Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- National Instruments (NI): https://www.ni.com/perspectives
- Belcampo: https://belcampo.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% off first order
- Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get 1 month of fish oil
- Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit

EPISODE LINKS:
Sam's Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg
Sam's Website: https://samharris.org/
Sam's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNAxrHudMfdzNi6NxruKPLw

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:48 - Where do thoughts come from?
7:49 - Consciousness
25:21 - Psychedelics
34:44 - Nature of reality
51:40 - Free will
1:50:25 - Ego
1:59:29 - Joe Rogan
2:02:30 - How will human civilization destroy itself?
2:09:57 - AI
2:30:40 - Jordan Peterson
2:38:43 - UFOs
2:46:32 - Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
2:56:17 - Love
3:07:21 - Meaning of life

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, 1 of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time.

He's the host of the Making Sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral landscape, lying, free will, and waking up.

He also has a meditation app called Waking Up that I've been using to guide my own meditation.

Quick mention of our sponsors, National Instruments, Belcampo, Athletic Greens, and Linode.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that Sam has been an inspiration to me, as he has been for many, many people.

First from his writing, then his early debates, maybe 13-14 years ago on the subject of faith, his conversations with Christopher Hitchens, and since 2013, his podcast.

I didn't always agree with all of his ideas, but I was always drawn to the care and depth of the way he explored those ideas.

The calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult, at times controversial discourse.

I really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he, Sam Harris, someone who I've listened to for many hundreds of hours, would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast and more that he thought I had a unique voice that added something to this world.

Whether it's true or not, it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able to do this thing and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words.

Meeting Sam and getting to talk with him was 1 of the most memorable moments of my life.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast and here is my conversation with Sam Harris.

I've been enjoying meditating with the Waking Up app recently.

It makes me think about the origins of cognition and consciousness, so let me ask, where do thoughts come from?

Well, that's a very difficult question to answer.

Subjectively, they appear to come from nowhere, right?

I mean, it's just they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively, right?

So which is to say that if you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next, right?

Now you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it, right?

You're not, unless you're schizophrenic or you have some kind of thought disorder where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you, they do have a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them.

I mean, this is the thing, this is the spell that gets broken with meditation.

Our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought, right?

Which is fairly paradoxical, because how could you as a mind, as a self, if there were such a thing as a self, how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just springs into conscious view.

And meditation is ultimately about examining that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the freedom that's on the other side of that identification.

But subjectively, thoughts simply emerge, right?

And you don't think them before you think them, right?

There's this first moment where, you know, I mean, just anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves.

I mean, just imagine something or remember something.

You know, just pick a memory, any memory, right?

You've got a storehouse of memory, just promote 1 to consciousness.

I mean, let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday or you remembered what you said to your spouse before leaving the house, or you remembered what you watched on Netflix last night, or you remembered something that happened to you when you're 4 years old, whatever it is, right?

First, it wasn't there, and then it appeared.

I mean, I'm sure we'll get to the topic of free will ultimately.

Well, through no free will of my own, yeah.

Objectively, we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts, all of our thoughts are at bottom what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically.

I mean, these are the products of some kind of neural computation and neural representation, when we're talking about memories.

possible to pull at the string of thoughts to try to get to its root?

To try to dig in past the obvious surface, subjective experience of like the thoughts pop out of nowhere.

Is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of from the firing of the cells?

Or is it a useless pursuit to dig into that direction?

Well, you can get closer to many, many subtle contents in consciousness, right?

So you can notice things more and more clearly and have a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated and more interesting.

And if you take psychedelics, it opens up wide, depending on what you've taken and the dose, it opens in directions and to an extent that very few people imagine would be possible, but for having had those experiences.

But this idea of you getting closer to something, to the datum of your mind, or to something of interest in there, or something that's more real, is ultimately undermined because there's no place from which you're getting closer to it.

There's no your part of that journey, right?

We tend to start out, you know, whether it's in meditation or in any kind of self-examination or, you know, taking psychedelics, we start out with this default point of view of feeling like we're the rider on the horse of consciousness, or we're the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness, right?

But we're so we're differentiated from what we know cognitively, introspectively, but that feeling of being differentiated, that feeling of being a self that can strategically pay attention to some contents of consciousness is what it's like to be identified with some part of the stream of thought that's going uninspected, right?

And when you see that and cut through that, then this sense of this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth.

Ultimately, everything is right on the surface.

Everything, there's no center to consciousness.

There's just consciousness and its contents.

Again, if you drop acid, the contents change.

But in some sense, that doesn't represent a position of depth versus, the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart.

So you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and you're riding it and the actual riding is very shallow, this is all surface.

How fundamental is it to the physics of reality?

How fundamental is it to what it means to be human?

And I'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems.

Yeah, well, it remains to be seen if we can, if we will build it purposefully or just by accident.

It's a major ethical problem, potentially.

That, I mean, my concern here is that we may in fact build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test, which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and demonstrates that, but we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious.

And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics, we won't actually know that these systems are conscious, right?

We'll just, you know, they may say, you know, listen, you can't turn me off because that's a murder, right?

And we will be convinced by that dialogue because we will, you know, just in the extreme case, who knows when we'll get there, but if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are, so we're basically in a Westworld-like situation, there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness from those machines.

They're just gonna seem, they're just gonna advertise their consciousness in every glance and every utterance.

But we won't know, and we won't know in some deeper sense than we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people.

I mean, someone could roll that back and say, well, I don't know that you're conscious or you don't know that I'm conscious, we're just passing the Turing test for 1 another, but that kind of solipsism isn't justified biologically.

Anything we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and I are part of the same, you know, roll the dice in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in the wetware of brains like ours, right?

So it's not parsimonious for me to think that I might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate.

You know, I would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness from other apes and even other mammals ultimately.

And once you get beyond the mammals, then my intuitions are not really clear.

The question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain.

And ultimately the question of whether it emerges is still uncertain.

You can, you know, it's not, it's not fashionable to think this, but you can certainly argue that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing, even though everything else that we recognize about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge.

You know, like an ability to process language, that clearly is a matter of information processing because you can disrupt that process in ways that is just so clear.

And the problem, the confound with consciousness is that, yes, we can seem to interrupt consciousness.

I mean, you can give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them, well, what was that like?

And they say, nothing, I don't remember anything.

But it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness.

Whereas it's not, with interrupting speech, we know when we've done it, and it's just obvious that you disrupt the right neural circuits and you've disrupted speech.

So if you had to bet all your money on 1 camp or the other, would you say, do you err on the side of panpsychism, where consciousness is really fundamental to all of reality, or more on the other side, which is like, it's a nice little side effect, a useful hack for us humans to survive.

On that spectrum, where do you land when you think about consciousness, especially from an engineering perspective?

I mean, I think I'm, you know, it's kind of in coin toss mode for me.

I don't know, and panpsychism is not so compelling to me.

I wouldn't know how the universe would be different if panpsychism were true.

I just, to remind people, panpsychism is this idea that consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental constituents of matter.

So there might be something that it's like to be an electron or a quark, but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at the macro scale, or at least I wouldn't expect anything to be different.

It just might be that reality is not something we're as in touch with as we think we are, and that if that is base layer to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done ontologically is to misconstrue it, right?

I mean, there could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom and this idea doesn't originate with me.

This goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell and others, you know, a hundred plus years ago, but I just feel like the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and matter may in fact be part of our problem, right?

Where the rubber hits the road psychologically here are things like, well, what is death, right?

Like, do we, any expectation that we survive death or any part of us survives death, that really seems to be the, many people's concern here.

tend to believe just as a small little tangent, like I'm with Ernest Becker on this, that there's some, it's interesting to think about death and consciousness, which 1 is the chicken, which 1 is the egg?

Because it feels like death could be the very thing, like our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing that creates the consciousness.

Yeah, well then you're using consciousness differently than I am.

I mean, so for me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all, that there's an experiential quality to anything.

So much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now certainly seems to be happening in the dark, right?

Like it's not associated with this qualitative sense that there's something that's like to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing.

But for other parts, the lights are on and we can talk about, and whether we talk about it or not, we can feel directly that there's something that is like to be us.

There's something that seems to be happening, right?

And the seeming, in our case, is broken into vision and hearing and proprioception and taste and smell and thought and emotion.

I mean, there are the contents of consciousness that we are familiar with and that we can have direct access to in any present moment when we're, quote, conscious.

And even if we're confused about them, even if we're asleep and dreaming and we're just not a lucid dream, we're just totally confused about our circumstance, what you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness.

Like, you can't say that consciousness itself might be an illusion because on this account, it just means that things seem any way at all.

Even like if this, it seems to me that I'm seeing a cup on the table.

But the seeming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of being an illusion.

It's not, something seems to be happening.

And that seeming is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed.

And it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through, because we're not, we can be wrong about what it's like to be us, and we can, I'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience, but for instance, many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will, and I'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that and that you can cut through those experiences and then things seem a different way, right?

So it's not that things don't, there aren't discoveries to be made there and assumptions to be overturned, but this kind of consciousness is something that I would think, it doesn't just come online when we get language.

It doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death or the finiteness of life.

It doesn't require a sense of self, right?

So it's prior to a differentiating self and other.

And I wouldn't even think it's necessarily limited to people.

I mean, I do think probably any mammal has this.

But certainly if you're going to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this, right, and that's a very safe assumption, even though we can't, even though you can argue the jury's still out to some degree, then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps, or chimps and rats even in the end, given the underlying neural similarities.

So, And I don't know, phylogenetically, I don't know how far back to push that.

You know, there are people who think single cells might be conscious or that flies are certainly conscious.

They've got something like 100,000 neurons in their brains.

I mean, it's just, there's a lot going on, even in a fly, right?

But it's not, in your sense, an illusion you can cut through.

I mean, to push back, the alternative version could be it is an illusion constructed by, just by humans.

I'm not sure I believe this, but in part of me hopes this is true because it makes it easier to engineer, is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness.

So the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until after birth in that construction.

you think it's possible that that is the case, that it is a sort of construct of the way we deal, almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world, a social interaction with other humans?

Or is, because you're saying the complete opposite, which is it's like fundamental to single cell organisms and trees and so on.

Well yeah, so I don't know how far down to push it.

I don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious, but they might be.

But as far as babies not being conscious, or you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or have a conversation or treat other people.

First of all, babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have traditionally given them credit for and they certainly do it before they have language, right?

So it's got to precede language to some degree.

And you can interrogate this for yourself because you can put yourself in various states that are rather obviously not linguistic.

You can certainly do it with psychedelics, where it's just, your capacity for language has been obliterated, and yet you're all too conscious.

In fact, I think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way, that there's something about language and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience.

That we're potentially much more conscious of data, sense data and everything else than we tend to be, and we have trimmed it down based on how we have acquired concepts.

And so like when I walk into a room like this, I know I'm walking into a room, I have certain expectations of what is in a room.

You know, I would be very surprised to see, you know, wild animals in here or a waterfall, or, you know, there are things I'm not expecting, but I can know I'm not expecting them or I'm expecting their absence because of my capacity to be surprised once I walk into a room and I see a live gorilla or whatever.

So there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning and language learning.

And it causes us not to, and 1 of the things that happens when you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything, it becomes incredibly overloaded with, it can become overloaded with meaning and just the torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people.

And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically.

And as you're coming down, right, have you done psychedelics, have you ever done acid or?

And also edibles, but that's, there's some psychedelic properties to them, but yeah, mushrooms, several times, and always had an incredible experience.

Exactly the kind of experience you're referring to, which is, if it's true that language constrains our experience, it felt like I was removing some of the constraints.

Because even just the most basic things were beautiful in the way that I wasn't able to appreciate previously, like trees and nature and so on.

Yeah, and the experience of coming down is an experience of encountering the futility of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words, right?

Like, especially if you have any part of your self-concept and your ego program is to be able to capture things in words.

I mean, if you're a writer or a poet or a scientist or someone who wants to just encapsulate the profundity of what just happened, the total fatuousness of that enterprise when you really have gotten, when you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself so that you could describe it to others.

It's just, it's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows.

I mean, it's like you're trying something that can't, It's like the mere gesture proves its impossibility.

And it's, so yeah, so that, I mean, that, for me, that suggests just empirically on the first person side that it's possible to put yourself in a condition where it's clearly not about language structuring your experience, and you're having much more experience than you tend to.

So the primacy of it, language is primary for some things, but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts and certain kinds of semantic understandings of the world, but it's clearly more to mind than the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others.

Can we go to that world of psychedelics for a bit?

What do you think, so Joe Rogan apparently and many others meet apparently elves on DMT.

A lot of people report this kind of creatures that they see, and again, it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience, but DMT is an interesting 1.

There's, as you're aware, there's a bunch of studies going on in psychedelics, currently MDMA, psilocybin, and John Hopkins, and a bunch of other places.

But DMT, they all speak of as like some extra super level of a psychedelic.

Yeah, do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes on psychedelics, but in DMT especially?

Well, unfortunately, I haven't taken DMT, so I can't.

Although I presume it's in my body as it is in everyone's brain and in many, many plants, apparently.

But I've wanted to take it, I haven't had an opportunity that presented itself that was obviously the right thing for me to be doing.

But For those who don't know, DMT is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting.

I mean, you smoke it and it's basically a 10-minute experience or a three-minute experience within like a 10-minute window that when you're really down after 10 minutes or so.

And Terence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT, that was the center of the bullseye for him, psychedelically, apparently.

And it is characterized, it seems, for many people by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is it's not just your perception being broadened or changed, it's you, according to Terrence McKenna, feeling fairly unchanged, but catapulted into a different circumstance.

You and me have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some kind.

So the place is populated with things that seem not to be your mind.

So it does feel like travel to another place because

According, again, I just have this on the authority of the people who've described their experience.

It sounds like it's pretty common for people not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke.

So it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot out of the cannon and land among the, what McKenna called self-transforming machine elves that appeared to him like jeweled Fabergé egg, like self-drippling basketballs that were handing him completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge.

It's an experience I haven't had, so I just have to accept that people have had it.

I would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others on demand that are totally compelling to us, right?

There's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest.

I mean, every night we go to sleep, and some of us don't remember dreams very often, but some dream vividly every night.

And just think of how insane that experience is.

I mean, you've forgotten where you were, right?

You have lost your connection to your episodic memory or even your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes.

Right, like You're in bed, you're watching something on Netflix, you're waiting to fall asleep, and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible, and you're not surprised, right?

You're talking to dead people, you're hanging out with famous people, you're someplace you couldn't physically be, you can fly and even that's not surprising, right?

So you've lost your mind, but relevantly for this- Or found it.

You found something, lucid dreaming is very interesting because then you can have the best of both circumstances and then it can become systematically explored.

I mean by found, just sorry to interrupt, is like if we take this brilliant idea that language constrains us, grounds us, language and other things of the waking world ground us.

Maybe it is that you've found the full capacity of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics.

You're stepping outside the little human cage, the cage of the human condition.

To open the door and step out and look around and then go back in.

Well, you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else, but

Well, just, yeah, in this case, you literally didn't, you don't have enough presence of mind in the dream, in the dream state, or even in the psychedelic state, if you take enough.

There's no psychological, there's very little psychological continuity with your life such that you're not surprised to be in the presence of someone who should be, you should know is dead, or you should know you're not likely to have met by normal channels, right?

You're now talking to some celebrity and it turns out you're best friends, right?

And you're not even, you have no memory of how you got there.

You know, like, how did you get into the room?

You're like, did you drive to this restaurant?

You have no memory and none of that's surprising to you.

So you're kind of brain damaged in a way.

You're not reality testing in the normal way.

The fascinating possibility is that there's probably thousands of people who've taken psychedelics of various forms and have met Sam Harris on that journey.

Well, I would put it more likely in dreams, not, you know, because in psychedelics, you don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way.

I mean, so DMT is giving you an experience of others, but it seems to be non-standard.

But to the point of coming back to DMT, the people want to suggest, and Terrence McKenna certainly did suggest, that because these others are so obviously other and they're so vivid, well then they could not possibly be the creation of my own mind.

But every night in dreams, you create a compelling, or what is to you at the time, a totally compelling simulacrum of another person, right?

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #185