Free Will with Sam Harris (Part 1) [Video] || The Psychology Podcast

[Music] hey it's great to have sam harris on the podcast sam is the author of five new york times bestsellers including the end of faith letter to a christian nation the moral landscape free will lying and waking up the end of faith won the 2005 pen award for nonfiction his writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics neuroscience moral philosophy religion meditation practice human violence rationality but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves in the world is changing our sense of how we should live he also hosts the making sense podcast which was selected by apple was one of the itunes best and has won a webby award for best podcast in the science and education category sam thanks for making the time to chat with me happy to be here scott i'm really looking forward to this chat and i really uh want to set the tone by saying i appreciate your intellectual honesty um and your intellectual bravery um sometimes one can just be intellectually honest but it happens to go with the flow of the current of the culture but you're intellectual honest and you're uh you don't mind being intellectually honest if it uh doesn't always win your friends so i really want to um to say i appreciate that even if i don't necessarily appreciate if i don't necessarily agree with everything you say in your arguments and i thought we could go through very carefully today um lots of areas of mutual interest and work through them very carefully and and see if we can arrive at some uh some maybe even transcendent conclusions so sure yeah happen to do it cool so since this is the psychology podcast i did want to start a little bit with your your development your child development and um that that's obviously uh formed some role in who you are today and the kind of interests you have um i'm curious what you're like in a child as a child and in particular in the sort of way you interacted with other people and in the way that you which you engaged with the truth as a child um well in so far as i remember actually i just read a um i guess it was a fourth or fifth grade um you know review of me by one of my one of my teachers i just happened to find that my mother happened to produce this uh so it was kind of hilarious to see uh the who i am now prefigured and and who i seem to be then um but i i think i you know i was certainly recognizable to myself as a little kid uh i think i was very logical and rational and you know argumentative and i was you know i was a little debater and uh negotiator um and it was i was very interested in many different things so i was i was a good student but i wasn't especially happy i don't think i was i was um i was a perfectionist and very hard on myself i would say i mean i think i was very self-critical um my dad left when uh i was two and a half so i you know i you know i don't know insofar as the the pop psychodynamics of that are are easily interpreted i mean i think i kind of internalized that and um you know that was uh that framed my childhood pretty decisively um but um you know i had i had a great mom and i have a great mom and and uh you know it was uh yeah it was it was not definitely not an unhappy childhood but it was the thing that that um really changed my life i'm sure we'll get to this but you know when when my introspective contemplative life started around the age of 18 that was a very clear break with who i used to be in in in in terms of access to um anything like tranquility or you know any kind of ease of being in the world so i don't remember you know i i'm sure i had my moments as a kid that were just you know childlike awe and wonder and joy i know i did have those moments and i had a lot of fun with my friends but i was in terms of in terms of the the way myself seemed structured it was always poised to be unhappy as honestly as any self really is but i felt like there was like a layer of perfectionism and self criticism that was you know unusually strong i would say were you in the debate club high school no i i don't think there was i don't i might mike if if we had a debate club i didn't notice it but no but i was i still would debate you know you know i think one can make the error in looking at uh your calm demeanor your tranquility and kind of assume that well there's not much emotion going on i think one can easily make that error as they do with a lot of people who are go through many years of meditative practice i was struck by something you said in an interview when you were describing um leaving uh your you know your father was in the hospital he was dying you were 17 years old and you left uh the hospital you didn't really feel um a full motion in that moment but you went then watched a movie is that right and and and all these emotions kind of poured out of you when you were able to kind of fully process or more fully processed what's going on through the medium of art you remember making that point in an interview yeah i i definitely remember the experience so the movie was right on point it was terms of endearment which has somebody dying of cancer and if if memory serves so um which my dad was was it was dying of cancer so um yeah so i i do remember that where it was it suddenly gave me access to the full grief rather than leaving me like the the sartrian character uh or the uh i guess it's kamu in the stranger doesn't he get convicted of not crying at his mother's funeral yeah well larry david gets convicted of many crimes uh like that of social taboo and curb your enthusiasm yeah yeah but you know i bring this up because to me that was poignant when you told that story about your father and it i just wanted to um bring out a little bit more of the humanity of sam harris i guess was my point in doing that um i know you don't uh talk about personal things too often and i certainly don't want to do it in a way that would make you uncomfortable but i think it's important to paint the a picture of you as human as well right right before i go into full vulcan mode yes yes before we talk about trump you know well that humanize is also human i think i think my my so-called trump derangement syndrome has revealed me to be all too uh fraught with emotion so right that's a that's a good that's it or as someone your critics would say uncontrolled emotion yeah i guess yeah not just emotion okay needless to say i disagree on that point but that's a debate for another time now you were really interested in martial arts early even in your youth right um not jujitsu but a ninjutsu yeah around uh 14 i got into to martial arts or what seemed to be martial arts at the time my sense of what is a truly effective martial art has has evolved uh since then but yeah in as a um i think i was 14 when i started training and did that for until i was through college and then stopped for you know almost 20 20 plus years and then then had a mid-life crisis and got in into brazilian jiu jitsu and then got a lot of injuries but that was that was fun well let's let's talk about call your college needs before we get to the crisis okay 20 year old crisis um you were in stanford uh you were experimenting with um ecstasy related kind of drugs is that right yeah well i had one mdma trip that was really decisive for me and that was my um i think was my sophomore year yeah it was my sophomore year at stanford and did that play a role in you deciding to like you dropped out quite literally dropped out of stanford and go on the spiritual journey went on for 10 years yeah yeah sort of so kind of on paper it looks like a bad idea you take drugs and you drop out of college but that is what happened and yeah there was almost certainly a direct connection there i mean i think i what i experienced in that first trip was just that the mind was a a very different place than i gave it credit for you know that it was possible to experience well-being directly that in a way that's not contingent upon the the success in one's life or anything one thinks one wanted right you know so i had had a girlfriend break up with me the year before or i guess you know just a few months before um and had been pitched into a real unhappiness and i would say you know full-on depression as a result of that so it's like my happiness had seemed to be totally dependent upon being in a relationship that i that i you know valued and being with someone i loved and and just my sense of myself completely imploded um and then i had this experience on mdma which was a perfect counterpoint to all of that right i just realized okay the there's there's a door in the mind that can swing open that can leave you with the the um uh utter certainty of your capacity for your own you know know freedom really psycho is a really deep psychological freedom that doesn't need a reference point in your life right you could be on your deathbed you could be uh you know you you could be that you could you could tap into this way of being before anything changes in your life right so like it was that it was that discontinuity between the way i was feeling you know and and you know and obviously the mind's capacity to feel that way and anything one might you know link it to in one's life now that i should say that's also part of what's dysfunctional about drugs obviously i mean i mean we want our sense of well-being to have some connection to the reality of our lives and the reality of the world because then you're you know the alternative is you can be delusional and and you know you could just be a heroin addict who's lying on the couch and and blissing out based on on the the pharmacology of the moment but having you have a totally dysfunctional life so i'm not recommending that but it was just it was the the recognition that how i was tending to be by virtue of what i was thinking about and what i was paying attention to was was a had really become a machine producing my my unhappiness right and the machine stopped during this you know six hour period on mdma and i could feel as i came down and as i could feel it start up again i felt you know intuitively that i could understand something about the mechanics of this and that there were other ways to to to to arrest the the hideous progress of this machine in my life and so that's how i got into meditation and other esoteric things you know we could talk about well in terms of esoteric things it's true is it true that you once worked in the security detail for the dalai lama well not not not worked i i was um you know i was really into meditation at that point and um that dalai lama was doing a a like a month-long tour of france you know teaching in you know almost in a different city each night i mean he was he was practically not more than 24 hours in any one place so it was just a literally a tour of france um and my friends who were also you know long-time uh buddhist practitioners many you know many of whom had done three-year retreats in various meditation centers in in france um we're organizing this trip and so i got tapped as you know yet another uh student of of meditation who who could be part of you know of the logistics and so we got you know i got put with a few with you know maybe a dozen other people as part of his security detail which you know didn't strike me as totally inappropriate given i had at this point a pretty long background in martial arts but you know no one else did right so it really we weren't really a security detail and we were the buffer between him between his real security detail and the public right so like he had like four secret service guys with guns who were his real bodyguards right and they weren't the dalai lama's bodyguard no i i was i was the i was you know the uh but ironically we were the ones who had all the conflict with the press and the public because we were the buffer between the real guys with guns and and the you know the rabble who were um could be surprisingly uh raucous and weird around the dalai lama was it was amazing i mean it was actually one moment where somebody literally grabbed him by the robes and turned him around so as to get a picture with him right so it was like the you you know if you if you um spend any time at all in a circumstance like that you you do discover some very odd behavior from people but um you know it was just a it was it was a very interesting way to be with him because i got to spend a you know a month with him uh you know pretty up close and just to see how he functioned in that in that mode and he's a he's a very self-actualized guy i mean he's just a he's just a real mensch it's a inspiring guy i love spending time with people like i remember i was on a uh this is going to sound funny but i was on a party bus with matu ricard oh yeah so matthew was there too i know oh wonderful wonderful we were at a conference together and i can genuinely say that he was he seemed so content with his being you know yeah there's something about a certain um contentness with being where you know people were making you know uh tawdry jokes you know people were making inappropriate jokes about uh the party bus we're on and he laughed you know you know there's a certain there's something about an ease of consciousness where someone um can sort of just uh get amusement from from all aspects of human nature yeah matthew is a remarkable person i mean as you probably know he he was a scientist before he became a monk so he's he's he's uh you know he's got a phd in molecular biology and then you know his study study was some of the greatest zogchen teachers of the the 20th century and and um yeah matt matthews and he doesn't you know as you say he doesn't take himself seriously uh so he's um yeah he's a wonderful guy so this 10-year period of your life um was very formative period for you studied with some very uh big name leaders in the in the buddhist tradition of meditation um yeah facilitated by in in some cases facilitated by matthew matthew was translating you know every every teaching i got from his teacher dougal kenzie you know matthew was translating for and um uh yeah so i spent some time with with him and his teachers in nepal what a wonderful serendipity there i had no when i brought up matu's name about being on a party bus i had no idea you had spent so much time with matu uh and he was so formative in those years of your life so i'm really glad i'm glad i brought it up then yeah um you know i mean i i was really uh amazed when i when i looked into this and preparing for this interview and i saw who you studied with i didn't even know all these people that you i knew the people but i know you had studied with them so my eyes widened you know um you got such a firsthand look at uh um not only you know the character structure of some of these leaders as well as their teachings right so i'll just mention some names um uh you pandita oppendidae yeah ooh oop sorry it's not like university yeah ooh um yeah so can you tell me a little bit about uh that experience because i think that you had mixed feelings about it i'd like to take a moment to talk about our sponsor betterhelp is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals for quite a lot of us right now during this coronavirus pandemic we are struggling with our most fundamental basic needs such as our needs for security connection and opportunities to master our work i think all of us could use some therapy right now i know i sure could which is why i've really been enjoying working with a professional therapist at betterhelp so i can realize the best version of myself even under the current circumstances betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist and you can start communicating with your therapist in just under 48 hours note that it's not a crisis line and it's not self-help it is professional counseling done 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announce a special offer for listeners of the psychology podcast you can get 10 percent off your first month of professional counseling by going to betterhelp.com psycpodcast that's betterhelp.com psych podcast join the over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional i'm sure i'm not the only one who's picked up an online shopping habit during this pandemic i enjoy the convenience access to reviews and the ability to compare prices across websites to find the best deal sometimes it can get exhausting though trying to find the coupon codes for products but thanks to the browser extension honey manually searching for coupon codes is a thing of the past honey is the free browser extension that scours the internet for promo codes and applies the best one it finds to your cart you'll save time and money honey supports over 3000 stores online ranging from tech and gaming products to popular fashion brands to food delivery here's how it works imagine you're shopping on one of your favorite sites once you check out the honey button drops down and all you have to do is click apply coupons honey does all the work for you in a matter of seconds and if it finds a working coupon you'll watch the prices drop i found it super easy to use and recently i used the browser extension to save 13.50 on a new cool pair of pajamas if you don't already have honey you could be straight up missing out on free savings it's literally free and installs in a few seconds and by getting it you'll be doing yourself a solid and supporting this podcast get honey for free at joinhoney.com psychology that's joinhoney.com yeah so broadly i i am when i started practicing meditation i got into uh vipassana first and vipassana is this is usually translated as insight meditation and it comes from the the oldest school of buddhism the theravada that's the buddhism of of southeast asia thailand and burma sri lanka and it is the tradition that has given us this boom in mindfulness mindfulness is is an export from from the you know the terabyte of pipasana teachings um it's not to say that it doesn't have analogs and other traditions of buddhism and then even in other traditions but it's you know mindfulness framed as mindfulness is really you know tarabata buddhism um so i started with that and spent a fair amount of time on retreat studying with you know both western students of the practice like you know joseph goldstein who's who was certainly my main western teacher but you know jack cornfield and sharon salsberg and all the people who started you know ims and um spirit rock i did most of my retreats at ims in the inside meditation society in massachusetts and uh they brought cytopandita out to teach there and he was you know he was their teacher of of again theravada vapasana you know inside meditation and he was a very rigorous kind of martial uh style teacher who he was a monk and and when you sat with him you took this you know some subset of the monks vows so you didn't eat afternoon and you tried to only sleep four hours a night and it was just wall-to-wall meditation um and so i spent several months on retreat with him i did you know at least i did a two-month retreat and i think one or two one-month retreats with him um i sat with him in australia for two months at one point and um yeah that was it was extremely useful but the logic of that practice was something that i felt that i eventually graduated from and moved on to to a different way of thinking about just you know why one is is paying attention to to one's experience in this way and what what there is to realize about the nature of the mind uh you get a the division conceptually is really between dualistic and non-dualistic forms of mindfulness i mean that's the way i i tend to talk about it i want to talk about these things in waking up my meditation app or in the book by that name um and so then i moved on to study with some of these other teachers we'll we'll talk about but like matthew's teachers in nepal they were teaching a style of meditation uh called zogchen which is which is a non-dual kind of awareness practice which which is you know in some ways the same i mean it's not it's not that there isn't it's not that there's something different to realize ultimately but it's a different set of instructions uh with respect to just what to pay what to pay attention to and why and i think there's a lot that goes by the way of meditation instruction that is ultimately somewhat misleading and and you know if you get deeply into it if you if you really if your life is about seeking enlightenment at any point if you really want to to fundamentally change the firmware of your mind um you know it's possible to really get frustrated and to experience a lot of psychological pain born of one's you know spiritual seeking and and so that's zogchen is a is a tibetan teaching which um is often translated as great perfection it can also be translated as great completion um so there's a there's a you know the the the message is there's there's a there's a a completeness and perfection to the nature of consciousness itself inherently right that there's something that to realize about consciousness that you're not producing by your efforts right it's not that you're you're meditating so hard that you you know you wind up uh uh perfecting consciousness no it's it's it's you're you're you're recognizing something that's already there right this is not a a something you're manufacturing and it's an important distinction because it it's you can at a certain point you can get the sense that you know all the work you're doing contemplatively i mean you know sitting for for a dozen hours a day day after day week after week month after month in many cases year after year um if you ask yourself why you're doing that right there can be an implicit logic to it that is uh both false and and um uh unhappiness producing which is that you you you can feel that you know you really are bound right you're really not free in this moment and you have to do something rather heroic to get free i mean you have there's a prison you have to escape from right you have to order this there's a there's a disorder in your mind that you have to put right and um even if you're even if you understand that that's not quite the right way to think about it there's this tacit sense in each moment that you're not good enough your life isn't good enough your experience isn't good enough and that's why you are making these weird efforts in the first place right i mean you want to improve something about your your mind right you're you're neurotic and you don't want to be neurotic right you you're having anxiety attacks and you don't want anxiety attacks right you um you know you you notice that your relationships are mediocre because you're not all that loving and you can't figure out how to get more loving right you know so it's like you're you've got a problem you're trying to solve there's a not you're trying to untie and so even if you're given a philosophy which says no no actually the mind is intrinsically radiant and pure and you just have to recognize that you're trying to do that because you have a problem that you want to solve right you're like you're you can't do you you don't recognize that really and now you're trying to because you want to put out these various fires in your life um so it's it is a it's a bit of a conundrum how you can ever get to the place where you're not making those kinds of dualistic you know problematized efforts and you're actually enjoying what the mind is like before you screw it up by you know seeking happiness and uh so yeah anyway dzogchen unties those knots very directly and and uh you know it's so it was very useful to to get the time i got with those teachers i mean my main teacher was took oregon ripped a and um and also neoshocan rinpoche and those are both people who um i took oregon i only saw in nepal you know where matthew and was but he wasn't the you know he wasn't the primary student of tokugan ripped he was i was dealing with different translators at that point so didn't you study with uh dilgo gente as well yeah so yeah dougal kennedy was was matthew's main teacher and really one of them yeah the great llamas of his time did he appear in a dream of yours before you met him am i making that up yeah i forgot where i spoke about that but um i wasn't even sure if that was you but that was you okay yeah yeah no i went actually it's funny and now i remember i once i actually told the dalai lama who dalai lama also studied with cancer remember he was his ocean teacher and i told the dalai lama about this dream but in the middle of my telling him this story i realized that there was no way to tell the story without pointing directly at his face because that's what dylan kennedy was doing to me in the dream he was pointing in my face um and the dream doesn't make any sense i can tell you what the dream was it makes absolutely no sense without pointing but it is that it's in fact a cultural taboo to point at someone you know in tibet right like this is this is like it's essentially you know as far as i understand it akin to you know giving someone the finger i mean it's just rude and here i'm now and i've launched and very enthusiastically into telling a dream to the dalai lama who i'm sitting directly across from you know like there's no it's just it's just me and him and it's just you know i've launched into this thing and now i realize i'm about to point in in his face so i kind of half pointed and i'm not even sure that it was a it was a coherent story at that point but no the dream was actually quite simple and brilliant it was one of those dreams where you realize that there seems to be a part of your mind that understands something that you the dream protagonist that doesn't right so like i was genuinely so i was in dialogue with you know obviously some imaginary person in my dream you know a product of my own mind um he was saying and doing things that were totally coherent and in you know enlightening actually uh and the the dream protagonist was fairly stupefied by being in this relationship and the bree the dream protagonist was me right so it just it was just one of those moments where where clearly the mind is bigger than than you thought you were in that moment you know so it's this kind of part a partitioning of intelligence but anyway the dream was um he was uh looking directly into my eyes and he's he was saying he was saying tell me uh tell me who you are and and i was kind of struggling for for words and he's and he said tell me and he pointed directly into my face and i just kind of you know still struggling for words and he said tell me and then he and then on the third tell me he pointed he said tell me and he pointed directly over my shoulder right looking past me as though there was someone directly behind me but i knew there was no one behind me right and in that like and i mean it actually seemed like i've never heard anyone you know i've never heard about any zogen master or any other buddhist master or any master kind of give this sort of intervention but the there was something about suddenly having like this very the the intensity of being you know being pointed directly to you know in my face and then to have it overshoot me you know to kind of go over one of my shoulders it actually just sort of teased out the structure of selfhood in my mind because i realized that there's there is something there is something about this self the sense of being in relationship to oneself that there's a there's an eye and a me you know this the structure of our our thought is is predicated on this the idea that you can talk to yourself right like like if you're the one talking and the one hearing how does that make any sense right you already know the thing you're saying to yourself presumably because you're saying it right um so it's like when i'm when i uh uh you know i sit down at this desk and i i said oh where's that pencil right like i i'm who am i asking like is there someone else in me who needs to be part of this search party right like it makes absolutely no sense and it it just strikes it still it strikes me to this day as a kind of brilliant gestural way of revealing that this is a a a false situation right that the the starting point for your paying attention to these things is not what it seems to be um anyway so that's what the the dream was quite uh it was quite powerful and that yeah and then i went to nepal and got to study with him which was which was great that is brilliant bro it's i'm laughing uh with one thing you said you said it you know you're saying the dream was quite brilliant i'm thinking like you know we'll get to the whole free will thing later but like who should take credit for the brilliance of that dream you know yeah because it's funny well it's funny because some people are inclined to to take if you consciously wrote that story it would seem immodest for you to say you know my story is brilliant but for some reason you saying my dream was brilliant no one it doesn't act trip it doesn't you know trigger that uh immodesty people get what that means and i think that's it's interesting i just wanted to double click on that right and then there's the question are we ever more responsible for our thoughts than we are in dreams right yeah how would we come to the answer to that question using scientific methods i don't think there is any scientific method that'll adjudicate that answer but we'll get into that yeah we'll definitely get into it um and just uh just to close this childhood so we get to the real meat of the intellectual arguments um you were a fiction writer and it's maybe even inspiring i heard somewhere that you have in a drawer somewhere a couple novels that you wrote during that 10-year period is that true uh yeah i assume they're on one of my hard drives i don't think i have i don't know if i have a uh a hard copy of anything at this point but um yeah so when i when i originally dropped out of school it was kind of i had a dual purpose i was going to write fiction i was going to write a novel and and that's you know that just there seemed to be no reason to stay in school if that was my professional aspiration i mean no one cares where you went to school or whether you finished if you write the great american novel so um i started doing that and i also got more deeply into studying meditation and you know went to india to study with some people and spend some time on retreat and then i would come get off and and write more fiction um but one once i got sufficiently interested in the nature of the mind i just started writing yeah i i got bend toward writing nonfiction and then then i obviously needed to go back to school to to get the the bona fides to do that credibly so um that's what changed for me but i i never when i the fiction i wrote it was i never finished something that i felt like okay this is i can really get behind this i was growing so much as a writer that you know i was kind of the sort of the you know i was kind of running across the bridge and it was crumbling behind me like every time i finished something i looked back on it and noticed how how inadequate it was as you know it was not something that i was going to want to publish so you're you might you probably won't be able to do it i do not think i'm going to um publish any of these early novels no yeah i i say david eagleman because he's published fiction about consciousness and stuff as well i could imagine i could imagine writing fiction again or writing a play or writing i mean i i could imagine wanting to do that it's you know finding the time as you know is is always the this is the puzzle it needs to be solved here but i do um yeah i could imagine doing that but i i can't quite imagine going back and dusting off the stuff i wrote in my 20s that that's probably not going to happen let's put a period on that yeah put up here in that i want to pee before we talk about free will yeah i'm with you okay i'll be back two minutes or so showing no free will at all here exactly have you ever listened to an episode of the psychology podcast and wished that you had the opportunity to ask me a question well now's your chance to interact with me more directly over at stereo every single sunday at 5 p.m pacific time i'm going live on the stereo app with my friend aj jacobs a best-selling author and lifestyle experimenter you can join the conversation live and talk directly to us on the app we had our first chat recently and it was so much fun note this is exclusive to the stereo app with stereo you can be your very own talk host or if listening is more your thing you can jump on our stereo talk and ask all those questions you've been dying to ask all you've got to do is download the stereo app and follow me at stereo.com psycpodcast then just join us on sundays at 5 pm pacific time to join in on the discussion again download the stereo app and follow me at stereo.com psycpodcast and join us on sundays at 5 pm pacific time once you sign up follow me so that you can get notified every time i go live on stereo see you there i want to read a sentence that you wrote because i have all sorts of issues with it and i want to just give you my my perspective and see what you think you say consider what it would actually take to have free will you would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions and you would need to be in complete control of these factors to me the sentence kind of reads like you're an implicit dualist in a sense because who is the you in that sentence you know it's obviously not it's obviously not something non-physical because in your own view um that wouldn't make sense so the only remaining possibility is that it's your consciousness and if it's your consciousness then how is it even enough to generate ultimate free will since consciousness must itself be a physical process so even if it was fully aware of all the influential factors and even if it were in complete control of them it would itself still haven't to be a set of physical processes with their own deterministic antecedent causes also you know it seems to me like the role of consciousness is actually pretty large just indirect you know consciousness affects our later choices and actions rather than our immediate ones so you're absolutely right you're right when you say that but i still think it does affect um the things that is it's still essential to what people mean by the term free will and that might get to the crux of this argument you know people care about the potential for growth and the capacity to exhibit self-control destructive impulses that might detract them from reaching their long-term goals that's what people really care about when they when they talk about free will so i just wanted to get some of your thoughts on this because i'm not completely clear i understand that that that sentence yeah well i mean it's not really understandable in in that way i mean what you've really just landed on is the problem with the concept of free will it just it it doesn't it's an incoherent idea and so far as we we actually connect with what people really think they have the concept makes no sense i mean they're versions of this i mean as you know dan dennett has tried to purify the concept of free will in ways so as to give us a you know in his terms a free will that's worth wanting right like he you know there's a a compatibilist project that that tries to um say well you know obviously libertarian what's called libertarian free will doesn't exist that makes no sense we can all agree on that hear of all hear all these other things we have and are and are you know right to want and um let's just call those free will uh there are several problems with that one is that it it is actually a way of just changing the subject it's just not you're not actually interacting with what this this spurious and spooky and and incoherent thing that people feel they have you're not and you're not acknowledging just how many important things shift ethically once you let go of that spooky free will i think that things really do change and and they change in ways that are important not just for our our justice system and you know just our very concept of justice they're important for our ethical intuitions about just what it means to be a good person and how we should feel in the presence of of um you know all of the misadventures we have in life of just you know you know colliding with with people who who um bother us annoy us frighten us you know i mean just like well how should we feel about uh evil people like what is what is what is this whole uh demarcation of our of our world into these concepts of good and evil how should we think about all that all of these things shift to to a greater or lesser degree once you get rid of this notion of free will and dan dennett's project acknowledges none of that right and that's that's the problem i have that's why we he and i have never agreed on this topic um he you know the analogy i use is you know that we're living in in a world where most people believe in atlantis right they believe all the the spooky things people tend to believe about atlantis they believe in an underwater kingdom and a you know just a some uh prior civilization that had all the answers and then got submerged and you know and like that's what really preoccupies them and dan comes along saying no no no no you do you realize atlantis is actually sicily and here are all the reasons why sicily and atlantis just you know just historically and it would you go into what plato was writing and it's pretty clear he might have been talking about an island in the mediterranean and here's the argument and okay so now let's talk about sicily right okay we can talk about sicily but sicily is not atlantis right sicily is not what people think that was it's not what has infatuated generations of people who've been talking about atlantis and people are infatuated by this idea that again this is just libertarian free will that they could have done otherwise right like it it seems to most people that if you rewound the movie of their life to a few seconds ago they could have thought or acted or wanted or intended and therefore behaved differently than they did and when you do something that angers me if you if you say something that offends me you do something that you know you break a promise you do so you do something my anger also tends to presuppose that ability in you to have a moment ago to have done otherwise like you should have done otherwise right i'm pissed now because you shouldn't have done that right and and when you actually trace the the you know the my my emotional reactivity there down to its roots i am relating to you differently than i would be relating to a gust of wind or a wild animal or a miscalibrated robot or something else that was also behaving the laws of nature about which i would never say it should have done otherwise right like when a machine is malfunctioning um i have it may cause tremendous harm in my life right or or if a wild animal you know shows up and starts you know if if a cougar shows up in my yard and starts attacking me or my kids that's a that's a a horrifying problem to figure out how to solve right and it certainly would warrant killing the thing if i can do it right um but at no point am i under the illusion that this is living out the consequences of its free will and that i'm in relationship to the kind of thing that could and shouldn't do couldn't should do otherwise if i could rewind the universe to to a moment ago um and people so people the rules ethically and psychologically seem to change entirely for people when you're talking about people you know they don't think this way about chimpanzees they don't think about this way about people with certain kinds of brain damage so there's a certain layer of human ability right behavioral regulation linguistic production you know goal setting right there's that layer of our humanness which arguably is is the most important some of the certainly some of the most important stuff we do that convinces us that we are not part of the clockwork of the universe anymore right and then there are other spooky ideas that that that get inserted here where people wonder about their souls you know they might have an immortal soul that's somehow pulling the strings of the brain or maybe there's kind of some quantum events here that that give us some degree of freedom that you know mere monkeys don't have right and all from a scientific point of view there's no reason to grant any of that credence but the the crucial piece here and this is really my honestly my only original contribution to this conversation because this is for 2000 years it's been obvious that free will didn't make any sense yeah it i mean it it's the problem is it just it doesn't make any sense there is no way to describe causality where this this notion of i could have done otherwise uh makes sense because randomness doesn't get you there but the only thing that that's original that i've contributed to this or at least this original in the in the sense that i didn't get it from anyone else i mean i'm sure someone else has has made this precise point because it's there to be made is that the the starting point for this conversation is deeply mistaken the the starting point for everyone is listen we know we have free will because we experience it we have this experience of free will the experience of i can choose to move my right hand and my left hand and clearly i'm doing it no one's forcing me to do it i can take a long time and decide i can go back and forth like this is i am the author of my behavior here i know this from the first person side but it's very difficult to figure out how to make sense of this in terms of the of the streams of causality that i'm not aware of in terms of you know gene transcription and and you know neurotransmitter behavior and you know all of the causes reaching back to the big bang that i didn't author that that are you know the state of the universe that accounts for me for what i'm doing you know whether it's deterministic or random all of that causality it's hard to map free will onto all of that but i know i have it from the experiential side right the the truth is that is an illusion right it's not even an illusion my point is that the the illusion of free will isn't even there if you look closely at it so there is no ex there is no mystery to solve experientially right everything about your experience is totally compatible with determinism or determinism plus randomness neither of which gives you this freedom people think they have but honestly your your behavior right now your emotion your intention your thought is totally compatible with a the most deterministic picture possible like like the the novel of your life is already written say let's say let's say we live in a block universe where the future exists just as much as the past right where there's literally zero degrees of freedom there's no such thing as possibility there's only what is actual right like so like the next thing you think and do you know your reaction to the thing i'm saying now is is already written right let's say that's true i'm not saying that's the universe we live in but i am saying that your experience of yourself in the world in this moment is totally compatible with that sort of universe so there really is no problem to solve here now there's there are many things that follow and don't follow from that but we we simply do not have an experience of free will we have an experience of there being a difference between voluntary and involuntary action and we can talk about the things we do experience but free will uh is just not something that is that it's impossible to find a place in your subjectivity to make sense of the claim it's normal it's no it makes no more sense subjectively than it does objectively or in in terms of third-person causes and effects you're really hung up on the magical free will part of this uh of this um it's not it's not hung up it it is what people mean it is when when you have someone who feels that someone should be punished for the really punished because they deserve their punishment dessert the just desserts right right that is someone who feels that the the the logic of retribution is anchored to libertarian free will not that their genes and their environment 100 conspired to make them do what they did it seems like the argument you're making is besides the point though because i think compatible is free will when you really look at the philosophy of mind literature on compatible with free will i think it's a lot more like full conceptions of free will than sicily is like atlantis in your analogy because you know the point is that let me let me let me outline what i think the why what you're saying is besides the point and you tell me why i'm wrong i'd love to hear why i'm wrong if i'm wrong um it seems like people can do all the things they care about if they think that they care about making choices that are somehow uncaused they just aren't understanding what that literally means as you point out what people really mean when they insist that free will is important is they don't want to feel coerced they think of causes as sources of coercion but that's a confusion i think people want to make choices that are consistent with their own goals and be able to deliberate about the causes where their desires aren't totally clear and they can do those things and it's pretty clear their consciousness participates causally in the in that process well well i i would dispute that i think that's uncertain but i mean the bowel meister did a global review of the literature and all this you know you focus on the label that i don't forget how you pronounce l i b e t studies yeah but that was that doesn't really get at the issue because when you actually look at the role of consciousness as playing a causal role in human behavior you see it's a very pervasive strong effect of consciousness i guess the way i view the situation is that we have certain degrees of freedom um in depending on uh the role of the mix of conscious and unconscious processes that we can bring to bear to a task at uh our conscience at any moment of time and you don't see there being a wiggle room there in in the degrees of freedom of of a meaningful sense of the term a free will of what people care about well my criticism of free will is happening on another level and and bringing in consciousness is is consciousness is additionally a difficult thing to talk about right so yeah so i'm familiar with baumeister's work on consciousness and and agency um but it doesn't get at the the issue that i'm raising here so i mean for instance there are certain things i'm conscious of right and i'm conscious and and they seem to have a relationship to my behavior right so i'm conscious of um you know just deciding to to do this podcast with you right so like it seemed like consciousness was necessary to get us both here to do this podcast right but we don't regret it no no no not at all um but the um so so to decide to do something in the future to to organize your behavior such that you actually arrive at the appointed hour to care about right right well so this this is this is voluntary behavior and it is um it's it's in conformity with various goals and promises and um you know it's hard to get uh chickens to behave any anything like this and there's really no other animal that we know of that does a good job of organizing their behavior in this way and we seem to do it based on uh consciously uh thinking thinking about certain things and paying attention to certain things and there's something that to say that it's conscious is to say that that there's a qualitative character to all of that and there's there's something that it's like to be me deciding to do a podcast with you and then you know showing up and being here and and making small mouth noises of the sort that i'm now making and um yes this is all illuminated by consciousness in our case now the question is one what what is really going on there and i mean first of all everything that i that either of us is conscious of is being promoted into consciousness on the basis of neural activity of which we're not conscious right so there's a there's a kind of base layer of neurophysiological causality that we can't inspect and that is simply producing it's producing every like i'm getting to how am i getting to the end of this sentence right it's in conformity with the grammar of english somehow sometimes right i make errors i sometimes i notice them i mispronounce certain words i but but basically i'm you know somehow i'm getting to the end of the sentence in something like grammatically correct form and i can't inspect the micro events that are i'm not conscious of any of the micro events that are allowing me to do that right so there's a there's all the unconscious processing that our conscious phenomenology sits on top of now the question is and this is you know essentially a criticism of what baumeister was up to there there's much much of what we seem to do consciously it remains mysterious why consciousness need be associated with any of these things right like we could imagine building robots that were that could pass the the turing test that could do all of these things without there being something that it's like to be those robots right and so it would be and and then maybe that's not in fact possible maybe con maybe a certain level of intelligent behavior just produces consciousness you know that that you know the jury is still out on that i like the idea that free will evolved in humans you don't you don't like that argument at all well no it would but what would free if we could if we build a robot that can do a podcast that can agree to do a podcast that will show up at the appointed hour that we'll put it in its calendar and that will that will have a a a touring test passing conversation with you at what point in our building in what point in the manufacture of that robot and in your interaction with it however pleasant will you imagine that we inserted free will into its code you know from my perspective it's just when we've been able to give it conscious control in some way to be able to override its programming so to speak you know i mean humans have evolved it's a program it can't override his programming first we are just so of course we are just our biology what else would we be but isn't the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we are i mean you could still say the robot it means something for the robot to to to be a unique unique robot right i mean don't don't you don't you think that that the interesting thing is that you know the biology the biology encompasses you know all the unique aspects of of what sam harris is and who sam harris is including your unconscious and your consciousness but but so the things of which i'm unconscious right so so here's here's the um i was trying to think of how to how to get it get at this so as to have it have the point land um thanks for listening to part one of my conversation with sam harris do you have a million questions after listening you can join the psychology podcast after party on the stereo app this sunday at 5 00 pm pacific time best-selling author aj jacobs and i will be discussing the episode in fact aj and i go live every sunday and we love having discussions with fellow psychology enthusiasts you can join our show ask questions about anything you want and share your experiences and opinions about the podcast i truly want to hear everything within reason stereo is the app for live social conversations download the stereo app now and follow me at stereo.com psycpodcast and join aj and i live this week you can also get the link in the show notes see you there and tune in next week for part two of my conversation sam harris thanks for listening to this episode of the psychology podcast if you'd like to react in some way to something you heard i encourage you to join in on the discussion at the psychologypodcast.com that's the psychologypodcast.com thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind brain behavior and creativity [Music] you

Channel: The Psychology Podcast

Views: 36,245

Rating: 4.8702984 out of 5

Keywords: psychology, podcast, Scott Barry Kaufman

Id: 77w7VEYfCCo

Length: 58min 12sec (3492 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Pyroskyy]

It feels like these always come down not really having the same definition of "free will". Sam seems to understand this and tries his best to make his definition clear, but there is usually still a disconnect. Even when Scott says "ultimate free will", it feels a level below what Sam is talking about. Since we can't control our subconscious systems, we will never have true/ultimate/highest level free will, which is Sam's argument as I understand it.

[u/gazzthompson]

Today it’s great to have Sam Harris on the podcast. Sam is the author of five New York Timesbest sellers, including The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy,religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. He also hosts the Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.

[u/dvijdc]

Why is the Scott part of the audio super mumbly and hard to listen to (especially in the first half of the podcast)?! This podcast has like 200+ episodes, I'd expect them to be ultimate pros at audio-editing at this point.