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

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

the following is a conversation with sam harris one of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time he’s the host of the making sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind including the end of faith the moral landscape lying free will and waking up he also has a meditation app called waking up that i’ve been using to guide my own meditation quick mention of our sponsors national instruments valcampo athletic greens and linode check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that sam has been an inspiration to me as he has been for many many people first from his writing then his early debates maybe 13 14 years ago on the subject of faith his conversations with christopher hitchens and since 2013 his podcast i didn’t always agree with all of his ideas but i was always drawn to the care and depth of the way he explored those ideas the calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult at times controversial discourse i really can’t express in words how much it meant to me that he sam harris someone who i’ve listened to for many hundreds of hours would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast and more that he thought i had a unique voice that added something to this world whether it’s true or not it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able to do this thing and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words meeting sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with sam harris i’ve been enjoying meditating with the waking up app recently it makes me think about the origins of cognition and consciousness so let me ask where do thoughts come from well that’s that’s a very difficult question to answer uh subjectively they appear to come from nowhere right i mean it’s just they they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively right so which is to say that if you pay attention the nature of your mind in this moment you realize that you don’t know what you’re going to think next right now you’re expecting to think something that seems like you authored it right you know you’re not unless you you’re schizophrenic or you have some kind of thought disorder where you where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you they do have a a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them and people readily identify with them they feel like what you are i mean this is the thing this is the spell that gets broken with meditation our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought right which is fairly paradoxical because how could you as a mind as a self you know if there if there were such a thing as a self how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just springs into into conscious view but and you know meditation is ultimately about examining that that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the the freedom that’s on the other side of that identification but the um subjectively thoughts simply emerge right and you don’t think them before you think them right there’s this first moment where you know just anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves i mean just imagine something or remember something and just just pick a memory any memory right you’ve got a storehouse of memory just promote one to consciousness did you pick that memory i mean let’s say you remembered breakfast yesterday or you remembered what you said to your spouse before leaving the house or you remembered what you watched on netflix last night or you remembered something that happened to you when you’re four years old whatever it is right it first it wasn’t there and then it appeared and that is not a i’m sure we’ll get to the topic of free will ultimately uh that’s not evidence of free will right why are you so sure by the way it’s very interesting after no no free will of my own yeah um everything just appears right but what else could it do and so that’s that’s the subjective side of it objectively you know we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts all of our thoughts are [Music] uh at bottom what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically i mean that these are the products of some kind of neural computation and neural um representation when you’re talking about memories is it possible to pull the string of thoughts to try to get to its root to try to dig in past the the obvious surface subjective experience of like the thoughts pop out of nowhere is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of from the the firing of the cells or is it a useless pursuit to dig that to dig into that direction well you can get closer to many many subtle contents in consciousness right so you can notice things more and more clearly and have a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated and more interesting and if you take psychedelics you know it opens up you know why depending on what you’ve taken and the dose you know it opens in directions and to an extent that you know very few people imagine would be possible but for having had those experiences but this idea of you getting closer to something to the the datum of of your mind or such as something of interest in there or something that’s more real is um is ultimately undermined because there’s no place from which you’re getting closer to it there’s no your part of that journey right like we we we tend to start out you know whether it’s in meditation or or in any kind of self-examination or you know taking psychedelics we start out with this default point of view of uh feeling like we’re the kind of on the the rider on the horse of consciousness or we’re the we’re the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness right but we’re so we’re differentiated from what we know cognitively uh introspectively but that feeling of being differentiated that feeling of being a self that can strategically pay attention to some contents of consciousness is what it’s like to be identified with some part of the stream of thought that’s going uninspected right like that it’s a false point of view and when you see that and cut through that then this sense of this this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth ultimately everything is right on the surface everything there’s no center to consciousness there’s just consciousness and its contents and that those those contents can change vastly again if you drop acid you know the the contents change but there’s in some sense that doesn’t represent a position of depth versus the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart so you’re taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and you’re riding it and the actual riding is very shallow this is all surface so let me ask about that horse what’s up with the horse what what is consciousness from where does it emerge how like fundamental is it to the physics of reality how fundamental is it to what it means to be human and i’m just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems yeah well it remains to be seen if we can if we will build it uh purposefully or just by accident this is a major ethical problem potentially uh that i mean my concern here is that we we may in fact build artificial intelligence that passes the turing test which we begin to treat not only as super intel