Making Sense with Sam Harris - #75 — Ask Me Anything 7

Episode Date: May 12, 2017

Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about the illusion of the self, his podcast with Charles Murray, the future of brain-machine interfaces, his BJJ practice, reasoning with the extreme Left, mindfulness and parenting, his experience of going back to school after a long break, transgenderism, increasing one’s vocabulary, 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.

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Okay, this is an Ask Me Anything episode. And just one housekeeping item here. I noticed the other day that Amazon canceled my Affiliates account. This is the account that allows me to post links to books and to have some portion of your shopping on Amazon through those links come back to support the podcast at no extra cost to you. And they did this because apparently I was in violation of their policy. You can't tell your podcast listeners that following these Amazon links does support the podcast. I'm not sure why they consider this some kind of unethical inducement. It's obvious that this is

why podcasters and content creators use Amazon Affiliates links, but honestly I had never read the fine print, and I don't know how frequently it gets updated. I was certainly not in conscious violation of their policy. And, you know, I don't see anything unethical about either way of thinking about this. Obviously, Amazon can have any policy they want. But this is just to inform you that those of you who have been supporting the podcast this way can no longer do that, and that those links are now retired. The only ways to support the podcast are through my website at samharris.org forward slash support, or through Patreon. And you can find a link to Patreon also on my support page. But this is, I mentioned this for another reason. This is a larger problem that people are running into online,

people who are creating content. Those who use YouTube ads, which I don't, are often finding their videos demonetized suddenly based on some algorithmic or editorial concern about the content. Podcasters and videographers are just finding that their online businesses evaporate overnight. And I've heard from many ex-Muslims and secularists that their Facebook pages have been cancelled based on some perceived blasphemy, or even an organized campaign launched by their religious critics. So it's just a fact that many content creators are very vulnerable to the decisions made by these platforms. And it's easy to lose sight of this vulnerability when we're on social media and building a platform there. Platforms that can be not only useful, but indispensable for writers and artists and podcasters.

We are using someone else's platform. We are essentially sharecropping for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And this can all go away overnight. It's the Wild West out here still when it comes to producing digital content. Okay, so this is an Ask Me Anything podcast. I went out on Twitter asking for questions and it looks like I got 1,400 of them or at least 1,400 responses to the tweet. or at least 1,400 responses to the tweet. Now I'm going to go through these more quickly than usual,

in the interest of both hitting more points and seeing if I can do it. One of the features I'm building into my meditation app is a Q&A feature, where I can answer questions live. So I can announce that I'm going to be on the app for the next hour, come and ask questions, and it'll be like an audio version of Periscope where you can type in questions and I can respond. And I've never done this really, so let's see how it works. Maybe this feature is something I don't need at all, because it'll just cause me to put my foot in my mouth again and again. Okay, first question. Is it possible that the mindfulness notion of the self being an illusion

is itself an illusion? Well, almost anything is possible. I'll tell you why I think it's not an illusion. The classic illusion is something that seems a certain way, but then you pay more attention to it. You study it more carefully, and it seems another way. So it collapses into another form on the basis of paying more attention to the phenomenon. This can be true of visual illusions. You think there's a triangle there,

but then you see that the sides of the triangle don't even exist, right? Because they've been merely implied. So you pay more attention and you see that there is no triangle there on the page, even though there seems to be one. triangle there on the page, even though there seems to be one. Now, the sense of self, the sense that there's a subject in our heads, a thinker of thoughts, that is a feeling that if you pay more careful attention to it, goes away. And every time it comes back, once you actually know how to pay attention, it is by virtue of being distracted, being captured by something else, being lost in thought, actually. And then when you pay attention again, it goes away. And once you learn how to pay attention, once you really

learn how to meditate, it goes away every time. You reliably fail to find this feeling that you've been calling I. Now I talk much more about this in my book Waking Up. I will talk much more about this in my forthcoming meditation app. meditation app. But the idea that there may really be a self that just disappears or seems to disappear every time you look for it is no more compelling to me than the idea that there really is a triangle on the page in the Kniezeklein illusion, and that it only seems to disappear every time you look for its sides. And if you're not familiar with the illusion I'm talking about, Google Kinesa Klein triangle, and you'll see a triangle bounded by three partial circles, or what seems to be a triangle. But again, much more on that in my

book Waking Up and in my forthcoming app. Tell me some real-life examples that are good for society and that are informed by Charles Murray's research in The Bell Curve. I guess I should say a few things about the Charles Murray podcast. I got some considerable criticism for that. Glenn Greenwald called me a racist. No surprises there. But I got actually much less criticism than I would have thought, as did Charles. I think we were both pleasantly surprised by the reception. I think he said in his email to me that I appear to have gotten more criticism for having him on the podcast than he

was getting for being himself. But in any case, I didn't get all that much. I think people got the point of what I was doing there, which makes me happy. The point of the conversation was not to talk about differences in IQ across race. As I think I made clear, that topic doesn't really interest me, and I share some of the skepticism communicated in this question. When I asked Charles what the point of this kind of research was, many of you felt that his answer was insufficient and a little confusing. I can tell you what I took his answer to be. He seemed to be saying that if we are misled by an irrational expectation that intelligence must be the same statistically across populations, then we will perceive any

difference in representation of racial groups or ethnic groups in the various walks of life as being synonymous with racism or bad policy. To take another potentially inflammatory example, that because the number of Jews in the NBA isn't exactly in register with the number of Jews in the population, well, then there's some latent anti-Semitism operating there, keeping Jews off the basketball court. Now, does anyone think that? I doubt it. I doubt it. But Charles' general concern is clearly that our expectations and our policies track real facts in the world, and that we not go in search of problems that don't exist, and that we not make other problems that clearly do exist worse by giving them bad remedies. Now, our conversation didn't go into social policy with any depth at all. And I think

at one point in the podcast, I simply said, I'm not informed enough about the consequences of various policies to even have that conversation. But the real purpose of that podcast episode was to perform a kind of exorcism on the topic and Murray's reputation. Again, we're talking about a man who cannot stand up on a college campus without encountering the threat of being physically hounded off of it. UC Berkeley, just the other day, declared that it could not keep Ann Coulter physically safe were she to come to the campus to talk to the college Republicans. Now, I don't agree with Ann Coulter about much. I'm not at all inclined to invite her on the podcast because I think what she says is either boring or insincere, but it's pretty clear we are having a breakdown of civil society when a college cannot keep her safe and

puts the onus on her, at least implicitly, and her views and the views of those who want to hear her speak rather than on this moral panic that is shutting down conversation on the left. So I wanted Murray here above all because I realized that I had been somewhat complicit in his defamation merely by my benign neglect of his work. Once it became clear to me that he was a well-intentioned and careful scholar, whatever the merits of his research in fact are. He was not at all the Gollum that had been created by the hysteria on the left. So, I had that conversation with Charles. I enjoyed it. Most of you seemed to find it quite illuminating, and I have no regrets there. We have to be able to talk about facts we have to be able to talk about facts without at every turn

claiming that those with whom we disagree are evil. You want to see some criticism of the bell curve that came out contemporaneous with its publication? In this Twitter feed, Michael Shermer linked to one of the articles published in Skeptic magazine. If you go to skeptic.com and search bell curve, presumably you'll get some older articles there,

at least one of which is critical. But I should say that there's nothing that I've heard since my podcast with Charles that suggests to me that he was misrepresenting the state of the science circa 2017. In fact, one person I heard from was Richard Heyer, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine. Richard is a PhD in psychology who studies the neurobiology of intelligence, And he's written a very recent

book for Cambridge University Press entitled The Neuroscience of Intelligence. I have now read part of that book, just arrived the other day. And what's clear from the parts I've read and from his email to me is that the basic science that Murray was discussing has held up. As controversial as it still is in some quarters, the notion of general intelligence seems valid. IQ tests can test for it. There's no reason to think that we are unable to do this in an unbiased way, and the results of these tests are predictive of a wide variety of outcomes, educationally, occupationally, and otherwise. And there seems to be absolutely no question that intelligence is highly heritable and correlates with neurophysiological facts at the level of the brain. So again, this is not my area of special interest, and none of this is to claim that

intelligence is the only thing that dictates success in life. I'm sure many of you know some very smart people who haven't done much of anything with their lives or have done some very questionable things. I certainly know such people and no doubt we will find out more about the brain basis of intelligence in the coming years. Whether we will be able to augment it directly by brain-machine interface, that's another question that has come up, I see, repeatedly here. Many of you have asked what I think of Elon Musk's new company Neuralink and his goal of building a brain-computer interface that not only will be useful for people suffering neurological injury or disease, but will be so useful and so readily adopted

that we will all become cyborgs and plug our brains directly into the cloud. Well, first I should say that I don't have any inside information on this. I actually haven't spoken to Elon about this much, apart from early conversations about the fact that he was doing this. Most of what I know about the company I learned recently from Tim Urban's blog post about Elon and Neuralink, which you can read on the Wait But Why blog. And if you don't know Tim Urban and his blog, you really should. He's fantastic. He's another one of these content creators who you can support on Patreon, as I do. He's amazing. I'll have him on the podcast

at some point, because he's doing something very unique. And he's written these very long, really book-length blog posts on Elon and his various companies. He's done it for SpaceX and Tesla, and he just did one for Neuralink. So you can read there just how daunting the technical challenges are in doing this. Just what it means to put an array of whatever material composition on the cortex or implant anything into the brain, hoping to be able to read out the activity of vast numbers of neurons so as to get the data of conscious and unconscious thought out into the world, much less reading programs from the world back into the brain, so as to influence its functioning. This is an incredibly daunting challenge. I think it's no exaggeration to say this is the most ambitious thing, technically, that we can imagine. When you consider the

possibility of helping people whose brains have been damaged, either by injury or illness, well then this is totally uncontroversial. It's a wonderful thing to be tempting. And there's already some progress on those fronts. But when you imagine the bigger picture of fundamentally augmenting human intelligence so that we're not in a losing competition with the machines of the future, well obviously there are a few assumptions there that will be controversial and at least one that strikes me as potentially far-fetched. And that's the assumption that it will be possible to do this in a way that is sufficiently non-invasive so that we'll all want to have our brains connected to the cloud. Anything that requires

neurosurgery, obviously, is setting the bar pretty high, and it remains to be seen just how non-invasive a brain-machine interface can become. But the technical challenges are fairly astounding, and Tim Urban's blog post will give you a good sense of what they are. will give you a good sense of what they are. Do you think reducing wild animal suffering is a moral blind spot of modern humans or a moral error? I remember hearing about some vegans who thought it a moral duty to prevent various predators

on the African savannah from killing their prey. Who knows if that was just a slander of vegans, but I'm sure somebody's capable of thinking that. It is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of an ethical concern for animals. But the underlying fact is that nature is not a theater of moral concern. Really, it is an abattoir. Everything is getting eaten. Every animal, with the exception of the apex predators, lives in perpetual flight from the other animals that want to make it a meal.

perpetual flight from the other animals that want to make it a meal. There is no way to intercede here that doesn't directly cause the starvation and therefore misery and death of some other species. And then when you add the layer of contagious illness and parasites, the layer of contagious illness and parasites, right? The fact that every creature is more or less all the time being victimized by various worms and amoebas. It's pretty clear that there is no all-seeing and all-powerful, compassionate God who set this place up for general equanimity. So yeah, I don't see how we intercede on behalf of the rabbits and the pigeons and take a position against the foxes and coyotes and hawks. I do feel a little strange about people who keep pet snakes and repeatedly feed them mammals like mice and rats, there's a cognitive hierarchy there that I wouldn't want to keep standing on the wrong side of day after day. I think the rats and the mice suffer more than the snakes. That could just be my warm-blooded bias, but the neurological details would back me

up there. Next question. How is Brazilian jiu-jitsu coming? Slowly, as ever. I absolutely love it. I'm still in the mode of perpetually mitigating injury, so I don't do it nearly as much as I would want to. I think I will probably be a blue belt for the rest of my life at this rate, but it does remain one of the most gratifying hours I can spend doing anything. What are your thoughts on Kevin Kelly's article, The Myth of Superhuman AI? Actually, I've read the article, and Kevin got in touch with me, and we're going to do a podcast, I think in about a month here. I have to check the calendar. But it's already scheduled, and I look forward to that. We disagree about many things on this topic, and that should be a fun conversation. I think we disagree about

religion and a few other things too, so I'm looking forward to that. How do you think your friend, the late, great Christopher Hitchens, would have dealt with the Trump presidency? Well, eloquently, no doubt. And he is missed more than ever at this point, I would say. Once again, many people are under the impression that he hated the Clintons so much that he would have obviously sided with Trump. Given what I know about Hitch, that seems almost perfectly delusional. I honestly cannot imagine a candidate and his surrogates who are more at odds with Hitch's deepest intellectual values. The lack of honesty and real intellectual engagement with history and with policy and with facts as they can be known. But unfortunately, we do not have the pleasure of his company now.

And if you think I'm soft on the Clintons, go back and listen to my podcast with Andrew Sullivan that we did in the run-up to the election. I certainly share most of Hitch's view of both Clintons. But we now have the president we have, and barring some impeachment proceeding relative to the Russian hacking scandal, it would seem we have to make the best of it for the time being. Will you do a podcast with Ben Shapiro on religion? Many people have asked that I do something with Ben.

I am certainly open to it. In fact, Dave Rubin has threatened to get us together on his show. I'm not entirely sure what we would get into, but Ben is obviously smart, and we disagree about many things, although Trump is not one of them. Ben is a, last I looked, not a Trump fan. But he is a conservative, and I believe he's a conservative or even orthodox Jew. Not sure, but no doubt there's something to disagree about there, and I am open to it.

Not sure when it's going to happen, however. Some of you have noticed my trolling of Jocko Willink and his trolling of me online. I forget how this started. I think I once revealed that I was a fan of Downton Abbey on a podcast and started getting slammed for it on Twitter. started getting slammed for it on Twitter. And then I just went out, I just lurched at Jocko on Twitter saying something like, well, I happen to know that when Jocko is doing his deadlifts in his basement at four in the morning, he's watching old episodes of Downton Abbey. Isn't that right, Jocko? Those of you who don't know Jocko, Jocko is a Navy SEAL and now New York Times number one best-selling author of the book Extreme Ownership with his Navy SEAL co-author Leif Babin. And Jocko is also a jujitsu black belt. He's about the most macho guy you will ever

meet, but also one of the nicest guys. Anyway, so people have been trying to get us together to debate free will, I think, because his kind of core ethic and productivity hack is to take what he calls extreme ownership over the things that happen in your life. You know, when your efforts come to naught, don't blame the world, don't blame other people. You have to own the whole process. That's how you improve. That's how you inspire more trust in people who are collaborating with you. There's a lot to be said about the wisdom of doing that, and people seem to think that this is at odds with my view of free will. It may be in certain cases, but generally speaking, I don't think it is.

But in any case, people want us to debate free will, which I would be happy to do. So we've been pitted together online, and Jocko has been threatening to demolish me in debate, and I have been threatening to physically demolish him. And I would encourage those of you who listen to the Jocko podcast to listen to his more recent episodes to detect any sign of fear in him. He can only conceal it for so long. He's got to be under a lot of pressure, knowing that I'm out here training. Hearing from some people here who used to be religious

and got reasoned out of their religion by me and others, it's amazing that many people think this never happens. It happens all the time, and I continually see the evidence of it. So this idea that you can't reason people out of their faith is just not true. What you can't generally do is do it within the hour of a scheduled debate or otherwise on demand. But it happens. How would someone lose their faith? Just a blow to the head, or a good scare? No, generally it's one of two ways. They either discover the ways in which various doctrines

don't make a lot of sense, or they don't want the sort of life that seems to be dictated by any kind of serious adherence to revelation. So some combination of those two either doesn't make sense or doesn't lead somewhere good. But the first reason I think is always the more compelling. People will make fairly impressive sacrifices to their own happiness, and even to the happiness of their children, if they believe that the doctrines that justify and even mandate those sacrifices are true. So the question of truth is everyone's concern. This is another point of confusion, the idea that religious people, religious fundamentalists,

aren't really concerned about what's true. No, they're as concerned as anyone. They're far more concerned, in fact, about truth than many so-called religious fundamentalists. 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 and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.