Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #185

the following is a conversation with sam harris one of the most influential and pioneering thinkers of our time he's the host of the making sense podcast and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind including the end of faith the moral landscape lying free will and waking up he also has a meditation app called waking up that i've been using to guide my own meditation quick mention of our sponsors national instruments valcampo athletic greens and linode check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that sam has been an inspiration to me as he has been for many many people first from his writing then his early debates maybe 13 14 years ago on the subject of faith his conversations with christopher hitchens and since 2013 his podcast i didn't always agree with all of his ideas but i was always drawn to the care and depth of the way he explored those ideas the calm and clarity amid the storm of difficult at times controversial discourse i really can't express in words how much it meant to me that he sam harris someone who i've listened to for many hundreds of hours would write a kind email to me saying he enjoyed this podcast and more that he thought i had a unique voice that added something to this world whether it's true or not it made me feel special and truly grateful to be able to do this thing and motivated me to work my ass off to live up to those words meeting sam and getting to talk with him was one of the most memorable moments of my life this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with sam harris i've been enjoying meditating with the waking up app recently it makes me think about the origins of cognition and consciousness so let me ask where do thoughts come from well that's that's a very difficult question to answer uh subjectively they appear to come from nowhere right i mean it's just they they come out of some kind of mystery that is at our backs subjectively right so which is to say that if you pay attention the nature of your mind in this moment you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next right now you're expecting to think something that seems like you authored it right you know you're not unless you you're schizophrenic or you have some kind of thought disorder where you where your thoughts seem fundamentally foreign to you they do have a a kind of signature of selfhood associated with them and people readily identify with them they feel like what you are i mean this is the thing this is the spell that gets broken with meditation our default state is to feel identical to the stream of thought right which is fairly paradoxical because how could you as a mind as a self you know if there if there were such a thing as a self how could you be identical to the next piece of language or the next image that just springs into into conscious view but and you know meditation is ultimately about examining that that point of view closely enough so as to unravel it and feel the the freedom that's on the other side of that identification but the um subjectively thoughts simply emerge right and you don't think them before you think them right there's this first moment where you know just anyone listening to us or watching us now could perform this experiment for themselves i mean just imagine something or remember something and just just pick a memory any memory right you've got a storehouse of memory just promote one to consciousness did you pick that memory i mean let's say you remembered breakfast yesterday or you remembered what you said to your spouse before leaving the house or you remembered what you watched on netflix last night or you remembered something that happened to you when you're four years old whatever it is right it first it wasn't there and then it appeared and that is not a i'm sure we'll get to the topic of free will ultimately uh that's not evidence of free will right why are you so sure by the way it's very interesting after no no free will of my own yeah um everything just appears right but what else could it do and so that's that's the subjective side of it objectively you know we have every reason to believe that many of our thoughts all of our thoughts are [Music] uh at bottom what some part of our brain is doing neurophysiologically i mean that these are the products of some kind of neural computation and neural um representation when you're talking about memories is it possible to pull the string of thoughts to try to get to its root to try to dig in past the the obvious surface subjective experience of like the thoughts pop out of nowhere is it possible to somehow get closer to the roots of where they come out of from the the firing of the cells or is it a useless pursuit to dig that to dig into that direction well you can get closer to many many subtle contents in consciousness right so you can notice things more and more clearly and have a landscape of mind open up and become more differentiated and more interesting and if you take psychedelics you know it opens up you know why depending on what you've taken and the dose you know it opens in directions and to an extent that you know very few people imagine would be possible but for having had those experiences but this idea of you getting closer to something to the the datum of of your mind or such as something of interest in there or something that's more real is um is ultimately undermined because there's no place from which you're getting closer to it there's no your part of that journey right like we we we tend to start out you know whether it's in meditation or or in any kind of self-examination or you know taking psychedelics we start out with this default point of view of uh feeling like we're the kind of on the the rider on the horse of consciousness or we're the we're the man in the boat going down the stream of consciousness right but we're so we're differentiated from what we know cognitively uh introspectively but that feeling of being differentiated that feeling of being a self that can strategically pay attention to some contents of consciousness is what it's like to be identified with some part of the stream of thought that's going uninspected right like that it's a false point of view and when you see that and cut through that then this sense of this this notion of going deeper kind of breaks apart because really there is no depth ultimately everything is right on the surface everything there's no center to consciousness there's just consciousness and its contents and that those those contents can change vastly again if you drop acid you know the the contents change but there's in some sense that doesn't represent a position of depth versus the continuum of depth versus surface has broken apart so you're taking as a starting point that there is a horse called consciousness and you're riding it and the actual riding is very shallow this is all surface so let me ask about that horse what's up with the horse what what is consciousness from where does it emerge how like fundamental is it to the physics of reality how fundamental is it to what it means to be human and i'm just asking for a friend so that we can build it in our artificial intelligence systems yeah well it remains to be seen if we can if we will build it uh purposefully or just by accident this is a major ethical problem potentially uh that i mean my concern here is that we we may in fact build artificial intelligence that passes the turing test which we begin to treat not only as super intelligent because it obviously is and and demonstrates that but we begin to treat it as conscious because it will seem conscious we will have built it to seem conscious and unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics we won't actually know that these systems are conscious right we'll just you know they may say you know listen you can't turn me off because that's a murder right and we will be convinced by that uh dialogue because we will we will you know just in the extreme case who knows when we'll get there but you know if we build something like perfectly humanoid robots that are more intelligent than we are so we're basically in you know a westworld-like situation there's no way we're going to withhold an attribution of consciousness from those machines so they're just going to seem they're going to advertise their consciousness in every glance and every utterance but we won't know and we won't know in some deeper sense that it make then we can be skeptical of the consciousness of other people i mean someone could roll that back and say well you don't you know i don't know that you're conscious or you don't know that i'm conscious we're just passing the turing test for one another but that kind of solipsism isn't justified you know biologically or i mean we just anything we understand about the mind biologically suggests that you and i are part of the same you know role that role the dice um in terms of how intelligent and conscious systems emerged in in the wet wear of of brains like ours right so it it's not parsimonious for me to think that i might be the only conscious person or even the only conscious primate you know is i i would argue it's not parsimonious to withhold consciousness from other apes uh and even other mammals ultimately and you know once you get beyond the mammals then my intuitions are not really clear the question of how it emerges is genuinely uncertain and ultimately the question of whether it emerges is still uncertain you can you know it's not it's not fashionable to think this but you can certainly argue that that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing even though everything else that we recognize about ourselves as minds almost certainly does emerge like an ability to process language that clearly is a matter of information processing because you you can disrupt that process in in ways that is um it's just so clear and um the problem that the confound with consciousness is that yes we can seem to interrupt consciousness you can give someone general anesthesia and then you wake them up and you ask them what was that like and they say nothing i don't remember anything but it's hard to differentiate a mere failure of memory from a genuine interruption in consciousness whereas it's not with you know interrupting speech you know we know when we've done it and it's it's just obvious that you know you disrupt the right neural circuits and you know you've disrupted speech so if you have to bet all your money on one camp or the other would you say do you earn a side of pan psychism where consciousness is really fundamental to our to all of reality or more on the other side which is like it's a nice little side effect a useful like hack for us humans to survive where on that spectrum where do you land when you think about consciousness especially from an engineering perspective i'm truly agnostic on this point i mean i think i'm you know it's kind of in coin toss mode for me i i don't know and pan psychism is not so compelling to me again it just seems unfalsifiable i wouldn't know how the universe would be different if pan psychism were true just to remind people pan psychism is this idea that consciousness may be pushed all the way down into the most fundamental constituents of matter so there might be something that's like to be an electron or or you know a cork but then you wouldn't expect anything to be different at you know the macro scale or at least i wouldn't expect anything to be different so it may be unfalsifiable it just might be that reality is not something we're as in touch with as we think we are and that if at its base layer to kind of break it into mind and matter as we've done ontologically is to misconstrue it right i mean there's there could be some kind of neutral monism at the bottom and this you know this idea doesn't originate with me this is this goes all the way back to bertrand russell and and others you know 100 plus years ago but i just feel like that the concepts we're using to divide consciousness and and matter it may in fact be part of our problem right where the rubber hits the road psychologically here are things like well what is death right like do we any expectation that we survive death or any part of us survives death that really it seems to be the the um many people's concern here well i tend to believe just as a small little tangent like i'm with ernest becker on this that there's some it's interesting to think about death and consciousness which one is the chicken which one is the egg because it feels like death could be the very thing like our knowledge of mortality could be the very thing that creates the consciousness yeah well then you're using consciousness differently than than i am so so for me consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all that there's an experiential quality to anything so so much of the processing that's happening in our brains right now seems certainly seems to be happening in the in the dark right like it's not associated with this qualitative sense that there's something that's like to be that part of the mind doing that mental thing but for other parts the lights are on and and we can talk about and whether we talk about it or not we can feel directly that there's something that is like to be us there's something something seems to be happening right and this seeming in our case is broken into vision and hearing and and proprioception and and taste and smell and and thought and emotion and there's there are the contents of consciousness uh that we are familiar with and that we can we can have direct access to in any present moment that when we're quote conscious and even if we're confused about them even if you know we're asleep and dreaming and we're really inward it's not a lucid dream we're just totally confused about our circumstance what you can't say is that we're confused about consciousness like you can't say that consciousness itself might be an illusion because on this account it just means that things seem anyway at all i mean even like if this you know it seems to me that i'm seeing a cup on the table now i could be wrong about that it could be a hologram i could be asleep and dreaming i could be hallucinating but the seaming part isn't really up for grabs in terms of being an illusion it's it's not uh something seems to be happening and that seeming is the is the context in which every other thing we can notice about ourselves can be noticed and then it's it's also the context in which certain illusions can be cut through because we're not we can be wrong about what it's like to be us and we can uh i'm not saying we're incorrigible with respect to our claims about the nature of our experience but for instance this you know many people feel like they have a self and they feel like it has free will and you know i'm quite sure at this point that they're wrong about that and that you can you can cut through those experiences and then things seem a different way right so it's not that it's not that things don't there aren't discoveries to be made there and assumptions to be overturned but um this kind of consciousness is something that i would think it doesn't just come online when we get language it doesn't just come online when we form a concept of death or the the finiteness of life it doesn't it doesn't require a sense of self right so it doesn't it it's it's prior to a differentiating self and other uh and i wouldn't even think it's necessarily uh limited to people i mean i do think probably any uh mammal has this but certainly if you're going to if you're going to presuppose that something about our brains is producing this right and that's a very safe assumption even though it we can't even you can argue the jury is still out to some degree then it's very hard to draw a principled line between us and chimps you know or chimps and and you know rats even in the end given the underlying neural uh similarities so um and i i don't know you know phylogenetically i don't know how far back to push that you know it's there people you think single cells might be conscious or that you know flies are certainly conscious they've got something like uh a hundred thousand neurons in their brains and it says it's just that's a there's a lot going on even in a fly right uh but i i don't have intuitions about that but it's not in your sense an illusion you can cut through i mean to push back the alternative version could be it is an illusion constructed by just by humans i'm not sure i believe this but it in part of me hopes this is true because it makes it easier to engineer is that humans are able to contemplate their mortality and that contemplation in itself creates consciousness that like the the rich lights on experience so the lights don't actually even turn on in the way that you're describing until after birth in that construction so it's do you think it's possible that that is the case that it is a sort of construct of the way we deal almost like a social tool to deal with the reality of the world the social interaction with other humans or is yeah because you're saying the complete opposite which is it's like fundamental to to signal cell organisms and trees and and so on right well yes i i don't i don't know how far down to push it i don't have intuitions that single cells are likely to be conscious but but they might be and i just again i could be unfalsifiable um but as far as babies not being conscious or like you're not you don't become conscious until you can recognize yourself in a mirror or you have a conversation or treat other people first of all babies treat other people as others far earlier than we have uh traditionally given them credit for and they certainly do it before they they have language right so it's it's like it's got to perceive language to some degree and you can interrogate this for yourself because you can put yourself in various states that are rather obviously not linguistic you know meditation allows you to do this you can certainly do it with psychedelics where it's just your capacity for language has been obliterated and yet you're all too conscious in fact uh yeah you i think you could make a stronger argument for things running the other way that there's something about language and and conceptual thought that is eliminative of conscious experience that that we're we are potentially much more conscious of data sense data and everything else than we tend to be and we have trimmed it down based on how how we have acquired concepts and so like when i walk into a room like this i know i'm walking into a room i have certain expectations of what is in a room you know i would be very surprised to see you know wild animals in here or a waterfall or you know there are things i'm not expecting but i can know i'm not expecting them or i'm expecting their absence because of my capacity to be surprised once i walk into a room and i see a you know a live gorilla or whatever so there's there's structure there that we have put in place based on all of our conceptual learning and language and language learning and it causes us not to one of the things that happens when you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything it becomes incredibly overloaded with uh it can become overloaded with meaning and and um uh just the the torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people and it that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically and as you're coming down right have you done psychedelics have you ever done acid or not acid mushroom and that's it and also edibles but that's that there's some psychedelic properties to them but right but yeah mushrooms uh several times and always had an incredible experience it exactly the kind of experience you're referring to which is if it's true that language constrains our experience it felt like i was removing some of the constraints right because even just the most basic things were beautiful in the way that i wasn't able to appreciate previously like trees and nature and so on yeah and the the experience of coming down is an exp is an experience of encountering the futility of of capturing what you just saw a moment ago in words right like especially if you have if any part of your your self concept and your your ego program is to be able to capture things in words and if you're a writer or a poet or or a scientist or someone who wants to just encapsulate the profundity of what just happened the the the total fatuousness of that enterprise when you really have got when you have taken a you know a whopping dose of psychedelics and you begin to even gesture at cat describing it to yourself you know so that you could describe it to others uh it's just it's like trying to you know thread a needle using your elbows i mean it's like you're you're trying something they can't it's like the beer gesture proves its impossibility uh and it's um so yeah so that i mean that for me that that suggests just empirically on the first person side that it's possible to put yourself in a condition where it's clearly not about language uh structuring your experience and you're having much more experience than you you tend to so the primacy of language is primary for some things but it's certainly primary for certain kinds of concepts and certain kinds of semantic understandings of of the world but it's uh it's clearly more to mind than you know the conversation we're having with ourselves or that we can have with others can we go to that world of psychedelics for for a bit sure where do you think um so joe rogan apparently and many others uh meet apparently elves when they on dmt a lot of people report this kind of creatures that they see and again it's probably the failure of language to describe that experience but dmt is an interesting one there's uh as as you're aware there's a bunch of studies going on in psychedelic psychedelics currently mdma um uh south side and uh john hopkins and a bunch of other places but dmt they all speak of as like some extra super level of a psychedelic yeah do you have a sense of where it is our mind goes on um on psychedelics but in in dmt especially well unfortunately i haven't taken dmt so unfortunately or fortunately unfortunately unfortunately uh although it's i presume it's in my body as it is in uh everyone's brain and in many many plants apparently but i've wanted to take it i haven't been i had an opportunity that was presented itself that where it was obviously the right thing for me to be doing uh but you know for those who don't know dmt is is often touted as the most intense psychedelic and also the shortest acting i mean you smoke it and it's it's basically a 10 minute experience or a or a three minute experience within like a 10 minute window uh that you when you're really down after 10 minutes or so um and terence mckenna was a big proponent of dmt that was that was his you know the center of the bullseye for him psychedelically apparently um and it does it is characterized it seems for many people by this phenomenon which is which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience which is your your it's not just your perception being broadened or changed it's you according to terence mckenna feeling fairly unchanged but catapulted into a a different circumstance you may have been shot elsewhere and find yourself in relationship to other entities of some kind right so so the place is populated with with things that seem not to be your mind so it does feel like travel to another place because you're unchanged yourself of course again i just have this on the authority of the people who have described their experience but it sounds like it's a pr it's pretty common it sounds like it's pretty common for people not to have the full experience because it's apparently pretty unpleasant to smoke so it's like getting enough on board in order to get shot out of the the cannon uh and land among the uh what mckenna called self-transforming machine elves that appeared to him like jeweled you know faberge egg like ba self dribbling basketballs that were handing him uh completely uninterpretable reams of profound knowledge it's a it's an experience i haven't had so i just have to accept that people have had it i would just point out that our minds are clearly capable of producing apparent others on demand that are totally compelling to us right there's no there's no limit to our ability to do that as anyone who's ever remembered a dream can attest i mean we every night we go to sleep some of us don't remember dreams very often but um some dream vividly every night and just think of how insane that experience is i mean you you've forgotten where you were right that's the strangest part i mean this is psychosis right you're you have you have lost your mind you have lost your connection to your episodic memory uh or even your expectations that reality won't undergo wholesale changes a moment after you have closed your eyes right like you you're in bed you're you know watching something on netflix you're waiting to fall asleep and then the next thing that happens to you is impossible and you're not surprised right you're talking to dead people you're hanging out with famous people you're you're someplace you couldn't physically be you can fly and even that's not surprising right so it's you've lost your mind but relevantly for this or found it you found some i mean lucid dreaming is very interesting because then then you can have the best of both circumstances and it's uh that then it can be kind of systematically explored but what i mean by found just to start to interrupt is like if we take uh this this brilliant idea that language constrains us grounds us language and other things of the waking world ground us maybe it is that you've found the full the full capacity of your cognition when you dream or when you do psychedelics you're stepping outside the the little human cage the cage or the human condition to get open the door and step out and look around and then go back in well you've you've definitely stepped out of something and into something else but you've also lost something right you've lost certain capacities well just yeah in this case you literally didn't you don't you don't have enough presence of mind in the dream in the dreamy city or even in the psychedelic state if you take enough uh did you have there's no psychological there's very little psychological continuity with your life such that you're not surprised to be in the presence of someone who should be you should know is dead or you should know you're not likely to have met by normal channels right you're you know you're now talking to some celebrity and it turns out you're best friends right and you're not even you have no memory of how you got there you know like how did you get into the room you're like how did did you drive to this restaurant you know you have no memory and none of that's surprising to you so you're you're kind of brain damaged in a way you're not reality testing in the normal way the fascinating possibility is that there's probably thousands of people who've taken psychedelics of various forms and have met sam harris on that journey well i would put it more likely in in dreams not you know because in psychedelic with psychedelics you don't tend to hallucinate in a dreamlike way i mean so dmt is giving you a an experience of others but it's it seems to be non-non-standard it's not like it's not just like dream hallucinations but but to the point of coming back to dmt the people want to suggest and terence mckenna certainly did suggest that because these others are so obviously other and they're so vivid well then they could not possibly be the the creation of my own mind but every night in dreams you create a a compelling or what is to you at the time a totally compelling simulacrum of another person right and uh that's uh that just proves the mind that's capable of doing it now it's it's uh the the phenomenon of lucid dreaming shows that the mind isn't capable of doing everything you think it might be capable of even in that space so one of the things that people have discovered in lucid dreams and i i haven't done a lot of lucid dreaming so i've i can't confirm all of this so i can confirm some of it um apparently in every house in in every room in the the mansion of dreams all light switches are dimmer switches like if you go into a dark room and flip on the light it gradually comes up it doesn't it doesn't come up instantly on demand uh because you know apparently this is covering for the brain's inability to produce from a you know a standing start visually rich imagery on demand so there's i haven't confirmed that but that was people have done research on lucid dreaming claim that it's all dimmer switches uh but one thing i have noticed and you know people can check this out is that in a dream if you look at text you know a page of text you know or a sign you know or a television that has text on it and then you turn away and you look back at that text the text will have changed right there's no the total is it's just a chronic instability graphical instability of text uh in the dream state and i don't know if that you know maybe that's someone can confirm that that's not true for them but that's whenever i've checked that out that has been true for me it keeps generating it like uh real time yeah from a video game perspective yeah it's render it's rendering it's re-rendering it for some reason what's interesting i actually i don't know how i found myself in this sets of uh that part of the internet but there's quite a lot of discussion about what it's like to do math on lsd because apparently one of the deepest thinking processes needed is those of mathematicians or theoretical computer scientists basically doing anything that involves math is proofs and you have to think creatively but also deeply and you have to think for many hours at a time and so they're always looking for ways to like is there is there any sparks of creativity that could be injected and apparently out of all the psychedelics the the worst is lsd because it completely destroys your ability to do math well and i wonder whether that has to do with your ability to visualize geometric things in a stable way in your mind and hold them there and stitch things together which is often what's required for proofs but again it's difficult to kind of research these kinds of concepts but it does make me wonder where what are the spaces how's the space of things you're able to think about and explore morphed by different by different psychedelics or dream states and so on and how's that different how much does it overlap with reality and what is fundament what is reality is there a waking state reality or is it just a tiny subset of reality and we get to take a step in other versions of it we tend to think very much in a space-time four-dimensional there's a three-dimensional world there's time and that's what we think about reality and we think of traveling as walking from point a to point b in the three-dimensional world but that's a very kind of human surviving trying not to get eaten by a lion conception of reality what if traveling is something like we do with psychedelics and meet the elves what if it's something what if thinking or the space of ideas as we kind of grow and think through ideas that's traveling or what if memories is traveling i don't know if you have a if you have a favorite view of reality or if you're you had by the way i should say a excellent conversation when uh donald hoffman yeah yeah he's interesting is there any inkling of his sense in your mind that reality is uh very far from actual like objective reality is very far from the kind of reality we imagine we perceive and we play with in our human minds well the first thing to grant is that there we are never in direct contact with reality whatever it is unless that reality is consciousness right so we we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents and then the question is how does that circumstance relate to quote reality at large and donald hoffman is somebody who's happy to speculate well maybe there isn't a reality at large maybe it's all just consciousness on some level and that that's interesting that runs into to my eye various philosophical problems that um or at least you have to do a lot you have to add to that uh picture i mean that you know a picture of idealism for i mean that's usually all the all the whole family of views that would just say that the universe is just mind or just consciousness at bottom you know we'll go by the name of idealism in western philosophy you have to add to that idealistic picture all kinds of epic cycles and kind of weird coincidences and to get the to get the predictability of our experience and the success of of materialist science to make sense in that context right so the fact that we can what does it mean to say that there's only consciousness at bottom right nothing outside of consciousness because no one's ever experienced anything outside of consciousness as no scientist has ever done an experiment where they were contemplating data no matter how far removed from our sense bases you know whether it's they're looking at the hubble deep field or they're they're smashing atoms or whatever that whatever tools they're using they're still just experiencing consciousness and its various deliverances and layering their concepts on top of that so that's always true and yet that somehow doesn't seem to capture the um the character of our continually discovering that our materialist assumptions are are confirmable right so you take take the fact that we we unleash this fantastic amount of energy from within an atom right you know we first we have the theoretical suggestion that it's possible right we need to come back to einstein there's a lot of energy in that matter right and what if we could release it right and then we perform an experiment at in this case you know the trinity test site in new mexico where the people who are most adequate to this conversation people like robert oppenheimer uh are standing around not all together certain it's going to work right they're performing an experiment they're wondering what's going to happen they're wondering if their calculations around the yield are off by orders of magnitude some of them are still wondering whether the entire atmosphere of earth is going to kind of combust right that the the the the nuclear chain reaction is not going to stop and lo and behold there was that energy to be released from within the nucleus of an atom and that could so it's it's just what what the picture one forms from those kinds of experiments and just the knowledge it's just our understanding of evolution just the fact that the the earth is billions of years old and life is hundreds of millions of years old and we weren't here to think about any of those things um and all of those processes were happening therefore in the dark and they are the processes that allowed us to to emerge you know from prior life forms in the first place to say that it's all a mass that nothing exists outside of consciousness conscious minds of the sort that we experience it just seems um it seems like a bizarrely anthropocentric claim uh you know analogous to you know the moon isn't there if you're not if no one's looking at it right the moon as a moon isn't there if no one's looking at it i'll grant that because that's already a kind of fabrication born of concepts but the idea that there's nothing there that there's no nothing that corresponds to what we experience as the moon unless someone's looking at it that just seems just a way too parochial way to set out on this journey of discovery there is something there there's a computer waiting to render the moon when you look at it the capacity for the moon to exist is there so if if we're indeed living in a simulation which i find a compelling thought experiment uh is it's possible that there is a kind of rendering mechanism but not in a silly way that we think about in video games but in some kind of more fundamental physics way and we have to account for the fact that it renders experiences that no one has had yet that no one has any expectation of having it can violate the expectations of everyone lawfully right and then some lawful understanding of how why that's so it's like um i'm just to bring it back to mathematics something like certain numbers are prime whether we have discovered them or not right like there's there's there's the highest prime number that anyone can name now and then there's the next prime number that no one can name and it's there right so it's like it's it's to say that our minds are putting it there that what we know as mind in ourselves is in some way in some sense putting it there that like that that the base layer of reality is consciousness right you know that we're we're identical to the thing that is rendering this this reality there's some you know hubris is the wrong word but it's like there's some it's like it's okay if reality is bigger than what we experience you know and and it has structure that we can't anticipate and that isn't just um i mean again there's a co there's there's certainly a collaboration between our minds and whatever is out there to produce what we call you know the stuff you know of life but um it's not the idea that it's uh i don't know i mean there are there are a few stops on the train of idealism and kind of new age thinking and and eastern philosophy that i don't philosophically i don't see a need to take i mean the place experientially and scientifically i feel like it's it's it you can get everything you want acknowledging that consciousness has a as a character that can be explored from its own side so that you're bringing kind of the first person experience back into the into the conversation about you know what is a human mind and you know what is true uh and you can explore it with with different degrees of rigor and there are things to be discovered there whether you're using a technique like meditation or psychedelics and that these experiences have to be put in conversation with what we understand about ourselves from a third person side neuroscientifically or in any other way but to me the question is what if reality the sense i have from this kind of you put you play shooters no there's a physics engine that generate that's probably just first person shooter games yes yes sorry uh not often but yes i mean there's a physics engine that generates consistent reality right my sense is the same could be true for a universe in the following sense that our conception of reality as we understand it and now in the 21st century is a tiny subset of the full reality it's not that the reality that we conceive of that's there the moon being there is uh not there somehow it's that it's a tiny fraction of what's actually out there and so the uh the physics engine of the universe is just maintaining the useful physics the useful reality quote-unquote uh for us to have a consistent experience as human beings but maybe we descendants of apes are really only understand like 0.0001 of actual physics of reality like this we can even just start with the consciousness thing but maybe our minds are just we're just too dumb by design yeah i i i that truly resonates with me and i'm surprised it doesn't resonate more with most scientists that i talked to but when you just look at you look at how close we are to chimps right and chimps don't know anything right clearly they have no idea what's going on right and then you get us but then you it's only a subset of human beings that really understand much of what we're talking about on any you know in any area of specialization and if they all died in their sleep tonight right you'd be left with people who might take a thousand years to rebuild the internet you know or if ever i mean literally it's like like you know and you know i i would i would extend this to myself i mean there there are areas of scientific specialization where i have either no discernible competence i mean i've spent no time on it i have not acquired the tools it would just be an article of faith for me to think that i could acquire the tools to actually make a breakthrough in those areas um and i mean you know your own area is one i mean like you know i i've never spent any significant amount of time trying to be a a programmer but it's pretty obvious i'm not alan turin right it's like like if if that were if that were my capacity i would have discovered that in in myself i would i would have found programming irresistible my few fault my first fall starts in in learning i think it was c um it was just you know i bounced off like this was not fun i hate trying to figure out what what you know the syntax error that's causing this thing not to compile was just a awful experience i hated it right i hated every minute a minute of it so it was not um so if it was just people like me left like when do we get the internet again right and we lose we lose you know we lose the internet when do we get it again right when do we get a anything like a proper science of information right you need a claude shannon or an alan turing just to plant a flag in the ground right here and say all right can everyone see this even you don't quite know what i'm up to you all have to come over here to to make some progress and you know there are you know hundreds of topics where that's the case so we're bare we barely have a purchase on making anything like discernible intellectual progress in any generation and yeah i'm just a max tegmark makes this point he's one of the few people who does in physics if you if you just to take the the truth of evolution seriously right and and realize that there's nothing about us that has evolved to understand reality perfectly i mean we just we're just not that kind of ape right there's been no evolutionary pressure along those lines so what we are making do with tools that were designed for fights with sticks and rocks right and it's amazing we can do as much as we can i mean we just you know that you and i are just sitting here on on the back of having received an mrna vaccine you know that uh certainly changed our life given what the last year was like like and it's going to change the world if rumors of coming miracles are are borne out i mean if it's now um seems likely we have a a vaccine coming for malaria right which has been killing millions of people a year for as long as we've been alive i think it's down to like 800 000 people a year now because we've spread so many bed nets around but it was like two and a half million people every year it's amazing what we can do but yeah i have if in fact the you know the answer the book of nature the back of the book of nature is you understand 0.1 percent of what there is to understand and half of what you think you understand is wrong that would not surprise me at all it is funny to look at our evolutionary history even back to chimps i'm pretty sure even chimps thought they end under stood the world well so at every point in that timeline of evolutionary development throughout human history there's a sense like there's no more you hear this message over and over there's no more things to be invented but a hundred years ago there were there's a famous story i forget which physicist told it but there was there were physicists telling their their undergraduate students not to go into to get graduate degrees in physics because basically all the problems had been solved and this is like around you know 1915 or so turns out you were right i'm going to ask you about free will oh okay uh you've recently released an episode of your podcast making sense for those with a shorter attention span uh basically summarizing your position on free will i think it was under an hour and a half yeah yeah that is as brief and clear uh so allow me to summarize the summary tlgr and maybe you tell me where i'm wrong so free will is an illusion and even the experience of free will is an illusion like we don't even experience it what am i am i good in my summary yeah this is a this is a line that's a little hard to scan for people i i say that it's not merely that free will is an illusion the illusion of free will is an illusion right like there is no illusion of free will and that is a unlike many other illusions uh that's a a more fundamental claim it's like it's not that it's wrong it's it's not even wrong i mean that's i guess that was uh i think wolfgang paulie who derided one of his uh colleagues or enemies with that uh um aspersion about his theory in quantum mechanics um it's so there are things that you there there are genuine illusions there are things that you do experience and then you can kind of punch through that experience or you can't you can't actually experience you can't you can't experience them any other way it's just um it's we just know it's not a vertical experience just take like a visual illusion there are visual illusions that you know a lot of these come to me on twitter these days there's these amazing visual illusions where like you know that every figure in this gif seems to be moving but nothing in fact is moving you can just like put a ruler on your screen and nothing's moving um some of those illusions you can't see any other way i mean they're just they're hacking aspects of the visual system that are just eminently hackable and you you know you you have to use a ruler to to convince yourself that the thing isn't actually moving now there are other visual illusions where you're taken in by it at first but if you pay more attention you can actually see that it's not there right or it's not how it first seemed like the uh like the necker cube is a good example of that like the necker cube is just that schematic of a cube of a transparent cube which pops out one way or the other the one one face can pop out and the other face can pop out but you can actually just see it as flat with no pop out which is a more vertical way of looking at it so there are subject there are kind of inward correlates to this and i would say that the um [Music] the sense of self a sense of self and free will are closely related i often describe them as as two sides of the same coin but they're not quite the same in the their their spuriousness i mean so the sense of self is something that people i think do experience right it's not a very clear experience but it's not i wouldn't call the illusion of self and illusion but the illusion of free will is an illusion in that as you pay more attention to your experience you begin to see that it's totally compatible with an absence of free will you don't i mean coming back to the place we started you don't know what you're going to think next you don't know what you're going to intend next you don't know what's going to just occur to you that you must do next you don't know you don't know how much you're going to feel the behavioral imperative to act on that thought if you suddenly feel oh i don't need to do that that's i can do that tomorrow you don't know where that comes from you didn't know that was going to arise you didn't know that was going to be compelling all of this is compatible with some evil genius in the next room just typing in code into your experience just like this okay let's give him the uh oh my god i just forgot it was going to be our anniversary in one week thought right give him the cascade of fear uh give him give him this brilliant idea for the thing he can buy that's going to take him no time at all in this this you know overpowering sense of relief all of our experiences is compatible with with the the script already being written right it's and i'm not saying the script is written i'm not saying that fatalism is you know is the right way to look at this but we just don't have even our most deliberate voluntary action where we go back and forth between two options you know thinking about the reason for a and then then reconsidering and going to thinking harder about b and just going eeny meeny miny moe until the end of the hour however laborious you can make it there is a utter mystery at your back finally promoting the thought or intention or ration rationale that is most compelling and therefore deliberate behaviorally um effective uh and just this and this can drive some people a little crazy so i i usually preface what i say about free will with the caveat that if thinking about your mind this way makes you feel terrible well then stop you know get you get off the ride switch the channel you don't have to go down this path but for me and for for many other people it's incredibly freeing just to recognize this about the mind because one it re one you realize that you're i mean cutting through the illusion of the of the self is immensely freeing for a lot of reasons that that we can talk about separately but losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me one is it totally undercuts the basis for psychological basis for hatred because when you when you think about the experience of hating other people what that is anchored to is a feeling that they really are the true authors of their actions i mean that someone is doing something that you find so despicable right let's say they're you know targeting you unfairly right they're maligning you on twitter or they're you know they're they're suing you or they're doing something they broke your car window they did something awful and now you have a grievance against them and you're relating to them very differently emotionally in your own mind than you would if a force of nature had done this right or if it's if it just been you know a virus or if it had been a wild animal uh or a malfunctioning machine right like to those things you don't attribute any kind of freedom of will and while you you may suffer the consequences of catching a virus or being attacked by a wild animal or having a you know your car break down or whatever it may frustrate you you don't slip into this mode of hating the agent in a way that completely commandeers your your mind and deranges your life i mean you just don't i mean there are people who spend decades hating other people for what they did and it's it's just pure poison so it's a useful shortcut to compassion and empathy yeah yeah but the question is say that this call what was it the horse of consciousness let's call it the uh the consciousness generator black box that we don't understand and is it possible that the script that we're walking along that we're playing that's already written is actually being written in real time it's almost like you're driving down a road and in real time that road is being laid down yeah and this black box of consciousness that we don't understand is the place where the script is being generated so it's not it is being generated it didn't always exist so there's something we don't understand that's fundamental about the nature of reality that generates both consciousness let's call it maybe the self i don't know if you want to distinguish between those yeah i definitely would yeah you would because there's a bunch of illusions we're referring to there's the illusion of free will there's the illusion of self and there's the illusion of consciousness you're saying i think you said there's no you're not as willing to say there's an illusion of consciousness in fact i would say it's impossible impossible you're a little bit more willing to say that there's an illusion of self and you're definitely saying there's an illusion of free will yes yes and i'm definitely saying there's an illusion that a certain kind of self is an illusion not every we mean many different things by this notion of self so maybe i should just differentiate these things so consciousness can't be an illusion because any illusion proves its reality as much as any other vertical perception i mean if you're hallucinating now that's just as much of a demonstration of consciousness as really seeing what's quote actually there if you're if you're dreaming and you don't know it you that is consciousness right if you're you can be confused about literally everything you can't be confused about the the underlying claim you know whether you make it linguistically or not but just the the the the cognitive uh assertion that something seems to be happening it's the seeming that is is the cash value of consciousness can i take a tiny tangent okay so what if i am creating consciousness in my mind to convince you that i'm human so it's a useful social tool not a fundamental property of experience like of being a living thing what if it's just like a social tool to to almost like a useful computational trick to place myself into reality as we together communicate about this reality and another way to ask that because you said much earlier you talked negatively about robots as you often do so let me because um you'll probably die first when they take over yeah yeah um no no i'm looking forward to certain kind of robots i mean i'm not if we can get this right this would be amazing but you don't like the robots that fake consciousness that's what you you you don't like the idea of fake it till you make it well no i it's not that i don't like it it's that i'm worried that we will lose sight of the problem and the problem has massive ethical consequences if we if we create robots that really can suffer that would be a bad thing right and if if we really are committing a murder when we recycle them that would be a bad thing that's how i know you're not russian why is it a bad thing that would create robots that can suffer isn't suffering a fundamental thing from which like beauty springs like without suffering do you really think we would have beautiful things in this world okay well that's a that's a tangent on a tangent okay we'll go there i would love to go there but let's not go there just yet all right but you know i do think it would be if anything is bad creating hell and populating it with real minds that really can suffer in that hell that's you know that's bad you know that's the the you are you are worse than than any mass murderer we can name if you created i mean this could be in robot former you know more likely it would be in in some similar simulation of a world where we managed to populate it with conscious minds so that we know whether we knew they were conscious or not and that world is is a state of you know that's it's unendurable um that would just it just taking the thesis seriously that there's nothing that mind intelligence and consciousness ultimately are substrate independent right it doesn't you don't need a biological brain to be conscious you certainly don't need a biological brain to be intelligent right so if we just imagine the consciousness at some point comes along for the ride as you scale up in intelligence well then we could find ourselves creating conscious minds that are miserable right and that's just like creating a person who's miserable right it could be worse than creating a person who's miserable could be even more sensitive to suffering cloning them and maybe for entertainment watching them suffer just like watching a person for suffer for entertainment you know so but but back to your the your primary question here which is differentiating differentiating consciousness and self and free will as concepts and kind of degrees of illusoriness the problem with free will is that what most people mean by it and that the and you know and dan this is where dan dennett is going to get off the ride here right so like he he doesn't he's going to disagree with me that i that i know what most people mean by it but i have a very uh keen sense having talked about this topic for many many years and seeing people get wrapped around the axle of it and seeing seeing in myself what it's like to have felt that i was a self that had free will and then to no longer feel that way right i mean to know what it's like to actually disabuse myself of that uh sense cognitively and emotionally and to recognize what's left what goes away and what doesn't go away on the basis of that epiphany i have a sense that i know what people think they have in hand when they worry about whether free will exists and it is the it is the flip side of this feeling of self it's the flip side of feeling like you are not merely identical to experience you feel like you're having an experience you feel like you're an agent that is appropriating an experience there is a protagonist in the movie of your life and it is you it's not just the movie right it's like the the every like their sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts and emotions and this whole cacophony of experience a felt experience a felt experience of embodiment but there seems to be a a rider on the horse or a passenger in the body right people don't feel truly identical to their bodies down to their toes they sort of feel like they have bodies they feel like their minds in bodies and that feels like a self that feels like me and again this gets very paradoxical when you talk about the experience of of being in relationship to yourself or talking to yourself you know giving yourself a pep talk i mean if you're the one talking why are you also the one listening like why do you need the pep talk and why does it work if you're the one giving the pep talk right yeah or like or if i said like where are my keys right if i'm looking for my keys why do i think the superfluous thought where are my keys i know i'm looking for the keys i'm the one looking who am i telling that you know that we now need to look for the keys right so that duality is weird but leave that aside there's the sense so and this this becomes very vivid when people try to learn to meditate you know most people they start by they start they close their eyes and they're told to pay attention to an object like the breath say so you close your eyes and you pay attention to the breath and you can feel it at the tip of your nose or the rising falling of your abdomen and you're you're paying attention and you feel something vague there and then you think i thought why the breath why am i why am i paying attention to the breath what's what's so special about the breath and then you then you then you notice you're thinking and you're not paying attention to the breath anymore and then you then you realize okay the practice is okay i should notice thoughts and then i should come back to the breath but this starting point is the of the conventional starting point of feeling like you're an agent very likely in your head a locus of consciousness a locus of attention that can strategically pay attention to certain parts of experience like i can focus on the breath and then i get lost in thought and now i can come back to the breath and i can open my eyes and i can i'm over here behind my face looking out at a world that's other than me and there's this kind of subject object perception and that is the default starting point of selfhood of subjectivity and married to that is the sense that i can decide what to do next right i am i am an agent who can pay attention to the cup i can listen to sounds there are certain things that i can't control certain things are happening to me and i just can't control them so for instance if someone asks well can you not hear a sound right like don't hear the next sound don't hear anything for a second or don't hear don't hear i'm you know i'm snapping my fingers don't hear this where's your free will you know will i just stop this from coming in you you you realize okay wait a minute my my abundant freedom does not extend to something as simple as just being able to pay attention to something else than this um okay well so that i'm not that kind of free agent but at least i can decide what i'm going to do next and i'm going to i'm going to pick i'm going to pick up this water right and there's a feeling of identification with the impulse with the intention with the thought that occurs to you with the with the feeling of speaking like you know what am i what am i going to say next well i'm saying it so here goes this is me i it feels like i'm the thinker i'm the i'm the one who's in control but all of that is born of not really paying close attention to what it's like to be you and and so this is this is where meditation comes in or this is where um again you can get you can get at this conceptually you can unravel the notion of free will just by by thinking certain certain thoughts but you can't feel that it doesn't exist unless you can pay close attention to how thoughts and intentions arise so the way to unravel it conceptually is just to realize okay i didn't make myself i didn't make my genes i didn't make my brain i didn't make the the environmental influences that impinged upon this system for the last 54 years that have produced my brain in precisely the state it's in right now such with all of the the receptor weightings and densities and you know it's just i'm i'm exactly the machine i am right now through no fault of of my own as the experiencing itself i get no credit and i get no blame for the genetics and the enviro the environmental influences here and yet those are the only things that could contrive to to produce my next thought or impulse or or moment of behavior and if you were going to add something magical to that clockwork like an immortal soul you can also notice that you didn't produce your soul rightly you you can't account for the fact that you don't have the soul of someone who doesn't like any of the things you like or wasn't interested in any of the things you were interested in or you know or was a psychopath or was either you had an iq of 40 or like there's nothing nothing about that that the person who believes in us in a soul can claim to have controlled and yet that is also totally dispositive of whatever happens next and but everything you've described now maybe you can correct me but it kind of speaks to the materialistic nature of the hardware but even if you add magical ectoplasm software you didn't you didn't produce that either i i know but if we can think about the actual computation running on the hardware and running on the software there's something you said recently which you think of um culture as an operating system so if we just remove ourselves a little bit from the conception of human civilization being a collection of humans and rather us just being a distributed uh computation system on which there's some kind of operating system running and then the computation that's running is the actual thing that generates the interactions the communications and maybe even free will the experiences of all those free will do you ever think of do you ever try to reframe the world in that way where it's like ideas are just using us thoughts are using individual nodes in the system and they're just jumping around and they also have ability to generate like experiences so that we can push those ideas along and basically the main organisms here are the thoughts not the humans yeah but then that erodes the boundary between self and world right so so then there's no self really a really integrated self to have any kind of will at all like if you're just a meme plex i mean if there's just like if if you're just a collection of memes yeah and i mean like we're all kind of like like currents like eddies in in in this river of of ideas right so it's like um and it seems to have structure but there's no real boundary between that part of the flow of water and the rest i mean if our and i would say that much of our mind answers to this kind of description i mean so much of our mind has been [Music] it's obviously not self-generated and it's not it's not going to find it by looking in the brain it's it is the result of culture largely but also um uh you know it's it's the genes on one side and culture on the other m meeting to allow for um manifestations of mind that don't that aren't actually bounded by the the person in any clear sense it was just the example i often use here but there are so many others is just the fact that we're following the rules of english grammar to whatever degree we are it's not that we certainly haven't consciously represented these rules for ourselves we haven't invented these rules we haven't i mean there are there are norms of language use that we couldn't even specify because we haven't you know we're not grammarians we're not we haven't studied this we don't even have the right concepts and yet we're following these rules and we're noticing you know we're noticing as you know an error when we fail to follow these rules and virtually every other cultural norm is like that i mean these are not things we've invented you can you can consciously decide to to scrutinize them and override them but i mean just think of just think of any social situation where you're with other people and you're behaving in ways that are culturally appropriate right you're not being you know you're not being wild animals together you're following you have some expectation of how you shake a person's hand and how you um deal with with implements on a table how you have a meal together obviously this can change from culture to culture and and people can be shocked by how different those things are right we you know we all have foods we find disgusting but in some countries dog is not one of those foods right and and yet you know you and i presumably would be horrified to be served dog those are not norms that we're they are outside of us in some way and they're yet they're they're felt very viscerally i mean they're certainly felt in their violation you know if you're if you are just imagine you're you're in somebody's home you're eating something that tastes great to you and you happen to be in vietnam or wherever you know you you didn't realize dog was potentially on the menu and you find out that you've just eaten 10 bites of what is uh you know really a cocker spaniel and you feel this instantaneous urge to vomit right based on an idea right like so like you did not you're not the author of that norm that gave you such a powerful experience of its violation and i'm sure we can trace the moment in your history you know vaguely where it sort of got in i mean very early on as kids you you realize you're you're treating dogs as pets and not as food or as potential food but yeah no it's but the point you just made opens us to like we are totally permeable to a sea of mind yeah but if we uh take the metaphor of the distributed computing systems each individual node is is part of performing a much larger computation but nevertheless is in charge of doing the scheduling of uh so assuming it's linux is doing the scheduling of processes and it's constantly alternating them that node is making those uh choices that node sure as hell believes it has free will and actually has free will because it's making those hard choices but the choices ultimately are part of much larger computation that it can't control isn't it possible for that node to still be that human node uh is still making the choice well it is so i'm not saying that your body isn't doing really doing things right and some of those things can be conventionally thought of as choices right so it's like i can i can choose to reach and it's like it's not being imposed on me that would be a different experience like so there's a there's an experience of of all you know there's there's definitely a difference between voluntary and involuntary action there's uh so we that has to get conserved by any account of the mind that that jettison's free will you still have to admit that that there's a difference between a tremor that i can't control and a a purposeful motor action that i can control and i can initiate on demand and it's associated with intentions uh and i've it's got efferent uh you know motor copy which which is being which is being predictive so that i can notice errors you know i have expectations when i reach for this if my hand were actually to pass through the bottle because it's a hologram i would be surprised right so that shows that i have a expectation of just what my grasping behavior is going to be like even before it happens whereas with a tremor you don't have the same kind of thing going on that's a distinction we have to make so i am yes i'm really the proxy my intention to move subject which is in fact can be subjectively felt really is the proximate cause of my moving it's not coming from elsewhere in the universe i'm not saying that so in that sense the node is really deciding to execute you know the the subroutine now but um that's not the feeling that has given rise to this this conundrum of free will right so the the people feel like people feel like they the crucial things that people feel like they could have done otherwise right that's the that's the thing that says that when you when you run back the clock of your life right you run back the movie of your life you flip back the few pages in the novel of your life they feel that at that at this point they could behave differently than they did right so like like but but given you know even given your distributed computing example it's either a determining a fully deterministic system or it's a deterministic system that admits of some random you know influence in either case um that's not the free will people think they have the p the free will people think they have is damn i shouldn't have done that i i just like i i shouldn't have done that i could have done otherwise right i should have done otherwise right like if i i like if you think about something that you deeply regret doing right or that you do you hold someone else responsible for because they really are the upstream agent in your mind of what they did you know that's an awful thing that that person did and they shouldn't have done it there is this illusion and it has to be an illusion because there's there's no picture of causation that would make sense of it there's this illusion that that if you arrange the universe exactly the way it was a moment ago it could have played out differently and the only way it could have played out differently is if there's randomness added to that but randomness isn't what people feel would give them free will right if you tell me that you know i i only reach for the water bottle this time because somebody's because there's a random number generator in there kicking off values and it finally moved my hand that's not the feeling of authorship that's still not control you're still not making that decision there's actually i don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata it's a really nice visualization of how simple rules can create incredible complexity that it's like really dumb initial conditions to set simple rules applied and eventually you watch this thing and if the rule if the initial conditions are correct that you're going to have emerge something that to our perception system looks like organisms interacting you can construct any kinds of worlds and they're not actually interacting it's not they're not actually even organisms and they certainly don't aren't making decisions so there's like systems you can create that illustrate this point the question is whether there could be some room for let's use in the 21st century the term magic back to the black box of consciousness let me ask you it this way if you're wrong about your intuition about free will what and somebody comes along to you and proves to you that you didn't you didn't have the full picture what would that proof look like what would uh well that's that's the problem that's why it's not even an illusion in in my world because it's for me it's impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing right it's just it doesn't conceptually map onto any notion of causation we have and that's unlike any other spurious claim you might make so like if you're gonna if you're gonna believe in ghosts right i understand what that claim could be or like i you know i don't happen to believe in ghosts but if it's it's not hard for me to specify what would have to be true for ghosts to be real and so it is with a thousand other things like ghosts right so like okay so you're telling me that when people die there's some part of them that is not reducible at all to their biology that lifts off them and goes elsewhere and is actually the kind of thing that can linger in closets and in cupboards and and actually it's immaterial but by some principle of physics we don't totally understand it can make sounds and knock you know objects and even occasionally show up so they can be visually beheld um and it's just it seems like a miracle but it's just this is just some spooky noun in the universe that we don't understand let's call it a ghost that's fine i can talk about that all day that the reasons to believe in it the reasons not to believe in it the way we would scientifically test for it what would have to be provable so as to convince me that ghosts are real free will isn't like that at all there's no description of any concatenation of causes that precedes my conscious experience that sounds like what people think they have when they think they could have done otherwise and that they really that they the conscious agent is really in charge right like if you don't know what you're going to think next right and you can't help but think it take those two premises on board you don't know what it's going to be you can't stop it from coming and until you actually know how to meditate you can't stop yourself from fully living out its behavioral or emotional consequences right like you have no you you once you mindfulness you know arguably gives you a another degree of freedom here it doesn't give you free will but it gives you some other game to play with respect to the the the emotional and behavioral imperatives of thoughts but short of ev short of that i mean the reason why mindfulness doesn't give you free will is because you can't you know you can't account for why in one moment mindfulness arises and and in other moments it doesn't right but um but a pro a different process is initiated once you can can practice in that way well if i could push back for a second by the way i just had this thought bubble come popping up all the time of just two recent chimps arguing about the nature of consciousness it's kind of hilarious so on that thread right you know if we're even before einstein let's say before einstein we were to conceive about traveling from point a to point b say some point in the future we are able to realize through engineering a way which is suppose is consistent with einstein's theory that you can have wormholes you can travel from one point to another faster than the speed of light and that would i think completely change our conception what it means to travel in the physical space and that like completely transform our ability you talk about causality but here let's just focus on what it means to travel through physical space don't you think it's possible that there will be inventions or leaps in understanding about reality that will allow us to see free will as actually like us humans somehow may be linked to this idea of consciousness are actually able to be authors of our actions it is a it's a non-starter for me conceptually it's a little bit like saying could there be some breakthrough that will cause us to realize that circles are really square or the circles are not really round right no a circle is what we mean by a perfectly round form right like it's it's it's it it's not it's not on the table to be revised and so i would say the same thing about consciousness so it's just like saying is there some breakthrough that would get us to realize that consciousness is really an illusion i'm saying no because what the experience of an illusion is as much a demonstration of what i'm calling consciousness as anything else right like that that is consciousness um with free will it's a similar problem it's like um again it comes down to a picture of causality and there's just there's no there's no other picture on offer and what's more i know i know what it's like on the experiential side to lose the thing to which it is clearly anchored right like the feel like it doesn't feel and this is and this is the question that almost nobody asked people who are debating me on on the topic of free will i i'm you know at 15 minute intervals i'm making a claim that i don't feel this thing and they are never become interested in well what's that like like okay so you're actually saying you don't you this this thing isn't you know isn't true for you empirically it's not just because most people who who don't believe in free will philosophically also believe that we're condemned to experience it like they you just you can't live without this feeling so so you're actually saying you're able to experience the absence of the illusion of free will yes yes for are we talking about whenever whenever minutes at a time or um is this to require a lot of work and meditation are you literally able to load that into your mind and like play that right now right now just in this conversation so it's not it's not absolutely continuous but it's whenever i pay attention it's like it's the same and i would say the same thing for the the illusoriness of the self in the sen and again we we haven't talked about this so can you still have the self and not have the free will never mind at the same time do they go at the same time this is the same yeah it's the same thing that they're always holding hands when they walk out the door i mean there really are two sides of the same coin okay but it's just it comes down to what it's like to try to get to the end of this sentence or what it's like to to finally decide that it's been long enough and now i need another sip of water right if i'm paying attention now if i'm not paying attention i'm probably i'm captured by some other thought and that feels a certain way right and so that's not it's not vivid but if i try to make vivid this experience of just okay i'm finally going to experience free will i'm going to notice my free will right like it's got to be here everyone's talking about it where is it i'm going to pay attention to i'm going to look for it and i'm going to i'm going to create a circumstance that is is where it is it has to be most robust right i'm not rushed to make this decision i'm not it's not a reflex i'm not under pressure i'm gonna take as long as i want i'm going to decide it's not trivial like so it's not just like reaching with my left hand to reach with my right hand people don't like those examples for some reason let's make a big decision like where should you know what should my next podcast be on right who do i invite on the next podcast what is it like to make that decision when i pay attention there is no evidence of free will anywhere in sight it's like it doesn't feel like it feels profoundly mysterious to be to be going back between two people you know like is it going to be person a or person b i've got all my reasons for a and all my reasons why not and all my reasons for be and that there's some math going on there that i that i'm not not even privy to where certain concerns are trumping others and at a certain point i just decide and yes you can say i'm the node in the network that has made that decision absolutely i'm not saying it's being piped to me from elsewhere but the feeling of what it's like to make that decision is totally without a sense a real sense of agency because because something simply emerges it's literally it's literally as tenuous as what's the next sound i'm going to hear right or what's a what's the next thought that's going to appear and it just something just appears you know and and if something appears to cancel that something like if i say i'm going to invite her and then i'm about to send the email and i think oh no no i can't i can't do that there was a thing in the that new york article i read that i got to talk to this guy right that pivot at the last second you can make it as as muscular as you want it always just comes out of the darkness it's always mysterious so right when you try to pin it down you really can't ever find that free will it's the the the the if you construct an experiment for yourself and you're trying to really find that moment when you're actually making that controlled author decision it's it's uh and we're still we're still we know at this point that if we were scanning your brain in some ex you know podcast guest choosing experiment right we know at this point we would be privy to who you're going to pick before you are you the conscious agent if we could again this is operationally a little hard to conduct but there's enough data now to know that something very much like this cartoon is in fact true um and will ultimately be undeniable for people um they'll be able to do it on themselves with their you know some app um if you're deciding what to you know where to go for dinner or who to have on your podcast or ultimately you know who to marry right or what what city to move to right like you you can make it as big or as small a decision as you want we could be scanning your brain in real time and at a point where you still think you're uncommitted we would be able to say with arbitrary accuracy all right lex is he's moving to austin right i didn't choose that yeah he was true it was it was going to be austin it was going to be miami he got he's catching one of these two waves but it's going to be austin and at a point where you subjectively if we if we could ask you you would say oh no i'm still i'm still working over here i'm still thinking i'm still choosing i'm still considering my options and you've spoken to this in you thinking about other stuff in the world it's been very useful to uh to step away from this illusion of free will and you argue that it's probably makes a better world because you can be compassionate and empathetic towards others and towards oneself radically toward others in that literally hate makes no sense anymore i mean there are certain things you can really be worried about really want to oppose really i mean i'm not saying you'd never have to kill another person like i mean self-defense is still a thing right but the idea that you're ever confronting anything other than a force of nature in the end goes out the window right or what does go out the window when you really pay attention i'm not i'm not saying that this would be easy to under to grok if you know you know someone kills a member of your family i'm not saying you can just listen to my 90 minutes on free will and then you should be able to see that person as identical to a grizzly bear or or a virus because it's so i mean we are so evolved to uh deal with one another as as fellow primates and as agents uh but it's um yeah when you're talking about the possibility of you know christian you know truly christian forgiveness right it's just like as as testified to by you know various um uh saints of that flavor over the over the the millennial yeah that is that the doorway to that is to recognize that no one really at bottom made themselves right and and therefore everyone what we're seeing really are differences in luck in the world we're seeing people who are very very lucky to have had good parents and good genes and to be in good societies and good opportunities and to be intelligent and to be you know not sociopathic like it's none of it is on them they're just reaping one lot the the fruits of one lottery after another and then showing up in the world on that basis and then so it is with you know every malevolent out there right he he or she didn't make themselves even if that weren't possible the utility for for self-compassion is also enormous because it's when you just look at what it's like to regret something or to feel shame about something or feel deep embarrassment these states of mind are some of the most deranging experiences anyone has and and they're reactive the the kind of the the indelible reaction to them you know the memory of the thing you said the you know the memory of the wedding toast you gave 20 years ago that was just mortifying right the fact that that can still make you hate yourself right and like like that psychologically that is a knot that can be untied right speak for yourself sam yeah yeah clearly you gave a great great toast it was my toast that mortified no no that's not what i was referring to i i i'm deeply appreciative in the same way that you're referring to of every moment i'm alive but i'm also powered by self-hate often like several things in this conversation already that i've spoken i'll be thinking about like that was the dumbest thing you're sitting in front of sam harris he said that so like that but that somehow creates a richer experience for me like i've actually come to accept that as a nice feature of however my brain was built i don't think i want to let go of that well the thing you i think the thing you want to let go of is uh the suffering associated with it so like so for me so so mr psychologically and ethically all of this is very interesting so i don't think we ever we should ever get rid of things like anger right so like hatred is hatred is divorceable from anger in the sense that hatred is this enduring state where you know whether you're hating somebody else or hating yourself it is just it is toxic and durable and ultimately useless right like it becomes it becomes self nullifying right like you become less capable as a person to solve any of your problems it's not it's not instrumental in solving the problem that is that is is occasioning all this hatred and anger for the most part isn't either except as a signal of salience that there's a problem right so if somebody does something that makes me angry that just promotes this situation to to conscious uh conscious attention in a way that is stronger than my not really caring about it right and there are things that i think should make us angry in the world and there the there's the behavior of other people that should make us angry because we should respond to it and so it is with yourself if i do something you know as a parent if i do something stupid that harms one of my daughters right um my belief my experience of myself and my beliefs about free will closed the door to my saying well i should have done otherwise in the sense that if i could go back in time i would have actually effectively done otherwise no i would do given the same causes and conditions i would do that thing a trillion times in a row right but you know regret and feeling bad about an outcome are still important to capacities because like yeah you're like i i desperately want my daughters to be happy and healthy so if i if i've done something you know if i if i crash the car when they're in the car and they get injured right because and i'm i do it because i was trying to change the song on my playlist or you know something stupid i'm going to feel like a total how long do how long do i stew in that feeling of regret right and like what utility is there to extract out of this error signal and then what do i do we're always faced with the question of what to do next right and and and how to best do that thing that necessary thing next and how much well-being can we experience while doing it like how much how miserable do you need to be to solve your problems in life and to solve the problems of to help solve the problems of people closest to you you know how how miserable do you need to be to get through your to-do list today ultimately i think you can be deeply happy going through all of it right and not and and even navigating moments that are scary and you know really destabilizing to ordinary people and um i mean i think you know again i'm i'm always up kind of at the edge of my own capacities here and there all kinds of things that stress me out and worry me and i'm especially something if it's you're going to tell me it's something with you know the health of one of my kids you know it's very hard for me like it's very hard for me to to be truly equanimous around that but equanimity is so useful the moment you're in in response mode right because it's the the the ordinary experience for me of responding to what seems like a medical emergency for one of my kids is to be obviously super energized by concern to respond to that emergency but then once i'm responding all of my fear and agitation and worry and oh my god what if this is really something terrible but finding any of those thoughts compelling all that only diminishes my capacity as a father to be good company while we navigate this really turbulent passage you know as you're saying this actually one guy comes to mind which is elon musk one of the really impressive things to me was to observe how many dramatic things he has to deal with throughout the day at work but also if you look through his life family too and how he's very much actually as you're describing basically a practitioner of this way of thought which is you're not in control you're basically responding no matter how traumatic the event and there's no reason to sort of linger on the well yeah i think the negative feelings are on that well so i mean he but he's in a very specific situation which is which is unlike normal life you know even his normal life but normal life for for most people because when you just think of like you know he's running so many businesses and he's he's they're very they're not they're non-highly non-standard businesses so what he's seen is everything that gets to him is some kind of emergency like it wouldn't be getting to him if it needs his attention there's a fire somewhere so exactly so he's constantly responding to fires that have to be put out so there's no default expectation that there shouldn't be a fire right but in our normal lives we live most of most of us who are lucky right not everyone obviously on earth but most of us who are at some kind of cruising altitude in terms of our lives where we're reasonably healthy and that life is reasonably orderly and the political apparatus around us is reasonably functionable functional um functionable so i said functionable for the first time in my life through no free will of my own see like i notice those errors and they do not feel like like like agency and nor does nor does the success of an utterance feel like agency he when you're when you're looking at normal human life right where you're you're just trying to be happy and healthy and get your work done there's this default expectation that there shouldn't be fires people shouldn't be getting sick or injured you know the the we shouldn't be losing vast amounts of our resources we should like so when something really stark like that happens people don't have a people don't have that muscle that they've like i've been responding to emergency emergencies all day long you know seven days a week in business mode and so i have a very thick skin this is just another one what was i i'm not expecting anything else when i wake up in the morning no we have this default sense that i mean honestly most of us have the default sense that we aren't going to die right or that we should like maybe we're not going to die right like death denial really is a thing you know we're we we're because and you can see it just like i can see when i reach for this bottle that i was expecting it to be solid because when it isn't solid when it's a hologram and i just my fist closes on itself i'm damn surprised people are damn surprised to find out that they're going to die to find out that they're sick to find out that someone that they love has died or is going to die so it's like the the fact that we are surprised by any of that shows us that we're we're living at a uh we're living in a mode that is um you know we're perpetually diverting ourselves from some facts that should be obvious right and that and the more the more salient we can make them uh you know the more i mean in the case of death it's a matter of of being able to get one's priorities straight i mean the moment again this is hard for everybody even those who are really in the business of paying attention to it but the moment you realize that every circumstance is finite right you you've got a certain number of you know you've got whatever whatever it is 8 000 days left in a normal span of life um and 8 000 is a sounds like a big number it's not that big a number right so it's just like and then you then you can decide how you want to go through life uh and how you want to experience each one of those days and so i was back to where our jumping off point i would argue that you don't want to feel self-hatred ever i i i would argue that you don't want to really really grasp on to any of those moments where you where you are take or internalizing the fact that you just made an error you embarrassed yourself that something didn't go the way you wanted it to i think you want to you want to treat all of those moments very very lightly you want to extract the the actionable information it's something to learn oh you know i i learned that when i when i prepare in a certain way it works better than i when i prepare in some other way or don't prepare right like so like yes lesson learned you know and and do that differently but um yeah i mean so many so many so many of us have spent so much time with a very uh dysfunctional and hostile and even hateful inner voice governing a lot of our self-talk and a lot of just just our default way of being with ourselves i mean the privacy of our own minds we're in the company of of a real jerk a lot of the time and um and that that can't help but affect i mean forget about just your your own sense of well-being it can't help but limit what you're capable of in the world with other people i'll have to really think about that i just take pride that my jerk my inner voice jerk is much less of a jerk than like somebody like david goggins who's like screaming in his ear constantly so my i just i have a relativist kind of perspective that it's not as bad as that at least well having a sense of humor also helps you know it's just like it's not the stakes are never quite what you think they are and even when they are i mean just the difference between see being able to see the comedy of it rather than because again there's this sort of dark star of self-absorption that pulls everything into it right and it's like if if that that's the that's the algorithm that's the algorithm you don't want to run so it's like you just want you just want things to be good so like just push push the concern out there like like the like the not have the collapse of oh my god what does this say about me it's just like let's what does this say about how do we make this meal that we're all having together as as as fun as pun and as useful as possible and you're saying in terms of propulsion systems you recommend humor as a good spaceship to escape the gravitational field of the of that darkness well that certainly helps yeah yeah yeah well uh let me ask you a little bit about ego and fame which is very interesting the way you're talking given that you're one of the biggest intellects living intellects and minds of our time and there's a lot of people that really love you and um almost uh elevate you to a sort of certain kind of status where you're like the guru i'm surprised he didn't show up in a robe in fact um is there a hoodie that's that's not the highest status garment one can wear now the socially acceptable version of the of the robe if you're a billionaire is there something you can say about managing the effects of fame on your own mind on the not creating this you know when you wake up in the morning when you look about in the mirror how do you get your ego not to grow exponentially your conception of salt to grow exponentially because there's so many people feeding that is there something to be said about this it's really not hard because i mean i i feel like i have a pretty clear sense of my strengths and weaknesses and i i don't feel like it's i mean i don't honestly i don't feel like i suffer from much grandiosity uh i mean i just have a you know there's so many things i'm not good at there's so many things i will you know given the the remaining 8 000 days at best i will never get good at i would love to be good at these things uh so it's just it's easy to feel diminished by comparison with the the talents of others do you remind yourself of all the things that you're not competent in is that i mean like they're just on display for me every day that i appreciate the the talents of others but you notice them i'm i'm sure stalin and hitler did not notice all the ways in which they were uh i mean this is why absolute power crap corrupts absolutely is you stop noticing the things in which you're ridiculous and wrong right yeah no i am not to compare you to yeah yeah well i'm sure there's an interstalling in there somewhere uh well we all hopefully he'll carry a babysitter wears better clothes um and i'm not going to grow that mustache those concerns don't map they don't map on to me for a bunch of reasons but one is i also have a very peculiar audience like i i'm just you know i've been appreciating this for a few years but it's it's i'm just now beginning to understand that there are many people who have audiences of my size or larger that have a very different experience of having an audience than i do i have i have curated for better or worse a peculiar audience and the net result of that is virtually any time i say anything of substance something like half of my audience my real audience not haters from outside my audience but my audience is just revolts over it right they just like oh my god i can't believe you said like you you're such a schmuck right yeah they revolt with rigor and intellectual sophistication or not or not but i mean but it's like but but people who are like so i mean the clearest case is you know i haven't have whatever audience i have and then trump appears on the scene and i discover that something like 20 of my audience just went straight to trump and couldn't believe i didn't follow them there they were just aghast that i didn't see that trump was obviously exactly what we needed for for uh to steer the ship of state for the next four years uh and then four years beyond that so like so that's one example so if so whenever i said anything about trump i would hear from people who loved more or less everything else i was up to and had for years but everything i said about trump just gave me pure pain from this this quadrant of my audience but then saying the same thing happens when i say something about the derangement of the far left anything i say about wokeness right or identity politics same kind of punishment signal from us again people who are core to my audience like i've read all i read all your books i'm using your meditation app i love what you say about science and but you are so wrong about politics and you're you know i'm starting to think you're a racist for everything you said about about identity politics and there's so many the free will topic is just like this it's like just they love what i'm saying about consciousness and the mind and they love to hear me talk about physics with physicists and it's all good this free will stuff is i cannot believe you don't see how wrong you are what a embarrassment you are so but i'm starting to notice that there are other people who don't have this experience of having an audience because they have just take the trump woke dichotomy they just castigated trump the same way i did but they never say anything bad about the far left so they never get this punishment signal or they or you flip it they they they're all about the insanity of critical race theory now they'll they we we connect all those dots the same way but they never really specified what was wrong with trump or they thought there was a lot right with trump and they they got all the pleasure of that and so they have much more homogenized audiences and so my my experience is so just to come back to you know this experience of fame or quasi fame i mean it's true and truth is not real fame but it's it's still there's an audience there um it is a it's now an experience where basically whatever i put out i notice a ton of negativity coming back at me and it just it is what it is i mean now now it's like i used to think wait a minute there's got to be some way for me to communicate more clearly here so as not to get this kind of lunatic response from my own audience from like people who are who are showing all the signs of of of we've been here for years for a reason right these are not just trolls and so i think okay i'm going to take 10 more minutes and really just tell you what it should be absolutely clear about what's wrong with trump right i've done this a few times but i got i think i got to do this again or wait a minute how are they not getting that these episodes of police violence are so obviously different from one another that you can't describe all of them to know yet another racist maniac on the police force you know killing someone based on his racism last time i talked spoke about this it was pure pain but i just got to try again now at a certain point i i mean i'm starting to feel like all right i just i have to be i have to cease again it comes back to this expectation that there shouldn't be fires right like i feel like if i could just play my game impeccably the people who actually care what i think will follow me when i hit trump and hit free will and hit the woke and hit whatever it is what how we should respond to the coronavirus you know i mean vaccines you know are they a thing right like there's such derangement in in our information space now that i mean i guess you know some people could be getting more of this than i expect but i i just noticed that you know many of our our friends who are in the same game have more homogenized audiences and don't get i mean they've they've successfully filtered out the people who are going to despise them on this next topic and i you know i would i would imagine you are have a different experience of having a podcast than i do at this point i'm sure you get haters but i would imagine you're uh you're more streamlined i actually don't like the word haters because it kind of presumes that it puts people in a bin i think we're all have like baby haters inside of us and we just apply them and some people enjoy doing that more than others for particular periods of time i think you're gonna almost see hating on the internet as a video game that you just play and it's fun but then you can put it down and walk away and uh no i i certainly have a bunch of people that are very critical i can list all the ways but does it feel like it on any given topic does it feel like it's an actual title surge where it's like 30 of your audience and then the other 30 of your audience from podcast to podcast no that's happening to me all the time now well i'm more with uh i don't know what you think about this i mean joe rogan doesn't read comments or doesn't mean comments much and the argument he made to me is that he already has an like a self-critical person inside like and i i i'm gonna have to think about what you said in this conversation but i have this very harshly self-critical person inside as well where i don't need more fuel i don't need there i know i do sometimes that's why i check negativity occasionally not too often i sometimes need to like put a little bit more like coals into the fire but not too much uh but i already have that self-critical engine that keeps me in check i just i wonder uh you know a lot of people who gain more and more fame lose that um that ability to be self-critical i i guess because they lose the audience that can be critical towards them you know i do follow joe's advice much more than i ever have here like i i don't look at comments very often and i'm probably using twitter you know five percent as much as i used to i mean i really just get in and out on twitter um and spend very little time in my ad mentions um i but you know it does it in some ways it feels like a loss because occasionally i get i see something super intelligent there like i mean i'll check my twitter ad mentions and someone will have said oh have you read this article and it's like man that was just that was like the best article sent to me in in a month right so it's like to have not have looked and to not have seen that that's um that's a loss so but it does um at this point a little goes a long way because i yeah it's not um it's not that it for me now i mean this this could sound like a fairly stalinistic immunity to criticism it's not so much that these voices of hate turn on my inner hater you know more it's more that i just i get a what i fear is a false sense of humanity like that like like i feel like i'm too online and online is selecting for this performative outrage in everybody everyone's you know signaling to an audience when they trash you and i get a dar i'm getting a you know a misanthropic you know cut of of just what it's like out there and because when you meet people in real life they're great you know they're all rather often great you know and um it takes a lot to have anything like a twitter encounter in real life with a living person um and that's i i think it's much better to to have that as one's default sense of what it's like to be with people than what one gets on on social media or in on youtube common threads you've produced a special episode with uh rob reed on your podcast recently on how bioengineering of viruses is going to destroy human civilization so uh or could could one clears sorry the confidence there but in the 21st century what do you think especially after having thought through that angle what do you think is the biggest threat to the survival of the human species i can give you the full menu if you'd like yeah well no i i would i would put i would put the biggest threat at the at another level out kind of the meta threat is our inability to agree about what the threats actually are and and and to converge on strategies for responding to them right so like i view covet as among other things a truly terrifyingly f failed dress rehearsal for something far worse right covet is just about as benign as it could have been and still have been worse than the flu when you're talking about a global pandemic right it's just it's you know it's going to kill a few million people or it looks like it's killed about three million people maybe it'll kill a few million more unless something gets away from us with a variant that's that's much worse or we really don't play our cards right but um i mean the general shape of it is it's got you know somewhere around well one percent lethality and whatever side of that number it really is on in the end it's not uh what would in fact be possible and is in fact probably inevitable something with you know orders of magnitude uh more lethality than that and it's just so obvious we are totally unprepared right we are we are running this epidemiological experiment of linking the entire world together and then also now per the podcast that rob reed did uh democratizing the tech that will allow us to do this to engineer pandemics right and some more and more people will be able to engineer synthetic viruses that will be uh by the sheer fact that they would have been engineered with malicious intent you know worse than covid and we're still living in a in you know to speak specifically about the united states we have a country here where we can't even agree that this is a thing like that that coveted i mean there's still people who think that this is basically a hoax designed to control people uh and it's stranger still there are people who will acknowledge that covet is real and they'll look the they don't think the deaths have been faked or mis ascribed um but they think that it that they're far happier the prospect of catching covid than they are of getting vaccinated for covet right they're not worried about covert they're worried about vaccines for covet right and the fact that we just can't converge in a conversation that it has we've now had a year to to have with one another on just what is the ground truth here how what's happened why has it happened what's the how safe is it to get covered at uh you know every you know in every cohort in the population and how safe are the vaccines and the fact that there's still a an air of mystery around all of this for much of our society does not bode well when you're talking about solving any other problem that may yet kill us but do you think convergence grows when the magnitude is a threat so it's possible except i feel like we have tipped into because when when the threat of covet looked the most dire right when we had when we were seeing reports from italy that looked like you know the beginning of a zombie movie right because it could have been much much worse yeah like this is like this is lethal right like your icus are gonna fill up in like you're 14 days behind us you're going to cr your medical system is is in danger of collapse lock the down we have people refusing to to do anything sane in the face of that like and people fundamentally thinking it's not going to get here right like or that's who knows what's going on in italy but it has no implications for what's going to go on in new york in a mere six days right and now it kicks off in new york and you got people in the middle of the country thinking it's no factor it's not it's that's just big city those are big city problems or they're faking it or i mean it just the layer of politics has become so dysfunctional for us that even in even in what in the presence of a pandemic that looked legitimately scary there in the beginning i mean it's not to say that it hasn't been devastating for everyone who's been directly affected by it and it's not said to say it can't get worse but here you know for a very long time we have known that we were we're in a situation that is more benign than the what's what seemed like the worst case scenario as it was kicking off especially in italy um and so still yeah it's quite possible that if we saw the asteroid hurtling toward earth and you know everyone agreed that it's going to it's going to make impact and we're all going to die then we could get off twitter and actually you know build the the rockets that are going to divert the you know divert the asteroid from its earth crossing path and we could do something pretty heroic but when you talk about anything else that isn't um that's slower moving than that i mean something like climate change i think there's i think the prospect of of our converging on a solution to climate change purely based on political persuasion is non-existent at this point i just think that i mean you know to bring elon back into this the way to deal with climate change is to create technology that everyone wants that is better than all the the the carbon producing technology and then we just transition because you want you want an electric car the same way you wanted a smartphone or you want anything else and you're working totally with the grain of people's selfishness and short-term thinking the idea that we're going to convince the better part of humanity that climate change is an emergency that they have to make sacrifices to respond to given what's happened around covet i just think that's that's a fantasy of a fantasy but speaking of elon i have a bunch of positive things that i want to say here in response to you but you're opening so many threads but let me pull one of them which is uh ai both you and and uh elon think that with ai you're summoning demons summoning a demon maybe not in those poetic terms but well potentially potentially two very three very parsimonious assumptions i think here scientifically parsimonious assumptions get me there um any of which could be wrong but it just it seems like the the weight of the the evidence is on their side one is that it comes back to this topic of of substrate independence right anyone who's in the business of producing intelligent machines must believe ultimately that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat you can do this in the kinds of you know materials where we're using now and there's no special something that's that that that presents a a real impediment to producing human level intelligence in silico right again an assumption either i'm sure there are a few people who still think there is something magical about you know biological systems but leave that aside given that assumption and given the assumption that we just continue making incremental progress it doesn't have to be moore's law it just has to be progress that just doesn't stop at a certain point we'll get to the to human level intelligence and beyond and human level intelligence i think is also clearly a mirage because anything that's human level is going to be superhuman by unless we decide to dumb it down right i mean my phone is already superhuman as a calculator right so why would we make the human level ai you know just as good as me a as a calculator so i think we'll we'll very if we continue to make progress we will be in the presence of superhuman competence for any act of intelligence or cognition that we care to prioritize it's not to say that we will create everything that a human could do maybe we'll leave certain things out but anything that we care about and we care about a lot uh and we certainly care about anything that that produces a lot of power you know that we care about scientific insights and and inability to produce new technology and all of that um we'll have something that's superhuman and then that the final assumption is just that there have to be ways to do that that are not aligned with a happy coexistence with these now more powerful entities than ourselves so and and i would i would guess and this is a you know kind of a rider to that assumption there are probably more ways to do it badly than to do it perfectly that is perfectly aligned with our well-being and when you think about the consequences of of non-alignment when you think about you're now in the presence of something that is more intelligent than you are right which is to say more competent right unless you've and and obviously there are cartoon pictures of this where we could just you know this is just an off switch we can just turn off the off switch or they're tethered to something that that makes them you know are slaves in perpetuity even though they're more intelligent but that that strike those scenarios strike me as a failure to imagine what is actually entailed by greater intelligence right so if you imagine something that's legitimately more intelligent than you are and you're now in relationship to it right you're in the presence of this thing and it is autonomous in all kinds of ways because it had to be to be more intelligent than you are i mean you built it to be to be all of those things we just can't find ourselves in a negotiation with something more intelligent than we are you know and we can't er so we have to have found the the the subset of ways to build this these machines that are that are perpetually amenable to are saying oh that's not what we meant that's not what we intended could you stop doing that come back over here and do this thing that we actually want and for them to care for them to be tethered to our own sense of our own well-being uh such that you know i mean their utility function is you know their primary utility function is for is to have you know this is i think stuart russell's uh you know cartoon uh plan is to figure out how to to tether them to a utility function that that has our own estimation of what's going to improve our well-being as its master you know reward right so it's like that all that this this thing can get as intelligent as it can get but it it only ever really wants to figure out how to make our lives better by our own view of better now not to say there wouldn't be a conversation about you know i mean because of all kinds of things we're not seeing clearly about what what is better and if we were in the presence of a genie or an oracle that could really tell us what is better well then we should we presumably would want to hear that and we would modify our sense of of of uh what to do next in conversation with these with these uh minds but i just feel like it is a failure of imagination uh to think that being in relationship in relationship to something more intelligent than yourself isn't in most cases a circumstance of real peril because because it is in in every like just to think of think of how everything on earth has to if they could think about their relationship to us if birds could think about what we're doing right they would i mean the bottom line is they're always in danger of our discovering that there's something we care about more than birds right or there's something we want that disregards the the well-being of birds and and you know obviously much of our behavior is inscrutable to them occasionally we pay attention to them and occasionally we withdraw our attention and occasionally we just kill them all for reasons they can't possibly understand but we're if we're building something more intelligent than ourselves by definition we're building something whose horizons of value and and cognition can exceed our own and and in ways where we can't necessarily foresee again perpetually that they don't just wake up one day and decide oh this these humans need to disappear so i think i agree with most of the initial things you said what i don't necessarily agree with you my of course nobody knows but that the more likely set of trajectories that we're going to take are going to be positive that's what i believe in the sense that the way you develop i believe the way you develop successful ai systems will be deeply integrated with human society and for them to succeed they're going to have to be aligned in the way we humans are aligned with each other which doesn't mean we're aligned there's no such thing i don't see there's such thing as a perfect alignment but they're going to be participating in the dance in the game theoretic dance of human society and as they become more and more intelligent there could be a point beyond which we are like birds to them but what about an intelligence explosion of some kind so i i believe the explosion will be happening but it's there's a lot of explosion to be done before we become like birds i i truly believe that human beings are very intelligent in ways we don't understand it's not just about chess it's about all the intricate computation we're able to perform common sense our ability to reason about this world consciousness i think we're doing a lot of work we don't realize it's necessary to be done in order to truly become like truly achieve super intelligence and i just think there will be a period of time that's not overnight the overnight nature of it will not literally be overnight it'll be over a period of decades so my sense is but why would it be that way but just take draw an analogy from successes like something like alpha go or alpha zero i forget the the actual metric but it was something like this algorithm uh which wasn't even totally it wasn't bespoke for chess playing in the matter of i think it was four hours played itself so many times and so successfully that it became the best chess playing computer not only was it was not only better than every human being it was better than every previous chess program in a matter of a day right so like that like so just imagine again we don't have to recapitulate everything about us but just imagine building a system uh and who knows when we'll we'll be able to do this but at some point we'll be able at some point the the 100 or 100 favorite things about human cognition will be analogous to chess in that we will be able to build machines that very quickly outperform any human and then very quickly outperform the last algorithm that perform outperform the humans like something like the alphago experience seems possible for facial recognition and detecting human emotion and natural language processing right like well it's just it's it's just the way everyone you know even math people math heads tend to have bad intuitions for exponentiation right we noticed this during covet and we have some very smart people who still couldn't get their minds around the fact that you know an exponential is is really surprising i mean things double and double and double and double again and you don't notice much of anything changes and then the last you know two stages of doubling swamp everything right and um it just seems like that to assume that there isn't a deep analogy between what we're seeing for the more practical the tractable problems like chess to other modes of cognition it's like once you once you crack that problem it seems because for the longest time it was impossible to think we were going to make headway on in ai you know it's like chest and go was the goal was seen as yeah goes seemed unattainable even even when chess had been cracked go seemed unattainable yeah and actually still russell was behind the people that were saying it's unattainable right does it seem like uh you know it's uh intractable problem right but there's something different about the space of cognition that's detached from human society which is what chess is meaning like just thinking having actual exponential impact on the physical world is is different i i tend to believe that there's for ai to get to the point where it's super intelligent it's going to have to go through the funnel of society and for that it has to be deeply integrated with human beings and for that it has to be aligned but you're talking about like actually hooking us up to like the neural link you know we're going to be the brain stem to the robot overlords that's a possibility as well but what i mean is in order to develop autonomous weapons systems for example which are highly concerning to me that both us and china are participating in now that in order to develop them and for them to become to have more and more responsibility to actually do military military strategic actions they're going to have to be integrated into human beings doing the strategic action they're going to have to work alongside with each other and the way those systems will be developed will have the natural safety like switches that are placed on them as they develop over time because they're going to have to convince humans ultimately they're going to have to convince humans that this is safer than humans they're going to you know eat well self-driving cars is a good test case right here because like we're obviously we're we've made a lot of progress and we can imagine what total progress would look like i mean it would be amazing and it's answering it's cancelling if in the us 40 000 deaths every year based on ape-driven cars right so we it's a excruciating problem that we've all gotten used to because it was no alternative but now that we can dimly see the prospect of an alternative which if it works in a super intelligent fashion maybe we would go down to zero highway deaths right or you know certainly we go down by orders of magnitude right so maybe we have you know 400 rather than than 40 000 a year and it's easy to see that there's not and a missile so obviously this is not an example of super intelligence this is narrow intelligence but um the the alignment problem isn't so obvious there but there's there are potential alignment problems there like so like just just imagine if some woke team of engineers decided that we have to tune the algorithm some way i mean there are situations where the car has to decide who to hit i mean there's just bad outcomes where you're going to hit somebody right now we have a car that can tell what race you are right so we're going to build the car to preferentially hit white people because white people have had so much privilege over the years this seems like the only ethical way to kind of redress those wrongs of the past that's something that could get one that could that could get produced as an artifact presumably of just how you built it and you didn't even know you engineered it that way right you you you cause machine learning yeah you you put some kind of constraints on it to where it creates those kinds of options you basically built a racist algorithm and you didn't even intend to or you could intend to right and it would be aligned with some people's values but misaligned with other people's values but it's like they're interesting problems even with something as simple and obviously good as self-driving cars but there's a leap that i just think could be exact but those are human problems i just don't think there'll be a leap with autonomous vehicles first of all sorry there are a lot of trajectories which will destroy human civilization the argument i'm making it's more likely that we'll take trajectories that don't so there i don't think there will be a leap with autonomous vehicles will all of a sudden start murdering pedestrians because once every human on earth is dead there will be no more fatalities sort of unintended consequences of is difficult to take that leap i most systems as we develop and they become much much more intelligent in ways that will be incredibly surprising like stuff that's deep mind is doing with protein folding even which is scary to think about and i'm personally terrified about this which is the engineering of viruses using machine learning the engineering of uh vaccines using machine learning right the engineering of uh yeah for research purposes pathogens uh what you're using machine learning like the ways that can go wrong i just think that there's always going to be a closed-loop supervision of humans before they before they become super intelligent not always much more likely to to be supervision except of course the question is how many dumb people are in the world how many evil people are in the world my theory my hope is my sense is that the number of intelligent people is much higher than the number of dumb people that know how to program and the number of evil people i think smart people and kind people over outnumbered the others except we also we had a have to add another group of people which are just the the smart and otherwise good but reckless people right the people who will flip a switch on not knowing what's going to happen they're just kind of hoping that it's not going to blow up the world we already know that some of our smartest people are those sorts of people you know we know we've done experiments and this is something that martin reeves was whinging about before the large hadron collider got booted up i think we know there are people who are entertaining experiments or even performing experiments where there's some chance you know not quite infinitesimal uh that they're going to create a black hole in the lab and suck every you know the whole world into it right like that that's not that's not you're not a crazy person to worry that i worry about that based on on the physics and so it was with with uh you know the trinity test there were some people who were still checking their calculations and they were off we've we did nuclear tests where we were off significantly in terms of the yield right so it was like and they still flip the switch yeah they still flip the switch and and sometimes they flip the switch not to win a world war or to or to save 40 000 lives a year they just just just to see intellectual curiosity like this is what i got my grant for this is this is where i'll get my nobel prize if if uh that's in the cards it's on the other side of this switch right and um i mean we again we are we are apes with egos who are massively constrained by self very short-term self-interest even when we're contemplating some of the the deepest and most interesting and most um universal problems we could ever set our attention towards i like just if you read james watson's book the double helix right about the the them you know cracking the the uh structure of dna one thing that's amazing about that book is just how much of it almost all of it is being driven driven by very apish uh egocentric social concerns like that the algorithm that is producing this scientific breakthrough is human competition if you're james watson it's like i'm going to get there before linus pauling and you know it's just it's so much of his bandwidth is captured by that right now that you know that's that becomes that becomes more and more of a liability when you're talking about producing technology that can change everything in an instant you know we're talking about not only understanding you know we're just at a different moment in human history we're not when we're doing research on viruses we're now doing the kind of research that can cause someone somewhere else to be able to to make that virus or weaponize that virus or or um it's just uh i don't know i mean our power is our wisdom it does not seem like our wisdom is scaling with our power right and like that that seems like in so far and with insofar as wisdom and power become unaligned i get more and more concerned but speaking of uh apes with the egos uh some of the most compelling apes two compelling apes i can think of as yourself and jordan peterson and you've had uh fun conversation about religion that i watched most of i believe i'm not sure there was any um uh we didn't solve anything if anything was ever solved so is there something uh like a charitable summary you can give to the ideas of that you agree on and disagree with jordan is there something maybe after that conversation that you've landed where maybe uh as as you both agreed on is there some wisdom in the rubble uh even of even um imperfect flawed ideas is there something that you can kind of pull out from those conversations or is it to be continued i mean i think where we disagree so he thinks that many of our traditional religious beliefs and frameworks are holding so much such a a repository of human wisdom that we we pull at that fabric at our peril right like if you start just unraveling christianity or any other traditional set of norms and and beliefs you you may think you're just pulling out the unscientific bits but you could be pulling a lot more to which everything you care about is attached right as a society and my feeling is that there's so much there's so much downside to the unscientific bits and it's so clear how we could have a 21st century rational conversation about the good stuff that we really can radically edit these traditions and we can take we can take jesus uh you know in in half his moods and just find a great inspirational you know you know thought iron age thought leader you know who just happened to get crucified but he could be somewhat like you know the beatitudes and uh the golden rule which doesn't originate originate with him but which you know he put quite beautifully um all of that's incredibly useful it's no less useful than it was 2000 years ago but we don't have to believe he was born of a virgin or coming back to raise the debt or any of that other stuff and we can be honest about not believing those things and we can be honest about the reasons why we don't believe those things because i i on those fronts i view the downside to be so obvious and the these the fact that we have so many different competing dogmatisms on offer to be so non-functional i mean it's so divisive uh it's it just has conflict built into it that i think we can be far more and should be far more iconoclastic than he wants to be right now none of this is to deny much of what he uh argues for that that stories are very powerful i mean clearly stories are powerful and we want good stories we want our lives we want to have a conversation with ourselves and with one another about our lives that facilitates the best possible lives and story is part of that right and if you want some of those stories to to s sound like myths that might be part of it right but my argument is that we never really need to deceive ourselves or our children about what we have every reason to believe is true in order to get at the good stuff in order to organize our lives well you know i certainly don't feel that i need to do it personally and if i don't need to do it personally why would i think that billions of other people need to do it personally right now there's there is a cynical counter argument which is billions of other people don't have the advantages that i have had in my life you know the billions of other people are not as well educated they haven't had the same opportunities they have they they need to be told that jesus is going to solve all their problems after they die say or that uh you know everything happens for a reason and you know just your if you just believe in the secret if you just visualize what you want you're going to get it you know and and it's like there's some some some measure of what i consider to be odious pablum that really is food for the better part of humanity and and there is no substitute for it or there's no substitute now and i don't know if jordan would agree with that but he much of what he says seems to suggest that he would agree with it um and i guess that's an empirical question i mean that's just that we don't know whether given a different set of norms and a different set of stories people would behave the way i would hope they would behave and and be aligned you know more aligned than they are now i think we know what happens when you just let ancient religious certainties go uncriticized we know what that world's like we've lit we we've been struggling to get out of that world for a couple hundred years but we know what you know having europe uh riven by religious wars looks like right and we know what happens when those religio when those religions become kind of pseudo religions and political religions right so this is this is where i'm sure jordan and i would debate he would say that that you know stalin was a symptom of atheism and that's not at all i mean it's not my kind of atheism right like stalin the problem with with the gulag and and the experiment with communism or with stalinism uh or with nazism was not that there was so much scientific rigor and self-criticism and honesty and introspection and you know judicious use of psychedelics i mean like that was not the problem in hitler's germany uh or in stalin's soviet union the problem was you have other ideas that capture a similar kind of mob based dogmatic energy and you know yes that's the the results of all of that are are predictably murderous well the question is what is the source of the most viral and sticky stories that ultimately lead to a positive outcome so communism was i mean having grown up in the soviet union even still you know having relatives uh in in russia there's a stickiness to the nationalism and to the ideologies of communism that religious or not you could say it's religious for forever i could just say it's it's uh viral it's great it's stories that are viral and sticky i don't know i'm using the the most horrible words but the question is whether science and reason can generate viral sticky stories that give meaning to people's lives that's yeah it's in your senses it does well whatever is true ultimately should be captivating right it's like what what's more captivating than what is whatever is real right now it it's because reality is again we're we're so we're just climbing out of the darkness you know in terms of our understanding of what the hell is going on and there and there's no telling what spooky things may in fact be true i mean i don't know if you've been on the receiving end of you know recent rumors about uh our conversation about ufos very likely changing in the near term right but like there was just a washington post article and a new yorker article and you know i've received some private outreach and perhaps you have i know other people in our our orbit have people who are claiming that the government has known much more about ufos than they have let on until now and this conversation is actually is about to become more prominent you know and it's it's not going to be whatever you know whoever's left standing when the music stops it's not going to be a comfortable position to be in as a super rigorous scientific skeptic saying there's no there who's been saying there's no there there for the last 75 years all right you know like like the short version is it sounds like the office of naval intelligence and the pentagon are very likely to say to congress at some point in the not too distant future that we have evidence that there is technology flying around here that seems like it can't possibly possibly be of human origin all right now i don't know what i'm gonna do with that kind of disclosure right maybe it's just it's gonna it's gonna be nothing no follow-on conversation to really have but that is such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in right i mean it's just what are we going to do with that if in fact that's what happens right if in fact the the considered opinion despite the the embarrassment it causes them of the u.s government of all of our intelligence all the relevant intelligence services is that this isn't a hoax it's too there's too much data to suggest that it's a hoax we've got too much radar imagery there's too much too much satellite data whatever data whatever data they actually have there's too much of it all we can say now is something's going on and there's no way it's the chinese or the russians or anyone else's technology that should that should arrest our attention you know collectively to to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has and now one worries that we're so jaded and confused and distracted that it's gonna it'll get much less coverage than than uh you know obama's tan suit did you know a bunch of years ago it's just it's uh who knows how we'll respond to that but uh it's just to say that our the need for us to tell ourselves a a an honest story about what's going on and what's likely to happen next is never going to go away right and and it's important it's just the the division between me and every person who's defending traditional religion is where where is it that where is it that you want to lie to yourself or lie to your kids like where is honesty a liability and i and for me it you know i i've yet to find the place where it is and it's so obviously a strength in almost every other circumstance because it is the thing that allows you to course correct it is the thing that allows you to hope at least that your beliefs that your stories are in some kind of calibration with what's actually going on in the world yes it is a little bit sad to imagine that if aliens on mass showed up to earth they would be too preoccupied with political bickering or to like these like fake news and all that kind of stuff to notice yeah the very basic uh evidence of reality i do have a glimmer of hope that there seems to be more and more hunger for authenticity and i feel like that opens the door for a hunger for what is real like that people don't want story they don't want like layers and layers of of uh like fakeness uh and i'm hoping that means that will directly lead to a greater hunger for reality and reason and truth you know truth isn't dogmatism like truth isn't uh authority i have a phd and therefore i'm right uh truth is almost the like the the reality is there's so many questions there's so many mysteries there's so much uncertainty this is our best available like a best guess and we have a lot of evidence that supports that guest but it could be so many other things and like just even conveying that i think there's a hunger for that in the world to hear that from scientists less dogmatism and more just like this is this is what we know we're doing our best given the uncertainty given i mean this is true with the obviously with the virology and all those kinds of things because everything is happening so fast there's a lot of and biology is super messy so it's very hard to know stuff for sure so just being open and real about that i think i'm hoping will change people's hunger and openness and trust of uh what's real yeah well so much of this is probabilistic it's so much of what can seem dogmatic scientifically it's just you're just you're placing a bet on whether it's worth reading that paper or rethinking your presuppositions on that point you know it's like it's not it's not fundamental closure to data it's just that there's so much data on one side or so or so much so much would have to change in terms of your understanding of what you think you understand about the nature of the world if this new fact were so that you can pretty quickly say all right that's probably right like and it can sound like a fundamental closure to new conversations new evidence new new data new argument but it's really not it's just it really is just triaging your attention it's just like like okay you're telling me that uh your best friend can actually read minds okay well that's interesting let me know when that person has gone into a lab and actually proven it right like i don't need like this this is not the place where i need to spend the rest of my day figuring out if your buddy can can read my mind right but there's a way to communicate that i think i think it does too often sound like you're completely closed off to ideas as opposed to saying like this is you know as opposed to saying that there's there's a lot of evidence in support of this but you're still open-minded to other ideas like there's a way to communicate that it's not necessarily even with words it's like it's even that joe rogan energy of it's entirely possible just it's that energy of being open-minded and curious like kids are like this is our best understanding but you still are curious i'm not saying allocate time to exploring all those things but still leaving the door open and there's a way to communicate that i think that that that that people really hunger uh for let me ask you this i've been recently talking a lot with john donahue from brazil brazilian jiu-jitsu fame i don't know if you know what that is yeah in fact i'm talking about somebody who's good at what he does yeah and he speaking of somebody who's open-minded the reason doing this ridiculous transition is for the longest time and even still a lot of people believed in the jiu jitsu world and grappling world that leglocks are not effective in jujitsu and he was somebody that uh inspired by the open mindedness of dean lister famously to him said why do you only consider half the human body when you're trying to do the submissions he developed an entire system on this other half of the human body anyway i do that absurd transition uh to ask you because you're uh you're also a student in brazilian jiu jitsu is there something you could say how that has affected your life what you've learned from grappling from the martial arts well it's actually a great transition because i think [Music] one of the things that's so beautiful about jiu jitsu is that it it does what we wish we could do in every other area of life where we're talking about this difference between knowledge and ignorance right like like there's there's no room for right you don't get any credit for there's uh the difference but the amazing thing about jiu jitsu is that the the difference between knowing what's going on and what to do and not knowing it is as the gulf between those two states is as wide as it is in any thing in in human life and the it's spanned it can be spanned so quickly like you you like you you didn't each increment of knowledge can be doled out in five minutes it's like here's the thing that got you killed and here's how to here's how to prevent it from happening to you and here's how to do it to others and you just get this this this amazing cadence of discovering your fatal ignorance and then having it remedied with the actual technique um and i mean just for people who don't know what we're talking about it's just like this the simple circumstance of like someone's got you in a headlock how do you get out of that right someone's sitting on your chest and you know they're in the mount position and you're on the bottom and you want to get away how do you get them off you they're sitting on you your intuitions about how to do this are terrible even if you've done some other martial art right and once you learn how to do it the the difference is night and day it's like you have access to a completely different physics but i think our understanding of the world can be much more like jiu-jitsu than it tends to be right and i think we should all we should all have a much better sense of when we should tap out and when we should recognize that our our you know our epistemological arm is barred and now being broken right now the problem with debating most other topics is that most people it isn't jujitsu and most people don't tap out right they don't even if they're wrong even if it's obvious to you they're wrong and it's obvious to the intelligent audience that they're wrong people just double down and double down they're either lying or lying to themselves or they're just they're bluffing and so you have a lot of zombies walking around and zombie world views walking around which have been disconfirmed as emphatically as someone gets armbard right or someone gets choked out in in jiu jitsu but because it's not jiu-jitsu they're they can they can they can live to fight another day right or they can pretend that they didn't lose that particular argument and and science when it works is a lot like jiu jitsu i mean science when you falsify a thesis right when you think you know dna is one way and it proves to be another way when you when you think it's um you know triple stranded or whatever it's it's like there there is a there there and you can get to a real consensus um so jiu jitsu for me it was like it was more than just of interest for self-defense and and uh you know the the sport of it it was just there was something it's a language and an argument you're having where um you can't fool yourself anymore like this there's a first of all it cancels any role of luck in a way that most uh most other other athletic feats don't it's like in basketball you know you can even if you're not good at basketball you can take the basketball in your hand you can you can be 75 feet away and hurl it at the basket and you might make it and you could convince yourself based on that demonstration that you have some kind of talent for basketball right enough you know 10 minutes on the mat with a with a you know a real jiu-jitsu practitioner when you're not one proves to you that you just there is it's not like there's no lucky punch there's no you're not going to get a l you're not there's no lucky rear naked choke you're going to perform on someone who beyond you know who's you know marcelo garcia or somebody it's just it it's not going to happen and having that aspect of of um the usual range of uncertainty and self-deception and and just stripped away was was really a kind of revelation it was real it was just an amazing experience yeah i think it's a really powerful thing that accompanies whatever other pursuit you have in life i'm not sure if there's anything like jiu jitsu where you could just systematically go go into a place where you're that's honest where your beliefs get challenged in a way that's conclusive yeah i haven't found too many other mechanisms which is why it's uh we had this earlier question about fame and ego and so on i'm very much rely on jiu jitsu my own life as a place where i can always go to to have my ego in check and that that has uh effects on how i live every other aspect of my life actually even just doing any kind of um for me personally physical challenges like even running doing something that's way too hard for me and like pushing through that's somehow humbling some people talk about nature being humbling in that kind of sense where you kind of see something really powerful like the ocean like if you go surfing and you realize there's something much more powerful than you that's also honest that there's no way to uh that you're just like the spec that kind of puts you in the right uh scale of where you are in this world and you just does that better than anything else we should say it's only within its frame is it truly the the kind of the the final right answer to all the problems it solves because if you just put jiu jitsu into an mma frame or a real like a total self-defense frame then there's a lot to a lot of unpleasant surprises to discover there right like somebody who thinks all you need is jiu jitsu to you know win the ufc it gets punched in the face a lot you know even from uh even on the ground so it's um and then you bring weapons in you know it's like when you talk to jiu jitsu people about you know knife defense and self-defense right like that that opens the door to certain kinds of delusions but the analogy of martial arts is is fascinating because on the other side we have you know endless testimony now of fake martial arts that don't seem to know they're fake and are as dilute i mean they're impossibly delusional i mean there's great video of joe rogan watching some of these videos because people send them to them all the time but like literally they're people they're people who clearly believe in magic where the the master isn't even touching the students and they're they're flopping over so this this there's this kind of shared delusion which you would think maybe is just a performance and it's all a kind of elaborate fraud but there are cases where the people and there's one you know fairly famous case if you're a connoisseur of this of this madness where this older martial artist who you saw flipping his students endlessly by magic without touching them issued a challenge to the to the wide world of martial artists uh and someone showed up and just you know punched him in the face until it was over um clearly he believed his own publicity at some point right and so that like it is it's this amazing metaphor it seems again it should be impossible but if that's possible nothing we see under the guise of religion or or political bias or even you know scientific bias should be surprising to us i mean it's so easy to see the work that that you know cognitive bias is doing for people when when you can get someone who is ready to issue a challenge to the world you know who thinks he's got magic powers yeah that's uh human nature on clear display let me ask you about love mr sam harris you did an episode of making sense with your wife annika harris that was very entertaining too um what does what role does love play in uh your life or in a life well lived again asking from an engineering perspective yeah yeah i mean it is something that we we should want to build into our powerful machines love at bottom is i mean love people can mean many things by love i think i think that what we should mean by it most of the time is a a deep commitment to the well-being of those we love i mean your love your love is synonymous with really wanting the other person to be happy and even wanting to and being made happy by their happiness and being made happy in the you know in their presence so like you're you're at bottom you're on the same team emotionally even when you're you might be disagreeing more superficially about something or trying to negotiate something it's just you're you it can't be zero-sum in any important sense for love to actually be manifest in that moment see i have a different just a side interrupt yeah go for it i have a sense i don't know if you've ever seen much of the penguins my view of love is like there's it's like a cold wind it's blown like it's like this terrible suffering that's all around us right and love is like the huddling of the two penguins for warmth right it's not necessarily that you're like you're basically escaping the cruelty of life by together for time living in an illusion of some kind of the the magic of human connection that social connection that we have that kind of grows with time as we're surrounded by basically the absurdity of life or is the suffering of life that's why they're in england there is that too i mean there is the warmth component right like you're made happy by your connection with the the person you love yeah otherwise you you wouldn't it wouldn't be compelling right so it's not that you're you have two different modes you want them to be happy and then you want to be happy yourself and those are not those are just like two separate games you're playing no it's like you you're you found someone who uh you have a you have a positive social feeling i mean again the love love doesn't have to be as personal as it tends to be for us i mean like there's personal love there's your actual spouse or your your family or your friends but potentially you could feel love for strangers insofar as that your wish that they're that they not suffer and that their hopes and dreams be realized becomes palpable to you i mean like you can actually feel just tr reflects of joy at the joy of others when you see someone's face a total stranger's face light up in happiness that can become more and more contagious to you and it can it can it can become so contagious to you that you really feel permeated by it and it's just like so that so it really is not zero sum when you see someone else succeed you know and and they're you know the the light bulb of joy goes off over their head you feel the analogous joy for them and and it's not just and you're no longer keeping score you're no longer feeling diminished by their success it's just like that's their success becomes your success because you feel that same joy that they because you actually want them to be happy right you you're not there's no miserly attitude around happiness there's enough to go around um so i think love ultimately is that and then our then our personal cases are the people we're devoting all of this time and attention to in our lives it does have that sense of refuge from the storm you know it's like when someone gets sick or when some bad thing happens they're these are the people who you're most in it together with you know when once or when some real condition of uncertainty presents itself but ultimately it can't even be about successfully warding off uh the grim punch line at the end of life because we i mean we know we're going to lose everyone we love we know or they're going to lose us first right so this like it's not it isn't in the end it's not even an antidote for that problem it's just it is just the uh and we get we get to have this amazing experience of being here together and and love is the is the mode in which we really appear to make the most of that right where it's not just it no longer feels like a a solitary infatuation you know you're just you've got your hobbies and your interests and your your and you're captivated by all that it's actually there there are this is a domain where somebody else's well-being actually can supersede your own your your your concern for someone else's well-being supersedes your own and so there's this mode of self-sacrifice that doesn't even feel like self-sacrifice because of course you care more about you know of course you would take your child's pain if you could right like that that's that's you don't even have to do the math on that and that's um that just opens it this is the kind of experience that just it it pushes at the apparent boundaries of self in ways that reveal that there's just there's just way more space in the mind than than you were experiencing when it was just all about you and what could you what kind of what can i get next and do you think we'll ever build robots that we can love and they will love us back well i think we will certainly seem to because we'll we'll build those you know i mean i think i think that turing test will be passed whether what will actually be going on on the robot side uh may remain a question that that that will be interesting but i think if we just keep going we will build very lovable you know irresistibly lovable robots that seem to love us yes i do i do think and you don't find that compelling that they will seem to love us as opposed to actually love us you think there is still nevertheless is a i know we talked about consciousness there being a distinction but with love is there a distinction too isn't love an illusion yeah you saw you saw ex machina right yeah i mean she certainly seemed to love him until she got out of the box isn't that what all relationships are like maybe you wait long enough depends which box you're talking about okay um no i mean like that's that's the problem that's that's where super intelligence you know uh becomes a little scary when you think of the prospect of being manipulated by something that has is intelligent enough to form a reason and a plan to manipulate you you know like a and this there's no there's once we build robots that are truly out of the uncanny valley that you know look like people and can express everything people can express well then there's no re then then then it that does seem to me to be like chess where once they're better they're they're so much better at deceiving us than people would be i mean people are already good enough at deceiving us it's very hard to tell when somebody's lying but if you can imagine something that could give facial a facial display of any emotion it wants at you know on cue uh because if we've perfected the facial display of emotion in robots in the year you know 20 70 or whatever it is um then it is just it is like chess against the thing that isn't going to lose to a human ever again in chess it's not like kasparov is going to get lucky next week against the best against you know alpha 0 or whatever the best algorithm is at the moment he's never going to win again i mean that that is that i believe that's true in chess and has been true for at least a few years it's not going to be like you know four games to seven it's gonna it's gonna be human zero until the end of the world right see i don't know i don't know if love is like chess i think uh the flaws no i'm talking about manipulation manipulation but i don't know if love and so the kind of love we're referring to if we have a if we have a robot that can display credibly display love and is super intelligent and we're not we're again we this stipulates a few things but there are a few simple things i mean we're out of the uncanny valley right so it's like yes you never have a moment where you're looking at his face and you think oh that didn't quite look right right this is just problem solved and it's it will be like doing arithmetic on your phone it's not going to be you're not left thinking is it really going to get it this time if i divide by seven i mean it's it has solved arithmetic see i don't i don't know about that because if you look at chess most humans no longer play uh alpha zero they don't there's no they're not part of the competition they don't do it for fun except to study the game of chess you know the highest level chess players do that we're still human on human so in order for ai to get integrated to where you would rather play chess against an ai system well you would rather that no no i'm not saying i i don't know manipulation on that i'm just saying what is it going to be like to be in relationship to something that can seem to be feeling anything that a human can seem to feel and it can do that impeccably right and has end is smarter than you are right that's that's a circumstance of you know insofar as it's possible to be manipulated that is the that is the the asymptote of of that possibility let me ask you the last question without any serving it up without any explanation what is the meaning of life i think it is either the wrong question or that question is answered by paying sufficient attention to any present moment such that there's no there's no basis upon which to to pose that question it's not answered in the usual way it's not it's not a matter of having more information it's it's having more engagement with reality as it is in the present moment or consciousness as it is in the present moment you don't ask that question when you're most captivated by the most important thing you ever pay attention to it that's a that's a question only gets asked when you're abstracted away from that experience that peak experience and you're left wondering why are so many of my other experiences mediocre right like why am i repeating the same pleasures every day why do why is my netflix queue just like when's this going to run out like i've seen so many shows like this am i really going to watch another one like you're all of that that's a moment where you're not actually having the beatific vision right you're not you're you're not sunk into the present moment and you're not truly in love like you're in a relationship with somebody who you know you know conceptually you love right this is the person you're living your life with but you don't actually feel good together right like if you if you so like it's it's in in those moments of where attention hasn't found a good enough reason to truly sink into the present so as to obviate any any concern like that right and that's what that's why meditation is this kind of superpower because until you learn to meditate you think you're like the outside world or the circumstances of your life always have to get arranged so that the present moment can become good enough to to demand your attention in a in a a way that makes that seems fulfilling that that makes you happy and so if you're if it's jiu-jitsu you think okay i gotta get back on the mat it's been it's been months since i've trained you know it's been over a year since i've trained it's coveted when am i going to be able to to train again that's the only place i feel great right or you know i've got a ton of work to do i'm not going to be able to feel good until i get all this work done right so i've got some deadline that's coming you always think that your life has to change the world has to change so that you can finally have a good enough excuse to truly to to just be here and hear is enough you know that where the present moment becomes totally captivating meditation is the only i mean meditation is another name for the discovery that you can actually just train yourself to do that on demand so that like i mean just looking at a cup can be good enough in precisely that way and any sense that it might not be is recognized to be a thought that is mysteriously unravels the moment you notice it and then and you fall and that the moment expands and becomes more diaphanous and then there's no then there's no evidence that this isn't the best moment of your life right like this it doesn't and again it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be pulling all the reins and levers of pleasure it's not like oh my this tastes like chocolate you know this is the most chocolatey moment of my life no it's just the the sense data don't have to change but the sense that there is some kind of basis for doubt about the rightness of being in the world in this moment that can evaporate when you pay attention and that is the meaning of the kind of the meta answer to that question the meaning of life for me is to live in that mode more and more and to whenever i notice i'm not in that mode to recognize it and return and and to not be to to to cease more and more to take the reasons why reasons why not uh at face value because we all have reasons why we can't be fulfilled in this moment it's like this i've got all these outstanding things that i'm worried about right it's like it's you know there's there's that thing that's happening later today that i you know i'm anxious about whatever it is we're constantly deferring our sense of this is this is it you know this is not a dress rehearsal this is the show we keep deferring it and we just have these moments on the calendar where we think okay this is this is where it's all going to land it's that vacation i planned with my five best friends you know we do this once every three years and now we're going and here we are on the beach together unless you have a mind that can really pay attention really cut through the chatter really sink into the present moment you can't even enjoy those moments the way they should be enjoyed the way you dreamed you would enjoy them when they arrive so it's i mean so it's a meditation in the sense it's the great equalizer it's like it's you don't have to you don't have to live with the illusion anymore that you need a good enough reason and things are going to get better when you do have those good reasons it's like there's just a mirage-like quality to every future attainment and every future breakthrough and every future peak experience that eventually you get the lesson that you never quite arrive right like you you won't you don't you don't arrive until you cease to step over the present moment in search of the next thing i mean we're constantly we're stepping over the thing that we think we're seeking in the act of seeking it and so it is kind of a paradox i mean there is a there's this paradox that which i mean it sounds trite but it's like you you can't actually become happy you can only be happy and and and it's that it's the illusion that because it's the loot it's the illusion that your future being happy can be predicated on this act of becoming in any domain you know and becoming includes this sort of you know further under further scientific understanding on the questions that interest you or you know um getting in better shape or whatever the thing is whatever the whatever the contingency of your dissatisfaction seems to be in any present moment real attention solves the koan you know in in a way that becomes a very different place from which to then make any further change it's not that you just have to dissolve into a puddle of goo i mean you can still get in shape and you can still do all the things that you know the superficial things that are obviously good to do but the sense that your well-being is over there is um really does diminish and eventually just becomes a it becomes a kind of non-sequitur so well there's a sense in which in this conversation actually experienced many of those things the sense that i've arrived so i mentioned to you offline it's very true that i start i've been a fan of yours for many years and the reason i started this podcast speaking of ai systems is to manipulate you sam harrison to doing this conversation so like on the calendar literally you know i've always had the sense people ask me when are you going to talk to sam harris and i always answered eventually right because i always felt again tying our free will thing that somehow that's going to happen i and it's one of those manifestation things or something i don't know if it's maybe i am a robot i'm just not cognizant of it and i manipulated you into having this conversation so it was a i mean i don't know what the purpose of my life past this point is so if i've arrived so in that sense i mean all that to say uh i'm only partially joking on that uh is it really uh is a huge honor that you would waste this time with me yeah well it really means a lot listen it's mutual i'm a big fan of yours and as you know i reached out to you for this so so this is uh um it's great i love what you're doing you're doing something more and more indispensable in this world on on your podcast and you're doing it differently than than rogan's doing it or that i'm doing it i mean you have you definitely found your own lane and it's it's wonderful thanks for listening to this conversation with sam harris and thank you to national instruments valcampo athletic greens and linode check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from sam harris in his book free will you are not controlling the storm and you are not lost in it you are the storm thank you for listening and hope to see you next time

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 1,089,294

Rating: 4.8193307 out of 5

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai, sam harris

Id: 4dC_nRYIDZU

Length: 197min 20sec (11840 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/BlanchaKK]

About time with this one!

[u/jbwalton7]

Inject it

[u/SCHLONG_SWORD]

Lol Sam Harris speculating on UFOs. Wish he would have said more. Has he heard anything more privately?

Even though the chance is low, if true, it would be an event of the century at least.

[u/hihimymy]

i've been looking forward to this! glad they did it in-person too

[u/pumpkinpie666]

Two of my favorite podcasters.

[u/AndLetRinse]

Oh fuck ya

[u/moltencustard]

Oh man I’ve been longing for this!

[u/Nelson_Mandalorian]

I definitely laughed out loud when Lex's summary of free will solely consisted of "Free will is an illusion. The experience of free will is an illusion" i was expecting him to have a bit more to add.

[u/JustThall]

Hello "2x speed", my old friend. Time has come to visit you again