Transcription
I mean, there's a lot that my brain is doing that that I can't inspect consciously. And the truth is, as a matter of my conscious experience, I can't even tell that I have a brain. Right? That's a pretty big blind spot.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Sam Harris. And I'm so pleased to have this opportunity, Sam, to talk with you. You write and talk about a wide range of topics, including the problems with faith, morality, free will, secular enlightenment, gun ownership, the dangers of the Islamic religion, and more. And what really impresses me is not so much the wide range, but you're what I would call a stand-up guy. You stand up for your convictions, and you speak to them truthfully. From your experience, from your knowing, and I really respect that. And I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.
Let me just tell you a little bit more about Sam. He's the author of five New York Times bestsellers, neuroscientist, philosopher, host of the widely acclaimed Making Sense podcast, and he's the creator of the Waking Up app for people who want to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context. Sam, welcome.
Thank you. Thank you. It's great to meet you. Happy to be here. Wonderful to meet you, too. I'm surprised that it's taken so long for our life paths to converge for right here, this moment, but I'm so happy that we're on.
Okay. Well, I well, I heard your voice somewhere. I I think it was probably on your own podcast, and I thought this is if ever there was a great podcasting voice, this is this is a voice I have to meet. So. You really uh you um that you can't be the you can't be the first time you've heard this, but you've just got this amazing radio timeless radio voice. So, congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you. Came with the body and everything.
Yeah. With it.
So, about 10 years ago, I hosted a 23-part interview series called Waking Up. What does it really mean? Mhm. And the thing that astonished me the most after doing 23 interviews is that people didn't answer the same way. I was shocked. I was like, wow, people use the same word, waking up, spiritual awakening, and they mean different things by it. So, I wanted to start there and hear precisely what Sam Harris means by waking up.
Yeah, well, it can mean a a few things. I think the the center, the bull's-eye for me, and this is really the the direct influence of of the non-dual teachings in in Buddhism and and the Indian tradition on me. This is you know, really Dzogchen and Advaita. Um it's not that those two schools think they teach precisely the same thing, but I basically think they do. You know, albeit the methods are different, but I think the goal is the same, and and the goal is really to recognize that the sense of self, the sense that there's a subject in the middle of experience, that to to whom experience refers, that there's a there's an I uh that is appropriate in experience. It's not identical to experience, but it's kind of on the on the edge of it or in the middle of it. The subject in the head, that's an illusion. Right? So, you're you're you're waking up from the the dream of of subject-object perception, and especially when you're certainly when you're talking about the mechanics of psychological suffering, you're waking up from the dream of identification with thought. Right? The sense that this next arising thought is what you are subjectively. Right?
I mean, this is not something that people would necessarily assert conceptually. I mean, most people, certainly most educated people in the West, people who believe that we've understood something scientifically about the nature of of ourselves, that they're not going to think that they're they really are identical to their thoughts, or they're going to think they're identical to their bodies, probably. And if they're if they're religious in any sense, that they're they think they're identical to their souls, you know, inside their bodies, very likely. But there's this there's this sense of a feeling identical to thought that really is the default state for most of us. You just you the the thoughts sneak up upon us unawares, and we just they they inhabit us. And when you obviously in in meditation, you learn to recognize them as as appearances in consciousness, but unrecognized, strangely, this next piece of language or this next image, this next memory, this next judgment, this next, you know, kindling opinion, just feels like me, right? It just feels like, okay, this is you know, there's no distance there's no subjective distance between me and the voice in my head which is thinking this next thought. And that that's that's the default state. And that really is in many ways deeply analogous to being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming.
You know, when we when we go to sleep, we we we fall into a dream state. I think the most remarkable thing about dreams is that we're totally unsurprised to suddenly find ourselves in this new condition, right? You're you're safely in your bed, you fall asleep, and then however many however many minutes later, in subjective time, it's more or less instantaneous, you're somewhere else, you know, you're surrounded by other people, the people you've never met, or famous people, or dead people, or and you're and unless it's a lucid dream, unless you have some reality testing going on that that links it to your waking state, the most remarkable thing is that we don't even notice this transition. I mean, we have no sense that the the laws of physics have been have been suspended for us, that our, you know, our psychological continuity has been has been interrupted. We're just ready to to feel that we are this the subject in the next circumstance, and something like that happens with thought more or less every moment of our waking lives. We just are borne away by this voice in our heads, or by this stream of imagery, and it totally defines our our sense of being in the world. I mean, if you think a thought of self-hatred, or you think a thought of regret, or you think of the person who died, who you that who you deeply miss, you know, if you have no perspective on those thoughts, all of a sudden, that is you. That is your that is your emotional state. That is your life. And it's very strange that thought has this kind of power over us. I'm not saying that thought is something we want to get rid of. Uh obviously, thought is is quite necessary for our functioning as as human beings, but it is the the the mechanism that delivers virtually all of our psychological suffering, and meditation offers a way to break that spell.
Sam Harris is not the thinker. You're waking up from something. I get that, from identification with thought and with being the thinker. So, there's a waking up from, but what about the waking up to? What do you discover you are? How would you language that?
Uh well, I tend to use the word consciousness or or awareness. I use those as synonym for what remains when you're when you're not shattering experience with concepts. Right? So, you there really is just consciousness and its contents. And the contents are in in some basic sense indivisible from consciousness itself. Right? This is a very traditional view in in Advaita or in Dzogchen or you know, in Mahamudra or even or even Zen. I mean, any any non-dual school would would give you some version of this where you have a this condition that is the basis of of all experience, all subjectivity. That the feeling that it's like something to be what you are is is consciousness. And this is this would be no less true even if you were radically confused about everything. I mean, even if even if this is all a dream, even if this is all an illusion, even if you know, nothing is as it seems, there is this seeming. There is this experience of something. And you know, you know, for lack of a better word, many of us call that consciousness or awareness. And everything you can experience is appearing in that space.
And I I should be clear. I'm not making any metaphysical claims about this. I'm not saying that uh that consciousness is the the foundation of all reality, that you know, that it preceded the Big Bang, say. I'm not I'm not I'm not saying that that insight into non-duality teaches you anything about cosmology, right? It it clearly doesn't. Right? So, we I think we can bracket all of those metaphysical questions about how consciousness relates to the brain or the physical universe. Those are very interesting um I get they're they're consequential for certain questions. I mean, we haven't figured all of that out yet, obviously, but it really doesn't matter for the claims I'm making about the possibilities of experience and about the nature of human suffering. Uh so, you can bracket the metaphysics. I'm happy to talk about it if it interests you, but I just want to be clear that I'm talking about the nature of experience and what can be realized from the from the first-person side, if you simply pay close attention to what it's like to be you.
Right, but here's where I'd love to understand a little bit more from your perspective. >> Mhm. In the waking up process, there's this discovery of consciousness or awareness that isn't touched by the contents that come and go. And yet you're over there, wherever you are. What's geography are you in? And I'm over here. We have different Mhm. experiences, perspectives. There's a uniqueness of Sam Harris, the stand-up guy that I mentioned, and Tami Simon with the radio voice. How do you understand that?
Well, I I think that um it's obvious that that the consciousness of contents and you know, our minds it is um these things, these phenomena are are in some unavoidable sense born of our body and our and our our entanglement with the with the world, right? I mean, so there's it's I don't think you can be a um Again, I would like to bracket the metaphysics because I'm I'm somewhat agnostic about the the kind of the final answers here. It's it's pretty clear we don't know them. So, consciousness for me is distinct from mind in the sense that it it still remains a mystery as to how it relates to neurophysiology. Mind itself, right? Like the functions of a human mind, our ability to process language, our ability to map the the physical world onto our visual field onto our um visual cortex, right? I mean, all of that is clearly based on what the brain is doing, right? We know through through now about 150 years of neurology and emerging neuroscience and psychology that you that the mind as such isn't independent of the brain, right? So, that's just so the information processing of the brain really is creating a lot of the phenomena that we can be conscious of, right? So, that this is a you know, again, slightly confusing, but I I would hold consciousness itself aside, the fact that it's like something to have a mind, the fact that it's like something to be what you are. I would hold that aside as a as still a a remaining mystery, but as to the phenomenon you know, what it's like to be you is is uh powerfully dependent upon you as a physical system over there, wherever you are, right? And and so it is for me, right? So, the fact that I don't wake up with your memories and you don't wake up with mine, that's not a mystery from my point of view. I mean, your memories are are encoded in the the neural substrate of your brain, right? Now, whether we could copy them onto the hard drive of some future computer, that's that's an open question, right? This is this is all interesting and and and questions about progress in AI come here and um and if if in fact consciousness is just an emergent property of information processing on some level, well, then, you know, questions of conscious AI will will one day be something we have to entertain. Um and uh but again, that's that's still not yet known.
So, from my point of view consciousness itself is in some ways deeply impersonal because the thing that would make it personal is the is the specifics of of its contents, right? My my my consciousness is I would imagine totally identical to yours except for the fact that over here it's populated by my memories and my pains and pleasures, my attitudes, etc. So, um and that again is not a mystery because the only place you know, but my particular pain in my knee can appear is over here where my knee is, right? And and and in the nervous system that is, you know, mapping the inputs to my knee, you know, in my in the physical in the cortex of my brain, right? So, um it certainly seems that not every part of the human brain is producing conscious experience, right? I mean, again, this is this is another mystery. It's it's still not entirely mapped and it's I can't be entirely confident of this. I mean, it's possible that parts of the the brain that we we think are consciously dark may in fact be conscious in ways that that that would surprise us, but um at certainly at the gross level, it seems that the totality of what I can be conscious of as a mind is a subset of the neural activity that's occurring in my brain and and perhaps a smallish subset, right? I mean, there's a lot that my brain is doing that that I can't inspect consciously. And the truth is as a matter of my conscious experience, I can't even tell that I have a brain, right? That's a pretty big blind spot, right? I mean, there's no no experience you're going to have in meditation that is going to deliver the details of neurophysiology and it won't even deliver the fact that your brain exists or is as is really plays any role at all in in driving your experience. So, we're we're not we we don't subjectively, we don't have a perfect concept of of what we are in our totality, but I would argue that again, that doesn't really matter for when we're when we're talking about the promise of of meditation and the and the um the nature of the self, the kinds of illusions we're taken in by and the way in which they produce suffering for us.