Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion | Big Think
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Published 2014-09-16
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Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.
Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.
Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.
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TRANSCRIPT
Sam Harris: What one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. This is a point that many philosophers have made – Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers. While I don’t agree with everything they’ve said about consciousness I agree with them on this point that consciousness is what it’s like to be you. If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain in our case because – and people want to do this. Someone like Francis Crick said famously you’re nothing but a pack of neurons. And that misses the fact that half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it’s true you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just a case of tails being down. But that doesn’t actually reduce one side of reality to the other.
And to give you a more precise example, we have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like anxiety and fear at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear. You can scan their brains with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their blood cortisol and see that its spiking. So these now are considered objective third person measures of fear. But if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear and showed none of these signs and they said they were completely calm when their cortisol spiked and when their palms started to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value of a change in physiology is still a change in the first person conscious side of things. And we’re inevitably going to rely on people’s subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language, I think, is a false one. So we have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective.
I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion.
Transcript continued on: bigthink.com/videos/sam-harris-on-self-transendenc…
All Comments (21)
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He has to be one of the most eloquent speakers I've ever heard.
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I have no self and I have no free will and yet somehow I still have to pay my student loans.
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Without struggle the mind creates struggles.
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Honestly, I opted out of the philosophy of consciousness thoughts by my mid-20's. There were too many incorporeal aspects to the conversation that I felt were not useful to delve into any further. My future attention was to simply major in neurology at a university. Now I gives hand jobs to bums for $15 under the Queensboro bridge.
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Yeah im gonna have to watch this 5 more times to understand it
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We are lucky to live in the present time of phone technology where we could hear intelligent and articulate beings like Sam without actually going to college . This is a type of talk that one can only hear in academic environments.
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I'm currently doing the Waking Up course of meditation and although it's really simple (and probably obvious), the biggest breakthrough for me was to realise that I needed to stop trying to 'find myself', which is something I've always tried to do, and instead make every effort to lose my self.
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He explains each point so clearly and precisely. You can tell he's put a lot of effort over the years into speaking as accurately as possible.
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4:57 "In spiritual, mystical, new age g ...religious literature..." I'm gonna go out on a limb and say he almost said "garbage". Nice save.
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He's literally my favorite person in the world to listen to
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The phrase "whatever your favorite contemplative is" is one that has been missing in my life. That one is headed straight to long-term memory for future use.
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Nietzche said it first: The body tells the I, "Feel hunger!", so the I says "I am hungry!"
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I searched: "Ben Stiller neurologist", and this came up.
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I never tire of hearing one of the most articulate rational compelling intellectuals around today.
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Whatever consciousness is, it is. Explaining it, knowing where it comes from, understanding where it goes when we no longer have it, etc- none of this matters in the least. It's a fact, it stands on it's own ;)
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The Self: Sam Harris is an illusion
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If I am not me, den hoo da hell am I? Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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The explanation about the self being an illusion at around minute 3:07 is still based on the objective 3rd person experience of reality, excluding the 1st person subjective experience of reality. He acknowledged at the start of the video that full reality can't be determined by the 3rd person view of reality, the external sensor perception in which science seems limited to.
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Next topic: Ben Stiller is an illusion
