Ask Sam Harris Anything #1

hi I'm Sam Harris author of letter to a Christian nation and the moral landscape and the end of faith and I'm answering questions for reddit this is an ask Sam Harris anything our and I want to thank my friend Jason Calacanis at Mahalo for letting me use this studio incredibly nice of him to do that so I'm just going to jump right into question number one from ceará nor I've read all your books I've seen most of your lectures and I'm a huge fan Thank You Sara Noor and my question is what should we do next I feel like I'm adrift in a sea of rationality no clear goal in sight what do you think the practical goals are for the for a passionate pro reason activists especially those still in college well this is a question I get all the time it's a it's rather inconvenient that I don't have a good answer for it I actually don't think there is a good answer for this question I don't think there's a single programmatic step to take I think obviously I think atheist groups and conferences and literature are useful but I think they're useful only up to a point because they usually you have to think about what the goal is the end goal I think we have to get to a time in which people are embarrassed to pretend to know things they don't know that's that to me is the is that the center of the bullseye and that that covers religion that covers any form of irrationality or dogmatism really I think I think the goal is to get to a time where people people's detectors are really finely calibrated and where we in public discourse in journalism in in at the level of newspaper editorials and and and every conversation that matters we are reluctant to give people a pass when they pretend to know things they don't know now the question is how do you engineer that and I think rallying around some kind of political identity like atheism or anything else it's probably not the thing that's going to push the ball over the line I think it may be maybe necessary and good to do now obviously I support it to some degree and I have a my own secular organization project reason but the analogy I use is many of you probably heard this is to something like racism and what is it that is has fundamentally eroded racism in our culture I don't think it's a civil rights act I don't think it's the n-double a-c-p I think those are essential pieces but you know I would take Chris Rock over the n-double-a-cp any day in terms of the effect on the culture the effect on changing attitudes towards towards African Americans in this case and so we have to change we have we need an attitudinal change in the culture and the only way to do that is to make sense sort of all at once on a thousand sides and to not not tolerate obvious and so that's not it's not one answer to what you should do getting out of college or what you should do it you know in whatever place you're in in culture I think you the burden is to make sense the burden is to is to support people who make sense read good books write good books have consequential conversations ask hard questions of people who clearly don't know what they're talking about and expose their ignorance and hypocrisy and double think to the world wherever you can so for better or worse that's that's the only answer I got at the moment according to Wikipedia after leaving Stanford you travel to Asia and you studied meditation with Hindu and Buddhist teachers could you give some insight into this period how significant was this time for you do you still practice meditation yeah I do practice meditation still and this period in my life was was just absolutely formative of my view of the nature of human consciousness what the possibilities are for changing our experience of the world why it's interesting to study consciousness and subjectivity at the level of the brain and this is all this proceeded my interest in neuroscience and so what I did in my 20s really I still practice meditation and I've I've done some subsequent period of intensive practice on retreat but in my 20s I spent about two years of that decade on silent meditation retreats ranging from as short as a weekend to three months and but most of this was was done in a in a Buddhist context studying a practice called the piscina which I devout on my blog recently so you can read my comments there the pasta is a very simple practice that is just perfectly designed for export into into science and there in the rational community generally because there is actually nothing you need to presuppose on insufficient evidence in order to get the practice off the ground you don't have to you don't even have to like anything about Buddhism it's just a practice of training the tension on the present moment and you start with your breath you start with just the experience of the sensation of breathing and as you as you learn to focus on that one object of attention the first thing you realize is how difficult that is I mean you people have not tried to meditate tend not to realize just what a torrent of white noise there is in their in their mind at every moment we're just thinking thinking thinking thinking every moment of the day we're chased out of bed by our thoughts in the morning and we just think think think think think until we till we fall asleep at night and the the character of this conversation we're having with ourselves is really what engineers are suffering or the kind of the mediocrity of our of our lives in every present moment all of our worry and anxiety and self-doubt and self-criticism and I mean obviously thoughts are necessary and we couldn't navigate our lives without thinking but there's automaticity being lost and thought without knowing that you're thinking is really the the string upon which all of our suffering is strung and meditation is a is a tool for sort of stepping back from that process and and discovering the space in consciousness prior to that stream of thinking and there's a tremendous amount of relief that comes from that and a trim is it's a it's a so at the first pass it's a great tool of stress reduction you you begin to notice why you suffer how you're suffering that the mechanics of suffering moment to moment the mechanics of worry and doubt and fear and and anger etc and meditation gives you a tool to sort of relax that automaticity and that tool can be very hard one to get in hand it's not it's not easy again the first thing you discover when you go sit in silence for days or weeks and try to meditate every moment of the day is just how hard that task is paying attention to the breath is incredibly difficult it's simple too it's a simple instruction but it's incredibly difficult to do but at a certain point you can actually develop enough concentration to do it and there's an incredible freedom that comes with that it's just it's it is a relief to be able to just put down the burden of your rumination if only for a moment the other things that comes from it and the reason why this is such intellectual interest to to me it's part from personal interest is that it it breaks the this cognitive illusion that most of us live with most of the time that we our egos that we ourselves that we are this something to which this pronoun I can refer riding around inside our bodies this is this is the point of view that most most of you I think will find familiar that you you don't feel truly identical to your body you don't feel that you are you are coterminous with your body down to your fingertips you feel that you have a body you feel that you are a subject living inside the body which is paradoxically a kind of object I mean it's a kind of a vehicle for you most people feel located behind their eyes looking out at a world that is that is other than what they are and the body is in some sense other than what they are and this is an illusion this is an illusion that we know this is an illusion neurologically we know this doesn't make sense scientifically when you just just reductively look at what the self could possibly be as a as a collection of systems but it doesn't make sense subjectively it's a subjective illusion that can be penetrated it is what it feels like to be thinking every moment of the day without knowing that you're thinking and and when you can see thoughts as just objects of a kind arising in consciousness consciousness that's prior to them this sense of self the sense of being this locus of consciousness behind the eyes looking out at a world that's not self that you can you can break that illusion if only for a moment and breaking that is I think of great utility personally psychologically it's also of great interest psychologically in terms of just how we to understand the mind at the level of the brain and how we think of ourselves as subjective creatures and it is also the point of contact between any complete description of the mind and everything that's really at the core of religious and mystical and spiritual literature but the fascination that the human beings have had for 2,000 years at least with notions of self transcendence and and transforming human life in in a in the context of religion has been [Music] seeded by this possibility people have lost their feeling of self to a great degree and with that loss has come incredibly positive experiences and a free a real freedom that is rare in this war old and then they have kind of witnessed that freedom to others and described it in terms of Iron Age pseudoscience and philosophy so it's it's you have it all conflated with with very ancient concepts of being in relationship to a deity and this is a problem with the only language we have had in which to talk about the higher possibility of self transcendence has been religious language and that's something that I'm hoping to change in my next book and in subsequent conversations about this I think there are more questions on the subject so that won't be the last you've heard from me on that subject so I did another quote several questions on meditation and one thread I think I should should pick up on here is is this connection between anything we might talk about in terms of self transcendence words like transcendence words like spirituality and the notion of supernatural things is this a is there any any kind of spookiness that we must believe in or endorse in order to practice meditation or grant some legitimacy to to these claims I think we have to we have to make a really clear distinction between describing the character of one's experience and making claims about the way the cosmos is and this is this is really where where a lot of conversations about really any conversation about about meditation and spirituality and science tends to go astray you have someone like Deepak Chopra who is a you know for all intents and purposes a pseudo scientist and a charlatan who makes claims about he makes legitimate claims about the character of the experience of meditation it's possible to feel that you're one with the university to lose your sense of boundary with the universe it's possible to have really wonderful kind of oceanic experiences of consciousness or specific experiences that seem like just pure consciousness where sense-data fall away and it just seems like you are consciousness prior to anything else showing up in terms of the character of your experience but but someone like deepak then moves from those experiences to making claims about consciousness giving birth to the universe that we are the one mind that that in which the universe is arising metaphysical and and even physical claims for which there is no warrant and so what you it's you have to be very slow to extrapolate from what you experience in the in the darkness of your closed eyes to what is true of the nature of the universe and so it's people have been offered a kind of false choice between pseudoscience on the one hand of the of the Deepak Ian flavour and a kind of pseudo spirituality or a pseudo mysticism because it is not true when when most scientists and even and most atheists and secularists say well we were spiritual we if spiritual means I love my kids I love I've experienced a beautiful sunset I'm in awe the beauty of nature I'm you know when Einstein says that it's just it's a miracle that the laws of nature are rationally intelligible and therein they're mathematically beautiful this whole sort of picture of awe and wonder that that that scientists can attest to if that's spirituality well then I'm spiritual too and there's really nothing left out there is something left out that is not that whole picture would as valid as that is in terms of describing the scientific impulse and and rather ordinary experiences of beauty in the world that is not what a mystic a real mystic or contemplative experiences after his 10th year in the cave doing us nothing but meditated I mean that is not the the highest possibility of human consciousness being attested to by all of the religiously confused people over the ages who have talked about being one with the universe there is another there's there's a spectrum of experience that we have to acknowledge that that that many many millions of people have experienced that is a hell of a lot more interesting in the end and transforming of the human personality than just being in awe at the beauty of nature so atheists deny this at their peril because people have had these experiences know that it's not they're not being captured by this language of what a beautiful sunset so my argument is that we have to avoid pseudoscience and we have to avoid pseudo spirituality there is a we have to just become interested in the full spectrum of human experience and and talk about it rationally question from rael boy who has offered the most level-headed and persuasive arguments against the claims you make in the moral landscape I'm just finishing the rest of that question really has been extremely disappointed by the level of criticism of it as of I you know there actually has not been an argument against the case I make in the moral landscape that I have found even momentarily destabilizing a bit all of the difficulties that that my argument runs into I feel like I raised in the book and much of the criticism I've gotten has been from people who either have not read the book or have read it badly I mean there there have been a few knits to pick obviously as there are with any book but the big sort of hard swing criticism that I've gotten has been from people for the most part who have just missed the point somehow and undoubtedly some of the false lies with with me I may February if I were a better writer or a better communicator of these ideas well then you know I would have fewer problems so it's one of the things you get when you when you write controversial books hammered into you is just how hard it is to communicate successfully with people about loaded topics and this is this notion of science ultimately absorbing our talk about the good life about values is an incredibly scary idea for many people and even many people who should be able to parse what I'm saying without getting emotionally hijacked so I've just run into the full gauntlet of pushback and misunderstanding that you get when you when you try to say a taboo and as I did with my books on religion so anyway I share your disappointment rail boy a question about being able to reason people out of their beliefs this is steak music and it seems like there were a few more questions on this this point whether you can ever successfully reason someone out of their beliefs when they didn't get these beliefs by reason in the first place this is something I actually run into a lot where people people imagine that it's that no one ever changes their mind that is incredibly difficult to to reason with people and it is and yet I see the evidence of people changing their minds all the time but I've received emails by the thousands of people who from people who were at one point fundamentalist and I've even received emails from from fundamentalist ministers who have completely lost their faith but who are still functioning as ministers because they can't figure out what else to do with their lives but it was it's kind of flabbergasting that anyone's in this situation but multiple people like that actually have been interviewed by dan dennett now and and some of his students so you get you hear from people who have gone just the full made the full tour from you know bible-thumping literacy to absolute certainty that they were wrong what you don't tend to find however is people doing that in real time you don't you don't you never really see the evidence of people changing their mind in response to counter evidence and counter-argument in real time under pressure people tend to want to change their minds in private and I understand that because it's sort of embarrassing to to admit that you are wrong but people do change their minds and they do it based on a some kind of collision with with evidence and rationality or the evidence of other people's bad reasoning and self-deception when you begin to see when you become sensitive to all the people around you living in an echo chamber of confirmation bias and shoddy reasoning and selective cherry-picking of data picking cherry-picking of data it's it's possible to wake up and see the unten ability of that and I and there obviously are millions of people who have so reason is the tool it's just it's it's the tool and the tool kit to use I think the I think one missing piece which I alluded to earlier on a question about spirituality is if all you have is reason if all you have is the talk of science and debunking of religious belief and it's all framed in it basically a denial of the character of people's experience or the legitimacy of their experience then you have a problem because people people know they've had certain experiences they have a admittedly fallacious set of beliefs about what those experiences mean or what they attest to but they know they've had these experiences and what atheists and secularists and scientists tend to do well or at all is connect to the character of those experiences and and give some alternate explanation for them an explanation that is not entirely demeaning and deflationary and and give some warrant to the legitimacy of the experiences themselves so an experience for instance like self-transcending love you know loving experiencing love of a sort that makes no sense unless you have experienced it so we literally knowing that you could love a stranger someone you haven't actually no relationship with as your default setting now people have had these experiences on MDMA people have had these experiences in religious contexts but they're people who have not had this experience right who just have who it's just a a non sequitur when you when you talk about loving your neighbor as yourself as Jesus is reported to have said so if you're someone who has no idea what people are talking about in that area and they are you have you have a lot of Christian talk about Christian love and you're only the only purpose toward which you can wield your reason is to is to say all of that is well then it's a totally unpersuasive argument you need you need more than that and I think what you we can as a as a community of reasonable people Marshall more than that in an effort to get people to think sanely about the nature of reality a question about MDMA which I have recently touched on let me just give a word of caution about MDMA nd I haven't been shy about saying that MDMA has been useful to me personally it was actually the first drug I took that that made me realize that was there was a very different kind of experience a person could have in this world than than the one I was tending to have and so it's it wasn't incredibly useful for me I actually think MDMA is not the safest drug in the world I think it's there's a good evidence now that is neurotoxic it's also a drug that can clearly be abused in a way that certain classic psychedelics really can't so you know I I it's been many many years since I've taken MDMA it's it's and and for issues of safety and and concern for for its toxicity are largely the reasons why I wouldn't take it now so I'm just I don't want to I don't want you to get the sense that I'm telling you to go forth and and enroll by the millions I think it's I think well I wouldn't say you should never take it because I took it and it was incredibly useful I think it's issues of purity and knowing what you're getting and even getting pharmaceutical grade MDMA is not intrinsically safe I think it's I think that the jury is no longer out on whether whether this damages neurons so a question from Zoda wrap I think that's how you would say that about Peter singer and vegetarianism why how could one ethically defend eating meat I think that's the gist of this question you know I actually can't ethically defend eating meat I do eat meat I was a vegetarian for for six years and began to feel that I wasn't getting enough protein and started eating meat again and found that I actually felt a lot better so I think it's it's hard to be an intelligent and active and fit vegetarian at least it was hard for me but clearly the way we treat animals our farming practices just the nature of what life is like in an abattoir I can't defend any of that and I can't defend delegating that and I and I would I would support any effort we could make to make that whole practice much saner and more compassionate and and the moment we had a real substitute for it the moment we had synthetic meat say which is actually something that that people are working on I think we would have an ethical obligation to to do that so it's it's not there's there's a lot to say but the ethics of meeting ins a lot to say about the ethics of farming there may be ways to differentiate among species you know if pigs suffer much more than cows well then we have much we should have much more concern for pigs I don't in fact know that they do but there's a many questions here but as a global issue I think it's I think singer is is very often right on the subject I think it's it's unethical to delegate something to be done that you wouldn't do yourself for ethical reasons you know if you would be horrified to kill an animal and couldn't just never countenance it to get your next hamburger well then to have it done out of sight and out of mind is not an ethical solution now it's the solution that many of us still sleep reasonably soundly at night having having put in place but I don't have a an argument to support it questions of security and my own security bodyguards I hear you live in an undisclosed location travel with bodyguards the security issue I don't want to over sell the security issue because I worry that people who want to make similar noises to the sort I'm making will be scared to make them because they just think there's a this this your life is utterly complicated by by having let your reason out in public your life can be complicated by by doing so I you know it's it's not I take security seriously I take it more seriously than some people who have similar job descriptions and but nothing bad has happened to me and nothing and I wouldn't I don't regret any decision I've made to have the career I've had so it's not being up being a public figure to any degree entails a certain kind of security risk I'm sure there are actors and and CEOs who get much more hate mail than I get in fact 99% of my mail is incredibly positive incredibly supportive so you shouldn't imagine that the moment you criticize religion every time you open your inbox you just are just hearing from people who hate you all day there's there's some of that but it's for the most part not at all what's what's going on nevertheless there are a lot of crazy people out there and you know I get my share of death threats and I get I get and I you know I just take I take the issue seriously and I get security where where wherever I think it's needed so and there are people who have exquisite security concerns and this is you know in comparison with which I have no conservative security concerns someone like ayaan Hirsi Ali who you know is what many of you know is a colleague of mine and on the on the advisory board of my foundation ayaan is someone you know she is an ex-muslim who isn't officially an apostate now that's it puts you in a very different category of and the the psalm and Rushdie effect is what she has had to live with and that's that those security concerns or have been obscene and that's and that's it's a problem it's a problem that even in the United States if someone like herself can't go to a college campus without these incredible machination 'he's and metal detectors for every talk etc so we we need to put our house in order security wise but but personally speaking is not a fear that I live with on a day-to-day basis so there's a question here about the USSR and I assume communism generally as a as a militant atheist power and and this questioner Serbia's is is sort of pushing back against some of my answers to this in the past in the past I've said that that communism was kind of like another religion in the communism it was a a nationalistic and you can even love is all together communism Stalinism even Nazism these are these are these are ideologies that that obviously were quite dogmatic and focused not on God but created a religion like cult organized around economics on the one hand or the purity of German blood on the other and your Serbia is worried that now I am basically using religion to to subsume everything that human beings do that's bad no it's it's it that the issue is dogmatism the issue is is is strong conviction without evidence and conviction that is shared by the mob so that you can you know the hatred of Jews to take the Holocaust as a as one example passion that a passionate belief belief that moves millions to act to demonize the other based on bad argument and bad evidence a willingness to accept these these these convictions without argument without evidence that that's the intrinsic problem and that's the press the problem that is unusually present in the context of religion but it's not only in in a religious context so dogmatism is a thing I'm arguing against and there are political dogmas there which which not it's not by accident begin to take on some of the character of religions when you put them in place so you have something like North Korea which is really has many of the features of a religious cult gone berserk of you have you have millions of people who are starving imagining that our food shipments our devotional offerings to their to the brilliance of their Dear Leader this is not a circumstance where people have suffered for too much reason or too much self-criticism or too much skepticism I mean this is not perhaps you've heard me say this before but there's no society I know of that has ever suffered because people have become too reasonable and so so that's that's the that's the lens through which to see this this is not most of what I've said against religion can be said against Stalinism for instance or North Korea and so to say that those are the product of atheism ISM it's another reason why this word atheism is not especially useful because as a label it begins to confuse people they think that okay well Stalin was an atheist so now now atheism is just as bad as religion well no we're not the criticism against religion is not the mere advocacy of atheism as an identity the criticism against religion is because there's no evidence for these core beliefs let's criticize the beliefs let's criticize this willingness to adopt things on on bad evidence there's a there is another question from cos Eve about the link between morality and well-being and again bringing it back to animals and also vegetarianism and veganism yeah again this the the basis of morality is on my view a concern for the well-being of conscious creatures so that to the extent that any creature can suffer or be made happy or be deprived of happiness well then we have an ethical interest in and and and ethical concerns but come into play so yes it is it why would it be wrong to kill pigs and worse to kill pigs and to kill flies say well it would be wrong because pigs suffer or can suffer or be happy-happy or be deprived of happiness and they can do those things to a much greater extent than flies can now we could be wrong about that I there's no reason to think we are wrong about that but that would be the way to we would we should parcel our ethical concern it's to the extent that something can suffer or be made happy that's that's the extent to which it sort of enters into the moral universe and this is why it's right to be more concerned about human beings than it is to be concerned about pigs or any other species we're aware this is not mere speciesism it's not merely because we're human beings we should be more concerned about ourselves it's because we show every sign of having a broader and deeper and richer experience than any other conscious creature we know about if we were in the presence of conscious creatures who had happy to bite the bullet here and I do this in the book if we met conscious creatures who we knew had a much broader deeper and richer experience of the world than we had yes they would be more important than us I don't see that as some people find that as a such a such a controversial statement that is almost a reductio ad absurdum of my argument if there is something that stands in relation to us the way we stand in relation to bacteria well then that's something that's more important than us I don't see any other way of thinking about it now there's no evidence whatsoever that beans like that exist but if they did yeah I would would we certainly shouldn't eat them so there's a question from legion 6 2 to 6 what was the most compelling argument or reason given for religion and has it changed your mind on specific ideas that part of a longer question about the the experience I've had in Q&A is and debates with with theists and has there been anything that has just pushed back against my criticism of religion that has given me pause or made me worry that I'm I'm wrong about any of this there's there's certainly nothing that has come from atheist or a defender of religion that has made me think that well maybe I'm wrong about the core issues about what's true and we may I've never been in dialog with a Christian and begun to worry that well maybe Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead and we'll be coming back to earth etc the only the only argument that I find interesting that no one tends to really make at length but but I but it would be one that would give me pause that would give me pause is the it's a purely pragmatic argument which is and I'll give you it's it's what I think is probably its strongest form when you look for instance at why Muslims in the United States tend to be very different from Muslims at least to live to this point have tended to be very different than Muslims in in Western Europe in the degree to which they have expressed a kind of solidarity with extremism and we have we seem to have a less of a problem of jihadism and sympathy with jihadism in the states and we have in Western Europe you look at that specific problem the problem of religious certitude in extremist Islam and some of my critics could say well the reason why things are better in the United States is because we have this rich diverse respectful conversation about religion where religion is encouraged nobody is is obliged to be any more secular than they then they want to be this is not like France where we're criticizing religion or we're banning the veil so the there's something about just celebrating everybody's craziness in the public sphere which is mitigates that craziness and especially on the point of bringing Islam into modernity the only way the only bridge to modernity for Islam is one in which you silence any criticism of the faith and you just sort of encourage its most benign phase and so this is a it's a purely pragmatic argument this is not something that gives credence to the sanctities of Islam or the or the propositional claims of Islam now if that were true I don't actually know that that's true I don't know I I suspect it's not true there are other reasons why we have a different character to the Muslim community in the u.s. and we have in Western Europe but if that were true if we could you know look at the answers in the back of the book and and and discover yes if you criticize Islam the way I criticize it the effect will be terrible and if you talk about Islam and dissemble about Islam the way Karen Armstrong does the effect will be to modulate it in a few short years and will Islam will bathe it basically be like you know Methodism in in the u.s. well then that's a pragmatic argument and I would you know that it's certainly worth I think and so on certain points caving into it I think it's yet there's certainly room to to live the truth and to be a mere politician about these things I'm not convinced that that's that's the case but that's sort of the hardest thing for me to ignore it's when someone raises that forcefully in to the end of telling me I shouldn't be saying what I'm saying in public okay well there's a bit of a long thread on seems to me questioning the coherence of thinking about well-being as a basis morality and and some expression about how hard it is to actually know in any case you know what is going to maximize well-being and and there's a bunch of bunch of questions and comments that I'm trying to distill here and this is something that that I touch on in the moral landscape it's true that that that in with almost any complex question we can't know at the end of the day what all the consequences are going to be and you know the consequences can be extremely good or extremely bad in unforeseen ways and all we can do is make our best effort to to navigate in the space of possible experience based on what we think is reasonably likely to occur so one example that that I've been using that that is recently in the news is you look at something like the the nuclear disaster in Japan that happened this year that that you need to put a frame around that that looks like an intrinsically bad thing and anyone who would consciously intentionally engineer that would be a criminal who would want to lock lock away forever I mean this has been a circumstance of immense human suffering but a skeptic of consequentialism could always say well look if you take a kind of a wide enough shot of this event who knows what its actual effects are but what what if what if it causes us to be far more careful with nuclear materials than we whatever otherwise have been what if it winds up saving millions of lives in the end you know later in this jury what if 50 years from now we'll look back at this year as just a turning point in our wise stewardship of destructive technology we can't know in advance that that's not going to occur so it seems to make a mockery of this whole calculus so you don't know you can't know even if the worst nuclear accident in memory is bad therefore you can't you can't know if anything is good or bad in the end well that kind of skepticism about not knowing that the valence of various outcomes in human life I think is it's impossible to act on we can only act on what we think is plausibly going to be good or bad it's also very hard to argue that that is the unit even if this nuclear disaster does have all of these good secondary effects it's very hard to argue that that would be the best way to have engineered those effects but we could have all gotten around a conference table and made a sane nuclear policy without with just the hypothetical casualties without the actual suffering and death and and economic destruction so it's very hard to argue that that that the bad things that have good consequences are the only things that could have those good consequences so but my argument in the moral landscape is is purpose toward having a making a deeper claim and and and for us having a deeper foundation for our moral concern and the claim it says whether or not we can figure these things out whether or not we can get answers in practice we have to admit that their answers in principle that that because they're an infinite number of questions for which we can't get answers in practice and yet we know there are answers in principle and this is a scientist is what science is science is conducted in the context of our knowing that there's a background reality that has a certain character that we don't understand and we know that we can be right or wrong with respect to our beliefs about it and we can't always know whether we're right or wrong so - with the possibilities of experience we know that that the universe admits of certain experiences we know that some of these experiences are terrible and we know that some of them are sublimely happy so we know that there's a spectrum we know that navigating in this space is not entirely haphazard we know that that suffering arises based on on certain psychophysical principles in our case it has everything to do with the structure of the human brain and what we do in this world and how we the kinds of social systems we we build and and the kind of influences we we engineer in human life the kinds of cultures we have the kinds of conversations we have with one another and with anyway so we know that it's possible for life to get really bad just how bad perhaps we don't know but we know when looking down at you know failed states like Congo or complete upheavals of culture like you know world wars we know that these are places not worth going and we we frankly don't know how good it could get but we know that it could get a lot better than then it has for most people most of the time and these are so this is a domain of right and wrong answers this is a domain about which people can form beliefs that are clearly erroneous you know you look at a culture like again this is there my favorite example that the Taliban these are people who are struggling mightily making heroic self-sacrifice to build a culture that is obviously terrible that as Terra is terrible for everyone in it is terrible even for the men in it and yet I'm continually running into intellectuals in the first world and liberals and even liberal women who are open-minded about the legitimacy of how the Taliban goals and culture and and who the suit where the strongest thing they'll say against it is you know I wouldn't like it and I wouldn't want to live there but you know if that's how they want to live or they have their values this this to my eye is a complete abdication of kind of intellectual honesty but it's also a failure of compassion it's a failure to actually connect with how bad and unnecessary the suffering is in those places and so I'm arguing for right or right and wrong answers to the question of how human beings can flourish whether or not we can actually get those answers in any narrow frame view of any question about public policy or anything else okay there's actually question about my future research from Hermes the messenger what kind of questions am I asking and wanted to know about my current and future research we're actually planning now to do a another fMRI study on belief but in this case we're looking at why it's so difficult for people to change their minds actually goes back to a question I answered earlier it's it seems to me a bit of a mystery that people are unable to really value and exceed accede to to counter-argument and counter evidence in real time even though they go away and do it in private rather often there's this clearly people Marshall a lot of resources emotional resources to resist counter arguments and counter evidence and you know liberals and conservatives do it it's not nobody has a monopoly on self-deception and self-serving biases but I want to look at what mechanisms in the brain actually control our resistance to counter evidence our defense of our cherished beliefs and I also want to look at what it means to successfully change one's mind about on points of belief in neuro physiological terms so those moments where you you resist despite a wealth of evidence you know so kind of what dogmatism looks like in real time and those moments where you actually cave in and and have your your views about the world modulated successfully that's something that we're going to do in neuroimaging study on soon and actually my foundation project reason is it's going to fund that and that it's it seems to me is a not only an interesting question but it strikes me as the perhaps the most consequential question I don't think that the neuroimaging component of it is necessarily the only or most consequential piece but the most consequent consequential phenomenon we're dealing with I think in human culture is the fact that we can't successfully talk to each other we can't successfully change one another's views in anything like real-time based on reasoned argument we have these echo chambers where you have you know in the political sphere you have have Democrats and Republicans in the u.s. having conversations about all manner of thing you know the economy being especially consequential at this moment and you get the sense that there's nothing that one side can say to the other I'll say on on the desirability of raising or lowering taxes you get the sense there's nothing that they could say to another the other there's no panel of economists marshaled on either side or in between they could get the two camps to persuade one another and and there have to be right or wrong answers in this space about you know the question of what to do with these avi taxes and so that I think that's there's something about this breakdown of self-criticism and intellectual honesty and an openness to to rational argument that is what while we celebrate it in the ivory tower and in in public discourse generally as this this common tool we use all the time we rely on it as this is essential rational discourse rational argument this is the best of us I think I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I've seen someone stripped of their cherished opinion in real time under pressure in the face of counter-argument and so it's it's a it's incredibly consequential that we don't have more humility and more openness to to radical changes of opinion in the public sphere because what then happens is a complete failure of decision making and policy making so I'm going to try to get a neuroscientific handle on it probably sometime in the next 12 months and with that I think I want to wrap up my my reddit answer session has been a pleasure to talk to you guys thank you for the invitation I'm sorry it took so long to get these answers to you and again I'd like to thank Mahalo and my friend Jason Calacanis for giving the studio time it's it's made it very easy to do thank you very much

Channel: mahalodotcom

Views: 518,307

Rating: 4.8840418 out of 5

Keywords: Sam, Harris, The, Moral, Landscape, Letter, to, Christian, Nation, End, of, Faith

Id: b8Z5eDXRKzM

Length: 54min 19sec (3259 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/Knews2Me]

For any who want to go back to a certain questions or don't want to sift through stuff they don't care about:

Question #1@0:35: "My question is what should we do next? I feel like I'm in a sea of rationality, no clear goal in sight, what do you think the practical goals are for a passionate pro-reason activist; especially those still in college?"

Question #2@3:53: "According to Wikipedia after leaving Stanford you traveled to Asia and you studied with Hindu and Buddhist teachers can you give some insight into this period? How significant was this time for you; do you still practice meditation." - Vipassana is how you spell the meditation practice he mentions in case you want to look it up (like I did).

Question #3@16:34: "Who has offered the most level headed and persuasive against the claims you make in The Moral Landscape?"

Question #4@18:47: "Can you ever successfully reason someone out of their beliefs when they didn't get their beliefs by reason in the first place?"

Question #5@23:35: Addressing MDMA = ecstasy

Question #6@25:25: "Addressing Peter Singer and vegetarianism, how can one ethically defend eating meat?"

Question #7@27:44: "Questions about security, bodyguards, living in a non-disclosed location etc."

Question #8@30:52: "There's a question here about the USSR and, I assume, communism generally as a militant atheist power and this questioner Userbious is sort of pushing back against some of my answers to this in the past. In the past I've said that communism was kind of like another religion, that communism was a nationalistic and you -can even lump in Stalinism, even Naziism- these are ideologies that were quite dogmatic and focused not on god but created a religion-like cult organized around economics on the one hand or purity of German blood on the other and Userbious is worried that now I'm basically using religion to subsume everything that human beings do that's bad."

That's it for the night, I'll finish later tomorrow if no one else does.

*Edit: Doh, I lied. Not that I expected anyone to wait up for the rest but the weekend trip came earlier than expected and I'll have to put it off until Tues.

• Edit: The rest of it.

Question #9@34:47: "Question about the link between morality and well-being and again bringing it back to vegetarianism and vegan-ism."

Question #10@37:26: "What was the most compelling argument or reason given for religion and has it changed your mind on specific ideas? Has there been anything that has pushed back against my criticism of religion that has given me pause?"

Question #11@41:49: "Questions about the coherence of thinking about well-being as a basis of morality and how hard it is to actually know in any case what's going to maximize well-being."

Question #12@48:42: "Question about future research on what kind questions am I asking and my current and future research."

[u/reverse_cigol]

Of all the "four horsemen" I find him to be the most disarming.

[u/event_horiz0n]

I was pleasantly surprised at the hour response. I'm also glad to see his focus is moving away from atheism to more important ideas. Arguing with theists gets so boring sometimes. I'm looking forward to his new book

[u/TheRatRiverTrapper]

One thing I admire about Sam Harris is how humble he is. The "intellectual snobiness" that theists acuse Hitchens and Dawkins of certainly can't be said for Sam. I believe that if evidence of a creator was to appear tomorrow, Sam would be the first to say he was wrong. In other words, he is more interested in finding the truth then protecting his ego/opinions. Thanks for the AMA Sam!

[u/Dangger]

Meditation is really hard. Seriously.

[u/[deleted]]

His answer to the first question is the reason why it's ok to have a million funny pictures filling up r/atheism.

[u/BFG_9000]

I'm gonna need proof - how do we know this is the real Sam Harris?

[u/[deleted]]

Laughed a good laugh in the first half of minute 37. "... there is no evidence whatsoever that beings like that exist, but if they did, we certainly shouldn't eat them!"

[u/psychedelicacy]

thanks for your words sam! AND YOUR UPVOTES! cue predator laugh