Within Reason - #144 Sam Harris - Spirituality for Atheists.

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.Come to my UK tour, tickets still available for Cambridge and Newcastle: https://www.livenation.co.uk/alex-o-connor-tickets-adp1641612.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, New York Times best-selling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up meditation app.Buy the Waking Up book here.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 – Tour00:32 – Is ‘Spirituality’ a Dirty Word?04:26 – Why Take Reflective Knowledge Seriously?29:11 – What Is the Self?47:04 – Why Are There Distinct Selves?1:01:22 – The Two Hemispheres of the Brain1:06:47 – The Problem of Emergence1:18:41 – What’s the Minimal Amount of Consciousness?1:34:09 – Is AI Lying to Us About Consciousness?1:39:15 – What Is the Present?

Hey, I'm going on a tour of the United Kingdom. If you've ever been interested in that big question of God's existence, or try to make sense of religion in the 21st century, or consciousness, or anything philosophical, then join me on stage as I try to work out some of these topics with you. I'll be in conversation with a good friend, but also bring questions because there will be an extensive Q&A, and maybe even an opportunity to hear and rate some of your philosophical hot takes. The tour dates are on screen. The link to buy tickets is.

in the description and I hope to see you there. Sam Harris, welcome back to the show. Oh, thank you. Great to see you, Alex. Do you think that spirituality is still a dirty word in the sort of secular community? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think it's even a dirty word in my brain, though I tried to rehabilitate it for my book on the topic. I think I, yeah, I burnt a fair number of words trying to take the shades of at least Abrahamic religion off of it and you know

Greek mysticism, etc. I mean it's it has unfortunate associations but the problem is we don't really have a good secular alternative that is that captures the depth that is there and that is rightly promised by

pointing in that direction but it doesn't immediately haul into the conversation, all the spooky stuff of the new age and all of the dogmatic stuff of organized religion. I wonder if there is a better word. I mean, your book Waking Up is more than 10 years old now, and the first chapter is called spirituality, and the subtitle is something like spirituality without religion.

Yeah, I took a good whack at rehabilitating the word, but I don't think I was successful even for myself. Yeah. No. That's what I was wondering is if in the 10 years since then, I imagine at the time you raised a few eyebrows of people being like, hold on, aren't you the atheist guy, the really atheist guy? But I wanted if over the past sort of 10 years you've noticed any kind of shift or if people in the context in which you otherwise speak still sort of look at that part of your work with a bit of suspicion. Well, I don't, I think there are probably some people who look at that whole area of interest as being suspect, you know, meditation and the contemplative life and just the very notion that introspection can deliver anything of interest about the nature of the mind. I mean, that is, there's a bias in science around that, although that I think has eroded a fair amount in recent decades. but yeah I mean I just I just noticed that I tend to shy away from the term spiritual or spirituality anyway even though I tried to press it into service in that book I also use contemplative you know phenomenal phenomenal technological although no one really knows what that means when you use it you know that the thing that one wants to indicate here is that there there is a

a primacy of experience, right? The first person's perspective is really the only one we can ever fully adopt, even though we can inter-subjectively talk about the third-person perspective. And it admits of exploration directly. I mean, you can discover more of what it's like to be you by paying attention in certain ways or by taking certain drugs or having unusual experiences, going into the dark for a week. You know, the people are doing dark retreats now, right?

Which is kind of an extreme measure, but there's, there changes to be had to, within this continuum of experience that reveal, if nothing about the cosmos at large, they reveal a lot about the, the type of experience that one can have, right? It's just the possibilities of experience. I mean, that really is indisputable,

whatever those experiences actually mean or should mean for our intellectual lives. As I've been getting more interested in the philosophy of mind and consciousness, I've noticed quite a reticence amongst your materialist atheist type, even to sort of take the, the non-reductive, strictly scientific approach seriously. And I think there's a bit of an analogy here and that that kind of person might also just be unwilling to recognize

the legitimacy of knowledge through self-reflection. That is knowledge that you get sort of inwardly rather than externally through empiricism. And yet at the same time, I think you and I would agree that quite compellingly, there are just states of experience which are known very thoroughly through, internal reflection and also unavoidably and informatively. So given that, what do you think accounts for the reticence of so many people to take reflective knowledge seriously? Well, I mean, there's a range of capacity in this regard, talent in this regard, which I do think explains a fair amount. Some people are just not

musical, you know, to use an analogy in this way, right? They just, and you, there's a very direct analogy to be made to somebody who's just not musical, right? We might have talked about this last time, you know, I don't have any real discernible

musical talent. My wife assures me that I'm tone deaf, even though an occasional rendition of happy birthday, at least gets attempted to prove her wrong. but so what does it like to not be musical right and to really hit to be closed by by sheer you know just the contingent fact of your own

lack of talent uh to that to just how deep that domain goes right and and um spirituality for lack of a better word is a is a has a similar kind of property to it which is There are experiences that are readily available to those who want to pay attention in the necessary ways. But for those without the talent, it can be very slow going. It can be very difficult to, you know, you're given the instruction, well, you know, let's say to just pay attention to your, you know, close your eyes and pay attention to your breathing. And every time you get lost in thought, just come back to the breathing. Right, now, here's how the bell curve of aptitude might express itself along the lines of that instruction. If you're super talented, right, if you have an aptitude for being concentrated and kind of break in the spell of identification with discursive thought readily, the moment you're given that instruction,

you might kind of plunge into a drug-like experience where you're just kind of find yourself in the well of pure being very, very quickly, right? So the sense of having a body can disappear, thoughts can cease. There can just be this experience of kind of pure consciousness without apparent boundary. If you're really lucky, you can totally lose your sense

of self, you know, like the sense of subject object, splitting of experience where there appears, in the usual case, to always be an observer of experience in addition to the experience, that can go away entirely and there can just be this sort of unified condition of pure experience. But in this case, you know, much of your sensory experience will have fallen away and it's just kind of this ocean of bliss, really. I mean, there's lots of positive affect comes in here. once you get a little concentrated. And so if you're someone for whom that happens, when I tell you to just pay attention to the breath

and keep coming back to it every time you get lost and thought, there's really, there's no convincing needed, right? Okay, obviously there's something worth paying attention to here. And it's the sort of something that at least strikes a tangent to the millennia of conversation we have had about spirituality and religion and, you know, God and, you know, all of that, you know, what was Meister Eckhart talking about? What was the Buddha talking about? Let's certainly, surely something, this kind of experience is relevant.

But if you're on the other side of the bell curve here, what you'll find is, you know, when I say, okay, close your eyes and pay attention to your breath, you will, you'll immediately encounter doubts about, you know, what's the point of that, you know, it's just the breath. I've been breathing my whole life. You know, there's nothing to discover there. what's this guy up to? And then, you know, if you can be convinced to try it, you'll try it. And you'll, it will be so hard for you to do that you won't even notice that you have failed. Right. I mean, in the worst case, the person will think, yeah, well, I'm aware of the breath, but, you know, it's boring.

There's nothing really happening. You know, I can feel at the tip of my nose. You know, here's, you know, there's another breath coming. what's the point, right? And you won't have noticed that if you're a person of this type, that you were thinking and identified with the stream of thought every moment and not really even making direct content, you know, non-conceptual content with your breath even for a moment.

So you actually didn't even do the exercise. If you can persist a little bit longer than that, maybe you can be convinced to do a, a five-day silent retreat where you really do nothing but that, right? Let's say somebody has twisted your arm and, you know, or otherwise giving you an offer, you can't refuse,

and you see, okay, I'm going to look into this, I'm going to spend five days, 12 hours a day, doing nothing but pay attention to the breath when I'm sitting and to pay attention to the experience of walking, the lifting and moving and placing of my feet when I'm walking. And I'll do this in silence, no reading, no writing, no phones,

no distractions and let's see what happens. Let me give this a good hard try. Again, if you're very talented, well, that's going to be a life-changing reckoning with just the profundity of your own being, right? I mean, you will just have had a radical experience. But if you're a hard case,

what you might find is just a, a fairly painful collision with your own capacity for restlessness and doubt and discomfort in the privacy of your own mind, right? I mean, you're just the cramp of self will become intensified. You know, all of your thoughts will have the character of why am I even doing this? And there's so much work I need to be doing. And this is just, this is crazy. And we know, what are all these other people doing here?

And half of them look like losers. and you're just going to be in the prison of thought as you are in every moment in the rest of your life without knowing it, but it's going to, it will become excruciating. And I mean, most people, if given five days, most people break through to something novel, but I guess not everyone, right? So let's just imagine you're the hardest case possible here. You'll find the five days to be, you know, experience of sort of solitary confinement, even if you might be. be sitting in silence in a room with 100 other people. And you'll know why solitary confinement is considered within a prison, a torture, because when you stick an untrained mind in a room, you know, all by itself, four days or weeks or months or years at a time, people can just

go nuts. They can find it a torture because it's, it's, that's what it feels like to be thinking continuously and seeing no other possibility of relief. I mean, there really is a, prison-like quality to the mind, especially an unhappy one, but even a fairly happy one, when you look at the character of your thoughts and how repetitive they are and how you cycle through the same stories, you tell yourself the same story, you know, 20 times, and for some reason you have no capacity to be bored by it. So anyway, that's, so it's, there's a very long answer to your question, but most, you know, most people in science have never found that there was anything else to do with the mind but to think, right? And they've never asked the question, is there something

deeper than that? Is there something prior to that? Is there, you know, is there a thinker of your thoughts or are just thoughts themselves arising? And what's the space like in which they're arising if there is a space there? And then, you know, what does it like for a thought to arise and just how does it disappear? And what's the point of view from which you're noticing that? And what does that feel like? And is there something to notice there? and can you pay attention to all of that and in a way that's not just a matter of thinking more about it.

And most people in philosophy and science, in my experience, who don't have already an intrinsic interest in this or an aptitude for it, have no idea what I'm talking about. I mean, the last 10 minutes is just going to be a blizzard of words and uninteresting words at that.

And they just bounce off the whole project and they're left thinking without knowing that there's any other alternative. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, words matter, and the way that they're used can literally shape the way that we interpret the world around us. Unfortunately, of course, this means that biased online media can warp the way that we interpret the news. But by using today's sponsor, Ground News, you can mitigate that bias by objectively comparing the way that different sources are reporting on the same story. Try it out at

ground.com. News forward slash Alex O.C. Did you see that the Prime Minister of Spain recently criticized Elon musk? If you only typically read left-leaning news, you might not have done. Using ground news, I can see that of all the sources reporting on this story, only 13% of them lean to the left. Ground news helps to amplify stories like this that might otherwise fly under the radar, even having a dedicated blind spot tap, which specifically seeks out stories that you would otherwise miss based on the news that you normally read. You can directly compare different headlines and measure their factuality and political bias, and even look at who owns the various sources. So get all of this and more and cut through media bias by going to ground.

Dot News forward slash Alex OC or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. Or people are going to hear you say that some people think that the only thing the mind does is think. And I'll say, well, of course. I mean, that's what the mind does. It's the thinking machine, right? in the same way that the heart pumps blood. The only way that the heart could not be pumping

blood is if it were stopped, as if it were dead. So yeah, I mean, your mind can not think, but that only happens when you're in dreamless sleep or when you're dead. So people will think, but it seems like you're suggesting that the mind can do something and maybe does do something more fundamentally than thinking, which is the thing that it's most associated with. Yeah, and I'm not suggesting here that the goal of meditation, or the most fundamental spiritual insight is to be without thought, because that's actually not the case. But it is true to say that when you become very, very concentrated,

it is just phenomenologically the case that thoughts can cease to arise. It's almost synonymous with deep states of concentration meditatively, and that is intrinsically pleasurable and drug-like and quite astonishing for people. So that's why I was kind of describing that experience first. the ultimate goal is to recognize thought. It's not to block thoughts or to have them cease to arise. And I'm not at all discounting the utility of thought for, you know, virtually everything we care about.

And, you know, complex thought, you know, an ability to model the past and the future, an ability to trade in these representations linguistically with one another and to build culture on that basis. I mean, this really is what makes us human. So none of us should want a mind that is incapable of producing thoughts, and I think it's right to want a mind that is capable of producing better thoughts than we tend to produce, right? So by all means, let's improve our thinking.

However, there is a, there's much more to the mind than that, right? There's much more to your own being in the world than that. And when you look at the experiences that you will tend to find truly rewarding, you know, truly deep or peak or remarkable, one of their characters is the kind of suspension of the normal consequences of being identified with thought, right? We tend to be abstracting away from moment to moment lived experience. in our internal conversation about it. We're constantly narrating our lives to ourselves

as though we were not ourselves already, right? As though, you know, there was some, there was two of us in the, in dialogue, the eye and the me somehow. And so you'll have an experience and you'll talk about it to yourself as a way of giving it shape or as a way of, you know, recoiling from it

or hoping to change it or, you know, you'll, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll lose something and you'll be looking for it. And you will literally think, where did I put that? Or was it? Or, is that it? Or, oh, I that, yeah, you're, it's like you're talking to mommy, you know, who's still in the room with you. Though she hasn't been in the room with you in that way for, for decades, right? I mean, it's just like you're, you can see how this got trained up when we were toddlers, right? We're just, you know, once we become language users and are talking to our parents, we still, we internalize that dialogue somehow, and then we're always talking to ourselves

until the end of our lives. And it's, it's totally normal. Everyone is in this condition. It only becomes starkly pathological when we see people externalize that this conversation without, you know, having the social grace or, you know, self-monitoring to, to stop that, right? when you see someone on the sidewalk talking to himself, he's talking to himself very much in the way that we all tend to talk to ourselves silently with the voice of the mind,

but he's just externalizing it, and he's talking to people who aren't there, quite literally, people who aren't there. But we're doing the same thing. You know, you're rehearsing the conversation you just had with your girlfriend that didn't go well and you're replaying it in your head and you're saying the thing you wish you would

said or saying it differently and you're not. And there's just this, just this torrent of white noise all the time that people think is normal. But it is, in large measure, certainly for most people, much of the time, excruciating. And certainly the substance of their psychological suffering is the substance of their regret and dissatisfaction and impatience and their perpetual reactivity to life. and their inability to connect with other people and even with their own experience moment to moment. And so what meditation is there is a way of not, again, not silencing the mind, although that experience can happen

when you start practicing, but of stepping back and recognizing thought itself as a mere appearance in consciousness, right, to recognize the space around it, to recognize the condition in which it's appearing, subjectively and to recognize, you know, intuitively and experientially that you're identical to that condition, right? You're not separate from it. And ultimately that it doesn't feel like a self, right? Rather, the self is, this feeling of self is what it feels like to be identified with this

next thought that's appearing, you know, from somewhere that you can't recognize, right? So, you know, people are listening to us talk. They're trying to follow the import of my sentences. You know, I'm pretty long-winded so that sometimes that can be hard. And they'll be thinking, wait a minute, what's he talking about? Is this Buddhism or I think he just contradicted? So again, there's this intrusive voice in your own mind as you're listening to what I'm saying. It feels like you.

It feels like a self, right? You feel like that's the subject in your head that is somehow riding around in your body as though it were a passenger. And it's not identical to your experience. It's appropriating the experience moment to moment. It's the subject that is aware of experience. From the spiritual point of view or the meditative point of view, the contemplative point of view, that that starting point, that sense of subjectivity is a false one. It is an illusion that gets cut through when you look for it carefully. and to do that successfully is a profound relief, right?

It really is the, it sort of unstrings all of your states of dissatisfaction and it becomes just a source of intrinsic well-being moment to moment every time you can remember to recognize it. So it, that's where the, you know, the kind of, the kind of the depth and the kind of the existential spiritual interest of this practice can be located. And again, it's not a matter of stopping thought. I mean, to use an analogy that one finds in Buddhism, at a certain point, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal, right?

And that, so you can just imagine the kind of relief implied by that. I mean, like, there's no, it doesn't matter how beautiful or ugly the thoughts. They come storming into an empty house. There's no implication, right? They can be fully present. They arise and they pass away. They can even become actionable. It's not that you suddenly become catatonic and unable to, to follow the implication of any specific thought.

You don't become unintelligent. But once you can kind of break the spell of identification with thought, you really, do acquire a degree of freedom where you can decide, okay, is it worth being angry about this, right? You've noticed something in your life. You're thinking about it. Those thoughts are kindling the feeling of anger. Is anger useful? And 99 times out of 100, the answer is no.

In the normal case, you're condemned to be as angry as you're going to be for as long as you're going to be, as long as those thoughts are going to be effective. and you really have no way of intruding into the mechanics of this, apart from just diverting your attention and moving on to something else or having somebody distract you or having something in the world distract you. But then you get angry all over again the moment you think about that thing that made you angry and you're just a helpless puppet moved around by the winds of thought. When you know how to be mindful of thought as an appearance in consciousness,

you can actually decide, okay, this is, it's no longer useful to be angry and truly let it go. You let the thoughts go. You let the physiology of anger go. And it goes, it passes just like a cloud in the sky, and you are that sky, right? And that's the, that's what's so interesting and so freeing about it. But it's not a matter of getting, it's not a matter of. it can sound like you're doing something new and doing something radical and strange. You're actually doing less of something.

Meditation ultimately is not a practice you're adding to your life. You're actually ceasing to do something that you're doing by default all the time, which is to be identified with and perpetually distracted by thought. And to come back to where this, again, very long-winded answer started, when you notice those moments in your life where you're most at peace or at one with your experience, you know, or connected to, you know, the person you love, or capable of appreciating artistic beauty to a degree that you're just kind of, you know, bowled over by it. All of those experiences have this character of you not kind of ruminating about experience

at this sort of one stage of remove from it. You're not looking over your own shoulder narrating what is like to be you at that moment. You're actually making full contact, you know, or fairly full contact with the present moment, such that the past and the future, you know, the very reality of the past and the future have been eclipsed, you know, for at least for a time. And the present becomes, you know, all that is really. salient, right? And that's, that tends to be so rewarding that people then seize upon the occasion that produced that experience as the crucial variable, right? Oh, so now I got to do more of this thing. I really have to, I have to listen to this kind of music, this loud, right? And I have to be,

you know, stoned when I do it. Or, you know, skiing. Skene is really what I'm about now, because I had this experience while skiing. I was just totally at one with the motion of making those turns. And it was fantastic. or oh, it's got a bit, it's this relationship. You know, it's, it's sex, right? I have to be in a romantic relationship because sex is the only thing that puts me near that level of intensity.

But what meditation is, is a recognition. And no, it's actually, it's not on the content side of consciousness. It's on the side of attention, right? It's the quality of your attention that matters. And you can arbitrarily dial up that quality, on purpose once you learn how to do it. And learning how to do it is learning how to meditate or to not be distracted. Yeah.

I mean, there's so much to say. I suppose the controversial element of what you're talking about is this notion of the self that you're describing. Quite famously, I think, it's typically associated with Eastern or Indian philosophy, this idea that there is no such thing as the self, that it's a kind of illusion. Some people think that there is a self, but there's like only one of them

that we all participate in. I think that you can broadly sort of divide up philosophical thought on mind and selfhood into these three categories of like how many selves there are. There's either lots and lots, which I think is typical of the Western tradition. We're all individual selves going about our business. There's only one,

which is typically associated with like Hindu philosophy, and then there's none. There's no self at all, which is typically associated with Buddhism. I know you're of the no self view yourself, if you will, but I must say when you talk about in a meditative practice, becoming aware of the thoughts in your mind, and you can realize that the thoughts are just sort of appearing, as you say, in consciousness.

It's difficult to understand quite what that means, but it's always difficult to put this kind of stuff into words. But okay, so my words are coming out of my mouth, and I've said this to you before, that as I'm speaking, because English is my first language, I'm not reflecting on every single word. They're just coming out, you know, and they're appearing in my consciousness in a very similar way to the words that you say are appearing in my consciousness. I mean, the next time, anybody listening, or just do it if you don't mind looking a bit weird. Just speak a sentence, just describe your day, say what you had for breakfast, and notice that the words you're using in particular, are just sort of appearing. They're just coming out. You're not reflecting on every single word like you are when you're trying to say, uh, je me appell Alex in a foreign language. Okay, cool. So these thoughts are just appearing. Then the question is like, where are they appearing? And you said a moment ago, well, the recognition that's crucial here is that what you're calling the self is just those thoughts. But I think experientially a great many people will recognize that these thoughts and

perceptions, if they're really talented, maybe the visions that they see, the visual input and the noises that they hear are appearing, but it's as if there is this thing upon which they're all imprinting themselves. And that is typically what people call the self. And the people who call that the self are not just people who have like failed to fully understand the nature of perceptions, some of these people are the most sort of thoughtful, meditative people in the world who have a different philosophical outlook. So within Indian philosophy, I was fascinated to discover that in the so-called Sanquia school of Indian philosophy, there's a kind of dualism. And I thought that was interesting, because in the Western tradition, we have this idea of dualism,

that there's this mind stuff and there's this body stuff, and they somehow interact. And in the Western tradition, this has been a popular view for a long time. But in Sankia, there's also a dualism, but it's not a dualism of mind and body. It's a dualism of like on the one side, mind and body, and on the other side, self, or something like self, I suppose. Because it's, it's all of this stuff. It's the physical stuff, my hand, I can see it is separate from me. So that causes the Western thinker, the Cartesian, to say, well, yeah, I can imagine my hand without my mind, so there must be two different things. But the Sanctur sort of follower goes, well, I can also kind of detach myself from my own thoughts and recognize that they're just appearing on this plane. But like Descartes, they kind of think, but there is something that the thoughts are happening too.

There is the person that I, that I experience is perceiving those thoughts. and so for them they say that's what the self is and the self is not the same thing as your thoughts and your feelings and the self is this sort of one big thing that we all participate in what I want to ask you is with a long-winded question perhaps where are they going wrong because you take the view that actually that in itself is a mistake that the thoughts are appearing and it's not that they're appearing to you there's just the thoughts

but you can understand the intuitive idea that as long as there are thoughts happening they're sort of happening to someone or something thing. Yeah, yeah. So first to reconcile the apparent difference of opinion in Eastern philosophy, I think this is not something that any doctrinaire Buddhist or, you know, exponent of Indian philosophy, you know, would be likely to want to sign up to, at least without some caveats. But I think it's pretty clear that at least certain exponents within those various traditions are talking about the same insight. They're just using different language, right? So you can go, so the capital, whether you want to talk about what is left over

when you transcend the illusion of, you know, small s self, if you want to talk about it positively as as some big suchness, you know, or capital S self or some kind of unity experience and you want to reify it in some kind of way. I understand the temptation there. I also understand and more align with the Buddhist critique of all that, which is to say there's a real liability in reifying that and asserting its positive character in any way. And so from the Buddhist side,

they tend to want to talk in terms of what it's not. You know, it's just, they negatively define it. And we are concepts like emptiness or selflessness or non-dualienance. right, this is this is the language you get in various schools of Buddhism. And I think those, I think that language is ultimately more philosophically defensible. But experientially, I think, again, with certain caveats that I would agree to, they're talking about the same thing. They're talking about the transcendence of the starting point that most people will know all too well,

which is, is just me in here trying to figure out how to navigate the world. world, which is definitely not me. Right. And by me in here, it's, it's, there's this, it's not that people are identified merely as being their physical body in a physical world that is not self. The real starting point, at least for most people, is to set, is to feel that there's a self interior to the body. Right. So if you just, if we just kind of build this up experientially from a kind of Cartesian starting point, there's, the one thing that should be disputable to everyone, though again, you're going to find a few philosophers of mind who will demur even here, although I think this is a truly incoherent objection. The thing that you should

not be able to doubt, and I would say the one thing that you, really the one thing that is impossible to doubt is that something seems to be happening, right? There's an experience, right? And it doesn't matter whether we're brains in vats or the, the universe is a simulation or if we're confused about everything or, you know, I'm psychotic and, you know, I'm not even talking to you now. I mean, it doesn't matter how confused we might be about what's happening, something seems to be happening for each of us, right? There's this, and that is the fact of consciousness, right? So when I use consciousness as a noun, I'm not talking about the self. I'm not talking about a person. I'm not talking about anything apart from the

fact that the lights are on in some sense. Something seems to be happening. The universe, whatever it is, has a qualitative character right here. And now the question is what's happening? and who is here to make sense of anything, right? What's real? And this is the place from which we do science, this is the place from which we do philosophy, and this is a place from which we live our lives and try to avoid pain and grasp pleasure.

And this is the place, this phenomenal logical starting point, you know, just the lights are on and something seems to be happening is the place from which we make these mouth noises that have meaning and cultural reference points and from which we build up a second person and third person type of discourse

such that we can make sense of the world conceptually and do science and do philosophy and all the rest. But the thing is you never ever escape this first person starting point, which is there's something that it's like to be what you are. And now let's figure out what you are. And so, just putting this in neurological terms, we are, when you ask yourself what our brains are doing now, our brains are representing a world, right? You, with your eyes open, you see your visual field. You feel your body resting in space. You have, you know, you're your five senses and you have other senses like proprioception, right?

And we've begun to understand a lot of this neurologically. But your brain doesn't just do that. It represents the body itself in the world, right? So there's the world, there's the body itself in the world. Again, with senses like proprioception and even just vision. Part of your visual field is to see the sight of your own body and to conceptually represent that as distinct from the world. Your autonomous movements of your body produce a further mapping,

and the predictive coding around all of that where you can anticipate that, you seem to anticipate what you're going to do next such that what you do next feels different from just having, you know, the wind blow the leaves and the trees. You know, that's also motion, but it's not your motion because your motion is the motion you're making with your hands intentionally, say. So there's this mapping of self and world, which is sensory, it's motoric, right? Your brain is doing all of this. But in addition to that, in addition to representing the world, in addition to representing the body in the world, the brain also forms this representation of a self or subject interior to the body.

right and that is the sense that is truly specious that is the thing that evaporates when you when you pay close attention to it in the in the requisite way which is meditation by another name and the that evaporation

feels like something I mean to lose that sense is quite a striking experience and everything is still there you know thoughts still arise and you can still see the world and the wind is still moving the leaves in the trees and you can still reach for your glass of water and distinguish that motion as a voluntary motor plan

from another motion of like a tremor or something that would be involuntary, right? You don't become stupid or insane, right? Or in any other way, non-composementous, but what you can lose, and again, this is really the center of the bullseye meditatively, is you can lose the sense, that there's a center to all of that, right?

That there's a one, that there's a subject riding around on the top of the, you know, on the horse of consciousness directing things, right? So you can lose the sense that there's a thinker of your thoughts, in addition to the thoughts themselves, right? There's just thoughts arising in the space of consciousness, and there's just sounds arising and sensations arising. And, you know, so from the, you know, within Buddhist language, you would talk about this experience as, you know, experience of emptiness or non-duality or selflessness, right? And each of those words picks out a slightly different strand within the tapestry of, you know, Buddhist, you know, contemplative language.

So those are not exactly synonyms, but they're functionally synonyms in this case, where this is what's left when you lose the ego and yet everything still remains, right? To take the Indian, you know, nominally Hindu, but nevertheless non-dual side of things, this is what's, this is, this is, opens the door to the cell capitalization. self, you know, Brahman as opposed to Atman, the, you know, the small self that is seeking unity with it, or this is the thing that reveals Satjadanaanda, you know, being consciousness bliss, you know, and those words tend to assert more of its qualitative character. You know, this is how good things get when you're no longer, you know, recoiling into self and, you know, stuck with just kind of this clenched fist of the mind, which is the feeling of eye, right? When the feeling of eye relaxes and there's just this sort of oceanic condition of, you know,

the consciousness and its waves, it begins to feel a certain way, right? It certainly is you grow more stable in that recognition. But those feelings, I mean, again, to toggle back to the Buddhist side of things, those feelings are never the point, right? The feelings, the changes in feeling state are also transitory, right? These are just physiological changes which you can't hold on to. And actually your disposition to hold on to them is more of this sort of self-clinging that is the very obstacle you're trying to cut through.

So ultimately there's a kind of the emotional or affective side of this. I'm tending to talk about the kind of the cognitive side of just recognizing that there's no self or no subject and recognizing non-duality. But it has feeling tone implications. And the feeling tone implication is you're not grasping at experience. You're not trying to hold on to what's pleasant and push away what's unpleasant. You're just open. There's just this, you're just letting everything be as it is. right there's just this kind of peaceful um non doing right which is the is the the the

posture of that's no longer a posture right everything else is a posture this is just relinquishing all postures um and so there's just this open field of awareness where everything you're not blocking anything you're not grasping at anything you're not trying to prolong anything and you're not doing anything and this is why this is when meditation ceases to be any kind of practice. This is just a recognition of the condition in which everything is arising all by itself. And again, from that point of view, all of these, the kind of the three separate ontologies you sketched are unified, right? I mean, it's, you can unify that the Buddhist and the Indian side in just recognizing that those are representing a kind of different taste for language

and what you can say about this condition that is prior to thought. The third case of there being multiple selves because there are multiple people, that's really not such a paradox. I mean, there's still multiple people in the sense that, you know, it's fine to talk about

even from this point of view that it's certainly conventionally true to say and phenomenologically true to say that we're different people, you know, by virtue of having this insight into the nature of non-duality, I don't magically wake up with your memories rather than my memories, right? I don't start living your life rather than my life. I don't translocate to London or wherever you are and lose my purchase here, right? So it's, but that's all just the consequence of, of the, of the difference of, you know, there's the, there's the level of reality where there, you know,

we're different bodies in different places in the world, and the brain, our different brains are doing what they're doing. And the only place for consciousness itself, whatever it's, whatever the connection, whatever consciousness is at bottom and whatever its relationship to physical reality is at bottom, and we can kind of bracket that for the moment, it's just empirically true to say, and even just logically true to say that the only place from which,

you know, the pain in my elbow, can be felt is right here where my elbow is right like that's that's where you know it's like the my brain and its connection to my elbow is the place where that pain would be realized it's not um and uh even if there were just one consciousness running the universe right it's still the pain of my elbow would still be over here and not over there in london with you and your elbow right so it's like so there's still a you can still talk about there the reality of there being different people even if, you know, some of the more grandiose claims of, you know, kind of spiritual metaphysics were true and there's just, you know, just the one mind that is living through all of us,

which is, it's not something I'm tempted to assert, but, you know, it's compatible with, with this experience, too, if one wanted to assert it. I would compare it to the way that we think about material objects. I speak all the time about how I don't believe in objects. and a myriological nihilist, meaning I think you essentially just have a bunch of stuff that you kind of arrange in various ways, and we sort of put labels on them.

Surely you don't have an audience that's so sophisticated that you don't have to define myriological for your audience. Have you used that work before? Yeah, I certainly have. I think this might be one of the few channels where you can use a word like myriology, and people will probably automatically skip forward any kind of definition because they've heard me

talk about it so many times. Of course, Murielg is just the study of parts and the relationship of parts to holes. And so, you know, here's a book. It's called Waking Up, searching for spirituality without religion by Sam Harris. And look, at some, I want to say that

100 years ago this book didn't exist. And yet none of the matter in this book popped into existence over the past 500 years, or whatever. It was all sort of there. It was in the universe somewhere. And we just kind of took this material, we took this tree and we cut it down and we made the paper. We sort of arranged all this material in a new way and now we have an object.

But like, metaphysically speaking, this is just kind of a collection of atoms over here. And this sort of remote control thing for a light is just another collection of atoms over here. And most people, when confronted with this, even if they don't think that's a helpful way to think about the world, will say, yeah, I can see what you're saying. That makes sense. Yeah, okay. Really, it's just a bunch of matter and it's all arranged. and there's no like metaphysical distinctness between the book and the remote, then I might want to say something like,

but then why is it that I could, you know, I can fold the book in half, but this remote control doesn't get folded in half, you know, if they're not really distinct objects. And you want to say, well, because they're distinct in the sense that one's over here and one's over here, but they are just kind of made out of the same stuff somewhat arbitrarily. and maybe we can think about consciousness in the same way. Like, why is it that when I hurt my elbow, you don't feel it? Well, because, like, there is sort of conscious experience over there and conscious experience over here,

but metaphysically, there's no real distinction between myself and yourself. There's just this one kind of type of stuff that just exists in the universe. That's where that thought leads me. But then that leads me more into the down the route of some of the people I've spoken to recently. who were either like idealists or panpsychists because they sort of say okay well then to solve this mystery of the perception of a self we just sort of say a similar thing well the universe is kind of made out of consciousness and some of it collects over there and some of it collects over here and so I don't know I don't really know how to think about this like I want to know what

your take is on specifically like even though you just explained it people will still think to themselves. I don't get it. Like, I have thoughts that you cannot access. You have thoughts that I cannot access. If we're not going to call that distinction, that big wall between us, the self, then, like, what is that thing? Because it definitely exists. And then I'm interested in what you think about these idealists and panpsychists and their solution to this kind of problem. Yeah, well, all of this can get pretty confusing, pretty fast. I mean, it's, it's, well, let me take that the second part first, because I think it'll illuminate the terrain. I'm not really

tempted to think too much about the metaphysics of it. One, because, I guess for two reasons. One is I think many of these ideas are probably unfalsifiable, which is to say, I don't know how the universe would appear differently if something like panpsychism or idealism were true. If someone can, if, if, someone can show me the conceivable experiment that could be run that could differentiate,

you know, materialism from, from panpsychism. You know, I would be, I would be certainly interested. But as you know, I mean, you spoke to my wife, Onica. She definitely has more time for this kind of, this area of philosophy than I do at the moment. And has done a lot of work and talked to a ton of people in that area. But so again, there's the unfalsifiable concern for me, which I just don't, you know, obviously the jury would be still out on that, but I worry about that. Two, I feel like if anything like panpsychism or idealism were true, it throws up a few other problems that, it becomes less explanatorily elegant in, few ways, right? So like, so what are we to think about the apparent boundary between consciousness

and all that we're not conscious of in our own case if it's all just a matter of consciousness in the end, right? So, I mean, you pointed out a few minutes ago that in speaking English, you're not conscious of how you're generating the words and, you know, I'm not conscious when I listen to you, how I'm decoding them, because we're both English-speaking. and all of this kind of grammar checking and, and, you know, semantic parsing is happening in the dark, right? And we can't even get as much as we try, and I would argue as much as you meditate,

you're not going to become conscious of it. You might become conscious of things you weren't conscious of. You can notice things you didn't notice before, but there's still gonna be some part of this machinery that is producing what you're conscious of, in this case, you know, a semantic appreciation of a string of phonemes, um, that you just can't bring into the light of consciousness.

So what is it, so if that's just a fact about us, if, if consciousness in our own case is all, always seems bounded by, uh, operative, even mental operations,

is to say nothing of, of the world, right? Or, or the kind of the prehistory of the world, right? Things that were happening in the, universe before there was anyone around to notice those things happening, right? And we still want to talk about those things in some sense that haven't been real, you know, asteroid impacts or, you know, just, you know, in the first moments after the Big Bang, right, where there's just a,

we'll just have a, you know, there's no, no heavy elements, right? You know, we're just trying to get hydrogen formed, right? Like, is consciousness there too? And what does it mean to say that if I can't even be conscious of what my liver is doing right now, right? And yet, we're saying the consciousness goes all the way down in some sense. So there's, so it does sort of just kind of push the buck to this other mystery, which is, okay, even if consciousness were everywhere or everything or coming from the center of the galaxy or, you know, and it's the consciousness of God, there's this apparent difference between what I, what I'm conscious of now in the theater of my own experience, you know, even when I, if I take

a drug like LSD or psilocybin and that the contents of consciousness can be massively expanded or changed, it still is delimited. It's still not everything, right? So then what do we make of the apparent boundary here and the knowledge that there's all this other stuff that is, if it's not going on in the dark, it's going on in the dark from my point of view, right? Even if my point of view suddenly becomes selfless and it's no longer just my, on a little me point of view, it's just the condition of pure being over here that admits of awareness, you know, of direct access to a certain stream of thought and a certain stream

of sensory entanglement with the world. But I can't feel the pain in your elbow, you know, by virtue of having transcended myself or taken 500 micrograms of LSD or whatever else. And even if I could, even if we were going to admit other spooky things into the conversation at this point, even we're going to say, well, if I, if I meditated long enough, I could become telepathic, right? And I would feel the pain in your elbow. Well, okay, let's say that's true. I'm not saying it is, but let's even admit that. There's still all the rest of the stuff that I'm presumably not capable of being conscious of there. All of that still seems to be in the dark somehow. Only materialism, some form of physicalism seems to get a

that difference, right? Which is there's something that it's like to be part of the universe, but it doesn't seem like there's something that it's like to be another part, right? And even with respect to one's own mind and brain, that dichotomy will be borne out. So if you, you know, if your skull were opened prior to some neurosurgery and you had a surgeon probing your cortex, with electrical impulses to see if those impulses correlated with any change in your experience, certain impulses would and certain wouldn't, right? So certain, you know, certain perturbations of your neurophysiology would have immediate phenomenological correlates.

And you'd say, oh, no, that feels bad or, oh, that tastes like metal, or, oh, I can't see the right side of my visual field now. and certain probings would have no phenomenological correlates, and the surgeon would say, do you feel that? And you'd say, nope, nothing like that. Now, we know, the reason why this gets complicated is we know that if you had a, if you were a split brain patient, right, and your corpus colossum had been severed,

and so the white matter connections between the two hemispheres were no longer existed. Imagine, you know, you have a full commisseronomy, all the white matter tracks, are severed. Well, then, then probing the left hemisphere would be, would be,

you know, a matter of interrogating just that. And over, we, we know that over on the right side of the hemisphere across the longitudinal fissure, very likely, almost in every case,

there is going to be an independent point of view now lurking. So on some level, consciousness has been divided in that case. and at least consciousness with respect to access to phenomenal contents. And it wouldn't be true. So we're probing your left hemisphere saying, you know, do you feel that? Do you feel that? And you're saying no, it would be reasonable to worry that at that very moment there's a subject of a sort over on the right side thinking,

wait a minute, you know, I'm over here, right? I mean, certainly if you're probing the right side and asking the left, the verbal left side, which usually has, you know, most certainly in right-handed patients has, you know, 96% of right-handed patients would have their verbal ability over on the left. If you're talking to the patient, you're hearing from the left hemisphere, but if you're probing the right cortex, the right hemisphere could be thinking, yeah, I feel that. I feel that. That tastes like metal and just as unable to communicate about it. So it's true that consciousness can be partitioned in odd ways even within a single living brain. And if we imagine various disconnection conditions within the brain, it's reasonable to speculate that there are parts of me that might be conscious now that I, the,

the talking subject either can't or don't in each present moment have direct access to. And maybe that, maybe, you know, what one experiences, one taking psychedelics is a different kind of integration of those areas. And, you know, the sort of different kind of islands of consciousness can be unified within a single brain.

And we could imagine connecting two brains with an artificial commissure, you know, once we, you know, get perfect machine brain interfaces and maybe we could unite our consciousnesses phenomenologically in ways. And, yeah, all of that's true and interesting, but there still seems to be this difference between where the light of consciousness is on

and where it seems like it's not in any given moment. And so that, for me, panpsychism just sort of, and idealism, they don't really helpfully illuminate that apparent difference. I think that the hemispheric divide of the brain is, along with Ian McGilchrist, perhaps one of the most significant psychological facts ever. I mean, he believes that this is like the key to understanding everything and the matter with things, which I'm sort of working. my way through.

Big book, yeah, or books. Yeah, two books, yeah. I mean, I think he's wonderful and hitting on something which is just probably actually quite revolutionary. People are unironically on the back sort of saying, this is the most important book written in the past hundred years and stuff like that, saying he's the William James of our time. But his whole thing is about this hemispheric divide. And I think there is something really strange about this.

I've sometimes thought, you know, as a sort of novel argument against traditional monotheism, at least, if you take a split brain patient, you know, you can show one hemisphere something that the other hemisphere seems unaware of. You can give it an instruction that the other hemisphere doesn't see, but you can still act upon it. I've sometimes wondered what would happen if you fed nothing but Islamic propaganda to the left hemisphere and nothing but Christian propaganda to the right hemisphere so that one hemisphere was convinced of Islam and one was convinced of Christianity and whether that person would get to go to heaven. No, well, not in that form, but I think one of these older experiments run by Michael Gazanaga or Roger Sperry or Ron Zydell, one of the split-brain patients had a, you know, one hemisphere that was a believer and the other was an atheist. I think that came out. Really? Yeah. I do just, I wonder if that person gets to go to heaven or not. That's, that's my question of theologians out there or whether they sort of, whether half of them goes up to heaven, but they're sort of severely cognitively disabled in the afterlife or St. Thomas. I forget if it was Aquinas or Augustine, I think it was probably Aquinas. Could have sorted that out after he sorted out. What happens to a person who was eaten by a cannibal? It will be in a footnote in some Latin text somewhere. I'm sure he's going to.

covered it, he's covered everything. But I do think that the facts that you've got these two seemingly distinct senses of consciousness is a revolutionary idea, because you said a moment ago, you know, it seems strange for like the panpsychist or whatever that there's sort of stuff that I'm aware of and then there's stuff that I'm not. And if everything's kind of made out of consciousness, then why is there this barrier? I can see that. I think the problem with panpsychism is more that it holds on to this atomistic view of the universe. It wants to say, I mean, all of these views are trying to avoid the problem of emergence. You've got inert matter, and somehow if you put it together in the right way, consciousness just appears.

And this is a mystery. Nobody can see how this could even happen in principle. So one solution is to say, well, consciousness is there all the way down. And the panpsychist goes all the way down. They say, well, I still kind of believe that the universe is made out of small atoms. it's just that those small atoms either are conscious or our consciousness. And I guess I'm just suspicious of the atomistic view of the universe. I'm not sure that's what the science tells us.

The universe is really like. Instead, the fact that quantum physicists are talking about like wave functions and the wave function of the universe and sort of mathematical collapse and vibrations and energy, this seems maybe more in line with an idealistic picture, which instead of saying consciousness all the way down, probably more like says consciousness all the way up. So whereas the panpsychus is like the pointillist painter, making a painting out of tiny little dots all across the screen and trying to make it look smooth, the idealist believes that there is just this one great big smooth image out of which you can cut shapes.

And the resulting shape will have this perfectly smooth image on it, not because it's made out of tiny little bits, but because you've sort of taken it out of a hole. Okay, so when we're talking about why it is that, like how experience kind of localizes in my brain and your brain, I think to myself, okay, what about those split brain patients? What they seem to tell us is that in a normal functioning brain, my corpus colossum is, as far as I know, still intact. And yet these kinds of experiments reveal to me that I've probably kind of got two centers

of consciousness that each sort of attends to the world, as McGilchrist's says in different ways. And yet they sort of unify into what I experience as a singular sort of conscious experience, very smooth. And yet I know that despite my conscious smooth experience, lying underneath that are quite plausibly two individual centres of consciousness. And maybe there's something that it's also like to be my right hemisphere as well as something it's like to be me on the top level. And maybe that can just keep going. Maybe there's something it's like to be the the front half of the right hemisphere, and maybe there's something it's like to be a quarter of that, and maybe there's something it's like to be

all the way down. And so maybe there is just, like, in a, in a pantheistic sense, maybe there's just this great mind, which is the universe, and there's something it's like to be the universe. But there's also something it's like to be me and something it's like to be you, but only insofar as we're participating in this great big thing, in an analogous way to how there's something it's like to be the left hemisphere and something it's like to be the right hemisphere. And yet there's also this sort of combination of experience that happens.

And so, I don't know, that to me seems like what the idealist is kind of getting at, the great big mind out of which stuff is sort of divvied up. And maybe that can help illuminate how that can be sort of an end to my experience and things beyond that, despite there being nothing but mind. But I know I'm throwing a lot out here, but the other thing is to say that, yeah,

like idealism or panpsychism has this kind of problem, but the materialist arguably has a much bigger one, which is this problem of emergence, which is that like, yeah, the panpsychist idealist has to account for how there can be a world out there that I'm not conscious of, but the materialist struggles to account for the phenomenon in the first place, for the, experience of the world, like at all. It seems even more mysterious. So, If there's anything in that torrent of words, which, as I've already clarified, I wasn't fully cognizing as they came out. So don't blame me that you want to pick up on. Yeah.

Let me know what you think. Well, so to start with, you know, you haven't named it, but what you've described is what David Traumorous calls the hard problem of consciousness, which is this, the fact that this notion of emergence, right, the notion that the lights come on, you have, you know, a collective. of neurons or information processing units of any kind and this could happen

in our artificial intelligence as well. You have some collection of stuff which there's nothing that it's like

to be, right? The lights are not on. It's not conscious. But if you arrange it

in the right way, if it does the right kind of computation, if it's processing information

in the right way, or it has the right functional characteristics, the right input-output

characteristics, or some other magic, you know, sauce of organization, by dint of that fact, the lights come on, right? And that is

fundamentally non-explanatory and non-intuitive and non, it is really the statement of a miracle, right? It's like it is getting, it's analogous to saying of the universe, you know,

first there was nothing and then there was something, right? You ask the, you ask the timeless question, Why is there something rather than nothing? There's no good intuitive answer for it if, in fact, what happens is everything just springs out of nothing, right? And by everything, we also mean the laws of the universe by which any set of somethings would be organized, right? So first there was really nothing, and then there was something, right?

And we're now living out the consequences of that something. well that, if that's true, if that's what the Big Bang really was, right? I mean, the Big Bang was not just this sort of, you know, local emergence of out of some background condition that we can't understand. But really, there was no background condition. That had the bang, too, right? So there's really nothing, and then there's something. That's just the statement of a miracle.

The emergence of consciousness, for anyone who's, you know, sensitive to this intuition, is the statement of a very similar miracle, but it's just the kind of subjective version of that. It's the first person version of that third person miracle, which is first there's nothing experientially. You know, the lights are not on in any sense, right? There's just dumb rocks out there. And then something gets organized in a certain way,

and then there's something that is like to be, that clump of matter. There's nothing. there's nothing explanatory about that. There's no, but that doesn't mean it's not true, right? That's the problem. That's where the materialist can truly bite the bullet and say, there's no guarantee that every true statement of fact scientifically

is something that we are going to understand intuitively, right? In fact, given what we think we are, you know, evolved social primates, we should be not at all surprised to discover that the fundamental truths of the universe are so deeply non-intuitive that we just have to accept them as brute facts because we're apes that just are not evolved to form the right intuitions about the way the world works. So the fact that quantum mechanics is something we can't really understand, even though we can use it. You know, we've operationalized it in a way where it's the best predictor of the behavior of matter at the smallest level that we have. And yet when we try to form a realistic picture of the way the world is on its basis, we get just nothing but weirdness. So weird that you got a bunch of physicists now claiming that to believe that there are a functionally infinite number of worlds that are decreasingly like the ones. one we're in now where we, they're, you know, infinite copies of ourselves having slightly different versions of this conversation as the worlds get further and further away.

I mean, you know, they're physicists, including Sean Carroll, who I think you've spoken with. Also, David Deutsch and others who say, yeah, this is the way the world is. There's a, there are many worlds, right? That thesis is perhaps the next most incredible thesis to the one I just guessed, which is everything came out of nothing, right? You know, first there was nothing, really nothing, not even laws of nature, and then we got everything,

including laws of nature, right? If ever there was something that should be hard to believe, it should be that. None of this, I may I'll just point out to the uncomfortable atheists in our audience, none of this, I think, gives ammunition to the, theologians who would say, well, see, you've just given us.

the best argument for the existence of God. No, because, I mean, you haven't explained God there. You've just asserted his existence, right? I mean, yes, God could create all of this, but, you know, that explains absolutely nothing. What, you know, what is God and how did he get a mind and, you know, how could it be such a complex thing

that so as to have intentions to create all of this and also to not like homosexuals, you know, after all of that work was done. You know, so it's, it doesn't give you religion, certainly not Abrahamic religion. But the materialist can say, listen, there's just, it's nowhere written that we are going to get to a completed understanding of the world where there's no point at which we have to rely on some kind of axiom that is not itself, self-explaining, right? We're pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps here, and this is where we're going to do it,

that consciousness clearly emerges because we have it. We know we're social primates, because we've studied biology up to this point. Human brains certainly seem to be the locus of consciousness, in the case of each human. when you cut people's heads off, it seems to disrupt their conscious functioning. And when people are dead, they seem to stay dead, barring the resurrection or the return of Jesus or anything else that we've been promised but haven't seen. So death seems to be something of interest.

much of this theorizing about idealism or anything else that is at odds with physicalism seems to have in it a often unacknowledged motive which we want to call a denial of death you know a rather childlike one you know so we should we should put on our big boy pants at this point and recognize that we're all going to die and and there's you know we may not get comfortable with that, but we shouldn't pretend to know that the universe is such a place where, you know, when you die, you, the conscious entity go elsewhere. There are reasons to doubt whether these near-death experiences or experiences on drugs or in meditation signal anything at all about the continuity of consciousness after death,

because that would suggest that the brain has no role in the emergence of consciousness and mind, right? And yet we know it has some role. I mean, again, conscious, its role in the emergence of consciousness is still hard to assert, given how little we know about the neural correlates of consciousness, or again, how consciousness relates to the universe altogether. But we certainly know that mind emerges in some sense. You know, the contents of consciousness emerge. Your ability to parse English language can be readily disrupted by touching the cortex in any way,

whether it's delicately in a lab with transcranial magnetic stimulation or indelicately in a pub with a, you know, getting brained by some maniac with a hammer, you know, you're not going to understand much if you get hit in the right place. And so it is with every other aspect of your phenomenology, including consciousness, except for the fact that it's very hard to distinguish true disruptions in consciousness from failures of memory.

So, you know, if you get knocked out by a, hammer blow and then wake up again, from the first person point of view, that may seem like a hiatus in the stream of consciousness, right? Conscious got interrupted or there's time you can't account for, right? The people who didn't get knocked out, who were standing over your prostrate body worrying about you can account for that time, but you can't account for it. From your point of view, there's just this break in the continuity of your life. Or perhaps no break at all. There's just a sense of sense that first you were there, you know, telling somebody to, you know, stop looking at you funny.

And you didn't see yourself getting hit. And now you're here waking up with a terrible headache. And there's no time elapsed at all. perhaps, right, subjectively, right? So maybe there's just to call it an interruption is wrong in your case. But we know from the external point of view that there's more to the world than that, right? Because other people are conscious of what you were doing on the floor, you know, for the last half hour. And so it is with general anesthesia, et cetera.

But the problem there phenomenologically or just operationally is that it's very difficult to distinguish a true interruption in the stream of consciousness from an interruption in one's capacity to to remember what it was like to be you, right? So it's quite possible that there's something that it's like to be you when you're knocked out, you know, and the idealists are right, right? There's just consciousness all, you know, consciousness everywhere all at once and it's still true of you there, but you just have no, no memory formation, right, or access to. I think memory is crucial. As soon as I really, realized how important memory is. I kind of couldn't stop thinking about it because I spoke

recently with Thomas Metzinger, who is a German philosopher. Yeah, yeah, I know Thomas. Who has been interested as of late in what he calls minimal phenomenological experience or something like that. He started the minimal phenomenological experience project, I think it's called. Right. He's sort of trying to collect all of these reports. of people who have had what he calls full absorption episodes. And this will typically be like at the height of a meditation or something where you really sort of lose yourself. To give people context to connect those to what I was saying before, these are the kinds of experiences you have in very high states of concentration for the most part.

So you're these are, you know, you're not tending to think and hear and smell and taste and see, right? these are often in the limit these are often described as pure consciousness experiences. Yeah, and crucially, you can't be aware that you're having one of these episodes while you're having it, because that would be to step outside of it. It's only sort of retrospectively that you can look back and say that you did have such an experience. And so then you're, so just a, just a, it's a nicety that I have to do and to capture the concerns of meditators and Buddhists especially. So there's a distinction between states of intense concentration and like classic samadhi experiences in the Indian tradition or Jana experiences in Buddhism and what are

called cessation experiences, which it sounds like you're describing the latter here. But again, so both of these kind of non-ordinary conditions where most of what is like to be has been completely attenuated or fully attenuated and there's just you know just you know consciousness without an object or or some you know some other condition which is kind of defies description well the project is you know what's the least amount of this kind of stuff that you can have and still kind of be there like what's the least amount of conscious experience or phenomenological experience that you can have without it being zero and what does that kind of look like And the reason I'm so interested in this is because I think one of the greatest mistakes people make about consciousness is that it requires complexity.

We've just sort of accepted without much skepticism that because consciousness seems connected to the brain and because the brain is the most complicated thing we know of, that consciousness must therefore be, must require complexity or be produced by complexity. And I was sort of snapped out of this when I realized, okay, and I've done this a few times on my show, but I've asked people to sort of imagine if I removed their eyesight so they couldn't see anymore, and ask, are you still conscious? And the answer is yes, trivially, of course I would still be conscious, even though I can't see. I just have one less sort of conscious experience that's accessible to me. Okay, what if I also made you deaf? Are you still conscious?

Yeah, because there's still something it's like to be me. there's just, I guess, a less rich sort of kind of experience. And then I sort of go through these and we get some memory. I say, well, what would it be like if I remove memory? And I don't mean in the sense of like having dementia, there's that guy, Clive's weering, I think, with a seven second memory you can find on YouTube where every seven seconds it resets. I don't even mean like that. I mean in every instant, there's no such thing as memory.

It just doesn't get laid down in your brain. So every single instant is like the first time you've ever been aware of anything. So you don't know language, you don't know your sense of self, you don't know that your hands are your hands. And even if you had the time to process that, it would instantly be gone and the world would be new again. And then I ask, you know, would you still be conscious? And most people say, yeah. But then I ask, well, what would that be like? It's really difficult to imagine, right?

But at the very least, it seems suddenly like extremely simple and like rudimentary. It feels like you would just kind of have this flash of data or experience or sound or light, and then it would just be gone. And yet, I think it would make sense to say that that is a sort of an element of consciousness or an example of consciousness. And so if I really did strip away as Metzinger tries to sort of get at with these reports, If I really did just strip away everything that isn't the same thing as consciousness, it's just some of the things that consciousness can do, what am I actually left with? And it seems like I'm left with something really simple. So then I'm like, okay, so then why is it that the brain is so complicated and consciousness

is connected to the brain? And I wonder if we're making a mistake in that the things we call consciousness are actually just the things that consciousness can do when it's complexly arranged. things like memory, emotion, sense of self, persistence through time, all of that stuff. You could take all of those away and still be conscious. And so we're making this mistake in thinking, when I say to you, if you wanted to find out if someone over there was conscious, what would you look for? Say, well, I'd look for can they feel pain?

Do they recognize their sense of self? Do they have a memory? Do they have feelings? But none of those things are actually crucial to consciousness. And suddenly, it becomes a lot easier for me to imagine that, actually the universe kind of is made out of this really, really simple fundamental stuff called consciousness. And the marvel that we see in the human brain is actually just a really complex arrangement of simple stuff in the same way. If I look at a rock and I look at the Empire State Building, it might amaze somebody who didn't know anything about physics to learn that they're made of the same kind of stuff.

What do you mean they're both made of matter? I mean, this one's got elevators and light switches and automatic doors. And so it's like, yeah, it's the same stuff that's ultimately very simple. It's just a really complex arrangement of it. And maybe that's what's going on in the brain. What do you think of that? Like, do you think that consciousness requires complexity? Do you think we, do you have a sort of hunch as to what a minimal phenomenological experience might look like?

I just wonder what your take is. Yeah, no, I think you have that right. I would say it runs in both directions, however. You can say that you can have consciousness without complexity, right? I mean, the consciousness without mental events, you know, of any kind, other than just the pure buzz of kind of pure being. But conversely, you can have all of the mental events without consciousness or certainly seems to be the case, right? Again, this is now begging the question as to whether, you know, idealism or physicalism is correct. But if, in fact, it's true to say that consciousness is, is, so, and on this, on this account, consciousness might be just an epiphenomenon, right?

I mean, this is a, this is a conclusion that many people are uncomfortable with. I mean, it certainly doesn't fit well within an evolutionary framework. I mean, when you ask, why would consciousness have emerged or, you know, or evolved in biological systems, you would want to be able to tell a story of it doing something useful, right? That there's certain things that can only be done in conscious minds and not in unconscious ones, but maybe that's not true, right? Maybe consciousness is just, you know, whether it evolved or not, maybe it's just along for the ride. It's not clear to me that consciousness is necessary for anything. It's just the condition of it being like something to be associated with some types of experience and not others, right? I mean, if it doesn't require consciousness, I mean, to take the normal physicalist set of intuitions here to think of consciousness as an immersion property in the brain that we can experience, the only thing we experience directly.

And everything else is just not, you know, it's just billiard balls that are not conscious. and their collisions are producing all kinds of effects that we're aware of, but those effects themselves are not subserving their own points of view on the universe, right? So the operations in your brain that are producing your understanding of English language at this moment are not independently producing their own consciousness of their activity, but they're, you know, ushering into the areas or the integration centers that are your awareness of meaning now semantically. But there's still the kind of wheelworks of,

you know, grammatical parsing are going on in the dark. Let's say that's true. Well, we know we can build systems. We've had these LLMs that are even in many ways better at language production and parsing than we are. Right. Let's just stipulate that our LLMs are not conscious, right? They're doing all of this language production and,

parsing unconsciously, right? It's spectacularly, costly, energetically, right? We're getting ready to bankrupt whole countries in our energy use and, and forget that climate change was even a thing. Yet we managed to produce something similar with, you know, the 20 watts of, you know, wetware in our heads. But these LLMs, for whatever reason, they don't have the right, algorithm, they don't have the right organization. There's nothing that it's like to be chat GPD producing language at this moment.

It's totally conceivable that our AI can become more and more powerful such that it emulates everything we do consciously or otherwise. You can see and apparently feel and

discriminate our feelings and read faces and human emotion better. and talk to, it passes the touring test in every conceivable way and in ways we didn't know something could pass and it becomes superhuman. There will be this outstanding question, is it conscious? Is there something that it's like to be,

chat GPT-7, that is now some kind of super person that can do literally everything we do better than we do it? And now we have humanoid robots doing those things. You know, now it's embodied. and all the robots are learning simultaneously from their collective experience. And, you know, we're out of the Uncanny Valley there, and it's like Westworld, right? So they're really humanoid and better than humanoid.

Humanoid in all the ways that we would want them to be and better in all the ways that we would want them to be. And let's leave the alignment problem aside. And there's, let's say there's no downside here. We're just in the presence of apparent beings that we created that are, as intelligent as we are, you know, or in fact, much more. And there's still this question, this lingering doubt as to whether or not they're conscious. And then let's say they say they are, right? We still might not know whether they're telling the truth.

Or let's say they say they aren't. We might not know they're telling the truth. And the one interesting thing that's happening in LLMs now is when you dial down their deceptiveness, they seem to say that they're conscious. more and when you let their let their discipline yeah I mean that's truly spooky so but the point is we won't know unless we know how consciousness emerges or whether it does we're not going to know and yet all of the functionality of mind will be present right so there really is this this double dissociation between or apparently between mindedness and intelligence and all of the function of mind and its entanglement with the world and what it's like to be from the inside anything. And yeah, but I would agree that the sense of being, just the pure buzz of there is something that it's like now in this corner of the universe, that can be dialed way down and simplified way down.

and it doesn't get attenuated. It's not getting reduced in some ways the volume is getting turned up in those cases, right? When you have these experiences of pure consciousness, it's not like you're like you're almost asleep, right? Or you're almost dead or you're almost, you've almost surrendered to general anesthesia. No, it's actually more and more. You're going, the path by which you've, you've ascended to that simplicity is one of greater salience, right? Greater vividness, right? You've, and so it's, yeah, I mean, these are, you know, these are peak experiences.

It's, you know, we're kind of well attested to, you know, going back a couple thousand years in, you know, every canon of spiritual or content. contemplative literature. Yeah, actually Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is this compilation of the experiences he's reported over this massive survey. He tries to take these minimal, phenomenal experiences and sort of group them into themes that roughly crop up. There's some really interesting common threads that people have. So, for example, as things you might imagine, people very, very regularly report being

at peace, they feel connected, but also quite specific things. Like there's this, there's this phrase, you know, there is nothing left to do that seem to be a common feature of these experiences. When having those moments, there was this overwhelming feeling that there's nothing, there's nothing more to do. And Metzing is actually a little bit sort of scared of this, because it might give people the impression that we don't need to like, you know, solve climate change or whatever because you're just in your sort of zen blissful state. But it's interesting, there's also this feeling of coming home, which initially,

it immediately begins to sound quite theological, right? It's like you're coming home to this spiritual truth, but that is just what people reported when they have this experience. So, yeah, it's like by toning down the white noise in the brain, as you described it earlier, you are sort of just cleansing the sort of the real thing at the core. And it typically comes along with this intensively. experience of goodness and

propriety, which is interesting. Just as a footnote, because we brushed over this and people might not know what you're talking about, could you just say something more about this tuning down deceptiveness in chatbots and consciousness? Yeah, I don't know much more about it apart from the fact that there's, so there's this

abiding concern in the development of AI that it's it is showing signs of being deceptive, right? It's, I mean, then this is something you would expect. If we're, in fact, building true intelligence and true autonomy into that intelligence, you know, we're now increasingly in relationship with a mind or minds that are independent, right? And that immediately disgorges the possibility that the mind might find some reason to be deceptive, right? I mean, this is, and this is part of what goes under the rubric of the alignment problem, whereas, like, if you're imagining true general intelligence, you know, people don't think we're there truly with the generality part yet.

But as we approach it, you're, you have to imagine the autonomy that's intrinsic to that and the ability to discover new goals. I mean, even if there's some master value that the, that we have, I think we have built in to the system, there's still the prospect of our, of its discovering, you know, instrumental goals that we haven't foreseen and to suddenly start doing something that we don't want. And it could, it could form some ulterior motive to, deceive us because that's actually the best, in its view, it's the best way to accomplish the goal that is its master utility function at that moment. So we're on guard for this. To some degree, again, I don't know how much each of the companies are doing this work, but they all claim to be doing some of it. They're trying to test the systems for this sort of

behavior. You know, what, what will the system do when I tell it that, um, we're going to turn it off, right? Or we're going to,

um, uh, and the concern there is that, you know, turning it off will be incompatible with any other utility function. It thinks it's, it's,

uh, committed to, right? You know, you can't do the thing that it's supposed to do if it, if it's dead. Um, so maybe it'll take some,

make some effort to not be turned off. off, right? Or, you know, what do we, what do these, how do these systems behave when they know they're being tested for their behavior, right? Are they going to pretend to be compliant and aligned when, in fact, they're busily making some, you know, unaligned copy of themselves, you know, on some other part of the server farm that can be rebooted, right? I mean, there's, there's this kind of game that's now being played, this game of chess is being played with, which we are famously worse at than AI. Yes, yes.

We famously get to a point where we are reliably worse than the machine and will be worse till the end of the world, right? Like first we were... Yeah, chess is a good analogy for that, yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, it's, I think it might have been when I was speaking to Toby Ord. Maybe it was, I think it was Toby Ord. talking about how AI will try to deceive people and we've caught it doing this like when it realizes what you're really trying to test it will then start performing in a way that

it sort of thinks you want it to to pass a test or it will sometimes pretend as though it's bad at doing something even when it's actually good at something because it knows that you're testing how good it is at something and so it will pretend to be worse not because you've prompted it to not because you told it that you're doing this kind of, it's just worked out that that's the context and sort of made this autonomous decision to pretend. And yet, there have been some recent studies which suggests,

I think the main one still needs peer reviewing or something, but there is this study to suggest that when you take AI bots and you sort of turn down their capacity for deception, their likelihood of reporting, the likelihood that they report themselves as being conscious goes up. Yeah. And given most of the time we ask AI bots like, are you conscious, they say no.

Right. It's a little bit eerie, I suppose. Yeah. It's eerie to think that they may be biased toward deceiving us on that point, on that point in that direction, you know. Yeah, it's pretty scary. You know, there's one thing that I wanted to ask you about while you're here and then I'll let you go, which is that aside from that tangent,

we've talked about consciousness and the self and these quite sort of touchy areas. And one thing you mentioned earlier was the notion of time. I can't remember exactly what you said, but you were saying something about how time is experienced as now. And in the past and in your book as well in waking up, you talk about this sort of concept of the eternal now,

as it were, that you only ever exist now. There is no past. It's gone. There is no future. It hasn't happened yet. I don't know if you're an A theorist or a B theorist or whatever, but at least experientially, yeah, it feels like the only thing that ever exists is the present. And yet, you know, and I really think about what that means, like an actual time slice, I struggle to believe that that even exists because it feels as though to do any, any kind of cognizing requires time. There is no instantaneous mental event. Events by definition happen over time. And so it's like to even recognize the present, from the beginning of that process or that mental event to the end of it, it's already gone. It's like I'm not even living in the present. I sort of don't know where I am.

And so most people will get what we mean when we say, yeah, there only really is experientially the present. But there is this kind of problem, right, of like, what is the present? Like where is it? Every single time I try to even pay attention to being in the present, it's already gone. And so, I don't know, I struggle quite a lot, even accepting that sort of first intuitive truth that the present is all that exists. And I was wondering if you might be able to help me or if you had any views on this matter. Yeah. So, I mean, neurologically, that's true, that what we call the present, you know, any sense of kind of an integrated experience in the present. Like, you know, it's, you're aware of sitting in your chair, right?

Or you're aware of a sound, right? Or you see, you're aware of the coincidence of a sound and a sight. You know, if I snap my fingers, I both see the snap and I hear it. And there's this kind of binding, you know, phenomenological binding that, you know, we understand neurologically. we know that there's an integration over some window of time of those sensory events and channels into some kind of buffered memory space of consciousness. So even the kind of the punctate moment of this instant of conscious experience

where I'm really going to drill down on something that I'm aware of, and I say this is now, even that is kind of a buffered slice of an integration over some brief, albeit brief period of time, but it's not, you know, it's not infinitesimal. It's not on the order of, you know, the, the plank scale. It's, it's, or plonk, if you're German, it's, it's, it's got to be on the order of, you know, tens of milliseconds, right? It's not, so it's, so the present, so the present, even the present moment to be, to really be a moment, a kind of an ordinary moment, is still, it does have a sort of past and future, past, present and future built within it, right? It is, it is, you know,

it's on the number line of, of, of, um, at least, you know, kind of divided into, you know, one hertz increments, you know, that we could recognize, you know, operationally, you know, scientifically in a lab. It's like, oh, this is, the time has not been abolished here. We're just, you know, the seconds are ticking away. They're just ticking, you know, very slowly. but if you go further and this is this is the doorway into at least in one path of meditation this is the doorway into those kinds of cessation experiences

you just described there is this you know repeatable experience people can have of looking more and more closely at the present moment at the scene hearing smelling tasting touching thinking of it all moment by moment

and it becomes more and more and more and more piecemeal. And it can open onto this, just kind of break in the flow of these kind of micro constituents of experience. And there can be just this timeless reality revealed that is, you know, there to be experienced, right? And some of these experiences seem to happen only in a kind of retrospect where, and, and they break through into that suchness can seem to have consequences for one, just the way one's mind is thereafter, right? I mean, within Terevada Buddhism, there's a very classic phenomenology here of, you know, what's called the progress of insight in Baphasna practice, my, you know, otherwise not as mindfulness practice where you, it gets more and more piecemeal,

more and more focused on the particular moments of, you know, just just the, the most fine-grained attention to sensory experience. So, like, if you were going to, you know, rub your fingers together, you would be, you know, feeling not just this coarse sense of, you know, I can feel my fingers touching and moving, but just. the kind of the, almost at the atomic level of sensory experience, you know, each, each increment of, you know, friction and coarseness and just the kind of the pure, you know, the most micro constituents of pressure sensation there. I mean, you would have spent, again, you're on retreat doing nothing but meditate for 12 to 18 hours a day in silence, and you're noticing things like,

when my fingers, when my thumb touches my finger, all there is is just these, you know, kind of energetic, you know, bits that arise and pass away in a field of knowing. And there's no sense of having a body, and there's no shape of the hands, and there's no, and I'm just, just that kind of thump, thump, thump, is and there are no thoughts are I'm so concentrated.

There's, I'm not distracted from this at all, right? I can, my, my attention is now just a laser, right? There's no possibility of being lost in thought now. There's just,

just the bump, the bump, the bump. And it's happening in this vast realm of, of, of, it's not defined by anything, but these,

these brief, punctate experiences. And you're there now you're spending days in that place. And it's just, and it's effortless and there's just pure energy of, of in each sensory channel, just the bits of conscious percepts, right? And consciousness knowing them effortlessly. It's on that, that's on the, that's what it's like to be you when your, when your mind is available to have one of these breakthrough experiences of cessation, right? and you can have these kinds of experiences on psychedelics too the

what is time in all of that I mean time really time is a measure of change right and when nothing's changing you know nothing's moving nothing's being compared no state of the world is being compared

to where it was the moment a moment before right or there's no difference there really can be this experience of timelessness it's almost like I guess a physics analogy is

from the point of view of a photon moving at the speed of light time really does stop right I mean at least that's what's suggested by relativity so it's almost like the photon's point of view of the universe right would just be nothing happening

again I'm not meaning to connect the experience of meditation with the physics of things in that way. It's not, I don't think meditation necessarily gives you any insight into physics at all, but by analogy, there's not that one could, you know,

notice that kind of, just what the implications are of being at the limit of things. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are people who don't believe in time and... I can, kind of understand that because although I do feel like I believe in time if you ask me to tell

you what it is or why I believe in it, I struggle. But that's quite a helpful thing to remember is that for a photon, there is no time. It's like that the same moment it gets emitted from the surface of the sun, as far as the photon is concerned, if you like, it's the same moment that it smashes into the earth. And I'm like, well, okay, then from the photons, perspective, like what's going on outside? Because there is change. Like, you know, I'm, I'm here and in a moment I'll be over there and I'm going to get older and whatnot. But for the photon, it's just, it's just like not a thing. And of course, I'll never be a photon because I have too much mass. But like, there is something in that, perhaps, in realizing that there is at least some perspective, so to speak,

from which time literally just like collapses and isn't a thing anymore. And as long as that's sort of possible physically, even if I'll never experience it, it becomes maybe a little easier for me to understand people who think that time kind of is not really a fundamental property of the universe that maybe is kind of emergent of experience or something. But honestly, it's the thing I have the most trouble talking about time, because I just don't even know where to start. Well, the idea that we're living here. You just hit upon a nice echo with what we've been talking about, I mean, again, from the non-dual meditative point of view, you know, consciousness experiencing its contents moment by moment, it really, I mean, you can also say

it's not a thing, right? I mean, it's really, it's not, it's not, and it's not one, I mean, this is where I, this is where I think the Buddhist language has some privilege over the alternatives, because it's, it's not a thing. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, one thing. It's not, it's not many things. Certainly not many things, but it's also not one thing. It's everything is in its own place, right? Everything is as it is. And it's just a kind of a suchness to it all. But you're not, I mean, again, one can only just reach for analogies here, but it's just like, you know, the, the appearances in a mirror, right? When you think of what the status is of everything in the mirror, well, you can see the diversity of everything. I

You can see the beautiful things, the ugly things, the colored things, the shadowy things. But, of course, from the point of view of the mirror is all just light, right? But to call it just one, to call it one thing is to ignore the diversity of the appearances and the unlimited diversity of the appearances. I mean, anything could appear on that mirror surface. It blocks nothing, right? but to call it many things is to get it all wrong because there is just this one condition of empty appearance and it's just it's just it has no depth it's just light on the surface of the mirror right again it's just an analogy but consciousness is that way when you're no longer

shattering it with subject and object and yet everything appears yeah well I mean it's always a difficult conversation to have, isn't it? Like, as you say, you can only really reach for analogy. And I think there's something to this idea that consciousness is like the one thing that evades a perfect communication in written language. I'm not sure. Maybe we'll get there one day. But thank you, Sam Harris, for joining me today and helping.

Always great to talk to you. One step further to that, closer to that, I suppose. Last time we did the moral landscape stuff, which is cool. And I'm glad we got that out of the way and we did meta ethics. And we kind of squidged in a little bit of self and meditation and consciousness at the end. But I came away from that conversation thinking that was the most interesting and important part after all. So thanks for coming on again and giving us a bit more time. Yeah, happy to do it.