"Sam Harris"

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Hey, everybody, it's Sean Hayes.

I'm here with Jason Bateman and Will Arnett.

And this is a show called Smart List,

where one of us brings on a surprise guest

that the other two don't know about.

And it's super fun.

And here we go. Is that good?

No, that was terrible.

Smart.

Smart.

Smart.

Smart. Smart.
smart smart smart smart smart smart smart smart smart Just chat like you're a normal human being, Sean. Can you do that for like a minute? Is that possible? Well, do you have a stop on? You can go.
I have this pair of shorts that I wear and I get embarrassed for myself because they're on the verge of being too short, like the 1970s. Do you prefer short shorts or like long board shorts? Well, this is going to sound like I'm quoting a song, but I like short shorts.
You mean for all the 80 plus listeners? I like a short short. If you're asking me, honestly, I do like a short short.
Well, because look what I'm asking. You're just fucking disgusting.
Thank you. You would wear Denifloss just to show off your legs and your tan.
That's true. And my, Alessandra said to me today, she said, you have the smallest tan line like I wear a G-string, which I don't.
You kind of do. I'd love to.
Have you ever worn a G-string? You look like you would wear it confidently and people would be so embarrassed for you. i bought a speedo when i went to france i bought a speedo as a bit and i wore it a little bit my friends were like dude you gotta stop with the speedo it's disgusting it was so gross so will if you and i were on a deserted island together how long before you made the first move how how long is the life expectancy? On the island? On the island.
I don't know, maybe like three years. Okay, so...
You're looking at me for three years. How long before you go, hey, that looks...
I'd like to hit that. Shoot, two years and 364 days.
If we knew that at three years it was over, I guess the last day. The last day you'd be like, I could hit that.

Just her fuck it for the last day.

Yeah, fuck it.

What do I care? Okay. There's

Jason. Now I've got it.
And we're rolling.

Yeah. Can you hear us? Oh, this is so

exciting. I can hear you and I can see you.

You're receiving me. So,

Jason, you missed my incredible question earlier.

If we were all three on a deserted island

together, how long before both of you made a move on me? To eat you? Yes. He'd see me as a bag of Doritos.
Knowing Bateman's snacky tendencies would be hour six. I know.
Okay, guys. Our guest today.
I think we've lost the three people that were listening to us. I've never met this person.
Oh. I've always wanted to.
I'm a huge fan. This person probably hung up too.
He's an author, a philosopher, a neuroscientist, and he has a very successful podcast. His academic background is in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.
So I totally geek out on this stuff. Definitely has hung up.
Mostly I wanted to meet him because of his religious philosophies. He's the first person to introduce me to the idea of atheism so i'm super duper excited for all of us to meet sam harris no kidding gentlemen hello sam sam harris hello there nice to meet you i'm so glad you didn't hang up on i didn't know we were gonna be talking about the x-ray to donner party so listen first of all sam i can't even believe I'm looking at you.
I'm meeting you. If you only knew how I've been a super duper gigantic fan for so long, you are so fascinating to me and there's so much to get to.
I feel like, you know, it's like Christmas morning and Christmas, you know, is about the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ of which you don't believe. But because of you, I first started deeply questioning all things religion.
And I want to just start at the beginning. Can you pinpoint the one experience or person or whatever it is that enlightened you? Because I can look to you and say, you are the person that enlightened me.
On this particular point of disbelief in a personal God? Yeah, all that. Yeah.
It really wasn't one person. I mean, I think I, you know, most people who don't get indoctrinated into religion start that way, right? I mean, you have to be convinced that a certain book was authored by the creator of the universe.
Otherwise, you wouldn't just spontaneously form that belief. So I didn't, in my upbringing, I didn't have any, I didn't have any atheist indoctrination.
I mean, I honestly knew no, before I wrote my first book, The End of Faith, which sort of inducted me into the crowd of atheists, I didn't think in terms of atheism versus religion. In fact, the word atheist doesn't even appear in the book, but I did not have a religious background I was reacting to.
I mean, the end of faith, as you know, was my immediate reaction to September 11th. I mean, once people started flying planes into our buildings.
Wow. So from after 9-11, you wrote that.
Because the book I read that completely enlightened me was Letter to a Christian Nation. That was your second book.
Right. So that was my second book.
Yeah. And I was reading it and I was just like i was just like yeah why aren't we we're never taught to question things well not like in the 70s and 80s you know when i was growing up we weren't told to question things we just accept it because that's the thing you were born into you know wait quick quick sean be honest did you read it or listen to it it was read to me yeah that's what i thought and i i needed pictures.
I needed pictures drawn.

No, but to you, it just seems like we're all forced to label ourselves in some kind of category of religion or lack thereof and then get judged for whatever we choose.

Do you feel people have, that they have to stake a claim of some kind of faith or like a non-faith or just can someone just be neutral?

Or it feels like we always, all of us have to say what we are yeah no so i've resisted that that demand because that really is demand that's coming from theology right so i mean this is a controversial point among atheists but i've i've often said um i mean i think there was a talk on youtube i think it's called the problem with atheism i've often said that said that we don't have to define ourselves in these terms. I mean, no one defines himself as a non-astrologer, right? You don't have to resist astrology by first joining a group of non-astrologers and then going to bad conferences and bad hotels, you know, and organizing around this variable of not being an astrologer.
And that's what atheists tend to do. Let me ask you this, Sam.
Because I've always wondered this. And I've got to say, you know, I grew up, I went to Canada, what was called Anglican schools, which is Episcopalian in this country.
That's hockey in the morning and Bible study after lunch. That's right.
Yeah. And then hockey.
And then hockey again. And then hockey again.
So it's like a hockey sandwich, but then they just called it Anglicanism, but, but a church of England, whatever. And my, but I don't know enough about it, even though I sort of studied it, et cetera, at school.
And one of my sisters actually has a number of degrees of bachelor of religion, master in theology from Yale divinity school, et cetera. But it seems to me as sort of the layman, literally, that the thing that has always lended legitimacy to religion is just time, right? Does that seem fairly accurate? I think more to the point, death.
Without death, without the ending of personal time, there'd be no rationale for those. But I mean, you know, you look at the sort of the genesis, if you will, thank you, of the Mormon church.
You know, Joseph Smith was laughed out of upstate New York. He was kicked out of every place that he went and, you know, that the Church of Latter-day Saints.
And I mean no offense to people who happen to be, but that that was for a long time that they were seen as heretics, whatever, and they were kicked out of every town they went to. But eventually, over a certain amount of time, they became legitimized as a religion.
Is that fair to say in that all religions kind of go along that same route? We have a lot of religions that have come up that have been very popular in California in the last 50 years that a generation from now will be, I don't know, I can't think of

one off the top of my head, but that might be a generation from now considered to be

less of a cult and more of an actual religion. That seems to be a theme.

Well, I mean, it's not a fact that speaks to the truth of any one doctrine, obviously, right?

Thank you. to be a theme.
Well, I mean, it's a, it's not a fact that speaks to the truth of any one doctrine, obviously, right? So it is just a fact that given enough time and a large enough population of subscribers, a cult begins to seem and it begins to be treated as a mainstream religion. But, and then certain religions like Mormonism sort of on the boundary here the boundary here because the truth is we know too much about Joseph Smith.
The origins of Mormonism are not sufficiently shrouded in the mists of history so as for it to get the treatment that, you know, Christianity and Judaism and Islam get, which is a free pass on all these questions of miracles. And we just know, you know, the South Park episode on Mormonism is just too much like the actual history of Mormonism for Mormonism to survive, you know, full contact with modern reality.
Well, and the musical by those guys called Book of Mormon. It was like, awesome.
But you know, my beef is simple with Catholicism. It's where's the beef, right? Yeah, where is your beef? You've been asking that.
And if we, back, see, he likes to take it back to the deserted island. I'll show you where the beef is.
Just let the dogs out and let us know what your beef is. Wait, who let the dogs out? So look, Sam's checking his email.
So my beef is simple. I grew up in a die-hard catholic family my aunt and uncle on my mom's side were a nun and a priest respectively left the convent and got married and but grew up hardcore

catholic and then obviously the main topic of discussion whenever you bring up catholicism

and people who question it is the hypocrisy right so here i am this gay kid growing up catholic

Thank you. Obviously, the main topic of discussion whenever you bring up Catholicism and people who question it is the hypocrisy, right? So here I am, this gay kid growing up Catholic.
I don't understand why I'm going to hell and the priests who committed child abuse to the thousands of children around the world aren't going to hell. They're forgiven.
And basically the hypocrisy was the thing that always bothered me. So when I saw Religious by Bill Maher, which I think is a great documentary.
It's fascinating. He questions all religions.
I emailed Bill afterwards and I go, all things being equal, if every religion in the world believes their God is the correct God, don't they all cancel each other out? Yeah. Yeah, no, that's one great point made by Bertrand Russell, a famous atheist.
He said that even if we knew that one of our religions was perfectly true, given that there are so many on offer, every religious believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability, right? You got at least five, and the truth is you got 500, but let's just say you only have five, then at best you've got a 20% chance of having picked right or been born into the right circumstance, right? Yeah. So, and that's just, that's where we are, and so they're mutually nullifying, and I think the most important point is that all they are, all these religions are, are records of human conversations, right? I mean, all we have is human conversation by which to orient in reality.
And the question is, do you want a 21st century conversation about the nature of reality and how to live within it? Or do you want to be anchored to an Iron Age conversation, right? Right, right. And religion is the only area in human thought where you win points for proving that you are immune to all possible evidence and argument.
And therefore, it's almost impossible to have a discussion about it. And that you're not open to conversation.
What's explicit here when you're making a faith claim is that, listen, these beliefs are so important to me that I'm not willing to talk about them rationally, really. I'll pretend to be rational, but the truth is I'm not actually open to evidence and argument that undercuts these cherished ideas.
And what we need is a willingness to talk about the full range of human experience and what we want to get out of human life and what's rational to want in human life in 21st century terms. And 21st century terms are intrinsically non-divisive because this is an open conversation that does not respect accidents of the geography of one's birth or the linguistic partitioning of the world, right? The fact that you grew up speaking one language as opposed to another.
No, all of the world's thinking can be translated now. We have no right to be provincial in our thinking ultimately, right? And religion is the only system of thought where the norm, the respected norm is, no, no, the conversation has to reliably break down on these most important questions about how to live and how to raise your children and what's worth dying for.
And I mean, this is, you know, and this is all totally respectable to just prove completely immune to persuasion on these points, no matter what science says, no matter what evidence shows up in terrestrial reality, right? So it's just, it's like there's no way to disconfirm these beliefs once you make this initial claim that we can't possibly understand God's will and this specific book was written by him. Yeah.
I was on a press junket once for an animated film that had to do with the subject of inventions. And the interviewer asked me, you know, what's your favorite invention? And I said, religion.
And the studio didn't like that answer. So I said, because to me, every single thing in the world is invented.
Yeah. Right? And so every concept is invented.
The word table is invented. A table itself is invented.
Religion is invented. Sean, are you currently on acid? Because these seem to be revelations.
You are. I don't want to lie down and elevate your feet.
You're telling me I'm not lying down right now? So there really is no harm in anybody having these deep-seated feelings of faith and belief unless those beliefs are absolute such that if someone is on your land that you think in your religion is entitled to you, you now have the justification and the moral right to kill that person. That's where everything went off the rails because obviously none of us here, probably no one listening, begrudges anybody for their own little set of beliefs if that keeps them on some moral path et cetera.
But when you start inflicting real world consequences on somebody because what somebody else believes is in violation or inconsistent with what you believe, obviously that's a recipe for disaster. And that's a problem we have in so many corners of this world, right? Well, no, it actually gets worse than that because beliefs don't have to be absolute.
They can just be probabilistic, right? Just take—let's say I think that prayer often works or stands a good chance of working. And just put me in a role of any kind of responsibility, right? I'm an airline pilot, right? And I think that I can sort of land the plane with prayer, right? I don't have to do the full safety check because God's watching out for me and my people.
And I'm going to protect all these passengers just fine with a little, you know, a little tour of the rosary or just a couple of mantras or people believe that sort of thing right now, as evidenced by the fact that they're willing to die under certain circumstances to make the rhetorical point. Or just imagine I'm a parent and, you know, there's endless numbers of stories of, you know, parents doing completely irrational things with their kids, you know, denying the medical care or imposing, you know, crazy punishments on them or putting them in circumstances that are, you know, just objectively dangerous and pointless based on some kind of slavish attachment to a religious idea.
Right. And the truth is, here's the worst case.
The most benign-looking belief, if held for the wrong reasons, if held dogmatically, could actually lead to massive loss of life because it resists being changed through further considerations about evidence. And the best example of this is something like all human life is sacred, right? And it's sacred from the moment of conception, right? Now, what could go wrong there? That is the most specific, you know, non...
That sounds like just a machine to produce nonviolence, right? Like, I honor all human life equally, all the way down to the embryo, and it's all just... It's worth perfectly protecting insofar as we're able, right? Okay, great, you know, default position, except we develop something like embryonic stem cell research, right? And now you've got religious maniacs who think that there are 500 souls in a Petri dish that they can't see, but they're fertilized ova.
And you can't experiment on fertilized ova, even if you were going to develop therapies to heal people who've got full body burns or spinal cord injuries or Alzheimer's disease. So we had in the US, in some ways we found a workaround, but for at least a decade...
Ovaltine. That was it, right? It was Ovaltine.
Yeah, that was the workaround. We lost at least a decade on embryonic stem cell research simply because of religious ideas about souls and petri dishes, right? Now, born of this default, again, on its face, totally benign notion that all human life down to the zygote needs to be respected equally.
But this is quite a crazy idea because you have people who are literally saying that speck in a Petri dish that I can't see is just as important to me. It's just as appropriate object of my moral concern as a girl who you can wheel up in a wheelchair who can't walk but may yet be able to walk if we made a breakthrough in spinal cord regeneration.
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Hey guys, everybody should have a support system, right? Who's your support system? My support system, as you well know, talk about it all the time, is Scotty. And of course, my two besties, Will and Jason.
Whenever I have a problem, an issue, I talk to them about it. And if they're not available, I will talk to a therapist.
And I've been going to therapy for a long time. And it's always great.
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Hilton, for the stay. Right.
I can't imagine how many arguments you've had with people with respect to that position on embryos, etc. And then also these are the people who are protecting those souls who are also very willing to allow everybody to have a gun or to shoot that gun or to kill criminals who are convicted of certain crimes.
How can you apply the same? How many millions of arguments have you had on that particular subject? Yeah, you know, the gun topic is also interesting. I have sort of nonstandard views there as well.
But you can push this view into obvious hypocrisy because people are, this is, I forget what the line is, but, you know, the Christian right really cares about you, you know, up until the moment you're born. And then, you know, then they have all kinds of ideas that seem to be antithetical to human wellbeing after that.
What we need is an error correcting mechanism by which to continually revise our policies and our norms in response to what we find out about the world. And what would that be? That really is free speech guided by intellectual honesty and guided by just an openness to evidence and argument, right? So it's very easy to imagine the conditions under which I could be convinced that Jesus is the son of God, right? I mean, there is some evidence that, you know, Jesus could show up, right? If the second coming and the rapture happens as advertised by evangelicals, you know, that'll be a science experiment, you know, finally consummated in human history, right? Just take a look at Will.
I mean, yeah. Listen.
Pretty damn close. I think that the only solution to these problems is always economic.

If we make it economically disadvantageous to believe in a religion, then it will shift.

It's the only thing that moves anything in this country consistently.

I mean, you know, they ask people to stop smoking cigarettes not because the fucking government gives a shit about us smoking cigarettes but because they didn't want to have to pay for the health care of people who are sick.

Full stop. Yeah.
No, I don't think, well, I mean, there's some economic policy to change here, which I don't think religions should have the tax advantages they do. I mean, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
But no, you can't be punishing people economically as a method for changing their minds. I think, you know, I think this larger question of incentives in society is a huge one.
And we definitely want to be, we want to make things easier and easier, which is to say we want to incentivize, we want the incentives aligned for people to be moral and, and responsible and do the right thing, even when their moral intuitions would reliably fail.

And we want them to be rational.

But it's more a matter of norms.

It's not a matter of actual penalties.

It's like, what is it taboo to say?

You can go through a PhD program in any fundamental science,

physics, chemistry, biology,

to say nothing of the social sciences, and never have your religious beliefs challenged, right? Like literally, you can get a PhD in physics, all the while being a fundamentalist Christian who thinks the universe is 6,000 years old, right? The Bible is a perfect record of its origin. And now you would be, you have to navigate that personally with some considerable cognitive dissonance, right? I mean, there's just no way to square your religious beliefs with what we know about physics, you know, to take the age of the universe as just a single data point.
But there's no one in a lab who's going to sit you down and say, listen, okay, you, you know, I know what you think you know about, you know, God and angels and the afterlife and, flying and healing the dead and raising the dead and all the rest and the coming resurrection. None of this makes any sense in terms of what you're learning here.
Wait, he could fly? Yeah, he could fly. I didn't know that.
You too will fly if you're a rapture. That might turn me.
That's why he wears a cape. That's why he wears the fucking cape.
I always thought it was a different guy. You know, I remember one time being in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and having a guy who was a newcomer saying, and I'm not, who knows, it could be anybody, saying, he said, I can't get around this acceptance of God.
I can't. I'm a scientist and I'm having a really tough time with it.
And he basically ended up dropping out. And I get it.
But isn't there a secular hack for that in AA? There is. Just talk about the universe at large and all that we don't know about it.
There is. And I, in fact, even talked to him about it and said, listen, I struggle with this idea, of course, of organized religion and God and all that sort of stuff.
And I have a hack that I use that helps me, you know, and that is my sort of interpretation of what God is. I use that in order to get over the same hurdle that you're talking about.
I have a totally random, but not random, but kind of random question. What do you say about all those people that claim to die on the operating table and then came back? Yeah.
Like they even describe what they saw above them in the room. And there's so many of those stories.
So what is that white light? Do you believe in it? What is it? Right. So, yeah, this is a clearly an experience people seem to have had, right? And I think the crucial thing to observe there is that none of these people actually died, right? Because they came back and told us about this experience, right? So they didn't suffer brain death, right? So the brain is on and functioning and the fact that they can come back and talk to us is proof of that much, right? So yeah, many of them suffered cardiac arrest or some other, you know, experience that, you know, physiologically that justifies them calling this a near-death experience.
And then there's all these other experiences people have in meditation and through psychedelics and just through other perturbations of their nervous system. It's DMT.
It's just DMT. Yeah.
What's DMT? So DMT, which I haven't taken. I have a, you know.
Yet. Experimented with psychedelics,

but I have not tried DMT,

though I would like to. Will will hook you up.

Will, usually the first one's free, right?

There's no hookup.

It's like the four of us

are going on a ranch for a weekend

and it's like very safe,

from what I understand.

I've never done it either.

Oh, is this that drink you drink

and then you get crazy?

Well, you're talking about ayahuasca there,

which is also DMT,

but it's a slower release orally active.

He's a rapper, isn't he?

He was.

He was.

But DMT, as Samuel is about to explain to you, it occurs naturally in the human body and you can also get it from plants, et cetera.

Right, Sam?

Yeah.

So DMT is a molecule which is almost ubiquitous in nature.

It's in plants and it's an endogenous neurotransmitter, the function of which we don't really understand, but our brains do produce it, although arguably probably not in the kind of quantity that would necessarily explain near-death experiences. But that is one thesis about near-death experience.
Maybe this is a sudden release of DMT. If you're about to tell me that DMT is going to one day give us the ability to fly, I'm totally doing it.
Apparently, DMT is the smoking or injected version of it, which is a very similar experience, apparently, is the most intense, you know, among those who have tried everything, they claim that if you get enough on board, I mean, I think there's a challenge to actually smoke enough. It's supposed to be very unpleasant to smoke.
So if you get enough, the experience is of being kind of shot out of your body and going elsewhere. And how you characterize that elsewhere is, you know, open to some debate, but it is an elsewhere that puts you rather often in contact with what seem to be other beings, right? And these beings have a kind of alien insect-like quality.
I mean, Terrence McKenna, who raved about this for decades, called them self-transforming machine elves, right? So you could suddenly appear in a room where these elf-like aliens are creating objects, which, you know, on Terrence's account, were a kind of language. And it's just like the most, you know, blindingly beautiful, bejeweled Fabergé eggs of meaning that they're busily trying to give you and to get you to do what they're doing, right? But the crucial part of the phenomenology here is- Jason and Will are my DMT.
That's how I got into that. I think you're going to get to, which is that this happens to people and people describe very similar experiences, right? It sounds like hell getting there though.
Well, the thing that's interesting about this is that unlike most other psychedelic experiences, where it is just that the sense is of having your perception of reality totally changed, right? And you can lose your sense of self in all of that. And that's very common with LSD or psilocybin.
With DMT, again, the smoked version, I don't think this is quite as common on ayahuasca. It's got its own range of experiences.
But the smoked or injected experience of DMT is one of being put elsewhere and finding yourself in relationship to other beings. And again, these beings are almost never the characters sprung from human religion, right? People aren't meeting the Virgin Mary or Jesus.
They're meeting aliens or insects or reptiles. I mean, like, you know, one guy claimed to have been raped by a crocodile, you know, in one of these case studies.
Maybe it's on that island, Sean. Probably not as good as it sounds.
Yeah. But again, what's striking to me is that people often describe this, the same experience, people who, you know, over the

years. as it sounds.
Yeah. There you go.
But again, what's striking to me is that people often describe the same experience. People who, you know, over the years will often describe meeting these aliens, these little insect-like people or whatever and they all have this sort of similar characteristics and similar experience which is remarkable.
Yeah. So the same cute crocodile in everybody's recollection? Not everybody gets the crocodile.
Not everybody gets the crocodile. That's the boss fight you don't want.
And the experience is like 20 minutes. It's not eight hours.
That's the other thing that's amazing. It's less.
And there's no fee. This is free? If you're in the right circles.
Is there a link or anything? Free to those who can afford it. Very expensive to those who can't.
Yes, we have a discount code in the chat, Jason, and you can access it. I know you're big on mindfulness and meditation.
Yeah, so meditation is another way of coming at some of this terrain. And it's actually, it informed my view of religion, too, because I spent in my twenties, a lot of time, uh, practicing meditation.

I spent close to two years on silent meditation retreats, you know, you know, Buddhist context, but without thinking of myself really as a Buddhist, just wanting to explore, you know, just what was possible in terms of changing my moment to moment experience of the mind and the world. And, and then, you know, the, the, the first books I wrote were my effort to bring those kinds of insights into harmony with what we could understand about the mind through, you know, 21st century methods like neuroscience and moral philosophy and, and philosophy of mind.
And so there's clearly a baby in the bathwater we want to save in religion. I mean, there's no question that there's an experience you can have that makes you feel very much like, you know, someone like Jesus, right? Or Buddha, right? Like unconditional love is a state of mind that can be experienced.
And you can get there on MDMA if you are lucky, and you can get there by practicing meditation. And there are all kinds of other experiences on the menu, whether you get there through something like DMT or LSD or psilocybin, it's just like the mansion of possible experience is vast.
And some of these experiences have a lot to say about how good life could be in the present for more and more of us if we got our shit together. And unlike psychedelics, meditation is a very incremental and, you know, fairly predictable way of navigating that landscape of changes in mental state.
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Now, Sam, back to my two kind of just more random questions. Is there an afterlife is my one question.
And then my last question to you is define a good life because so

many people want to achieve happiness. And what does that mean to you? Right.
So on the first question, that really is a question about what is the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, right? So if consciousness is something that is being produced by information processing in the brain, in our case, and the brain dies, then you would expect the light that is consciousness to go out, right, without residue. There's nothing to lift off the brain and go elsewhere, certainly not to a heaven that, you know, has rivers of milk and honey and et cetera.
So the truth is we don't actually know

how consciousness is entangled with the physics of things.

We don't know how, at what point it arises.

We don't really know that neurons produce it,

although you're certainly on firm ground in neuroscience

and in science generally,

if that's your default assumption.

There's every reason to believe that the mind,

the rest of mind, language processing, an ability to see and hear and smell and think, that that is what the brain is doing, right? And if you damage parts of the brain, you can selectively damage those capacities. And if you damage the whole brain at death, there's every reason to believe you lose all of that, right? And this is another reason why the near-death experiences are a little fishy because people go into a tunnel of light and they recognize their grandmother

and they have conversations apparently in a language they understand.

I see a hot crocodile. I've been trying to get his number.

Sorry. Keep going, Sam.

So to recognize anyone's grandmother or a crocodile,

you're still retaining some faculties,

which we have every reason to believe are being mediated by brain activity, right?

So to know that it was a crocodile and not a buffalo

is to know something about animals.

There was no doubt, no doubt.

Sorry.

So that part of your temporal lobe

was probably still online.

Now, so the thesis here is that

if you destroy the brain entirely

as if by magic, all of your faculties, you know, go elsewhere and you are, you know, you enjoy some afterlife. There's reason to be skeptical of that, but consciousness itself, the fact that the lights are on, right? The fact that seeing and hearing and other sense experiences are associated with a point of view, right? Which need not be so, right? I mean, we're in the process of building artificial intelligence, which can see and hear and detect faces and parse natural language and all the rest.
And very soon on some of these tasks, it's already doing it better than we are. And ultimately we'll do everything better than we do.
But there'll be an open question. Is there something that it's like to be one of these machines? Are these machines conscious? Wait till the religious folks get their hands on those robots.
Right, right. Yeah, exactly.
Then we'll have to convert them. But no, but then there's a real question of, you know, could we inadvertently build conscious machines or areas of the internet inhabited by, you know, billions of conscious minds, right? Ex Machina.

Did you ever see that movie, Ex Machina?

Yeah, yeah.

That was great.

That was great.

So could we build either individual intelligences or simulated worlds populated by conscious

minds?

The interesting case is that we could do this inadvertently.

It could be just a fact that as you scale up an intelligence, consciousness comes along

for the ride at some point, right? And we could get there without actually understanding how consciousness arises. And we could then find ourselves in the position, wittingly or not, of having created hells and populated them, right? We could create machines that can suffer every bit as much as we can suffer or even more, you know, suffer in ways that we can't even imagine because these minds are not constituted like our own.
And obviously that'd be a terrible thing to do. And that's something that we could stumble into.
And a moral quandary if you talk about unplugging it. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, are you murdering your computer if you unplug it once your computer is conscious? Sure. Given that, so if you think that the conscious mind, like if we were to give Sean a lobotomy, would we notice? This is a great question.
I mean, because seriously, I haven't understood a word you said this entire podcast. There are things like lobotomies where you wouldn't notice, where the split brain procedure is something that, you know, grand mal epileptics get, where you divide the left and right hemispheres.
And for the longest time, people thought these people were unchanged. But what actually happens is that you have now created two islands of subjectivity in the brain and two independent points of view where the right hemisphere quite literally doesn't know what the left hemisphere is doing.
And you can tease this out in experiments. And you have created kind of two subjects, which is fascinating.
But I didn't answer your question. I think all of this is to say that the question about an afterlife or, you know, survival of death is a question about how consciousness arises, you know.
So whatever is true there, again, we have to bracket that. We don't yet know, although you're not going to embarrass yourself in science by assuming that it is at some level produced by computations in the brain and therefore the lights go out when you die.
But is there going to be a moment where scientists agree on that? Is that imminent, do you think, that they're going to say, okay, we've... That this is what happens when you die, you mean? Or no, or we finally figured out the moment where consciousness arises? I think it's conceivable, but I think what's even more likely is that we will lose sight of it as an interesting question because we will build machines that seem conscious to us.
They will drive our intuitions that cause us to ascribe consciousness to other people so fully that we will just lose sight of it as being an interesting question. At a certain point, whether they're humanoid robots or whether it's Siri on your phone, knowing more about you and passing every possible test of rationality and empathy and everything else you get from another person so well that, again, you'll just find yourself in a relationship.
You won't lose any more thought over whether this thing is conscious than you worry that whether your dog is conscious or whether your wife is, right? Right. Insert joke there.
Did you like that movie, Her, Spike Jonze, this movie? Yeah. Yeah, no, I thought that was pretty interesting too.
I thought the final vision of just them losing interest in us and disappearing was a great idea. Yeah, me too.
Beautiful movie. Spoiler.
Yeah. Yeah..
Yeah. Apologies.
So back to my other question, so sorry to repeat it, but like, so what constitutes a good life for Sam Harris? Ultimately, meditation is the reference point here. And I guess I would come back to this point of confusion that is very easy for people to fall into, which is meditate.
Ultimately, meditation can mean many different things, right? But what I mean by it and what I think we should mean by it is it's not actually something. It's not actually a practice.
When you're meditating, you're simply no longer lost in thought. You're not identified with thoughts as they arise.
And therefore, your attention is truly available to notice consciousness and its contents, right? And thoughts are among the contents of consciousness. So you're noticing, feeling, and seeing, and smelling, and the character of your experience more vividly.
And you're not being captured by this false point of view that you are the thinker of your thoughts. Right.
It's the absence of ego in a way, if you will. And, but for me, what was difficult was that maybe this is a condition of, of, of the world in which we live now.
I don't know if it was easier to meditate a hundred years ago or 200 years ago, but everything seems so busy. So I found it very, very hard when I first started to, to quiet my mind was, was much harder than I thought it would be.
And I guess that. How do you think we feel when you're talking? That's where, I wish you were on a two-year silent retreat.
Sam, sorry, please continue. So Sam, a good life wouldn't be Sunday afternoon watching your favorite football game with a beer.
Well, no, no, it could definitely be that. Okay.
But this point of view, once you recognize that, it's actually ultimately, it's not a matter of quieting the mind either. It's a matter of recognizing everything as it appears, including thoughts.
So there's a metaphor in Tibetan Buddhism which says that ultimately thoughts are like thieves entering an empty house. There's nothing for them to steal.
So you want to get to a point of view where everything is arising in its own place, right? There's just consciousness in its contents. And every experience you could possibly have, whether it's on DMT or watching football, drinking beer, all of it has a single status.
It doesn't preclude anything except the thing that does preclude and the reason why meditation is good for you ultimately, right? Apart from all the other ancillary benefits, like, you know, I mean, it may in fact be good for your health in other ways, but the truth is I would recommend it even if it were a little bad for you in all kinds of other ways for this reason, it cancels the mechanism in your mind that leads you to suffer unnecessarily, right? When you look at the character of your psychological suffering, all of your worry and your anxiety and your regret and your shame and your embarrassment, all of it, right, is a matter of thinking without knowing that you're thinking. That's what the self is, really.
I mean, the small self, the sense of being this embattled, you know, subject in the head, that's what it feels like to be lost in thought. I mean, you're having a conversation with yourself, paradoxically, that you're not able to inspect because you're busy, identified with each new thought that springs into consciousness.
I mean, so just to take it right down to the tracks of this conversation, I'm talking and each of you, if you're normal people, have a voice in your heads that is competing with just listening to what I'm saying, right? So I'm saying something and you might think, well, what the fuck does that mean, right? Well, that voice in the head, what the fuck does that mean? That, for most people, that feels like a self, right? That feels like what they are. And that just springs into view.
There's no perspective on it. There's no sense of there being space around it or that there's a condition in which it's appearing.
And meditation is a practice of just dropping back and recognizing thoughts, you know, images and sounds in the mind, the linguistic, you know, sounds. Taking a step back and so like eliminate all those feelings of

regret or doubt

or shame.

That is such a fascinating way.

It can sound too abstract

the way I put it, but

if you think of what will prevent

you from having

the best day of your life today,

we all know what it's like to be

deeply happy, at least

if only for moments.

To have a moment with your kids or your

Thank you. the best day of your life today.
I mean, we all know what it's like to be deeply happy, at least if only for moments, right? To have a moment with your kids or your spouse or just yourself, just watching a sunset. We all know what it's like to just fully connect with the present moment in a way that doesn't leave us looking over our own shoulder, wondering whether this is gonna get good or wondering what's gonna happen a few moments from now or thinking about the past and how to get back.
It's like, it's all about this moment right here. Yeah.
What is the thing that prevents that from happening on demand? It is an inability to pay sufficient attention to the present moment. Yeah.
I remember distinctly as a kid having moments of discomfort and thinking quite literally fantasizing about what it would be like to be a robot in that moment and to be to be completely cut off from emotion and i think sort of i was almost envious of of the the the ability to or the inability to um feel emotion or have those things or be in um you know i wanted to be cut off from that in that way the cut off from self and then i then I thought, well, that would be a great way to go through life. And then you could, you wouldn't be affected by anything.
Of course, the sort of hole in that is that I wouldn't be able to enjoy a good experience either, because I wouldn't be able to enjoy any, I wouldn't be able to have any experience. But this is a crucial point that, you know, mindfulness meditation, which is the type I recommend, isn't a matter of being cut off from even negative emotion.

I mean, so if you feel anger or regret

or sadness, whatever it is,

it's a matter of being willing to feel it totally.

I mean, let yourself burn up with that emotion.

The crucial difference is

every time you notice you're getting lost in thought

about why you have every reason to be angry or sad or how bad the future is going to be or what an asshole that person was or I can't believe they said that on Twitter about me. Fuck them, right? That conversation, you have to break the spell of identification with those thoughts and be willing to just feel the emotion.
And you feel it. You feel it 100%.
I mean, the normal, the default state is actually to avoid feeling it. We have resistance to these emotions.
So part of what keeps you stuck in this automaticity of thinking about, you know, your anger, say, is it's an effort to solve the problem of you don't want to feel this way anymore. You're angry and you're resistant to this feeling.
You don't want, you don't like this feeling. And now you're thinking about all the stuff you should do to discharge your anger.
You know, like, I'm just going to tell her to fuck off, right? Watch, I'm going to type this. And so all of that is a way of not actually being willing to fully feel it.
And if you do fully feel it and you break the connection to thought, nothing lasts. I mean, anger lasts for 15 seconds, right? So it's literally impossible to stay angry for a minute if you, unless you get lost in thought again about the reason why you should be angry.
And so that, on the other side of that realization is a freedom to just, you can decide, okay, well, how long do I want to stay angry about this? Like, is anger actually useful? I'm not saying anger is never useful, but it's rarely useful to maintain. I mean, for me, it's useful as a signal.
It's like a salient signal that, you know, something is really worth paying attention here. Like, okay, I'm in the presence of a total asshole who just did something to piss me off.
And now how do I want to respond? Responding from that place of anger isn't usually the best course. And so you, but it gives you this, if you don't have any perspective on it,

you will stay angry for as long

as you'll stay angry for.

I mean,

you'll stay angry

for a day,

a week,

and it'll have

all the behavioral

consequences it has.

And you have literally

no degree of freedom there.

I'm going to call you

next time I want to

fire off a reply

email to my mom

because I think

that you're going to be very...

Waiting is a good algorithm.

You're going to be

very helpful. She has been super annoying lately.
I don't mind saying that on the podcast. Well, Sammy, I can call you Sammy, right? Sure.
I really have been such a fan for so, so long. I want to thank you for being here today.
I could listen to you talk all day long. I know, it's incredible.
I really just find you so fascinating. And so thank you.
Great to meet you guys. Really appreciate it, Sam.
Thank you so much. I hope when civilization reboots, we can meet in person.
Yeah, that'd be a blast. What a delight that would be.
Yeah. Thanks for your time and your knowledge.
Thanks, Sam. Thank you, Sam.
Nice to meet you guys. Appreciate it.
Nice to meet you, Sam. See you, pal.
What a beautifully articulate guy he is i mean those are really abstract thoughts and to be able to i wanted to every all of his thoughts were so well thought out and articulated as you said and i wanted to every time he finished it like a really long great point i wanted to go that's what i always say um have you guys ever read letter to a christian nation it's really fascinating it's it's literally you can read it like in a day it's i'm such a fast reader i bet you i could read it in a minute you actually are a fast reader aren't you well i am yeah i do read a lot but i will read it and i know a bunch of people who are who are um friends who who we know who are big fans of his and and um talk about him all the time and love him, he's so... He's fascinating, right? Super smart.
You know what I meant to ask him? I meant to ask him if he knew, because I would think that Ricky, he and Ricky would share a lot of similar views. My new puppy? Not your new puppy, but I haven't spoken to your puppy, so I don't know.
Oh, because his name is Ricky. Yeah.
All right. Why would you say he and Gervais would be...
Because Gervais is a, he's a, I was going to say a big atheist. He's not a big atheist, but he, but these are a lot of, he has a similar point of view on a lot of this.
Did you ever see Gervais debate it with Colbert? No. It's fascinating.
You can YouTube it. It's really cool.
Wow. And funny.
Gervais is hilarious on this subject. He's great.
Yeah, he's. I wonder if they know each other.
That was, that was very, very fulfilling. Thank you for the brain meal there, Sean.
Yeah, for sure. Sean, what a guest.
What a guest. He's the best.
All right, until next time. Yeah, until next time.
Wait, what's my new sign-off? What was my new sign-off? Oh, I think it was... Bang! Pasta.
Pasta. Jesus Christ fuck I hope COVID ends soon it's eating your brain smart smart smart hey friends Jason here We're so excited the SmartList has officially joined the SiriusXM family.
We can't wait to announce new surprise guests who we know that you'll love. If you want to be the first to hear new episodes ad-free and a whole week early, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcast podcasts or visit Sirius XM.com slash podcasts plus to start your free trial today.
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