Questioning Sam Harris | Sam Harris | #224

you need to value certain things in order to get any facts in hand in the first place any statement about facts relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence right if you're if you don't value logic there's no logical argument you can give someone to say that they should value it if someone doesn't value evidence there's no evidence you could give them to say that they should value it so that so it you know epistemology sort of bites its own tail or put or picks itself up from its boot right now that actually that actually harkens back to the is ought problem right because right there you said and i'm not denying the validity of anything you've said so far but right there you said that without agreeing on the validity of evidence let's say there's no agreement about what is and there we've got a frame problem there right we have that value that you need to even determine what is well the question then is well where does that value come from and you can't say well it comes from what is in some easy manner because you just said unless you have a value of a certain sort you can't derive what is and that's partly why this ought to is ought problem just doesn't seem to go away [Music] [Music] [Music] hello everyone i'm pleased today in a variety of ways to have as my guest dr sam harris who is undoubtedly familiar to many of you watching or listening to this sam is a neuroscientist philosopher and author of five new york times bestsellers his work covers a wide range of topics neuroscience moral philosophy religion meditation practice political polarization rationality but generally focuses on our developing understanding of ourselves and how how our developing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live his books include the end of faith the moral landscape free will lying and waking up sam hosts the popular making sense podcast there's also the creator of the waking up app which we're going to talk about a fair bit today which offers a modern rational approach to the practice of meditation and an ongoing exploration of what it means to live a good life he's practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many tibetan indian burmese and western meditation teachers both in the us and abroad he holds a degree in philosophy from stanford and a phd in neuroscience from ucla sam and i spoke twice a few years ago it's probably four years ago now on his podcast we got bogged down a bit the first time trying to agree on a definition of truth which in our defense is not necessarily the easiest thing to come to an agreement on but our second discussion flowed more freely then we met twice in front of live audiences of about 3 000 in vancouver and soon after at dublin and then at the o2 in london those were tremendously exciting events i believe for both of us and for everyone else involved and perhaps even for the audiences where something approximating nine thousand and eight thousand people respectively listen to our discussions and we haven't spoken well for a long time perhaps not since then even and i so i'm very much looking forward to this and the time i first thing i'd really like to know is what do you make of those events in retrospect and they attracted a very large crowd certainly by our standards and i'd like to know how you look back on that and and what you think about that well first let me say i'm just very happy to to see you and to be speaking with you again it's really it's been uh i think we spoke once on the phone since those events if i'm not mistaken but you know it's been the years passed quickly or all too slowly depending on what's going on as you know and uh you know i've heard about a lot of what you've gone through indirectly and what you put out there publicly and i just you know i was you know i was i was worried about you and i'm incredibly gratified to see you re-emerge and and uh connect with your audience and and uh be back be back in the game because thanks man i value your voice yeah well it's i i'm pretty thrilled to be back and to be able to be talking to people again like this so let's hope it continues yeah yeah um well you know it was very interesting because i mean you know as you know and as as your your fans know you you really did kind of come out of nowhere like a you know on a rocket like trajectory right so you were somebody i had never heard of and then all of a sudden you were the most requested person for my from my audience to have on the podcast and then we did that first podcast that you mentioned where we we got bogged down on questions of epistemology and um which i you know i think i haven't listened to it since but i i still think it was a useful conversation and not god is going yeah and many people found it very valuable i mean you know it's just to either to my advantage or your advantage people found it valuable uh they heard what they some heard what they wanted to hear in it and some some had their minds uh bent around as as was intended but uh people most people many people certainly felt felt it was a kind of failed experiment in conversation and we should try it again and then we had a a much more amicable discussion on my podcast and that planted the seed for these public events and if if memory serves we had one event booked in vancouver and you were still not quite the famous jordan peterson yet and then in like in the 15 days it took us to actually get to that event um your star had risen so quickly that we recognized that the promoter recognized that we had to book a another event immediately uh after you know so the next night we we so we had two back-to-back events in vancouver um and then yeah those those subsequent events with you were really a lot of fun because we were disagreeing very stridently about fairly existential topics and by the time we got to london and and dublin we had these immense audiences that were were segmented in ways that i had never quite experienced i i've been in front of you know my home team audience and i've been in front of a hostile audience but i've never been in front of an audience where you know fully fifty percent or sixty forty i mean i don't know what the split was at that point but you know thousands of people were on one team and thousands of people were on another team for questions of god and faith and meaning and yeah but everybody was on board for the discussion you remember one thing that happened this was in vancouver we were going to switch to a q a and we asked the audience essentially if they wanted the discussion to continue because we were in the middle of it or if they wanted to switch to the q a and it was overwhelming supporting the audience for the discussion to continue which i thought was quite remarkable yeah yeah yeah so it was it was a lot of fun and uh it was a tremendous amount of energy i mean to have eight or nine thousand people show up for a uh an intellectual discussion really i mean it did have the character somewhat of a debate but it was not framed as anything like a formal debate and we were really just having a conversation and agreeing where we agreed and disagreeing where we disagreed and it was um anyway i i found it to be a lot of fun and it was ridiculously exciting yeah and people people loved it so yeah i've yes and so what do you make of that it's like why in the world was what it was that we were talking about attractive to so many thousands of people well you know when you look at the full sweep of what we cover i mean in those particular conversations we weren't focusing on areas that we we agree about much more i mean we you know you and i if you're going to turn us loose on questions of um you know moral panic around identity politics and social justice hysteria you know you and i will agree i think probably 90 percent or more on many of those topics uh and i don't recall us touching any of that but that but that was in the in the background it was certainly it was certainly the the wind in your sails you know making you more and more prominent at that point because you had hit those topics so hard um but you know the topics we were touching questions of of you know what is reality and how we should live within it really you know the fundamental questions of of you know what it means to live a good life what are the requisites for living a good life how should we think about our place in the universe so as to have the best chance of living a good life these are the most important questions anyone ever asks provided they have sufficient freedom to even worry about such things right i mean just if the wolf is at the door or in the room well then people really for the most part don't have the luxury of of worrying about whether they're as ethical or as honest or as profoundly engaged with the the present moment um as they might be but once you get to something like you know first world concerns where you have enough material abundance where you know survival is not a question and when political stability is sufficient that you're not continually worried that you know your neighbors are going to murder you um then you're then it really i mean then then we you know when you when you wake up at three in the morning and can't get back to sleep you're thinking about what what does this all mean and what's you know what is a good life one of the things that we did agree on i think that sort of provided a container for the discussions in total was that there was potentially such a thing as the good life that that's just not some you know epithelial abstraction or something like that but something central and to some degree i think we disagreed about where the information for deriving what might constitute the good life comes from but it isn't even clear to me exactly where those differences lie and that was part of i suppose the fun of the discussion and something that i also hope to continue today because i've seen since then it seems to me that you've turned your attention more and more perhaps not more and more but you certainly continued your route into investigation of what constitutes the good life and and also your attempts to bring what you've learned to under perhaps an increasingly wide audience using the technology that you're using now i have this app that you have which is the waking up app my wife has um subscribed to that for the last year and a half and i joked with you earlier that she probably spent more time with you than she has with me in the last year and a half so that's quite quite comical but she finds it's quite useful and and i took a good look at it today how does tell me about that app and why you're doing that are you doing that instead of writing a book or is it another book and why are you doing that well i seem to be doing everything instead of writing a book the writing a book has has become an opportunity cost that i can't justify at the moment but no doubt i will write another book at some point but yeah between my podcast and app that's really those are the two channels where i am putting out my ideas at this point so why did you switch to that because well i looked at the app and one of the things you're doing is you've broken down lectures in some sense into like 10-minute chunks that are focused on different topics a whole variety of topics i've got the app right here and um assuming my phone so there's groups of lectures fundamentals mind and emotion the illusory self mysteries and paradoxes and some of the topics for example the illusory self uh self and other alone with others looking in the mirror the art of doing nothing mysteries and paradoxes what is real consciousness the mystery of being in some ways it looks like a book right it's got chapters it's got sub chapters but why why this why this technology and and how is it performed for you in comparison to a book well so i did write the book version of this content or certainly most of this content so i i have a book waking up and it touches you know it is my attempt to ground so-called spiritual experience experiences like self-transcendence and unconditional love and the kinds of things people experience on you know various psychedelics you know this is all of increasing interest to people now i wanted to ground all of that in what i consider to be a rational empirical understanding of the world right i didn't want to believe anything on insufficient evidence so as to prop up the [Music] the importance of these experiences because they don't they don't actually need to be propped up by by by you know in my view faith or or any unjustified claim to knowledge um and they do you know in at very interesting points deliver their own kind of knowledge about the nature of the mind i mean there are things you can recognize directly in your experience that puts your understanding of your own subjectivity in closer register with what we understand about the brain right now not everything is is it can be can be cashed out experientially but many things can and uh can i can i ask you one question well i okay so that's there's a bunch of that that i agree with deeply and one of the things i've tried to do to the degree that it was possible when talking about let's say matters that could be religious i've tried to stay out of the religious territory as much as possible because it seems to me counterproductive to make an appeal to faith would you can make an appeal to well what would you to it not just to experience it's deeper than that to something like the combination of experience in science so let me run something by you as an example and see what you think of this because one of the things that we really sparred about i suppose or discussed was the the is art conundrum right right we agree that you have to have oughts because you have to act and that's that landscape of value but we ran into some trouble i think trying to make our viewpoints about where those oughts might be derived from you seem to be more convinced than me perhaps that the step from is to ought was simpler and i was more convinced that it was more complicated and there were problems that still remained there i'll let you respond to that but i wanted to talk about this deeper experience so i was standing with my wife the other day on the dock of this cottage we have up north and it's very dark up here and so when you look up you can see the night sky well enough to see the milky way and actually to see galaxies if you use the corner of your eye and and so and one of the things that's associated with that is an experience of awe and it's not surprising because there you are confronting what's essentially infinite as far as you're concerned as as much as it might be for us and i thought a lot about the experience of aw one of the things and it's also produced by music quite regularly one of the things that happens when you experience awe is that a vestigial pilo erection mechanism kicks in and that's the mechanism that makes prey animals puff up you see this with cats they're quite funny when they do this they puff up so they look bigger in in in this when they catch sight of a threatening predator and so they perhaps subjectively experiencing experience the more terror stricken end of awe but that awe is very very deep it's not a it's not a rational response it's way underneath rationality it's an instinctual response and it seems to me as well that it's associated very tightly with our instinct to imitate and it's strange to think that you could look at the night sky and that could catalyze a in an instinct to imitate but we're very we're very good at using abstraction us creatures and it's not exactly obvious what we can imitate and what we can't so i think that's an example of this idea that you're putting forward that the domain of religious experience let's say a spiritual experience has a uh biological underpinning a deep biological underpinning and you know part of my question is what's the what are the implications of that exactly if that if that happens to be the case so first i'd like to know if you agree about that discussion about awe and there is an odd thing and then anything else you'd like to add i'd like to hear yeah we've opened many doors there that's a i see a 10-hour conversation but treating just those topics but um well to start with the azot bit you're in very good company most people in science and philosophy as you know believe there really is a a disjunction between is and ought and to follow hume's really cast aside remarks i mean he didn't go into it deeply but but at one point uh he wrote that you can't derive an art from an is right there's no description of the way the world is they can tell you how it ought to be so um and he was he was decrying the fact that so many scholars and then in general so many theologians in his time would move smoothly from is to ought without acknowledging that they had had committed a logical error but i do think there's a trick of language lurking at the bottom of this is an odd talk that is misleading and um and it's it's difficult to spot and you know i believe i've spotted it and and but i i do you know the people who don't agree with me don't agree with me i mean that their intuitions don't pass through you know the point where i'm i'm trying to shove them um and you know it's somewhat analogous to um you know the philosopher wittgenstein made a point when he was criticizing freud he was criticizing freud's notion of the unconscious he didn't he thought this reification of the unconscious was was fallacious and you know we can leave that aside i don't you know that's uh i'm not sure i agree with him there but the the point he was making about the power of language was interesting he said imagine if instead of saying uh i saw nobody in the room we said i saw mr nobody in the room imagine a language that forced us to say i saw a mr nobody right just just imagine what confusion would be born of that convention of language that's something he said in his i think was in the blue book and there are many places in our thinking about the world where language plays a similarly confusing role where we have reified something which is not probably happens with free will yeah no so i think it's a confu it's confused us about free will it confuses about about death for instance i mean i think well you know if you're an atheist who doesn't believe that anything happens after you die right if you think uh there's there's no rebirth you know there's no reincarnation and and that eastern picture of karma and rebirth is probably not true and you think there's no heaven or hell and if you really think you get something like a dial tone when you die well many people are left expecting some kind of oblivion some kind of positive nothingness some some some permanent loss of experience where and so this notion of nut of of oblivion um is a kind of reification uh but if you if you think about it more clearly that's precisely the kind of thing you would not except i mean if if it's simply the end of experience well then you're not going to be experiencing the end of experience right this is not you didn't you didn't experience an absence before you were born right well the idea that you would experience is implicit in the way the question is framed right right right so there's no there's nothing you're going to suffer this is something that epicurus pointed out through lucretius that you know death is nothing for us you know we're where we are death is not and where death is we are not right like there's just non-overlapping sets of facts whatever those facts are if in fact death is the end of experience so which is to say there's nothing to worry about really if if uh if death is is just the end of anything um and so how do you think that relates to what is odd yeah so to come back to to is an odd i just think really what we have i mean forget about morality forget about questions of good and evil forget about uh any value judgment what i and try to return your mind to something like the primal circumstance of consciousness right i mean just just imagine waking up from you know a 100 year sleep and you've forgotten everything about yourself and now you're just a mind in a world in some sense we're all in we're all potentially in that position in every moment in our lives you know just seeing creation afresh right seeing this moment of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching thinking for you know as though for the first time you know clearly do you know that have you ever heard of the neurological case i think it was a man who had bilateral hippocampal damage he was in the psychiatric hospital and he woke up like that every second yeah yeah his wife would come in the room and he'd say it's as if it's as if i'm seeing you for the first time he lost that right he lost the imposition of memory on his perception and so every perception was fresh and new yeah well so and i'm not recommending brain damage to anyone as a way of freshening up experience but there's a there's a non-neurologically compromised way of of grasping this intuition which is it just in this moment you know experience really is potentially totally fresh and totally new and it but for the fact there's this there's this ever-present layer of our thinking about it our remember remembering what just happened are expecting the next thing that's going to happen that's really the conversation we're having with ourselves in each moment and meditation is a way of breaking that spell and actually being vividly aware of the present moment in a way that that frees you from this automaticity of just viewing everything through your through your concepts and your discursiveness that's a neurologically justifiable viewpoint too because it looks like the hippocampal map that more or less keeps track of in some sense our memories and then also of our conditional positioning in the world is likely either it's inhibiting that more primal perception although it's doing it in a very useful manner generally speaking because it keeps us oriented enough in the moment so that we focus on minut the minute details that might be necessary to our survival but it's it's conceivable that it's simultaneously blinding to blinding us to a broader and deeper reality that in some sense is deeply nourishing in the face of suffering yeah yeah and and what's more the the mechanism that is tiling over reality with concepts in every moment and keeping us thinking and persevering about our experience rather than recognizing that we're identical to our experience um let's table this part of the discussion for a second this would go under the question of what is the self you know what do we mean by self and what might tran self transcendence be but this whole mechanism is productive of most if not all of our psychological suffering right like there's just yeah you know all of our anxiety and depression and fear and regret and shame and and an inability to love even the people we ostensibly love you know in our lives you know the contraction into self that is so toxic so much of the time um you know all of our deferring our happiness to some future time where we've met all of these goals that that that raise our status in comparison with you know everyone else we're comparing ourselves to that whole stratum of of being a person is a confection of endlessly thinking about ourselves about our past and our future and even our present and it's possible to punch through that whether it's through you know using psychedelics or practicing meditation or just having just a a collision with the present moment that's engineered by something you know you're someone close to you dies or say you know something something changing music can do that yeah you can do that and dance can do that or you know in certain cases the you know the aw you describe looking at looking up at the the milky way right that can do that for people um okay so let me let me but i just i just didn't answer your i didn't answer your question the this this notion that there's there's this separation between facts and values right doesn't it doesn't run through when you when you think of what this primal circumstance is like where you have to figure out how you when you have to make sense of the world you have to you have to try to understand what is going on in the world and you have to most importantly have to figure out what to do next right so i view so you you can forget about morality forget about science forget about anything for the moment and just recognize that the world is such that we are confronted with a an ever-present navigation problem we have this the possibility of navigating both personally and collectively to places in the space of all possible experience that are just manifestly terrible you know and and the worst place i call the worst possible misery for everyone right so it is possible to imagine a universe where every conscious system suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can you know some some version of the perfect hell right and then there's then it's possible to recognize that whatever you want to call it whether you whether you want to use words like good and evil or right and wrong or not every other place on the what i call the moral landscape is better than the worst possible misery forever right i agree with that completely that that's why i studied atrocity for so long because i figured if i could find out what the worst thing was that would be a pointer to the best thing because if you know the worst thing then the opposite of that is the best thing whatever that is that doesn't mean you have to propositionalize it it's not even that easy to do and there may be many opposites of that it may not just be one best possible place on the landscape there could be many peaks and valleys on the moral landscape and there could be peaks that are not equivalent in anything but the fact that they are equally distant from the worst possible misery for everyone right so there could be so i'm not you know this this can sound like moral relativism but it's not it's it's it's an objective picture of morality i think it does but it's just to say that there are there may be there may be very different ways of living where given the given the the right kind of minds involved you could be happy in very strange ways and in ways that you know would be counterintuitive for you know apes like ourselves um but nonetheless they could be very far from the the worst possible misery for everyone so in any case i call this so so whatever you want to call navigating in this space moving away from just uh unendurable pointless misery right toward you know beauty and creativity and joy and love and you know all of the good stuff we recognize and again there's there's there's no we haven't seen the horizon of this we have no idea how beautiful life could be for for minds like our own or minds you know significantly more sensitive and creative and intelligent than our own i mean there's there's nothing i had a vision of heaven as a place that was perfect where everyone that was in it was striving to make it better right right yeah so there's there's some we don't know how good things can get and we don't know how bad things can get but we know they can get quite terrible from where our current vantage point and we know they can get quite wonderful from our current vantage point and this is where the distance between facts and values collapses for me there are writers let me ask you let me just land this final sentence there there are right and wrong answers with respect to how to navigate in this space right there there there is it is and they're right and wrong whether we've discovered them or not right we could all be wrong about the thing we should do next so as to be as happy as possible you know we could be we could think we're doing something very wise and compassionate and useful and actually we're you know slowly poisoning ourselves with some you know toxin that we haven't identified right i mean so they're thing so it is truly possible to not know what you don't know it's truly possible to not know what you're missing right for there to be some happier place on the landscape that you could get to if only you knew to try to get to it but you're not trying to get to it because you're satisfied you know drinking 12 beers a night and you know cheating on your wife or whatever it is you could have a whole civilization that is unaware of just a local peak yeah exactly a great one it's a local peak but yes uh not as good as it might be um so there's there are there so there are two ways to see that this in my view that this this disconnection between facts and values collapses first you need to you need to value certain things in order to get any facts in hand in the first place any statement about facts relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence right if you're if you don't value logic there's no logical argument you can give someone to say that they should value it if someone doesn't value evidence there's no evidence you could give them to say that they should value it so that so it you know the epistemology sort of bites its own tail or put or picks itself up from its boots right now that actually that actually harkens back to the is ought problem right because right there you said and i'm not denying the validity of anything you've said so far but right there you said that without agreeing on the validity of evidence let's say there's no agreement about what is and there we've got a frame problem there right we have that value that you need to even determine what is well the question then is where does that value come from and you can't say well it comes from what is in some easy manner because you just said unless you have a value of a certain sort you can't derive what is and that's partly why this odd is is ought problem just doesn't seem to go away yeah but so but it goes away because it goes away the moment you recognize there is in principle always a mystery at our backs you know this is true experientially i mean i say i would say this is true experientially with respect to the nature of consciousness but it's true conceptually with with respect to even those fields that pretend to be most directly in contact with the nature of reality i mean so even physics you know when you're talking about the most rudimentary laws of physics right there is still there has to be a first brute fact or a or a brute axiom that you accept that doesn't that need not prove itself right there's no self-justifying epistemology yes well that exactly yes i believe that well i think that that's why there is an emphasis on faith in some principle in so many religious traditions is that there is a starting place there and you're you're trying to flesh out where that is at least to some degree so let let me ask you a couple of that mention one thing and then ask you a couple more things so this is what distinction is even more peculiar when you look deep into the neuroscience of perception okay so one of the most influential books i ever read was an ecological approach to visual perception and it's a classic text on perception and a very sophisticated one and i don't think it what it has no pretensions to mysticism of any sort and so that's kind of interesting given the conclusion and the conclusion of the author is that what we see aren't facts or objects we see meanings so for example a six-month-old who crawls towards a visual cliff which is a plate of glass stretched over a or placed over a falling off places the the six month old will stop he won't crawl seven months i don't remember the exact she won't crawl across that piece of glass right he doesn't see cliff and infer falling off place he sees falling off place and there's a condition called neglect which is characteristic of certain people who have pre-frontal lobe damage called sorry it's not neglect it's called utilization behavior yeah and these people lose the ability not to act in the presence of a meaningful object so if they walk down the hall and the door is open they will go through the door if you put a cup in front of them they cannot stop but pick it up because they don't see cup and infer drinking they see a drinking object directly and so even that is ought distinction is is deceptive in a very fundamental sense because it's predicated on the idea that what we see are meaningless objects and that we lay an overlay of meaning on top of that and it's not by no means obvious at all that that's how we see yeah and that's part of the reason why it's been so difficult to make machines that can see and act in the real world because the object world is not simple and that value structure that you're describing that over that that value structure right that is embedded in all of our perceptions in ways that we are only beginning to understand scientifically yeah there's so many ways in which our oh you know what's called folk psychological sense of of what our minds do uh is is just completely broken right and we have we have a sense of of the tools we're using to do anything you know that beliefs desires perceptions uh expectations uh the movement of attention right and our sense of what all of this is uh from the first person side has definitely broken apart in in many respects as we've studied these things neuroscientifically from psychologically from the third person side and understanding ourselves understanding the world and our place within it and what's possible is inevitably a marriage of those two sides i mean you can't you can't fully banish first person experience because they're me most of what we we know about ourselves has a cash value in terms of the experiential side i mean you know to take the the greatest case there's simply no evidence of consciousness anywhere in the universe but for the fact that we know it to exist in ourselves from the first person side you can't look at a brain even a living one and have and form any intuition that it it's a locus of consciousness it's only by correlating changes in the experience of living people with you know tools of neural imaging in this case or things like eeg where we say okay well when the brain's doing that there's something that it's like to experience those changes right and that and and we pretend rather often to take the third person science side off the gold standard of first person experience and say okay that's really you know the mind may be an illusion you know maybe even consciousness is an illusion what we know is happening is that our brains that are processing information and we've got things like synapses and and neuromodulators and neurotransmitters and that's the real stuff right that's the reality this mind part is is some kind of um right that's a definition it's not an observation it's just a tissue of confusion reality right that's a big problem yeah there's no you can't you can't banish the the the the side which is in fact uh cashing out so many of your claims about the nature of in this case the brain and but that's not to say that we can't be deeply mistaken from the first person side about what our minds are doing i mean so you know i might you know as you as we've indicated here already i'm an enormous fan of meditation i think it's i think it's indispensable for understanding certain things about the nature of the mind but you you can't even tell that you have a brain by meditating right much less you you know what it's doing right so it's like it's that there are things that you there there are some major blind spots in first-person experience no matter how you train experience but you can notice for instance that the sense of self the sense that you're a subject interior to your experience the the you're a kind of a locus of a consciousness that is appropriate in experience that is that is an illusion or at best a convention right a kind of construction that you can cease to construct and so much of um so why why do you why do you believe that that's so useful right there's something core here yeah no it's a great question i want to make i want to make one observation before we go back to sure so well one of the things i learned when i was studying ancient egyptian mythology was that the egyptians worshiped horus that's the eye yeah and we may have talked about this before but they weren't worshiping rationality they weren't worshiping that monkey mind they were worshiping attention itself and they regarded attention as the process that revitalized dead totalitarianism because they had a god for that that was osiris and so there's something and when the egyptians were contemplating what constituted proper political sovereignty they regarded the union of osiris and and horus as the emblem of proper sovereignty and that was the osiris that was rescued from his totalitarian state by his union with horus so it's like the conceptual world which tends to ossify like well like egypt in the exodus book and the attention process which focuses perhaps on what's outside of the of totalitarian certainty and therefore continues to update it and that's not rationality and i think it's pointing to something that's similar to what you're fascinated by with your concentration on it i think it's on attention per se it's not rationality it's certainly not correct it's not the contents of thought it's something more like direct apprehension and you know in clinical in clinical practice rogers carl rogers particularly taking a bit of a leaf from freud but he said that if you attend to your clients which meant listen to them but it meant attend it didn't mean engage them in rational dialogue it meant more like listen they will transform psychologically as a matter of course right yeah so i use attention as slightly different way or a more specific way and differentiate it from something like consciousness or awareness itself so that like so and this is i think this is i mean i'm sure there are different ways of using it but um one tends to meet this definition now in in cognitive science and neuroscience where it's a narrowing of the field of awareness but there's still a field or there's or it's like a spotlight within within a larger field so for instance i you know i'm looking at you on zoom now and i can look at it i can look at you know one of your eyes right i can specifically look at that eye and i can focus on that but there are many other things that i within my visual field that that i'm not focusing on but which are never the less there and one of them could suddenly capture my quote attention right so i'm looking at your eye i'm doing my best to look at your eye to the exclusion of everything else but if you know if a mouse ran across my desk all of a sudden that would have a hundred percent of my attention and that so it's that shift it's the shift of the spotlight that that's the that's the attentional mechanism that is happening within this larger context of what i would call consciousness or awareness because it's you know so you're using attention as as the scientist like yeah like the fovea right exactly so it's the kind of the cognitive phobia where so that's where consciousness is most intense right because those neurons are each neuron in the fovea is connected to 10 000 neurons in the primary visual cortex so it's it's tremendously dense cortically and then so you could think of maybe we could distinguish these two concepts this way so at in the center of your vision at the fovea it's extraordinarily high resolution consciousness which we call attention and then as you move out from the fovea to the periphery your your consciousness becomes lower and lower resolution until out here if you're speaking visually you can't even really count the number of fingers that you see you can see the hands only if they move and out here it's black and white and out here it's gone yeah high resolution foveal focus and you can move your eyes to put that high resolution high neurological vision to work yeah i would i would use the terminology a little differently here though because i wouldn't say that consciousness is diminishing at the edges i would say that the visual perception is so consciousness is just the fact that anything is being known right so you can be conscious for instance of a very blurry vision right or you can be conscious that you're blind that you can't see anything right but like if you just close your eyes now even your visual consciousness is just as present it's just you're you're just aware of the the darkness behind your eyelids right and it's not even all that dark there's it's scintillating with various colors and right so okay so we could say that you've got that high resolution attention in the middle then it gets lower resolution right to here where you can't see and then that's all contained within a broader attentional field right yes and i would call that that the broadest possible field just consciousness okay more awareness fine so okay so now we know exactly what we mean by our terms and so and so what i would what i would say is to your question which i think is a very important question what's the point of examining the self you know much less transcending it um there are several points i mean what the main one is that it is the the string upon which all of our suffering is is strong i mean it's just it is just it is when you feel as miserable as you can feel that sense of being at the center of this uh torment uh and like which of what what direction will you find relief right i mean this is this is just this is you've got the cacophony of the unpleasant experience and then you've got this place in the middle of it or a parent place in the middle of it from which you're trying to resist this experience right or figure trying to figure out how to change it right so let's say you have a terrible pain you know somewhere in your body you know there's the pain there's a strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation you know the burning and and stabbing and twisting feeling and then there's this reaction to it from apparently some point outside the pain very likely you know for most people up in the head i mean most people feel like they're a subject in their heads that is not not truly coincident with the rest of their body they don't feel most people for the most part don't feel identical to their bodies they feel like they have bodies and these bodies can misbehave in various ways and again so you have a terrible pain the pain's down there let's say it's in your knee you're up here now a a a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body right and you're resisting you're trying to you're trying to find some way of resisting these sensations um and so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts right you know that you can have thoughts that terrorize you um and all of it seems to suggest i mean this is you know this is the extreme case of stark uh unhappiness but even in the best of times right even when things are going really well and everything experience is very smooth and we're getting what we want and you know we you know our favorite treats are just an arm's length away and we're filling our mouths with with gumdrops or whatever it is we're we're gratifying this thing at the center of our experience and it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent it's just you know it's just you you get to the thing you want and you gorge yourself on it and then you don't want a new thing you want a new thing you know you then you need a drink of water because the the this this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is is too clean and too much and you got to wash that out so that you just you wouldn't want to stay in that state even if you could and there's some there's there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction even in satisfaction that we all encounter even in the best of times right even when you literally can get anything more or less anything you want and and yet we know at any moment it can be subverted by something terrible happening you know at any moment you can suddenly feel like you're you might be having a heart attack right and then that becomes the thing that the this sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon and um and it's it is it makes life i mean this this again the sense of of of being in this vulnerable center right it makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by you know increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience right we have to control this thing because at any moment it's just we're constantly just if you just look at any moment we might die yeah yeah we're avoiding death you know but even you know even for those of us who don't think about death very often and there are those people we're constantly modifying our experience so as to to avoid discomfort whether it's social discomfort or physical discomfort or just every every correction in our body if you if you just try to sit still for an hour you'll notice that all of the micro adjustments of in posture that you're now no longer making are made because you really don't have to wait long before you feel miserable i mean your body the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home and just resolving not to move is is quite extraordinary it's just you know it's it's just there's no position that's comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now okay so when you when you rise out of that into this meditative state like what what's your experience and what has that done for you personally and ethically um okay so so the starting point which i've just dimly sketched out of being a subject in the head right i mean this is something that i i will be familiar to 99 of our audience or you know 99.999 percent of our audience people feel that they are they don't feel identical to their bodies they feel like they have bodies and now you know they might be told okay you might want to look into this practice of meditation you might want to just understand yourself a little better here start with this practice you can close your eyes and pay attention to the feeling of breathing you know the sensation of breathing in the in the at the rising falling of their chest or the air passing in their nostrils and every time you get lost in thought just come back to the raw sensation of breathing that's a very you know basic exercise of you know what's called mindfulness and the moment you try to try to do that you begin to discover or you know some moments down the line you discover that it's very hard to do that your that your default state is to get distracted by a conversation you're having with yourself and to forget all about this project of paying attention to the present moment and it could be it doesn't matter what it is but you know the breath in this case and and so it is in fact true to say that for most people i mean literally 99.9 percent of our audience uh they couldn't pay attention to the breath for a full minute say even if their lives depended on it right it's just like it's simply not in the cards it's not it's you know the fate of the world could depend on it and someone who's not really fairly well trained in this uh just couldn't do it and so that's interesting right what's interesting is that despite your best efforts you get carried away by thought helplessly moment after moment now being able to break that spell being able to see thought as thought eventually once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object you begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience so it's just you know sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness but when you can but this is where this is the kind of cru the crucial you know kind of almost binary difference which which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit the moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment because what happens is in the default case the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us in some sense they kind of come out of nowhere and that just feels like me right so i'm you know i'm trying to it's a reflexive identification yeah you wouldn't act the damn things out if they didn't feel like you you know and so they have to have that impulse to action in them that that's part of felt identity right so you're saying that you're saying and this is part of i suppose part of the buddhist tradition particularly although not only that being the the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering at least under some circuits especially being the puppet of them yes okay yeah and so and so this is so but the the people you know listening to us now can feel this so you know that you know we're talking and people are trying to understand the threat of this conversation but it's comp they have a voice in their head that's competing with this right they you know they're trying to listen to us but they're also thinking right and they think so they might think what the hell's he talking about right like there's just some some intrusive thought comes in or like oh no wait a minute he didn't answer the question that thought that that feels if you're identified with it if you don't see it as mere language appearing in consciousness or mere imagery right it feels like me it's like that is the self that isn't it feels like what i believe yeah that's just that that's no space yeah well one of the things you do in clinical work all the time especially in the cognitive behavioral field is you help people identify those thoughts in some sense as as objects to no longer identify with them and to say you know just because you think that it's not necessarily true it's not necessarily you and it's not necessarily helpful right now we can check and see if any of those three you know propositions were true maybe it is you maybe you do believe that maybe it is useful but we're going to start by hypothesizing that some of these automatic thoughts are actually what's driving your misery and i really also see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies because their thought systems that are almost entirely foreign in some sense to the individual person that invade that cognitive space that you're describing and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity and if they're blinding the person to some underlying reality that's actually revivifying and nourishing and an antidote to suffering then they're a tremendous block to exactly that process yeah yeah so so there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and it's its connection to suffering uh and one is at the level of thought itself right so you can you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts right you can you can you can get some you can triangulate on your your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself uh and engineer a better conversation with yourself right and that's you know then yes and cognitive behavioral thinking like a six year old for example and start thinking like a 30 year old right right and right but what's more a 30 year old that actually has good intentions for you right like that you could a friend yes right you can make your mind your friend yeah yeah loved one even yes yeah yeah can you imagine that so uh imagine that so that's that's a that's a totally legitimate way to to climb out of of the the great whole of of suffering that people find themselves in um but there's a there's a more fundamental and and i'm not i'm not saying what you know what i'm what i'm recommending in terms of you know meditation mindfulness here is more fundamental but it is not it's completely compatible with that you know more conceptual discursive layer right and some things i would argue some things are best addressed on the discursive layer and some things are better better addressed on the on the the more fundamental layers well you know when you're sitting meditating first of all you're sitting and so it's perfectly reasonable to adopt a mode of thought that's healthful and productive in relationship to the fact that you're sitting you know those more discursive propositional thoughts that we've been describing they're they're higher resolution in some sense and they're more practically implementable and so there's going you want to get that in order but that doesn't mean that there that this phenomenon that you're describing that's outside the entire discursive structure doesn't exist right it's probably also the place we go at least to some degree when we go to sleep and we dream and get revivified it's outside that discursive landscape and that's necessary for physiological rejuvenation yeah well dreams are very interesting because i i think they are necessary and we know a lot about the necessity of of rem sleep for health and so there's no question that dreams are doing good things for us but they also are an experience of stark psychosis you know i mean they are they are a condition unless you're unless we're talking about lucid dreaming this is a circumstance where you really have no idea what's going on i mean you you are in reality asleep in your bed and yet you have transitioned into another experience which where the laws of nature are violated you're talking to dead people you're you know the sky is the limit right and you're not even surprised you're doing so little reality testing you're not even surprised about these changes you have so little purchase on who you were just 15 minutes ago when you went to sleep that it's so that means it does mean it does mean to some degree at that point though that you have suspended your unthinking identification with your daytime propositional thought yeah yeah but you but in in the normal case you're identified with your dream body and and your dream persona and whoever you whoever you've become i mean you're you're being terrorized in a in a in a more malleable right with the identity is still there yeah it's just it's it's it's it's more random and less logically coherent and there's something there about exploration and change of categories themselves that's going on but i can see your point about it still being well part of and more to the point if there's actually a very close connection between what happens with ordinary thought and dreaming so for instance uh i mean or ordinary thinking is it to in my view or ordinary identification with thought i'm not i don't mean to demonize thought per se because we need thoughts and and the goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts is to be able to recognize them as as what they are and to recognize the process of thinking um and to break this this this pseudo identification with it but the identification with thought is very much analogous to dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming and the switch from a normal dream to a lucid dream is analogous to to the kind of waking up in the middle of life that i'm i'm advocating here where you can actually just recognize thoughts as thoughts and there's something that the way in which thoughts steal over us where so you're trying to pay attention to something and then all of a sudden you're you're replaying an argument that you had with your wife you know yesterday right and helplessly and and it's actually it's it's it's dredging up the emotion that is appropriate to that argument right so now you're getting angry or regretful or whatever it is um it's it's quite crazy it's totally normal i mean this is the default state of most people most of the time but given how unhappy the character of our conversation is with ourselves most of the time given that the stories we're telling ourselves are less than perfectly inspiring and perfectly ennobling and and uh you know great you know opening us to great reservoirs of compassion and wisdom right they're not doing that um it's worth looking into this and it is it does have this dreamlike character of both coming out of nowhere and seizing completely seizing the reins of of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere and also we forget it we it has a that's part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality that proclivity well but it is but a lot of these thoughts aren't rational it's just it's just you're just rehearsing your experience it's just like you'll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row and never and you won't be bored on the 10th time you'll you'll like if you just imagine what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loudspeaker for everyone to listen to you know and you were just you just it was just helplessly you know externalized every every normal person would sound insane you know because because of the the perseveration and the and just the redundancy and the and the strange structure to the discursiveness i mean this is this is a um you know this is ever present it's so it's so ever present that it strike it doesn't strike people as strange but to be presuming we have a we have a dialogue with ourselves as though the eye could talk to the me and that made any sense at all it's like you know i'm sitting here and you're getting set up for this interview right and i i'll think um oh i got to get some water right now i know if i'm the one to say it and i'm the one who here is i know i need water who am i telling you it's like it's like i'm telling someone else right who needs to be informed about this well you're probably telling the prefrontal cortex and it tells the motor cortex so you know it's that's probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex because it doesn't have direct output over the motor cortex it's something like that yeah it remains to be seen whether any of that is actually functionally necessary but i i think for the most part it's not i mean for the most part we we simply talk to it's almost like we started talking to our parents you know once we once we had once the language is incredibly useful as you know and it's it is what defines us as as people in many respects and once it gets to it's it's like once it gets tuned up it never shuts off and you know we're talking to it so you know first we're pre-linguistic and we're just drinking in language that's aimed at us you know all the time our parents are jabbering to us we begin to understand what they're saying as so much of it is you know indexical they're pointing to things and we're naming those things we're hearing the word the sounds associated with those the things that are being grasped and handed to us and um and soon we begin to participate in this language game in ways that we're not conscious of and once this gets tuned up we talk to our parents we jabber to our parents incessantly and then we jabber to ourselves when they leave the room and it never stops well you know in in mcgillcrist and i have talked about this issue and he he's of the opinion i hope i'm not misrepresenting him and and it's an idea that i had shared to some degree is that the the right hemisphere in many ways this is in left-handed people at least in some sense is more regulated by the underlying limbic structures the motivational structures like an animal is and and the left hemisphere to the degree that it's linguistic it inhibits those right hemisphere functions tonically and that's likely speech and what that means implies perhaps is that if you can shut that speech off there's a different mode of perception that's characterized by the right hemisphere's immersement in these underlying motivational systems that might be part and parcel of that revivification possibility that you're i think you're pointing to as something that lies outside the linguistic landscape and that can become maybe hyper dominant has become hyper dominant in us because we're so immersed in language i mean from what i can tell i mean thus far the the research on the the neuroimaging research on meditation is you know still in its infancy despite the fact that there have been hundreds and even thousands of paper papers at this point on meditation but you know silencing the default mode network is certainly part of the the footprint of of the change here that is relevant and the default mode network for people i mean many people have heard of this by now but it used to be kind of an esoteric topic but just a brief review the default mode network is called the default mode because it was noticed in virtually every neuroimaging experiment ever designed that there was this the system of structures in the midline of the brain that would would increase their their activity in between tasks so whatever the paradigm was if you're giving people a reading task or a sensory task or a memory task or a visual discrimination whatever it is you're putting them in the scanner they have to pay attention to something in those epochs between tasks when they were no longer having to pay attention to something that they're waiting for the next thing to be presented to them this these set of structures in the midline would increase their activity so it was called the default mode uh it's just the kind of the brain's idling state but these are also the structures that that seem to have a disproportionate amount of responsibility for self-reference and self-representation and and they get tuned up even further when you give people tasks that require a set a a a retrospective analysis of the self you know if i if i gave you a list of words and i was saying i asked you to decide you know which of these words apply to you and which of these words don't apply to you as a person right that's the kind of task that would increase you know be above baseline activity in in the default mode network um and there are other components to this uh you know even sort of questions of identity i mean a lot of that is is in whole or in part mediated by the default mode um and it this is what becomes noticeably quiescent when you are successfully practicing mindfulness and it becomes quiescent in in those experiences with psychedelics where the sense of self is is transcended for a time now where linguistic communication often becomes extremely difficult yeah yeah but people experience but so what's interesting here is that that you know i i think people you know ordinary people who do not take psychedelics and have no interest in meditation do experience interruptions in this sense of self a lot that just go unrecognized and sometimes they go recognized because their their so-called peak experiences or you know flow experiences where you know they'll you know even the kinds of experiences you referenced you know looking up at the milky way you know the the most beautiful encounter with with um a starry night you have you know in that decade say you've gone to the place where there's the least light pollution and you've got you know a cloudless moonless night and then you you point your gaze skyward and you get the full experience that's you know there there are two experiences people tend to have when they when they have sought out a peak experience like that if they're lucky they really have something like a moment where they're lifted out of themselves and they they can just have something like this breathtaking encounter with nature right and then all too often that lasts you know a second and a half and then they're just talking about it and thinking about it and trying to get back to it but they're they're still just jabbering to themselves and to you know whoever's with them very likely trying to get a hold of this thing where if you took mushrooms or if you took acid in that circumstance well then your linguistic you know efforts to to get this thing in hand are completely blown over and you have the full you know multi-hour encounter with the thing itself right and it's you know that's what that's what's so amazing about psychedelics is that whoever you are i mean this let's leave aside the prospect of having a bad trip which we you know about which many interesting things can be said the the so-called good trip you can have on mushrooms or lsd is this condition of the data of your senses and you're in in particular in in a circumstance like the one you described your engagement with the natural world becomes so vivid so salient that the boundary between self and world is completely overcome right so like and the energetics of all of that suddenly becomes very salient so it's not just like you're no longer representing yourself also the consequences you know you know griffith's work and if someone has a mystical experience on psilocybin and they're smokers they stop 75 percent of the time yeah it's like they live so far out of themselves that even their addictions lift yeah yeah right that's quite something you know you talk about being possessed by that default network well to be possessed by an addiction like a nicotine addiction is something like that going wild and nonetheless going there apparently has this transformative capacity you also see the same thing with treatment for alcoholics you know i mean for for years alcohol researchers have known that the only reliable treatment for alcoholism is spiritual transformation and that's hard knows empirical researchers have been wrestling with that for a long time well it can give it gives you the sense that you know again i'm not i'm not claiming that the the the beatific vision that one has on lsd or psilocybin is necessarily the the true target state of one's spiritual life i mean it's you know in some ways i i think it's not it's there's something misleading about it but at a minimum these this this can end to the continuum of positive experience you know just just being flooded with bliss and and completely overcome with with an encounter with the present moment and and meaning you know just the perception of meaning whether that meaning can be rationally justified in the end right because literally you can if you're in the right state of mind it doesn't matter what you're looking at it doesn't have to be the milky way you can just be staring at a you know a puddle in the concrete in a parking lot and all of a sudden that is the you know the answer to the mystery of existence right so in some ways it's it's it's potentially you there's a place to stand where you can pathologize this you know ex this herophony of of meaning but you know leaving that aside leaving that criticism aside the experience itself proves beyond any possibility of doubt that it's possible to have an utterly transforming transformative and uh totally satisfying encounter with the present moment that isn't itself dependent on anything happening it's a quality of your attention now neurochemically that something obviously has to happen in order to to allow you to pay attention that fully to anything but there is a way of granting your attention to the present moment so that the sacredness of anything comes fully into view so okay let me i got a couple of questions for you on that so let's go back to this starry night idea so i want to tell you a story i was i was talking to my wife today about the fact that i was going to talk to you because she's been following your meditation course but at the same time that she's done she she she was she had a medical death sentence two years ago yeah fundamentally okay so she's been through a variety of forms of hell and has come out the other side and has changed in consequence of that and one of the things she started doing as well as doing your meditation course was using the rosary so i asked her today she's also been talking to the jonathan pago who's an extraordinarily interesting religious thinker who carves icons he's a former french canadian young guys very very deep person in my estimation in any case she's been praying the rosary and i said okay so well you do that and you listen to sam's meditations and so how does that work and she says well i do the rosary first i said well what do you why do you do that and what do you do and how do you see them related and she said well with the rosary so she's she's concentrating on mary and she said mary's uh as a conduit to christ and i'll explain what she meant by that in a sec but um she she it's a i said she she said well first it's a practice okay so she does it every day so it's an embodied practice right so she says the words and she moves these beats and so she's moving her hands and there's it's divided into five sections and so when her attention wanders from prayer it's brought back because there's five sections right so you imagine you have this tendency to wander off into the default network and but by manipulating something with your hands it ties you to the present moment yeah okay so it's a meditative practice uh that that's more embodied than just sitting still say and she finds that useful and and while she says the words well we've talked a lot about what these words mean and so in reference to the starry night for example there's this series of renaissance paintings which are quite magnificent that show an image of mary with her with 12 stars around her head and with her foot on a serpent and that's that's an allusion to the garden of eden because uh well eve crushes the serpent beneath her foot and so and this is relevant to your discussion and our discussion earlier about the deepest of all evils right because that that's a concern of yours it's being a concern of mine what's the darkest possible place well the that snake in those paintings represents that and that's why in christianity the snake which is a predator is associated with satan right as the as what would you say the emissary of evil or malevolent something like that and so because mary has her head in the stars she can have her foot on the serpent and that's part of that meditation and while she does that before she listens to your meditation but that's where i see the the psychological link let's say because you want to put your psyche in the highest possible place whatever that is and we don't know what it is exactly but it's something like what happens when you look up at the night sky it's something like that and if you do that that means that your foot is simultaneously on that serpent yeah no i mean i don't have any um first of all it's wonderful that she's using the app and getting some benefit from it i i love that and there's no and my and the juxtaposition of doing the rosary with doing you know what i'm recommending the app is not as odd as you might think it is in my in my view i mean i have you know it's there's so much of um there's so much there's so much resonance between what i think is true and the kinds of things jesus said right my only my my issue my issue with organized religion every organized religion is just that clearly what we're really talking about are deeper universal truths about the nature of of mind right maybe you know whether would you limit it to human minds or just mind itself consciousness itself and so there's no culture there's no religion there's no provincial uh cult that has the full story and what we really really the burden on us in in in every present generation you know but certainly now in in the 21st century where they're all the barriers to to to um uh universalization yeah all the barriers to infra you know getting information and translating from other languages all of that's broken down we have we have access to everyone's ideas right there have been a hundred billion people and a bunch of them have had good ideas a bunch of them have had bad ideas and we have access to to thousands of years uh yeah human conversations yeah my only argument what those ideas were my only argument is that we should only care about using the best ideas uh and we should and we we no longer have the right to any deep serious sectarianism right now we can be that's not to say that you can't be especially taken with with jesus and the tradition that has grown up around him uh and you know you're not so you're kind of bored with socrates and so you don't spend as much time with him and that's all fine but the the problem i i've had traditionally with organized religion is religion historically is the only corner of culture where people begin saying to themselves and to their children we're playing a totally different game over here this is not just this is not a matter of just ideas and human beings and human conversations and ordinary books no no these books were written by god or inspired by god you know and uh they can't be edited and uh everything i think it seems to me that laying the danger in that i i'm not disagreeing with you but it seems to me the danger in that is that it it actually minimizes the problem of atrocity that's associated with sectarianism because and you can heap as many atrocities as you want on that side of the balance i i will agree with you well okay so this is what i'm pointing to though because we're having a dis discussion in some ways about sacred things and so and then we're talking about the issue of religion and so there's a couple of things i want to say about that dostoevsky had it right to some degree in the grand inquisitor because the do you remember that story the grand visitor yeah i mean i i'm sure it's been been many okay now several decades since i actually read the book but well the remarkable thing about that story is christ comes back to earth and he does some miracles and it's the church himself that puts him in jail and then the head of the church comes to the jail and says what the hell are you doing back here the last thing we need is you we've got everything sorted out we know what's going on it's like we're going to put you to death tomorrow and then christ kisses him on the lips and the grand inquisitor turns white and then when he leaves the grand inquisitor he leaves the door open and that was that's so brilliant and you know dostoevsky was writing at the same time as nietzsche and had quite an influence on nietzsche as it turned out and but because dostoevsky was writing fiction he could go places that dostoevsky couldn't go as a philosopher and one of the things he was trying to point out was that despite the proclivity to totalitarianism that you can lay at the feet of sectarian religion the door is left open and you know all of us have to come to terms with the fact that our institutions religious and otherwise tend to ossify into these totalitarian structures that are analogous socially i think in some ways to the default network that you just described they're trying to point to something beyond that but you know they degenerate and ossify and then but but then we have to go underneath that too if we're going to get our criticisms right because as terrified as it's reasonable to be about religious sectarianism and totalitarianism it's also necessary to remember that chimpanzees go on raiding parties yeah and and kill the neighboring tribe so to speak and they're not motivated by religious concerns and so to to put that at the feet of religion even implicitly i think is i understand why that's an impulse but it doesn't face the problem deeply enough and it also obscures a potential solution i think because it tends it tends to throw the baby out with the bath water and i know you're trying to regain the baby yeah no i'm trying to save the baby yeah yeah no i i love that baby um yeah i mean for me the the crucial variables that make um religion itself so problematic are one the religions and and this is true of the the abrahamic ones in particular the religions that are focused on a text right that can't be edited now you you religious moderates and religious liberals will disagree with me and they'll say that the whole tradition is a matter of you know reinterpreting and grappling with the the the contradictions and the um and there's a that's of all a very rich discourse and blah blah blah but the the real problem is the books themselves betray their merely human origin on almost every page you know there's just like you know it's true of the plays of shakespeare it's true of the iliad and the odyssey it's true of of uh virgil it's true of dostoevsky and it's true of the bible right in all its parts right so there's just there's and the you know if you just imagine how good a book would be could be if it were truly written or dictated by it by an omniscient being i mean it's it's just it's trivially easy to imagine that yeah but jesus would be so much better than they in fact are it's really not that easy to translate the sorts of experiences that you're pointing to into words no no no no i know i matter right no but it but you can you can do concepts and words well but even well okay okay let's talk about that for a minute better and worse because that's really that that and and i want to tie this back to your comments about navigation earlier so you know we do have and this is perhaps an issue of definition getting the definition straight again here we do have the sense that some texts are deeper than others and i don't think it's reasonable to disagree about that you can read a shallow story you think well you know that was shallow and you can read a deep story and you think that was deep but you don't know exactly what you mean by shallow or deep so let me just add one one foot note here which is somewhat confounding it goes to what we were just saying about psychedelics it's possible for you to be bringing the depth to a text or to a circumstance or to a puddle in the in a parking lot that isn't necessarily there right so like that like this is where it gets close to the most modern quandary yeah like literally i you know you if you're if you're going to connect all the dots you know you can this is something i did in the end of faith as a as a parlor trick just because i wanted to prove this point is that i literally walked into a bookstore and went to the cookbook aisle the bookstore and randomly chose a cookbook and opened it i opened it up at random and just just dictated just wrote down the recipe and then created a mystical text on the basis of that recipe and i just i just showed that this recipe which it was for some hawaiian cookbook was like wok seared fish and shrimp cakes or something and i i took the ingredients in that recipe and wove a completely confabulatory mystical text out of those ingredients now that that was something i was bringing to the text there was no author uh uh creating that document that's clearly a problem and look i actually and the truth is people can always do that right so that that's it's very hard to keep score here and to be and to be rigorous all we can do is again and again have this this experience of you say something that that on your own side purports to be meaningful and intends to be meaningful and you're trying to convey something and then i and other people seem to grasp what you're communicating and we have this intersubjective convergence which is increasingly satisfying and yes so i mean but i do take your point that they're dostoevsky was writing you know the brothers karamazov is a deeply interesting meaningful document uh and okay so let's take that away let's take that argument apart because you you put your finger on the postmodern quandary right because the postmodernists in some sense the reason that they ran into trouble with assuming they criticized the notion that there was a canonical interpretation of a text because there's so many subjective interpretations of any text in fact there's a near infinite number of potential subjective interpretations of any text just like there's almost an infinite number of places you could be looking right now and so it's a huge deep problem so so and when you say that you can project something onto the text that in some sense isn't there that's also an extremely deep problem and these problems are deep enough you know the fact of multiple interpretations of a single reality is so pervasive that it stopped ai researchers it's the thing that stopped ai researchers from being able to build functional robots like it's a killer problem yeah okay so that's the frame problem okay so let's let's let's agree that that exists but we should also agree and partly i think by the merits of your own argument that we do have a reliable subjective intuition that texts differ in depth yeah and that that means something so i'm going to propose what it means and you tell me what you think about this okay sure so one of the ways that we specify where to look at is by looking at what we deem to be important and so here's a way of conceptualizing that and it sort of maps onto the idea of the fovea extending outward to less high resolution consciousness so i write a sentence because i want to write a paragraph i write a paragraph because i want to sequence paragraphs into a book a chapter i write chapters to sequence them into a book i write a book because i want to be a practicing scientist i want to be a practicing scientist because i'm a good citizen i want to be a good citizen hypothetically because i want to be a good person you know and maybe i want to be a good person to avoid the hell that you described okay so those are nested value structures and we see the world through that structure simultaneously the whole thing is there and if one part of it collapses we make reference to the part that contains it that's how we don't crash like a computer now that now the navigation that you described these nested structures their navigation maps as far as i can tell now okay so here's the depth issue some maps have more other maps dependent on them than other maps do okay so if i go into your map structure some of that's even propositionalized and i mess about with the deeper axiomatic propositions upon which many other propositions rest then that's going to disturb you fundamentally and that's part of that experience of depth and and you know look look you get much more if you're married and you love your wife you're much more upset if she divorces you than if you have an argument about who should do the dishes well why well because the stability of your marriage is a precondition for all sorts of other ways that you perceive the world and if that's violated well that's traumatic yeah so so when we so and the reason i'm trying to get this clear with you is because you think clearly about these things but also because it allows to it allows for clarification of language in some sense so we could say that as you go deeper into that nested structure what you approach becomes more and more sacred by definition i'm trying to define it experientially because the uh so let's say you're transformed at a fundamental level that means something shifts way down deep and that's how you feel it even in an embodied sense and and what we've defined as as human beings as religious as far as i can tell or is sacred is our attempt to define the landscape that is characterized by those deepest structures of maps now what you're talking about i think is outside the map system altogether in some sense you know it's the container for all of it yeah yeah it is in some sense because or it's it's orthogonal to it i mean it penetrates it at every point but it's not reducible to it and i mean that's why it's so consequential so for instance i think you can so taking accepting your your picture of nested maps and and depth and all that i agree with all of that um and maps can be more or less useful and more or less in register with with the the reality they're purporting to describe right um so you can have faulty maps and in science we really try to get an accurate map and and we we have a high resolution map yeah and we have a language game which is when it's working is optimized to you know as richard feynman famously said not fooling ourselves right i mean that's like the master value of not fooling yourself whereas i would argue in in religious discourse not fooling yourself is not a master value and in fact you know so much of what goes by the name of religious faith okay but let me let me put this on terminology then because you talk about the sacred right and and and you accept that and and you also and you also see it as revivifying and and and crucial to the prevention of suffering yeah but you juxtapose that against religion and so what what's the difference as far as you're concerned between what's sacred and what's religious uh yeah good question well so maybe the best way to get at it is by reference to a principle which is i think what i think anything that's true right and this is this is true scientifically descriptively but it's true spiritually and it's true with respect to anything we would call sacred anything that's true anything that's real is discoverable now right it's like literally like if we if we lost everything if we lost all the books if we lost all the tools if we lost everything and we just found ourselves having to reboot not only civilization but human cognition you know everything that is real is discoverable from that starting point if you're even if you're starting at zero again now we would we would talk about it differently we would have you know we would we would have memories of what you know some of us would have memories of all that we've lost and that would anchor us to certain expectations but the point is what is true what is real what is what is what is the real opportunity for a direct self-transcendent engagement with reality right what what is the real opportunity for us let me take a suffering let me take exception to that in one manner i see what you mean i understand what you mean i believe but here's here's a potential problem with that so i first i'm i'm not saying let me just close the door to a possible misunderstanding i'm not saying that we shouldn't stand on the shoulders of giants and i'm not saying tradition is useless in fact you know i i would i would probably agree with you that that we should be fairly conservative in how we in in how we overthrow our traditions i mean so i'm not i'm not arguing that we should just be radical iconoclasts the tears that we should tear everything down to the studs and start again that's not that's not what i'm advocating well what's the difference be what's the difference in your vision then between the tradition that you would be conservative about and religion i'm not trying to corner you i'm just trying to see how you're making the distinction conceptually it comes down to very specific claims that that i think are clearly false and which many of our religions advertise as not only important but indispensable for their projects so take islam as a specific example is i mean islam mainstream islam not just al-qaeda-style islam just any islam that really is worthy of the name in the year 2021 is founded on the claim that the quran is the literal word of god it it and it is it is not christian what does literal mean yeah but in the minds of most muslims most of the time it means that these stanzas were dictated to muhammad in his cave by the archangel gabriel and he was he was commanded to recite and he recited them and what we have here is in truth the claim the the the the orthodox claim is is even more stringent than what the the seemingly analogous you know fundamentalist relig you know christian claim about the bible it's not just that the text itself is is verbatim what god said uh it's the the document itself is in fact like the the every instantiation of the physical document is itself the word of god it's like it's it's there's sort of a double layer of sacredness to it is this it cannot be edited like this problem that claim or is it the problem that the people who purport to understand it claim to be 100 right no no but the problem is is that given that claim and given the actual contents of the book yeah which you have is an endless source of divisiveness and conflict like if you dignify that claim okay this is the most important series of utterances ever expressed on earth this is it let's find out what the creator of the universe wants us to know what he wants us to know above all else is that one we should hate and fear and despise and resist and never befriend unbelievers right that's that's that message comes through on virtually every page and a hell has been prepared for these unbelievers where their skins will be endlessly burned off of them and and replenish so that they can be tortured anew right do you think there's any relationship between that claim and your observation that failure to take refuge in the sacred as you've laid it out dooms you to possession by the default network and puts you into attention okay so it is possible to give a very enlightened reading of this text or really any text that that allows you to step out of its divisive and and toxic uh implications so i would support that kind of reading you know if if we who were if we were joined in this conversation by by muslim scholars who said no no don't you understand jordan's spiritual interpretation of this admonishment is precisely what god intended he intended it to be to be an engine not of hate and division and sectarian tribalism he intended it to be a device that would allow you to recognize the the emotional and cognitive implications of of of being caught by dualism say right like really you know et cetera et cetera you go as far as you want in that direction that'd be great the problem is the book itself gives no indication that your interpretation is the right one in fact it gives every indication that it's not and then with the sequence of muslim scholars okay good luck so hopefully well i wish you i wish you good luck there yeah well i i i i praying for good luck because it's an it's a conversation that absolutely needs to be had yeah clearly i would agree sadly but this chapter i would just say that it's not that what you're doing with the book isn't possible my concern is that these book these books tend to make that very difficult and there are there are other more plausible uh and easier interpretations that require less hermeneutics less cognitive bandwidth less less principles of charity and less cosmopolitanism and and so therefore it's no accident that you you wind up with something like the islamic state if you take the quran very very seriously and that's that's what worries me as we as we live in this world where it's increasingly easy for small numbers of people to screw up the whole project for millions of us you know as as technology you know leverages the consequence of well that's why i've been focusing on development of the individual you know because it is increasingly possible for individuals to do that so we have to stop doing it yes yeah so i'm with you there look i would love to keep talking to you i i want to ask you one more i'm getting tired and that's why yeah no i don't know because i think first maybe we should do another event sure okay i will talk to my agents second this idea you had about escaping from the text let's say and returning to existential first principles or phenomenological first principles the only objection i can see to that is that if you lose you can't derive the way of producing a social organization directly from the existential experience and so that's a right because you think look partly we're going to derive our sacred values from this lev this strata of experience that you described but there's also an element there's also the fact that we derive our values from collective agreement right so we and maybe we feed the collective agreement with the sacred experience but then if we lose that that collective tradition it's very difficult to rebuild that from first principles yeah 100 and and i would say just to clear up any confusion on this point i'm not suggesting that meditation or even the the deepest insights you can have through meditation uh or psychedelics is sufficient for everything to forget for us to get everything we want out of life right it's like it's i i think i i it's proper use is as you describe is seeding every other ordinary moment in life with this capacity to refresh the mind and and uh um an allowance revivify the stale dogma of men just just it is the thing that equips us to actually be loving and unconflicted and relaxed in the present moment whatever's whatever's going on but when you ask the question what should we do to build a viable global civilization there's so many other modes of of conversation and knowledge gathering and reliance upon institutions and tr and tradition that is necessary you know i'm not i'm not imagining some beautiful state of nature where we have lost our all of the structure that we've built up over thousands of years and we just we just meditate as yogi's and yeah and then try to figure out then try to call someone when our you know internet goes down right we there's a tremendous amount of knowledge that we need to do anything well at this point you know as we've just witnessed in you know getting through you know now we're now into our second year of a global pandemic right i mean we have a lot to figure out how do we how do we even make sense with one another in the presence of social media and uh how do we respond when when trust in institutions has broken down there's a lot to to figure out and meditation and you know psilocybin and any you know and and a full speed collision with the with the beauty and profundity of the present moment isn't the answer to many of those questions it's just it is just it's the answer to any other things it's a wellspring you know like existential dread and you know uh etc so yeah i mean that's um anyway i i love talking to you and uh i'm very happy to see your face and it's really good to see it again and i remember why we kept talking now yeah and maybe i remember why other people came and listened and so i would love to do it again sure sure well because we're gonna we'll hammer it out you know yeah yeah hey good to see you thanks for agreeing to talk to me again and good luck with your app and everything that you're doing yeah and with your orientation towards the highest good all of that yeah back at you back at you okay man take care talk soon okay i'll get in touch i look forward to it [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 2,055,888

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, maps of meaning, biblical series, free speech, freedom of speech, biblical lectures, personality lectures, personality and transformations, sam harris, sam harriss, sam harris meditation, jordan peterson sam harris, sam harris interview, sam harris podcast, sam harris vs jordan peterson, jordan peterson carl rogers, sam harris carl rogers, sam harris psychedelics, jordan peterson psychedelics

Id: prt9D90BvFI

Length: 105min 32sec (6332 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ima_thankin_ya]

SS: here you go you blood thirsty animals

[u/Ultimafax]

The Super Bowl of r/samharris

[u/Working_Bones]

Around 32:00, after Sam spends half an hour working up to an argument for why the is/ought problem is overblown and perhaps largely a linguistic issue, Jordan very compellingly points out a potential incoherence or irony in Sam's argument, then they both get sidetracked and drop the topic completely. I hate podcasts sometimes.

[u/OK_ULTRA]

Damn, it was nice seeing that ad for Waking Up off the top. Don't know if that was a favour form Peterson but it seems very respectful.

[u/raff_riff]

Anyone know how to access this outside of the link above? It’s not showing up under Apple podcasts for JBP’s list of episodes.

[u/wrg5y5ye5y5e6]

Weren't there rumors about an unpublished conversation between the two? A few months ago, something about JBP tweeting something like "that was nice, let's do it again soon" or something like that.

---

EDIT: I see it says "This episode was recorded on November 25, 2021" on the description, so this was probably it.

[u/alxndrblack]

I wonder if we will discover the meaning of truth

[u/[deleted]]

Good at least up to half way through.

[u/window-sil]

Neat!