#185 – Sam Harris: Consciousness, Free Will, Psychedelics, AI, UFOs, and Meaning

It's not merely that free will is an illusion; the illusion of free will is an illusion. There is no illusion of free will.

Losing the sense of free will does two things very vividly for me: One is it totally undercuts the... psychological basis for hatred. Because 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 have curated, for better or worse, a peculiar audience ... Virtually any time I say anything of substance, something like half of my audience... just revolts over it. 'Oh my God, I can't believe you said that. You're such a schmuck.'

When you take psychedelics and you just look as though for the first time at anything, it becomes incredibly overloaded ... Just the torrents of sense data that are coming in in even the most ordinary circumstances can become overwhelming for people. And that tends to just obliterate one's capacity to capture any of it linguistically.

When you have taken a whopping dose of psychedelics, and you begin to even gesture at describing it to yourself so that you could describe it to others, it's like trying to thread a needle using your elbows.

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 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.

I view COVID as... a truly terrifyingly failed dress rehearsal for something far worse.

I think the prospect of our converging on a solution to climate change purely based on political persuasion is non-existent at this point.

If you pay attention to the nature of your mind in this moment, you realize that you don't know what you're going to think next.

My concern here is that we may, in fact, build artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test, which we begin to treat... as conscious, because it will seem conscious ... And unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges from physics, we won't actually know that these systems are conscious.

Terence McKenna was a big proponent of DMT ... It is characterized, it seems, for many people, by this phenomenon, which is unlike virtually any other psychedelic experience, which is it's not just your perception being broadened or changed; it's you... feeling fairly unchanged but catapulted into a different circumstance.

It's impossible to say what the universe would have to be like for free will to be a thing. It doesn't conceptually map on to any notion of causation we have.

Hatred is this enduring state where, whether you're hating somebody else or you're hating yourself, it is... toxic and durable and ultimately useless. It becomes self-nullifying. You become less capable as a person to solve any of your problems.

To speak specifically about the United States, we have a country here where we can't even agree that this is a thing ... There's still people who think that this is basically a hoax designed to control people. Stranger still, there are people who will acknowledge that COVID is real... but they're far happier with the prospect of catching COVID than they are of getting vaccinated for COVID.

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 COVID, I just think that's... the fantasy of a fantasy.

It is a failure of imagination to think that being in relationship to something more intelligent than yourself isn't, in most cases, a circumstance of real peril.

We are apes with egos who are massively constrained by very short-term self-interest, even when we're contemplating some of the deepest and most interesting and most universal problems we could ever set our attention towards.

One of the things that's so beautiful about jiu-jitsu is that 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. There's no room for bullshit.

Until you learn to meditate, you think that the outside world or the circumstances of your life always have to get arranged so that the present moment can become good enough to demand your attention in a way that seems fulfilling.

You can certainly argue that consciousness might be a fundamental principle of matter that doesn't emerge on the basis of information processing.

For me, consciousness is just the fact that the lights are on at all—that there's an experiential quality to anything.

We are never in direct contact with reality, whatever it is—unless that reality is consciousness. So, we're only ever experiencing consciousness and its contents.

I do follow [Joe Rogan's] advice much more than I ever have here. I don't look at comments very often, and I'm probably using Twitter, you know, 5% as much as I used to. I really just get in and out on Twitter and spend very little time in my @ mentions.