What this covers
Sam Harris joins the Know Thyself Podcast today for a deep dive into consciousness, free will, and artificial intelligence. He explains the illusory nature of self, our daily psychosis, and why it's essential to wake up from the 'dream' of our thoughts. Sam shares how the practice of meditation can help set us free, and how to break the spell of negative emotions. He also dives deep on the pitfalls of the spiritual path, explaining the drawbacks of non-dual thinking, emptiness in Buddhism, and why some Gurus misbehave. Sam gives a thorough explanation into his present thesis on solving the hard problem of consciousness, explains how the concept of free will can be limiting with understanding psychopaths, and if he believes that artificial intelligence will one day become conscious.
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___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 2:41 The Illusion of Self and the Process of Suffering 11:08 Our daily psychosis - Identification with thought 16:35 The Transitory Nature of Thought and the Benefits of Meditation 27:14 When ego is useful, and when to let go 32:40 Breaking the Spell of Negative Emotions 35:19 Understanding Impermanence and its Relation to Suffering 43:31 The concept of "Emptiness" in Buddhism 56:32 Pitfalls of the ‘goal’ of enlightenment 59:11 The Duality of the Spiritual Path 1:12:15 The Illusion of Seeking and False Beliefs in Meditation Practice 1:14:58 How non-dual teachings got twisted 1:17:31 Waking up vs embodiment 1:25:21 Why spiritual teachers misbehave 1:30:57 Sam’s Personal Pivotal Moments in the Journey of Self Inquiry 1:44:46 The hard problem of consciousness 2:09:24 Consciousness and Intelligence in AGI 2:17:42 Do we really have Free will? 2:29:57 Why Gratitude & Reason Heals Us 2:40:02 Conclusion ___________
Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times best sellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
Sam’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), The Annals of Neurology, among others. He also hosts the Making Sense Podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the “iTunes Best” and has won a Webby Award for best podcast in the Science & Education category.
Sam received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has also practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad. Sam has created the Waking Up app for anyone who wants to learn to meditate in a modern, scientific context.
https://www.samharris.org https://www.wakingup.com/knowthyself for free 30 days of Waking Up App
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Sam Harris argues that the conventional sense of self is an illusion that can be directly recognized through contemplative practice, and that disidentification from thought is the key to both psychological freedom and ethical clarity in how we relate to ourselves and others.
- The feeling of being a subject interior to the body is not grounded in actual experience when examined closely through meditation and mindfulness
- Suffering arises primarily from identification with thought rather than from external circumstances, and this can be resolved through recognizing the centerless nature of consciousness
- Genuine wisdom requires integrating spiritual insight into selflessness with reason, empathy, and gratitude to navigate the practical and ethical dimensions of human life
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Even someone with profound spiritual insight cannot spontaneously acquire practical wisdom in unrelated domains like economics, medicine, or engineering; enlightenment is orthogonal to many of the specific forms of knowledge required to build a functioning civilization, making both enlightened Buddhas and expert practitioners necessary for human flourishing.
“it's not enough you know a bunch of enlightened Buddhas even is not enough to help us build a civilization that really works right there's a lot there's just a tremendous amount of knowledge that that we want that you don't get by just meditating more even on even correctly on the nature of emptiness”
Spiritual insight into non-duality and the illusory nature of the self does not automatically confer wisdom about ethics, culture, psychology, or practical matters, and teachers can have genuine non-dual realization while still making harmful choices or holding culturally conditioned biases.
“and also just differences in culture right like becoming enlightened doesn't get you a new culture all like it's like and if if you don't know anything about quantum mechanics before you become a Buddha you're not going to know anything about quantum mechanics after you become a Buddha”
Gratitude, when pursued deeply, contains and generates love, compassion, and ethical behavior, because recognizing how much one has that others lack and how much one has that is unearned creates both humility and natural goodwill toward others who suffer more or lack more.
“if you push if you push far enough in the direction of gratitude it there's so many psychological and ethical errors you can no longer make right like it it it it it almost contains everything we mean by love as well”
Most people feel like passengers in their bodies rather than identical to their bodies, experiencing a dualism where they feel they have a body rather than being one, even when they intellectually know themselves to be identical to their brain as materialists.
“it's not that people feel identical to their bodies they feel almost like passengers in their bodies they feel like they have bodies”
Impermanence is the central fact motivating spiritual inquiry because even a perfectly arranged life with wealth, health, good relationships, and careful management cannot create invulnerable well-being since death is inevitable and everyone close to you will die or disappear from your life.
“impermanence is really the the central fact that we have to get our heads around to be motivated to to look into any of these esoteric ideas right because for but for impermanence experience could be perfect right”
The critical distinction between being angry and maintaining anger lies in the duration and half-life of the emotional state, and if one is angry for 10 hours rather than 10 seconds, there is vastly more damage one can do to one's life and relationships through what one says and does from that state.
“it's not that you never get angry again but there's an enormous difference between being angry for 10 seconds and being angry for 10 hours or 10 days or or and and then acting on the basis of that negative emotion given those those very different time windows”
The difference between a normal person lost in thought and an actively psychotic person is primarily one of degree and behavioral constraint, not kind—both are caught in unexamined thought patterns, but the psychotic person cannot help but verbalize their thoughts whereas the normal person has learned to keep their mouth shut.
“there's something similar between ordinary thinking and ordinary dreaming and there's something similar between those two states and what we recognize to be psychosis in people who are you know actually mad and you know walking the streets talking to themselves”
The conventional sense of self that people experience as a subject interior to the body—a thinker and doer—is an illusion that can be directly discovered through contemplative practice to not be the case, which has profound psychological and ethical implications for reducing unnecessary suffering.
“the conventional sense of self that people are walking around with is an illusion which can be discovered to be such right so you can inspect it to the point where you no longer feel that way”
Recognizing the illusory nature of free will doesn't eliminate the moral and ethical distinction between voluntary and involuntary action, nor does it eliminate responsibility, but it does undermine hatred of others because one recognizes that their harmful actions are the only actions they could have performed given their prior causes.
“what you're not doing is eliminating the difference between voluntary and involuntary action I mean there's still a difference between deciding you want to reach for a glass of water versus you know inadvertently knocking the glass over”
You can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a non-event; for example, you can be making a cup of tea while thinking anxiously about a meeting five days in the future, getting anxious about something that may not even resemble the circumstance you'll actually encounter.
“I've always found it so interesting that we can spend a lifetime suffering something that is essentially a nonevent you know you're making a cup of tea and you're thinking about a meeting that you're going to have in 5 days and you're getting anxious”
Flow experiences—where an athlete or artist is 'in the zone' and not thinking about how to perform, mistakes, or scoring—are experiences where the sense of self as the experiencer drops away and there is just the pure experience of action; these are moments people seek out and value, pointing to the intrinsic reward of losing self-consciousness.
“whether it's you know performing some athletic of you know action like you know hitting a tennis ball like the moment when tennis really feels like it's working is a moment when you're not thinking about how to do it what you should have done the fact that you just missed it”
The truth is that breaking the spell of thought identification doesn't even require the contents of consciousness to change; the moment you recognize there is no center, no subject in the middle of anger, there is no one who is angry, and freedom is already present even as the physiology of anger continues to dissipate.
“the truth is breaking the spell doesn't even require the the contents of Consciousness to change like they will change if you if you actually are no longer thinking about why you should be angry but you can re the moment you recognize that there's no Center that there's no subject in the middle of the anger that there's no one who is angry you can the physiology can can you know it'll take 10 seconds to dissipate”
Becoming self-conscious in the presence of another person's gaze—the sudden recognition that one is an object in the world to another—is the fundamental contraction that constitutes the feeling of self, and freedom from self involves being present with others without this contraction.
“you look and you see that somebody's staring at you right that change when you suddenly realize that you're an object in the world for another person um that sudden you know contraction really where you suddenly become self-conscious in the presence of another person that is the self right I mean that is that feeling”
The dual perspective of seeing life as something happening to you that you must resist versus seeing life as a continuous opportunity to wake up and deepen understanding of reality's true nature creates a fundamental shift in how one engages with impermanence and change.
“that switch that change of perception from things that are just continually happening unfortunately and I'm the victim of it to using life and its continual opportunities to wake up and to dig deeper into the true nature of Self in reality”
Watching film and television is rewarding because it allows people to temporarily lose their sense of self and become absorbed in narrative without self-consciousness, and this is a supersitimulus that hijacks our evolved attunement to face-to-face social encounters by delivering unprecedented visual intimacy without social risk.
“one aspect of of what people find so rewarding is that you're you're losing your sense of self for much of that time you're just you're you're sort of Disappearing you're becoming effectively effaced you're certainly no longer self-conscious right”
Negative states of mind like fear and anger, once recognized through mindfulness, begin to function as alarms that alert one to what requires attention rather than as states that one is lost in, allowing one to decide whether there is any genuine reason to remain in that state.
“once you can practice you know mindfulness for lack of a of a better word um negative states of mind like fear and anger begin to function like mindfulness alarms where like you suddenly you're going along there's nothing out of the ordinary happening and then suddenly something happens and you feel lousy”
Meditation is not a method to create a new state of consciousness or to build the ego out of existence, but rather an art of recognizing what is already the case—that there are already natural breaks in the sense of self and gaps between thoughts that one can become aware of, revealing a larger space of awareness.
“meditation is the art of recognizing what is already the case and and just looking closely enough at the at the nature of experience to recognize that there you know the gap between thoughts actually reveals something right that there there are breaks between thoughts naturally”
It is possible to be happy and at rest before the next desire is satisfied or the next problem is solved, recognizing that consciousness is already free and open even in the presence of pain, negative thoughts, or unsolved problems.
“once you learn to meditate you can recognize that it's actually possible to be happy before the next good thing happens right before and before you you solve the the problem that has just appeared”
The Buddhist concept of 'no-self' (anatta) and the Advaita Vedanta concept of the universal 'Self' (Atman) are pointing to the same experiential reality but using different linguistic and metaphysical frameworks—Buddhism emphasizes what consciousness is not (not compounded, not conditional, not constructed) while Advaita makes positive assertions about a universal Self.
“I'm convinced that they're talking about the same experience ultimately they're just asserting different things about it uh and here we're up against the the limitations of language”
In the beginning stages of spiritual practice, there necessarily appears to be a duality between the seeker and the sought, the meditator and the goal, which seems unavoidable; however, when insight matures, one recognizes that this very duality was always already illusory and the goal was never actually absent.
“when you have this insight into selflessness or into non-duality or emptiness depending on how you want to talk about it one of its Hallmarks is you recognize okay that this this was always already the situation right it was it's not this is not something newly created by my meditative efforts”
Even in cases of criminal behavior or evil action, on some level the person 'could not have done otherwise' given their genes and circumstances; they are more analogous to dangerous forces of nature like tigers or grizzly bears than to freely choosing agents, which should inform how we think about punishment and rehabilitation.
“you have to recognize that on some level once you get rid of the illusion of free will you recognize that that person is some is basically analogous to you know a great white shark or a grizzly bear or a tiger or any other you know system that is intrinsically dangerous to be close to”
Looking at someone like Hitler, the harder question is not whether to stop him but at what point in his life you would have been justified in doing so; even as a baby, he was 'just a baby' without moral culpability for becoming the man he became, and tracing this back reveals that culpability for being oneself cannot be truly located anywhere.
“at what point in his life would it would it have been Justified to kill Hitler I mean killing the 25-year-old Hitler before he has done anything especially egregious well you know he's going to become the The 40-Year-Old Hitler”
In Advaita teaching, there is a danger of becoming so uncompromising in denying the reality of any spiritual path or practice that people become paralyzed, believing that meditation is futile and that any spiritual effort proves their unenlightenment, leading them to live ordinary lives solving ordinary problems without any practice or inquiry.
“either that happened or people just felt that um all spiritual efforts were were doomed but then they just went on to live you know ordinary lives where they're making all kinds of other efforts to be happy”
Reason is the only algorithm by which strangers with conflicting interests can converge on cooperation, because reality has an objective structure and reason is the method by which different perspectives can be forced to align with that objective reality.
“reason is the is really it's the only tool for the job because it's the only algorithm you can run where even if people don't like each other and are emotionally unavailable they're resisting uh playing well with others reason because of its Universal characteristics because you can show people you can you can show your enemies that they're not even that they're be that they're contradicting themselves”
Consciousness itself—the sheer fact that it feels like something to be aware, to experience—is what is ever-present and the ground truth of all value and meaning, regardless of what specific contents of consciousness arise and pass away.
“what is ever present what is there always to be noticed is consciousness is is just the the sheer fact that it feels like something to be what you are to be aware of experience to be to be uh awake”
A durable form of well-being cannot be predicated on any change in the contents of consciousness because nothing that appears will not disappear, so any satisfying experience is inherently transitory and therefore insufficient as a basis for stable happiness.
“any state of mind that wasn't here a moment ago and suddenly appears you know joy and you know creative fulfillment and love and ecstasy and Rapture you know any drug experience or non-drug experience any psychedelic you know Insight or um Insight had any other way if it wasn't there a moment ago and it's here now by definition it will disappear right”
The feeling of free will—the sense that there is a subject in the driver's seat who can initiate action—is itself an illusion related to the illusion of self, because all of one's thoughts, desires, and actions can be traced back through causation to influences (genes, environment, prior causes) for which one is not responsible.
“what what people mean by free will is that they are the true they they the subject the inner subject the conscious experiencer of their experience is the true author of thought and action and will right”
If consciousness emerges from unconscious neural complexity, this seems necessarily to remain miraculous and non-intelligible—analogous to saying that true nothingness somehow gave rise to existence, consciousness cannot logically emerge from true unconsciousness because true unconsciousness (true non-experience) cannot give rise to something (experience).
“if Consciousness emerges on the basis of unconscious complexity you know first you have unconscious information processing first you have unconscious uh molecules you know chemicals bouncing around but that at a certain point of integration at a certain point of of encoding the lights come on right if that's the way things work that you know those of us who are enamored of the the hard problem uh would say it's always going to seem like a miracle”
Alan Watts was one of the greatest communicators of Eastern wisdom and non-dual philosophy to Western audiences, and while he didn't focus on detailed meditation practice, he excelled at explaining the big-picture insights and fundamental reorientation that non-dual understanding provides.
“Watts was one of the the great communicators of this and it was just so entertaining to listen to him um I me he's not he's not he's not focused on the me the detailed mechanics of of meditation right he's you're not getting a lot of practice talk from him but like as far as the big picture insights of you know just what what is Eastern wisdom”
Intelligence is substrate-independent, meaning there is nothing fundamentally special about biological brains that gives them a monopoly on intelligence, and we can already build systems that exceed human capability in narrow domains like arithmetic and will soon exceed human capability across broader domains.
“there there is simply no doubt that intelligence is substrate independent I mean there's just there's just no reason to think that there's something magical about biology with respect to what we mean by intelligence”
The hard problem of consciousness is that while we understand the neural correlates of perception mechanistically (light hitting retina, photons being transduced, information flowing through neurons), this entire mechanistic explanation fails to account for why any of it is accompanied by subjective experience—why there is something it is like to see rather than pure information processing.
“there all the quote easy problems of understanding the mind which is just you can understand how for instance with vision you know there's there's light that comes in and hits the retina and gets you know so you have you have electromagnetic energy that gets transformed into electrochemical energy in the nervous system”
Most people are thinking basically every moment of the day, having a conversation with themselves, remembering the past and anticipating the future, and this constant conceptualization and judgment of experience means they are subtly or grossly failing to make actual contact with the present moment.
“it's just a fact about us that we're thinking basically every moment of the day we're having a conversation with ourselves we're we're remembering the past we're anticipating the future we're subtly fail you subtly or grossly failing to make actual contact with the present moment”
An awakened humanity would be founded on love, gratitude, and reason working together: gratitude and love providing the motivation and emotional foundation for compassion, while reason provides the method for coordinating action and solving collective problems; without any one of these three, the project fails.
“you can find me in fewer and fewer places now it's just uh noticed that yeah it's really just um I guess samh harris.org and waking up.com”
We will likely build artificial intelligence that seems conscious before we understand whether it actually is conscious, and once systems are sufficiently human-like in behavior, appearance, and responsiveness, most people will relate to them as conscious beings regardless of metaphysical uncertainty.
“I think it's more likely that we will um in the near term far be before we actually think we understand the the the true neural correlates of Consciousness I think we'll build computers that we think are conscious because they just seem to be conscious”
The Buddhist core translation of the first noble truth as 'life is suffering' is a mistranslation of the Pali term 'dukkha,' which more accurately means 'unsatisfactoriness' arising fundamentally from impermanence—because everything is changing, nothing can be successfully held onto, creating the inherent frustration of seeking permanent satisfaction in an impermanent world.
“the basic meaning is unsatisfactoriness very very much because of uh what I just said about the implications of impermanence right like because everything is changing there's nothing you can successfully hold on to that is unsatisfactory”
The ultimate freedom that comes from recognizing selflessness is available in ordinary consciousness—not just in rarified states of intense concentration or blissful meditative states—and is as available while checking email as it is while in profound meditation.
“and then any experience however mundane you know even as something as boring as checking your email can be an experience in which you recognize this once you know how to meditate”
The experience of being identified with thought is neurologically and functionally similar to dreaming while asleep; just as you don't notice the transition into a dream or feel surprise at impossible circumstance while dreaming, you're equally unaware that your waking thoughts about a future problem are a kind of hallucination constraining your actual present-moment perception.
“when we're thinking we are doing something quite similar to what we're doing when we're dreaming...when you're asleep and dreaming your thinking is no longer constrained by your sensory experience”
Boredom is commonly misunderstood as a lack of interesting stimulation available; in truth, boredom is usually just the failure to pay sufficient attention to what's already present, and meditation reveals that one can be completely content and fascinated by very simple, apparently boring objects or states of consciousness.
“boredom as a state is really just our failure to pay attention to like what the ordinary state of boredom that most people are familiar with is just nothing is nothing interesting or good enough is happening to capture your attention and you don't know how to meditate so you're waiting for something good to happen”
Living life as a monastic or renunciate, dedicating oneself only to meditation and contemplative practice while removing all worldly concerns and relationships, is not a mistake or inferior path, but it represents a different project from engaging with the world; the ultimate wisdom applies equally to monastic and worldly life.
“I mean you can become a monk or a nun right you can become a a monastic where all you do every hour of the day is meditate and so you have no business problems you have no relationship problems”
An experience with MDMA at age 18 was transformative because it revealed the possibility of a fundamentally different mode of consciousness—one where social self-consciousness and concern about how one appeared to others simply disappeared, revealing what had always been present beneath that burden.
“for the first time in my life I was just I was unencumbered by concerns about myself that I didn't even know had been operative right it's like for the first time time I was not paying attention to the the way the person was looking at me like like the like the change in expression from the on the other person's face was no longer getting read back in into a um a self-conscious mapping of my own you know performance”
The mirror analogy illuminates the nature of realization: just as you can look at a full-length mirror in a restaurant for a long time without recognizing it as a mirror, then suddenly have a perceptual shift where you see it as a mirror with no change to the visual stimulus itself, realization involves a sudden recognition that changes understanding without changing the contents of experience.
“have you ever been go to a restaurant or a store and there's a there's a ful length mirror along one wall like you know Florida ceiling mirror and you might have a say it's a restaurant you might be halfway through your meal before you recognize that everyone over there on that side of the room is is just in the the same people you're sitting with but they're in a mirror right”
Consciousness is centered and feels located behind the eyes because of perceptual and social conditioning: you have a visual point of view, and you've been conditioned by others looking at you to feel located in your body where your face is; this creates the illusion of a localized conscious subject, but direct investigation reveals consciousness has no location.
“there's a that feeling of that that is a ramification of what we feel all the time when we feel that we are the subject when we when we feel implicated as objects in the world and in relation to the world”
An Outward Bound solo experience where most people have profound insights into meaning, self, and solitude, left Harris as a teenager profoundly uncomfortable and wanting only to escape; this revealed to him that there was 'something missing' from his consciousness but he didn't recognize what until much later.
“I was profoundly unhappy like I was like I was the kind the person who if you put him in solitary confinement would just have died of exposure to his own mind right I mean it was just it was a catastrophe”
Harris spent approximately one year on silent meditation retreat across multiple increments and studied with various teachers in India and Nepal before his practice shifted from dualistic mindfulness practice to non-dual recognition, largely prompted by teachings from Zen teachers and Advaita teachers like Poonjaji.
“I probably spent about a year on Retreat where I think it would be safe to say that you know even after a year on Retreat I I wouldn't fully understand the kinds of things I was I've been talking about with you today”