Making Sense with Sam Harris - #68 — Reality and the Imagination

Episode Date: March 19, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about meditation, the need for stories, the power of technology to erase the boundary between fact and fiction, wealth inequality, the problem of finding meaning in a world without work, religion as a virtual reality game, the difference between pain and suffering, the future of globalism, 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval has a Ph.D. in history from Oxford University, and he's a tenured professor in the Department of History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He specialized in world history and medieval history and military history,

but his current research focuses on macro-historical questions. For instance, what is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between human beings and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history has unfolded? These are all fascinating questions. Our time was somewhat limited by Yuval's schedule. Our love for Skype was somewhat unrequited. He was back in Israel at the time of this interview. But I think you'll find our conversation very interesting.

And now I bring you Yuval Harari. And now I bring you Yuval Harari. I am here with Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure to be here. You have really just exploded onto the scene here with two wonderful books, Sapiens being the first and Homo Deus, which just came out in the US. Congratulations. These are really fantastic, beautiful, exciting books. Thank you. Your background's in history, however. You're a historian technically, but you've written two very interdisciplinary books. You get into

anthropology and biology and technology to an unusual degree. And I'm very fond of this kind of crossing of boundaries intellectually, being a fan of the concept of the unity of knowledge. Did you always know you wanted to work this way when you went into history? Was that your intention? Or is this just something that has happened kind of late in the game for you? I always wanted to do it, but for many years it seemed impossible. It's really only after I got my tenure at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that I also got the courage or the opportunity to let go of the publish or perish regime and do what I really wanted to do, which was to pursue the big questions of history, the big questions of history, the big questions of life. And as you said, I mean,

reality is one. If you want to get answers to the really big questions, you cannot remain confined within a single discipline because reality isn't confined to a single discipline. Yeah, I often say that the single disciplines are now defined more by university architecture and budgets than anything else, and to remain siloed in one way of thinking about reality. In part, it's an understandable outcome based on everyone's limitations on time and bandwidth and the impossibility of knowing everything about everything. So people do specialize. But really, the boundaries between philosophy and science and specific disciplines within science and anthropology and sociology and psychology and history, I mean, it's just the facts of the cosmos don't obey these boundaries. So it's great to just see someone

run directly over them. I mean, if you start with a question that for me is one of the most central questions of history, whether humans today are happier than in the Stone Age and whether we know how to translate power into happiness, then I mean, what discipline does this question belong to? It's, you know, it's history, it's philosophy, it's biology, it's everything. Yeah, yeah. So I want to jump into the books, in particular, your latest. But before I do, it's very rare that I get someone on the podcast who is also seriously committed to the practice of meditation and has a lot of experience there. So I just want to, this is a very novel thing. Okay.

You came off of a, I believe, a 60-day silent retreat recently. And if I'm not mistaken, that's something you do every year. How did you get into meditation and what does your background look like there? Well, when I did my PhD in Oxford 17 years ago, I went to a Vipassana retreat and I learned Vipassana meditation from a teacher called SN Goenka. And it completely blew my mind and changed my life. And ever since that first course, I do two hours of Vipassana meditation every day. I usually start my workday with one hour of meditation and I finish it with another hour of meditation. And every year, like my yearly vacation is to go for

a long retreat of between 30 and 60 days of just meditation in complete silence. No emails, no computers, no books, no reading, writing, nothing, just meditating. Oh, that's wonderful. I am envious. Do you have kids? No, just dogs. Explains a lot. That explains your freedom. Yeah, that's really wonderful. So just to give people a clearer picture of what you're up to there. So Goenka is a very famous Vipassana teacher. famous Vipassana teacher. There are two strands of Vipassana that have been very influential,

particularly in the West, among all the Westerners who in the 60s discovered this practice. And they both come out of Burma. And Goenka's is one line coming from a teacher named Uba Kin. And there was another line that came from a teacher named Mahasi Sayadaw. And so all of the Vipassana practice I've done on retreat has come from the Mahasi Sayadaw line, which teaches the same kind of mindfulness, but it's a different sort of practice. I mean, I think the technical details are less important. The key is just to observe reality as it is every moment, just to stay focused on what is really happening right now, as against all the stories and explanations that our mind constantly generates. And this is extremely difficult. What struck me in my first course, I remember the first day I came to the retreat,

I was absolutely amazed by it. It starts with a very simple practice, sounds simple anyway, of you just have to focus your attention on the breath and observe when the breath is coming in and when the breath is going out of your nostrils. That's it. You don't have to do anything. Just observe that. And I couldn't do it for more than like five seconds or ten seconds. And my mind would run away somewhere. And I was 24 at the time. And it was the first time I realized how little I understand my mind, how little control I have over my attention. And this is why they start with this very simple practice, just focus on the breath because it's so difficult.

And once you get the hang of that and you can do it for more than 10 seconds, then yes, the idea or the instruction is to start observing not just the breath, but everything that is happening in the body, sensations throughout the body. In every part of the body, there is some sensation at any moment. And you start observing that, and you see the deep connection between these sensations and what's happening in your mind. We think that we react to events in the outside world, to memories from our childhood, to something we saw on television. But in fact, in each and every moment, we constantly react to the sensations within our body.

And everything people do, as a historian, I can say that everything people do, you know, from fidgeting in your chair to starting a world war, you're actually reacting to sensations in your body. It's amazing how out of control our minds are and how few people realize that their minds are out of control. And the consequences of them being out of control are, as you say, these are the same process that gets you to say something untoward in a personal interaction is the very process that brings us, you know, civilizational scale catastrophes, wars and all the rest. People are being moved by their thoughts in every moment, and they see no alternative. And meditation is, for the most part, the one way people can become more aware of these processes that

rule their lives. Had you had any psychedelic experiences or anything that got you to go on that first retreat? Or how did you find yourself there? No, I had a very good friend. He's still a good friend of mine. He now works in Silicon Valley. And he, for an entire year, kept nudging me, you should go to a retreat. And he was very persistent. And I was at a time in life that I had all these big questions and I had no answers. And I was very disappointed with the university, with the academic world, with my studies because they didn't provide me any answers to the really deep questions of the suffering in the world and the suffering in my life, where is it coming from and what can we do about it.

He kept telling me, you know, you should go to a meditation retreat. Maybe it will show you something. And I just kept reading books and reading articles. And I was convinced that the answer will come from there until I reached a certain degree of desperation. And I said, okay, what can I lose from going to this 10 days meditation retreat? And I never looked back since. And have you done any psychedelics since, or is that something that you haven't experienced? As a student, I did, what was it?

Ecstasy, but it was an interesting experience, but it didn't teach me anything really valuable. And later on, I realized, I mean, the really, I think the dangerous potential of all the psychedelic drugs is that people get hooked on the excitement and that they want special experiences yeah and this is also dangerous sometimes in meditation that people come to a meditation retreat and they want something special they want to experience i don't know bliss and then to fly in the air and to see stars and whatever and then you come to the retreat at least in vipassana and they tell you okay observe your breath and then you have a pain in your at least in Vipassana, and they tell you, okay, observe your breath. And then you have a pain in your back, and they say, oh, good, you have pain, observe the pain.

Look, just for once in your life, instead of reacting to the pain, just see, how does pain feel? Or maybe it's very hot, and they tell you, okay, observe the heat. How does the heat feel? Or how does boredom feel? And people say, I don't want to observe boredom or pain. I want these special, wonderful experiences. And it's the same with psychedelic drugs. I think that they can open your mind to some levels of reality, which are usually hidden hidden from us, but the danger is that people just want the next trip and the next special

experience. And in the end, I think the real key is to understand the normal everyday experiences and not the unique once-in-a-lifetime special experience. Because if you want to deal with your anger or boredom or irritation or anything, then you need to observe your anger. And it's very difficult if you're just pursuing special experiences. Yeah, that's a very important point, and I fully agree with it. The illusion that gets introduced when you're using psychedelics in that way to have more peak experiences, as you say, you can use meditation that way, where the moment you feel a little bliss or rapture or some very positive, unusual mental state, you can take that to be the signature of a successful meditation.

And the illusion that creeps in there, which is of a piece with everyone's efforts to seek happiness throughout their lives, is that experience has to change in order for the most profound things about the human mind or human consciousness can be discovered. Profundity is elsewhere, which is in fact not the case. I mean, if the ego is an illusion, as it turns out it is, you can discover that coincident with the most ordinary moments of consciousness. You don't need the full fireworks show of a psychedelic experience to notice that there's a subject-object illusion that can be penetrated. And that's something that you do get with a very systematic

approach to mindfulness meditation in this case. It's wonderful you're doing that. Has meditation affected the way you approach your work? I believe I detect the influence in many of the things you've written, but how do you view that? Yes, it has a very deep influence, both on my ability to research and to write such books, because especially when you deal with something like the history of the world in one book, the one thing you need above all else is the ability to focus on what's really important and how not to get bogged down in the thousand little details and all you know, all the kings and battles and dates

and all that. And the practice of meditation, I think, gave me this ability to remain focused. And without that, I couldn't have written Sapiens or Homo Deus. And on another level, at least Vipassana is really about observing reality as it is and being able to distinguish between what is real and what is just a story or a fantasy created by our own minds. And this has a very deep impact on my interpretation of history. Because also when I look at history, for me, the big question is what is real and what are fictions created by human beings? And at least my understanding

is that a source of human power, but also the source of so much human misery is the human imagination and the ability of humans to create fictional stories and then to believe them to such an extent that they can start entire wars just because they believe some religious or national or economic fiction. And this is really what gave us control of the planet. We control this planet not because as individuals we are much more intelligent than chimpanzees or pigs or dogs, but rather because we are the only mammal

that can cooperate in very large numbers. And we can do that because we believe in fictions. If you examine any large-scale human corporation, you always find a fictional story at the basis, whether it's about God or the nation or money or even human rights. Human rights, like God and heaven, they are just a story invented by humans. They are not a biological reality. And this is, again, the source of our power and also of many of our calamities. You can never convince a group of chimpanzees to attack the neighboring group by promising them that after they die, if they die for the great chimpanzee god or the great

chimpanzee nation, then after they die, they will go to chimpanzee heaven and there receive lots of bananas and virgin chimpanzees and things like that. No chimpanzee will ever, ever believe such a story. And this is why we control the world and not the chimpanzees. I love this basic picture, but I must admit I've had a few problems with some of your terminology here because you use words like religion and fiction and stories fairly loosely. So you say things like, you know, science depends on religion and humanism is a religion and, you know, all, as you just said, all large-scale human cooperation is based on

fiction. But it seems to me that there are fictions and then there are fictions. And I think we still want to differentiate between stories and concepts that are obviously false, right, and therefore spread confusion by definition, and those that one need not be confused to adopt. So, you know, the U.S. Constitution, or the concept of human rights, or the convention of money, these are not fictions in the same way that the concept of paradise, or martyrdom, or the Holy Spirit are fictions. And I mean, I don't have to be confused about the nature of reality to see the benefit of thinking in terms of human rights or to use money. Do you disagree with that? Or are we on the same page there? No, I definitely agree that not all stories are the same. And some stories are much more

beneficial than other stories. And also they demand a kind of different kind maybe of belief. But what happens is even if you start by a convention like money, that yes, everybody knows that these pieces of paper have no value and it's just an agreement between people that invest them with a certain value. Very soon what happens is that people forget that or ignore that. And if you open a suitcase full of $100 bills and you look at the brain of the person who is looking at that pile of money, you see like all the neurons going crazy. And the person sees the money as something really valuable. Now if you start talking with him and you know, have a long philosophical discussion, then yes, in the end maybe he will agree that ah, actually it's just a convention.

But the immediate experience of the person looking at the pile of money is, you know, immense greed and even a willingness to kill for it. And it's the same with corporations. If you tell somebody that Google is just a story or General Motors is just a story, then yes, if you sit for a long philosophical discussion or legal discussion, they will understand what you mean. philosophical discussion or legal discussion, they will understand what you mean. But in most cases, in everyday experience, we treat these entities as if they are completely real.

Yeah. It's also worth pointing out that we can get locked in to these conventions in ways that create an immense amount of needless suffering. And you must know Alan Watts, the great popularizer of Eastern philosophy from the 60s and 70s. He told an amusing story. I'm sure he told this a hundred times, but when he's talking about the Great Depression in this vein and talking about the concept of money, he pointed out that money is an abstraction, kind of like an inch, right, or any unit of measurement. And so the way our economy fell into the abyss after the Great Depression was, to some degree, a matter of our not being able to free ourselves from this convention. And so he talked about, you know, what happened in the Great Depression was like a construction worker showing up on the job and the foreman says, sorry, no more work today. We've run out of inches, right? And the idea of

running out of money when there's still houses to be built and still people who want them, and there was no less work to be done, but we couldn't coordinate our work given what had happened to the economy. These abstractions obviously have enormous power. And also, I would say that if you would talk with, you know, like a theologian, then he will tell you, well, I also we also know that God is not this old man, old angry man in the sky that gets upset. If you if I don't know, if you don't follow his orders. God is love, God is whatever. And he will come up with some very abstract and maybe convincing story about what God is. And when you hear this story of the theologian, you will say, well, actually,

maybe I was too fast to condemn religion. But as a historian, I would tell you, yes, the theologian's God, this is maybe kind of a nice, not nice, but this idea has some sense in it. But this is not the God of history. This is not the God that launched the Crusades and the jihads and all the religious wars and persecutions and so forth. and the jihad and all the religious wars and persecutions and so forth. There is a huge gap between the God of the theologians and the God of the masses. And from a historical perspective, it's the God of the masses that really counts. It's the angry man in the sky.

And it's the same with money. Yes, if we have this deep conversation, then we all agree that money is just an obstruction created by humans and so forth. But I don't know if you're if you're in the middle of a warfare between two two gangs or between two corporations, then everybody's dead serious that these pieces of paper or these electronic data on the computer. This is the most important thing in the world. data on the computer, this is the most important thing in the world. So what is the internet doing to us now in affecting the power or lack of power of the stories we use to organize our lives? How do you view our current moment with respect to creating stories that will allow for the emergence of a viable global civilization or, you know, truly open societies that are durable.

What's your sense of the present? Well, there are two questions there, one about the internet and the other about a global society. And they are not, I think they are very different questions. Let's hold globalism, I want to talk about globalism and its precarious birth later on. So let's just talk about technology and its implications at the moment. Well, technology makes our stories and fantasies more important than ever before, because it makes them more powerful than ever before. You know, if people in ancient Egypt

wanted to live forever, they just couldn't. They didn't have the technology. So they fantasized. And their fantasies had a lot of impact on the economy because they used all the resources to build these huge pyramids. And it had an impact on culture and on politics, but the impact was limited. Now when people fantasize about immortality, they are starting to have the technology to actually do it. I don't think it will be feasible in, say, 20 years, but given 50 years, 100 years, I don't think that overcoming old age and death is impossible. And then whatever we fantasize on, whatever our dreams, whatever stories we believe, it becomes the most powerful force in the world.

The very future of evolution, of life, will be shaped by human fiction. By human fiction, I mean the stories in which we believe. Science and technology will give us the power to realize whatever fiction we believe in. And then the question, what is your favorite fiction, will become maybe the most important question in the evolution of life. What we are seeing or what we will see in the not so distant future is exactly the collapse of the separation

between fiction and reality. Because things that begin as fiction in the human mind, we will have the technology to make them a reality, and then they are no longer fiction. Yeah. You could create your favorite heaven or hell, maybe, using bioengineering and using brain computer interfaces and virtual reality technology and things like that. Do you think in terms of optimism and pessimism here, or are you just describing the world as you see it

and not tipping in one direction or another with respect to your hope or fear about what's happening? I try not to think in terms of optimism and pessimism because it then colors your lenses and makes it more difficult to just see what is happening. I also think as a historian that history is not deterministic and technology is not deterministic. You could use the same technology for very good purposes or for very bad purposes, if you look at the 20th century, then you see that with the same technology of electricity and cars and radio and all

that, people could create communist dictatorships or fascist regimes or liberal democracies. The electricity didn't tell people what to do with it. And it's the same with biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We still have options. And just to give one example, which is close to my heart, because I'm very much concerned about what we are doing to other animals and especially farm animals. And I think think that biotechnology poses both the greatest threat and the greatest promise to farm animals, depending on what we choose to do with it. You could use biotechnology to start engineering cows and pigs and chickens that grow faster and have more meat and give more milk and whatever, serving

the interests of the industry while completely disregarding what this means in terms of the experience and the misery of the animals. On the other hand, you could use biotechnology to start what is known as cellular agriculture or create cultured meat or clean meat, which is meat grown from cells. If you want a steak, you don't need to raise a cow and kill it and have a steak. You can just grow the steak from cells. I actually had Uma Valetti, the CEO of Memphis Meats on the podcast about a year ago, and that was the topic. I'm very excited about this truly ethically pure approach to growing meat and just no animal involved. It'd be a wonderful breakthrough.

Yeah. So this is a good example that the same field, of course, it's not exactly the same technology, but the same field, depending on how we choose to use it, can be an immense blessing and can be a terrible curse. So I try to focus just on understanding what are the possibilities. And also, I try not to make prophecies and forecasts. I don't think anybody really knows how the world would look like in 2015. I really just try to map the different possibilities. So to take a very local case that is in the news, the news itself is in the news, really. So the issue of fake news seems to me has direct relevance to the influence of stories. How do you view this recent

phenomenon of fake news? Is it at all new? Or is this, have we been dealing with fake news for thousands of years? I still don't understand what's new about it. I mean, it's a very troubling phenomenon for sure, but I don't think there is anything new. I mean, if this is the era of post-truth, then I would like to know when was the era of truth. I mean, was it, you know, the 1950s, the 1930s, the Middle Ages? I don't think there is anything that Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels, didn't know about propaganda and fake news and manipulating the public. And going much further back, you know, fake news are thousands of years old. You just need to think of the public. And going much further back, you know, fake news are thousands of years old. You just need to think of the Bible.

And the Bible is also a disconcerting example that fake news can last forever. It's not get exposed after, you know, a month or a year. They can last for thousands of years. That's a great meme. Fake news can last forever. Let's get T-shirts printed. So one thing that's very interesting in your latest book, again, on the implications of technology,

you speculate about the likely birth of new religions inspired by technology. Say a little more about that. Yes, I think that there is a good chance that Silicon Valley and places like it will create not just gadgets and tools, but ideological systems and even religions that will make many of the traditional promises of religion, promising justice and prosperity and even immortality, but here on Earth with the help of technology and not after you die with the help of supernatural beings. And you can say that we have actually seen at least some techno-religions, religions based on technology previously.

Maybe the best example is socialism and communism. Communism promised to create paradise on earth with the help of the technology of the Industrial Revolution. Now, it didn't work very well, but this was the basic idea. We don't need God, we just need to control the means of production, and the engineers and the technicians, they can create paradise on Earth for us. And this didn't work very well, but I think that in the 21st century, we'll see a second wave of these techno-religions. Now, if you don't like the term religion, you can just use

ideology instead. But I think there is no essential difference between ideology and religion. They both fulfill the same function in history to give legitimacy to human institutions and to human norms and values. Whether there is a God involved or not is really far less important than the historical function, because in the end, it's not God that makes religions, it's humans that make religion. The dividing line for me, usually between religion and another kind of ideology, like a political one, is at the line between the natural and the supernatural. agents for which you have no real evidence, or you're making claims about the validity of prophecy, you know, the Messiah is going to return, or you're making claims about the survival of consciousness after death based on precious little evidence, that's where I think it's

obviously a religious enterprise, and you have superstition and otherworldliness creeping in. But again, there's no very clear line there. And when you talk about something like the personality cult in North Korea at the moment, obviously it has many of the features of a religion, certainly the socially consequential ones. And then you have something like the singularity phenomenon or the idea of the singularity in Silicon Valley as propounded by somebody like Ray Kurzweil. That has many of the features of otherworldliness, arguably, that a classical religion does. I mean, there is this expectation of immortality that you mentioned a few moments ago. And yeah, I agree that the boundaries here are somewhat fungible,

but when you think of the birth of a technology-inspired religion, is the notion of the singularity something that answers to that description already, or are you thinking about something else? Definitely. That's probably the best example we have today. I think the singularitarians may deserve the title, you know, the first Silicon Valley techno religion. But as the technology matures and delivers more and more achievement and power, I think we'll see more and more of that, especially because, you know, again, in contrast to ancient religions like Christianity or the religion of ancient Egypt, when you needed to postpone most of your desires to the afterlife, the immense attraction of the new technologies is that they promise to fulfill all these miracles here and now in this very life on Earth. miracles here and now in this very life on earth. Now, whether they managed to do it or not,

it's a different question, of course, but the temptation is, I think, immense. The difference here, it really does strike me as a difference, is that the technology that promises this kind of rapturous fulfillment of all human desire exists to a considerable degree even now, and we are noticing it, while it creates these benefits, the benefits of intelligent technology and automation, it is creating the very harms that will make people more and more desperate to find something to anchor them. Take automation as the narrow case. The consequences of automation, I think unarguably at this point, will be a kind of relentless loss of the need for human labor, right? There are jobs that will go away that will never be replaced. And in the limit, when you get perfect automation and perfect AI,

we have a total change of just the purpose of human life. And people will not be able to find their meaning anymore in work because there is no need for human work in the same way that there's virtually no need for horses to work now. And if you gave me a horse, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I mean, if you gave me a free horse, you would just be imposing a cost on me, right? Whereas a century ago, there were, I think,

28 million horses working in the U.S. and they were indispensable. So if you buy the fact that we are moving towards something like, in the best case, this is to be desired and this is a matter of success. If we don't destroy ourselves with technology, we will be putting ourselves out of a job. around and developing the political and ethical norms that will get people to want to do that, that's a huge challenge. And you'll have vast numbers of people who are looking for meaning in their lives. And, you know, obviously, that's a problem now. It's been a problem for thousands of years, but it's a problem that most people haven't had to confront very directly because the burden has been on them to spend most of their lives working. And that's something that seems to be going away. Again, if we succeed, if it doesn't go away, it means we have created some chaos for ourselves that will be intolerable for other

reasons. So tell me about your views on wealth inequality here and the implications of automation and artificial intelligence for the future? I'll speak first about inequality and then about the problem of meaning, which I think is the deepest problem. 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, Thank you. at SamHarris.org.