Ask Sam Harris Anything #2

hi this is Sam Harris I'm an author and neuroscientist and I'm doing my second episode of ask me anything where I go to readers and and visitors to my blog and solicit questions and last time I did with Reddit now I'm doing it with Facebook and Twitter and I got literally hundreds if not a something like a thousand questions coming in by by email mostly so I really can only touch the tip of the iceberg but I've called these questions and consolidated them and and I'm going to jump right in and I'm not naming names so your anonymity is protected first question if there is no heaven in hell isn't life pointless how could it possibly matter in the scheme of things if we treat one another morally or deepen our scientific understanding the universe we're all going to die so doesn't atheism by definition rob life of its meaning this is a an odd question that I get almost always from religious people this is a I consider this a kind of software glitch of the human mind it's it's it's not a question that resonates with me and I just want to try to unpack why I think it's so strange that the the subtext of this question and even rather off in the text is that unless experience lasts forever there's no point it means nothing so so just just try to map this onto your life you know every good meal you've had every pleasant experience as opposed to an unpleasant one every relationship none of it means anything because it ends a good movie is meaningless it's no better than a bad movie because it ends this is a this is a strange idea this is a unless we disappear into infinity with experience there's no difference between the most sublime happiness and the most abject suffering and I think when you actually try to connect with that intuition it's it's strange and really is insupportable in our moment-to-moment experience we care very deeply about the character of our experience in fact it's the only thing we can care about and I think quite to the contrary this notion of eternity this notion of nothing matters here but it matters in over the over the long haul in the afterlife because the bulk of our experience is in is after we die this religious idea is actually Rob's life of its meaning it doesn't bring meaning to life it renders meaningless all of the precious moments we have while alive and this is the only life we're certain of and it's continually ending it not only ends in death but it ends in each moment and things change and that makes each moment precious so when you take a experience like if you're a new parent and you're carrying your child say what you do you pick your child up hundreds of times a day it seems and you never think that there's going to be a last time you do that may a certain point your child's going to get too heavy to pick up you don't you don't pick up 15 year-olds for the most part at a certain point you will have picked your child up for the last time now we tend not to go through life thinking in those terms but if we did if we realize that it's as though we're standing in front of a kind of a ticket machine at a deli counter and we're just pulling tickets not knowing how many are in there and we just a certain point you pull and you've got the last one in hand for every experience there'll be a last time you pick your child up and you will not have noticed that was the last time that makes life very precious and certainly death the you know the final ticket at the end of life makes it all incredibly precious it's just it could not be more precious and it's preciousness is not predicated on it lasting forever as though such a thing could even make sense so this is this is really this is another mode in which religion convinces us not to take death seriously and that's that's actually its selling point we don't have to take death seriously because we live for eternity after we die needless to say there's no evidence for that but it's it's I think psychologically and so unhelpful to do that because we it offers no incentive to make this life as creative and as beautiful and as rich as as we can possibly make it we've got many many questions on free will meta just there's an immense amount of interest in in a few blog posts I did on free will please discuss your views on free will you've said that that it is an illusion but the choices and tensions and efforts still matter but what can words like choice and tension and effort mean if there's no such thing as free will now that there's been so much interest in this I think I'll probably write a short ebook on it and just pull together my blog posts and and go more a little deeply into this because it's it I didn't know this but this is actually just an issue that that really matters to people apparently psychologically they most people most of the time feel very clearly that they have they are the authors of their own actions that they are the thinker's of their thoughts and the the intenders of their intentions and as a result from this point of view of being a self that can choose experiences they think that something very important about their experience would be lost or falsified if in fact we we determined scientifically or philosophically that there's no such thing as free will well the problem is free will is just a non-starter philosophically and scientifically there's no unlike many other illusions there's no way you can describe the universe so as to make sense of this notion of free will now there are many people who could have artfully changed the subject and try to get a version of free will that still makes some scientific sense it actually is not what people mean by free will what people mean is that they they're as they're conscious selves are free to choose their their actions you choose what you you want you choose what you will to do and this is true in the in the simplest way with gross motor actions but it's true in your life course the kinds of things that interest you etc now people don't deny that they're influenced by their genes and the environment and and the social systems they live in but they still feel that at every moment there is freedom to choose now what can this mean from from the position of conscious awareness of your inner life this can't be true because everything you're consciously aware of in every moment is the result of causes of which you are not aware and over which you exert no conscious control so it's a simple experiment you think of someone in your life just remember someone you know now the person who comes to mind feels like someone you chose you just took this person off the shelf of memory and since but you can't account for why you thought of that person as opposed to somebody else ok let's see let's say you know a hundred people in this world you you before I posed the question you weren't thinking of anybody I asked you to think of someone you know and somebody emerges into conscious awareness we know as a matter of neurophysiology that that was that that was manufactured by the brain at the at the end of a series of causes of which you are not conscious of which you are the mere witness you are merely receiving that memory of a person and so it is with every other choice you would make in life you to choose to move your right hand as opposed to your left hand as long as you want to deliberate about that you could deliberate for an hour but the final impulse that's effective if I go back and forth between my two hands and finally say oh you know it's going to be my right I am in no position to say why it wasn't my left and we know and there have been a variety of neuro physiological experiments and now neuroimaging experiments attesting to this we know that monitoring brain function would have allowed scientists in the lab to predict which hand I was going to move seconds before I'm consciously aware of my motor plan so this is a problem for this this this full psychological notion of free will this idea that we are the authors in every moment of our inner lives and and of what we subsequently do in the world because we know that we are downstream of causes of which we're not conscious and and cannot possibly be conscious now some people want to say well okay this so there's this stream of neuro physiological events that are beginning thoughts and intentions and emotions but we are in a position to change subsequent events okay well that's actually not true the we that's in a position to change those subsequent events is simply more events I mean there's there's just a one event following another as a matter of neurophysiology so the the idea that you can I can decide I can have an I can't pick my impulse to move my right hand versus my left hand but I can decide to stop moving it that that decision to stop is also something that is arising based on prior causes so however you look at this you you have to admit that the precontent of consciousness are are born of an unconscious mental life which is almost certainly at bottom a matter of neurophysiology in our case now the many subsequent questions that follow on this this concern about free will so if in fact we can't choose what we choose but simply choose how can choice be important it was so then why don't want to just sit back and and wait and see what happens why choose to do anything why get out of bed in the morning well to choose to do nothing is itself a choice it's and it's actually a very hard thing to do when you just sit there and wait to see what happens and you're going to get impatient you're going to get restless you're going to want to eat something you're going to be moved by impulses which you'll then have to choose to resist in order to sit and just wait and see what happens so you're just you can't you can't step out of the stream of being lived by your unconscious mental processes which are showing up as conscious intentions emotions moods desires etc the the notion that choice is important can be conserved however because choice is what at the level of our conscious life choice is what precedes some of the biggest changes in our experience to choose to marry one person as opposed to another or to choose to have a child or choose to go to college or to drop out of college these are these are behaviors that are preceded by thoughts and and conversations and a lot of effort mental effort to get and wane of pro's and con's all of this actually does precipitate the next moment of experience and the next and and and what in fact we choose to do and yet all of it is being born of processes of which we are not consciously aware so one question that comes up that is that is related here is a worry that if we if we were rigorously honest about freewill being an illusion maybe we would lose something in terms of being motivated to change ourselves to improve ourselves we wouldn't value effort in quite the way we need to in order to to live the best life as possible this might be true it might be that there's a way to talk about effort and and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and commitment to a goal etc which more or less ignores the unconscious underpinnings of our inner lives and gives people the illusion that they really are the authors the real authors of their thoughts and actions that's fine it's just it's not it's not a that is a pedagogical question a pragmatic question and in any given instance it is true that it has an effect think about yourself in terms of being capable of great effort and being the real author of your action so you get up in the morning and rather than think well I just have the genes I have I have the environment I have I had the parents I have I'm a mere recipient of all these clauses I really can't be any different or better than I am so I'm just going to see what happens that isn't necessarily the message you need to take from this no freewill argument you can you can also acknowledge that giving yourself a pep talk or being given a pep talk by others thinking in terms of effort and striving and and bettering yourself all of that has an effect now it has an effect which again is part of this mirror stream of neuro physiological influences about which in every instant we are not consciously aware but it doesn't negate the fact that it really it does have an effect and talking in terms of choices and efforts and commitment to goals is has a great utility and is not merely illusory it's you know to be given a pep talk that works is to be moved in a way that then has consequences in your life but again to pay close attention in any given moment you are not in a position to know why it works in one moment as opposed to another or the the genetic and environmental influences that that explain why you are precisely you as you are in that moment one reader writes I think there is a big barrier to getting across rationalist atheist free thinking arguments against religion and it's the fact that religious people generally think that they're that they in their religion are doing good things for good reasons even when they're actually doing horrible things for instance oppressing women and homosexuals spreading lies about contraception hindering scientific progress etc so how can we even hope to get across to them the damage that their views cause when they think they're actually being good and being motivated by good reasons and that we're the ones who are wrong so this is a it's a good question it points to the fact that most people most of the time are actually motivated to be good I mean it's not they're a lot of evil mustache twirling people who think that they're bigger they're consciously aware that they're being evil and just wanting to harm people as Steven Weinberg the physicist pointed out good people without religion good people will still be good bad people still be bad but to get good people to do bad things you that often requires religion I think that's that's often true that it nowhere do we see people good people normal people people who really do love their kids and people who really do want to live in good societies do needlessly stupid things that cause immense amounts of human misery but for religion and its and its otherworldly motives it's just it's it manages to subvert very simple projects and drain away energy that could be used for for creating a better life in this world in a way that that I think would be unimaginable but for any other ideology and so what to do about this I think really there's just there really are only two things we can do we can up we have to undermine the truth claims of religion we have to call into question the beliefs that motivate good people to do harmful things so if the the belief that homosexuality is an abomination destined to be punished by a wrathful God who finds it loathsome many many millions of people believe this they believe this because of their religious doctrines they wouldn't then weren't born into this world believe in it this is an ideology that gets drummed into them early in life if our religions were different that this belief would go away if there were a line in the Bible which said well if all the homophobic pastors the Bible were removed and they were replaced by lines which said well men can love men and women can love women we wouldn't have a problem with phobia so this isn't ideology and what it creates is this it just just look at the results in our society at the level of individuals we have people by the millions who suffer total isolation in their communities who are who are convinced that their parents and their friends will cease to love them if they knew they were gay and even more horribly they're right about that in many cases and I hear from these people by the thousands in emails it's a this Nia so these are and these are not parents who are disposed to hate their children these are parents who have an ideology that causes them to hate their children in many cases or to fear that their children are going to hell so this destroys relationships and then it also subverts our political discourse in ways that should otherwise be unthinkable the fact that we have to argue about gay marriage and not talk about poverty or nuclear proliferation or climate change or anything else of great consequence so we have to undermine the beliefs and we also have to talk about the consequences of the needless complication that is occasioned by the beliefs so that's really the two things I think that need to be focused on in order to undercut this what would you say to a non-believer whose husband or wife or entire family is deeply religious what can they do to mitigate all the conflict that arises at the boundary between belief and disbelief especially when it comes to deciding how to raise children so this is again this is something that I hear daily in my inbox this is the people who either can't come out of the closet as non-believers or or out of the closet and then reaping the whirlwind of consequences for for doubting God within a community where everyone believes and the the amount of anguish born of this is just amazing now I haven't had this experience I can't really I can't really advise people in any intelligent way based on my own my own direct experience but I just think this is this is something depending on the circumstance this can be a deal breaker it does end relationships it does end marriages whether it needs to in every case I certainly doubt it just it's a matter of how tenaciously the and dogmatically and intolerant lis believer is want to hold on to their certainty and insists that children be raised with with a fear of hell for instance I mean that would be a deal breaker for me you know the idea that to be with someone who insisted upon instilling in our child fear of eternal torment in hell you know I I view that as child abuse so so if that's the situation you're in well that's that's a problem and I don't really have a magic bullet for for fixing it it's but there are many gradations of that and and clearly when the relationships matter enough and there's enough love and understanding there enough goodwill despite differences then I think some of these these impasses can be negotiated but it it's a huge and completely unnecessary problem it's the alternative would be just to speak rationally and openly about what in fact we know about the nature of the universe and to never hesitate to admit what we don't know and that spirit of open-mindedness could would just nullify all of these sectarian certainties of religion and and allow people to still explore whatever is there to be found in terms of spiritual life or mystical experience or anything else that could be actually of interest to people in their lives please talk about raising children without religion for instance in the absence of religious belief how can you talk to a child about death well this is a circumstance that everyone runs into who is a parent I actually haven't yet because my my daughter is still young enough not to be aware of death but this is that there's this taboo in our society around admitting we don't know things as it's not just with respect to children but you see this everywhere in political discourse and it's just it's happily and ironically the very the one thing that is unique about scientific discourse is that people are are without hesitation committed to saying they don't know when they don't know because the penalty for pretending to know things you don't know is huge so you have scientists rather often saying I don't know this I'm not an expert about this someone else in the room knows more about this than I do and you get this this kind of humility which which actually doesn't export very well into the rest of the culture because then you get a lots of people saying look science doesn't know anything so it's but for the rest of culture people tend to feel very uncomfortable having to admit when they don't know something and they're uncomfortable with their kids they don't model for their kids this this ability to just admit that you don't know and that seems to me to be a problem it's it's actually the basis for exploring anything honestly to admit that you don't know now with it with death I can honestly say I don't know what happens after death there there are reasons to be skeptical of survival of of death there's certainly reasons to be skeptical of any specific story about survival but in terms of the relationship between consciousness and and the physical world I'm not in a position to say oh yeah I know exactly what happens after death you are zeroed out in precisely the way you were zeroed out before your birth now there you're there are good reasons to believe that's true based on what we know about the brain but there's still this is not a matter of scientific certainty and if consciousness were in some ways independent in the brain I wouldn't expect that the world is to appear much differently or any differently than it does now we just simply there there is a mystery to consciousness but I don't I don't see the giving of false promises and false fears to children to be paying any kind of dividends that we want to conserve in our culture to put in the minds of children a fear of something bad happening after death seems to me to be manifestly unethical to give them this false hope placeholder that everyone goes to heaven and and and hangs out for eternity is to fail to equip them to grieve and to and to actually and fail it's as if it's a failure to be honest in the face of mystery so I think we can we can honestly say we don't know what happened we can honestly represent are the reasons to not be afraid of non-existence to be to be afraid of non-existence after death makes no more sense than being afraid of your non-existence prior to birth you're not suffering you you you didn't suffer you're abstinent your absence in the 18th century and you're not going to suffer your absence in the in the 22nd century so that's that's also something that too in an age-appropriate way we can communicate to children so I just don't a admitting that your gradations of certainty on everything you talk about seems to me to be virtually always a good thing even with young children how does your notion of the moral landscape incorporate the intrinsic value of human life or the intrinsic value of the natural world your emphasis on well-being on the conscious experience of conscious creatures would seem to suggest that people who are capable of the greatest happiness or produced the greatest benefit for others are more valuable than other people but many people would view this inequality is ethically offensive so your and your view also seems to suggest that nature has no value unless unless people are there to experience it so please clarify this well that it's true that the that I have linked got a moral worth to the possibilities of experience and the more experience the richer the experience the deeper the experience the more worth so that is the one asking why we are more important than insects it goes down to the nature of the possible experience the possible happiness we could be deprived of the possible suffering that could be inflicted on us insofar as this is a much greater range of experience than where we it's worse to to deprive us of happiness or inflict suffering on us then then it is in the case of insects so this as the questioner points out it kind of migrates inconveniently into our own species so so you unless you're going to draw the line and say that all human beings are precisely equal to all others you're left with this kind of weird calculus that what about the really really happy really smart really creative really wealthy really connected people versus the those who are the antithesis of all those things I think it's it's it's true that there are circumstances in which we might want to acknowledge that some people are more important than others some people are more important than others if we have a hostage crisis and the President of the United States is one of the hostages well then that hostage crisis is going to get a lot more attention than any other for good reason given his responsibilities given given the consequences of having the leader of the lone superpower held hostage when we think about a hostage crisis we don't tend to make other calculations however we don't think about well who is the smartest richest most creative person in there you know do it do we do we rescue the smart people before the the people who aren't so smart there's a good reason not to do that even though in the end we can talk about differences between people because we all value fairness so much and and the consequences of having a fairer society a society that blind to the differences between people a society that that treats all human life as though it were precisely equivalent that is of obvious benefit to almost all of us all of the time so it's it's either that you can point to situations in which you want to strip off the veil of ignorance there and say oh no we have to talk specifically about these people and why they are so important as in the case of the president say but generally speaking we all benefit so much by treating all human life as equivalent and sacred then that it's it just seems silly to try to parse it more but it is true that that in my view entails the claim that anyone who's smarter than me who is happier than me who's capable of much greater much richer and deeper experience who's going to help the world in ways I could never dream of that person is more important than me I don't have any hesitation or problem admitting that and it's just see it's just any way you look at it that seems to me to be a fact and yet I think we are again we are all better off living in a world in which we basically ignore that fact and and because because of the virtue of fairness and justice and and being blind to those details in how we write laws and create institutions and how and how we're motivated to help people had many questions about the authority of science that's the consolidation of several of them how can we be confident in our knowledge of the world and our whether it's reason generally or science specifically because we just we've naturally evolved we haven't evolved to understand the world perfectly we've just evolved to spawn and survive so how can we be confident that we are we are actually producing an understanding that is in any sense valid and when looking at the history of scientific progress and how we get these huge changes in scientific theory how can we be confident that science itself is a story of moving closer and closer to the truth this is a point that that the philosopher Thomas Kuhn came up with were made in his famous book the structure of scientific revolutions about probably fifty years ago the the character of change in scientific theory is not one of these these incremental changes which which seem to be converging on reality as it is but you have some rather wholesale changes as you going from Newton's theory to Einstein's theories look nothing like one another and from a kuhnian point of view that raises the doubt that maybe that this is we're not converging on the truth in any deep sense I think one thing to notice is this is this is really only true at the frontiers of science it's it's not true to say that we don't conquer ground in science which then is not no longer vulnerable to this theoretical churn it we do conquer ground and there are huge regions of our scientific understanding of the world which are not up for grabs and which no one is having to rethink in their in terms of the most basic shape so you take something like like DNA in biology you know there now there's there's obviously molecular biology is is a hugely fertile field of present research and inquiry but no one's going to wake up tomorrow morning and discover that DNA has nothing to do with inheritance that we've just completely misled on on that front that that would be there's so much attesting to the role of DNA plays in in in the mechanism that oh that allows for inheritance that yes there there are wrinkles that we are constantly finding like epigenetics for instance but this is this is this is ground that is conquered and we're not going to see wholesale changes in our understanding of the world there and this is this is progress of a sort that you only really have in science you don't have this you certainly don't have this in religion you don't have it in elsewhere for the most part in human creativity you don't have it in in art or literature you know we can't say that well novels are getting better generation after generation or art is getting better there's there's a there's a dialogue there is their influences but they're they're clearly in science is this justified sense that we are getting a more accurate and compelling picture of the way the world is and that it is iterative and it is it is a matter of progress and this progress extends to our understanding of ourselves our extends the understanding of the human mind and what's possible for us as subjective creatures so I think it's it's not our reliance on Authority in science the fact that we can we we talk in terms of what what the authorities in any one field believe to be true about the nature of the universe is not the same thing as a reliance on the authorities of religion it's a to reference the the mainstream opinion in chemistry is not the same move it's not the same abject reliance on authority as it is to reference the mainstream opinion in Protestant theology it's really the Protestant theological discourse is not constrained by the insult of reality in every moment it's not constrained by experiment and the mutual self criticism of people who are competing to to get their grants funded it's not it's not to say that the scientific discourse is perfect in the way it purifies itself of self-deception and and fraud and and other ways in which we can fail to understand the truth but it is so much better than any other game in town that it every other game suffers by comparison and that's something we just have to admit and and celebrate and as public away as possible got a few questions from Norway in response obviously to the recent terrorist atrocity there the first is one reader writes unfortunately this has led to the political left to delegitimize and demonize criticism of Islam even more than before obviously we whatever problem we had with the integration of Muslims before the terror attacks is still there it is however impossible not to reconsider one's rhetoric even when one's intentions are purely benevolent so so the question is is do you have any suggestions about how to approach this this is a problem which I blogged about a little bit already this is this is a real concern for me there was already such a politically correct impediment especially in Europe but but everywhere in the way of speaking honestly about specific doctrines within Islam and the way in which they are actually held by by Muslims in various communities and it's yeah it's decidedly inconvenient that the people who feel no constraint in terms of political correctness are and therefore do say rather voluble and often perfectly accurate things about Islam are racists and fascists and anti-semites and people you absolutely you know you wouldn't want to touch with a ten-foot pole but for the fact that they're the only people for the most part in the public square loudly saying what has to be said and so this obviously this just mind-boggling massacre that occurred in in Oslo has made it even more difficult to speak honestly about about the nature of Islam because you in doing so seem to align yourself or at least to be very callous to the company you're traveling and that's I think we just have to blow past that it's it's we have to talk about the we can't talk about religion as a monolith we have to talk about the differences among religions and within any one religion we have to talk about the uniquely bad and consequential ideas and for my money there is no set of notions worse or more damaging or more divisive or more imperiling of the future than the beliefs in martyrdom and jihad in the Muslim world in the doctrine which really are central to the doctrine of Islam this is not the crazy is Lomb that no muslims know about or care about this is not not the equivalent of some some cult within Islam that can be written off as not influential or representative of a major tradition this is not the Branch Davidians David Koresh in Waco Texas getting ready to self-immolate and not really representing Christianity this is a the just one of the central messages of Islam that paradise awaits those who die in defense of the faith nothing better can happen to you and it is incumbent upon all Muslim men to wage jihad and there are many others this idea is set within a larger context of Muslim expectation for world domination which is not a fantasy that right-wing racists make up it is something that that Salafi Muslims for the most part by and large talk about ad nauseam and so then this is a what has to happen is the Muslim world has to find some way to really marginalize these voices and it will be very difficult because these are not crazy interpretations of the faith these are rather straightforward instances of theology and and so it's it's like trying to figure out how to get the Christians to stop thinking Jesus is the Son of God it's it would be hard now there are Christians who have stopped thinking that and and there are Christians who don't invest anything in some of the central notions of Christianity it took centuries to make that possible in the West and well I don't think we have centuries to to wait around for the Islam to get its act together on the world stage so we have to we have to we can't lie about the nature of Islam and that's and given the fact that very few people on the Left realize this or want to real want to talk about this publicly you find yourself echoing the words of reactionaries and worse and that's it's it's a huge problem discursively and and i you know the only answer is to keep disavowing all of the racism and all of the the other craziness and make it clear at every moment that you're talking about ideas you're talking about Islam you're not talking about people and the color of people's skin certainly and you're not talking about specific cultures you're talking about ideas and their consequences so the white convert to Islam is who you're talking about just as much as the Arab who was born into the faith and within that frame you are talking about specific ideas not just a nominal attachment to the faith a related question from Norway do you think it would be helpful to us as proponents of reason and science to join forces with Christians in criticizing Islam in particular its treatment of women now again this is this is a delicate issue which I've personally and professionally run into giddy it's it is true to say that the people who are who are most candid about the problem that Islam poses and it's real doctrines tend to have their own ulterior motive and it is it is in a not so ulterior but it's the motive of advertising the merits of their own faith it's not to say is their only motive but but you have a lot of really animated Christians who attack Islam as the wrong faith fully believing that they're in possession of the right faith I don't see any particular reason to link up with to join arms with them in in any particular forum but it is only honest to point out when they're not wrong and the people in my camp the the non-believer camp that talk about all religions as though they're by definition equivalent and who talk about Christianity being just as bad in every case as Islam are just being dishonest and and offensive to Christians in ways that they don't need to be it's not its it is not true that every religion poses the same threat of terrorism in the 21st century and it is not true that every religion could pose the same threat of terrorism in the future so there are some religions that we will never generate terrorism and that's this is just obvious when you look at their doctrines now does not say that Islam is worse across the board on every question that religion can can be bad on it's it's it's not bad on stem-cell research Muslims for the most part believe that the soul enters the the embryo at the 40th day or some say that one hundred and twentieth day this is great for embryonic stem cell research is there's no problem sacrificing three to five day old human embryos within Islam so so Christianity the specific beliefs of Christianity pose a a liability to that scientific research and all of the life-saving consequences we might enjoy as a result in a way that Islam doesn't okay so we can talk about that difference honestly and that should be true across the board and that's it's it's inconvenient that as a matter of in the political sphere it really is a unique problem with Islam that we have to confront and it's very easy to worry that that there's a racist motive or a nationalist motive or a xenophobic motive encroaching in in the case of many people and no doubt it is especially in Western Europe at the moment judging by the questions that people often ask you at the end of a Q&A session when you talk about your book the moral landscape it seems to me that there is some confusion about your use of the word objectivity and science people seem to think that you're speaking strictly about the role of the hard sciences in determine determining human values and perhaps more important people's general concept of objectivity implies that that the phenomenon in question must be mind independent so when you talk about objective morality or objective truths about human well-being this doesn't make any sense of them because they're thinking about this is well-being a morality depend upon mine so how could they be objective could you clarify this yeah this is this is a real point of confusion for many people people think that people don't notice that there are two senses of the word objective and of the words objective and subjective there's this sense of what's called ontology this is what there is to know in the universe which is what facts are there to talk about and there are there are objective facts and subjective facts there are there are the facts of the material world spoken of in terms of physics and chemistry etc and there are facts of the subjectivity of any conscious system within that world and what it's like to be you in this moment is a is a set of subjective facts which has objective underpinnings its it has a lot to do with your the your body and your brain and your world etc but we can talk about human subjectivity objectively objectively in the epistemological sense in the sense that we're not being self deceived that we're not lying that we're we're constrained by by rational claims evidence based claims so for instance an example I use using the book the moral landscape and I often use in in this context I have something called tinnitus which it's often called tinnitus which is a ringing in the ear which you may have experienced if you've gone to a loud rock concert and you come home and your ears are ringing for in that case it's transient it goes away but people can get it based on some often some damage to the to the cochlea in the in the inner ear and you get ringing in your ear that's basically around for the rest of your life now I have this I'm not lying about it it's this is a phenomenon that is known to science people report this they they a lot is known about the kind of inner ear damage that can produce it it's it can be associated with hearing loss in the appropriate frequency of a we can we can study tinnitus we can talk about tinnitus I can tell you that my experience of it it seems to be on the right side and is high frequency as opposed to low frequency eyes so I could match it to a tone that you produced in the world this is all something that this is a feature of my inner life that I can represent ie in the spirit of scientific objectivity and about which science can know something there is no impediment to studying tinnitus and likewise there's no impediment to studying any other feature of our subjective life any moods or emotions or experiences that that people find compelling to study can be studied now it's inconvenient that we must rely on self-report to some degree to study these things now it's not that we simply have to take people's word for everything in their inner lives we know that people are actually not always the best judge of the they're more the moment-to-moment character of their experience and there are ways to get around self-report in certain experiments but yes the cash value of changes in experience is always change in experience and and there is there there's often no surrogate for simply having people tell you how their experience has changed that's not it's it's something worth worrying about in terms of designing in a specific experiment but it's not a a fundamental epistemological problem that rules out understanding human wellbeing or good and evil in scientific terms it's just it's just not and if it rules those things out it rules everything out about the rules the entire entire science of the mind out there's just no nothing to be known about depression or schizophrenia or anything else that people have been studying for for decades in neuroscience and psychology because these things are subjective experiences in response to my last video a reader asked a question about meditation and the claims I made about spiritual experience you've said that millions of quote real Mystics report that endless hours of meditation have transformed their conscious experience but millions of people tell us that God talks to them on a regular basis and others claim to have been abducted by aliens so what's the difference it seems that in every case all we can do is take their word for it now granted there these experiences might be subjectively real but not actually real and that's given the goal of Sciences to understand reality how can your claims about spirituality be scientifically justified well that's a I was trying to nullify that cancer earng last time around the the the distinction to make is between making claims about the character of your experience and making claims about physical reality or the universe at large so what I was saying is that you can make claims about your experience and what various methodologies have have done to change it and these are of a piece with any other claim about experience that people make and we can we can study these changes and experience that we can study when someone comes into the lab and says they're depressed or they're hearing voices or they've got a terrible pain in their knee these are claims about experience and we can we can talk about how those experiences are arising and what to do about them and spiritual experience is no different you took you can talk about the experience itself and talk about how its arise in the body at the level of neurophysiology or what people are doing to to engineer the experience the difference is when you start talking about what the experience means for the universe the weight why you're having the experience in some ultimate sense so the person who feels an experience of bliss while praying can talk about the experience of bliss that's there's nothing irrational about doing that to say that they're experiencing the bliss because it's the grace of God or the grace of Jesus that is the claim about being in relationship to invisible others which may or may not exist it's a claim about the attention of those very likely non-existent others on your person these are these are claims that are unjustified and in principle unscientific the claim that you were abducted by aliens is also a claim about the existence of aliens there they're coming to earth for strange proctological experiments done on cattle and people I mean this is this is not their reasons to be skeptical of those claims but if someone's had an experience where they will up and they saw aliens in their room it's very likely that it's hallucination or dream or some something we want to talk about in that context but they can still speak honestly about the character of the experience it's the what it means in ray in the external world that is the leap that is is often unjustified so in speaking about spirituality and mysticism and the experience of quote real mystics I'm talking about the the very positive changes that have occurred in people's lives based on making really sustained efforts in contemplation or meditation and it's it's as easy to talk about those things rationally as it is to talk about any other change in experience that is that is internal you know that is any change in the way you feel any change in your understanding of yourself Nha it's inconvenient that many of these these changes can't be demonstrated outwardly and precisely the way that that we can demonstrate changes in athletic performance say but many of them can be demonstrated many of them be two people can be emotionally quite different than they used to be there are neuro physiological coral correlates of expertise in meditation that people have studied with neuroimaging so it's this is all of this is tractable scientifically it's just a new field of inquiry can't religion just be a private matter one reader writes y ou issues shouldn't we concentrate on a limiting religion eliminating religion more or less only in the public sphere but not worry about what people believe in the privacy of their minds can it be something that just provides comfort to people and needs to just simply be kept out of politics now this is insofar as that's possible that's true the problem is just generally not possible insofar as people really believe what they say they believe insofar as they really believe that prayer works for instance then this belief has to show up in their lives has to show up in the kinds of decisions they make they they they are motivated by these beliefs their choices are constrained by these beliefs you've got parents who don't take their children to see doctors when they really need to see doctors because they think prayer works you know this is this is synonymous with with putting your child's life in jeopardy and it happens all the time in those communities where there's beliefs about the efficacy of prayer and and especially in in faiths like Christian Science where where medical interventions are anathema insofar as if someone really believes something of a religious doctrine or any other doctrine and there's some circumstance in the world that makes those beliefs relevant well then you you can never expect them to stay well behaved in the privacy of a person's mind so if the but if the bus driver who's driving your kids to school really thinks prayer works really works not just he's not just paying lip service to it he thinks that prayer changes the world that's troublesome it's troublesome because of all those situations that you can't necessarily foresee where he might decide to rely on prayer as opposed to something else to keep your children safe so just imagine a bus driver who thinks prayer works and he's exhausted doesn't really feel up to driving he probably shouldn't be behind the wheel but he said a prayer and so nothing bad is going to happen that's not the bus driver you want to driving your kids to school it the the the sense that that kind of thing never happens is erroneous the sense that that kind of thing is unlikely to happen is just merely a sense we have that people don't really believe what they say they believe and I there are many reasons to take people at their word especially when certain people do things like fly planes into buildings based on their expectation of paradise there are clearly people who are not just bluffing there are clearly people who really believe what they say they believe and we have to therefore put pressure on these beliefs and they're not merely a matter of a person's private worldview question from Jason Calacanis at Mahalo what do I like to speak about it corporate events well there is actually not that many corporations that that want to fly in a voluble atheist to talk about the the absence of God I you know there are there are I go to conferences more than more than corporate events but the the increasingly I'm talking about the way in which science can and will and must change our view of ourselves and the kinds of public policies we adopt because there's just there's up until very recently there's been the sense that science can stay sort of safely in its walled garden of figuring out what the universe is like and producing helpful technologies but this there's this other area of the humanities and religion and philosophy and and kind of value Laden talk which can function by its own rules and will never be constrained by by what's coming out of the lab and I think that has long but it's long been obvious that has been an illusion and it is unsustainable and increasingly so it will be obvious that you just you just in order to talk about the mind in order to talk about what is good in life you will be talking about what we know about the brain and what we know for a from many disciplines within science and that's that's troubling to some people and that's but that is that is what we have to talk about in order to create sane and and truly sustainable public policies that that will build a viable global civilization based on truly universal values I mean the the the one area of discourse that is in principle Universal is science everything else has some kind of regional and and geographic and merely contingent a merely accidental kind of shattering effect but there is there is one science and insofar as science can understand human nature and that's that is ultimately the way to understand human nature then there'll be one discourse about human nature and what is good for us and what is bad for us and what is possible and that's so that that's the area in which I I am tending to focus my attention

Channel: mahalodotcom

Views: 355,080

Rating: 4.8716664 out of 5

Keywords: ask sam harris anything, #2, sam harris, author, neuroscientist, the end of faith, letter to a christian nation, the moral landscape, meditation, religion, atheist, new york times bestseller, book, novel, christianity, muslim, life, question and answer

Id: 7qX_d4TDmz0

Length: 60min 54sec (3654 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/brevs]

Link for his first one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Z5eDXRKzM

[u/oheysup]

Yay

[u/[deleted]]

Really enjoyed it, but the way he dealt with inequality within the human species vis-a-vis the moral landscape wasn't particularly convincing to me.