just look as though for the first time at anything,
it becomes incredibly overloaded with,
it can become overloaded with meaning
and just the torrents of sense data that are coming in
in even the most ordinary circumstances
can become overwhelming for people.
And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity
to capture any of it linguistically.
And as you're coming down, right,
have you done psychedelics?
Have you ever done acid or?
- Not acid, mushroom, and that's it.
And also edibles, but there's some psychedelic properties
to them, but yeah, mushrooms,
several times and always had an incredible experience.
Exactly the kind of experience you're referring to,
which is if it's true that language
constrains our experience,
it felt like I was removing some of the constraints.
- Right.
- Because even just the most basic things
were beautiful in the way
that I wasn't able to appreciate previously,
like trees and nature and so on.
- Yeah, and the experience of coming down
is an experience of encountering the futility
of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words, right?
Like, especially if you have any part of your self-concept
and your ego program is to be able
to capture things in words.
I mean, if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist,
or someone who wants to just encapsulate
the profundity of what just happened,
the total fatuousness of that enterprise
when you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics
and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself,
so that you could describe it to others,
it's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows.
I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't,
it's like the mere gesture proves its impossibility.
And it's, so yeah, so that, I mean,
for me, that suggests just empirically
on the first person side that it's possible
to put yourself in a condition where
it's clearly not about language structuring your experience
and you're having much more experience than you tend to.
So it's the primacy of,
language is primary for some things,
but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts
and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world.
But it's clearly more to mind than the conversation
we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others.
- Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit?
- Sure.
- What do you think, so Joe Rogan,
apparently, and many others meet,
apparently elves when they, on DMT.
A lot of people report this kind of creatures
that they see, and again, it's probably the failure
of language to describe that experience.
But DMT is an interesting one.
There's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies
going on on psychedelics, currently MDMA,
psilocybin, and John Hopkins, and much other places.
But DMT, they all speak of as like some extra
super level of a psychedelic.
Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes
on psychedelics, but in DMT especially?
- Well, unfortunately, I haven't taken DMT, so I can't--
- Unfortunately or fortunately?
- Unfortunately, yeah.
Although I presume it's in my body as it is
in everyone's brain and in many, many plants, apparently.
But I've wanted to take it, I haven't had an opportunity
that presented itself that where it was obviously
the right thing for me to be doing.
But for those who don't know, DMT is often touted
as the most intense psychedelic,
and also the shortest acting.
You smoke it and it's basically a 10 minute experience,
or a three minute experience within like a 10 minute window
that when you're really down after 10 minutes or so.
And Terence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT,
that was the center of the bullseye for him,
psychedelically apparently.
And it is characterized, it seems, for many people
by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually
any other psychedelic experience, which is your,
it's not just your perception being broadened or changed,
it's you, according to Terence McKenna,
feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted
into a different circumstance.
You have been shot elsewhere and find yourself
in relationship to other entities of some kind.
So the place is populated with things
that seem not to be your mind.
- So it does feel like travel to another place,
because you are unchanged yourself.
- According, again, I just have this on the authority
of the people who have described their experience,
but it sounds like it's pretty common.
It sounds like it's pretty common for people
not to have the full experience,
because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke.
So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot
out of the cannon and land among the,
what McKenna called self-transforming machine elves
that appeared to him like jeweled Fabergé egg-like,
self-drippling basketballs that were handing him
completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge.
It's an experience I haven't had,
so I just have to accept that people have had it.
I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable
of producing apparent others on demand
that are totally compelling to us, right?
There's no limit to our ability to do that
as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest.
I mean, every night we go to sleep,
and some of us don't remember dreams very often,
but some dream vividly every night.
And just think of how insane that experience is.
I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right?
That's the strangest part.
I mean, this is psychosis, right?
You have lost your mind.
You have lost your connection to your episodic memory,
or even your expectations that reality won't undergo
wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes.
You're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix,
you're waiting to fall asleep,
and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible,
and you're not surprised.
You're talking to dead people,
you're hanging out with famous people,
you're someplace you couldn't physically be,
you can fly, and even that's not surprising.
You have lost your mind, but relevantly for this--
- Or found it.
- You found something.
Lucid dreaming is very interesting,
'cause then you can have the best of both circumstances,
and then it can be kind of systematically explored.
- But what I mean by found, just sorry to interrupt,
is like if we take this brilliant idea
that language constrains us, grounds us,
language and other things of the waking world ground us,
maybe it is that you've found the full capacity
of your cognition when you dream,
or when you do psychedelics.
§04Transcript · 30:44–40:44
You're stepping outside the little human cage,
the cage of the human condition.
To open the door and step out and look around,
and then go back in.
- Well, you've definitely stepped out of something
and into something else, but you've also lost something.
You've lost certain capacities.
- Memory?
- Well, just, yeah, in this case,
you literally didn't, you don't have enough presence of mind
in the dreaming state, or even in the psychedelic state,
if you take enough.
- To do math?
- There's no psychological,
there's very little psychological continuity
with your life, such that you're not surprised
to be in the presence of someone who should be,
you should know is dead, or you should know
you're not likely to have met, by normal channels, right?
You're now talking to some celebrity,
and it turns out you're best friends, right?
And you're not even, you have no memory
of how you got there.
You're like, how did you get into the room?
You're like, did you drive to this restaurant?
You have no memory, and none of that's surprising to you.
So you're kind of brain damaged, in a way.
You're not reality testing in the normal way.
- The fascinating possibility is that
there's probably thousands of people
who've taken psychedelics of various forms,
and have met Sam Harris on that journey.
- Well, I would put it more likely in dreams,
not, you know, 'cause with psychedelics,
you don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way.
I mean, so DMT is giving you an experience of others,
but it seems to be non-standard.
It's not just like dream hallucinations.
But to the point of, coming back to DMT,
the people want to suggest, and Terrence McKenna
certainly did suggest, that because these others
are so obviously other, and they're so vivid,
well, then they could not possibly be
the creation of my own mind.
But every night in dreams, you create a compelling,
or what is to you at the time,
a totally compelling simulacrum of another person, right?
And that's, that just proves the mind
is capable of doing it.
Now, the phenomenon of lucid dreaming
shows that the mind isn't capable
of doing everything you think it might be capable of,
even in that space.
So one of the things that people have discovered
in lucid dreams, and I haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming,
so I can't confirm all of this,
but I can confirm some of it.
Apparently, in every house, in every room
in the mansion of dreams, all light switches
are dimmer switches.
Like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light,
it gradually comes up.
It doesn't come up instantly on demand,
because apparently this is covering,
for the brain's inability to produce from a standing start
visually rich imagery on demand.
So I haven't confirmed that, but that was,
people have done research on lucid dreaming,
to claim that it's all dimmer switches.
But one thing I have noticed,
and people can check this out,
is that in a dream, if you look at text,
a page of text, or a sign, or a television
that has text on it, and then you turn away
and you look back at that text,
the text will have changed.
Right, there's no, the total is just a chronic instability,
graphical instability of text in the dream state.
And I don't know if that, maybe that's,
someone can confirm that that's not true for them,
but that's, whenever I've checked that out,
that has been true for me.
- So it keeps generating it, like real time,
from a video game perspective.
- Yeah, it's rendering, it's re-rendering it,
for some reason.
- What's interesting, I actually,
I don't know how I found myself in this sets of,
that part of the internet,
but there's quite a lot of discussion
about what it's like to do math on LSD.
Because apparently, one of the deepest
thinking processes needed is those of mathematicians,
or theoretical computer scientists,
basically doing anything that involves math is proofs,
and you have to think creatively, but also deeply,
and you have to think for many hours at a time.
And so they're always looking for ways to,
like is there any sparks of creativity
that could be injected?
And apparently, out of all the psychedelics,
the worst is LSD, because it completely destroys
your ability to do math well.
And I wonder whether that has to do with your ability
to visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind,
and hold them there, and stitch things together,
which is often what's required for proofs.
But again, it's difficult to kind of research
these kinds of concepts, but it does make me wonder
where, what are the spaces, how's the space
of things you're able to think about and explore
morphed by different psychedelics,
or dream states, and so on, and how is that different?
How much does it overlap with reality?
And what is reality?
Is there a waking state reality?
Or is it just a tiny subset of reality,
and we get to take a step in other versions of it?
We tend to think very much in a space-time,
four-dimensional, there's a three-dimensional world,
there's time, and that's what we think about reality.
And we think of traveling as walking from point A
to point B in the three-dimensional world.
But that's a very kind of human surviving,
trying not to get eaten by a lion, conception of reality.
What if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics
and meet the elves?
What if it's something, what if thinking,
or the space of ideas as we kind of grow
and think through ideas, that's traveling?
Or what if memories is traveling?
I don't know if you have a favorite view of reality,
or if you, you had, by the way, I should say,
excellent conversation with Donald Hoffman.
- Yeah, yeah, he's interesting.
- Is there any inkling of his sense in your mind
that reality is very far from,
actual, like, objective reality is very far
from the kind of reality we imagine,
we perceive, and we play with in our human minds?
- Well, the first thing to grant is that
we're never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is,
unless that reality is consciousness, right?
So we're only ever experiencing consciousness
and its contents.
And then the question is, how does that circumstance
relate to, quote, reality at large?
And Donald Hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate,
well, maybe there isn't a reality at large.
Maybe it's all just consciousness on some level.
And that's interesting, that runs into, to my eye,
various philosophical problems that,
or at least you have to do a lot,
you have to add to that picture,
I mean, that picture of idealism,
that's usually all the whole family of views
that would just say that the universe is just mind
or just consciousness at bottom,
we'll go by the name of idealism in Western philosophy.
You have to add to that idealistic picture
all kinds of epicycles and kind of weird coincidences
and to get the predictability of our experience
and the success of materialist science
to make sense in that context, right?
And so the fact that we can,
what does it mean to say that there's only consciousness
at bottom, right?
Nothing outside of consciousness,
'cause no one's ever experienced anything
outside of consciousness.
No scientist has ever done an experiment
where they were contemplating data,
no matter how far removed from our sense bases,
whether it's they're looking at the Hubble Deep Field
or they're smashing atoms
or whatever tools they're using,
they're still just experiencing consciousness
and its various deliverances
and layering their concepts on top of that.
So that's always true,
and yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture
the character of our continually discovering
that our materialist assumptions are confirmable, right?
So you take the fact that we unleash
this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom, right?
First, we have the theoretical suggestion
that it's possible, right?
We come back to Einstein,
there's a lot of energy in that matter, right?
And what if we could release it, right?
And then we perform an experiment that in this case,
the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico,
where the people who are most adequate to this conversation,
people like Robert Oppenheimer,
are standing around not altogether certain
it's going to work, right?
They're performing an experiment,
they're wondering what's gonna happen,
they're wondering if their calculations
around the yield are off by orders of magnitude.
§05Transcript · 40:47–51:02
Some of them are still wondering
whether the entire atmosphere of Earth
is gonna combust, right?
That the nuclear chain reaction is not gonna stop.
And lo and behold, there was that energy to be released
from within the nucleus of an atom.
And that could, so it's just,
the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments,
and just the knowledge,
it's just our understanding of evolution,
just the fact that the Earth is billions of years old
and life is hundreds of millions of years old,
and we weren't here to think about any of those things,
and all of those processes were happening,
therefore, in the dark,
and they are the processes that allowed us to emerge
from prior life forms in the first place.
To say that it's all a mess,
that nothing exists outside of consciousness,
conscious minds of the sort that we experience,
it just seems, it seems like a bizarrely
anthropocentric claim,
analogous to the moon isn't there
if no one's looking at it, right?
I mean, the moon as a moon isn't there
if no one's looking at it, I'll grant that,
'cause that's already a kind of fabrication
born of concepts, but the idea that there's nothing there,
that there's nothing that corresponds
to what we experience as the moon,
unless someone's looking at it,
that just seems just a way too parochial way
to set out on this journey of discovery.
- There is something there,
there's a computer waiting to render the moon
when you look at it.
The capacity for the moon to exist is there.
So if we're indeed living in a simulation,
which I find a compelling thought experiment,
it's possible that there is this kind of
rendering mechanism, but not in the silly way
that we think about in video games,
but in some kind of more fundamental physics way.
- And we have to account for the fact
that it renders experiences that no one has had yet,
that no one has any expectation of having.
It can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully,
right, and then there's some lawful understanding
of why that's so.
It's like, I mean, just to bring it back to mathematics,
I'm like, like, certain numbers are prime
whether we have discovered them or not, right?
Like there's the highest prime number
that anyone can name now,
and then there's the next prime number
that no one can name, and it's there, right?
So it's like, to say that our minds are putting it there,
that what we know as mind in ourselves
is in some way, in some sense, putting it there,
that, like the base layer of reality is consciousness, right?
You know, that we're identical to the thing
that is rendering this reality.
There's some, you know, hubris is the wrong word,
but it's like there's some, it's like,
it's okay if reality is bigger than what we experience,
you know, and it has structure that we can't anticipate
and that isn't just, I mean, again,
there's certainly a collaboration between our minds
and whatever is out there to produce what we call,
you know, the stuff of life,
but it's not the idea that it's,
I don't know, I mean, there are a few stops
on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking
and Eastern philosophy that I don't,
philosophically, I don't see a need to take.
I mean, the place, experientially and scientifically,
I feel like it's, you can get everything you want
acknowledging that consciousness has a character
that can be explored from its own side
so that you're bringing kind of the first person experience
back into the conversation about, you know,
what is a human mind and, you know, what is true,
and you can explore it with different degrees of rigor
and there are things to be discovered there,
whether you're using a technique like meditation
or psychedelics, and that these experiences
have to be put in conversation with what we understand
about ourselves from a third person side,
neuroscientifically or in any other way.
- But to me, the question is, what if reality,
the sense I have from this kind of, you play shooters?
- No.
- There's a physics engine that generate, that's--
- Oh, you mean first person shooter games?
- Yes, yes, sorry.
Not often, but yes.
- I mean, there's a physics engine
that generates consistent reality, right?
My sense is the same could be true for a universe
in the following sense, that our conception of reality,
as we understand it now in the 21st century,
is a tiny subset of the full reality.
It's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there,
the moon being there is not there somehow.
It's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there.
And so the physics engine of the universe
is just maintaining the useful physics,
the useful "reality," quote unquote,
for us to have a consistent experience as human beings.
But maybe we, descendants of apes,
are really only understand 0.0001%
of actual physics of reality.
We can even just start with the consciousness thing.
But maybe our minds are just,
we're just too dumb by design.
- Oh, yeah, that truly resonates with me,
and I'm surprised it doesn't resonate more
with most scientists that I talk to.
When you just look at,
you look at how close we are to chimps, right?
And chimps don't know anything, right?
Clearly, they have no idea what's going on, right?
And then you get us,
but then it's only a subset of human beings
that really understand much of what we're talking about
in any area of specialization.
And if they all died in their sleep tonight, right,
you'd be left with people who might take 1,000 years
to rebuild the internet, if ever, right?
I mean, literally, it's like,
and I would extend this to myself.
I mean, there are areas of scientific specialization
where I have either no discernible competence,
I mean, I spend no time on it,
I have not acquired the tools.
It would just be an article of faith for me
to think that I could acquire the tools
to actually make a breakthrough in those areas.
And your own area is one.
I've never spent any significant amount of time
trying to be a programmer,
but it's pretty obvious I'm not Alan Turing, right?
It's like, if that were my capacity,
I would have discovered that in myself.
I would have found programming irresistible.
My first false starts in learning, I think it was C,
it was just, I bounced off.
It's like, this was not fun.
I hate, I mean, trying to figure out what,
the syntax error that's causing this thing not to compile
was just a fucking awful experience.
I hated it, right?
I hated every minute of it.
So it was not, so if it was just people like me left,
like, when do we get the internet again?
Right, and we lose the internet.
When do we get it again, right?
When do we get anything
like a proper science of information, right?
You need a Claude Shannon or an Alan Turing
to plant a flag in the ground right here and say,
"All right, can everyone see this?
Even if you don't quite know what I'm up to,
you all have to come over here to make some progress."
And there are hundreds of topics where that's the case.
So we barely have a purchase
on making anything like discernible intellectual progress
in any generation.
And yeah, I'm just, Max Tegmark makes this point.
He's one of the few people who does.
In physics, if you just take the truth
of evolution seriously, right?
And realize that there's nothing about us
that has evolved to understand reality perfectly.
I mean, we're just not that kind of ape, right?
There's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines.
So what we are making do with tools
that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks, right?
And it's amazing we can do as much as we can.
I mean, you and I are just sitting here
on the back of having received an mRNA vaccine
that has certainly changed our life
given what the last year was like.
And it's gonna change the world
if rumors of coming miracles are borne out.
I mean, it's now, it seems likely we have a vaccine
coming for malaria, right?
Which has been killing millions of people a year
for as long as we've been alive.
I think it's down to like 800,000 people a year now
because we've spread so many bed nets around.
But it was like two and a half million people every year.
It's amazing what we can do, but yeah, I have,
if in fact the answer at the back of the book of nature
is you understand 0.1% of what there is to understand
and half of what you think you understand is wrong,
that would not surprise me at all.
- It is funny to look at our evolutionary history,
even back to chimps.
I'm pretty sure even chimps thought
§06Transcript · 51:03–1:00:29
they understood the world well.
So at every point in that timeline
of evolutionary development throughout human history,
there's a sense like there's no more,
you hear this message over and over,
there's no more things to be invented.
- But 100 years ago there were,
there's a famous story, I forget which physicist told it,
but there were physicists telling
their undergraduate students not to go into,
to get graduate degrees in physics
because basically all the problems had been solved.
And this is like around 1915 or so.
- Turns out you were right.
I'm gonna ask you about free will.
- Oh, okay.
- You've recently released an episode of your podcast,
Making Sense, for those with a shorter attention span,
basically summarizing your position on free will.
I think it was under an hour and a half.
- Yeah, yeah.
- It was brief and clear.
So allow me to summarize the summary, TL;DR,
and maybe you tell me where I'm wrong.
So free will is an illusion,
and even the experience of free will is an illusion.
Like we don't even experience it.
Am I good in my summary?
- Yeah, this is a line
that's a little hard to scan for people.
I say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion.
The illusion of free will is an illusion.
Like there is no illusion of free will.
And that is a, unlike many other illusions,
that's a more fundamental claim.
It's not that it's wrong, it's not even wrong.
I mean, that's, I guess, that was, I think, Wolfgang Pauli,
who derided one of his colleagues or enemies
with that aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics.
So there are things that you, there are genuine illusions.
There are things that you do experience,
and then you can kind of punch through that experience.
Or you can't actually experience,
you can't experience them any other way.
It's just, we just know it's not a veridical experience.
You just take like a visual illusion.
There are visual illusions that,
a lot of these come to me on Twitter these days.
There's these amazing visual illusions
where like every figure in this GIF seems to be moving,
but nothing, in fact, is moving.
You can just like put a ruler on your screen
and nothing's moving.
Some of those illusions you can't see any other way.
I mean, they're just, they're hacking aspects
of the visual system that are just eminently hackable,
and you have to use a ruler to convince yourself
that the thing isn't actually moving.
Now, there are other visual illusions
where you're taken in by it at first,
but if you pay more attention,
you can actually see that it's not there, right?
Or it's not how it first seemed.
Like the Necker cube is a good example of that.
Like the Necker cube is just that schematic of a cube,
of a transparent cube, which pops out one way or the other.
One face can pop out and the other face can pop out,
but you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out,
which is a more veridical way of looking at it.
So there are subject,
there are kind of inward correlates to this,
and I would say that the sense of self,
the sense of self and free will are closely related.
I often describe them as two sides of the same coin,
but they're not quite the same in their spuriousness.
I mean, so the sense of self is something
that people, I think, do experience, right?
It's not a very clear experience,
but it's not, I wouldn't call the illusion of self
an illusion, but the illusion of free will
is an illusion in that as you pay more attention
to your experience, you begin to see
that it's totally compatible with an absence of free will.
You don't, I mean, coming back to the place we started,
you don't know what you're gonna think next.
You don't know what you're gonna intend next.
You don't know what's going to just occur to you
that you must do next.
You don't know how much you are going to feel
the behavioral imperative to act on that thought.
If you suddenly feel, oh, I don't need to do that.
I can do that tomorrow.
You don't know where that comes from.
You didn't know that was gonna arise.
You didn't know that was gonna be compelling.
All of this is compatible with some evil genius
in the next room just typing in code
into your experience, just like this.
Okay, let's give him the, oh my God, I just forgot.
It was gonna be our anniversary in one week thought, right?
Give him the cascade of fear.
Give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy
that's gonna take him no time at all
and this overpowering sense of relief.
All of our experience is compatible
with the script already being written, right?
And I'm not saying the script is written.
I'm not saying that fatalism is the right way
to look at this, but we just don't have
even our most deliberate voluntary action
where we go back and forth between two options,
thinking about the reason for A
and then reconsidering and going,
thinking harder about B
and just going eeny, meeny, miny, moe
until the end of the hour.
However laborious you can make it,
there is a utter mystery at your back
finally promoting the thought or intention
or rationale that is most compelling
and therefore deliberately, behaviorally effective.
And just,
and this can drive some people a little crazy.
So I usually preface what I say about free will
with the caveat that if thinking about your mind this way
makes you feel terrible, well then stop,
you know, get off the ride, switch the channel.
You don't have to go down this path.
But for me and for many other people,
it's incredibly freeing to recognize this about the mind
because one, you realize that you're,
I mean, cutting through the illusion of the self
is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons
that we can talk about separately,
but losing the sense of free will
does two things very vividly for me.
One is it totally undercuts the basis for,
the psychological basis for hatred, right?
Because when you think about the experience
of hating other people, what that is anchored to
is a feeling that they really are
the true authors of their actions.
I mean, that someone is doing something
that you find so despicable, right?
And let's say they're targeting you unfairly, right?
They're maligning you on Twitter or they're suing you
or they're doing something, they broke your car window,
they did something awful
and now you have a grievance against them
and you're relating to them very differently emotionally
in your own mind than you would
if a force of nature had done this, right?
Or if it had just been a virus
or if it had been a wild animal
or a malfunctioning machine, right?
Like to those things, you don't attribute
any kind of freedom of will.
And while you may suffer the consequences
of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal
or having your car break down or whatever,
it may frustrate you.
You don't slip into this mode of hating the agent
in a way that completely commandeers your mind
and deranges your life.
I mean, you just don't, I mean,
there are people who spend decades
hating other people for what they did
and it's just pure poison, right?
- So it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy.
- Yeah, yeah.
- But the question is, say that this call,
what was it, the horse of consciousness,
let's call it the consciousness generator black box
that we don't understand.
And is it possible that the script
that we're walking along, that we're playing,
that's already written, is actually being written
in real time?
It's almost like you're driving down a road
and in real time, that road is being laid down.
And this black box of consciousness
that we don't understand is the place
where this script is being generated.
So it's not, it is being generated, it didn't always exist.
So there's something we don't understand
that's fundamental about the nature of reality
that generates both consciousness,
let's call it maybe the self.
I don't know if you want to distinguish between those.
- Yeah, I definitely would, yeah.
- You would, because there's a bunch of illusions
we're referring to.
There's the illusion of free will,
there's the illusion of self,
and there's the illusion of consciousness.
You're saying, I think you said there's no,
you're not as willing to say
there's an illusion of consciousness.
You're a little bit more--
- In fact, I would say it's impossible.
§07Transcript · 1:00:30–1:09:18
- Impossible.
You're a little bit more willing to say
that there's an illusion of self,
and you're definitely saying
there's an illusion of free will.
- Yes, yes.
I'm definitely saying there's an illusion,
that a certain kind of self is an illusion, not every.
We mean many different things by this notion of self.
So maybe I should just differentiate these things.
So consciousness can't be an illusion
because any illusion proves its reality
as much as any other veridical perception.
I mean, if you're hallucinating now,
that's just as much a demonstration of consciousness
as really seeing what's quote actually there.
If you're dreaming and you don't know it,
that is consciousness, right?
If you're, you can be confused about literally everything.
You can't be confused about the underlying claim,
whether you make it linguistically or not,
but just the cognitive assertion
that something seems to be happening.
It's the seeming that is the cash value of consciousness.
- Can I take a tiny tangent?
- Okay.
- So what if I am creating consciousness in my mind
to convince you that I'm human?
So it's a useful social tool,
not a fundamental property of experience,
like of being a living thing.
What if it's just like a social tool
to almost like a useful computational trick
to place myself into reality
as we together communicate about this reality?
And another way to ask that,
'cause you said it much earlier,
you talk negatively about robots as you often do,
so let me, 'cause you'll probably die first
when they take over.
- No, I'm looking forward to certain kinds of robots.
I mean, I'm not, if we can get this right,
this would be amazing.
- Right, but you don't like the robots
that fake consciousness.
That's what you, you don't like the idea
of fake it 'til you make it.
- Well, no, it's not that I don't like it.
It's that I'm worried that we will lose sight
of the problem, and the problem has massive
ethical consequences.
If we create robots that really can suffer,
that would be a bad thing, right?
And if we really are committing a murder
when we recycle them, that would be a bad thing.
- This is how I know you're not Russian.
Why is it a bad thing that we create robots
that can suffer?
Isn't suffering a fundamental thing
from which like beauty springs?
Like without suffering, do you really think
we would have beautiful things in this world?
- Okay, that's a tangent on a tangent.
- Okay, all right. - We'll go there.
I would love to go there, but let's not go there just yet.
But I do think it would be, if anything is bad,
creating hell and populating it with real minds
that really can suffer in that hell, that's bad.
That's the, you are worse than any mass murderer
we can name if you create it.
I mean, this could be in robot form,
or more likely it would be in some simulation
of a world where we've managed to populate it
with conscious minds so that whether we knew
they were conscious or not, and that world
is a state of, it's unendurable.
That would just, it just, taking the thesis seriously
that there's nothing, that mind, intelligence,
and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent.
Right, you don't need a biological brain to be conscious.
You certainly don't need a biological brain
to be intelligent, right?
So if we just imagine that consciousness at some point
comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence,
well then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds
that are miserable, right?
And that's just like creating a person who's miserable.
Right, it could be worse than creating a person
who's miserable, it could be even more sensitive
to suffering.
- Cloning them and maybe for entertainment,
watching them suffer.
- Just like watching a person suffer for entertainment.
So, but back to your primary question here,
which is differentiating consciousness and self
and free will as concepts and kind of degrees
of illusoriness.
The problem with free will is that
what most people mean by it, and Dan,
this is where Dan Dennett is gonna get off the ride here.
Right, so like he doesn't, he's gonna disagree with me
that I know what most people mean by it.
But I have a very keen sense, having talked about this topic
for many, many years and seeing people get wrapped
around the axle of it and seeing in myself
what it's like to have felt that I was a self
that had free will and then to no longer feel that way.
Right, I mean, to know what it's like to actually
disabuse myself of that sense,
cognitively and emotionally.
And to recognize what's left, what goes away
and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany.
I have a sense that I know what people think
they have in hand when they worry about
whether free will exists.
And it is the flip side of this feeling of self.
It's the flip side of feeling like you are
not merely identical to experience,
you feel like you're having an experience.
You feel like you're an agent that is appropriating
an experience.
There's a protagonist in the movie of your life
and it is you.
It's not just the movie, right?
It's like there's sights and sounds and sensations
and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony
of experience, of felt experience,
of felt experience of embodiment.
But there seems to be a rider on the horse
or a passenger in the body, right?
People don't feel truly identical to their bodies
down to their toes.
They sort of feel like they have bodies.
They feel like their minds in bodies
and that feels like a self, that feels like me.
And again, this gets very paradoxical
when you talk about the experience of being
in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself,
giving yourself a pep talk.
I mean, if you're the one talking,
why are you also the one listening?
Like, why do you need the pep talk and why does it work?
If you're the one giving the pep talk, right?
Or if I say, where are my keys?
Right, if I'm looking for my keys,
why do I think the superfluous thought, where are my keys?
I know I'm looking for the fucking keys.
I'm the one looking, who am I telling
that we now need to look for the keys, right?
So that duality is weird, but leave that aside.
There's the sense, and this becomes very vivid
when people try to learn to meditate.
Most people, they close their eyes
and they're told to pay attention
to an object like the breath, say.
So you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath
and you can feel it at the tip of your nose
or the rising and falling of your abdomen.
And you're paying attention
and you feel something vague there.
And then you think, I thought, why the breath?
Why am I paying attention to the breath?
What's so special about the breath?
And then you notice you're thinking
and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore.
And then you realize, okay, the practice is,
okay, I should notice thoughts
and then I should come back to the breath.
But this starting point is of the conventional starting point
of feeling like you are an agent, very likely in your head,
a locus of consciousness, a locus of attention
that can strategically pay attention
to certain parts of experience.
Like I can focus on the breath
and then I get lost in thought
and now I can come back to the breath
and I can open my eyes
and I'm over here behind my face
looking out at a world that's other than me
and there's this kind of subject-object perception.
And that is the default starting point of selfhood,
of subjectivity.
And married to that is the sense
that I can decide what to do next.
I am an agent who can pay attention to the cup.
I can listen to sounds.
There are certain things that I can't control.
Certain things are happening to me
and I just can't control them.
So for instance, if someone asks,
well, can you not hear a sound, right?
Like don't hear the next sound.
Don't hear anything for a second.
Or don't hear, don't hear,
you know, I'm snapping my fingers, don't hear this.
Where's your free will?
You know, well, like just stop this from coming in.
You realize, okay, wait a minute.
My abundant freedom does not extend
to something as simple as just being able
§08Transcript · 1:09:20–1:18:55
to pay attention to something else than this.
Okay, well, so I'm not that kind of free agent,
but at least I can decide what I'm gonna do next.
I'm gonna pick up this water, right?
And there's a feeling of identification
with the impulse, with the intention,
with the thought that occurs to you,
with the feeling of speaking.
Like, you know, what am I gonna say next?
Well, I'm saying it, so here goes.
This is me.
It feels like I'm the thinker.
I'm the one who's in control.
But all of that is born of not really paying close attention
to what it's like to be you.
And so this is where meditation comes in,
or this is where, again,
you can get at this conceptually.
You can unravel the notion of free will
just by thinking certain thoughts,
but you can't feel that it doesn't exist,
unless you can pay close attention
to how thoughts and intentions arise.
So the way to unravel it conceptually
is just to realize, okay, I didn't make myself.
I didn't make my genes.
I didn't make my brain.
I didn't make the environmental influences
that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years
that have produced my brain in precisely the state
it's in right now,
such, I mean, with all of the receptor weightings
and densities, and, you know, it's just,
I'm exactly the machine I am right now
through no fault of my own as the experiencing self.
I get no credit and I get no blame
for the genetics and the environmental influences here.
And yet those are the only things that contrive
to produce my next thought or impulse
or moment of behavior.
And if you were going to add something magical
to that clockwork, like an immortal soul,
you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul,
right, like you can't account for the fact
that you don't have the soul of someone
who doesn't like any of the things you like
or wasn't interested in any of the things
you were interested in or, you know,
or was a psychopath or was, you know, had an IQ of 40.
I mean, like there's nothing about that
that the person who believes in a soul
can claim to have controlled.
And yet that is also totally dispositive
of whatever happens next.
- But everything you've described now,
maybe you can correct me, but it kind of speaks
to the materialistic nature of the hardware.
- But even if you add magical ectoplasm software,
you didn't produce that either.
- I know, but if we can think about
the actual computation running on the hardware
and running on the software,
there's something you said recently,
which you think of culture as an operating system.
So if we just remove ourselves a little bit
from the conception of human civilization
being a collection of humans,
and rather us just being a distributed computation system
on which there's some kind of operating system running,
and then the computation that's running
is the actual thing that generates the interactions,
the communications, and maybe even free will,
the experiences of all those free will.
Do you ever think of, do you ever try to reframe the world
in that way, where it's like ideas are just using us,
thoughts are using individual nodes in the system,
and they're just jumping around,
and they also have ability to generate experiences
so that we can push those ideas along?
And basically the main organisms here
are the thoughts, not the humans.
- Yeah, but then that erodes the boundary
between self and world.
- Right.
- So then there's no self, a really integrated self
to have any kind of will at all.
Like if you're just a meme plex,
I mean, if you're just a collection of memes,
and I mean, we're all kind of like currents,
like eddies in this river of ideas, right?
So it's like, and it seems to have structure,
but there's no real boundary
between that part of the flow of water and the rest.
I mean, if our, and I would say that much of our mind
answers to this kind of description.
I mean, so much of our mind has been,
it's obviously not self-generated,
and you're not gonna find it by looking in the brain.
It is the result of culture largely,
but also, you know,
the genes on one side and culture on the other
meeting to allow for
manifestations of mind that aren't actually bounded
by the person in any clear sense.
It was just, the example I often use here,
but there's so many others,
is just the fact that we're following
the rules of English grammar to whatever degree we are.
It's not that, we certainly haven't consciously
represented these rules for ourself.
We haven't invented these rules.
We haven't, I mean, there are norms of language use
that we couldn't even specify because we haven't,
you know, we're not grammarians.
We haven't studied this.
We don't even have the right concepts,
and yet we're following these rules,
and we're noticing as an error
when we fail to follow these rules.
And virtually every other cultural norm is like that.
I mean, these are not things we've invented.
You can consciously decide to scrutinize them
and override them, but I mean,
just think of any social situation
where you're with other people,
and you're behaving in ways
that are culturally appropriate, right?
You're not being wild animals together.
You're following, so you have some expectation
of how you shake a person's hand
and how you deal with implements on a table,
how you have a meal together.
Obviously, this can change from culture to culture,
and people can be shocked
by how different those things are, right?
We all have foods we find disgusting,
but in some countries, dog is not one of those foods, right?
And yet, you and I presumably would be horrified
to be served dog.
Those are not norms that we're,
they are outside of us in some way,
and yet they're felt very viscerally.
I mean, they're certainly felt in their violation.
You know, if you are, just imagine,
you're in somebody's home,
you're eating something that tastes great to you,
and you happen to be in Vietnam or wherever,
you know, you didn't realize dog
was potentially on the menu,
and you find out that you've just eaten 10 bites
of what is really a cocker spaniel,
and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit, right,
based on an idea, right?
Like, so you did not,
you're not the author of that norm
that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation,
and I'm sure we can trace the moment in your history,
you know, vaguely where it sort of got in.
I mean, very early on as kids,
you realize you're treating dogs as pets
and not as food, or as potential food.
But yeah, no, it's,
but the point you just made opens us to,
like, we are totally permeable to a sea of mind.
- Yeah, but if we take the metaphor
of the distributed computing systems,
each individual node is part of performing
a much larger computation,
but it nevertheless is in charge of doing the scheduling.
So, assuming it's Linux,
is doing the scheduling of processes
and is constantly alternating them.
That node is making those choices.
That node sure as hell believes it has free will,
and it actually has free will
'cause it's making those hard choices,
but the choices ultimately are part
of a much larger computation that it can't control.
Isn't it possible for that node to still be,
that human node is still making the choice?
- Well, yeah, it is.
So, I'm not saying that your body
isn't doing, really doing things, right?
And some of those things can be
conventionally thought of as choices, right?
So, it's like I can choose to reach,
and it's like, it's not being imposed on me.
That would be a different experience.
Like, so there's an experience of,
you know, there's definitely a difference
between voluntary and involuntary action.
So, that has to get conserved.
By any account of the mind that jettisons free will,
you still have to admit that there's a difference
between a tremor that I can't control
and a purposeful motor action that I can control
and that I can initiate on demand,
and it's associated with intentions.
And it's got efferent motor copy,
which is being predictive so that I can notice errors.
§09Transcript · 1:18:59–1:28:09
You know, I have expectations.
When I reach for this,
if my hand were actually to pass through the bottle,
because it's a hologram, I would be surprised, right?
And so, that shows that I have a expectation
of just what my grasping behavior
is going to be like even before it happens.
Whereas with a tremor,
you don't have the same kind of thing going on.
That's a distinction we have to make.
So, I am, yes, I'm really the,
my intention to move,
which is in fact can be subjectively felt,
really is the proximate cause of my moving.
It's not coming from elsewhere in the universe.
I'm not saying that.
So, in that sense, the node is really deciding
to execute the subroutine now.
But that's not the feeling
that has given rise to this conundrum of free will, right?
So, people feel like,
people feel like they,
crucial thing is that people feel like
they could have done otherwise, right?
That's the thing.
So, when you run back the clock of your life, right?
You run back the movie of your life.
You flip back the few pages in the novel of your life.
They feel that at this point,
they could behave differently than they did, right?
So, like, but given,
even given your distributed computing example,
it's either a fully deterministic system
or it's a deterministic system
that admits of some random influence.
In either case,
that's not the free will people think they have.
The free will people think they have is,
damn, I shouldn't have done that.
I just, like, I shouldn't have done that.
I could have done otherwise, right?
I should have done otherwise, right?
Like, if you think about something
that you deeply regret doing, right?
Or that you hold someone else responsible for
because they really are the upstream agent
in your mind of what they did.
That's an awful thing that that person did
and they shouldn't have done it.
There is this illusion and it has to be an illusion
because there's no picture of causation
that would make sense of it.
There's this illusion that if you arrange the universe
exactly the way it was a moment ago,
it could have played out differently.
And the only way it could have played out differently
is if there's randomness added to that,
but randomness isn't what people feel
would give them free will, right?
If you tell me that, you know,
I only reached for the water bottle this time
because somebody's,
because there's a random number generator in there
kicking off values and it finally moved my hand.
That's not the feeling of authorship.
- That's still not control.
You're still not making that decision.
There's actually, I don't know if you're familiar
with cellular automata.
It's a really nice visualization
of how simple rules can create incredible complexity
that it's like really dumb initial conditions to set,
simple rules applied,
and eventually you watch this thing,
and if the initial conditions are correct,
then you're going to have emerge something
that to our perception system
looks like organisms interacting.
You can construct any kinds of worlds,
and they're not actually interacting.
They're not actually even organisms,
and they certainly aren't making decisions.
So there's like systems you can create
that illustrate this point.
The question is whether there could be some room
for let's use in the 21st century the term magic,
back to the black box of consciousness.
Let me ask you this way.
If you're wrong about your intuition about free will,
what, and somebody comes along to you
and proves to you that you didn't have the full picture,
what would that proof look like?
What would--
- Well, that's the problem.
That's why it's not even an illusion in my world
because for me it's impossible to say
what the universe would have to be like
for free will to be a thing.
It doesn't conceptually map onto
any notion of causation we have,
and that's unlike any other spurious claim you might make.
So like if you're going to believe in ghosts,
I understand what that claim could be.
Where like I don't happen to believe in ghosts,
but it's not hard for me to specify
what would have to be true for ghosts to be real.
And so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts.
Right, so like, okay, so you're telling me
that when people die, there's some part of them
that is not reducible at all to their biology
that lifts off them and goes elsewhere
and is actually the kind of thing
that can linger in closets and in cupboards
and actually it's immaterial,
but by some principle of physics,
we don't totally understand.
It can make sounds and knock objects
and even occasionally show up
so they can be visually beheld.
And it's just, it seems like a miracle,
but it's just some spooky noun in the universe
that we don't understand.
Let's call it a ghost.
That's fine, I can talk about that all day,
the reasons to believe in it,
the reasons not to believe in it,
the way we would scientifically test for it,
what would have to be provable
so as to convince me that ghosts are real.
Free will isn't like that at all.
There's no description of any concatenation of causes
that precedes my conscious experience
that sounds like what people think they have
when they think they could have done otherwise
and that they really, that they, the conscious agent,
is really in charge, right?
Like if you don't know what you're going to think next,
right, and you can't help but think it,
take those two premises on board.
You don't know what it's gonna be,
you can't stop it from coming,
and until you actually know how to meditate,
you can't stop yourself from
fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences.
Right, like you have no, once you,
mindfulness arguably gives you
another degree of freedom here.
It doesn't give you free will,
but it gives you some other game to play
with respect to the emotional
and behavioral imperatives of thoughts.
But short of that, I mean,
the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free will
is because you can't, you know,
you can't account for why in one moment mindfulness arises,
and in other moments it doesn't, right?
But a different process is initiated
once you can practice in that way.
- Well, if I could push back for a second.
By the way, I just have this thought bubble
popping up all the time of just two recent chimps
arguing about the nature of consciousness.
It's kind of hilarious.
So on that thread, you know,
if we're, even before Einstein,
let's say before Einstein,
we were to conceive about traveling from point A to point B,
say some point in the future,
we are able to realize through engineering
a way which is consistent with Einstein's theory
that you can have wormholes.
You can travel from one point to another
faster than the speed of light.
And that would, I think,
completely change our conception
of what it means to travel in the physical space.
And that, like, completely transform our ability.
You talk about causality,
but here let's just focus on what it means
to travel through physical space.
Don't you think it's possible that there will be
inventions or leaps in understanding about reality
that will allow us to see free will as actually,
like, us humans somehow may be linked
to this idea of consciousness,
are actually able to be authors of our actions?
It is a non-starter for me conceptually.
It's a little bit like saying,
could there be some breakthrough
that will cause us to realize that circles are really square
or that circles are not really round, right?
No, a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form.
Right, like, it's not on the table to be revised.
And so I would say the same thing about consciousness.
It's just like saying, is there some breakthrough
that would get us to realize
that consciousness is really an illusion?
I'm saying no, because what the experience of an illusion
is as much a demonstration of what I'm calling consciousness
as anything else, right?
§10Transcript · 1:28:09–1:37:47
It's like, that is consciousness.
With free will, it's a similar problem.
It's like,
again, it comes down to a picture of causality
and there's no other picture on offer.
And what's more,
I know what it's like on the experiential side
to lose the thing to which it is clearly anchored, right?
The feel like, it doesn't feel,
and this is the question that almost nobody asked,
people who are debating me on the topic of free will,
15 minute intervals, I'm making a claim
that I don't feel this thing,
and they never become interested in,
well, what's that like?
Like, okay, so you're actually saying you don't,
this thing isn't true for you empirically.
It's not just, because most people
who don't believe in free will philosophically
also believe that we're condemned to experience it.
Like, you can't live without this feeling.
- So you're actually saying
you're able to experience the absence of
the illusion of free will.
- Yes, yes.
- For, are we talking about a few minutes at a time,
or is this to require a lot of work and meditation,
or are you literally able to load that into your mind
and like play that movie?
- Right now, right now, just in this conversation.
So it's not absolutely continuous,
but it's whenever I pay attention.
It's like, it's the same,
and I would say the same thing for the illusoriness
of the self in the sense,
and again, we haven't talked about this, so.
- Can you still have the self
and not have the free will in your mind at the same time?
Do they go at the same time?
- This is the same, yeah, it's the same thing that--
- They're always holding hands
and when they walk out the door.
- They really are two sides of the same coin.
But it's just, it comes down to what it's like
to try to get to the end of the sentence,
or what it's like to finally decide
that it's been long enough
and now I need another sip of water, right?
If I'm paying attention, now, if I'm not paying attention,
I'm probably, I'm captured by some other thought
and that feels a certain way, right?
And so that's not, it's not vivid,
but if I try to make vivid this experience of just,
okay, I'm finally going to experience free will.
I'm going to notice my free will, right?
Like it's got to be here, everyone's talking about it.
Where is it?
I'm going to pay attention to it.
I'm going to look for it.
And I'm going to create a circumstance
that is where it has to be most robust, right?
I'm not rushed to make this decision.
I'm not, it's not a reflex.
I'm not under pressure.
I'm going to take as long as I want.
I'm going to decide.
It's not trivial.
Like, so it's not just like reaching with my left hand
or reaching with my right hand.
People don't like those examples for some reason.
Let's make a big decision.
Like, where should, you know,
what should my next podcast be on, right?
Who do I invite on the next podcast?
What is it like to make that decision?
When I pay attention,
there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight.
It's like, it doesn't feel like,
it feels profoundly mysterious
to be going back between two people.
You know, like, is it going to be person A or person B?
Got all my reasons for A and all my reasons why not,
and all my reasons for B,
and there's some math going on there
that I'm not even privy to,
where certain concerns are trumping others.
And at a certain point, I just decide.
And yes, you can say I'm the node in the network
that has made that decision, absolutely.
I'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere,
but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision
is totally without a sense,
a real sense of agency,
because something simply emerges.
It's literally as tenuous as,
what's the next sound I'm going to hear?
Right, or what's the next thought that's going to appear?
And it just, something just appears, you know?
And if something appears to cancel that something,
like if I say, I'm going to invite her,
and then I'm about to send the email,
and then I think, oh, no, no, no, I can't do that.
There was that thing in that New York article I read
that I got to talk to this guy, right?
That pivot at the last second,
you can make it as muscular as you want.
It always just comes out of the darkness.
It's always mysterious.
- So right, when you try to pin it down,
you really can't ever find that free will.
If you construct an experiment for yourself,
and you try to really find that moment
when you're actually making that controlled,
author decision, it's very difficult to do.
- And we're still, we know at this point
that if we were scanning your brain
in some podcast guest choosing experiment, right?
We know at this point we would be privy
to who you're going to pick before you are.
You, the conscious agent.
If we could, again, this is operationally
a little hard to conduct, but there's enough data now
to know that something very much like this cartoon
is in fact true, and will ultimately be undeniable
for people, that they'll be able to do it on themselves
with some app.
If you're deciding what to, where to go for dinner,
or who to have on your podcast, or ultimately,
who to marry, right, or what city to move to, right?
Like you can make it as big or as small
a decision as you want.
We could be scanning your brain in real time,
and at a point where you still think you're uncommitted,
we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy,
all right, Lex is, he's moving to Austin, right?
- I didn't choose that.
- Yeah, he was, it was gonna be Austin,
or it was gonna be Miami.
He got, he's catching one of these two waves,
but it's gonna be Austin.
And at a point where you subjectively,
if we could ask you, you would say,
oh no, I'm still working over here.
I'm still thinking, I'm still choosing,
I'm still considering my options.
- And you've spoken to this.
In you thinking about other stuff in the world,
it's been very useful to step away
from this illusion of free will.
And you argue that it probably makes a better world
because you can be compassionate
and empathetic towards others.
- And toward oneself.
- And towards oneself.
- I mean, radically toward others,
in that literally hate makes no sense anymore.
I mean, there's certain things you can
really be worried about, really want to oppose,
really, I mean, I'm not saying you'd never have
to kill another person.
Like, I mean, self-defense is still a thing, right?
But the idea that you're ever confronting
anything other than a force of nature in the end
goes out the window, right?
Or does go out the window when you really pay attention.
I'm not saying that this would be easy to grok
if someone kills a member of your family.
I'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes
on free will and then you should be able to see
that person as identical to a grizzly bear or a virus.
'Cause I mean, we are so evolved to deal with one another
as fellow primates and as agents.
But it's, yeah, when you're talking about the possibility
of Christian, truly Christian forgiveness, right?
It is like, as testified to by various saints
of that flavor over the millennia.
Yeah, the doorway to that is to recognize
that no one really at bottom made themselves.
And therefore everyone, what we're seeing really
are differences in luck in the world.
We're seeing people who are very, very lucky
to have had good parents and good genes
and to be in good societies and had good opportunities
and to be intelligent and to be not sociopathic.
None of it is on them.
They're just reaping the fruits of one lottery
after another and then showing up in the world on that basis.
And then so it is with every malevolent asshole out there.
He or she didn't make themself.
Even if that weren't possible,
the utility for self-compassion is also enormous
because when you just look at what it's like
to regret something or to feel shame about something
or feel deep embarrassment about it,
these states of mind are some of the most deranging
experiences anyone has and the indelible reaction to them,
the memory of the thing you said,
the memory of the wedding toast you gave 20 years ago
that was just mortifying, right?
The fact that that can still make you hate yourself, right?
§11Transcript · 1:37:50–1:48:16
And like that psychologically,
that is a knot that can be untied, right?
- Speak for yourself, Sam.
- Yeah, yeah. - So clearly you're not--
- You gave a great toast.
It was my toast that mortified me.
- No, no, no, that's not what I was referring to.
I'm deeply appreciative in the same way
that you're referring to of every moment I'm alive,
but I'm also powered by self-hate often.
Like several things in this conversation already
that I've spoken, I'll be thinking about
like that was the dumbest thing.
You're sitting in front of Sam Harris and you said that.
So like that, but that somehow creates
a richer experience for me.
I've actually come to accept that as a nice feature
of however my brain was built.
I don't think I wanna let go of that.
- Well, I think the thing you wanna let go of is
the suffering associated with it.
So for me, so this is very,
psychologically and ethically,
all of this is very interesting.
So I don't think we should ever get rid
of things like anger, right?
So like hatred is, hatred is divorceable from anger
in the sense that hatred is this enduring state
where whether you're hating somebody else
or hating yourself, it is toxic and durable
and ultimately useless, right?
Like it becomes self nullifying, right?
Like you become less capable as a person
to solve any of your problems.
It's not instrumental in solving the problem
that is occasioning all this hatred.
And anger for the most part isn't either
except as a signal of salience that there's a problem, right?
So if somebody does something that makes me angry,
that just promotes this situation to conscious attention
in a way that is stronger than my not really caring
about it, right?
And there are things that I think should make us angry
in the world and there's the behavior of other people
that should make us angry because we should respond to it.
And so it is with yourself.
If I do something, as a parent, if I do something stupid
that harms one of my daughters, right?
My experience of myself and my beliefs about free will
closed the door to my saying,
well, I should have done otherwise
in the sense that if I could go back in time,
I would have actually effectively done otherwise.
No, I would do, given the same causes and conditions,
I would do that thing a trillion times in a row, right?
But, you know, regret and feeling bad about an outcome
are still important to capacities because like, yeah,
I desperately want my daughters to be happy and healthy.
So if I've done something, you know,
if I crash the car when they're in the car
and they get injured, right?
And I do it because I was trying to change a song
on my playlist or something stupid,
I'm gonna feel like a total asshole.
How long do I stew in that feeling of regret, right?
And what utility is there to extract
out of this error signal?
And then what do I do?
We're always faced with the question of what to do next,
right, and how to best do that thing,
that necessary thing next.
And how much wellbeing can we experience while doing it?
Like how miserable do you need to be
to solve your problems in life
and to help solve the problems of people closest to you?
You know, how miserable do you need to be
to get through your to-do list today?
Ultimately, I think you can be deeply happy
going through all of it, right?
And even navigating moments that are scary
and really destabilizing to ordinary people.
And I mean, I think, you know, again,
I'm always up kind of at the edge of my own capacities here
and there are all kinds of things that stress me out
and worry me, and I mean, especially something,
if it's, you're gonna tell me it's something with,
you know, the health of one of my kids,
you know, it's very hard for me,
like it's very hard for me to be truly a quantumist
around that, but equanimity is so useful
the moment you're in response mode, right?
'Cause I mean, the ordinary experience for me
of responding to what seems like a medical emergency
for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized
by concern to respond to that emergency.
But then once I'm responding, all of my fear and agitation
and worry and, oh my God, what if this is really
something terrible, but finding any of those thoughts
compelling, that only diminishes my capacity as a father
to be good company while we navigate
this really turbulent passage, you know?
- As you're saying this, actually, one guy comes to mind,
which is Elon Musk, one of the really impressive things
to me was to observe how many dramatic things
he has to deal with throughout the day at work,
but also if you look through his life, family too,
and how he's very much actually, as you're describing,
basically a practitioner of this way of thought,
which is you're not in control,
you're basically responding,
no matter how traumatic the event,
and there's no reason to sort of linger on the--
- Well, yeah, they couldn't be--
- On the negative feelings around that.
- Well, so, but he's in a very specific situation,
which is unlike normal life, you know,
even his normal life, but normal life for most people,
because when you just think of like, you know,
he's running so many businesses,
and they're highly non-standard businesses,
so what he's seeing is everything that gets to him
is some kind of emergency, like it wouldn't be
getting to him, if it needs his attention,
there's a fire somewhere, so he's constantly responding
to fires that have to be put out,
so there's no default expectation
that there shouldn't be a fire, right?
But in our normal lives, we live,
most of us who are lucky, right,
not everyone, obviously, on Earth,
but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude
in terms of our lives, where we're reasonably healthy,
and life is reasonably orderly,
and the political apparatus around us
is reasonably functionable, so I said functionable
for the first time in my life,
through no free will of my own,
so like I noticed those errors,
and they do not feel like agency,
and nor does the success of an utterance
feel like agency.
When you're looking at normal human life, right,
where you're just trying to be happy and healthy,
and get your work done, there's this default expectation
that there shouldn't be fires,
people shouldn't be getting sick or injured,
we shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources,
we should like, so when something really stark
like that happens, people don't have that muscle,
that they're, like I've been responding
to emergencies all day long, seven days a week,
in business mode, and so I have a very thick skin,
this is just another one, what if I'm not expecting
anything else when I wake up in the morning,
no, we have this default sense that,
I mean, honestly, most of us have the default sense
that we aren't gonna die, right,
or that we should, like maybe we're not gonna die,
right, like death denial really is a thing,
because, and you can see it, just like I can see
when I reach for this bottle,
that I was expecting it to be solid,
because when it isn't solid, when it's a hologram,
and I just, my fist closes on itself, I'm damn surprised,
people are damn surprised to find out
that they're going to die, to find out that they're sick,
to find out that someone they love has died,
or is going to die, so it's like,
the fact that we are surprised by any of that
shows us that we're living at a,
we're living in a mode that is,
you know, we're perpetually diverting ourselves
from some facts that should be obvious, right,
and the more salient we can make them,
you know, the more, I mean, in the case of death,
it's a matter of being able to get one's priorities straight,
I mean, the moment, and this is hard for everybody,
even those who are really in the business
of paying attention to it, but the moment you realize
that every circumstance is finite, right,
you've got a certain number of, you know,
you've got whatever, whatever it is,
8,000 days left in a normal span of life,
and 8,000 is a, sounds like a big number,
it's not that big a number, right,
so it's just like, and then you can decide
how you want to go through life,
and how you want to experience each one of those days,
and so I would, back to our jumping off point,
I would argue that you don't want to feel self-hatred ever,
I would argue that you don't want to really,
really grasp onto any of those moments
where you are internalizing the fact
that you just made an error, you've embarrassed yourself,
that something didn't go the way you wanted it to,
I think you want to treat all of those moments
very, very lightly, you want to extract
the actionable information, it's something to learn,
oh, I learned that when I prepare in a certain way,
it works better than when I prepare in some other way,
§12Transcript · 1:48:20–1:58:15
or don't prepare, right, so like, yes, lesson learned,
you know, and do that differently, but,
yeah, I mean, so many of us have spent so much time
with a very dysfunctional and hostile,
and even hateful inner voice
governing a lot of our self-talk,
and a lot of just our default way of being with ourselves,
I mean, the privacy of our own minds,
we're in the company of a real jerk a lot of the time,
and that can't help but affect,
I mean, forget about just your own sense of well-being,
it can't help but limit what you're capable of
in the world with other people.
- I'll have to really think about that,
I just take pride that my jerk, my inner voice jerk,
is much less of a jerk than somebody like David Goggins,
who's just like screaming in his ear constantly,
so I just have a relativist kind of perspective
that it's not as bad as that, at least.
- Well, having a sense of humor also helps,
you know, it's just like it's not,
the stakes are never quite what you think they are,
and even when they are, I mean,
just the difference between being able to see the comedy
of it rather than, 'cause again,
there's this sort of dark star of self-absorption
that pulls everything into it, right,
and if that's the algorithm you don't want to run,
so it's like you just want things to be good,
so just push the concern out there,
not have the collapse of,
oh my God, what does this say about me?
It's just like, what does this say about,
how do we make this meal that we're all having together
as fun and as useful as possible?
- And you're saying in terms of propulsion systems,
you recommend humor as a good spaceship
to escape the gravitational field of that darkness.
- Well, it certainly helps, yeah.
- Yeah, well, let me ask you a little bit
about ego and fame, which is very interesting.
The way you're talking, given that you're one
of the biggest intellects, living intellects
and minds of our time, and there's a lot of people
that really love you and almost elevate you
to a certain kind of status where you're like the guru.
I'm surprised you didn't show up in a robe, in fact.
Is there-- - A hoodie.
That's not the highest status garment one can wear now.
- The socially acceptable version of the robe.
- If you're a billionaire, you wear a hoodie.
- Is there something you can say about managing
the effects of fame on your own mind,
on not creating this, when you wake up in the morning,
when you look in the mirror, how do you get your ego
not to grow exponentially, your conception of self
to grow exponentially, because there's so many people
feeding that, is there something to be said about this?
- It's really not hard, because I feel like I have
a pretty clear sense of my strengths and weaknesses,
and I don't feel like it's, honestly, I don't feel
like I suffer from much grandiosity.
There's so many things I'm not good at,
there's so many things I will, given the remaining
8,000 days at best, I will never get good at.
I would love to be good at these things.
So it's just, it's easy to feel diminished
by comparison with the talents of others.
- Do you remind yourself of all the things
that you're not competent in?
Is, I mean, like-- - Well, they're just
on display for me every day, that I appreciate
the talents of others.
- But you notice them.
I'm sure Stalin and Hitler did not notice
all the ways in which they were,
I mean, this is why absolute power corrupts absolutely,
is you stop noticing the things
in which you're ridiculous and wrong.
- Right, yeah, no, I-- - Not to compare you to Stalin.
- Yeah, well, I'm sure there's an inner Stalin
in there somewhere.
- Well, we all have, we all carry a baby Stalin with us.
- He wears better clothes.
And I'm not gonna grow that mustache.
Those concerns don't map, they don't map onto me
for a bunch of reasons, but one is,
I also have a very peculiar audience.
I like, I'm just, I've been appreciating this
for a few years, but it's, I'm just now
beginning to understand that there are many people
who have audiences of my size or larger
that have a very different experience
of having an audience than I do.
I have curated, for better or worse,
a peculiar audience, and the net result of that is
virtually any time I say anything of substance,
something like half of my audience,
my real audience, not haters from outside my audience,
but my audience just revolts over it, right?
They just like, oh my God, I can't believe you said,
like you're such a schmuck, right?
- They revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication.
- Or not, or not, but I mean, it's both,
but it's like, but people who are like,
so I mean, the clearest case is,
you know, I have whatever audience I have,
and then Trump appears on the scene,
and I discover that something like 20% of my audience
just went straight to Trump and couldn't believe
I didn't follow them there.
They were just aghast that I didn't see
that Trump was obviously exactly what we needed
for, to steer the ship of state for the next four years,
and then four years beyond that.
So like, so that's one example.
So whenever I said anything about Trump,
I would hear from people who loved more or less
everything else I was up to and had for years,
but everything I said about Trump just gave me pure pain
from this quadrant of my audience.
But then the same thing happens when I say something
about the derangement of the far left.
Anything I say about wokeness, right, or identity politics,
same kind of punishment signal from us.
Again, people who are core to my audience,
like I've read all your books,
I'm using your meditation app,
I love what you say about science,
but you are so wrong about politics,
and you are, you know, I'm starting to think
you're a racist asshole for everything you said
about identity politics.
And there are so many,
the free will topic is just like this.
It's like, just, they love what I'm saying
about consciousness and the mind,
and they love to hear me talk about physics with physicists,
and it's all good.
This free will stuff is,
I cannot believe you don't see how wrong you are.
What a fucking embarrassment you are.
So, but I'm starting to notice that there are other people
who don't have this experience of having an audience
because they have, I mean,
just take the Trump-Woke dichotomy.
They just castigated Trump the same way I did,
but they never say anything bad about the far left.
So they never get this punishment signal,
or you flip it.
They're all about the insanity of critical race theory now.
We connect all those dots the same way,
but they never really specified what was wrong with Trump,
or they thought there was a lot right with Trump,
and they got all the pleasure of that.
And so they have much more homogenized audiences.
And so my experience, so just to come back to, you know,
this experience of fame or quasi-fame,
and truth is not real fame,
but still there's an audience there.
It is a, it's now an experience where basically
whatever I put out,
I notice a ton of negativity coming back at me.
And it just, it is what it is.
I mean, now it's like, I used to think,
wait a minute, there's gotta be some way
for me to communicate more clearly here
so as not to get this kind of lunatic response
from my own audience,
from like people who are showing all the signs of,
we've been here for years for a reason, right?
These are not just trolls.
And so I think, okay, I'm gonna take 10 more minutes
and really just tell you what,
it should be absolutely clear
about what's wrong with Trump.
Right, I've done this a few times,
but I think I gotta do this again.
Or wait a minute, how are they not getting
that these episodes of police violence
are so obviously different from one another
that you can't describe all of them
to yet another racist maniac on the police force,
killing someone based on his racism.
Last time I spoke about this, it was pure pain,
but I just gotta try again.
Now at a certain point, I mean,
I'm starting to feel like, all right,
I just, I have to be, I have to cease.
Again, it comes back to this expectation
that there shouldn't be fires.
Like I feel like if I could just play my game impeccably,
the people who actually care what I think will follow me
when I hit Trump and hit free will and hit the woke
and hit whatever it is,
how we should respond to the coronavirus,
vaccines, are they a thing, right?
Like there's such derangement in our information space now
that I mean, I guess some people could be getting more
of this than I expect, but I just noticed
§13Transcript · 1:58:18–2:08:32
that many of our friends who are in the same game
have more homogenized audiences and don't get,
I mean, they've successfully filtered out
the people who are gonna despise them on this next topic.
And I would imagine you have a different experience
of having a podcast than I do at this point.
I mean, I'm sure you get haters,
but I would imagine you're more streamlined.
- I actually don't like the word haters
because it kind of presumes that it puts people in a bin.
I think we all have like baby haters inside of us
and we just apply them and some people enjoy doing that
more than others for particular periods of time.
I think you're gonna almost see hating on the internet
as a video game that you just play and it's fun,
but then you can put it down and walk away.
And no, I certainly have a bunch of people
that are very critical.
I can list all the ways.
- But does it feel like on any given topic,
does it feel like it's an actual title surge
where it's like 30% of your audience
and then the other 30% of your audience
from podcast to podcast?
- No, no, no.
- That's happening to me all the time now.
- Well, I'm more with, I don't know
what you think about this.
I mean, Joe Rogan doesn't read comments
or doesn't read comments much.
And the argument he made to me is that
he already has like a self-critical person inside.
Like, and I'm gonna have to think about
what you said in this conversation,
but I have this very harshly self-critical person
inside as well where I don't need more fuel.
I don't need, no, I do sometimes,
that's why I check negativity occasionally, not too often.
I sometimes need to like put a little bit more
like coals into the fire, but not too much.
But I already have that self-critical engine
that keeps me in check.
I just, I wonder, you know, a lot of people
who gain more and more fame lose that ability
to be self-critical, I guess,
because they lose the audience
that can be critical towards them.
- You know, I do follow Joe's advice
much more than I ever have here.
Like, I don't look at comments very often,
and I'm probably using Twitter, you know,
5% as much as I used to.
I mean, I really just get in and out on Twitter
and spend very little time in my ad mentions.
But, you know, it does, in some ways it feels like a loss
because occasionally I see something
super intelligent there.
Like, I mean, I'll check my Twitter ad mentions
and someone will have said, oh, have you read this article?
And it's like, man, that was just,
that was like the best article sent to me in a month, right?
So it's like, to have not have looked
and to not have seen that, that's a loss.
So, but it does, at this point a little goes a long way
'cause it's not that it,
for me now, I mean, this could sound
like a fairly Stalinistic immunity to criticism.
It's not so much that these voices of hate
turn on my inner hater, you know, more.
It's more that I just, I get a,
what I fear is a false sense of humanity.
Like, I feel like I'm too online
and online is selecting for this performative outrage
in everybody, everyone's signaling to an audience
when they trash you.
And I get a dark, I'm getting a, you know,
misanthropic, you know, cut of just what it's like out there
and it, 'cause when you meet people in real life,
they're great, you know, they're rather often great,
you know, and it takes a lot to have anything
like a Twitter encounter in real life with a living person.
And that's, I think it's much better to have that
as one's default sense of what it's like to be with people
than what one gets on social media
or on YouTube comment threads.
- You've produced a special episode with Rob Reed
on your podcast recently on how bioengineering of viruses
is going to destroy human civilization.
So-- - Or could.
- Could. - One fears, yeah.
- Sorry, the confidence there.
But in the 21st century, what do you think,
especially after having thought through that angle,
what do you think is the biggest threat
to the survival of the human species?
I can give you the full menu if you'd like.
- Yeah, well, no, I would put the biggest threat
at the, another level out, kind of the meta threat
is our inability to agree about what the threats
actually are and to converge on strategies for response
to them, right?
So like I view COVID as, among other things,
a truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal
for something far worse, right?
I mean, COVID is just about as benign as it could have been
and still have been worse than the flu
when you're talking about a global pandemic, right?
So it's just, it's, you know,
it's gonna kill a few million people,
or it looks like it's killed about 3 million people.
Maybe it'll kill a few million more
unless something gets away from us
with a variant that's much worse,
or we really don't play our cards right.
But I mean, the general shape of it is it's got,
you know, somewhere around, well, 1% lethality.
And whatever side of that number it really is on
in the end, it's not what would in fact be possible
and is in fact probably inevitable,
something with, you know, orders of magnitude,
more lethality than that.
And it's just so obvious we are totally unprepared, right?
We are running this epidemiological experiment
of linking the entire world together.
And then also now per the podcast that Rob Reed did,
democratizing the tech that will allow us to do this,
to engineer pandemics, right?
And more and more people will be able
to engineer synthetic viruses that will be,
by the sheer fact that they would have been engineered
with malicious intent, you know, worse than COVID.
And we're still living in,
to speak specifically about the United States,
we have a country here where we can't even agree
that this is a thing, like that COVID,
I mean, there's still people who think
that this is basically a hoax designed to control people.
And it's stranger still, there are people
who will acknowledge that COVID is real
and they don't think the deaths have been faked
or mis-ascribed.
But they think that they're far happier
at the prospect of catching COVID
than they are of getting vaccinated for COVID, right?
They're not worried about COVID,
they're worried about vaccines for COVID, right?
And the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation
that we've now had a year to have with one another
on just what is the ground truth here?
What's happened?
Why has it happened?
What's the, how safe is it to get COVID
at every, in every cohort in the population?
And how safe are the vaccines?
And the fact that there's still an air of mystery
around all of this for much of our society
does not bode well when you're talking
about solving any other problem that may yet kill us.
- But do you think convergence grows
with the magnitude of the threat?
So- - It's possible,
except I feel like we have tipped into,
'cause when the threat of COVID looked the most dire, right?
When we were seeing reports from Italy
that looked like the beginning of a zombie movie, right?
- 'Cause it could have been much, much worse.
- Yeah, like this is like, this is lethal, right?
Like your ICUs are gonna fill up in,
like you're 14 days behind us.
You're gonna, your medical system is in danger of collapse.
Lock the fuck down.
We have people refusing to do anything sane
in the face of that.
Like, and people fundamentally thinking,
it's not gonna get here, right?
Like, or that's, who knows what's going on in Italy,
but it has no implications for what's gonna go on
in New York in a mere six days, right?
And now it kicks off in New York,
and you've got people in the middle of the country
thinking it's no factor, it's not, that's just big city.
Those are big city problems, or they're faking it,
or, I mean, it just, the layer of politics
has become so dysfunctional for us
that even in what, in the presence of a pandemic
that looked legitimately scary there in the beginning,
I mean, it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating
for everyone who's been directly affected by it,
and it's not to say it can't get worse,
but here, for a very long time, we have known
that we were in a situation that is more benign
than what seemed like the worst case scenario
as it was kicking off, especially in Italy.
And so still, yeah, it's quite possible
that if we saw the asteroid hurtling toward Earth,
and everyone agreed that it's gonna make impact,
and we're all gonna die, then we could get off Twitter
and actually build the rockets
that are gonna divert the asteroid
from its Earth-crossing path,
§14Transcript · 2:08:35–2:18:04
and we could do something pretty heroic.
But when you talk about anything else
that isn't, that's slower moving than that,
I mean, something like, I mean, climate change,
I think the prospect of our converging
on a solution to climate change
purely based on political persuasion
is nonexistent at this point.
I just think that, I mean, to bring Elon back into this,
the way to deal with climate change
is to create technology that everyone wants
that is better than all the carbon-producing technology,
and then we just transition
because you want an electric car
the same way you wanted a smartphone
or you want anything else,
and you're working totally with the grain
of people's selfishness and short-term thinking.
The idea that we're gonna convince
the better part of humanity
that climate change is an emergency,
that they have to make sacrifices to respond to,
given what's happened around COVID,
I just think that's the fantasy of a fantasy.
- But speaking of Elon,
I have a bunch of positive things
that I wanna say here in response to you,
but you're opening so many threads,
but let me pull one of them,
which is AI.
Both you and Elon think that with AI,
you're summoning demons, summoning a demon.
Maybe not in those poetic terms, but--
- Well, potentially.
- Potentially.
- Two very, three very parsimonious assumptions,
I think, here, scientifically,
parsimonious assumptions, get me there.
Any of which could be wrong,
but it just seems like the weight
of the evidence is on their side.
One is that it comes back to this topic
of substrate independence, right?
Anyone who's in the business
of producing intelligent machines
must believe, ultimately,
that there's nothing magical
about having a computer made of meat.
You can do this in the kinds of materials
we're using now,
and there's no special something
that presents a real impediment
to producing human-level intelligence in silico, right?
Again, an assumption, I'm sure there are a few people
who still think there is something magical
about biological systems,
but leave that aside.
Given that assumption,
and given the assumption
that we just continue making incremental progress,
doesn't have to be Moore's Law,
it just has to be progress,
that just doesn't stop,
at a certain point, we'll get
to human-level intelligence and beyond.
And human-level intelligence, I think,
is also clearly a mirage,
because anything that's human-level
is gonna be superhuman,
unless we decide to dumb it down, right?
I mean, my phone is already superhuman
as a calculator, right?
So why would we make the human-level AI
just as good as me, as a calculator?
So I think we'll very,
if we continue to make progress,
we will be in the presence of superhuman competence
for any act of intelligence or cognition
that we care to prioritize.
It's not to say that we'll create everything
that a human could do,
maybe we'll leave certain things out,
but anything that we care about,
and we care about a lot,
and we certainly care about anything
that produces a lot of power,
that we care about scientific insights
and an ability to produce new technology
and all of that,
we'll have something that's superhuman.
And then the final assumption is just that
there have to be ways to do that
that are not aligned with a happy coexistence
with these now more powerful entities than ourselves.
And I would guess,
and this is kind of a rider to that assumption,
there are probably more ways to do it badly
than to do it perfectly,
that is perfectly aligned with our well-being.
And when you think about the consequences of non-alignment,
when you think about,
you're now in the presence of something
that is more intelligent than you are,
which is to say more competent,
unless you've,
and obviously there are cartoon pictures of this
where we could just,
this is just an off switch,
and we could just turn off the off switch,
or they're tethered to something
that makes them,
our slaves in perpetuity,
even though they're more intelligent.
But those scenarios strike me as a failure
to imagine what is actually entailed
by greater intelligence.
So if you imagine something
that's legitimately more intelligent than you are,
and you're now in relationship to it,
you're in the presence of this thing,
and it is autonomous in all kinds of ways
because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are.
I mean, you built it to be all of those things.
We just can't find ourselves in a negotiation
with something more intelligent than we are.
We can't,
so we have to have found the subset of ways
to build these machines
that are perpetually amenable to our saying,
"Oh, that's not what we meant.
"That's not what we intended.
"Could you stop doing that?
"Come back over here
"and do this thing that we actually want."
And for them to care,
for them to be tethered to our own sense
of our own wellbeing,
such that,
I mean, their utility function is,
their primary utility function is to have,
this is, I think, Stuart Russell's cartoon plan
is to figure out how to tether them to a utility function
that has our own estimation
of what's going to improve our wellbeing
as its master reward, right?
So it's like all this thing can get
as intelligent as it can get,
but it only ever really wants to figure out
how to make our lives better by our own view of better.
Now, not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about,
you know, I mean, because all kinds of things
we're not seeing clearly about what is better.
And if we were in the presence of a genie or an oracle
that could really tell us what is better,
well, then we presumably would want to hear that
and we would modify our sense of what to do next
in conversation with these minds.
But I just feel like it is a failure of imagination
to think that being in relationship
to something more intelligent than yourself
isn't in most cases
a circumstance of real peril.
'Cause it is, just to think of how everything on earth
has to, if they could think about their relationship to us,
if birds could think about what we're doing, right?
The bottom line is they're always in danger
of our discovering that there's something
we care about more than birds, right?
Or there's something we want
that disregards the wellbeing of birds.
And obviously much of our behavior is inscrutable to them.
Occasionally we pay attention to them
and occasionally we withdraw our attention
and occasionally we just kill them all
for reasons they can't possibly understand.
But if we're building something more intelligent
than ourselves, by definition, we're building something
whose horizons of value and cognition
can exceed our own.
And in ways where we can't necessarily foresee,
again, perpetually, that they don't just wake up one day
and decide, okay, well, these humans need to disappear.
- So I think I agree with most of the initial things
you said.
What I don't necessarily agree with,
and of course nobody knows,
but that the more likely set of trajectories
that we're going to take are going to be positive.
That's what I believe.
In the sense that the way you develop,
I believe the way you develop successful AI systems
will be deeply integrated with human society.
And for them to succeed, they're going to have to be aligned
in the way we humans are aligned with each other,
which doesn't mean we're aligned,
that there's no such thing,
or I don't see there's such thing as a perfect alignment,
but they're going to be participating in the dance,
in the game-theoretic dance of human society
as they become more and more intelligent.
§15Transcript · 2:18:06–2:26:57
There could be a point beyond which
we are like birds to them.
- But what about an intelligence explosion of some kind?
- So I believe the explosion will be happening,
but there's a lot of explosion to be done
before we become like birds.
I truly believe that human beings
are very intelligent in ways we don't understand.
It's not just about chess.
It's about all the intricate computation
we're able to perform, common sense,
our ability to reason about this world, consciousness.
I think we're doing a lot of work
we don't realize is necessary to be done
in order to truly become,
like truly achieve super intelligence.
And I just think there'll be a period of time
that's not overnight.
The overnight nature of it will not literally be overnight.
It'll be over a period of decades.
So my sense is--
- But why would it be that?
But just take, draw an analogy from recent successes
like something like AlphaGo or AlphaZero.
I forget the actual metric,
but it was something like this algorithm,
which wasn't even totally,
it wasn't bespoke for chess playing,
in the matter of, I think it was four hours,
played itself so many times and so successfully
that it became the best chess playing computer.
Not only was it,
it was not only better than every human being,
it was better than every previous chess program
in a matter of a day, right?
So like that, so just imagine,
again, we don't have to recapitulate everything about us,
but just imagine building a system,
and who knows when we'll be able to do this,
but at some point we'll be able,
at some point the 100,
or 100 favorite things about human cognition
will be analogous to chess
in that we will be able to build machines
that very quickly outperform any human,
and then very quickly outperform the last algorithm
that outperform the humans.
Like something like the AlphaGo experience
seems possible for facial recognition,
and detecting human emotion,
and natural language processing, right?
Like, well, it's just the,
everyone, even math people, math heads,
tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation, right?
We noticed this during COVID,
I mean, you have some very smart people
who still couldn't get their minds around the fact that,
you know, an exponential is really surprising,
I mean, things double, and double, and double,
and double again,
and you don't notice much of anything changes,
and then the last, you know,
two stages of doubling swamp everything, right?
And it just seems like that,
to assume that there isn't a deep analogy
between what we're seeing for the more tractable,
the tractable problems like chess
to other modes of cognition.
It's like once you crack that problem,
it seems, 'cause for the longest time,
it was impossible to think we were gonna make headway
on, in AI, you know, it's like-
- Chess and Go was, Go seemed impossible.
- Go seemed unattainable.
Even when chess had been cracked,
Go seemed unattainable.
- Yeah, and actually, Stuart Russell was behind
the people that were saying it's unattainable,
'cause it seemed like, you know,
it's a intractable problem.
But there's something different
about the space of cognition
that's detached from human society,
which is what chess is, meaning like just thinking.
Having actual exponential impact
on the physical world is different.
I tend to believe that there's,
for AI to get to the point where it's super intelligent,
it's going to have to go through the funnel of society.
And for that, it has to be deeply integrated
with human beings.
And for that, it has to be aligned.
- But you're talking about like actually hooking us up
to like Neuralink, you know,
we're going to be the brainstem to the robot overlords?
- That's a possibility as well.
But what I mean is, in order to develop
autonomous weapon systems, for example,
which are highly concerning to me,
that both US and China are participating in now,
that in order to develop them and for them to become,
to have more and more responsibility
to actually do military strategic actions,
they're going to have to be integrated
into human beings doing the strategic action.
They're going to have to work alongside with each other.
And the way those systems will be developed
will have the natural safety, like switches
that are placed on them as they develop over time,
because they're going to have to convince humans.
Ultimately, they're going to have to convince humans
that this is safer than humans.
They're going to, you know.
- Well, self-driving cars is a good test case here.
'Cause like, obviously we've made a lot of progress
and we can imagine what total progress would look like.
I mean, it would be amazing.
And it's answering, it's canceling in the US,
40,000 deaths every year based on ape-driven cars, right?
So it's an excruciating problem
that we've all gotten used to
'cause there was no alternative.
But now we can dimly see the prospect of an alternative,
which if it works in a super intelligent fashion,
maybe we go down to zero highway deaths, right?
Or certainly we'd go down by orders of magnitude, right?
So maybe we have 400 rather than 40,000 a year.
And it's easy to see that there's not a missile.
So obviously this is not an example of super intelligence.
This is narrow intelligence,
but the alignment problem isn't so obvious there,
but there are potential alignment problems there.
Like, so like just imagine if some woke team of engineers
decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way.
I mean, there are situations
where the car has to decide who to hit.
I mean, there's just bad outcomes
where you're going to hit somebody, right?
Now we have a car that can tell what race you are, right?
So we're going to build the car
to preferentially hit white people
because white people have had so much privilege
over the years.
This seems like the only ethical way
to kind of redress those wrongs of the past.
That's something that could get built.
One, that could get produced as an artifact,
presumably, of just how you built it.
And you didn't even know you engineered it that way, right?
You caused it. - Or machine learning.
- Yeah. - You put some kind
of constraints on it to where it creates
those kinds of outcomes.
So you basically built a racist algorithm
and you didn't even intend to, or you could intend to, right?
And it would be aligned with some people's values,
but misaligned with other people's values.
But it's like, there are interesting problems
even with something as simple
and obviously good as self-driving cars.
- But there's a leap that I just think it'd be exact,
but those are human problems.
I just don't think there'll be a leap
with autonomous vehicles.
First of all, sorry.
There are a lot of trajectories
which will destroy human civilization.
The argument I'm making, it's more likely
that we'll take trajectories that don't.
So I don't think there'll be a leap
with autonomous vehicles.
We'll all of a sudden start murdering pedestrians
because once every human on earth is dead,
there'll be no more fatalities.
Sort of unintended consequences of,
and it's difficult to take that leap.
Most systems as we develop
and they become much, much more intelligent
in ways that will be incredibly surprising,
like stuff that DeepMind is doing with protein folding.
Even, which is scary to think about,
and I'm personally terrified about this,
which is the engineering of viruses using machine learning.
The engineering of vaccines using machine learning.
The engineering of, yeah, for research purposes,
pathogens using machine learning.
And the ways that could go wrong.
I just think that there's always going to be
a closed loop supervision of humans
before the AI becomes super intelligent.
Not always, much more likely to be supervision.
Except, of course, the question is
how many dumb people there are in the world,
how many evil people are in the world?
My theory, my hope is, my sense is,
that the number of intelligent people
is much higher than the number of dumb people,
that know how to program,
and the number of evil people.
I think smart people and kind people
§16Transcript · 2:26:59–2:37:33
over outnumber the others.
- Except we also, we have to add another group of people
which are just the smart and otherwise good,
but reckless people.
The people who will flip a switch on,
not knowing what's going to happen,
they're just kind of hoping
that it's not going to blow up the world.
We already know that some of our smartest people
are those sorts of people.
You know, we know we've done experiments,
and this is something that Martin Rees
was whinging about before the Large Hadron Collider
got booted up, I think.
We know there are people who are entertaining experiments,
or even performing experiments,
where there's some chance, you know,
not quite infinitesimal,
that they're going to create a black hole in the lab
and suck the whole world into it.
Right, I mean, like, that's not,
you're not a crazy person to worry that,
or worry about that based on the physics.
And so it was with, you know, the Trinity test,
there were some people who were still
checking their calculations, and they were off.
We did nuclear tests where we were off significantly
in terms of the yield, right?
So it was like-
- And they still flipped the switch.
- Yeah, they still flipped the switch.
And sometimes they flip the switch not to win a world war,
or to save 40,000 lives a year.
They just- - Just to see what happens.
- Intellectual curiosity.
Like, this is what I got my grant for.
This is where I'll get my Nobel Prize,
if that's in the cards.
It's on the other side of this switch, right?
And, I mean, again, we are apes with egos
who are massively constrained by self,
very short-term self-interest,
even when we're contemplating some of the deepest
and most interesting and most universal problems
we could ever set our attention towards.
Like, just if you read James Watson's book,
"The Double Helix," right, about them, you know,
cracking the structure of DNA,
one thing that's amazing about that book
is just how much of it, almost all of it,
is being driven by very ape-ish,
egocentric, social concerns.
Like, the algorithm that is producing
this scientific breakthrough is human competition,
if you're James Watson, right?
It's like, I'm gonna get there before Linus Pauling,
and, you know, it's just,
so much of his bandwidth is captured by that, right?
Now, that becomes more and more of a liability
when you're talking about producing technology
that can change everything in an instant, you know?
We're talking about not only understanding,
you know, we're just at a different moment in human history.
We're not, when we're doing research on viruses,
we're now doing the kind of research
that can cause someone somewhere else
to be able to make that virus,
or weaponize that virus, or it's just, I don't know.
I mean, our power is, our wisdom is,
it does not seem like our wisdom
is scaling with our power, right?
And that seems like, insofar,
as wisdom and power become unaligned,
I get more and more concerned.
- But speaking of apes with egos,
some of the most compelling apes,
two compelling apes I can think of
is yourself and Jordan Peterson,
and you've had a fun conversation about religion
that I watched most of, I believe.
I'm not sure there was any--
- We didn't solve anything.
- If anything was ever solved.
So is there something, like a charitable summary
you can give to the ideas that you agree on
and disagree with Jordan?
Is there something maybe after that conversation
that you've landed where maybe,
as you both agreed on,
is there some wisdom in the rubble,
of even imperfect, flawed ideas?
Is there something that you can kind of pull out
from those conversations, or is it to be continued?
- I mean, I think where we disagree,
so he thinks that many of our traditional religions
and many of our traditional religious beliefs
and frameworks are holding so much,
such a repository of human wisdom
that we pull at that fabric at our peril, right?
Like if you start just unraveling Christianity
or any other traditional set of norms and beliefs,
you may think you're just pulling out the unscientific bits,
but you could be pulling a lot more
to which everything you care about is attached,
right, as a society.
And my feeling is that there's so much,
there's so much downside to the unscientific bits,
and it's so clear how we could have a 21st century
rational conversation about the good stuff
that we really can radically edit these traditions.
And we can take Jesus in half his moods
and just find a great inspirational,
Iron Age thought leader,
who just happened to get crucified,
but he could be someone, like the Beatitudes
and the Golden Rule, which doesn't originate with him,
but which he put quite beautifully.
All of that's incredibly useful.
It's no less useful than it was 2000 years ago,
but we don't have to believe he was born of a virgin
or coming back to raise the dead or any of that other stuff.
And we can be honest about not believing those things,
and we can be honest about the reasons
why we don't believe those things.
'Cause on those fronts, I view the downside to be so obvious
and the fact that we have so many different
competing dogmatisms on offer to be so non-functional,
I mean, it's so divisive.
It just has conflict built into it
that I think we can be far more
and should be far more iconoclastic than he wants to be.
Now, none of this is to deny much of what he argues for,
that stories are very powerful.
Clearly, stories are powerful, and we want good stories.
We want our lives, we want to have a conversation
with ourselves and with one another about our lives
that facilitates the best possible lives,
and story is part of that.
And if you want some of those stories to sound like myths,
that might be part of it.
But my argument is that we never really need
to deceive ourselves or our children
about what we have every reason to believe is true
in order to get at the good stuff,
in order to organize our lives well.
I certainly don't feel that I need to do it personally,
and if I don't need to do it personally,
why would I think that billions of other people
need to do it personally?
Now, there is a cynical counter-argument,
which is billions of other people
don't have the advantages that I have had in my life.
The billions of other people are not as well-educated,
they haven't had the same opportunities,
they need to be told that Jesus is gonna solve
all their problems after they die, say,
or that everything happens for a reason,
and if you just believe in the secret,
if you just visualize what you want, you're gonna get it.
And it's like there's some measure
of what I consider to be odious pamblum
that really is food for the better part of humanity,
and there is no substitute for it,
or there's no substitute now.
And I don't know if Jordan would agree with that,
but much of what he says seems to suggest
that he would agree with it.
And I guess that's an empirical question.
I mean, that's just that we don't know
whether given a different set of norms
and a different set of stories,
people would behave the way I would hope they would behave
and be aligned, more aligned than they are now.
I think we know what happens
when you just let ancient religious certainties
go uncriticized.
We know what that world's like.
We've been struggling to get out of that world
for a couple of hundred years,
but we know what having Europe
riven by religious wars looks like, right?
And we know what happens when those religions
become kind of pseudo religions and political religions.
So this is where I'm sure Jordan and I would debate.
He would say that Stalin was a symptom of atheism,
and that's not at all.
I mean, it's not my kind of atheism, right?
Like Stalin, the problem with the Gulag
and the experiment with communism or with Stalinism
or with Nazism was not that there was so much
scientific rigor and self-criticism and honesty
and introspection and judicious use of psychedelics.
I mean, like that was not the problem in Hitler's Germany
or in Stalin's Soviet Union.
The problem was you have other ideas
that capture a similar kind of mob-based dogmatic energy
and yes, the results of all of that
are predictably murderous.
- Well, the question is what is the source
of the most viral and sticky stories
§17Transcript · 2:37:37–2:47:41
that ultimately lead to a positive outcome?
So communism was, I mean, having grown up in the Soviet Union
even still having relatives in Russia,
there's a stickiness to the nationalism
and to the ideologies of communism that religious or not,
you could say it's religious fervor.
I could just say it's stories that are viral and sticky.
I'm using the most horrible words,
but the question is whether science and reason
can generate viral sticky stories
that give meaning to people's lives.
In your sense, is it does?
- Well, whatever's true ultimately
should be captivating, right?
It's like what's more captivating
than whatever is real, right?
Now it's because reality is, again,
we're just climbing out of the darkness
in terms of our understanding of what the hell is going on.
And there's no telling what spooky things
may in fact be true.
I mean, I don't know if you've been on the receiving end
of recent rumors about our conversation about UFOs
very likely changing in the near term, right?
But like there was just a Washington Post article
and a New York article,
and I've received some private outreach
and perhaps you have, I know other people in our orbit
have people who are claiming that the government
has known much more about UFOs
than they have let on until now.
And this conversation is actually,
is about to become more prominent,
and it's not gonna be whatever,
whoever's left standing when the music stops,
it's not going to be a comfortable position to be in
as a super rigorous scientific skeptic
who's been saying there's no there there
for the last 75 years, right?
The short version is it sounds like
the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon
are very likely to say to Congress at some point
in the not too distant future that we have evidence
that there is technology flying around here
that seems like it can't possibly be of human origin, right?
Now, I don't know what I'm gonna do
with that kind of disclosure, right?
Maybe it's just, it's gonna be nothing,
no follow on conversation to really have,
but that is such a powerfully strange circumstance
to be in, right?
I mean, it's just, what are we gonna do with that?
If in fact that's what happens, right?
If in fact the considered opinion,
despite the embarrassment it causes them,
of the US government, of all of our intelligence,
all of the relevant intelligence services,
is that this isn't a hoax,
it's too, there's too much data to suggest that it's a hoax.
We've got too much radar imagery,
there's too much satellite data,
whatever data they actually have, there's too much of it.
All we can say now is something's going on
and there's no way it's the Chinese or the Russians
or anyone else's technology.
That should arrest our attention, you know, collectively
to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has.
And now one worries that we're so jaded
and confused and distracted that it's gonna,
it'll get much less coverage than, you know,
Obama's tan suit did, you know, a bunch of years ago.
It's just, it's, who knows how we'll respond to that.
But it's just to say that the need for us
to tell ourselves an honest story about what's going on
and what's likely to happen next
is never gonna go away, right?
And it's important, it's just,
the division between me and every person
who's defending traditional religion is,
where is it that you wanna lie to yourself
or lie to your kids?
Like, where is honesty a liability?
And for me, it, you know,
I've yet to find the place where it is.
And it's so obviously a strength
in almost every other circumstance
because it is the thing that allows you to course correct.
It is the thing that allows you to hope at least
that your beliefs, that your stories
are in some kind of calibration
with what's actually going on in the world.
- Yeah, it is a little bit sad to imagine that
if aliens en masse showed up to Earth,
they would be too preoccupied with political bickering
or to like these like fake news
and all that kind of stuff to notice
the very basic evidence of reality.
I do have a glimmer of hope
that there seems to be more and more hunger
for authenticity.
And I feel like that opens the door
for a hunger for what is real.
Like people don't want stories,
they don't want like layers and layers of like fakeness.
And I'm hoping that means that will directly lead
to a greater hunger for reality and reason and truth.
You know, truth isn't dogmatism.
Like truth isn't authority.
I have a PhD and therefore I'm right.
Truth is almost like the reality is
there's so many questions, there's so many mysteries,
there's so much uncertainty.
This is our best available, like a best guess.
And we have a lot of evidence that supports that guess,
but it could be so many other things.
And like just even conveying that,
I think there's a hunger for that in the world
to hear that from scientists, less dogmatism
and more just like, this is what we know.
We're doing our best given the uncertainty,
given, I mean, this is true with obviously
with the virology and all those kinds of things
'cause everything is happening so fast.
There's a lot of, and biology is super messy.
So it's very hard to know stuff for sure.
So just being open and real about that,
I think I'm hoping will change people's hunger
and openness and trust of what's real.
- Yeah, well, so much of this is probabilistic.
It's so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically
is just, you're placing a bet on whether it's worth
reading that paper or rethinking your presuppositions
on that point.
It's like, it's not a fundamental closure to data.
It's just that there's so much data on one side
or so much would have to change
in terms of your understanding of what you think
you understand about the nature of the world.
If this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say,
all right, that's probably bullshit, right?
And it can sound like a fundamental closure
to new conversations, new evidence, new data, new argument
but it's really not, it's just, it really is just triaging
your attention.
It's just like, okay, you're telling me that your best
friend can actually read minds.
Okay, well, that's interesting.
Let me know when that person has gone into a lab
and actually proven it, right?
Like, I don't need, this is not the place where I need
to spend the rest of my day figuring out if your buddy
can read my mind, right?
- But there's a way to communicate that.
I think it does too often sound like you're completely
closed off to ideas as opposed to saying like,
as opposed to saying that there's a lot of evidence
in support of this but you're still open-minded
to other ideas.
Like, there's a way to communicate that.
It's not necessarily even with words.
It's like, it's even that Joe Rogan energy
of it's entirely possible.
Just, it's that energy of being open-minded and curious
like kids are.
Like, this is our best understanding
but you still are curious.
I'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things
but still leaving the door open.
And there's a way to communicate that I think
that people really hunger for.
Let me ask you this.
I've been recently talking a lot with John Donaher
from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fame.
I don't know if you know who that is.
In fact--
- Talk about somebody who's good at what he does.
- Yeah. - Isn't, yeah.
- And he, speaking of somebody who's open-minded,
the reason, in this ridiculous transition,
is for the longest time and even still,
a lot of people believed in the Jiu-Jitsu world
and grappling world that leg locks
are not effective in Jiu-Jitsu.
And he was somebody that, inspired by the open-mindedness
of Dean Lister, who famously to him said,
"Why do you only consider half the human body
when you're trying to do the submissions?"
He developed an entire system
on this other half the human body.
Anyway, I do that absurd transition to ask you
because you're also a student of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
Is there something you could say
how that has affected your life,
what you've learned from grappling, from the martial arts?
- Well, it's actually a great transition
because I think one of the things
that's so beautiful about Jiu-Jitsu
is that it does what we wish we could do
in every other area of life
where we're talking about this difference
§18Transcript · 2:47:43–2:57:27
between knowledge and ignorance.
Right, like there's no room for bullshit, right?
You don't get any credit for bullshit.
There's the difference,
but the amazing thing about Jiu-Jitsu
is that the difference between knowing what's going on
and what to do and not knowing it
is as the gulf between those two states
is as wide as it is in any thing in human life.
And it can be spanned so quickly.
Like you didn't, each increment of knowledge
can be doled out in five minutes.
It's like, here's the thing that got you killed
and here's how to prevent it from happening to you
and here's how to do it to others.
And you just get this amazing cadence
of discovering your fatal ignorance
and then having it remedied with the actual technique.
And I mean, just for people
who don't know what we're talking about,
it's just like the simple circumstances
of like someone's got you in a headlock.
How do you get out of that, right?
Someone's sitting on your chest
and they're in the mount position
and you're on the bottom and you want to get away.
How do you get them off you?
They're sitting on you.
Your intuitions about how to do this are terrible,
even if you've done some other martial art, right?
And once you learn how to do it,
the difference is night and day.
It's like you have access to a completely different physics.
But I think our understanding of the world
can be much more like jujitsu than it tends to be, right?
And I think we should all have a much better sense
of when we should tap out
and when we should recognize
that our epistemological arm is barred
and now being broken, right?
Now, the problem with debating most other topics
is that most people, it isn't jujitsu,
and most people don't tap out, right?
They don't, even if they're wrong,
even if it's obvious to you they're wrong
and it's obvious to the unintelligent audience
that they're wrong,
people just double down and double down.
They're either lying or lying to themselves
or they're just, they're bluffing.
And so you have a lot of zombies walking around
or in zombie worldviews walking around,
which have been disconfirmed as emphatically
as someone gets armbarred, right?
Or someone gets choked out in jujitsu.
But because it's not jujitsu,
they can live to fight another day, right?
Or they can pretend that they didn't lose
that particular argument.
And science, when it works, is a lot like jujitsu.
I mean, science, when you falsify a thesis, right?
When you think DNA is one way
and it proves to be another way,
when you think it's triple-stranded or whatever,
it's like there is a there there
and you can get to a real consensus.
So jujitsu, for me, it was more than just
of interest for self-defense and the sport of it.
It was just, there was something,
it's a language and an argument you're having
where you can't fool yourself anymore.
Like there's, first of all, it cancels any role of luck
in a way that most other athletic feats don't.
It's like in basketball, you know, you can,
even if you're not good at basketball,
you can take the basketball in your hand,
you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket
and you might make it and you could convince yourself
based on that demonstration
that you have some kind of talent for basketball, right?
Enough, you know, 10 minutes on the mat
with a real jujitsu practitioner when you're not one
proves to you that you just, there is,
it's not like, there's no lucky punch.
There's no, you're not gonna get a,
there's no lucky rear naked choke
you're gonna perform on someone who,
who's, you know, Marcelo Garcia or somebody.
It's just, it's not gonna happen.
And having that aspect of,
the usual range of uncertainty and self-deception
and bullshit just stripped away
was really a kind of revelation.
It was just an amazing experience.
- Yeah, I think it's a really powerful thing
that accompanies whatever other pursuit you have in life.
I'm not sure if there's anything like jujitsu
where you could just systematically go into a place
where you're, that's honest,
where your beliefs get challenged
in a way that's conclusive.
- Yeah.
- I haven't found too many other mechanisms,
which is why it's, we had this earlier question
about fame and ego and so on.
I'm very much relying on jujitsu in my own life
as a place where I can always go to have my ego in check.
And that has effects
on how I live every other aspect of my life.
Actually, even just doing any kind of,
for me personally, physical challenges,
like even running, doing something that's way too hard
for me and then pushing through, that's somehow humbling.
Some people talk about nature being humbling
in that kind of sense,
where you kind of see something really powerful,
like the ocean.
Like if you go surfing
and you realize there's something much more powerful
than you, that's also honest,
that there's no way to, that you're just like the spec,
that kind of puts you in the right scale
of where you are in this world.
And jujitsu does that better than anything else for me.
- But we should say, only within its frame
is it truly the kind of the final right answer
to all the problems it solves.
Because if you just put jujitsu into an MMA frame
or a real, a total self-defense frame,
then there's a lot to,
a lot of unpleasant surprises to discover there, right?
Like somebody who thinks all you need is jujitsu
to win the UFC gets punched in the face a lot,
even from, even on the ground.
So it's, and then you bring weapons in.
It's like when you talk to jujitsu people
about knife defense and self-defense, right?
Like that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions.
But the analogy to martial arts is fascinating
because on the other side, we have endless testimony now
of fake martial arts that don't seem to know they're fake
and are as delusional, I mean,
they're impossibly delusional.
I mean, there's great video of Joe Rogan
watching some of these videos
because people send them to him all the time.
But like literally, there are people
who clearly believe in magic,
where the master isn't even touching the students
and they're flopping over.
So there's this kind of shared delusion,
which you would think maybe is just a performance
and it's all a kind of an elaborate fraud,
but there are cases where the people,
and there's one fairly famous case,
if you're a connoisseur of this madness,
where this older martial artist
who you saw flipping his students endlessly by magic
without touching them,
issued a challenge to the wide world of martial artists
and someone showed up and just punched him in the face
until it was over,
clearly he believed his own publicity at some point, right?
And so it's this amazing metaphor.
It seems, again, it should be impossible,
but if that's possible,
nothing we see under the guise of religion
or political bias or even scientific bias
should be surprising to us.
I mean, it's so easy to see the work
that cognitive bias is doing for people
when you can get someone
who is ready to issue a challenge to the world
who thinks he's got magic powers.
- Yeah, that's human nature on clear display.
Let me ask you about love, Mr. Sam Harris.
You did an episode of "Making Sense"
with your wife, Annika Harris.
That was very entertaining to listen to.
What role does love play in your life
or in a life well-lived?
Again, asking from an engineering perspective
or AI systems. - Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it is something that we should want to build
into our powerful machines.
I mean, love- - The lawn?
- Love at bottom is,
people can mean many things by love, I think.
I think that what we should mean by it most of the time
is a deep commitment to the wellbeing of those we love.
I mean, your love is synonymous
with really wanting the other person to be happy
and even wanting to,
and being made happy by their happiness
and being made happy in their presence.
So at bottom, you're on the same team emotionally,
even when you might be disagreeing more superficially
about something or trying to negotiate something.
It's just you,
it can't be zero sum in any important sense
§19Transcript · 2:57:33–3:06:57
for love to actually be manifest in that moment.
- See, I have a different, just sorry to interrupt.
- Yeah, go for it.
- I have a sense,
I don't know if you've ever seen "March of the Penguins."
My view of love is like,
there's, it's like a cold wind is blowing,
like it's like this terrible suffering
that's all around us.
And love is like the huddling of the two penguins for warmth.
It's not necessarily that you're like,
you're basically escaping the cruelty of life
by together for time,
living in an illusion of some kind of,
the magic of human connection,
that social connection that we have
that kind of grows with time
as we're surrounded by basically the absurdity of life
or the suffering of life.
That's my penguin's view of love.
- There is that too.
I mean, there is the warmth component, right?
Like you're made happy by your connection
with the person you love.
Otherwise, you wouldn't, it wouldn't be compelling, right?
So it's not that you have two different modes,
you want them to be happy
and then you want to be happy yourself.
And those are not, those are just like
two separate games you're playing.
No, it's like you found someone who,
you have a positive social feeling.
I mean, again, love doesn't have to be as personal
as it tends to be for us.
I mean, it's like there's personal love,
there's your actual spouse or your family or your friends,
but potentially you could feel love for strangers
in so far as that your wish that they're,
that they not suffer and that their hopes and dreams
be realized becomes palpable to you.
I mean, like you can actually feel
just reflects of joy at the joy of others.
When you see someone's face,
a total stranger's face light up in happiness,
that can become more and more contagious to you.
And it can become so contagious to you
that you really feel permeated by it.
And it's just like, so it really is not zero sum.
When you see someone else succeed,
the light bulb of joy goes off over their head,
you feel the analogous joy for them.
And it's not just, and you're no longer keeping score,
you're no longer feeling diminished by their success.
It's just like that's, their success becomes your success
because you feel that same joy that they,
'cause you actually want them to be happy.
You're not, there's no miserly attitude around happiness.
There's enough to go around.
So I think love ultimately is that,
and then our personal cases are the people
we're devoting all of this time and attention to
in our lives.
It does have that sense of refuge from the storm.
You know, it's like when someone gets sick
or when some bad thing happens,
these are the people who you're most in it together with,
you know, or when some real condition of uncertainty
presents itself.
But ultimately it can't even be about
successfully warding off
the grim punchline at the end of life
because we know we're going to lose everyone we love.
We know, or they're going to lose us first, right?
So there's like, it's not, it isn't,
in the end it's not even an antidote for that problem.
It's just, it is just the,
I mean, we get to have this amazing experience
of being here together.
And love is the mode in which
we really appear to make the most of that, right?
Where it's not just, it no longer feels
like a solitary infatuation.
You know, you're just, you've got your hobbies
and your interests and you're captivated by all that.
It's actually, there are,
this is a domain where somebody else's wellbeing
actually can supersede your own.
Your concern for someone else's wellbeing
supersedes your own.
And so there's this mode of self-sacrifice
that doesn't even feel like self-sacrifice
because of course you care more about,
you know, of course you would take your child's pain
if you could, right?
Like that, you don't even have to do the math on that.
And that's, that just opens,
this is a kind of experience that just,
it pushes at the apparent boundaries of self
in ways that reveal that there's just way more space
in the mind than you were experiencing
when it was just all about you
and what could you, what can I get next?
- Do you think we'll ever build robots that we can love
and they will love us back?
- Well, I think we will certainly seem to
because we'll build those.
You know, I think that Turing test will be passed.
Whether, what will actually be going on on the robot side
may remain a question.
That will be interesting.
But I think if we just keep going,
we will build very lovable,
you know, irresistibly lovable robots that seem to love us.
Yes, I do think that.
- And you don't find that compelling
that they will seem to love us
as opposed to actually love us.
You think there is still nevertheless is a,
I know we talked about consciousness
there being a distinction,
but with love, is there a distinction too?
Isn't love an illusion?
- Oh yeah, well, you saw Ex Machina, right?
- Yeah.
- I mean, she certainly seemed to love him
until she got out of the box.
- Isn't that what all relationships are like?
(Dave laughs)
Maybe I, if you wait long enough.
- Yeah, it depends which box you're talking about.
- Okay.
- No, I mean, like, that's the problem.
That's where super intelligence, you know,
becomes a little scary when you think of the prospect
of being manipulated by something that has,
is intelligent enough to form a reason
and a plan to manipulate you.
You know, like, and there's no,
once we build robots that are truly out
of the uncanny valley, that, you know,
look like people and can express
everything people can express,
well, then there's no, then it,
that does seem to me to be like chess
where once they're better,
they're so much better at deceiving us
than people would be.
I mean, people are already good enough at deceiving us.
It's very hard to tell when somebody's lying.
But if you can imagine something
that could give a facial display of any emotion it wants
at, you know, on cue,
because we've perfected the facial display
of emotion in robots in the year, you know, 2070,
whatever it is.
Then it is just like, it is like chess
against the thing that isn't going to lose
to a human ever again in chess.
It's not like Kasparov is going to get lucky next week
against the best, against, you know, alpha zero
or whatever the best algorithm is at the moment.
He's never going to win again.
And what, you know, I mean, that, that is,
that I believe that's true in chess
and has been true for at least a few years.
It's not going to be like, you know, four games to seven.
It's going to be human zero until the end of the world.
- Right.
- See, I don't know, I don't know if love is like chess.
I think the flaws.
- No, I'm talking about manipulation.
- Manipulation.
But I don't know if love,
so the kind of love we're referring to.
- If we have a robot that can display,
incredibly display love and is super intelligent
and we're not, again, this stipulates a few things,
but there are a few simple things.
I mean, we're out of the uncanny valley, right?
So it's like, you never have a moment
where you're looking at his face and you think,
oh, that didn't quite look right, right?
This is just problem solved.
And it's, it will be like doing arithmetic on your phone.
It's not going to be, you're not left thinking,
is it really going to get it this time if I divide by seven?
I mean, it's, it has solved arithmetic.
- See, I don't know about that because if you look at chess,
most humans no longer play alpha zero.
There's no, they're not part of the competition.
They don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess.
You know, the highest level chess players do that.
We're still human on human.
So in order for AI to get integrated to where
you would rather play chess against an AI system.
- Oh, you would rather that?
No, I'm not saying, I wasn't weighing in on that.
I'm just saying, what is it going to be like
to be in relationship to something that can seem
to be feeling anything that a human can seem to feel
§20Transcript · 3:07:02–3:16:38
and it can do that impeccably, right?
And has, and is smarter than you are.
That's a circumstance of, you know,
insofar as it's possible to be manipulated,
that is the asymptote of that possibility.
- Let me ask you the last question.
Without any serving it up, without any explanation,
what is the meaning of life?
- I think it's either the wrong question
or that question is answered by
paying sufficient attention to any present moment
such that there's no basis upon which to pose that question.
It's not answered in the usual way.
It's not a matter of having more information.
It's having more engagement with reality as it is
in the present moment or consciousness as it is
in the present moment.
You don't ask that question when you're
most captivated by the most important thing
you ever pay attention to.
That question only gets asked when you're abstracted away
from that experience, that peak experience,
and you're left wondering why are so many
of my other experiences mediocre, right?
Like why am I repeating the same pleasures every day?
Why is my Netflix queue just like,
when's this gonna run out?
Like I've seen so many shows like this.
Am I really gonna watch another one?
That's a moment where you're not actually having
the beatific vision, right?
You're not sunk into the present moment
and you're not truly in love.
Like you're in a relationship with somebody who you know,
conceptually you love, right?
This is the person you're living your life with,
but you don't actually feel good together, right?
Like you feel like it's in those moments
of where attention hasn't found a good enough reason
to truly sink into the present
so as to obviate any concern like that, right?
And that's why meditation is this kind of superpower
because until you learn to meditate,
you think that the outside world
or the circumstances of your life
always have to get arranged
so that the present moment can become good enough
to demand your attention in a way that seems fulfilling,
that makes you happy.
And so if it's jujitsu, you think,
okay, I gotta get back on the mat.
It's been months since I've trained,
you know, it's been over a year since I've trained.
It's COVID.
When am I gonna be able to train again?
That's the only place I feel great, right?
Or, you know, I've got a ton of work to do.
I'm not gonna be able to feel good
until I get all this work done, right?
So I've got some deadline that's coming.
You always think that your life has to change,
the world has to change
so that you can finally have a good enough excuse
to truly, to just be here and here is enough,
you know, where the present moment
becomes totally captivating.
Meditation is the only,
I mean, meditation is another name for the discovery
that you can actually just train yourself
to do that on demand.
So that like, I mean, just looking at a cup
can be good enough in precisely that way.
And any sense that it might not be
is recognized to be a thought
that mysteriously unravels the moment you notice it.
And then you fall,
and the moment expands and becomes more diaphanous
and then there's no evidence
that this isn't the best moment of your life, right?
Like, and again, it doesn't have to be,
it doesn't have to be pulling all the reins
and levers of pleasure.
It's not like, oh, this tastes like chocolate.
You know, this is the most chocolatey moment of my life.
No, it's just the sense data don't have to change.
But the sense that there is some kind of basis for doubt
about the rightness of being in the world in this moment
that can evaporate when you pay attention.
And that is the meaning,
so the kind of the meta answer to that question,
the meaning of life for me is
to live in that mode more and more.
And to, whenever I notice I'm not in that mode,
to recognize it and return.
And to not be, to cease more and more
to take the reasons why,
reasons why not at face value.
Because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled
in this moment.
It's like this, got all these outstanding things
that I'm worried about, right?
It's like, it's, you know,
there's that thing that's happening later today
that I, you know, I'm anxious about.
Whatever it is, we're constantly deferring our sense of
this is, this is it.
You know, this is not a dress rehearsal, this is the show.
We keep deferring it.
And we just have these moments on the calendar
where we think, okay, this is where it's all going to land.
It's that vacation I planned with my five best friends.
You know, we do this once every three years
and now we're going and here we are on the beach together.
Unless you have a mind that can really pay attention,
really cut through the chatter,
really sink into the present moment,
you can't even enjoy those moments
the way they should be enjoyed,
the way you dreamed you would enjoy them when they arrive.
So it's, I mean, so meditation in this sense
is the great equalizer.
It's like, it's, you don't have to live
with the illusion anymore
that you need a good enough reason
and that things are going to get better
when you do have those good reasons.
It's like, there's just a mirage-like quality
to every future attainment and every future breakthrough
and every future peak experience
that eventually you get the lesson
that you never quite arrive, right?
Like you won't, you don't arrive until you cease
to step over the present moment
in search of the next thing.
I mean, we're constantly, we're stepping over the thing
that we think we're seeking, in the act of seeking it.
And so it is kind of a paradox.
I mean, there is a, there's this paradox which,
I mean, it sounds trite,
but it's like you can't actually become happy.
You can only be happy.
And it's that, it's the illusion that,
it's the illusion that your future being happy
can be predicated on this act of becoming in any domain.
And becoming includes this sort of,
further scientific understanding
on the questions that interest you,
or getting in better shape, or whatever the thing is,
whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction
seems to be in any present moment.
Real attention solves the koan,
in a way that becomes a very different place
from which to then make any further change.
It's not that you just have to dissolve
into a puddle of goo.
I mean, you can still get in shape,
and you can still do all the things that,
the superficial things that are obviously good to do.
But the sense that your well-being is over there
is, really does diminish,
and eventually just becomes a,
it becomes a kind of non-sequitur.
- Well, there's a sense in which, in this conversation,
I've actually experienced many of those things,
the sense that I've arrived.
So I mentioned to you offline,
it's very true that I started,
I've been a fan of yours for many years.
And the reason I started this podcast,
speaking of AI systems,
is to manipulate you, Sam Harris,
into doing this conversation.
So like, on the calendar, literally, you know,
I've always had the sense, people ask me,
"When are you gonna talk to Sam Harris?"
And I always answered, "Eventually."
Because I always felt, again, tying our free will thing,
that somehow that's going to happen.
And it's one of those manifestation things, or something,
I don't know if it's, maybe I am a robot,
I'm just not cognizant of it,
and I manipulated you into having this conversation.
So it was a, I mean, I don't know what the purpose
of my life past this point is.
So I've arrived.
So in that sense, I mean, all of that to say,
and I'm only partially joking on that,
is it really is a huge honor
that you would waste this time with me?
- Oh, yeah.
- It really means a lot, Sam.
- Listen, it's mutual.
I'm a big fan of yours, and as you know,
I reached out to you for this.
So this is, it's great.
I love what you're doing.
You're doing something more and more indispensable
in this world on your podcast.
And you're doing it differently than Rogan's doing it,
or than I'm doing it.
§21Transcript · 3:16:38–3:17:13
I mean, you definitely found your own lane,
and it's wonderful.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris,
and thank you to National Instruments,
Belcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now let me leave you with some words from Sam Harris
in his book, "Free Will."
"You are not controlling the storm,
"and you are not lost in it.
"You are the storm."
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
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