Speaker 1: 0:15

Hi, this is Amina Shtari.

Speaker 2: 0:16

I'm Natasha McElhone.

Speaker 1: 0:18

Our guest today is Sam Harris. Sam is the host of the Making Sense podcast and an author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include the End of Faith, letter to a Christian Nation, the Moral Landscape, free Will, lying, waking Up and Islam and the Future of Tolerance with Majid Nawaz. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation, practice, human violence, rationality but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Speaker 2: 0:54

Sam's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in the New York Times, time Magazine, scientific American, nature, rolling Stone and many other publications. He's also written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Economist, the Atlantic Nature, among others. The Making Sense podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of iTunes' best, has also won a Webby Award for Best Podcast in the Science and Education category.

Speaker 1: 1:22

Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, indian, burmese and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. He has created the Waking Up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Today we talk about how failing at meditation is perhaps the best approach.

Speaker 1: 1:51

Dissolving concepts that are made up by our mind.

Speaker 2: 1:54

How to lose your head.

Speaker 1: 1:56

His book the Moral Landscape.

Speaker 2: 1:58

Moral absolutes versus moral relativism.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Is adversity the only path to growth?

Speaker 2: 2:03

The illusory distinction between rationality and emotions.

Speaker 1: 2:07

His book Free Will.

Speaker 2: 2:09

Whether we really know why we change our minds.

Speaker 1: 2:13

And how losing a foot might lead to a better podcast.

Speaker 2: 2:16

What and so much more.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Let's meditate. Hi, this is Omid Ashtari.

Speaker 3: 2:26

And Natasha McElhone and with us today we have Sam Harris, see, I only needed two takes to do that.

Speaker 1: 2:33

It's so good to have you, sam. Natasha and I always had long debates about your podcasts, and we came at it from different vantage points and disagreed, and so we decided that we will call this podcast when Shall we Meet, on the basis that somehow, through all the conflict, we always ended up in some constructive place and learned a lot about each other, nice, nice.

Speaker 3: 2:54

Well, I'll try to guess which one agrees with me, or do you go back and forth?

Speaker 2: 2:59

Oh, back and forth.

Speaker 3: 3:00

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:02

So there's so much to talk about about. Obviously, you're incredibly well known for all kinds of things, but being a neuroscientist, a best-selling author, um, you're making sense podcast and you're waking up app, which I know a ton of people use, including which we both use on a daily basis.

Speaker 2: 3:16

Really, yeah, um well, I I let me qualify that I try to meditate on a daily basis, but I fail daily. You in fact describe that process, or the torturous process, brilliantly of perhaps I didn't even know that I talked to myself until I tried to meditate.

Speaker 2: 3:35

To be honest, you're a great kind of meditation, buddy, you get it. It occurred to me that when you talk about this conversation and you, I think, a couple of times have cited it as being like a form of madness, what are we doing? How can you possibly have the construct of a conversation with yourself when you're the listener and the talker? But I wondered if there is any kind of evolutionary purpose to that that, is this like a conversational way or thought way of us testing things out in a safe environment in our own mind before we take it out into the world?

Speaker 3: 4:11

It's a very difficult question to answer with any confidence. I think both answers are true. Essentially, I mean, it's one that there may in fact be some evolutionary advantage to being able to model future experience or rehearse past experience in your imagination. There's a kind of a learning circuit that we can accomplish on our own, testing out various approaches to situations or modeling conversations in advance, or trying to extract some lesson from the embarrassing thing that happened yesterday by ruminating on it. But most of it probably I mean just speaking as a consumer of all the dumb thoughts I think throughout the day most of it is certainly pretty useless. So the other side of this is that evolution never thought to build us an off switch right. There has been no selection pressure on turning language off or turning imagery off, because language and imagery are just so useful.

Speaker 3: 5:18

Building an off switch may not in fact be useful from an evolutionary point of view, which is to say may not equip you to better spawn and ensure the survival of your kids. There's a lot to human life that has not been selected for by evolution that we care about right. Most of what we do, evolution can't see Virtually all of civilization, almost anything that we would consider recognizably human now in terms of what we care about and what matters to us. It's built upon circuitry and capacities that have clearly evolved for social primates like ourselves, but so much of it has no direct relationship to it. Direct relationship to it, and I think the challenge for us individually and as a species now is to answer some of the riddles of how to be happy in this world in ways that we're poorly equipped to do, based on evolution.

Speaker 2: 6:15

But why does this image from 15 years ago pop into my head, let's say, or your head, when you're desperately trying to focus on your breath? Where does that come?

Speaker 3: 6:27

from? I would say it's subjectively mysterious, which is to say that you know. You, as the witness of your experience, can't know where these thoughts are coming from, because they seem to just come out of nowhere, right? But you might be able to retrospectively hazard a guess as to why a thought about a certain topic arose when it did. But that would just be a guess and in many cases you would be wrong.

Speaker 3: 6:55

There's a region in the brain, in the middle line of the brain, called the default mode network, which has been called the default mode because it's been shown to be active regardless of the task a person is being given in the scanner. When the person is not on task, when they're just sort of waiting for something to happen, it's kind of the brain's default state when it's not busy doing something in particular that's requiring outward focus. It's directly associated with mind wandering. It's what you're doing in the privacy of your mind when something in the environment isn't directly engaging your attention or forcing a response. So these regions of the brain are also, they're not only active when your mind is wandering but when you're actually given a task, which is explicitly self-referential, if I ask you to think about yourself, your identity or whether certain words apply to you are you patient or are you tall or are you young, if you're thinking about those terms in explicitly self-referential ways. The default mode network will also be active. So it stands a fairly good chance of being, at least in part, the seat of our experiencing self, the sense that we are a self in the middle of experience, as opposed to just being identical to experience.

Speaker 3: 8:12

And, as you know, meditation is a first-person way, an experiential way, a subjective way of interrogating that seeming starting point in consciousness, the sense that you're a self that's having an experience, that you're a subject in your head that is having an experience, and part of your experience is of having a body.

Speaker 3: 8:36

That's where people default to subjectively, and that's the illusion, frankly, that meditation is designed to evaporate. Right, you look closely enough at this sense of self, such that you can find it to be absent, and that finding can be conclusive. It's not that you just fail to find it, you can fail to find it in a way that relieves you of the feeling in the first place. Right, you thought there was a sense of eye there that had you divorced from experience, always trying to control experience, always reacting. You know this is the thinker of your thoughts, but you look closely enough in such a way that you notice, okay, there's no center to experience. There's no, you're not on the edge of it. You're not actually behind your face looking out at something that's not you. There's no, you're not on the edge of it, you're not actually behind your face looking out at something that's not you.

Speaker 1: 9:31

There's just this totality of experience and you're identical to it. You know what's actually interesting, sam, is these two different modes of doing the meditative practice, where at some point you see the gap and you're observing the thoughts and then at some point you're just existing with it. I think there's value, and I think natasha really finds a lot of value in that gap in particular, because in a way it's good to realize I think you called it the biceps curl of of meditation is realizing that there is sometimes a gap here and that these thoughts do stream in and then go back to like just being your thoughts and then again seeing that the distraction is occurring and the gap is happening. What do you feel about the? The fact that this gap can be used to observe obsessive, compulsive rumination right rather than just like sitting with it?

Speaker 3: 10:13

yeah, well, you know, we're all almost certainly on some continuum with what we recognize, to be frank, psychopathology. I mean, we're not all all suffering from ocd, but we're suffering from from something analogous to it. I mean, I've described this ordinary thinking as analogous to a situation the most boring person in the world sort of kicking through the front door of your house and following you from room to room and never shutting up for your entire life, right Like. You've heard these stories dozens of times. You've thought these thoughts again and again, and again, and yet, paradoxically, you never get bored of them somehow. It's like you would if a person were externalizing all of these petty judgments and telling you the same story that you'd heard for the 12th time that day. Yet again, you'd find this person to be just insufferable company. And yet that's very much the character of our minds. Most of the time, we just keep finding the same ruts.

Speaker 2: 11:17

Isn't that the point of meditation is to be able to liberate us from, because I would argue that it's an enslavement? I don't think it's an enslavement. I don't think it is a choice.

Speaker 3: 11:27

Well, it's not. No, I yeah, I'm not suggesting that we suppress thought. I mean there are. There are styles of meditation where the goal is to be so focused that such that thoughts no longer arise, and that that is a possible and temporary state of the mind that you can achieve through meditations, just as concentration gets stronger and stronger thoughts discursive thoughts can be suppressed for a time, and that's a very pleasant and drug-like experience. But real meditation you know what I would call what I tend to refer to as mindfulness or awareness practice allows for thoughts to arise. I mean, it's just, it's based on a deeper recognition that consciousness has a certain character, whether thoughts are arising or not, and its character is one of being just open and really undefined by this sense of self that we think we're carrying around all the time. If you're going to break this spell of dualistic perception, you need to break it, with or without thought. And you know, ultimately thought is as good an object of meditation as anything else. It's like sounds in the room or sensations in your body.

Speaker 3: 12:36

It need not, in principle, be a distraction, although for quite some time it seems like the main distraction because it is. We're just habitually identified with each piece of language or imagery that arises in the mind.

Speaker 1: 12:52

How much do we understand about the storm under the surface? Because it is only one thought that I can carry at each point in time and there seems to be obviously some sort of competitive dynamic playing out between parts of my brain and action potentials that somehow then make that one thought to pop out right out of nowhere. Do we understand how the dynamics work?

Speaker 3: 13:14

Well, there's obviously a ton of mental activity that is going on that we're not aware of, right? I mean, what we are aware of really is just the tip of the iceberg, and it's being served up to us based on a lot of unconscious activity that we can't inspect in principle. I mean, just take this conversation. I mean you're aware of what I'm saying, you're aware that I'm speaking English, at least most of the time You're following. You know I'm tending to follow the rules of grammar I hope most of the time and you're decoding these mouth noises I'm making effortlessly. You're not having to work. Maybe sometimes I say something that is confusing, but because you speak English, there's this unconscious decoding of these noises I'm making and you're extracting semantic meaning from them. What you're conscious of are noticing errors. You're noticing things that you don't get. You're noticing words that you didn't quite hear, but all of that is riding on a surface of a lot of unconscious mental processing. Do we understand?

Speaker 1: 14:26

those dynamics, though those subconscious dynamics? Do we understand how these kind of pan out and how that one emergent thought comes out of the storm and rises to the surface?

Speaker 3: 14:36

Well, we understand many of the different regions of the brain involved in specific cognitive acts, right? So we know where your language centers are and we know the region of the brain that allows you to recognize faces. And we know this on the basis of recent neuroimaging experiments, but we also know it on the basis of you know 150 years of natural experiments in neurology. You know just brain injuries, right? People get you know one part of their brain injured, let's say the fusiform face area, and we discover that they can't recognize faces anymore. But they can recognize all kinds of other things. They can recognize trees and cars and houses, but not faces, right?

Speaker 3: 15:20

And that is among the many things about us, subjectively, that seem unified in our experience but we know break apart at the level of the brain, I mean. So something like memory, for instance, is a perfect example. We consciously, as a matter of first-person experience, tend to talk about and think about memory as a unitary phenomenon. It's just like I either remember something or I don't. I mean, do I remember the scene in the movie I saw two weeks ago? These are all acts of information retrieval and they can be successful or not, but we know that there are many different types of memory and they can all be independently interrupted. And there's much about us that is counterintuitive, that we now understand at the level of the brain that it just the seamless experience breaks apart and can be disturbed in ways that are pretty counterintuitive, based on neurological injury or just careful experiments you know, neurological injury or just careful experiments, the notion that you're referring to, that we have imagery and language in our head predominantly.

Speaker 1: 16:32

I find when I think about something I'm not actually spelling out the words and sometimes I actually stumble to express myself even though the thought is very clear in my mind, right. So in a way the brain deals in symbolic proto-language. That is not necessarily like verbalizing it all the time, and I wonder how much we understand that from a, again, neuroscientific point of view.

Speaker 3: 16:55

I agree with you that it's not. You don't tend to think the thought verbally before you express the thought. In fact, you know your expression of the thought is you just thinking while your mouth is moving right.

Speaker 3: 17:08

I didn't think this sentence before I spoke it. I just spoke it, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So I could, with the voice of my mind, silently utter a sentence which is almost certainly virtually identical, apart from the motor activity used to run my mouth. At the level of the brain, it's going to be virtually identical to what happens when I just speak the sentence.

Speaker 1: 17:36

Right, it's the rehearsal of words, and you know, but it would take longer than thinking the thought right.

Speaker 3: 17:44

Yeah, yeah, but thinking the thought, right. Yeah, but thinking the thought is. I mean, just speaking from my own experience, it's not so much that you ever really think a whole complex thought and then push it out with words. It's much more a matter of thinking it as you express it right. It's like it's not fully formed. I mean there may be some. There are exceptions to this in the that you know that inner tape that has already been well recorded.

Speaker 1: 18:31

It's compressed somehow and it just comes out.

Speaker 3: 18:33

Yeah, yeah, and I'm not. You know, I have a sense of knowing what I'm going to say in advance. I know where I'm going to go and I'm just kind of connecting the dots. But when you're thinking, when you're really just thinking out loud, which I think we're doing most of the time it is just that You're thinking out loud, but I do think there's a difference here.

Speaker 1: 18:57

Right, like so. For instance, when I ruminate you talked about ruminating a lot right, when I'm ruminating, I'm probably not speaking out the words of the things that I'm ruminating over. There is a shorthand that I'm using in my brain at that point in time. It feels like Because if I were to speak the words of the things that I'm ruminating about it would take like five minutes longer to actually ruminate on the thing.

Speaker 3: 19:18

I mean, I think there's a spectrum here. I mean there's the case where you actually are just talking to yourself, as though you would be talking to another person with the voice of your mind. I mean you know you're thinking the thought, you know why the hell did you do that, right? And it is a sentence you know it's like oh God, that was dumb, Right, Like that. So it's like this judging voice, a kind of a wisp of language, and sometimes it has a kind of cognitive structure, but it's not really linguistic, right, Like it's not just a, it's not a tumble of words, it's just. But it has some kind of semantic meaning. You know you were thinking about something that was happening at your house, but if you actually look back on what it was like to be you a moment ago, you couldn't say there was clear imagery of your house and you couldn't say there were clear words, words like kitchen or living room.

Speaker 3: 20:39

It's hard to say what was happening subjectively but, subjectively, you could still say you were thinking about your house.

Speaker 1: 20:45

Yeah, so there is a higher level of compression here, basically, and in some ways, then language as the kind of layer with which we save things in our brain, yeah, yeah, but I think we experience all the different levels subjectively.

Speaker 3: 20:59

I mean, you really can in a very dreamlike way. You can, you can. Dreams are a perfect example. In dreams you experience almost the movie version of this semantic and cognitive operation where, like, not only are you hearing language and producing language, you're actually producing the person you're speaking to right and you're giving them lines. And it's a very full experience. It's an illusory one, it's arguably a psychotic one if you don't know you're dreaming, if it's not a lucid dream. But it is very elaborated semantically and cognitively.

Speaker 2: 21:41

But I know what he means. It's a totally different experience than dreaming, because it's not daydreaming either, it's it's as yeah, I think that's a good word you use compression. The processing speed of that is so fast you couldn't even say it in words because it the speed at which you'd have to speak would just be impossible for our mouth or our motor system.

Speaker 2: 22:01

I've often wondered what that architecture is Like. What do we call it? Do we know more about it? Will we know more about it? Will it end up helping us to not have this constant barrage of self-talk? I guess, if we understood how it? Even enters how it gets developed.

Speaker 3: 22:20

Again, it's almost certainly not one thing at the level of the brain because it depends on what. The content is right. There could be a mathematical version of it, an ethical version of it, an autobiographical version of it, a relational version of that I mean, just like if you're in a conversation with another person and you detect some kind of micro expression on their face, you know that's a very specific operation. It happens very, very quickly. You can have some emotional reaction to it that is also very, very quick, but also very strongly valenced right, like you could just instantaneously feel like, okay, I don't really like that person, and you might not even be conscious of that judgment having been made, and yet it's affecting everything else. You then think and feel and do and it goes by in a tenth of a second.

Speaker 3: 23:09

Again, that's very specific real estate in the brain and doesn't overlap much, if at all, with the thing that is giving you a very brief, you know, punctate thought about, you know a memory from your childhood, right, or just a sense that a logical argument doesn't add up.

Speaker 3: 23:30

You know somebody is giving you, you know, a logical or mathematical piece of reasoning and you just feel like, no, that's. I don't know what the error is, but that doesn't seem quite right, right. So like again, totally different from detecting something, an expression on someone's face that makes you not trust them, but a similar error detection mode. I mean, I do think that some of these operations do have kind of a final common pathway where very diverse types of neural processing can be valenced as acceptable or unacceptable, right or true or false, or I like it or I don't like it. Right, and my graduate work was on some of this, where I studied belief and disbelief and uncertainty at the level of the brain, and that's one thing we did find is that, whether the beliefs related to ethics or religion or semantic knowledge about the world, very different types of processing required to judge whether something is true or false or undecidable, but the judgment itself seemed to be a kind of a final common pathway, cognitively and emotionally.

Speaker 1: 24:40

Brainstem pathway.

Speaker 3: 24:42

It feels like very limbic yeah it was limbic and, yeah, medial frontal cortex, for liking the taste of various ideas, reward centers there, and also insula, which governs our awareness of internal states of the body and also mediates feelings of disgust. That was activated for error detection, for feeling that something is false. I can give you a bunch of statements that are interrogating very different parts of your brain in order to judge them, but the judgment itself feels like something similar in each case. It's a psychological rejection state of a kind You're saying no, that doesn't map on to my reality, whereas if I give you something, that's obviously true, that acceptance and the confidence with which you can make that acceptance feels a certain way and so, yeah, that's something that we did find.

Speaker 2: 25:37

You talked about whether we remember people's faces. What's it called Prosopagnosia? What's it?

Speaker 3: 25:41

called Prosopagnosia, Prosopagnosia yeah that's it.

Speaker 2: 25:44

My son has this, and as do I, not to an extreme level, but to a very embarrassing level, particularly given what I do professionally.

Speaker 3: 25:55

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:56

And yet I have no other talent that you know an amplification, part of my brain that does something else. That's extraordinary.

Speaker 3: 26:03

Right, it's just this. It's just a pure diminishment of your character and standing in the world.

Speaker 2: 26:11

Yeah, can I fix it.

Speaker 3: 26:15

You might have made a choice Maybe you made an unconscious choice that I don't need to fill my memory banks with this face. Yeah, so I'm not a clinician, I have no clinical experience, so I don't know what the state of our knowledge is with respect to helping people with prosopagnosia. I mean, there's an area in the temporal lobes which I mentioned already, called the fusiform face area, which I mentioned already, called the fusiform face area, which is there or in some connection to there, is very likely the basis of prosopagnosia in everyone. I mean, there may in fact be different ways to have prosopagnosia I'm not sure, but this region of the brain it does other things, but among its many functions.

Speaker 2: 27:06

It allows us to recognize faces as faces. You can drill into a mouth or an ear. The minute you see that ear, you know exactly who that person is. But, why is it that your mind attached to the ear and not the whole face.

Speaker 3: 27:18

Most things, most things, however small, are recognizable as a series of relationships. There are very few things that are so unitary as to be something in its own right and not a matter of various intersecting concepts and shapes and connections. Right, so you know a car is you know what is a car? Well, is a car in? This is actually a very Buddhist reflection Is it in the wheels? Is it in the doors? Is it in the windows? Is it in the hood, the bumper? I mean, you get a series of car parts that have that are entangled with one another in the right way, and you recognize it's a car. And if you start pulling the parts off, well, for a time you can say well, that's a car without wheels, that's a car without wheels or doors, that's a car without wheels, doors or windows. But at a certain point its car-ness evaporates.

Speaker 2: 28:15

Or it just was a car.

Speaker 3: 28:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it is with any part of a human face. Certainly it is with a face, but an ear? What is an ear? How do you recognize an ear to be an ear? Well, if enough of it were missing or occluded by vision, it wouldn't be recognizable. And I mean our concepts for everything are like this, our experience of an intrinsically undivided world. I mean, just to take the visual field specifically, we see this field of color and shadow and it is divided really only by our concepts. We're thinking conceptually all the time.

Speaker 3: 28:59

Meditation is a way of relaxing the hold that concepts have on us, moment by moment, and just coming into contact with more of the raw data of experience, whether it's visual or, you know, just emotional or in any other channel.

Speaker 3: 29:18

You know, if you're feeling an emotion strongly, it's very easy to just, in a coarse grained way, just feel, just feel. Okay, well, I'm just, I'm angry or I'm anxious or I'm impatient. But if you become curious about what is anger or what is sadness or what is anxiety and you try to delve into it with your attention, you find that there's no one thing there, it's a changing state of energy in the body, and thing there it's a changing state of energy in the body and, in some sense, the more you try to feel it, the less substantial it becomes. That's one way to actually become free of the implications of all of these negative emotions A true willingness to feel them, without contracting around them or resisting them or thinking about how to get rid of them, et cetera. Just feel the way you feel completely, just let yourself become incandescent with that emotion, and that's what mindfulness does in the presence of negative emotion.

Speaker 1: 30:19

I find the moment that you described quite fascinating, when I experienced it myself in their meditations, where you suggest that you should keep your eyes open, and in those moments where I'm staring at the world and it falls apart and concepts are no longer being recognized, but just shapes and just the rawness of the stimuli that is coming into my brain. It's a bit scary at that moment because you realize how everything is just constructed and how this world is just a story that we've made up in some shape or form, where some are triangulating too many parts to count to some geometries that were somehow coarse-grained, assessing and therefore figuring out that something's a table and something's a chair and something's something else. I find that both a scary moment but a very liberating moment, and I think it's the analogy to what you just said on an emotional level, just to see that experience as an illusion in some shape or form.

Speaker 3: 31:09

Yeah, yeah, I mean. The open-eyed meditation is especially useful for interrogating this sense of self, because our sense of self is certainly, in most people, mostly defined by vision. Right, I mean leaving aside people who can't actually see. For one reason or another, we differentiate ourselves from everything that seems to be not self. It's certainly the physical world more in vision than in any other sense. That's how we locate our sense of self. It's so dependent on vision that you can do something in a lab.

Speaker 3: 31:44

You can provoke what's called a body swapping illusion If you give a set of goggles with video cameras associated with them. If I'm wearing the goggles that are receiving your video inputs and you're wearing the goggles that are receiving my video inputs, we can actually feel like we've swapped bodies based on just the change of vision. And so when you look for your sense of self, when you look for the one who is seen with eyes open, you can actually fail to find it in a way that is very salient. It can be very vivid. There's one teacher, Douglas Harding, whose practices are taught over at Waking Up by his student, Richard Lang. He talked about the sense of having no head. Right, you look for your head.

Speaker 2: 32:32

I get so frustrated at these ones. I have to say I don't have a frigging clue.

Speaker 3: 32:41

I mean, you're looking at me now it's a little odd because we've got cameras in the way, but if you're looking at me, you can notice that the only head you see is mine. Right, you don't see your head, right?

Speaker 2: 32:55

Well, unfortunately I do, okay Well you've got it.

Speaker 3: 32:58

You're looking back at you on the screen. So in normal life there's just where you know your head to be subjectively is just this open space where the world is appearing right. There's just the world. I mean, looking down at your body, you know it's terminating up into this place where you know you have a head, at least conceptually, but as a matter of experience you don't see your head there right. You just see your body terminating up into this open condition of awareness, right, like it is on some level. Just an analogy. I mean, obviously you're not really decapitated, you know you have a head, but it's a useful way to direct attention back upon itself. It's somehow more concrete than saying look for what is looking. The gesture to be made is to try to turn attention upon itself and notice that the moment you do that, this is just so gratifying to be able to ask you this.

Speaker 2: 34:02

So the moment that you say that turn attention back on itself, it disappears. It's a bit like for me if I have an inspiration, when I'm acting, if I try and clutch onto a feeling that I want to duplicate, it's like a bird that flies away.

Speaker 2: 34:19

It does not stay the minute. I recognize it. If it stays in my intuitive I don't even know how to describe where it's residing, but let's just say in the body and not in the mind somehow it has a chance to take me somewhere surprising, whereas the minute you say, turn attention back on itself. You just said you get this amazing freedom. I don't. I get confused.

Speaker 3: 34:47

Yeah, yeah. Well, that is something that can happen, I'll grant you, but that is something you can be mindful of. You can notice this feeling of confusion. That's as good an object of meditation as anything. But if you relax with this, if you just realize that this is something that you know, there's no emergency here, you don't have to get tight around this.

Speaker 3: 35:13

You just, in a very gentle way, if you just look for what's looking, if you look for yourself, if you try to turn attention without withdrawing your attention from the world, I mean still look at the thing you're looking at. I mean, whether you're looking at me or you're looking at an object on the desk, you have this dualistic sense of subject-object perception. If you just look for the subject, if you just try to find what is looking, you can notice in that first instant of trying to turn attention upon itself, that there's this moment of where you're no longer behind your face, you're no longer over here looking across space at the thing you're looking at. There's just this totality and it's very, very brief. It's not this is not something to find deep within yourself. There's just this experience of openness, there's just pure seeing right, like you lose the sense that there's a seer on the edge of the world looking at the world.

Speaker 2: 36:14

What's interesting is, I think I'm having the experience that you describe. I mean, I think a lot of people do, but it's through your first instruction, which is when you talk about there are sounds outside, let's say listen to those sounds, let them just keep appearing right, um, rather than being intrusive, let's say they are part of this soundscape that I'm experiencing.

Speaker 2: 36:38

And when I analyze those sounds like, hear them for the first time, hear what a horn is rather than going back to my library of assumed things and my priors, of what that usually means, I just meet it afresh. I find I get that freedom and that sense of not being me. I guess in that moment, as soon as you start talking about no face and no head or being behind it.

Speaker 3: 37:06

You're saying you get this sense of no subject-object division in hearing, but not in seeing.

Speaker 2: 37:16

No, I can get it in seeing too If I look at what I know has a name of a table, but as you, say if I pull it down into its component parts and I just look at the wood and the grain, how that liberates me from a set of assumptions about all kinds of things in fact, it's just interesting that the terminology around no head or where is being behind your face for some reason throws me into total confusion and I just was curious if it does for other people as well.

Speaker 3: 37:49

Well, it definitely does. I mean, it is one of the main complaints we get over at Waking Up People. Just you know it's. If I really wanted to make money in the meditation game, I would stop giving this instruction.

Speaker 2: 38:01

You're losing customers, exactly.

Speaker 3: 38:03

Because it's a bit of a hate crime against a certain percentage of the audience. But the thing I would point out is that it's possible to do that conceptual deconstruction of experience dualistically. I mean still feeling like there's a meditator, still feeling like a self, but you're noticing that concepts don't really fit the world very directly. So, for instance, like you could take hearing, you're listening to the sounds in your environment, you're hearing birds and car horns, and yet then you notice, okay, that's a layer of concepts that I'm imposing on the raw data of hearing. I'm going to listen even more closely. Then you begin to notice that a bird isn't a bird, a car horn isn't a car horn. I mean, there's raw frequencies being experienced, but it can still feel like I'm the one doing that. I'm over here, still separate, now having a different kind of experience, a deeper experience, a less mediated experience, but still there's an experiencer in the center of experience.

Speaker 3: 39:08

And so this turnabout, the looking for the looker, looking for the thinker or the hearer, is the thing that directly interrogates that presumed subject-object relationship.

Speaker 1: 39:21

So there's a level of collapsing concepts? Yeah, so there's a level of collapsing concepts and there's a level of collapsing the observer altogether.

Speaker 3: 39:28

Yeah, I mean the observer is another concept, it's another part of experience. I mean, here's logically, here's how you know it can't be the ground truth of your conscious experience. Because if you're experiencing it, if I feel, if I name some component of experience, well, that too is an appearance in consciousness, and so it is with a sound, and so it is with a sensation, a tingling in my fingers. Well, I'm not identical to that because I'm aware of it. This is kind of the subject-object sense, so the subject must be something else. But yet if the subject feels like anything, if it's a pattern of energy in any way, no matter how subtle, that too is an appearance. Otherwise, how can it modify my experience at all? So consciousness, that which is knowing, must be prior to it experientially, it must be the condition in which it too is appearing. And so, just logically, it doesn't make sense to say that consciousness itself feels like a self or feels like I. If any of that is appearing, that is appearing in front of the floodlights of consciousness. On some level, you're trying to feel the way consciousness feels prior to anything appearing and in the midst of anything appearing. So like what does it really feel? Like to be the hearer or the seer or the thinker or the censor of experience. And the more you fall back into that condition, the more it begins to feel like, ok, there's just this openness and clarity that is intrinsically undefined. Any sense of definition, any sense of structure, any sense of it's here and not there, is itself an appearance. It's part of the movie. What you're looking for is this condition in which everything is appearing, the condition of knowing anything or feeling anything or sensing anything. And the more you fall back into that, the more you recognize that there's no, the sense that there's a center to experience, and it is a self, it is an ego, that's an illusion, that's a concept.

Speaker 3: 41:50

The self as experienced is something like that which, when you recognize it, reveals that, okay, it's not at all what it seemed to be right, Because what it seemed to be is this unchanging place from which every other experience is being experienced Like. It is the thing to which everything is referring. When you look and can't find that thing, then there's just experience, and that is what. Then you can actually have an experience that is free of this feeling of self. People intuitively want to be free of that. The moments that are really rewarding are the moments where we feel so comfortable with another person or so comfortable in our own skin such that we really forget ourselves and we have the free attention just to behold the other. I want to be free enough of my own self-talk and self-scrutiny and self-consciousness such that my attention is totally available to just see you. There are degradations to this that can occur without meditation, but meditation really is the practice of very directly looking for this sense of center and ultimately not finding it in a way that actually changes your experience.

Speaker 1: 43:09

I'd like to transition to your book the Moral Landscape. In it, you suggest that there's absolute morality, and this morality is determined by measuring the well-being of conscious beings like us scientifically rather than in a wishy-washy philosophical way. This landscape of objective measurements will contain peaks and troughs, which then can guide us how to construct a moral code. Am I capturing the core argument?

Speaker 3: 43:35

well, yeah, except I don't put too much on the success of our efforts to measure well-being. I mean, as I think you know, for me well-being is a truly open-ended and fairly elastic concept. Right, it can absorb what our descendants care about in a thousand years. Right, and this is considered a weakness of my argument, that it's a check that almost never gets cashed. But that's not true. I mean, when you look, there are so many situations where we know whether a right turn or a left turn is headed toward happiness.

Speaker 3: 44:15

There are many aspects to the moral landscape. Perhaps I should just describe what this analogy is is. What I'm imagining is that there's a landscape of possible experience, not just human experience, but experience of all conscious minds that are adequate to various experiences. That is functionally infinite. It's maybe not technically infinite, but it's close enough so that we know we're never going to explore its totality. And there are all kinds of different arrangements among conscious beings that produce different experiences, moral intuitions about which experiences are better than others. But there's this landscape of well-being that has peaks and valleys, and you're somewhere on it, whether you know it or not, right? I mean, there are people who and this is part of what it means to be a moral realist. There can be answers to questions, whether we're asking those questions or not. And you know everyone can be wrong, right, everyone can think they have something really good in hand and they can be mistaken about that, just like with scientific truth. You know, we can all think, we understand.

Speaker 2: 45:20

You know how electricity works, but you know because it's the 14th century, we have no idea what we're talking about. Does it presuppose that we are rational beings? That's what I feel sometimes about your books and your arguments. I mean, are we becoming progressively more rational? It doesn't seem we are, so how do you measure this? I've got the feeling that you talk about measuring. So how do you measure this? I've got the feeling that you talk about measuring being able to measure well-being, which would lead to having a better moral compass through the prism of science and Neuroscience and measurements and fMRIs and all these things right.

Speaker 2: 45:58

And responses that you can actually look at, but I do feel that it's all relative and I felt that you argued that it's not and that there are these absolutes.

Speaker 3: 46:13

Yeah, okay. So that's like a two-part question. First, are we rational? Well, we are rational, but we're not merely rational and much of the opposition, that people to a better outcome, which is, you know, let's say, left and there's another path which leads.

Speaker 2: 46:41

But that's. There's another layer, which is sort of impulse control, right, your current self or your experiencing self versus your future self. That we know, that we tend to make poor decisions for our future selves right. We act on instinct and want what we want, and we want it right now, even though we rationally know that et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 3: 47:02

Yeah. So there again, this is a complex picture. We are clearly rational up to a point, and then we're clearly guilty of failures of rationality and failures of reasonableness. I mean. So, for instance, we can think we're doing the thing that's going to get us what we want and we're wrong about that because we just didn't think clearly enough. We can know that we're failing to get the thing we say we want because we're suffering some kind of weakness of will. There's still a person in there who knows yeah, I really do still want to lose the weight, but damn, I also really want this ice cream now. We can think of that as some kind of contradiction. Or we can just realize that the human mind is such that there's a kind of congress of selves and competing interests and you're just not unified. You want many incompatible things. We can get a bird's eye view on all of that and understand ourselves more and more clearly and then make decisions that can get us outcomes that we in a second order way, we insist we really really want, right? Like, yeah, we wanted something else in the moment, but the truth is we really do want to lose the 10 pounds, right? So now we're going to take the ice cream out of the house. We're going to throw it away, we're going to anticipate our weakness of will and we're going to guard against it.

Speaker 3: 48:24

But then there are just other experiences that are not merely rational but they're not irrational. So, for instance, loving your daughter or loving your spouse or loving anyone is not the product of reason, really, but it's not irrational, right? It's not, which is to say, you're not in conflict with some principle of reason in order to love somebody. In fact, it's quite reasonable to recognize that love is one of the most important experiences you have in your life and it's something you want to maximize. And you want to figure out how you fail to feel love in situations where you really should feel love, and there's a lot to learn about all that. And reason can help you all the way along the way to be more loving and to safeguard those situations in which feelings of love are more and more likely and feelings of hatred are less and less likely, and you can reason yourself out of your hatreds.

Speaker 3: 49:21

So, in my view, rationality is really the guardian of love, right? And it's the guardian of all of these squishier, positive, pro-social states that we want and which many people think exist in opposition to cold, calculating rationality. And I would also say the notion that rationality is cold and calculating is also mistaken when you think of what it feels like to be sure you're right or sure that someone else is wrong. Or you think of what it feels like to think you're right and to suddenly realize you're dead wrong. Right, and that a lot has been predicated on your being wrong in the past. Right, those are heavily laden emotional experiences. Right, they're like. The feeling of doubt is an emotion. The feeling of certainty is an emotion, the feeling of intellectual embarrassment. You're in the emotion game when you're reasoning about what is real.

Speaker 1: 50:21

Right. The second part of the question, I think, was more related to the scientific measurement of well-being, which is also part of the book, which you then actually said is not the main point that you're trying to make with it.

Speaker 3: 50:35

And also Natasha asked about relativism, which is the idea that how could there be truly right answers?

Speaker 3: 50:40

Well, the problem, generally speaking, is that people get confused about the difference between answers in principle and answers in practice. The fact that it's obvious you can't get the answer makes people throw up their hands and say, well, maybe there is no answer right, and that, I think, is a false move. But there also there's this sense that there's just so much gray and also that our ongoing scorekeeping never ends. So you take something like Chernobyl or Russia's invasion of Ukraine right, or you know there's almost nothing so horrible that you can't then say, well, the consequences of that thing are not fully in yet. So, for instance, what if it's true to say that Chernobyl in the fullness of time, true to say that Chernobyl in the fullness of time will have been the thing that caused us to become much, much safer in our handling of nuclear waste, yeah, and gave us better outcomes, right and then the God's eye view of the situation is but for that accident we wouldn't have handled nuclear waste properly and we'd have suffered something far more devastating as a result.

Speaker 3: 51:57

Now I'm not arguing that you can make that case readily for Chernobyl, but you're not wrong to think that that's possible in the aftermath of any true atrocity. So it's kind of the silver lining argument. There's a potential silver lining to anything. Even if that were true, and it's hard to deny that, it's at least conceivable in most cases, my moral landscape argument suggests that it's still not a peak on the landscape. It's like there still has to be in most cases a better way to have learned that lesson, even if you can say, well, yeah, I wouldn't have stopped riding a motorcycle until I lost my foot in that accident. I'm grateful I lost my foot because you know I could have wound up dead with all my motorcycle riding. You know I just finally I learned my lesson and now I don't have a foot.

Speaker 3: 52:47

Well, okay, but you know I, when I was 18, I thought about riding a motorcycle and I reasoned about kind of the utility of it and I thought, you know, this is one thing that really looks fun, but this is just one obviously life-wrecking possibility where I'm going to regret having ridden a motorcycle. And so I just decided, at the age of 18, I said you know, this is one species of fun that I'm going to deny myself, right? So it was possible to figure out that you don't want to be a motorcycle rider without losing a foot. That's that I'm going to deny myself, right. So it was possible to figure out that you don't want to be a motorcycle rider without losing a foot. That's what I'm saying, and so it is with many other things.

Speaker 2: 53:24

I'm wondering whether the avoidance of human suffering and we're very much at the apex of that with the way that we, you know, medicate an awful lot and we try and avoid suffering, try and avoid- suffering.

Speaker 3: 53:42

Whatever the other costs. Are that in fact? Maybe if you had lost your foot I'd be a better person? This would be a better podcast. If I had only one foot, I'm sure this would be a better podcast and it would be worth it.

Speaker 2: 53:52

I'm just wondering you know, you know these books, I don't know Atomic Habits.

Speaker 1: 53:58

Adversity builds character.

Speaker 2: 54:00

Yeah, being so avoidant. You talk about avoiding suffering or reducing it all the time, and I just wonder whether that's quite the right framework.

Speaker 3: 54:13

Obviously, there are forms of suffering and certainly forms of stress that we like that are enjoyable and they're useful. Right, and they build character. Most people who get into working out learn to love the experience of the physical stress of a very hard workout in the gym. Right, it's not something that they hate and they wish they could do without. It's actually part of what they love about working out, right?

Speaker 2: 54:40

That's a very common experience, but they're making themselves do that. That's the difference. It's anticipated. I mean the kind of suffering. I suppose that is a surprise.

Speaker 3: 54:50

So, therefore, it's truly challenging, because no, it's true that you can find people who will tell you I'm a much better person for having survived you, I'm a much better person for having survived cancer, I'm a much better person for having gone to war.

Speaker 3: 55:03

So one question is was that the only path to take by which to have improved yourself in all those ways and to have improved your subsequent experience?

Speaker 3: 55:13

And I think the answer to that is almost certainly no. But let's say that there are cases where that is in fact the case, where the only way for you to become the truly amazing and amazingly satisfied person you will be is to go through this narrow pass of misery on the way there, there, and that I would argue, just based on my analogy of the moral landscape. That would be analogous to literally having to descend on the landscape to go to some lower, you know, go down some lower ridgeline in order to get to a higher nearby peak, or just a higher spot than the one that's going to be available to you if you just keep going in the direction. You've been going right, and I think we encounter that kind of thing a lot, both individually and collectively, socially. I think it's true to say that, yeah, in order to put a whole society on some different footing. That's going to be better in the end. There might be a lot of short-term pain that we have to run together.

Speaker 2: 56:17

We're experiencing quite a lot right now.

Speaker 3: 56:20

I'm not sure the current situation is an example of that, but in fact I'm quite worried that it's not.

Speaker 1: 56:28

The point that you're making here is that there's really no room for moral relativism. And it gets very complicated when you actually take it up to society, right, because we talk a lot about these individual examples, relativism. And it gets very complicated when you actually take it up to a society, right, because we talk a lot about these individual examples, which are very clean cut, I think, to an extent right. But you see, you're in a political landscape, right, and there are certain people want to do this and certain people want to do that, and then how do you determine the collective well-being in a clean way? And I think that's where it gets a little bit more fuzzy.

Speaker 3: 56:57

Yeah well, it's a hard project. There are tricks that can make it easier and there are obvious errors. There are kind of failure modes that you want to avoid.

Speaker 3: 57:09

Dogmatism is something you want to avoid the idea that anyone has the ultimate right answer that's unchangeable for all of time. We know that that's not the perfect approach to getting now, you know eight and a half billion of us to cooperate together and build the best possible global society together, right? So dogmatism you know, religious and otherwise you need to keep out of the conversation. You have to admit that your moral intuitions, which is to say the very tool and the very criteria you would use to decide whether a certain outcome seems good to you, those can be wrong and we've learned that they can be argued out of that in a variety of ways.

Speaker 3: 58:02

I mean, ultimately, I think in the end it has more to do with just being exposed to gay people and gay lifestyles depicted in culture and realizing, okay, these are just human beings with certain preferences that have nothing to do with me, and there's no zero-sum contest between the sanctity of my marriage and what anyone else is doing in their private life, and so I can relax the taboo around this. The intuitions people have, and sometimes very strong intuitions about what is right and wrong, can fail to track the terrain that would lead us to right answers that relate to what really matters with respect to human well-being or the well-being of conscious creatures. You have to be humble in how you have this conversation, and there are people who will suffer, therefore, for bad reasons, and their insistence that they're suffering is not a lie. It's just we don't have to take it so seriously.

Speaker 2: 59:06

But you're still talking about it from the perspective of proof and seeing evidence and I guess let's just say that half the world doesn't need want desire proof. They like their belief system, oh, they do.

Speaker 3: 59:20

No, no, they do want proof. They just they have been convinced that you can act as though you knew certain things to be true when you don't in fact know them to be true, and, in fact, you can build your lives around them. But everyone is desperate for proof, and you can see that the moment they get a little taste of it, the moment they see the silhouette of Jesus in a piece of burnt toast, people want a corroboration of their core beliefs, and just notice how discounting they are of the faith-based suspensions of disbelief that other people make. This is something that I pointed out when I—there's a video of me online I was at Notre Dame in the States, which is a Catholic university, and I was talking about the doctrine of Islam.

Speaker 3: 1:00:14

Talking about the doctrine of Islam, and you know I was trying to impress on the crowd there. I said you know there's a thousand Catholics, for the most part, in this audience. And I said I mean, don't you know that, according to the Quran, you all are in danger of going to hell? Right? I mean, you understand that Jesus was not divine according to the Quran, and to think that he was is a species of polytheism and it is just an offense like no other. You understand that, don't you? I just want you to consider that for a second.

Speaker 3: 1:00:45

I want you to feel in yourself how blissfully unconstrained you feel on the basis of their certainty. On the basis of their certainty, you're going to sleep peacefully tonight, never giving a thought to the possibility that you might go to hell based on the Muslim logic. Right? You just have to know that every atheist feels this way about your core beliefs. Right? That's how I feel about you and everything you care about. Right, because you're playing the same game the Muslims are. So every religious dogmatist keeps a different set of books for themselves, but they keep my books, the atheist, secular, rational books, for everyone else, just as I do.

Speaker 2: 1:01:32

They view Islam the way I do. Yeah, but that's my point is, if we all have these different books and if the rationalist believes that they are right and everyone else is wrong. The rationalist doesn't have the different books.

Speaker 3: 1:01:44

No, no. Everyone needs the rationalist. Everyone recognizes that. They need the rational books when someone's trying to sell them a bridge, when they're trying to figure out how to whatever get any terrestrial project off the ground, or when they're criticizing the unjustified religious dogmas of other people, the ones that were not drummed into them. Again, this is an atheist meme, but everyone is an atheist with respect to the thousands of dead gods that nobody believes in now. It's just that the real atheist just goes one god further. He just adds the god of Abraham to the list and we're done.

Speaker 1: 1:02:27

The point is, some books are better than others, basically, and they can prove to be better than others, while others can't prove it. But I want to move away from this topic because I think I'd love to get to another one, which is just this incensed debate between me and Natasha, and that is that of free will. And Natasha is a compatibilist, I would say, and I am a determinist, and you have a really good book called Free Will, and so I want you to convince her To be clear compatibilists can be determinists right, true, you're right, they just think that—.

Speaker 2: 1:03:03

We have a bit of both.

Speaker 3: 1:03:06

It's in the very name. They just think that determinism is compatible with what we mean by free will.

Speaker 1: 1:03:11

Yes.

Speaker 3: 1:03:13

Okay, Well, so my late friend Dan Dennett was probably the most famous compatibilist in philosophy, and he and I had a proper fight at one point over this, and then we made up and it was fine, but it was a—. Oh, tell us about the fight we just had a fairly mean-spirited debate, the evidence of which is still available online. I wrote this book Free Will.

Speaker 1: 1:03:40

Did you write it before or after that debate?

Speaker 3: 1:03:42

No. So I wrote the book and he felt that I had not given him or compatibilism a fair shake. And that's probably true because, as will become clear, I think compatibilism is really just a pseudo-philosophy. It just changes the subject.

Speaker 1: 1:04:04

It doesn't.

Speaker 3: 1:04:04

It's a way of dodging the conversation and he doesn't like. He didn't like that at all. So he wrote a withering review of the book and then I responded to his review in similar terms and it sort of escalated because we were typing rather than talking. We got everything, got a little too much topspin and then we had to walk it back in a bar at the TED conference where we did a podcast Nice and made up.

Speaker 3: 1:04:34

So the problem for free will is that there's no account of causation.

Speaker 3: 1:04:42

That makes sense of it. If you put everything in terms of determinism just one domino falling and hitting the next however complicated that picture is, it doesn't seem like there's any room for free will because it's just dominoes falling In my brain. There's just a bunch of neurophysiological dominoes that are falling so as to produce this sentence and to produce the next memory I have and the next thought and the next freely chosen action, like now I want another sip of tea, I reach for the glass. It's me doing it, but behind me doing it it's just a lot of dominoes falling and it's the universe is doing it and I'm kind of the last to know. I, the conscious witness of my life, am the last to know that I was going to reach for a cup of tea, because if we were scanning my brain, there's a lot of neural activity that would be detectable before I'm consciously aware of the next thing I'm going to do. Right, and if that's the case, I am a kind of puppet. I'm a kind of biochemical puppet.

Speaker 2: 1:05:41

Just in case people haven't read much about neuroscience, that there's evidence to suggest that the brain makes a decision milliseconds before we are even aware of that decision.

Speaker 3: 1:05:53

Yeah, and in some experiments and for some decisions it can be on the order of seconds. I mean, you can predict better than chance better than chance what someone is going to do in certain experiments five seconds before they are aware of having consciously decided which choice they're going to make.

Speaker 3: 1:06:12

But even if that weren't true, I mean, that's a bit of a red herring. I actually regret referencing some of that literature in the book because even if you could collapse it all the way down so that there was no distance right and it was truly unpredictable, but it doesn't give you the free agency that people think they have, because what people think they have is what philosophers call libertarian free will, which is the sense that they could have done otherwise had they decided to do otherwise, and they were free to decide at any point to do otherwise. So if you could rewind the movie of my life, there's this sense that in this scene I could play things differently. Right, Like I just said, whatever I just said. But if you could rewind the universe to the state it was in 30 seconds ago, I could choose to complete the sentence differently.

Speaker 3: 1:07:04

People go through their lives feeling that that is the case, because that is the thing that seems to give a scope to our total sense of moral agency. Unless you could have done otherwise, what does it mean to tell the person hey, you shouldn't have done that. Someone just does something that you object to and you say listen, you asshole, you shouldn't have done that. That presupposes that they could have done something differently a moment ago, and I think this is really important.

Speaker 1: 1:07:36

Because, often, when I have this conversation with people, they're like, oh, but what does it even matter? I don't have a choice, then why would I even think about this? And you know, this is actually the point that you're making. There is a moral, and I would love you to talk about the bear in this example.

Speaker 3: 1:07:51

Yeah, so there's this feeling that you're a rational person. You should have done other than you did in that moment.

Speaker 3: 1:07:59

I share the sense that it's important for us to relate to one another in that way to view each other as moral agents, capable of rational decisions that follow moral norms, because we clearly are agents of that kind.

Speaker 3: 1:08:14

I mean we're not just always going berserk, we are capable of being well-behaved. And I mean we're not just always going berserk, we are capable of being well-behaved.

Speaker 3: 1:08:19

And we're capable more important, we're capable of learning how to behave better and better in civilized society. I mean, we go from being infants who know nothing, who are capable of following no norms, but for a few biological ones, but we learn to not be little monsters any longer and we become better and better behaved, at least some of us. Some people don't, and it's quite amazing to see them become president of the United States, but for most of us we learn morally salient lessons that equip us to play well with others when that breaks down, when someone does something quote immoral, provided they're neurologically intact and they're not suffering some obvious brain damage or they're not, you know, psychopaths. Those are distinct situations, but in most cases, when we're dealing with our friends and our family members and normal strangers, colleagues, we believe we're in the presence of people who, when they behave badly, they, it's true to say of them well, they shouldn't have done that and they could have done otherwise right.

Speaker 3: 1:09:31

And when they reflect on it, they think, yeah, you know, I really shouldn't have done that and I could have done otherwise. You know, the truth is I was cutting corners there, I was tired, I was late. So they have their reasons. Some of the reasons are spurious, which is to say that a person can be wrong about what actually motivated them to do what they did. Right, you know, we're not perfect judges of what our intentions were. And one of the virtues of meditation you know, one of the sometimes unpleasant virtues of meditation is you become a better and better witness of what your actual intentions are in each moment, and sometimes they're not as flattering as you would want them to be.

Speaker 2: 1:10:15

That's. Doesn't your argument make a mockery of something you've devoted so much of your life to, which is meditation, where you can change outcomes and you can study your responses to things and affect um a different response?

Speaker 3: 1:10:29

wouldn't it be refreshing if I just said yes. What? What are the chances? Do you think natasha? Oh, I've never thought about that. What are the chances that the you think Natasha?

Speaker 2: 1:10:36

Oh, I never thought about that.

Speaker 3: 1:10:39

What are the chances that the answer is?

Speaker 3: 1:10:40

yes to that question. The reason why we don't have free will is that we are just in this causal matrix of one thing happening after the next. There's this picture of causal influence, but the sense in each moment that you could have done otherwise in any sense, apart from just maybe randomness could have made a different contribution to your behavior, which again doesn't give you freedom, just gives you a different outcome through no agency of your own. That sense that you could have done otherwise is an illusion, but we can re-understand it in a way that is still useful. So take my role as a parent right, when my daughter does something that I think is not great and I wish she hadn't done. My belief that free will is an illusion doesn't cause me to be this bizarre character as a parent who will then say well, you couldn't have done otherwise. There's really nothing to talk about here, you know. I'll just let it go.

Speaker 2: 1:11:48

No, but why? Because it's a charade.

Speaker 3: 1:11:50

Otherwise, if you truly believe, Well, no, it's not a charade. I'm sorry, I can't personally, as an American, say charade, the universe won't let me. It's not a charade because there's still learning. That is possible. The conversation I'm about to have with her about why she shouldn't leave her dirty dishes on the table and she should at least put them in the sink, right Eventually, it's to be hoped that admonishment is going to change her brain in such a way so that the next time she's confronted by her own dirty dish at the end of a meal she will remember oh actually, dad really wants me to put this in the sink. That's what I'm going to do, so I don't have to have that boring conversation with him again, and the learning will have been accomplished and the behavior will change.

Speaker 3: 1:12:44

That's a perfectly mechanistic, deterministic process and in each moment it is mysterious as to why it works, or whether it works and the degree to which it works right. So, for instance, if I were to say to her oh, you put your dish in the sink. You know, it seems that my lecture finally got through to you. Is that what happened? And she would say yeah, yeah, I just didn't want to have that lecture anymore. But if I said to her well, why did it work this time? I've had to give you that lecture at least 400 times over the course of your life. It would be true to say she would not possibly have any idea of why it finally worked. Nor could I have any idea. And if we were, scanning—.

Speaker 2: 1:13:28

Well, she'd—being your daughter, she would say the universe willed it, that's right.

Speaker 3: 1:13:45

For the 400th time got fully ingrained. But it would not be a picture where you could see some little homunculus in there who finally decided okay, I'm the one with the freedom here, I'm the one with the will that can be freely directed. I'm going to decide at this late hour to be the sort of daughter who puts her dish in the sink, right? No, it's just more causality. And the witness of your inner life, your conscious self, is never in a position to know why one decision finally stuck or one impulse finally got canceled by the requisite level of strength of will, or why your will was weak in that moment to the degree that it was such that you broke down and ate the ice cream, and why, in the next moment, you got disgusted with yourself sufficiently so that you threw the spoon down and you stopped eating the ice cream.

Speaker 3: 1:14:42

And the closer you get to each of these time points in your life, all you confront subjectively is mystery. If a friend called and they gave you a pep talk and it really mattered, and it mattered to the degree on the pep talk scale of mattering to degree, you know, 8.5. You can't know why it didn't matter. 8.6 or 8.4, right, you didn't decide for it to matter as much as it did. Where the hell did that thought come from? That thought is a visitor to your life. You didn't author it right. You never had that thought in your life until the first time you had it.

Speaker 2: 1:15:21

I'm not disputing the random nature of these things why did it work that time and not that time? But I am disputing the ability to turn to respond differently or turn up the volume or down the volume on certain things, that we have some agency volume on certain things, that we have some agency.

Speaker 3: 1:15:48

Well, no, but each invocation of agency is itself mysterious. It's like we will build robots on some level we already have, but ultimately we will build effectively perfect robots that have exactly the agency you're talking about. And at what point in the process of building them will we say to ourselves this is where we put the free will in? I mean, we're just not going to do that, and it's going to be strange to say, yeah, we built these robots, we know exactly how they function, and or even we don't know how they function because there's a level of randomness or opacity in there. But we built these things and yeah, they have free will, just like us. Right, that's not the free will people think they have.

Speaker 1: 1:16:30

I think most of the time, when you consider this, it's easier to think about okay, in how many ways are we not free? Right, and we know all these?

Speaker 1: 1:16:40

like country that you're born, parents and ultimately, if you, if you scale it up even further and think how many other people are taking decisions every single day that you're caught in their causal cones right so and then, if you take it even further, I think it's just tough for for people to accept the fact that, for instance, they don't choose their partner that they love, right, or that they don't take those very important decisions. Maybe they're not free when it comes to chocolate versus vanilla, right, but like, when it comes to those really important decisions in life, people don't want to think that that was Well, they did choose.

Speaker 3: 1:17:14

It's not quite right to say they didn't choose Right, but all the criteria by which they made this choice are things they didn't choose right, so like they didn't, they baked into the universe. They didn't like. Does anyone choose to be heterosexual? Does anyone choose to have been born a male versus female? Does anyone choose to find been born a male versus female? Does anyone choose to find certain people attractive or beautiful? Does anyone choose to value sense of humor or do they just value it Right?

Speaker 2: 1:17:50

There's all these things we value, but of course these things are mutable, that you can be attracted to a certain kind of person and then think, actually that's not really serving me and I'm no longer. I'm going to change course, but did you?

Speaker 3: 1:18:04

choose that, but that disposition to say listen, I'm superficial now and I'm just concerned about how people look in bathing suits, but this is not really leading to, all things considered, to a life well-lived. Maybe I should be a little deeper than that. Some people are available to that thought, some people aren't. In neither case did they choose their availability or their lack thereof. It's like talking about any other organism.

Speaker 3: 1:18:34

I mean just take dogs Like dogs, dogs are making all kinds of choices. Take dogs Dogs are making all kinds of choices and I'm not suggesting that there are not important differences between human beings and dogs with respect to what we might call freedom in a conventional sense. It's like human beings can decide to forego pleasure for some higher goal in a way that presumably dogs can't right, because they can't formulate the higher goal conceptually in their minds right. All they notice is that there's food available and you know they can't represent some future state of the world whereby it would make sense to defer pleasure of eating in this moment, whereas we can right. But this is just more complicated behavior that just leaves no space for this intuition that if you rolled back the frames of the film I'm in now, neurochemically, something different could happen.

Speaker 1: 1:19:30

Right, leap here and be in the same uncomfortable world that you and I live in, where we know that we don't have free will. How can you? How can you make?

Speaker 3: 1:19:43

it less uncomfortable for them, because I don't think it's actually, because I actually don't think it's as uncomfortable.

Speaker 1: 1:19:47

I think I just want you to give that rallying cry of why isn't it uncomfortable to actually really truly believe it?

Speaker 2: 1:19:53

and just before you do that, what one of my objections around it. It's not like a lot of it I go along with and I do love the fact that in fact, it liberates people from necessarily being. I know you did say that people are inherently evil at some point, but let's say my view is that people aren't and that very often, yeah, because they're automatons that we described earlier.

Speaker 2: 1:20:19

they don't decide, and so the way that they behave isn't always a choice. But in terms of abnegating sort of responsibility for one's actions or self-improvement or attentiveness, I don't like what it does to that. But to me it feels so much more aligned with a faith-based religious view of life that everything's sort of predetermined and that the universe, instead of God or randomness, is our God, if you like.

Speaker 3: 1:20:48

Yeah well, it's not that everything's predetermined. So one way to draw the wrong lesson from this particular punchline is that you can become a fatalist. You can say well if.

Speaker 1: 1:21:00

I have no free will.

Speaker 3: 1:21:02

I'm just going to sit back and see what happens. Well, that's just not true, and you can just try it. Try to just sit back and see what happens, right? Just don't get out of bed and then see what happens. Well, at a certain point you're going to get very uncomfortable, you're going to have to go to the bathroom, you're going to have to eat and you're going to notice that there are bills to pay and the universe is going to keep perturbing you.

Speaker 3: 1:21:21

The choice to do nothing is itself a choice that has consequences, right. And if there are outcomes in life that you value, if there are things you want, if there are skills you want, if there are relationships you want, well then there are things that have to be done in order to accomplish those ends, right. So you can't learn to speak Chinese by accident. So if you just sit and wait to see what happens, you know that's one thing that's not going to happen among the many things that won't happen. So fatalism is the wrong lesson to draw here. So it's true to say that decisions matter. It's true to say that if you learn to meditate, you will be a different person. It's true to say that if you you know you might get cancer and then recover and then be profoundly changed in good ways as a result. Life is way more meaningful because of that brush with death. Right, that had consequences, right.

Speaker 3: 1:22:15

But it's not a matter of anyone being the true author of these changes, certainly not the conscious experiencer of your experience. Because from the side of experience, there is this fundamental mystery that you confront in every instance that everything is just appearing, everything is just happening all by itself. Your thoughts and sensations and emotions, everything is just springing into view in consciousness. And once you learn to be mindful, you can notice this process clearly. But then you'll forget, and that moment of forgetting is itself mysterious. And the moment in which you remember to remember is mysterious, and you'll get better and better at that again, based on some kind of causal process that you can't properly own, but based on your practice of mindfulness, you'll get better and better at noticing these moments where you've forgotten and you'll remember more. But it's again in this instant. If you forget, that's mysterious. If you remember, that's mysterious.

Speaker 2: 1:23:24

I'll grant you. I don't dispute how mysterious it all is. However, I feel that how we respond to that mysteriousness is something that is within our influence of.

Speaker 1: 1:23:37

You would say that because you have no other choice. That's your line.

Speaker 3: 1:23:41

This is Natasha on the ledge on the last ledge Clinging on. So let me ask you to interrogate that ledge. Did you decide to feel that way about it? Is that intuition itself an exercise of your free will?

Speaker 2: 1:23:59

Well, I'm open and I feel that my opinion on this is mutable.

Speaker 3: 1:24:07

But the degree to which it has muted or not.

Speaker 2: 1:24:11

In the future it could mute, and I may have felt much more absolutist in the past. So it's a process.

Speaker 1: 1:24:19

In the years that I've known you, nothing's changed, but I want to ask you about that process.

Speaker 3: 1:24:24

So you're not convinced. You know what that feels like. I'm asking you like that side of the coin, does that feel like something you have freely chosen, or is that just like a pain in your knee, Like it just came out of nowhere and you don't know where it comes from? But it just came out of nowhere and you don't know where it comes from, but you're just not convinced. And now imagine being bowled over, I would argue, through no free will of your own, and you're convinced of something that you were not convinced of a moment ago. What's that like and where's the free will in that? My point is that there's no evidence of free will on either side of this equation.

Speaker 3: 1:24:58

Being in doubt is something you haven't chosen. And having your doubt removed, I would argue, and it's even more salient because doubts people go kicking and screaming to the epiphany. Having your doubt removed.

Speaker 2: 1:25:11

In that case, why are you trying to spend time to convince me if all of this is already?

Speaker 3: 1:25:17

Because all of this matters, because this causal picture is real, like people can be convinced. It's not that arguments don't work. Arguments work, but they don't work through any free will of your own. Ok, so take the prototypical case of reasoning, which is just arithmetic, right, just add up a column of numbers, right, you see a long column of numbers. You can do this, you can get to the bottom of these numbers. It's just, let's say, seven numbers that you have to add together.

Speaker 2: 1:25:45

Please don't make me do that, no.

Speaker 3: 1:25:47

I won't. But one thing you can be sure of is that this is a process that admits of no freedom at all, right? So when I say, add the digits two and four, right, we'll wait, we'll just get yourself use all the freedom you got right. Right, I got two fresh numbers for you, two and four and a lot depends on you getting this right.

Speaker 2: 1:26:16

I made no decision. It's just there in front of me. I have no choice.

Speaker 3: 1:26:20

So where is the freedom of will in this operation? Now, so it is with any other species of reasoning. If I say something that seems incoherent to you or I contradict myself, right, I say something which I said. One thing I said A a moment ago, but now I'm saying B, and I'm such a sloppy thinker I didn't even notice it, but you caught me and you have this feeling, like Sam, that doesn't make any sense, right? That feeling comes online again, through no free will of your own.

Speaker 3: 1:26:49

You're tracking a logical error based on a very similar operation, cognitively, that allows you to say that two plus four equals six. And if someone says five, you say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's two plus four. I didn't say two plus three. And if the person insists on saying five, you say okay, well, now I'm in the presence of somebody who doesn't understand math, or this is just a gag, or civil disobedience, or I don't know what's happening. But we're not having a conversation anymore. We have these tools of rationality built in that have been refined through education and just many conversations, and through scientific learning, et cetera, and through scientific learning, et cetera. Again, our bullshit detector is something that goes off or not based on no act of free will. And when, all of a sudden, you see the light, you know, just on your own, through no outside influence, it just happens. And then when you recognize, oh Jesus, no, I thought that made sense, but no, here's this contradiction over here. No, I got to go back to square one.

Speaker 1: 1:28:01

That just happens right, and I find this actually empowering in a way, because the dominoes have fallen, so that I am the person that I am and I have a certain neural network that is expressing itself in a way, and I'm going to continue to play this role. I don't think it's disempowering. It's basically saying the dominoes have fallen, so that I am me and I am going to continue to be me, because I am contributing as an agent in this game of agents that are somehow influencing each other, and hopefully it's all Hegelian and it goes into a more perfect zeitgeist, but sometimes it doesn't feel that way.

Speaker 3: 1:28:36

Well, also I would just add to that is that it is a picture of openness and mystery that I find genuinely empowering. It suggests that you're not condemned to be merely who you were a moment ago or yesterday, because you have no idea how meaningful and how powerfully transformative your next insight could be, or your next conversation could be the next book you read, whatever it is. You're an open system. You're open to the influence of the world, and all these influences matter. I mean, it's all happening.

Speaker 2: 1:29:17

But I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. You can feel like a conduit who things are happening to and through, but there is a selection process within that paradigm, but that is also more of the stuff that's flowing through the conduit, all that selection is more.

Speaker 3: 1:29:37

And you get better at it, you can get worse at it, you can say sorry, I was drunk, I didn't mean to say what I said last night. All of that stuff is real. But the sense of free will is just the flip side of the coin of self. It is what it feels like to feel like a self. It's like you feel like I. You feel like me, you feel like a subject. It's me in the middle here.

Speaker 3: 1:30:03

I'm not identical to any experience. I'm the one having the experience. Right, there's experience over here, outside, you know, there's what I can see with my open eyes. There's my body, which is not me really. I mean, I might believe it is conceptually or scientifically, but in terms of my feeling, I'm the rider on the horse. I'm holding the reins of consciousness and intention and thought and I'm divorceable from all of that because I'm I. I'm me and this indigestible subject, that's the one that.

Speaker 3: 1:30:40

That's the guy who thinks he has free will, that's the guy who says I can still veto anything, I can still decide, I'm the decider. And then you say, ok, but you were scanning my brain and you predicted with perfect accuracy, 500 milliseconds before, that I was going to pick my right hand. I can decide to not care about any of that. I'm the guy who's going to throw a rock through this crystal palace. I mean, I think this goes back to Dostoevsky's Underground man, although it's been a very long time since I've read that book. Just like you can decide, I'm a passionate person. Who'm a passionate person, who's doesn't isn't going to be taken in by this, this temple of rationality here you're erecting in front of me and I can just perversely say no, I'm just going to do something I don't even want to do right now, because I, because I'm going to demonstrate my freedom, right Like, I don't even like broccoli, and I'm going to eat nothing but but broccoli all day today, just to show you that I'm free to do it.

Speaker 3: 1:31:38

Okay, but where did the idea come from? If you become a closer witness of your inner life, you'll see that the idea to just eat broccoli came out of nowhere. There's a mystery at our backs, subjectively speaking, there's a mystery at our backs and we are identical to it as a matter of experience. We are simply this condition in which everything is appearing and you can't think a thought before you think it. You can't intend an intention before you intend it. Everything's just springing into view, the idea that it could have gone otherwise. I mean knowing that everything was just the product of the last moment of the universe being what it was, and it's just more dominoes falling.

Speaker 1: 1:32:23

Sam, I did something unfair here and I enlisted you in an impossible task to convince Natasha of this.

Speaker 3: 1:32:30

I don't think it's impossible. I think Natasha is getting the firmware upgrade.

Speaker 1: 1:32:37

No, but listen. I really appreciate you spending so much time with us. Yeah, great to meet you I want to tell you that I read the Moral Landscape. I read Free Will. I'm a big fan of the Making Sense podcast. I listen to you pretty much every day due to waking up, so you've had a profound impact on my life and I want to thank you for that and I appreciate what you're doing out there.

Speaker 2: 1:32:59

Oh, thank you so much, and we didn't even get to talk about lying. That was, oh my god, I'm frustrated. We're gonna have to do it.

Speaker 3: 1:33:07

We'll have to do it again. Sure thing, yeah, happy to do it.

Speaker 2: 1:33:11

Amazing to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 1:33:14

It's a pleasure.