Making Sense with Sam Harris - #282 — Do You Really Have a Self?

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Jay Garfield about the illusion of the self. They discuss the default sense of subjectivity, the difference between absolute and conventional truth, interdependence, free will, subject-object duality, emptiness, the “mind-only” school of Buddhism, scientific realism and experiential anti-realism, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Okay, well, sorry for the long hiatus here, but I finally caught COVID, or it caught me. There's not much to report about my actual experience. It was not especially terrible, given the possibilities, but it was also not just a cold, either. I was left feeling quite grateful to have been vaccinated and boosted and to have had Paxlovid available to me. I'm not sure what it did, apart from produce a truly galling taste in my mouth, but I just don't know what the counterfactual was. I don't know how I would have done if I hadn't taken it. Anyway, it was not a lot of fun, but it was also manageable. So, happy to be back and to give you today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Jay Garfield. Jay is a professor in the humanities and professor of philosophy, logic, and Buddhist studies at Smith College, and he is also a

visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School. And he is the author of most recently the book, Losing Ourselves, Learning to Live Without a self. And we get deep into that topic. I found it a really useful conversation. We talk about how the self is an illusion, must be an illusion, can't be what it seems, etc., from a wide variety of angles. And we do that fairly systematically. So I hope you find it both useful and interesting. I think the nature of what we are as subjects, as persons, as experiencers in the world really is central to everyone's concerns, whether they know that or not. It is, as I point out, inextricable from the question of why we suffer and how we can be happy, how we can live better lives, what it means to be a good person in the world, how we can be ethical. All of these

questions are interlinked. Anyway, we get deep into it. So without further delay, I bring you Jay Garfield. I am here with Jay Garfield. Jay, thanks for joining me. Well, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. So you are a philosopher who is focused on areas that are really dear to my heart. Before we jump in, can you summarize your intellectual and academic background and orientation? Sure. I tend to move around a lot.

That is, I work in foundations of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, logic, Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, cross-cultural hermeneutics, ethics, a little bit of this and that. I'm not really a specialist. Well, so I want to focus on the topic of your recent book, and that book is Losing Ourselves, Learning to Live Without a Self. And that is an explicitly Buddhist framing of what could be considered one of the central mysteries slash paradoxes slash illusions of our being in the world. And so my goal for this conversation is to make the claim that the self is an illusion as understandable as possible for people. And this is something that people find really inscrutable. Even those who are seeking to penetrate this illusion through practices like meditation, even if they admit that this is a worthy goal to have an

insight on this front and are not at all skeptical about it, they still find it very difficult to think about and to say nothing of all of the people who think it's a preposterous claim on its face and that it sounds even undesirable if such a thing could be understood or experienced directly. So before we jump into that central question, and this will link up with ethics and cognitive science and other areas, first tell me, how did you come to be influenced by the Buddhist framing of all of this? What's your entanglement with Buddhism and meditation practice and any other related issue there? Sure. First, let me say that while there are certainly a lot of Buddhist ideas in this book,

and I draw on some Buddhist texts, I also draw on the Western philosophical tradition, in particular on the work of David Hume, but also contemporary phenomenology. So I really take it to be a more cross-cultural look at this than a specifically Buddhist look. But to answer your question, I began working in Buddhist philosophy quite a while ago, largely at the instigation of students at the college where I then taught at Hampshire College, who were really interested in Buddhist philosophy and dragged me into it kicking and screaming. And it was as a result of getting interested in Buddhist philosophy and dragged me into it kicking and screaming. And it was as a result of getting interested in teaching this material that it became an important research interest for me. And so for the last 30 years or so, I've been spending a lot

of my intellectual time with Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts and some East Asian Buddhist texts and trying to place them in conversation with Western philosophy and to bring Buddhist philosophy more into the mainstream of the philosophical curriculum around the world. I find the Buddhist tradition a very rich, very complex, very large tradition. And I think that to ignore Buddhist ideas when we're doing philosophy is simply irresponsible, given the extent and the depth and the rigor of that tradition. And in particular, when we're thinking about questions like the nature of the human person or the nature of whether there's a self there or not, Buddhists have been working

on this problem for a long time. Western philosophers have as well, of course, but the Buddhists have distinctive contributions. And when we place the Buddhist and the Western ideas together, we often get a lot more clarity. And that's what I'm trying to do in this book. Yeah, yeah. And what's been your engagement with the methodologies whereby Buddhists have traditionally come to have their insights and opinions on these topics, specifically meditation? Yeah, well, there's a lot of methodologies within Buddhism, many different meditative traditions, but also a lot of specifically academic philosophical practice. I'm not a religious person, and I'm not much of a meditator. I'm somebody who engages with this work philosophically, and that's something that many Buddhist scholars have done as well. I mean, who engages with this work philosophically, and that's something that

many Buddhist scholars have done as well. I mean, there's always this myth that if you go to a Buddhist monastery, you're going to find lots of people sitting in meditation. In fact, what you find is lots of people sitting in classrooms, in offices, in kitchens, and people doing various jobs, but among those jobs, teaching and debating philosophy. And so I think of my practice as more in the line with academic Buddhist practice, that is, working on ideas, debating, analyzing, writing, asking questions. That's what I do. Have you had more contact with Galupas than with any other tradition within Vajrayana Buddhism? Yes. My principal teachers in the Buddhist tradition have almost all been in the Galupa tradition, and many of the commentaries on which I rely on a lot of the work that I've translated is Galuk work, though I also certainly read in other traditions. I'm not a sectarian defender of the Galuk lineage. I also read work in the Sakya Kagyu and Yingma lineages

and in the Rima or non-sectarian movement of the 19th century. So I read pretty broadly in that area. And of course, when you're reading in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist philosophy, these Tibetan lineages have no relevance at all. So I try to be pretty broad, but the people from whom I've learned the most are certainly people in the Galuk lineage. Yeah, yeah. And that would certainly bias everything in the direction of scholastic, scholarly, philosophical emphasis and conceptual analysis as being intrinsic to any path of practice. You know, you certainly get more of that with the Galupas than with the Nyingmapas or Kagyu schools. That's true. But of course, the Sakya lineage is also highly academic and scholastic.

Yeah. And I think the way to put this is, if you're somebody like me, who's trained as a professional philosopher and is trained to be scholastic. When you encounter the Galuk and the Sakya lineages, you kind of feel like you've come home. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's jump in here. The self. What do you think most people mean by the term self? So when we propose to the naive listener that the self is an illusion or it's a construct, and those are different claims, obviously, or that it's not what it seems to be, what is the object that's coming under conceptual or empirical attack there? conceptual or empirical attack there. Sure. Let's begin by drawing a distinction and then by talking a bit about illusion and then coming to the self-illusion. So I'm going to try

to be a little bit systematic here. There's a distinction that runs through my book and one that I think is very important between the self and the person. And so while I argue in the book that the self is a non-existent thing and a chimera, I'm not denying that we exist as persons, and I want to replace the idea that we exist as selves with the idea that we exist as persons. The second thing to say is that when I think about illusion, I tend to think of this in a very Indian way. And in most Indian philosophical traditions, including the Buddhist tradition, an illusion is always defined as something that exists in one way but appears in another way. So, for instance, when we say that a mirage is an illusion, we mean that it exists as a refraction pattern of light,

but it appears to be water. When we look at the Mueller-Lyer illusion, we say that those two lines exist as equally long, but appear to be different. So when I talk about the self-illusion, I'm going to be talking about the person existing as a person, but often illusorily taken to be a self. So what do I mean by a self? I mean by the self, the thing that we kind of instinctively, atavistically think that we are. The me that owns my body, the me that stands behind and owns my mind, the subject of my mental states, the agent that acts upon the world but isn't quite in the world. And it's a hard illusion to really get people to see, in part because it's so atavistic, and in part because when you put it into words,

it sounds preposterous. So when I say that I naively and instinctively don't take myself to be my body or to be my mind, but to own them as a separate thing, well, that sounds crazy, but it is how we think. And I use a thought experiment in the early part of the book to illustrate that. And the thought experiment's really simple. Just imagine somebody whose body you'd like to have for a little while or for a long time. The moment you form that desire, whether the desire makes sense or not, you've told yourself that you are not your body, you're something that has a body and that could in principle have some other body. And you can do the same thing with your mind. You can imagine a mind you

would really love to have for a little while or for a long time. And if you can form that desire, then you don't regard yourself as identical to your mind. You regard yourself as something that has a mind and could have a very different mind, maybe a better one, maybe a worse one. But it's that thing that we think of behind our experience, the thing that's pure subject and never object, that's pure agent, that acts upon the world, that we take to be free of the causal nexus. That's the thing that I take to be the self. And I think that it's almost maybe a universal illusion that that's the way in which we exist, even though when we subject it to analysis, we find that it doesn't make a lot of sense. But we also find that lots of philosophy,

not just Western philosophy, but also Indian philosophy, also philosophy in other traditions, takes that atavistic idea of a self and then ramifies it into a kind of philosophical theory about what that self must be like. In Greek, we get the psuche, the kind of soul that then moves its way, works its way into the Judaic and Christian and Islamic traditions. In India, we get the atman, the thing that persists through lives and remains constant while everything else changes. And what we get then is a kind of sophisticated philosophical theory about what that self might be like. And my take is that those theories are kind of like theories of how deep the water is in a mirage. You start out with something that doesn't exist and then try to figure out what

its nature is. What I think we need to do is to try to work our way out of that illusion and come to understand ourselves as persons. Things that are part of the world, that are embedded in the world, that are embodied, that are interdependent, that are causally conditioned, that are kind of continua of psychophysical processes rather than individual things, and that only exist in interaction with other persons in a social context. And if we understand ourselves that way, we get a much deeper and much richer understanding of what it is to be a human being. Yeah, so let me see if I can ground this in the experience of our listeners. This is something I've done at many points before in discussing meditation, if I pulled in my friend Dan Dennett here, he would say, well, I don't believe in any self of that sort.

The self I believe in is simply the person, right? The whole person. And he would be right to say that, but he would not be honest about the nature of most people's experience, virtually every person's experience, and I would allege his experience as well, which is that of being a kind of passenger in the body of a sort you just described, where

most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel that they have bodies. They feel that they're appropriating the body from some position of subjectivity, very likely in the head, right? from some position of subjectivity, very likely in the head, right? They feel like a locus of consciousness and attention and will. This connects us to the perennial debate about the nature of free will. And it's that inner homunculus, that sense that you're behind as a subject, and therefore as a center to experience that we refer to when we say I or me most of the time. Now, of course, we do think of ourselves as people. We think of our bodies as being ours. We understand intellectually that whatever we are as minds and agents is arising out of the whole body. But when you pay attention, when you feel what in you is implicated when someone looks into your eyes or points at you or refers to you, when you become self-conscious before a crowd, there is this experience of being an inner subject that is threatened or implicated,

right? You feel, and in that case, just take the case of acute self-consciousness, your own face becomes a kind of mask, right? You're not identical to your face, you're behind your face, and in some sense your face is misbehaving. I mean, think of what it's like to be so embarrassed that you're blushing, right? And you're blushing, obviously, against your will. And you are the one implicated in the center of it all, feeling at war with your experience. And in those moments, your body is, in some sense sense part of the world, right? You are the inner man or woman, and everything else is out there. And it is from that place of being this embattled subject that virtually everyone seeks to have

a better experience in life, to get out of the position of always looking over your own shoulder and being abstracted away from your experience, but rather to have experiences that are so good and compelling that you're unified with them. And then we call these experiences flow experiences or peak experiences, those moments of unselfconscious unity with an athletic performance or an intellectual engagement or pure pleasure, whatever it is, those become highlights of the day. And the rest is us as subjects thinking, thinking, thinking, talking to ourselves in a way that is paradoxical and perhaps we can examine. But it is a subset of the person. It is the subject inside that is the self, whatever you may believe about its emergent

dependency on the brain and the rest of the body and its entanglement with the world. Yeah, that's a very nice way of putting it. And I'd like to emphasize something that you said in passing, and that was you talked about having a kind of inner experience or inner world. And part of the self-illusion is the illusion that our experiences and our actions happen in a kind of inner space that's outside of physical space and time, and that somehow physical space and time is all exterior to us, but that we have this inner life happening in an inner space. And what that does is it kind of removes us in consciousness

from the world and takes the world to be something of which we're a kind of spectator or upon which we can act, but to which we don't belong. And again, the moment we say it, it might sound crazy so that nobody thinks that on reflection, perhaps. Well, some people probably do, but most of us don't. But the moment we stop reflecting, we fall right back into it, and that's the illusion. Just as you could measure those lines in the Mueller-Lyer diagram, convince yourself that they are the same length, but still when you look at them, they look different. Just when we look at our experience, it feels broken into subject and object, inner and outer, agent and action. And that all implicates this idea of a non-spatio-temporal

inner ego or self that inhabits our body and mind or makes use of our body and mind in engaging with the world. And that's the illusion that I'm really concerned with here. Okay. Well, before we perform surgery on this concept and experience, why do you think this is important? I'll give you my answer in a second, but I would love to know what you think the significance of all this inquiry is. I think it's important for several reasons. One reason is that I really do believe that part of our task as human beings is the Socratic task, right? Know thyself, to try to understand who we are and what it is to lead a human life. And so the clearer we can get on that,

the more we actually have a kind of authentic self-understanding. But the other issue is a moral issue. That is that very often, the self-illusion functions as a kind of foundation for moral egoism that I think can be extraordinarily corrosive. egoism that I think can be extraordinarily corrosive. It also can be the foundation of a lot of moral reactive attitudes that can be very corrosive. Reactive attitudes like blame and anger, where we take other people to be selves acting freely and forget about the kinds of causal relations in which they're implicated. So I think that the self-illusion actually inhibits our relationships. I also think, as you pointed out earlier, the place where the self-illusion disappears is when we're in flow states. And when we're in flow states, we're in states of real

expertise as well as states of real happiness. And if we can understand that the self-illusion is one that breaks flow and takes us out of real expertise and can often suck the joy out of our lives, then becoming more aware of the self-illusion might enable us to be more attentive to what brings us into flow and so lead us to live happier, more effective lives. So for all of those reasons, I think this isn't a matter of kind of idle philosophical curiosity, but one that can actually enrich our lives if we get clearer about it. Yeah, I would just add that the obverse side of that coin of flow is all of the psychological suffering that is anchored to this feeling of self. And when you can cut through the illusion, that suffering itself can evaporate, right?

That this insight into selflessness is a kind of, psychologically speaking, a kind of universal solvent of psychological suffering. And that's really, I mean, that is the explicit promise of Buddhist soteriology, right? Suffering and the end of suffering, right? We're talking, the whole Buddhist project was to, or the Buddha's whole project was to diagnose why we suffer. And an insight into selflessness is at the root of the remedy there. And I would just say personally, this is something, obviously, I'm interested in the philosophical and conceptual side of this. But for me personally, being able to experience the illusoriness of the self has been the most important thing I've ever learned in my life. I mean, it's really one without a second. And it shouldn't be surprising that it can be experienced, right? Because we're

making a claim about what's true about the nature of consciousness in each moment. And the claim is not that there is a self and you can, by some process of analysis or meditative insight, get rid of it. It's no, it is not there in the first place. And it can be discovered, its absence can be discovered in a way that changes the character of experience. I mean, its absence can be felt, its absence can be made salient, and that is not a claim that needs to be taken on faith by anyone. It's merely an empirical claim that is there to be investigated. So the goal of a conversation like this, if not to actually precipitate that experience in the listener, is to make the terrain sound plausible enough that a person has

some indication of where they would look to find it, and the path by which they might actually arrive there. So we're essentially describing the map to the territory as clearly as we can. And to that end, let's talk about this from both the so-called objective or third-person side, and the subjective or first-person side, because they yield substantially the same view, in my experience, but they seem very different. From the third-person side, when we're talking about the physical universe that includes bodies and brains and everything that science and most of Western philosophy is going to acknowledge to be real, there, the existence of a truly separate self, a truly dualistic picture of what a person is,

doesn't make any sense at all. I mean, it's obvious from that point of view that there is simply the physical universe, and you are arising within it as an expression of it. You're inseparable from it materially. You're constantly exchanging atoms with it across the boundary of your skin. You're breathing yourself out, and you're breathing in the environment. There is no real boundary that a physicist is going to want to fight for here. And it's on that basis that any radical disjunction between a person and the world can be denied. of free will, you know, as in libertarian free will, never made any sense to anyone who thought about it. I mean, it's just obvious that there's the total set of all that happens in the universe, and fully within that part of the Venn diagram, as a subset of what happens, are all the things

that, quote, you do, right? Your actions are part of the physics of things and can't be otherwise. And so I guess, throwing it back to you here, do you see that as an incontestable and non-controversial starting point from the outside? Yeah, I think that's an extremely important starting point. I would only add one aspect to that, if I might, and that is that as hyper-social beings, which we are and which we've evolved into that kind of status, we don't only find ourselves inseparably embedded in the physical universe. We find ourselves inseparably embedded in a social universe, embedded with other people, with other persons. And that becomes extraordinarily

important because one of the mechanisms of that embedding, one of the many mechanisms, is language. And when we acquire language, we acquire a medium through which we introspect and through which we understand ourselves that's entirely transformative. And we can have the kind of illusion that when I find myself, for instance, believing right now that I'm talking to you, that I do that by introspecting and finding a little sentence in there that says, hey, Jay, right now you're talking to Sam. But that's, of course, crazy. I'm interpreting myself in terms of a language that's socially constituted. I understand myself as a philosopher or as a teacher or as a son or as a father in terms of social relations. And so we end up being constructed not as autonomous beings who enter a world and

then interact with it, but we're constructed and emerge out of a world that is both physical and social. And everything we are reflects that fact and reflects that constant interdependence and that dynamic interplay between our bodies and the physical environment around us, between our psychological states and the psychological states of others. And you just can't understand who we are without that. I think that's extraordinarily important. And as you put it, if we were to do physics or chemistry or biology or psychology, we can do all of that and we do all of that without ever saying, oh yes, and then there's the self. And we've got to think about that too, because it simply falls out of the equation. That illusion isn't one that's propagated by our best science. obviously has Buddhist overtones and links up with another concept that we might refer to

by the phrase conventional existence of things. So maybe we should explain some of that or introduce some of those distinctions. In your book, you reference the story of King Melinda and Nagasena to do this, and you also use a few other examples. Hume has an approach here with his church analogy. things, including people in the world, exist, but their existence is a kind of paradox, or things exist by convention, which is not quite the same thing as something existing truly independently from everything else. That's right. Oftentimes, when people hear the idea of conventional truth as opposed to ultimate truth, they think that what this is is a kind of second-class sort of reality, an ersatz sort of reality that isn't really real. It's something you do until ultimate truth comes along. But

that's a deep misunderstanding. So let's begin with the idea of dependent origination and then work our way into conventional existence. When in the Buddhist world, we talk about dependent origination, we mean that everything that occurs, occurs in dependence on a vast network of countless causes and conditions. My speaking depends upon all kinds of things happening in my nervous system, but it also depends upon my being able to breathe and there being oxygen in the air. It depends upon the things that I've been taught, the things upon which I've reflected. It depends upon the fact that you're at the other end of this conversation and that I see you as an interlocutor. When we talk about that dependence in the Buddhist world, we often distinguish three

different dimensions of that interdependence. The first, the one I've been stressing so far, is causal interdependence. Effects depend upon their causes, and there are many different kinds of causes, some of which are antecedent, some of which are simultaneous. We don't need to worry about that botany now. But even when you think about an ordinary event like, say, turning the lights on, you might say that flicking the switch is the cause. You might say that the power plant and the electric grid are the cause of the lights being on. You might say that your desire to read is the cause for the lights being on. All kinds of different causes to which we can appeal. So the causal nexus isn't linear. It's a real mesh. But secondly, we talk about part-whole

dependence. The technical term for that is myriological dependence. So a whole entity depends for its existence on its parts. I depend on my liver and my spleen and my lungs and my hair and all of that stuff to be who I am. But parts also depend upon their wholes. My heart can't function as a heart without being embedded in my body. My liver isn't my liver unless it's in me, and so forth. Or, to take other kinds of analogies, the college at which I teach depends upon its faculty and its students and its library and its buildings and its administrators and so forth. But each of those things depends upon the college in order to be a classroom building or a teacher or a student or an administrator. So that's a bidirectional myriological interdependence. meriological interdependence. But the third form of interdependence, the hardest one for most people to get their minds around, but the most important one in some ways for the present purposes,

is dependence on conceptual imputation. That is, things depend for their identities upon the ways in which we understand them. And I want to start with a really easy example to make that clear. And it's an example that I use throughout the book, and that's the example of money. If I've got a $5 bill in my hand, nobody denies that it's actually true that I've got $5 there, unless it's counterfeit, of course. But what I've got is a piece of paper in green ink. counterfeit, of course. But what I've got is a piece of paper in green ink. There's nothing about the paper and the green ink that make it worth $5. It's worth $5 because we've got the institution of the Federal Reserve, because I can exchange it for 5-1s, because I can buy something with it, people will accept it as a $5 note, unlike, say, an IOU or some Confederate

money. And it's important to see that the identity of that piece of paper as a $5 note depends upon this vast network, not only of physical causes and conditions, but of conceptual activity that constitutes its value as a $5 note. I mean, after all, if I've got a $5 note and a $20 note, the paper and the ink are worth exactly the same in both of those cases. It's not like there's four times as much really cool paper and ink in the $20 note as there is in the $5. But we have different conceptual responses to them. And those conceptual responses don't reflect the identity of the two notes as a five and a ten. Rather, they constitute that identity. And the more we look, the more we see that almost everything that we take seriously as a real

existent is interdependent in all of these three senses. It's causally interdependent, interdependent in all of these three senses. It's causally interdependent, it's myriologically interdependent, but it's also dependent for its identity on our conceptual resources. Now, that's important because when we think about things that are extended in time, like persons who often live for 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 years. And we think about the difference between what that person was when its body was brand new, when it first was delivered out of the womb, and what it might be like when it's an adult or an aged being. Those are very different bodies. But we unite them through a conceptual imputation by seeing that they're physically causally connected, them through a conceptual imputation by seeing that they're physically causally connected,

that they share some parts, that one part of the sequence is caused by earlier parts of the sequence. And we conceptually decide to say, let's call that one thing. And that gives us a person. But that person is something that is every bit as constructed as an entity as a dollar bill is. But just because the dollar bill or the $20 bill or the $5 bill, just because the fact that those are constructed doesn't make them unreal, but rather describes that in which their reality consists. When we understand the constructed nature of our own identities, a construction in which we are not the only agents, in which other people participate as well, we see that our existence as constructed beings doesn't amount to our non-existence. Rather, it constitutes our mode of existence.

When we understand ourselves as persons, we understand ourselves as interdependent artifacts in that sense. Hume, in the treatise of human nature, makes the beautiful point that human beings are natural artificers, that we are born to make things. Among the things we make are cookies and cakes, houses and cities, but we also make cultures. We also make ideas. And I think that the deepest part of this whole, our activity as artificers, is that one of the things that we make is ourselves. And in a lot of ways, we persons are the most sophisticated things that we human beings make as natural artifices. And so oftentimes, you can understand the illusion of the self as the illusion that

something that we've in fact made was something that existed independently and that we just found. It would be as though you thought that here's how money originated. Somewhere on a beach, somebody saw lots of pieces of paper and coins and then noticed that they were each valuable and that you could exchange them for things and that you could put them in the bank. And so they started doing that. But that the value in the coins and the papers was just there before we did anything with them. Nobody would accept that view. I want to suggest that it's exactly that way with us, that we're not just great apes who happened to discover that they were persons, but we've constructed ourselves as persons and then erroneously think that that's because we

noticed that we had selves. Okay, so I can imagine some listener being very skeptical about this analogy to the dollar. The claim would be, well, it's obvious that there are different types of existence among all the myriad objects and properties in the world. And yes, some things are socially constructed. Some things only exist by virtue of our agreeing that they exist. And money is among those many things. You know, something is a dollar because we say it is, and the moment we stop saying it is, well, then it ceases to be that. And there are, you know, there are cocktail parties and corporations and other things might be constructed in this way, but there are other things that exist, whether or not we even

know about them, much less have formed the right concepts about them and had conversations about them. So, you know, if a new virus comes flying out of a bat next week and begins to spread surreptitiously throughout the world, making people sick. Well, that virus is what it is, whether we know about it or not, and its efficacy in making people sick will be what it is, whether we've learned to even talk about it or not, much less cure it. So there are different ways in which things exist, and perhaps the self is much more like an unnamed virus than it is like a dollar that was the mere invention of people at a certain moment in time. And that the self has, and now I'm referencing your book and your own terminology. This self has the properties of priority and unity and subject-object duality and agency of the kind that we discover in ourselves. It's me in here,

and I can think and do whatever the hell I want, and I have free will. I'm a me, yes, I'm in my body perhaps in some paradoxical way, and I'm sure I'm dependent on my brain in ways that I can't introspect about, but all of this highfalutin talk about interdependence and emergent causation and all the rest, maybe there's something of interest to say there with respect to the neuroscience of being a self or the information processing aspect of what's actually happening in my brain. But as a matter of phenomenology, as a matter of lived experience, there's a simple point of view that is as undeniable as any conceivable feature of experience. And it's that I'm me and I'm not you.

And so none of what you've said really has put that into question. That's right. Nothing that I've said so far in this conversation has, but now maybe it's time to start doing that. Because what you've done is very ably characterized the self-illusion. And part of the kind of tell there, the giveaway, is that you talked about it as a kind of undeniable phenomenological fact, a fact about our experience. And I think that we have to be really careful when we go from how things seem to us to how they are. Because, of course, we know that we're all subject to illusions of all kinds.

Some of those illusions are what you might call accidental illusions, like the Mueller-Lyer illusion that you've got to kind of, that you encounter sometimes but not others, or the bent stick illusion, or something like that. Other illusions are pretty constant. So for instance, the illusion that our visual field is uniformly colored, or that it doesn't have a hole in the center of it. The illusion that our senses simply deliver the world to us just as they are, instead of thinking about perception as a complicated neurological construction system and so forth. So we know that we can't simply go from the phenomenology to metaphysics directly. And so that's an important cautionary right there. Now, when we start looking at the properties that you correctly assigned to

the illusory self, things like primordial independence, free agency, pure subjectivity, unity, simplicity, all of those, those are properties of the illusion. And we can kind of see that in a bunch of different ways. Let's start with the one that you've mentioned several times already and that I haven't really addressed, and that's the question of free agency. Oftentimes, especially in modern Western cultures, part of the self-illusion is the illusion that we can literally do whatever we want, that we've got libertarian freedom. And that's the illusion that while everything else is part of the causal matrix, that somehow

we stand outside of that causal matrix. The real locus classicus for that, of course, in the Western tradition is St. Augustine, who basically invented the idea of free will. And when he did that, he invented two things. One was the idea of a will as a kind of component of the ego, and the other was its exemption from the laws of causality. And the theological reasons for doing that have to do with theodicy, and we don't have to go there. But it is worth pointing out that if you've taken a psychology course, you don't suddenly find, oh yes, and there's the will, that's the will part of the brain. Or first there's a cause, a perception, then there's a

bit of will, and then there's an action. The idea of the will simply is completely inert in psychological theory. Let's spell that out a little more, because there's a point that I'm embarrassed I've never made before, given my bona fides as a critic of organized religion and organized Abrahamic religion in particular. But this idea of the will from Augustine is really, the whole point is to get God off the hook for human evil, right? That's right. I mean, this is all about the Garden of Eden and the fall. Yeah. So it's worth reminding ourselves of this, I guess. I mean, I don't want to bash the entire Christian tradition.

That's not my axe to grind. But this one is a pretty serious one. Augustine was worried about whose fault it was that we fell from Eden. And the problem is that if we understand God as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, it sounds like he should have known, he had to have known, that Eve was going to take the apple from the snake. He had to have really wanted her not to do that because he knew what a bad thing that was. And because he was omnipotent, he had to be able to stop it, but he didn't. And so if you put those things together,

it makes it sound like the fall is God's fault. And Augustine was worried about that because you can't blame God for stuff like that. And the way that he got God off the hook was to invent this faculty of voluntas, of will, which was a new faculty to create. And he said that we have this general faculty to act. And what's more, that faculty is special in that it's exempted from causation. And so there's nothing God could have done because Eve was free and could do things free of causation. So, even though he was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, he couldn't have stopped her from doing what she freely did. Now, if you are worried about talking snakes and apples from magical trees and the origins of evil and a triple omni-god, then perhaps you should take the idea of a free will seriously. But my point here is that if

that's not what drives you metaphysically, then you better recognize that that's the origin of this idea and that to the extent that we think of ourselves as selves, and so as free agents outside of the causal nexus, even though we know that we are biological organisms in a causally determined world, then you've really got a crazy picture of who you are, an alienating picture. And it's a picture that, as I said earlier, both can lead to illegitimate feelings of pride, shame, guilt, I did this, but can also lead to very dangerous attributions of blame and anger, failing to see that other people, just like me, fail to have this kind of free will. And I think that extirpating this myth of freedom

is a really important task of philosophy. But what I'm trying to also do in this book is to show that that myth of freedom is tied deeply to the idea of the self. And so one of the reasons that we want to say that the self isn't something that we just found is because to find it, we'd have to find something that was causally exempt, and there isn't anything that's causally exempt. We also have to find something that's simple. And when we look at who we are, how we act, how we perceive, and how we understand, what we discover is a complex of constantly changing phenomena, is a complex of constantly changing phenomena, not some simple single thing that persists through those phenomena. When we look at subjectivity, we don't find a single eye

lying behind all of that. We see perceptual subjectivity, affective subjectivity. Within perceptual subjectivity, auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory subjectivity. What we see is a complex, more like a committee than an individual thing. So when you start losing simplicity and this kind of perfect subject and free agency, you start seeing that this kind of mythical apparent thing really isn't there at all. It's as though you were looking at those lines of the Mueller-Lyer illusion, and as you erase the arrowheads on each side, the lines come back into a perception of equality. And when you see them that way, you see them correctly. When we see ourselves as natural organisms enmeshed in a causal nexus with an identity

that we constitute, then you begin to see who we are. And that's very different from the I that I think that I am when I succumb to the self-illusion. Well, it's interesting. Well, it's interesting. I think you can get there by taking the dualistic starting point of pure subjectivity seriously. So in taking subject or not, leave that aside. But as a matter of experience, there is this experience to be had of just being a pure witness of all the things that can be noticed, sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings, etc., objects out in the world. And because you can be aware of them as objects, that testifies to the fact that they are not you, right? You are something else over here that is aiming attention like a spotlight upon all the objects, and the fact that you can be aware of something proves that it's on the

object side of this subject-object chasm, and therefore not you, right? You are just the subject. But if you persist in doing that, what you notice is that this feeling of being a self is itself a kind of object, right? It is an appearance of a kind, however inscrutable. Otherwise, you would never sense that it was so, right? And certainly, you could never experience a loss of this feeling unless it is, in fact, a feeling, right? So there's some signature inexperience that we're calling self. There is a sense that it feels like something to be me, or in the middle, right? This thing that we're criticizing, this thing we're saying doesn't exist, the denial of that critique feels like something.

And if that feeling suddenly went away, then there'd be no basis upon which to say, I'm a self in the appropriating experience from the middle of experience. And so if you take this duality seriously, you notice that, well, okay, consciousness, that which is aware of the feeling of self must be prior to it and actually unimplicated in it in the same way it's unimplicated in the existence of the water bottle I can see on my desk, right? That's over there as an object. And so this feeling in the face or in the head or in the body, whatever it is, the energetics of it, that whatever the signature is of feeling individuated internal to the body, that is itself a kind of object and therefore doesn't actually constrain what consciousness

is in itself as a matter of experience. This is a logical point, but more importantly, it's a phenomenological one, because if you keep falling back into that position of just recognizing that everything, including this feeling of being a subject, is appearing all by itself in a condition that is aware of appearances, that you can begin to feel that the condition itself doesn't feel like I. It doesn't feel like a self, right? I mean, that is the way to punch through to this base layer of just consciousness and its contents, which can be experienced without that usual subject-object duality. That's right. And it's subject-object duality that's,

you know, kind of the bogeyman in this particular context. Because when we experience the world through that duality, which we're very often in. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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