Questioning Sam Harris | Sam Harris | EP 224

You need to value certain things in order to get any facts in hand. In the first place, any statement about facts relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence, right? If you're... if you don't value logic, there's no logical argument you can give someone to say that they should value it. If someone doesn't value evidence, there's no evidence you could give them to say that they should value it. So it— you know, epistemology sort of bites its own tail or picks itself up from its boot. Although that actually... that actually hearkens back to the is/ought problem, right? Because right there you said—and I’m not denying the validity of anything you've said so far—but right there you said that without agreeing on the validity of evidence, let's say, there's no agreement about what is. And there we've got a frame problem, right? We have that value that you need to even determine what is. Well, the question then is... well, where does that value come from? And you can't say, well, it comes from what is in some easy manner because you just said unless you have a value of a certain sort, you can't derive what is. And that's partly why this ought/ is-ought problem just doesn't seem to go away.

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Hello everyone! I'm pleased today, in a variety of ways, to have as my guest Dr. Sam Harris, who is undoubtedly familiar to many of you watching or listening to this. Sam is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times bestsellers. His work covers a wide range of topics: neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, political polarization, rationality—but generally focuses on our developing understanding of ourselves and how our developing understanding of ourselves in the world is changing our sense of how we should live. His books include "The End of Faith," "The Moral Landscape," "Free Will," "Lying," and "Waking Up." Sam hosts the popular "Making Sense" podcast and is also the creator of the "Waking Up" app, which we’re going to talk about a fair bit today. It offers a modern rational approach to the practice of meditation and an ongoing exploration of what it means to live a good life. He's practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers both in the US and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA.

Sam and I spoke twice a few years ago—it's probably four years ago now—on his podcast. We got bogged down a bit the first time trying to agree on a definition of truth, which in our defense is not necessarily the easiest thing to come to an agreement on. But our second discussion flowed more freely. Then we met twice in front of live audiences of about 3,000 in Vancouver and soon after at Dublin and then at the O2 in London. Those were tremendously exciting events, I believe, for both of us and for everyone else involved, and perhaps even for the audiences where something approximating 9,000 and 8,000 people respectively listened to our discussions. We haven't spoken, well, for a long time, perhaps not since then even, and I’m very much looking forward to this. Sam, the first thing I’d really like to know is what do you make of those events in retrospect? They attracted a very large crowd, certainly by our standards, and I’d like to know how you look back on that and what you think about that.

Well, first, let me say I'm just very happy to see you and to be speaking with you again. It's really—it's been, I think we spoke once on the phone since those events, if I'm not mistaken. But you know, years pass quickly or all too slowly depending on what's going on, as you know. And, you know, I've heard about a lot of what you've gone through indirectly and what you've put out there publicly, and I just, you know, I was, you know, I was worried about you, and I'm incredibly gratified to see you reemerge and connect with your audience and be back in the game.

Thanks, man, I value that a lot.

Yeah, well, I'm pretty thrilled to be back and to be able to be talking to people again like this, so let's hope it continues.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it was very interesting because, I mean, you know, as you know and as your fans know, you really did kind of come out of nowhere like, you know, on a rocket-like trajectory, right? So you were somebody I had never heard of and then all of a sudden, you were the most requested person for my audience to have on the podcast. And then we did that first podcast that you mentioned, where we got bogged down on questions of epistemology, and which I, you know, I think I haven't listened to it since, but I still think it was a useful conversation.

Yeah, and many people found it very valuable. I mean, you know, it just—to either to my advantage or your advantage—people found it valuable. They heard what they—some heard what they wanted to hear in it, and some, some had their minds bent around as was intended. But people, most people, many people certainly, thought it felt it was a kind of failed experiment in conversation, and we should try it again. And then we had a much more amicable discussion on my podcast, and that planted the seed for these public events. And if memory serves, we had one event booked in Vancouver, and you were still not quite the famous Jordan Peterson yet, and then in like the 15 days it took us to actually get to that event, your star had risen so quickly that we recognized, and the promoter recognized that we had to book another event immediately after—so the next night we—so we had two back-to-back events in Vancouver.

And then, yeah, those subsequent events with you were really a lot of fun because we were disagreeing very stridently about fairly existential topics. And by the time we got to London and Dublin, we had had these immense audiences that were segmented in ways that I had never quite experienced. I've been in front of, you know, my home team audience, and I've been in front of a hostile audience, but I've never been in front of an audience where, you know, fully 50% or 60/40—I mean, I don't know what the split was at that point, but you know, thousands of people were on one team and thousands of people were on another team for questions of God and faith and meaning.

But everybody was on board for the discussion. You remember one thing that happened—this was in Vancouver? We were going to switch to a Q&A, and we asked the audience essentially if they wanted the discussion to continue because we were in the middle of it or if they wanted to switch to the Q&A, and there was overwhelming support in the audience for the discussion to continue, which I thought was quite remarkable.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it was a lot of fun, and there was just a tremendous amount of energy. To have 8 or 9,000 people show up for an intellectual discussion really... I mean, this did have the character somewhat of a debate, but it was not framed as anything like a formal debate, and we were really just having a conversation and agreeing where we agreed and disagreeing where we disagreed. Anyway, I found it to be a lot of fun, and it was ridiculously exciting.

Yeah, and people loved it. So yeah, and so what do you make of that? It's like why in the world was what it was that we were talking about attractive to so many thousands of people?

Well, you know, when you look at the full sweep of what we cover— I mean in those particular conversations, we weren't focusing on areas that we agree about much more. I mean, you know, you and I, if you're going to turn us loose on questions of, you know, moral panic around identity politics and social justice hysteria, you know, you and I will agree, I think probably 90% or more on many of those topics. And I don't recall us touching any of that, but that was in the background. It was certainly the wind in your sails, you know, making you more and more prominent at that point because you had hit those topics so hard. But you know, the topics we were touching—the questions of, you know, what is reality and how we should live within it—really, you know, the fundamental questions of what it means to live a good life, what are the requisites for living a good life, how should we think about our place in the universe so as to have the best chance of living a good life—these are the most important questions anyone ever asks, provided they have sufficient freedom to even worry about such things, right? I mean, if the wolf is at the door or in the room, well then people really, for the most part, don't have the luxury of worrying about whether they're as ethical or as honest or as profoundly engaged with the present moment as they might be.

But once you get to something like, you know, first-world concerns where you have enough material abundance where your survival is not a question and when political stability is sufficient that you're not continually worried that your neighbors are going to murder you, then you—you know, when you wake up at 3 in the morning and can't get back to sleep, you're thinking about what does this all mean and what is a good life. One of the things that we did agree on, I think, that sort of provided a container for the discussions in total was that there was potentially such a thing as the good life—that that's just not some, you know, epiphenomenal abstraction or something like that, but something central. And to some degree, I think we disagreed about where the information for deriving what might constitute the good life comes from, but it isn't even clear to me exactly where those differences lie.

And that was part of, I suppose, the fun of the discussion and something that I also hope to continue today because I've seen since then it seems to me that you've turned your attention more and more—perhaps not more and more, but you've certainly continued your route into investigation of what constitutes the good life and also your attempts to bring what you've learned to an increasingly wide audience using the technology that you're using now: this app that you have, which is the Waking Up app. My wife has subscribed to that for the last year and a half, and I joked with you earlier that she probably spent more time with you than she has with me in the last year and a half, so that's quite comical. But she finds it's quite useful, and I took a good look at it today. How does... tell me about that app and why you're doing that? Are you doing that instead of writing a book or is it another book, and why are you doing that?

Well, I seem to be doing everything instead of writing a book. Writing a book has become an opportunity cost that I can't justify at the moment, but no doubt I will write another book at some point. But yeah, between my podcast and app, that's really—those are the two channels where I am putting out my ideas at this point.

So why did you switch to that?

Well, I looked at the app, and one of the things you're doing is you've broken down lectures in some sense into like 10-minute chunks that are focused on different topics—a whole variety of topics. I've got the app right here, and assuming my phone... So there are groups of lectures: fundamentals, mind and emotion, the illusory self, mysteries and paradoxes, and some of the topics—for example, the illusory self—self and other, alone with others, looking in the mirror, the art of doing nothing, mysteries and paradoxes, what is real, consciousness, the mystery of being... In some ways, it looks like a book, right? It's got chapters, it's got sub-chapters. But why this? Why this technology and how has it performed for you in comparison to a book?

Well, so I did write the book version of this content—or certainly most of this content—so I have a book, "Waking Up," and it touches... you know, it is my attempt to ground so-called spiritual experiences—experiences like self-transcendence and unconditional love and the kinds of things people experience on, you know, various psychedelics. You know, this is all of increasing interest to people now. I wanted to ground all of that in what I consider to be a rational empirical understanding of the world, right? I didn’t want to believe anything on insufficient evidence so as to prop up the importance of these experiences because they don't actually need to be propped up by, you know, in my view, faith or any unjustified claim to knowledge.

And they do, you know, at very interesting points deliver their own kind of knowledge about the nature of the mind. There are things you can recognize directly in your experience that put your understanding of your own subjectivity in closer register with what we understand about the brain right now. Not everything can be cashed out experientially, but many things can.

Can I ask you one question?

Well, okay, so there's a bunch of that that I agree with deeply, and one of the things I’ve tried to do to the degree that it was possible when talking about, let's say, matters that could be religious, I've tried to stay out of the religious territory as much as possible because it seems to me counterproductive to make an appeal to faith when you can make an appeal to—what would you... to not just to experience. It's deeper than that—to something like the combination of experience and science. So let me run something by you, as an example, and see what you think of this because one of the things that we really sparred about, I suppose, or discussed was the is/ought conundrum, right? Right, we agree that you have to have a value because you have to act, and that's the landscape of value—but we ran into some trouble, I think, trying to make our viewpoints about where those oughts might be derived from. You seem to be more convinced than me, perhaps, that the step from is to ought was simpler, and I was more convinced that it was more complicated and there were problems that still remained there. I'll let you respond to that, but I wanted to talk about this deeper experience.

So I was standing with my wife the other day on the dock of this cottage we have up north, and it's very dark up here. So when you look up, you can see the night sky well enough to see the Milky Way and actually to see galaxies if you use the corner of your eye. And so, one of the things that's associated with that is an experience of awe. And it's not surprising because there you are confronting what's essentially infinite as far as you're concerned, as much as it might be for us.

And I thought a lot about the experience of awe. One of the things—and it's also produced by music quite regularly—one of the things that happens when you experience awe is that a vestigial piloerection mechanism kicks in, and that's the mechanism that makes prey animals puff up. You see this with cats—they're quite funny when they do this. They puff up so they look bigger in... in this... when they catch sight of a threatening predator. And so, they perhaps subjectively experiencing... experience the more terror-stricken end of awe. But that awe is very, very deep. It's not... it's not a rational response; it's way underneath rationality. It's an instinctual response, and it seems to me as well that it's associated very tightly with our instinct to imitate. And it's strange to think that you could look at the night sky and that could catalyze an instinct to imitate, but we're very good at using abstraction—us creatures, and it's not exactly obvious what we can imitate and what we can't.

So I think that's an example of this idea that you're putting forward, that the domain of religious experience—let's say a spiritual experience—has a biological underpinning, a deep biological underpinning, and you know part of my question is what's the implications of that exactly, if that happens to be the case?

So, first, I’d like to know if you agree about that discussion about awe and the is/ought thing and then anything else you'd like to add, I'd like to hear.

Yeah, we've opened many doors there. That's a—I see a 10-hour conversation treating just those topics.

Well, to start with the is/ought bit, you're in very good company. Most people in science and philosophy, as you know, believe there really is a disjunction between is and ought and to follow Hume's cast aside remarks. I mean, he didn't go into it deeply, but at one point, he wrote that you can't derive an ought from an is, right? There's no description of the way the world is that can tell you how it ought to be. So, and he was decrying the fact that so many scholars, and in general, so many theologians in his time would move smoothly from is to ought without acknowledging that they had committed a logical error.

But I do think there's a trick of language lurking at the bottom of this is/ought talk that is misleading and it's difficult to spot. And you know, I believe I've spotted it, but I—you know, the people who don't agree with me, don’t agree with me, I mean, their intuitions don't pass through, you know, the point where I'm trying to shove them. And you know it's somewhat analogous to the philosopher Wittgenstein made a point when he was criticizing Freud. He was criticizing Freud's notion of the unconscious—he didn't think this reification of the unconscious was fallacious—and you know, we can leave that aside. I'm not sure I agree with him there. But the point he was making about the power of language was interesting. He said, imagine if instead of saying I saw nobody in the room, we said I saw Mr. Nobody in the room. Imagine a language that forced us to say I saw Mr. Nobody, right? Just imagine what confusion would be born of that convention of language. That's something he said in his—I think it was in the Blue Book.

And there are many places in our thinking about the world where language plays a similarly confusing role, where we have reified something, which is—to some degree, I think it's confused us about free will. It's confused us about death, for instance. I mean, I think, you know, if you're an atheist who doesn't believe that anything happens after you die, right? If you think there's no rebirth, you know, there's no reincarnation. And that Eastern picture of karma and rebirth is probably not true, and you think there's no heaven or hell. I mean, if you really think you get something like a dial tone when you die, well, many people are left expecting some kind of oblivion, some kind of positive nothingness, some permanent loss of experience, where—and so this notion of oblivion is a reification. But if you think about it more clearly, that's precisely the kind of thing you would not mean. If it's simply the end of experience, well then you're not going to be experiencing the end of experience, right? This is not—you didn't experience an absence before you were born, right? Well, the idea that you would experience it is implicit in the way the question is framed.

There's nothing you're going to suffer. I mean, this is something that Epicurus pointed out through Lucretius, that you know, death is nothing for us. You know, where we are, death is not, and where death is, we are not, right? Like, there's just... they're just non-overlapping sets of facts—whatever those facts are, if in fact death is the end of experience.

So how do you think that relates to is and ought?

So to come back to is and ought, I just think really what we have, forget about morality, forget about science, forget about anything for the moment, and just recognize that the world is such that we are confronted with an ever-present navigation problem. We have this—the possibility of navigating both personally and collectively to places in the space of all possible experience that are just manifestly terrible. You know, and I call it the worst place. I call it the worst possible misery for everyone, right?

So it is possible to imagine a universe where every conscious system suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can—some version of the perfect hell, right? And then, there's—then it's possible to recognize that whatever you want to call it, whether you want to use words like good and evil or right and wrong or not, every other place on the what I call the moral landscape is better than the worst possible misery for everyone, right?

I agree with that completely. That's why I studied atrocity for so long, because I figured if I could find out what the worst thing was, that would be a pointer to the best thing. Because if you know the worst thing, then the opposite of that is the best thing, whatever that is. That doesn't mean you have to propositionalize, not equivalent in anything, but the fact that they are equally distant from the worst possible misery for everyone, right? So there could be—so I'm not—you know, this can sound like moral relativism, but it's not. It’s an objective picture of morality. I don’t think it does, but it’s just to say that there are—there may be very different ways of living where, given the right kind of minds involved, you could be happy in very strange ways and in ways that would counterintuitive for—you know, apes like ourselves, but nonetheless, they could be very far from the worst possible misery for everyone.

So in any case, I call this... so whatever you want to call navigating in this space, moving away from just unendurable, pointless misery, right? Toward, you know, beauty and creativity and joy and love and, you know, all of the good stuff we recognize. And again, there's— there's no—we haven't seen the horizon of this. We have no idea how beautiful life could be for minds like our own or for minds, you know, significantly more sensitive and creative and intelligent than our own. I there’s no—we had a vision of heaven as a place that was perfect, where everyone that was in it was striving to make it better.

Right.

Yeah, so we don’t know how good things can get, and we don’t know how bad things can get. But we know they can get quite terrible from where our current vantage point, and we know they can get quite wonderful from our current vantage point. And this is where the distance between facts and values collapses for me. There are—let me ask you a question. Let me just land this final sentence. There are right and wrong answers with respect to how to navigate in this space, right? There are—it is and they’re right and wrong, whether we’ve discovered them or not. Right? We could all be wrong about the thing we should do next so as to be as happy as possible. You know, we could be— we could think we’re doing something very wise and compassionate and useful, and actually we’re, you know, slowly poisoning ourselves with some toxin that we haven’t identified, right? I mean, so there are things, so it is truly possible to not know what you don’t know. It’s truly possible to not know what you’re missing, right? For there to be some happier place on the landscape that you could get to if only you knew to try to get to it, but you’re not trying to get to it because you’re satisfied, you know, drinking 12 beers a night and, you know, cheating on your wife or whatever it is. You could have a whole civilization that is unaware of just—that’s a local peak, not a great one, it’s a local peak, but yes, not as good as it might be.

So there are—there are two ways to see that this, in my view, that this disconnection between facts and values collapses. First, you need to value certain things in order to get any facts in hand in the first place. Any statement about facts relies on having first valued things like evidence and logical coherence, right? If you don’t value logic, there’s no logical argument you can give someone to say that they should value it. If someone doesn’t value evidence, there’s no evidence you could give them to say that they should value it. So that, so, you know, epistemology sort of bites its own tail or picks itself up from its boot. Though that actually... that actually hearkens back to the is/ought problem, right? Because right there you said—and I’m not denying the validity of anything you’ve said so far—but right there you said that without agreeing on the validity of evidence, let’s say, there’s no agreement about what is. And there we’ve got a frame problem there, right? We have that value that you need to even determine what is. Well, the question then is well, where does that value come from?

And you can’t say, well, it comes from what is in some easy manner because you just said unless you have a value of a certain sort, you can’t derive what is. And that’s partly why this ought is/ is-ought problem just doesn’t seem to go away.

Yeah, but it goes away because it goes away the moment you recognize there is in principle always a mystery at our backs. You know this is true experientially. I mean, I say I would say this is true experientially with respect to the nature of consciousness, but it's true conceptually with respect to even those fields that pretend to be most directly in contact with the nature of reality. I—so even physics, you know, when you’re talking about the most rudimentary laws of physics, right? There is still—there has to be a first brute fact or a brute axiom that you accept that doesn't—that need not prove itself, right? There’s no self-justifying epistemology.

Yes, well that exact—yes, I believe that. Well, I think that’s why there is an emphasis on faith in some principle in so many religious traditions is that there is a starting place there, and you’re trying to flesh out where that is at least to some degree.

So let me ask you a couple of—or mention one thing and then ask you a couple more things. So this is/ought distinction is even more peculiar when you look deep into the neuroscience of perception. Okay, so one of the most influential books I ever read was "An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception," and it's a classic text on perception and a very sophisticated one, and I don't think... it has no pretensions to mysticism of any sort. And so that's kind of interesting given the conclusion.

And the conclusion of the author is that what we see aren't facts or objects; we see meanings. So for example, a six-month-old who crawls towards a visual cliff, which is a plate of glass stretched over a—placed over a—falling off place, the six-month-old will stop. He won’t crawl—7 months, I don’t remember the exact age. He won’t crawl across that piece of glass, right? He doesn’t see cliff and infer falling-off place; he sees falling-off place. And there’s a condition called neglect, which is characteristic of certain people who have prefrontal lobe damage. It’s called—sorry, it’s not neglect; it’s called utilization behavior. Yeah, and these people lose the ability not to act in the presence of a meaningful object. So if they walk down the hall and the door is open, they will go through the door. If you put a cup in front of them, they cannot stop but pick it up because they don’t see a cup and infer drinking; they see drinking object directly.

And so even that distinction is deceptive in a very fundamental sense because it's predicated on the idea that what we see are meaningless objects and that we lay an overlay of meaning on top of that. And it's not by no means obvious at all that that's how we see.

Yeah, and that's part of the reason why it's been so difficult to make machines that can see and act in the real world because the object world is not simple and that value structure that you’re describing—that value structure, right—that is embedded in all of our perceptions in ways that we are only beginning to understand scientifically.

Yeah, there are so many ways in which our, you know, what's called folk psychological sense of what our minds do is just completely broken, right? We have a sense of the tools we're using to do anything, you know, that would be beliefs, desires, perceptions, expectations, the movement of attention, right? And our sense of what all of this is from the first-person side has definitely broken apart in many respects as we've studied these things neuroscientifically from—and psychologically from—the third-person side. And understanding ourselves, understanding the world and our place within it and what's possible is inevitably a marriage of those two sides.

I mean, you can’t fully banish first-person experience because most of what we know about ourselves has a cash value in terms of the experiential side. I mean, there's, you know, to take the greatest case, there’s simply no evidence of consciousness anywhere in the universe but for the fact that we know it to exist in ourselves from the first-person side. I— you can’t look at a brain, even a living one, and form any intuition that it’s a locus of consciousness. It’s only by correlating changes in the experience of living people with, you know, tools of neuroimaging in this case or things like EEG where we say, okay, well when the brain’s doing that, there’s something that it’s like to experience those changes, right? And we pretend rather often to take the third-person science side off the gold standard of first-person experience and say, okay, well, it’s really the mind maybe an illusion. You know, maybe even consciousness is an illusion.

What we know is happening is there are brains that are processing information and we’ve got things like synapses and neuromodulators and neurotransmitters, and that’s the real stuff, right? That’s the reality—this mind part, is some kind of—

Right, that’s definition, not an observation, just tissue reality, right? And that’s a big problem.

Yeah, you can't banish the side which is in fact cashing out so many of your claims about the nature of—in this case, the brain. And—but that’s not to say that we can’t be deeply mistaken from the first-person side about what our minds are doing. I mean, so I'm, you know, as you—as we’ve indicated here already, I'm an enormous fan of meditation. I think it’s—I think it’s indispensable for understanding certain things about the nature of the mind. But you can’t even tell that you have a brain by meditating, right? Much less, you know, what it’s doing, right?

So it's like... there are things that you—there's some major blind spots in first-person experience no matter how you train experience. But you can notice, for instance, that the sense of self, the sense that you’re a subject interior to your experience that you're kind of a locus of a consciousness that is appropriate in experience—that is an illusion, or at best, a convention, right? A kind of construction that you can cease to construct.

And so much of— and so why—why do you—why do you believe that that’s so useful?

There’s something core here, question. I want to make one observation before we go back to that.

So, one of the things I learned when I was studying ancient Egyptian mythology was that the Egyptians worshipped Horus—that's the I. And we may have talked about this before, but they weren't worshipping rationality; they weren't worshipping that monkey mind. They were worshipping attention itself. And they regarded attention as the process that revitalized dead totalitarianism because they had a god for that— that was Osiris.

And so, there’s something... and when the Egyptians were contemplating what constituted proper political sovereignty, they regarded the union of Osiris and Horus as the emblem of proper sovereignty. And that was the Osiris that was rescued from his totalitarian state by his union with Horus. So, it’s like the conceptual world, which tends to aify like, well, like Egypt in the Exodus book, and the attention process, which focuses perhaps on what’s outside of the totalitarian certainty and therefore continues to update it. And that’s not rationality. And I think it’s pointing to something that’s similar to what you’re fascinated by with your concentration on, I think it’s on attention per se. It’s not rationality; it’s certainly not the contents of thought; it’s something more like direct apprehension.

And, you know, in clinical practice, Carl Rogers, particularly, taking a bit of a lea from Freud, but he said that if you attend to your clients—which meant listen to them—but it meant attend. It didn’t mean engage them in rational dialogue; it meant more like listen—they will transform psychologically as a matter of course.

Right, yes. I use attention in a slightly different way or a more specific way and differentiated from something like consciousness or awareness itself. So, like—so this is—I think this is—I’m sure there are different ways of using it, but one tends to meet this definition now in cognitive science and neuroscience where it's a narrowing of the field of awareness. But there's still a field; it's like a spotlight within a larger field. So for instance, I, you know, I’m looking at you on Zoom now, and I can look at a—I can look at, you know, one of your eyes, right? I can specifically look at that eye and I can focus on that, but there are many other things within my visual field that I’m not focusing on but which are nevertheless there.

And one of them could suddenly capture my, quote, attention, right? So I’m looking at your eye; I’m doing my best to look at your eye to the exclusion of everything else. But if, you know, if a mouse ran across my desk, all of a sudden, that would have 100% of my attention. And that shift—it’s the shift of the spotlight—that’s the attentional mechanism that is happening within this larger context of what I would call consciousness or awareness because it’s, you know, so you’re using attention as the like the fovea, right?

Exactly! So it’s like the kind of—the cognitive fovea where—so that’s where conscious is most intense, right? Because those neurons are—each neuron in the fovea is connected to 10,000 neurons in the primary visual cortex. So it’s tremendously dense cortically, and then you could think of—maybe we could distinguish these two concepts this way. So at, in the center of your vision, at the fovea, it’s extraordinarily high-resolution consciousness, which we call attention. And then as you move out from the fovea to the periphery, your consciousness becomes lower and lower resolution until out here, if you’re speaking visually, you can’t even really count the number of fingers that you see. You can see the hands only if they move, and out here, it’s black and white, and out here, it's gone.

Yeah. High-resolution foveal focus, and you can move your eyes to put that high-resolution, high-neurological vision to work.

Yeah, I would use the terminology a little differently here, though, because I wouldn’t say that consciousness is diminishing at the edges. I would say that the visual perception is... consciousness is just the fact that anything is being known, right? So you can be conscious, for instance, of very blurry vision, right? Or you can be conscious that you’re... blond—that you can’t see anything, right? But, like, if you just close your eyes now, even your visual consciousness is just as present. It’s just you’re—you’re just aware of the darkness behind your eyelids, right? And it’s not even all that dark; it’s scintillating with various colors, right?

So, okay, so we could say that you've got that high-resolution attention in the middle, then it gets lower resolution out to here, where you can’t see, and then that’s all contained within a broader attentional field, right?

Yes, and I would call that the broadest possible field just unconsciousness.

Okay, awareness, fine. So, okay, so now we know exactly what we mean by our terms, and so what I would say to your question, which I think is a very important question: what’s the point of examining the self, you know, much less transcending it?

There are several points. I mean, what the main one is that it is the string upon which all of our suffering is strung. I mean, it’s just—it is just—it is when you feel as miserable as you can feel that sense of being at the center of this torment. And like what direction will you find relief? I mean, this is just—this is—you've got the cacophony of unpleasant experience and then you've got this place in the middle of it, or apparent place in the middle of it, from which you're trying to resist this experience, right? Or figure—trying to figure out how to change it.

Right, so let's say you have a terrible pain, you know, somewhere in your body. You know, there’s the pain; there’s a strong stimulus of unpleasant sensation, you know, the burning and stabbing and twisting feeling. And then there’s this reaction to it from apparently some point outside the pain—very likely, you know, for most people up in the head.

I mean, most people feel like they’re a subject in their heads that is not truly coincident with the rest of their body. They don’t feel—most people, for the most part, don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies, and these bodies can misbehave in various ways. And again, so you have a terrible pain; the pain is down there, let’s say it’s in your knee; you’re up here now—a hostage being tortured by the misbehavior of the rest of your body, right? And you’re resisting; you’re trying to find some way of resisting these sensations.

And so it is with emotional distress or unpleasant thoughts, right? You know, you can have thoughts that terrorize you, and all of it seems to suggest—I mean this is, you know, this is the extreme case of stark unhappiness—but even in the best of times, right? Even when things are going really well and every experience is very smooth and we’re getting what we want and that we, you know, our favorite treats are just an arm’s length away and we’re filling our mouths with gumdrops or whatever it is. We’re gratifying this thing at the center of our experience, and it can never be finally gratified because experience itself is impermanent.

It’s just, you know, it’s—you get to the thing you want, and you gorge yourself on it, and then not only you want a new thing—you want a new thing. I mean then you need a drink of water because this lingering taste in your mouth of chocolate mousse or whatever it is is too cloying and too much and you got to wash that out. So that you just—you wouldn't want to stay in that state even if you could. And there’s some—there's kind of this rolling dissatisfaction even in satisfaction that we all ENCOUNTER, even in the best of times, right? Even when you literally can get anything—more or less anything you want.

And yet we know at any moment it can be subverted by something terrible happening. You know, at any moment you can suddenly feel like you might be having a heart attack, right? And then that becomes the thing that this sense of me in the middle of everything collapses upon. And it makes life— I mean, this, again, this sense of being in this vulnerable center, right? It makes life this kind of long emergency that can be pacified by, you know, increasingly strenuous efforts to control experience, right?

We have to control this thing because, at any moment, we might die.

Yeah.

We’re avoiding death, you know, but even, you know, even for those of us who don’t think about death very often—and there are those people—we're constantly modifying our experience so as to avoid discomfort, whether it’s social discomfort or physical discomfort or just—every correction in our body. If you just try to sit still for an hour, you’ll notice that all of the micro-adjustments of posture that you’re now no longer making are made because you really don’t have to wait long before you feel miserable. I mean, your body—the amount of pain you can get just sitting in the most comfortable chair you can find in your home and just resolving not to move is quite extraordinary.

It’s just, you know, it’s just there’s no position that’s comfortable enough that it will be comfortable an hour from now.

Okay, so when you rise out of that into this meditative state, well, what’s your experience and what has that done for you personally and ethically?

Okay, so the starting point, which I’ve just dimly sketched out of being a subject in the head, right? I mean this is something that I will be familiar to 99% of our audience or, you know, 99.999% of our audience. People feel that they’re, they don’t feel identical to their bodies; they feel like they have bodies. And now, you know, they might be told, okay, you might want to look into this practice of meditation; you might want to just understand yourself a little better here; start with this practice—you can close your eyes and pay attention to the feeling of breathing, you know, the sensation of breathing in, the rising and falling of their chest or the air passing in their nostrils.

And every time you get lost in thought, just come back to the raw sensation of breathing. That’s a very, you know, basic exercise of what’s called mindfulness. And the moment you try to do that, you begin to discover—or, you know, some moments down the line, you discover—that it’s very hard to do that; your default state is to get distracted by a conversation you’re having with yourself and to forget all about this project of paying attention to the present moment, and it could be, it doesn’t matter what it is, but, you know, the breath in this case.

And so it is, in fact, true to say that for most people—I mean literally 99.9% of our audience—they couldn’t pay attention to the breath for a full minute, say. Even if their lives depended on it, right? It’s just like... it’s simply not in the cards. It’s not—you know, the fate of the world could depend on it, and someone who’s not really fairly well-trained in this just couldn’t do it.

And so that’s interesting, right? What’s interesting is that despite your best efforts, you get carried away by thought helplessly moment after moment. Now, being able to break that spell, being able to see thought as thought—I—so eventually, once you get some degree of mindfulness in hand, you no longer confine your attention to the breath or any other arbitrary object. You begin to open it up to everything you can possibly experience.

So it’s just, you know, sights and sounds and sensations and emotions and thoughts themselves can become objects of mindfulness. But when you can—but this is the kind of crucial, you know, binary difference which produces an immense amount of psychological benefit. The moment you can really notice thoughts themselves as appearances in consciousness rather than what you are in each moment—because what happens is in the default case, the thoughts kind of creep up from behind us in some sense—they kind of come out of nowhere, and that just feels like me, right? So I’m, you know, I’m trying to—it's a reflex of identification.

Well, you wouldn’t act them out if they didn’t feel like you, you know? And so they have to have that impulse to action in them; that’s part of felt identity, right? So you’re saying—and this is part of, I suppose, part of the Buddhist tradition particularly—although not only—that being the puppet of those thoughts is part of what prolongs suffering, at least under some circumstances.

Especially being the puppet of them, yes.

Yeah. And so this is so—but the people, you know, listening to us now can feel this. So, you know, we’re talking and people are trying to understand the thread of this conversation, but it’s comp—that they have a voice in their head that’s competing with this, right?

You know, they’re trying to listen to us, but they’re also thinking, right? And they’re thinking, so they might think, "What the hell is he talking about?" Right? Like there’s just some intrusive thought comes in, or like, "Oh, no, wait a minute, he didn’t answer the question." That thought—that that feels like you’re identified with it, if you don’t see it as mere language appearing in consciousness or mere imagery, right? It feels like me, like, "That is the self." That feels like, what I believe—no space around it.

Interesting.

Yeah, well, one of the things you do in clinical work all the time, especially in the cognitive behavioral field, is you help people identify those thoughts in some sense as objects, to no longer identify with them and say, you know, just because you think that, it’s not necessarily true; it’s not necessarily you; and it’s not necessarily helpful right now. We can check and see if any of those three, you know, propositions were true; maybe it is you, maybe you do believe it, and maybe it is useful. But we’re going to start by hypothesizing that some of these automatic thoughts are actually what’s driving your misery.

And I really also see that as a tremendous danger of totalitarian ideologies because they’re thought systems that are almost entirely foreign in some sense to the individual person that invade that cognitive space and then manifest themselves as unquestioning identity. And if they’re blinding the person to some underlying reality that’s actually revivifying and nourishing and an antidote to suffering, then they’re a tremendous block to exactly that process.

Yes, so there are two levels at which we can address this problem of thought and its connection to suffering. And one is at the level of thought itself, right? It’s like you can replace bad thoughts with better thoughts, right? And you can—you can get some—you can triangulate on your tendency to have one kind of conversation with yourself and engineer a better conversation with yourself, right? And that's, you know, yes—in cognitive—

Like a six-year-old, for example—start thinking like a 30-year-old, right?

Right, and what’s more, 30-year-olds that actually have good intentions for you, right? Like that—your mind can be your friend.

Yeah, love one even, yes.

Yeah, imagine that. So, yeah, imagine that. So that’s a totally legitimate way to climb out of the great hole of suffering that people find themselves in.

But there’s a more fundamental—and I’m not saying what—I’m not saying what I’m recommending in terms of meditation and mindfulness here is more fundamental but it is not—it’s completely compatible with that, you know, more conceptual discursive layer, right? And some things, I would argue, some things are best addressed on the discursive layer and some things are better addressed on the more fundamental layer of, well, you know, when you’re sitting meditating, first of all, you’re sitting. And so it’s perfectly reasonable to adopt a mode of thought that’s healthful and productive in relationship to the fact that you’re sitting. You know those more discursive propositional thoughts that we’ve been describing, they’re higher resolution in some sense and they’re more practically implementable.

And so there’s going—you want to get that in order, but that doesn’t mean that this phenomenon that you’re describing that’s outside the entire discursive structure doesn’t exist and, right? It’s probably also the place we go at least to some degree when we go to sleep, and we dream and get revivified. It's outside that discursive landscape and that’s necessary for physiological rejuvenation.

Yeah, well dreams are very interesting because I think they are necessary. And we know a lot about the necessity of REM sleep for health and so there’s no question that dreams are doing good things for us, but they also are an experience of stark psychosis, you know? I mean, they are... they are a condition—unless you're talking about lucid dreaming. This is a circumstance where you really have no idea what's going on. I mean you are in reality asleep in your bed, and yet you have transitioned into another experience in which the laws of nature are violated. You're talking to dead people, you're—you know, the sky’s the limit, right? And you're not even surprised; you're doing so little reality testing, you're not even surprised about these changes.

You have so little purchase on who you were just 15 minutes ago when you went to sleep that it’s... so I mean, it does mean, to some degree, at that point though, that you have suspended your unthinking identification with your daytime propositional thought.

Yeah, yeah, but in the normal case, you're identified with your dream body and your dream persona and whoever you’ve become. I mean, you’re being terrorized in a more malleable sense.

The problem is still there; it’s just it’s more random and less logically coherent. There’s something there about exploration and change of categories themselves that’s going on.

But I can see your point about it still being that—and more to the point, there’s actually a very close connection between what happens with ordinary thought and dreaming.

So for instance, or ordinary thinking is—to in my view—or ordinary identification with thought. I don't mean to demonize thought per se because we need thoughts. And the goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts; it’s to be able to recognize them as what they are and to recognize the process of thinking, and to break this pseudonymous identification with it.

But the identification with thought is very much analogous to dreaming and not knowing that you’re dreaming. And the switch from a normal dream to a lucid dream is analogous to the kind of waking up in the middle of life that I’m advocating here, where you can actually just recognize thoughts as thoughts. And there’s something, the way in which thoughts steal over us, where it’s like you’re trying to pay attention to something, and then all of a sudden, you’re replaying an argument that you had with your wife yesterday, right?

And helplessly, and it’s actually dredging up the emotion that is appropriate to that argument, right? So now you’re getting angry or regretful or whatever it is. It’s quite crazy; it’s totally normal. This is the default state of most people most of the time.

But given how unhappy the character of our conversation is with ourselves most of the time, given that the stories we’re telling ourselves are less than perfectly inspiring and perfectly ennobling and great, you know, opening us to great reservoirs of compassion and wisdom, right? They’re not doing that.

So it’s worth looking into this, and it does have this dreamlike character of both coming out of nowhere and completely seizing the reins of attention and identity and taking us elsewhere.

And also, we forget it; we have... it has a—that’s part of the totalitarian spirit of rationality, that proclivity.

Well, but a lot of these thoughts aren’t rational; it’s just, you’re just rehearsing your experience. It’s just like—you’ll tell yourself the same thing ten times in a row, and never—and you won’t be bored on the tenth time. You’ll—you’ll—like if you just imagine what it would be like to externalize your thoughts on a loudspeaker for everyone to listen to you, you know, and you were just—you it was just helplessly, you know, externalized, every normal person would sound insane because of the perseveration and the strange structure to the discursiveness.

I mean, this is... you know, this ever-present... it’s so ever-present that it doesn’t strike people as strange, but to be presuming... We have a dialogue with ourselves as though the "I" could talk to the "me," and that made any sense at all. It’s like, you know, I’m sitting here and getting set up for this interview, right? And I’ll think, “Oh, I gotta get some water!” Right? I know if I’m the one to say it and I’m the one to hear it, I know I need water. Who am I telling?

It’s like I’m telling someone else, right?

Well, you’re probably telling the prefrontal cortex, and it tells the motor cortex, so you know it’s probably the hypothalamus talking to the prefrontal cortex because it doesn’t have direct output over the motor cortex. It’s something like that.

Oh, well, yeah, it remains to be seen whether any of that is actually functionally necessary, but I think for the most part it’s not. I mean, for the most part, we—we simply talk to our—it’s almost like we started talking to our parents, you know? Once we’ve—we once had—once you know the language is incredibly useful, as you know. And it’s—it is what defines us as people in many respects, and once it gets tuned up, it never shuts off.

And you know, we’re talking to... so, you know, first we’re pre-linguistic, and we’re just drinking in language that’s aimed at us, you know, all the time. Our parents are jabbering to us. We begin to understand what they’re saying, as so much of it is indexical: they’re pointing to things, and we’re naming those things; we’re hearing the words, the sounds associated with those things that are being grasped and handed to us. And soon we begin to participate in this language game in ways that we’re not conscious of.

And once this gets tuned up, we talk to our parents; we jabber to our parents incessantly, and then we jabber to ourselves when they leave the room, and it never stops.

Well, you know, Mikhail Christ and I have talked about this issue, and he’s of the opinion—I hope I’m not misrepresenting him—and it’s an idea that I had shared to some degree is that the right hemisphere, in many ways—this is in left-handed people at least—and in some sense is more regulated by the underlying limbic structures—the motivational structures—like an animal is. And the left hemisphere, to the degree that it’s linguistic, it inhibits those right hemisphere functions tonically.

And that’s likely speech. And what that means, implies perhaps, is that if you can shut that speech off, there’s a different mode of perception that’s characterized by the right hemisphere’s immersion in these underlying motivational systems that might be part and parcel of that revivification possibility that I think you’re pointing to as something that lies outside the linguistic landscape and that can become—maybe hyper-dominant—has become hyper-dominant in us because we’re so immersed in language.

I mean, from what I can tell, I mean thus far, the research on the neuroimaging research on meditation is, you know, still in its infancy, despite the fact that there have been hundreds and even thousands of papers at this point on meditation.

But, you know, silencing the default mode network is certainly part of the footprint of the change here that is relevant. And the default mode network, for people—many people have heard of this by now, but... it used to be kind of an esoteric topic. But just a brief review—the default mode network is called the default mode because it was noticed in virtually every neuroimaging experiment ever designed that there was this system of structures in the midline of the brain that would increase their activity in between tasks. So whatever the paradigm was, if you’re giving people a reading task or a sensory task or a memory task or visual discrimination, whatever it is you’re putting them in the scanner—they have to pay attention to something—in those epochs between tasks, when they were no longer having to pay attention to something that they were waiting for the next thing to be presented to them, these set of structures in the midline would increase their activity.

And so it was called the default mode; it was just the kind of the brain’s idling state, but these are also the structures that seem to have a disproportionate amount of responsibility for self-reference and self-representation. And they get tuned up even further when you give people tasks that require a retrospective analysis of the self. You know, if I gave you a list of words and I was saying, I asked you to decide, you know, which of these words apply to you and which of these words don’t apply to you as a person, right? That’s the kind of task that would increase, you know, be above baseline activity in the default mode network.

And there are other components to this; you know, questions of identity. I mean a lot of that is in whole or in part mediated by the default mode. And it—this is what becomes noticeably quiescent when you are successfully practicing mindfulness. And it becomes quiescent in those experiences with psychedelics where this sense of self is transcended for a time and where linguistic communication often becomes extremely difficult.

Yeah, yeah, but people experience—but so what’s interesting here is that people, you know, ordinary people who do not take psychedelics and have no interest in meditation, do experience interruptions in this sense of self a lot that just go unrecognized. And sometimes they go recognized because they’re so-called peak experiences or flow experiences where they’ll— they’ll even the kinds of experiences you referenced, you know, looking up at the Milky Way, the most beautiful encounter with a starry night you have—you know, in that decade, say—you’ve gone to the place where there’s the least light pollution and you've got, you know, a cloudless moonless night. And then you—you point your gaze skyward and you get the full experience.

That’s, you know, there are two experiences people tend to have when they have sought out a peak experience like that. If they’re lucky, they really have something like a moment where they’re lifted out of themselves, and they can just have something like this breathtaking encounter with nature, right? And then all too often, that lasts, you know, a second and a half, and then they’re just talking about it and thinking about it and trying to get back to it. But they’re still just jabbering to themselves, and to you know, whoever’s with them very likely trying to get a hold of this thing. Where if you took mushrooms, or if you took acid, in that circumstance, well then your linguistic, you know, efforts to get this thing in hand are completely blown over, and you have the full, you know, multi-hour encounter with the thing itself.

Right? And it’s—you know, that’s what’s so amazing about psychedelics is that whoever you are, I mean it’s—let’s leave aside the prospect of having a bad trip, which we know about, which many interesting things can be said. The so-called good trip you can have on mushrooms or LSD is this condition of the data of your senses and your—in particular, in a circumstance like the one you described, your engagement with the natural world becomes so, so vivid, so salient that the boundary between self and world is completely overcome.

Right? So like—and the energetics of all of that suddenly becomes very salient. So it’s not just like you’re no longer representing yourself; also the consequences—you know, Griffith work, and if someone has a mystical experience on psilocybin and they’re smokers, they stop 75% of the time. Yeah, it’s like they live so far out of themselves that even their addictions lift.

Yeah, yeah, right? That’s quite something. You know, you talk about being possessed by that default network. Well, to be possessed by an addiction, like a nicotine addiction, is something like that gone wild. And nonetheless, going there, apparently, has this transformative capacity. You also see the same thing with treatment for alcoholics, you know? I mean, for years, alcohol researchers have known that the only reliable treatment for alcoholism is spiritual transformation. That’s hard... those empirical researchers have been wrestling with that for a long time.

Well, I can give it gives you the sense that... you know, again, I’m not claiming that the biotypic vision that one has on LSD or psilocybin is necessarily the true target state of one’s spiritual life. I mean, it’s—you know, in some ways I think it’s not. There’s something misleading about it, but at a minimum, these—this continuum of positive experience, you know, just the—just being flooded with bliss and completely overcome with an encounter with the present moment and meaning— you know, just the perception of meaning, whether that meaning can be rationally justified in the end—right?

Because literally you can, if you’re in the right state of mind, it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at. It doesn’t have to be the Milky Way; you can just be staring at a, you know, a puddle in the concrete in a parking lot, and all of a sudden that is the, you know, the answer to the mystery of existence, right? So in some ways, it's potentially you—there’s a place to stand where you can pathologize this, you know, this—harmony of meaning. But you know, leaving that aside, the experience itself proves, beyond any possibility of doubt, that it’s possible to have an utterly transforming, transformative, and totally satisfying encounter with the present moment that isn’t itself dependent on anything happening.

It’s—a quality of your attention. Now, neurochemically, something obviously has to happen in order to allow you to pay attention that fully to anything, but there is a way of granting your attention to the present moment so that the sacredness of anything comes fully into view.

So, okay, let me—I got a couple of questions for you on that. So let’s go back to this starry night idea. So I want to tell you a story. I was—I was talking to my wife today about the fact that I was going to talk to you because she’s been following your meditation course.

But at the same time that she’s done, she was... she had a medical death sentence two years ago. Yeah, fundamentally, okay? So she’s been through a variety of forms of hell and has come out the other side and has changed in consequence of that. And one of the things she started doing as well is doing your meditation course was using the rosary. So I asked her today, she’s also been talking to Jonathan Pados, who is an extraordinarily interesting religious thinker who carves icons.

He’s a former French Canadian—young guy—very, very deep person in my estimation. In any case, she’s been praying the rosary. And I said, okay, so you do that and you listen to Sam’s meditations. And so how does that work? And she says, well with the rosary— so she’s concentrating on Mary. And she said, Mary’s a—she’s a conduit to Christ. And I'll explain what she meant by that in a sec.

But she said, well first it’s a practice, okay? So she does it every day, so it’s an embodied practice, right? So she says the words and she moves these beads, and so she’s moving her hands. And it’s divided into five sections, and so when her attention wanders from prayer, it’s brought back because there’s five sections, right? So you imagine you have this tendency to wander off into the default network. But by manipulating something with your hands, it ties you to the present moment.

Yeah.

Okay, so it’s a meditative practice that’s more embodied than just sitting still, say, and she finds that useful. And I took a good look at it today. And how does... tell me about that app and why you’re doing that? Are you doing that instead of writing a book—or is it another book and why are you doing that?

Well, I seem to be doing everything instead of writing a book. The writing a book has become an opportunity cost that I can’t justify at the moment. But no doubt I will write another book at some point. But yeah, between my podcast and app, those are really the two channels where I’m putting out my ideas at this point.

So why did you switch to that?

Well, I looked at the app, and one of the things you’re doing is you’ve broken down lectures in some sense into like ten-minute chunks that are focused on different topics—a whole variety of topics. I’ve got the app right here, assuming my phone. So there are groups of lectures: fundamentals, mind and emotion, the illusory self, mysteries and paradoxes—and some of the topics—for example, the illusory self—self and other, alone with others, looking in the mirror, the art of doing nothing, mysteries and paradoxes, what is real, consciousness, the mystery of being. In some ways, it looks like a book, right? It’s got chapters; it’s got sub-chapters. But why this? Why this technology? And how has it performed for you in comparison to a book?

Well, so I did write the book version of this content—or certainly most of this content. So I have a book, "Waking Up," and it touches—you know, it is my attempt to ground so-called spiritual experiences—experiences like self-transcendence and unconditional love and the kinds of things people experience on, you know, various psychedelics. You know, this is all of increasing interest to people now. I wanted to ground all of that in what I consider to be a rational empirical understanding of the world.

Right? I didn’t want to believe anything on insufficient evidence so as to prop up the importance of these experiences because they don’t actually need to be propped up by, you know, in my view, faith or any unjustified claim to knowledge. And they do, you know, at very interesting points deliver their own kind of knowledge about the nature of the mind.

There are things you can recognize directly in your experience that put your understanding of your own subjectivity in closer register with what we understand about the brain right now. Not everything can be cashed out experientially, but many things can.

Can I ask you one question?

Well, okay, so there’s a bunch of that that I agree with deeply. And one of the things I’ve tried to do to the degree that it was possible when talking about, let’s say, matters that could be religious, I’ve tried to stay out of the religious territory as much as possible because it seems to me counterproductive to make an appeal to faith when you can make it appeal to—what would you—to not just to experience?

It’s deeper than that—to something like the combination of experience and science. So let me run something by you as an example and see what you think of this because one of the things that we really sparred about, I suppose, or discussed was the is/ought conundrum, right?

Right, we agree that you have to have a value, because you have to act, and that’s the landscape of value. But we ran into some trouble, I think, trying to make our viewpoints about where those oughts might be derived from. You seem to be more convinced than me, perhaps, that the step from is to ought was simpler. I was more convinced that it was more complicated and there were problems that still remained there.

I’ll let you respond to that, but I wanted to talk about this deeper experience.

So I was standing with my wife the other day on the dock of this cottage we have up north, and it’s very dark up here. So when you look up, you can see the night sky well enough to see the Milky Way and actually to see galaxies if you use the corner of your eye.

And so—one of the things that’s associated with that is an experience of awe. And it’s not surprising because there you are confronting what’s essentially infinite as far as you're concerned, as much as it might be for us.

And I thought a lot about the experience of awe. One of the things—and it’s also produced by music quite regularly—one of the things that happens when you experience awe is that a vestigial piloerection mechanism kicks in, and that’s the mechanism that makes prey animals puff up.

You see this with cats—they’re quite funny when they do this. They puff up so they look bigger in this... when they catch sight of a threatening predator.

And so, they perhaps subjectively experiencing... experience the more terror-stricken end of awe. But that awe is very, very deep. It’s not... it’s not a rational response; it’s way underneath rationality. It’s an instinctual response, and it seems to me as well that it’s associated very tightly with our instinct to imitate. And it’s strange to think that you could look at the night sky and that could catalyze an instinct to imitate, but we’re very good at using abstraction—us creatures, and it’s not exactly obvious what we can imitate and what we can’t.

So I think that’s an example of this idea that you’re putting forward, that the domain of religious experience, let’s say a spiritual experience, has a biological underpinning—a deep biological underpinning—and you know part of my question is what’s the implications of that exactly, if that happens to be the case?

So first I’d like to know if you agree about that discussion about awe and the is/ought thing, and then anything else you’d like to add, I’d like to hear.

Yeah, we’ve opened many doors there. That’s a—I see a 10-hour conversation treating just those topics.

Well, to start with the is/ought bit, you’re in very good company. Most people in science and philosophy, as you know, believe there really is a disjunction between is and ought, and to follow Hume’s cast-aside remarks. I mean he didn’t go into it deeply—but at one point—he wrote that you can’t derive an ought from an is, right? There’s no description of the way the world is that can tell you how it ought to be.

So, and he was decrying the fact that so many scholars, and in general, so many theologians in his time would move smoothly from is to ought without acknowledging that they had committed a logical error.

But I do think there’s a trick of language lurking at the bottom of this is/ought talk that is misleading and it’s difficult to spot. And you know I believe I’ve spotted it, but I—you know, the people who don’t agree with me don’t agree with me. I mean their intuitions don’t pass through—you know the point where I’m trying to shove them.

And you know is somewhat analogous to the philosopher Wittgenstein made a point when he was criticizing Freud.

He was criticizing Freud’s notion of the unconscious. He didn’t he thought this reification of the unconscious was fallacious, and you know we can leave that aside. I’m not sure I agree with him there, but the point he was making about the power of language was interesting.

He said, imagine if instead of saying I saw nobody in the room, we said I saw Mr. Nobody in the room. Imagine a language that forced us to say I saw Mr. Nobody, right? Just imagine what confusion would be born of that convention of language.

That’s something he said in his—I think it was in the blue book.

And there are many places in our thinking about the world where language plays a similarly confusing role, where we have reified something, which is not probably happens with free will.

Yeah, no. So I think it’s confused us about free will; it’s confused us about about death for instance.

I mean I think, you know, if you’re an atheist who doesn’t believe that any anything happens after you die, right? If you think there’s there’s no rebirth, you know, there’s no reincarnation, and that Eastern picture of karma and rebirth is is probably not true and you think there’s no heaven or hell.

I mean if you really think you get something like a dial tone when you die, well many people are left expecting some kind of Oblivion, some kind of positive nothingness, some some some permanent loss of experience where.

And so this notion of a of Oblivion is a a reification, but if you if you think about it more clearly, that’s precisely the kind of thing you would not mean if if it’s simply the end of experience well then you’re not going to be experiencing the end of experience right.

This is not—you didn’t—you didn’t experience an absence before you were born, right? Well the idea that you would experience is implicit in the way the question is framed, right?

There’s nothing you’re going to suffer. I mean this is something that Epicurus pointed out through Lucretius that you know death is nothing for us. You know where we are death is not and where death is we are not, right? Like there just they just non-overlapping sets of facts whatever those facts are if in fact death is the end of experience.

So, which is to say there’s nothing to worry about really if if if death is is just the end of anything.

And so how do you think that relates to is and ought?

So to come back to to is and ought I just think really what we have mean forget about morality forget about science forget about anything for the moment and just recognize that the world is such that we are confronted with a an everpresent navigation problem.

We have this the possibility of navigating both personally and collectively to places in the space of all possible experience that are just manifestly terrible. You know and I and I the worst place I call the worst possible misery for everyone right.

So it is possible to imagine a universe where every conscious system suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can you know some some version of the perfect hell right.

And then there's then it’s possible to recognize that whatever you want to call it whe whether you want to use words like good and evil or right and wrong or not every other place on the what I call the moral landscape is better than the worst possible misery for everyone right?

I agree with that completely that that's why I studied atrocity for so long because I figured if I could find out what the worst thing was that would be a pointer to the best thing because if you know the worst thing then the opposite of that is the best thing whatever that is.

That doesn’t mean you have to propositionalize, not equivalent in anything, but the fact that they are equally distant from the worst possible misery for everyone right?

So there could be, um—so I’m not, you know, this this can sound like moral relativism but it’s not, it’s—it’s an objective picture morality, I don’t think it does, but but it’s just to say that there are—there may be very different ways of living where given the, given the, have the right kind of minds involved you could be happy in very strange ways and in ways that you know would counterintuitive for you know apes like ourselves, um, but nonetheless they could be very far from the the worst possible misery for everyone.

So in any case I call this—so whatever you want to call navigating in this space moving away from just unendurable pointless misery right toward you know beauty and creativity and joy and love and you know all of the good stuff we recognize and again there’s, there’s, there’s no we haven’t seen the horizon of this we we have no idea how beautiful life could be for for minds like our own or or minds you know significantly more sensitive and creative and intelligent than our own.

I there’s no, we had a vision of Heaven as a place that was perfect where everyone that was in it was striving to make it better right right yeah so there’s there’s some we we don’t know how good things can get and we don’t know how bad things can get but we know they can get quite terrible from where our current vantage point and we know they can get quite wonderful from our current vantage point and this is where the distance between facts and values collapses for me there are—right let me ask you a question let me just land this final sentence there there are right and wrong answers with respect to how to navigate in this space right there there there is it is and they’re they’re right and wrong whether we’ve discovered them or not right we could all be wrong about the thing we should do next so as