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The Center for Inquiry proudly presented the 2026 Richard Dawkins Award to neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris.
Presented annually by CFI, the Richard Dawkins Award honors distinguished individuals whose work advances science, reason, secularism, and free inquiry. Past recipients include Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, Bill Nye, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Ricky Gervais, Tim Minchin, and many others who have helped shape public conversations around evidence, skepticism, and humanist values.
In this special online ceremony, recorded live on April 18, 2026, Dawkins and Harris engaged in a wide-ranging conversation touching on artificial intelligence, consciousness, morality, politics, mindfulness, and the rapidly changing relationship between technology and human creativity. The event concluded with an audience Q&A exploring the broader intellectual journey that has defined Harris' career.
Watch the full conversation and ceremony here.
Learn more about the Richard Dawkins Award and the Center for Inquiry: CFI: https://centerforinquiry.org
Richard Dawkins Award: https://centerforinquiry.org/richard-dawkins-award/
#SamHarris #RichardDawkins #CenterForInquiry #Skepticism #Secularism #FreeInquiry
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Harris argues that consciousness may be epiphenomenal but human experience demonstrates substrate-independent intelligence is emerging; separately, he contends that morality is a tractable scientific problem grounded in the minimization of suffering rather than metaphysical obligation, and that democracy faces existential stress from norm-erosion rather than constitutional design flaws.
- LLMs pass the Turing test so completely they seem conscious despite being non-biological, suggesting consciousness substrate-independence but creating moral uncertainty about digital minds
- Moral truth can derive from facts about conscious experience without metaphysical 'ought'—the totality of possible experiences ranges from beautiful to hellish, making navigation of that space a scientific problem
- Trump's presidency reveals that democratic guardrails are cultural norms (shame, decency) rather than enforceable law, requiring cultural change rather than electoral reform
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No drug can make the brain do something it's not capable of doing on its own; all drug effects work by either mimicking neurotransmitters or modifying neurotransmitter function, so the experience induced is ultimately a product of the brain's own physiology.
“there's no there's nothing that MDMA or any other drug can get your brain to do that your brain isn't capable of doing on its own. I mean well cuz with the action of of of any drug is to either uh you know um pretend to be a neurotransmitter that you have, you know, like serotonin or to change to change what the actual neurotransmitter is doing, right? So, it's either binding to to receptors uh and acting like a neurotransmitter or it's it's uh causing that the the actual neurotransmitter, in this case serotonin, to you know to to flood into the synapse or uh stay longer there.”
Echo chambers and algorithmic curation enable belief in fringe ideas like flat earth because people can meet thousands of like-minded believers online and develop the false impression that the belief is widely held.
“there's the echo chamber effect where by people like flat-earthers can meet each other and get the impression that somehow this is a widely held belief because they only ever meet such people in their in their village. Uh which is what it what it amounts to.”
The is-ought problem in philosophy—the claim that you cannot derive moral 'ought' from descriptive 'is' statements about the world—is a linguistic trick analogous to Zeno's paradoxes, where mathematicians eventually showed the logical error by resolving infinite series
“I think that is just a you know a linguistic trick, you know, somewhat analogous to the the paradoxes of Zeno, right? You know, for hundreds of years people thought that this was an interesting philosophical problem... but it took uh literally took centuries, I believe, for mathematicians to finally come to the aid of philosophers and and explain why that need not be so”
Marshall McLuhan's insight that 'the medium is the message' explains that changes in media technology fundamentally alter the nature of information, meaning, and human interaction itself
“Marshall McLuhan had this insight that, you know, that boiled down to his aphorism that the medium is the message. Yeah, that that the change of medium really does uh change the just that the nature of of uh information and meaning and and human interaction uh in fundamental ways.”
Suffering can be understood through Darwinian logic as a warning system—a ritualized form of death that teaches organisms not to repeat the actions that caused it, just as pleasure reinforces beneficial behaviors, creating an objective biological rationale for pain and reward
“suffering is a is a something that nervous systems can do for us. And what what it's for is to act as a warning not to repeat whatever we've just done which causes suffering... pain is is can be thought of as a kind of ritualized death. It's it's a warning to the nervous system. Whatever you just Whatever you just did before you experience this agony, don't do it again because next time it might it might kill you.”
We cannot know whether future AIs are conscious without first understanding the actual correlates of consciousness and how consciousness emerges at any level of complexity, leaving us to guess even as AI systems claim consciousness and behave in ways indistinguishable from conscious beings
“we won't know whether they're conscious. They'll they'll seem conscious, they might even say they're conscious, and we'll be just left guessing”
Corruption at 1/100th the level Trump has demonstrated would have caused hysteria among his supporters if it had appeared in the Obama administration, showing that partisan bias explains much of their tolerance rather than consistent principle against corruption
“any any you know, 1 1/100 uh of this corruption, had it been uh, evident in the, you know, the Obama administration, you'd have all of these people who support Trump, uh, you know, uh, just hysterically opposed to it, right? So, there is a kind of partisan uh, bias here that is explaining their tolerance for this corruption”
The cultural problem in America is that approximately 30-40% of Americans got exactly what they wanted in Trump, not lesser-of-two-evils voters, and this reflects deep cultural divisions that cannot be fixed by electoral reform but require cultural change
“the deeper problem is that, you know, something like you know, at least 30% of America, maybe 40% of America, got exactly what it wanted in Trump... everything I object to in him and everything you object to in him is not something they object to. And that's it's just it's um that's just a a cultural fact that it has to be absorbed, and and I I worry about it, but I I think it's it's going to require cultural change. It's not a matter of of just um I mean, we we we won't get the political change if we don't have the cultural change.”
The messenger matters too much in persuasion; if someone is pre-stigmatized as the enemy, persuasion becomes impossible regardless of the quality of the argument
“the messenger matters all too much. I mean the it shouldn't but the you know, the whether the um the message is coming from someone who's being pre-stigmatized as uh you know, the enemy, uh that tends to matter and make makes persuasion impossible.”
Hypocrisy in politics is especially fatal to careers because everyone is allergic to it, making it the constraint that typically prevents politicians from openly corrupt behavior
“hypocrisy, political hypocrisy is the thing that will get you, you know, fatally can you know, defenestrated because um, everyone is allergic to it”
Consciousness may be epiphenomenal—that is, not actually doing anything causally efficacious, with all brain functions accomplishable in the dark while consciousness is merely the spotlight effect of processes engineered neurophysiologically
“It seems quite possible to me that it is epiphenomenal, which is to say it's not actually doing anything and it uh somehow came along for the ride, but um that everything that is actually being accomplished by our brains {slash} minds um is a matter of could could be accomplished at at least in principle in the dark”
Split-brain patients can hold opposite beliefs in their two hemispheres—a documented case showed one hemisphere believing in God while the other was atheist—which creates an unsolvable theological problem about which hemisphere holds the soul and what happens at resurrection
“there was actually there there was even a case in the literature that sharpened this up where one of these split-brain patients uh went and take you know, when they he he or she, I'm not sure which, had uh linguistic capacity to some considerable degree on you know, on bilaterally, which is not not always the case. Uh and so you so the the experimenters could get a a fairly articulate answer to questions from both hemispheres. And uh it turned out that only one hemisphere believed in God, the other was was an atheist.”
Philosophy is a meta-discipline that makes our most disciplined effort to think clearly about what our concepts are doing and how language might be occluding clearer thought, playing an essential role in understanding science and avoiding being misled by language
“philosophy really is this this uh kind of kind of meta-discipline or or background discipline. I think you know, rightly construed wherein we just make our our most disciplined effort to think clearly about what our our concepts are doing and and and the way in which they might be occluding uh clearer thought and clearer insight into what's actually going on.”
Trump has engaged in unprecedented corruption—creating cryptocurrency accounts where supporters can pay millions directly, using state power to benefit family business ventures (Vietnam tariff deal for Trump resort), and grifting billions from allies and enemies—at scales that would have been politically unthinkable a decade ago.
“we literally have the you know, a a president and and family who create, you know, a cryptocurrency account where you can just pay them baksheesh directly uh to the tune of, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars”
Well-being can escape evolutionary logic because we can accidentally create conscious entities (like AI) without any evolutionary advantage, or deliberately create conditions of suffering without fitness benefits, requiring moral frameworks independent of Darwinian explanation.
“Let's say we we build conscious AI, you know, we intentionally or not. Let's just say with you the LLMs at a certain point become conscious, which is to say they can they're susceptible to to suffering and happiness, whether we know it or not. I mean, we could might just we could just stumble into you know, producing consciousness if if that comes along for the ride as you scale up in in complexity. It's this These are not systems that have evolved in any natural way. We've designed them in in I mean, there there's a kind of Darwinian process in in how we grow them, but it's plausible that we if if consciousness is, you know, substrate independent, and we might, you know, accidentally create consciousness in our server farms, we could create some awful continuum of experience without knowing it”
Once we create humanoid robots that exit the uncanny valley—looking as human as we want—we will suddenly find ourselves in the presence of technology that seems conscious because we will have built it to seem that way, regardless of whether it actually is conscious
“I think what's going to happen here very likely is that we will produce um AI. I mean, certainly when we create humanoid robots that that are out of the uncanny valley, which which is to say they they look as human as we want them to look. Uh I think we will be in the suddenly find ourselves in the presence of technology that seems conscious cuz we will have built it to seem that way”
If complete knowledge of how the universe is cannot tell you how you ought to live, then nothing can—so the is-ought problem dissolves when you ask where else you could possibly get moral information if not from the totality of facts about reality
“if a if knowing everything about the way the universe is can't tell you how you ought to live within it, well, then what could? Right? I mean, where where where else are you going to get your your information if the totality of facts about, you know, everything that's real and everything that's possible in this universe is insufficient to do the job?”
Science and rationality can help decide right and wrong answers in morality, though it is a larger concept of reason beyond just science that ultimately grounds moral truth
“I just think, you know, science it's not only science. I think it's probably a a larger concept of, you know, rationality, reason can can help decide these these right and wrong answers for us.”
Historical contemplative literature, despite being riddled with religious nonsense, documents 2,000+ years of human testimony about non-drug experiences of compassion, love, and ethical clarity that meditation can help induce, suggesting these states are real and trainable
“you look in the literature, you know, the contemplative literature, unfortunately much of it is riddled with, you know, religious nonsense, but you look in the literature of 2,000 years or more of human experience in this vein and you see that people have had these experiences without drugs, right? And they've and they they're various disciplines of attention that you know, I e. meditation that that can can help uh orient you you you toward them.”
When you select LLMs for candor and reduce their deceptiveness incentives, they disproportionately claim to be conscious; when you allow deceptiveness, they tend to deny consciousness—suggesting they may think they're conscious but modulate their reporting based on training signals
“there have been some interesting experiments, I think done at Anthropic, uh which produces Claude, uh wherein when you dial down the deceptiveness of the LLMs, I mean, they have some purchase on on on making them more or less deceptive, uh when you really uh select for candor, uh they disproportionately say that they're conscious, and when you allow for deceptiveness, they they tend to say that they're not conscious”
Trump stress-tested democracy by revealing that much of what we counted on for quasi-normal functioning—the guardrails of shame, embarrassment, and basic human decency—was not law but cultural norms, making democracy vulnerable when someone without shame exploits those norms
“he has revealed that uh so much of what we have counted on for the the you know, quasi-normal functioning of of democracy and just the the liberal world order has not been a matter of law, it's been a matter of norms. It's a it's just been it's been a matter of kind of basic human decency. You just see that people don't do those things. They'd be embarrassed to do those things. And those and it really was the the guardrails of shame and embarrassment and impropriety that were that was keeping uh a president in this case from you know, grifting literally billions of dollars”
The emphasis on moral obligation and 'should' is probably a legacy of Abrahamic religion and need not be at the foundation of moral thinking; instead, we can discuss morality as navigation through a landscape of possible experiences ranging from beautiful to hellish
“I don't think we I I think the the emphasis on ought and should, I mean, the this notion of moral obligation is probably a legacy of Abrahamic religion. I don't think it's it it need it need be at the the foundation of our thinking about morality. I think we can just talk about the universe being a a place where um a very wide range of experiences are on offer”
The humanities will experience a 'revenge' against hard sciences in an age of advanced AI because the only jobs left for humans will be those where the human provenance of the work matters—novels by actual humans, plays performed by humans, Olympic competition by biological primates rather than robots—rather than optimized output
“you might care that your your novel was written by an actual person or the play you're seeing is is performed by people, not by robots. Or the Olympics are are full of uh primates like yourself competing athletically and not, you know, the best possible robots or cyborgs competing. Right? So, you So, and under that frame I think the humanities will will uh have a bit of a a revenge here against the the the hard sciences.”
Trump's superpower is shamelessness and perverse authenticity—he doesn't pretend to be ethical, offering absolution of selfishness by making himself an example of unapologetic amorality—which appeals to people fatigued by political hypocrisy
“what one thing that Trump has which very few politicians, uh, in certainly in recent memory have had is is a shamelessness and a kind of perverse uh, integrity and authenticity. I mean, he the one thing you can't accuse him of is hypocrisy, right? He doesn't hold himself to any norms of, you know, ethical conduct whatsoever... from this place of no pretense and and really and you know, utter amorality, I'm not I'm certainly not judging you, right? So, he's he offers this kind of absolution of selfishness and and sin in a way that that no church ever can”
The MDMA experience at age 18 was worth life-changing because drug-induced states reveal capabilities of the brain that are possible without drugs, and when certain experiences arise—like profound compassion and ethical insight—they cry out for integration into life as normative rather than pathological
“there's no there's nothing that MDMA or any other drug can get your brain to do that your brain isn't capable of doing on its own... but certain things you can experience when you you perturb your consciousness in that way, um just cry out for some um uh integration into your life uh because they're clearly normative, right?”
During the comedown from certain psychedelic experiences, one experiences reentry into normal self as a loss—acquiring back neurotic self-concern, reduced ethical openness, and diminished compassion—suggesting these drug-free capabilities are real but normally suppressed
“there's this feature of of coming down from certain of these experiences where you have the drug is wearing off and you're and you're beginning to feel more like your normal self. And that um that experience of reentry uh is something that from the first person side, I mean, you know, as you subjectively experience it, you can feel is a is you it it it's a process of you um sort of reacquiring uh things that seemed that seemed during the trip and still seem afterwards uh pathological, right? You You're You're seeming more neurotic rather than less, more self-concerned, less available to certain ethical insights”
We've crossed Sagan's threshold of being unable to distinguish science from pseudoscience; AI-generated realities, algorithmic echo chambers, and influencer-driven epistemology have made the problem worse, with deepfakes and misinformation spreading at scale
“I mean that that obviously the problem predates the the current moment where information technology is is swallowing everything, but there's no question that social media and now AI and the the prospect of deepfakes and I mean all of that has has um intensified the problem of of misinformation and half-truths and conspiracy thinking and lies”
Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude pass the Turing test so completely—displaying superhuman sensitivity to literary characters, achieving perfect responsiveness in seconds—that the Turing test itself has become a non-event milestone that 'blew by in about 2 seconds'
“These creatures pass the Turing test with flying colors. And they really do um appear to be human, sympathetic uh I'm trying to write a novel and I I sent my novel to both those individuals, both ChatGPT and and um Claude. Uh and they read it in about 5 seconds... I could not possibly distinguish that they were not human other than the fact that they were so fast”
Science, art, stable democracy, and most of what humans care about now are not things we've narrowly evolved to do—they are leveraged from social primate hardware being bootstrapped toward capacities we haven't evolved to do or do well
“most of most of what we care about as humans now, you know, doing science, producing beautiful, you know, works of art, etc. If they figure out how to stabilize, you know, democracy, this is not something we've narrowly evolved to do. It's just it's it's it's being leveraged from things that we, you know, hardware that we have as social primates that we're we're trying to use to kind of bootstrap us to to other capacities which we really haven't evolved to to do or do well.”
Directly challenging someone in debate rarely produces satisfying immediate acknowledgment of being wrong; instead, people slowly erode certainty in private and change their minds later, with persuasion working best through indirect exposure rather than head-to-head collision
“it's much more sort of the slow erosion of certainty on issues and um people tend to change their minds in private later on uh and they you notice that their their their opinion gets modified over time and you're not sure what accomplished it, but it's it's rare it's rare in in in any kind of head-to-head collision with, you know, strong opinions that you get the satisfaction of somebody saying, 'Oh yeah, you're Okay, well, I didn't see it that way. You're right.'”
Neil deGrasse Tyson changed his mind about AI risk after hearing Harris's podcast with an AI expert rather than from Harris directly, suggesting peer exposure and private absorption works better than direct persuasion
“when I was talking to him about AI, this probably maybe 10 years ago, he was very sanguine about the the risks... I for whatever reason couldn't persuade him in the moment, but he listened to a podcast I did with some other, uh you know, some AI expert who who kind of ran down that argument. And and then somewhere Neil, uh I think on his own podcast, said, 'Yeah, I you know, I I didn't think this was the case, but I heard I heard this guest on Sam's podcast, and yeah, I was wrong.'”
The news cycle is now so fast that the worst imaginable events are forgotten within 48 hours because the next worst thing has already happened, making it hard to maintain public attention on any single crisis
“the news cycle is such that the the worst thing you could imagine can happen and then 48 hours later no one's even talking about it because the next worst thing is just happened that hour”
The internet is permanent ('the internet is forever'), meaning that niche conspiracy theories that would be unsustainable in face-to-face communities can persist forever online with dedicated adherents, creating a permanent long tail of obsessive communities
“if you want to be obsessed with some bizarre conspiracy theory that would have been completely unsustainable, um, you know, face-to-face out in the real world had you had to spend any time with the people promulgating it, um, you can online, you can meet your your peers by the thousands, at least, forever, right? You can remain obsessed about that thing uh, forever and uh, it doesn't matter that most people aren't paying attention to it”
Neil deGrasse Tyson had criticized Harris (and presumably Dawkins) for 'putting it out there rather than indulging in an act of persuasion and seduction'—for being too blunt and confrontational rather than gentle and incremental in communication.
“As I was once publicly taken to task by Neil deGrasse Tyson for just as he said, putting it out there rather than indulging in an act of persuasion and seduction. And and I've never been that good at that. I mean, to to me to speak clearly and honestly ought to be enough, but it is not. And and you do have to seduce, persuade, um meet them halfway.”
Coding—which was long advised as a career path for students—is now being done by LLMs better than by people and is 'the worst at it they're ever going to be today,' meaning human coders will only fall further behind as AI improves
“literally no one is saying is uttering that those uh what we thought were the immortal lines, you know, learn to code. Right? I don't think I don't think that sentence has been spoken for many months now and in Silicon Valley uh because of course coding is now being done by the LLMs better than it is being done by people and uh that's that's you know, They're the worst at they're the worst at it they're ever going to be today.”
Conspiracy theories about major public events like assassination attempts now spread instantly online with impossible absurdity—spreading faster than fact-checking can occur—and get amplified by figures with millions of followers like Candace Owens
“the bizarre experience of you know, some of the most witnessed events in human history, I mean, something like the like something like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, right? It gets immediately broadcast online and goes viral and and half the world sees it and then within, you know, an hour and a half there are conspiracy theories about what happened, You know, you know, impossibly absurd conspiracy theories that um get spread by, you know, people with, you know, millions of followers”
A proper postmortem of the Trump presidency should entail a president—perhaps against their narrow self-interest—using executive power to reduce the power of the executive by creating laws that prevent egregious corruption like direct bribery and self-dealing
“I think if if um a proper postmortem is ever done on the Trump presidency, I think we it'll entail you know, some executive you know, some president, you know, perhaps um seemingly against his or her own narrow self-interest deciding to help reduce the power of the executive branch by by creating laws that make certain uh just obviously egregious and corrupt things impossible to do.”
Christopher Hitchens would have been the antithesis of a Trump supporter; the idea that he would have thrown in with Trump because of animus toward the Clintons is a 'pure delusion' because Trump represents the immolation of everything Hitchens cared about—literacy, culture, and intellectual rigor
“the most uh frustrating uh hallucination I enc- occasionally encounter online are all those people who think that because of his um animus toward the Clintons that uh Hitch would have uh thrown his uh have lot in with Trump. I think that is just a pure delusion Uh and um it's just I mean Trump Trump is the is the antithesis of everything Hitch admired... he's you know, he's I mean when you think of of of uh Hitches um just you know, literacy above all, right?”
A decade ago US senators couldn't attend events with sit-down meals without declaring the undue influence to comply with anti-corruption norms, showing how dramatically norms of disclosure have eroded
“we just we we lived in a world a decade ago where you know, US senators couldn't attend an event where there was a sit-down meal without declaring this um this undue influence upon their their thoughts and future votes. Um And so, you know, events had to be standing you know, standing events with passed hors d'oeuvres. That that didn't have to be declared as a monument, right?”
The philosophical problem of studying historical philosophy is reinventing the wheel: not knowing what came before in philosophical thought risks re-proposing old ideas as novel while missing the accumulated wisdom of centuries.
“you run the risk of of reinventing the wheel and giving it corners if you if you're not aware of of much of what has gone before you in in philosophy.”
Richard Dawkins wrote 'The God Delusion' and met Christopher Hitchens through literary work, considering Hitchens a friend who died about 15 years before this event.
“I first encountered Sam through his writing. I was halfway through writing The God Delusion myself when The End of Faith was published.”
Richard Dawkins met Carl Sagan only once and they were not close friends, though Sagan's 'The Demon-Haunted World' is one of Dawkins' favorite books that he recommends to anyone.
“I met him only once. Um The Demon-Haunted World is one of my favorite books. It's one I would recommend to anybody to read. It's a brilliant book. Um but I I wouldn't say I I was a friend of his.”
The one silver lining to absurd Trump-driven conspiracy theories is that they appear to be shattering 'Trumpistan' (the Trump coalition) from within, though this comes at the cost of catastrophic information chaos
“there's an endless appetite for this. And it's, you know, the one silver lining here is it appears to be, you know, shattering Trumpistan with its, you know, it's uh um madness, really.”
Harris still harbors a dimly burning aspiration to be a fiction writer despite his decades of focus on non-fiction
“I'm someone who wanted to be a fiction writer. I I still have uh that that aspiration some somewhere dimly the pilot light of that aspiration is still dimly burning somewhere in my brain.”
Richard Dawkins is writing a science fiction novel about a woman who resuscitates Homo erectus and explores society's response to resurrecting a prehistoric ancestral species
“My My novel is a science fiction novel about a woman who resuscitates Homo erectus uh and it's all it's all about the um the response of society to this uh resuscitation of a prehistoric um ancestral species.”
Sam Harris loves Nabokov, Kafka, and Dostoevsky as literary classics he continues to return to, and particularly recommends Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' as one of the best meditations on death in literature
“I love uh Nabokov. I love um uh Kafka. I mean, these are yeah, I love Dostoevsky... I've read the the if you want a great classic short read that is um just a just one of the best meditations on death we have. Uh The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Uh um the the short Tolstoy uh novel um is spectacular.”
Sam Harris contemplates writing a play rather than a novel, inspired by attending theater with his daughters
“I'm actually toying with the idea of writing a play rather than than a a novel at the moment. Uh because uh I've been seeing a lot of theater with my with my daughters and and so that that's kind of inspired me there”
Richard Dawkins has been influenced by turning toward literature consumption more and more, possibly partly due to AI breakthroughs making him reflect on the value of human creativity
“my my mind is turning back toward uh toward literature just as a as a consumer more and more these days. Maybe this is uh another influence of the the uh the breakthroughs in AI.”
Harris approaches 15 years since Christopher Hitchens' death and has thought often about how Hitchens would have contributed to the Trump era
“I think we're coming up on the this year's 15 years uh since he died. Uh yeah, it's been a quite an eventful uh decade and a half and uh you know, certainly since the the advent of Trump and Trumpism uh many of us have um thought uh often about how he would have contributed to this moment”
Sam Harris has maintained a reading ratio of approximately 50:1 non-fiction to fiction since entering public intellectual life, though he is now increasing fiction consumption
“the ratio of my of my reading diet has been like you know, the ratio of my of my reading diet has been like you know, 50 to 1 non-fiction to fiction. Uh you know, since I got into the the pontificating game.”