Sam Harris || Free Will (Part 1)

Award for Nonfiction. Is Writing in Public Lectures cover a wide range of topics neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation, practice, human violence, rationality, but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves in the world is changing our sense of how we should live. We also hosts the Making Sense podcast, which was selected by Apple as one of the iTunes Best and has won a Web Award for Best Podcast in the Science and Education category. Sam, thanks

for making the time to chat with me. Happy to be here, Scott, I'm really looking forward to this chat, and I really want to set the tone by saying I appreciate your intellectual honesty and your intellectual bravery. Sometimes one can just be intellectually honest, but it happens to go with the flow of the current of the culture. But your intellection honest, and you're you don't mind being

intellectually honest if it doesn't always win your friends. So I really want to to say I appreciate that, even if I don't necessarily appreciate and if I don't necessarily agree with everything you say in your arguments. And I thought we could go through very carefully today lots of areas of mutual interest and work through them very carefully and see if we can arrive at some some maybe

even transcendent conclusions. So sure, yeah, happy to do it. Cool. So, since this is the psychology podcast, I did want to start a little bit with your your development, your child development, and that that's obviously formed some role in who you are today and kind of interest you have. I'm curious what you're like in a child as a child, and in particular in the sort of way you interacted with other people and in the way that which you engaged

with the truth as a child. Mmm. Well, in so far as I remember, Actually I just read a uh I guess it was a fourth or fifth grade you review of me by one of my one of my teachers. I just happened to find that my mother happened to produce this. Uh So it was kind of hilarious to see, uh the who I am now prefigured in who I seem to be then. But I think I, you know, I was certainly recognizable to myself as a little kid.

I think I was very logical and rational and you know, argumentative, and I was, you know, I was a little debater and negotiator, and it was I was very interested in many different things. So I was. I was a good student. But I wasn't especially happy. I don't think I was. I was. I was a perfectionist and very hard on myself, I would say, I mean, I think I was very self critical. My dad left when I was two and a half, so I you know, I you know, I don't know in so far as the pop psychodynamics of

that are are easily interpreted. I mean I think I kind of internalized that. And you know, that was that was that framed my childhood pretty decisively. But you know, I had I had a great mom and I have a great mom and and uh you know, it was, yeah, it was. It was not definitely not an unhappy childhood, but it was the thing that that really changed my life.

And I'm sure we'll get to this, but you know, when when my introspective, contemplative life started around the age of eighteen, that was a very clear break with who I used to be in terms of access to anything like tranquility or you know, any kind of ease of being in the world. So I don't remember, you know, I'm sure I had my moments as a kid that were just you know, childlike awe and wonder and joy.

And I know I did have those moments, and I had a lot of fun with my friends, but I was in terms of in terms of the the way myself seemed structured. It was always poised to be unhappy, as honestly as any self really is, but I felt like there was a layer of perfectionism and self criticism that was, you know, unusually strong. I would say, were you in the debate club? No, I don't think there was. I don't, Mike, Mike if if we had a debate club, I didn't notice it, but no, but I was. I

still would debate as you know. You know, I think one can make the error in looking at your calm demeanor, your tranquility and kind of assume that, well, there's not much emotion going on. I think one can easily make that error, as they do with a lot of people who are go through many years of meditative practice. I was struck by something you said in an interview when you were describing leaving you Your father was in the hospital, he was dying. You were seventeen years old, and you

left the hospital. You didn't really feel full motion in that moment, but you went then watched a movie. Is that right? And and all these emotions kind of poured out of you when you were able to kind of fully process or more fully process what was going on through the medium of art. Do you remember making that point in the interview. Yeah, I definitely remember the experience.

It was so the movie was right on point. It was Terms of Endearment, which has somebody dying of cancer, and if memory served so, which my dad was dying of cancer. So yeah, so I do remember that where it was it suddenly gave me access to the kind of the full grief rather than leaving me like the the Sartrey in character or the I guess it's Camu in the Stranger. Doesn't he get convicted of not crying at his mother's funeral? Yes, well, Larry David gets convicted

of many crimes like that social taboo, curb your enthusiasm. Yeah, yeah, but you know, I bring this up because to me, that was poignant when you told that story about your father, and I just wanted to bring out a little bit more of the humanity of Sam Harris, I guess was my point in doing that. I know you don't talk about personal things too often, and I certainly don't want to do it in a way that would make you uncomfortable.

But I think it's important to paint a picture of you as human as well, right before I go into full vulcan mode, Yes, yes, before we talk about Trump is also human. I think I think my my so called Trump arrangement syndrome has revealed me to be all too fraught with emotion. So right, that's a good as someone your critic would the uncontrolled emotion. Yeah, I guess not just emotion here, Okay, nagles to say I disagree on that point, but that's a debate for another time. Now.

You were really interested in martial arts early, even in your youth, right, not jiu jitsu but a nin jujitsu. Yeah, around fourteen I got into martial arts, or what seemed to be martial arts at the time. My sense of what is a truly effective martial arts has evolved since then.

But yeah, as a I think I was fourteen when I started training and did that for until I was through college, and then stopped for you know, almost twenty twenty plus years, and then then had a midlife crisis and got into Brazilian jiu jitsu and then got a lot of injuries. But that was that was fun. Well let's let's talk about your college crisis, twenty year old quite crisis. You were in Stanford. You were experimenting with

ecstasy related kind of drugs, Is that right? Yeah? Well, I had one md M, a trip that was really decisive for me, and that was my I think it was my sophomore year. Yeah, it was my sophomore year at Stanford. And did that play a role in you deciding to you dropped out quite literally dropped out of Stanford and go in the spiritual journey went on for

ten years. Yeah, yeah sort of. So kind of on paper it looks like a bad idea, you take drugs and you drop out of college, but that is what happened, And yeah, there was almost certainly a direct connection there. I mean, I think I what I experienced in that first trip was just that the mind was a very different place than I gave it credit for. You know, that it was possible to experience well being directly, that in a way that's not contingent upon the success in

one's life or in anything one thinks one wanted. Right, you know, So I had had a girlfriend break up with me the year before, or I guess, you know, just a few months before, and had been pitched into kind of real unhappiness and now I would say, you know, full on depression as a result of that. So it's like, by my happiness had seemed to be totally dependent upon being in a relationship that I that I've you know, valued and being with someone I loved, and and just

my sense of myself completely imploded. And then I had this experience on MDMA, which was a perfect counterpoint to all of that. Right, I just realized, okay, that there's there's a door in the mind that can swing open, that can leave you with the the ah utter certainty of your capacity for your own you know, your freedom really is really deep psychological freedom that doesn't need a

reference point in your life. Right. You could be on your deathbed, you could be uh, you know, you could be that you could you could tap into this way of being before anything changes in your life, right, So like it was, it was that it was that discontinuity between the way I was feeling, you know, and and you know, and obviously the mind's capacity to feel that way and anything one might you know, link it to

in one's life. Now that I should say, that's also part of what's dysfunctional about drugs, obviously, And if you're I mean, what, we want our sense of well being to have some connection to the reality of our lives and the reality of the world, because then you're you know, the alternative is you can be delusional and and you know, you could just be a heroin addict who's lying on the couch and blisting out based on on the pharmacology

of the moment, but having you have a totally dysfunctional life.

So I'm not recommending that, but it was just it was the the recognition that how I was tending to be by virtue of what I was thinking about and what I was paying attention to, was was a had really become a machine producing my unhappiness, right, And the machine stopped during this you know, six hour period on MDMA, and I could feel as I came down, and as I could feel it start up again, I felt intuitively that I could understand something about the mechanics of this

and that there were other ways to to to to arrest the hideous progress of this machine in my life. And so that's how I got into meditation and other esoteric things we could talk about, well, in terms of esoteric things. It's true, is it true that you once worked in the security detail for the Dalai Lama? Well,

not worked. I was, you know, I was really into meditation at that point, and that Dalai Lama was doing a like a month long tour of France, you know, teaching in you know, almost in a different city each night. I mean, he was practically not more than twenty four hours in any one place. So it was just literally

a tour of France. And my friends who were also you know, a long time Buddhist practitioners, many and many of whom had done three year retreats in various meditation centers in France or organizing this trip, and so I got tapped as you know, yet another other student of meditation who could be part of you know, of the logistics, and so we got you know, I got put with with you know, maybe a dozen other people as part of his security detail, which you know didn't strike me

as totally inappropriate, given I had at this point a pretty long background in martial arts. But you know, no one else did, right, So it really we weren't really a security detail, and we were the buffer between him between his real security detail and the public. Right. So like there was he had like four secret service guys with guns who were his real bodyguards, and they weren't

a dial Lama's bodyguard. No, I was. I was the I was, you know, the but ironically we were the ones who had all the conflict with the press and the public because we were the buffer between the real guys with guns and and the you know, the rabble who were could be surprisingly raucous and weird around the Dalai Lama was. It was amazing. I mean was actually one moment where somebody literally grabbed him by the robes and turned him around, so it was to get a

picture with him, right. So it was like you you know, if you if you spend any time at all in a circumstance like that, you you do discover some very odd behavior from people. But you know, it was just a it was. It was a very interesting way to be with him because I got to spend you know, a month with him, uh you know, pretty up close and just to see how he functioned in that in that mode. And he's a he's a very self actualized guy. I mean, he's just a he's just a real mench

so inspiring guy. I love spending time with people like I remember I was on a This is gonna sound funny, but I was on a party bus with Matu Ricard. Yeah, Matto was there too, yeh know, wonderful, wonderful when we were at a conference together, and I can genuinely say that he was. He seems so content with his you know. Yeah, there's something about a certain contentness with being where you know,

people are making, you know, tawdry jokes. You know, people were making inappropriate jokes about the party bus we were on, and he laughed. You know. You know, there's a certain there's something about an ease of consciousness where someone can sort of just uh get amusement from from all aspects of human nature. Yeah, Matthew's a remarkable person. As you probably know, he was a scientist before he became a monk. So he's he's, uh, you know, he's got a PhD

in molecular biology. And then you know his study, his study with some of the greatest Zuchin teachers of the twentieth century. And yeah, matt Matthews. And he doesn't you know, as you say, he doesn't take himself seriously. So he's yeah, he's a He's a wonderful guy. So this ten year period of your life, it was very formative, Peard for you studied with some very big name leaders in the in the Buddhist tradition. You study facilitated by in some

cases facilitated by Matteo. Matteu was translating you know, every every teaching I got from his teacher, Digal Kenzie. You know, Matthew was translating for and uh yeah. So I spent some time with with him and his teachers in Nepaul. What a wonderful serendipity there. I had no when I brought up Mattou's name about being on a party bus, I had no idea you had spent so much time with Mattu and he was so formative in those years

of your life. So I'm really glad. I'm glad I brought it up then I brought it up, you know, I mean I I was really amazed when I when I looked into this and preparing for this interview and I saw who you studied with. I didn't even know all these people that you knew the people, but I know you had studied with them. So my eyes widened. You know, you got such a first hand look at not only you know the character structure of some of these as well as their teachings. Right, So I'll just

mentioned some names, uh SAIDA you Pandita. Yeah, it's not like university. Yeah. Yeah, So can you tell me a little bit about that experience, because I think that you had mixed feelings about it. If i'm if, I'm yeah,

so broadly I am. When I started practicing meditation, I got into vipassana first, and vipastna is This is usually translated as insight meditation, and it comes from the the oldest school of Buddhism, the Terravada, the Buddhism of of Southeast Asia, Thailand and Burma, Sri Lanka, and it is the tradition that has given us this boom in mindfulness. Mindfulness is an export from from the you know, the

Travada of Theapastana teachings. It's not to say that doesn't have analogs and other traditions of Buddhism and even in other traditions, but it's you know, mindfulness framed as mindfulness

is really you know, Terravada Buddhism. So I started with that and spent a fair amount of time on retreat studying with you know, both Western students of the practice, like Joseph Goldstein, who's who was certainly my main Western teacher, but you know Jack Cornfield and Sharon Salzburg and all the people who started you know IMS and Spirit Rock.

I did most of my retreats at IMS, the Inside Meditation Society in Massachusetts, and they brought saida Bandita out to teach there, and he was, you know, he was their teacher of again Ravada of Apastana inside Meditation, and he was a very rigorous kind of martial style teacher who he was a monk, and when you sat with him, you took you know, some subset of the monks of ows.

So you know, you didn't eat afternoon, and you tried to only sleep four hours a night, and it was just wall to wall meditation and so I spent several months on retreat with him. I did you know, at least I did a two month retreat and I think one or two one month retreats with him. I sat with him in Australia for two months at one point,

and yeah, and that was it was extremely useful. But the logic of that practice was something that I felt that I eventually graduated from it and moved on to to a different way of thinking about just you know, what, why one is paying attention to to one's experience in this way, and what there is to realize about the nature of the mind. You get a the division conceptually is really between dualistic and non dualistic forms of mindfulness and means that's the way I tend to talk about it.

I want to talk about these things in Waking Up my meditation app or in the book by that name.

And so then I moved on to study with some of these other teachers we'll talk about, but like Matthew's teachers in Nepal, they were teaching a style of meditation called Zogchen, which is which is a non dual kind of awareness practice, which which is, you know, in some ways the same I mean, it's not that it's not that there isn't it's not that there's something different to realize ultimately, but it's a different set of instructions with respect to just know what to pay what to pay

attention to and why. And I think there's a lot that goes by the way of meditation instruction that is ultimately somewhat misleading. And and you know, if you get deeply into it, if you if you really if your life is about seeking enlightenment at any point, if you really want to fundamentally change the firmware of your mind, you know, it's possible to really get frustrated and experience a lot of psychological pain born of one's you know,

spiritual seeking. And and so that's zoake chin is A is a Tibetan teaching which is often translated as great perfection. It can also be translated as great completion. So there's a there's a you know, the the the message is there's there's a there's a a completeness and perfection to the nature of consciousness itself inherently right, that there's something that to realize about consciousness that you're not producing by your efforts, right, it's not that you're you're meditating so

hard that you know, you wind up uh, perfecting consciousness. No, it's it's it's you're you're you're recognizing something that's already there, right, This is not a something you're manufacturing. And it's an important distinction because it's you can at a certain point, you can get the sense that you know all the work you're doing contemplatively. I mean, you're sitting for for a dozen hours a day, day after day, week after week,

month after month, in many cases, year after year. If you ask yourself why you're doing that, right, that there can be an implicit logic to it that is both false and and unhappiness producing, which is that you you you can feel that you know you really are bound, right, You're really not free in this moment, and you have to do something rather heroic to get free. I mean, you have there's a prison you have to escape from, right, you have to order, there's there's a there's a disorder

in your mind that you have to put right. And even if you're even if you underst that that's not quite the right way to think about it. There's this tacit sense in each moment that you're not good enough. Your life isn't good enough, your experience isn't good enough, and that's why you are making these weird efforts in the first place. Right, I mean, you want to improve something about your your mind. Right You're you're neurotic, and

you don't want to be neurotic, right you. You're having anxiety attacks, and you don't want anxiety attacks, right you. You know, you you notice that your relationships are mediocre because you're not all that loving and you can't figure out how to get more loving, right you know. So it's like you're you've got a problem you're trying to solve.

There's a knot you're trying to untie. And so even if you're given a philosophy which says no, no, actually, the mind is intrinsically radiant and pure, and you just have to recognize that. You're trying to do that because you have a problem that you want to solve, right You're you can't you don't recognize that, really, and now you're trying to because you want to put out these very as fires in your life. So it's it is

a it's a bit of a conundrum. How you can ever get to the place where you're not making those kinds of dualistic, you know, problematized efforts, and you're actually enjoying what the mind is like before you screw it up by you know, seeking happiness. And uh so yeah, anyway, Zoakchen unties those knots very directly and and uh you know it's so it was very useful to to get

the time I got with those teachers. I mean, my main teacher was took Oregon Rippache and and also Nyosho kan Rimpa Jay and those are both people who took Oregon. I only saw in Nepaul, you know where Matthew and was. But he wasn't the you know, he wasn't the primary student of Tukurgan Rimpche he was. I was dealing with different translators at that point. So did you study with Dogo Kyense Yeah? So yeah, Diggo Cancer Repertay was was Matthew's main teacher and really wanted them. Yeah, the great

Lamas of his time. Did he appear in a dream of yours before you met him? Am I making that up? Yeah? I never forgot where I spoke about that, But I wasn't even sure if that was you, But that was you? Okay, yeah, yeah, no, I was. Actually it's funny now I remember I once I actually told the Dalai Lama who Dali Lama also studied with cancer repertay. He was his scent teacher, and

I told the Dalai Lama about this dream. But in the middle of my telling him this story, I realized that there was no way to tell the story without pointing directly at his face, because that's what digal Cans was doing to me and the dream. He was pointing in my face, and the dream doesn't make any sense. I mean, I can tell you what the dream was,

it makes absolutely no sense without pointing. But it is that it's in fact a cultural taboo to point at someone, you know, in Tibet, right like this is this is like it's essentially, you know, as far as I understand it, a candy, you know, giving someone the finger. I mean,

it's just rude. And here I'm now and I've launched very enthusiastically into telling a dream to the Dalai Lama, who I'm sitting directly across from, you know, like there's no it's just it's just me and him, and it's just you know, I've launched into this thing, and now I realize I'm about to point in his face, so I kind of half pointed. And I'm not even sure that it was a it was a coherent story at that point. But no, the dream was actually quite simple

and brilliant. Uh. It was one of those dreams where you realize that there seems to be a part of your mind that understands something that you the dream protagonist that doesn't. Right. So, like I was genuinely so I was in dialogue with you know, obviously some imaginary person in my dream, you know, a product of my own mind, but he was saying and doing things that were totally

coherent and you know, enlightening actually, uh. And the dream protagonist was fairly stupefied by being in this relationship, and the the dream protagonist was me right. So it just it was just one of those moments where where clearly the mind is bigger than than you thought you were in that moment, you know. So it's this kind of

part a partitioning of intelligence. But anyway, the dream was he was h looking directly into my eyes and he's he was saying, he was saying, tell me, tell me who you are, and and I was kind of struggling for words, and he's and he said tell me, and he pointed directly into my face, and I just got up, you know, still struggling for words, and he said tell me.

And then he then on the third tell me, he pointed, He said, tell me, and he pointed directly over my shoulder, right looking past me, as though there was someone directly behind me. But I knew there was no one behind me, right and in that like and I mean, it actually seemed like I've never heard anyone, you know, I've never heard about any exoke gen master or any other Buddhist master or any master kind of give this sort of intervention.

But there was something about suddenly having like this, the intensity of being, you know, being pointed directly to, you know, in my face, and then to have it overshoot me, you know, to kind of go over one of my shoulders. He had actually just sort of teased out the structure of selfhood in my mind, because I realized that there's there is something there is something about this self, this sense of being in relationship to oneself, that there's a

there's an I and a me. You know, this the structure of our our thought is predicated on this, the idea that you can talk to yourself, right, yeah, Like like if you're the one talking and the one hearing, how does that make any sense? Right? You already know the thing you're saying to yourself, presumably because you're saying it, right. So it's like when I'm when I uh uh, you know, I sit down at this desk and I, oh, where's that pencil? Right? Like, I'm who am I asking? Like?

Is there someone else in me who needs to be part of the search party? Right? Like? It makes absolutely no sense, and it just strikes it still. It strikes me to this day as a kind of brilliant gestural way of revealing that this is a a false situation, right, that the starting point for your paying attention to these

things is not what it seems to be anyway. So that's what you know that the dream was quite uh, it was quite powerful and that and then I went to Nepaul and got to study with him, which was which was great. That is brilliant. It's I'm laughing. One thing you said, you said, you know, you're saying the dream was quite brilliant. I'm thinking like you know, we'll get to the whole free will thing later, but like, who should take credit for the brilliance of that dream?

You know, because it's funny. Well, it's funny because some people are inclined to take if you consciously wrote that story, it would seem immodest for you to say, you know, my story is brilliant. But for some reason, you saying my dream was brilliant, No one, it doesn't at trip, it doesn't, you know, trigger that immodesty. People get what that means. And I think that's it's interesting. I just

wanted to double click on that. Right then, there's a question that are we ever more responsible for our thoughts than we are in dreams? Right? Yeah, how would we come to the answer to that question using scientific methods? I don't think there is any scientific method that'll judicate that answer, but we'll get into that. Yeah, we'll definitely get into it. And just just to close this childhood so we get to the real meat of the intellectual arguments.

You were a fiction writer, and it's maybe even inspiring. I heard somewhere that you have in a drawer somewhere a couple of novels that you wrote during that ten year period. Is that true. Yeah, I assume they're on one of my hard drives. I don't think I have. I don't know if I have a hard copy of anything at this point. But yeah. So when I when I originally dropped out of school, it was of I had a dual purpose. I was going to write fiction.

I was going to write a novel. And that's you know that just there seemed to be no reason to stay in school if that was my professional aspiration. I mean, no one cares where you went to school or whether you finished if you write the great American novel. So I started doing that, and I also got more deeply into studying meditation, and you know, went to India to study with some people and spend some time on retreat and then I would come get off and write more fiction.

But once I got sufficiently interested in the nature of the mind, I just started writing. Yeah, I cut bent toward writing nonfiction. And then then I obviously needed to go back to school to to get the bona fides to do that credibly. So that's what changed for me. But I never when I the fiction I wrote, it was I never finished something that I felt like, Okay,

this is I can really get behind this. I was growing so much as a writer that you know, I was kind of sort of the you know, it's kind of running across the bridge, and it was crumbling behind me. Like every time I finished something, I looked back on and noticed how how inadequate it was. As you know, it was not something that I was going to want to publish, So you might you probably won't. Let I do not think I'm going to publish any of these early novels. No, yeah, I say David Egle, because he's

published fiction about consciousness as well. As I could imagine, I could imagine writing fiction again, or writing a play or write I mean, I I could imagine wanting to do that. It's you know, finding the time, as you know is always the is the puzzle that needs to be solved here. But I do yeah, I could imagine doing that, but I can't quite imagine going back and dusting off the stuff I wrote in my twenties that

that's probably not going to happen. I want to read a sentence that you wrote because I have all sorts of issues with it, and I want to just give you my perspective and see what you think. You say, consider what it would actually take to have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need

to be in complete control of these factors. To me, the sentence kind of reads like you're an implicit duellist in a sense, because who is the you in that sentence? You know, it's obviously not it's obviously not something non physical, because in your own view, that wouldn't make sense. So the only remaining possibility is that it's your consciousness. And if it's your consciousness, then how is it even enough to generate ultimate free will? Since consciousness must itself be

a physical process. So even if it was fully aware of all the influential factors, and even if it were complete control of them, it would itself still haven't to be a set of physical processes with their own deterministic, antecedent causes. Also, you know, it seems to me like the role of consciousness is actually pretty large, just indirect.

You know, consciousness affects our later choices and actions rather than our immediate ones, So you're absolutely right, You're right when you say that, But I still think it does affect the things that it's still essential to what people mean by the term free will, and that might get to the crux of this argument. You know, people care about the potential for growth and the capacity to exhibit self control of destructive impulses that might detract them from

reaching their long term goals. That's what people really care about when they when they talk about free will. So I just wanted to get some of your thoughts on this because I'm not completely clear. I understand that that sentence. Yeah, well, I mean it's not really understandable in that way. I mean, what you've really just landed on is the problem with

the concept of free will. It just it doesn't it's an incoherent idea and so far as we we actually connect with what people really think they have, the concept makes no sense. I mean that there are versions of this. I mean, as you know, Dan Dannatt has tried to purify the concept of free will in ways so as to give us a you know, in his terms, a free will is worth wanting, right, Like, you know, there's a compatibileist project that that tries to say, well, you know,

obviously libertarian was called libertarian free will doesn't exist. That makes no sense. I agree on that. Here, here are all these other things we have and are and are you know, right to want, and let's just call those free will. There are several problems with that. One is that it is actually a way of just changing the subject. It's just not you're not actually interacting with what this this spurious and spooky and and incoherent thing that people

feel they have. You're not and you're not acknowledging just how many important things shift ethically once you let go of that spooky free will. I think that things really do change, and and they change in ways that are important not just for our our justice system, and you know,

they just are a very concept of justice. They're important for our ethical intuitions about just what it means to be a good person and how we should feel in the presence of of you know, all of the misadventures we have in life, of just you know, you know, colliding with with people who who bother us, annoy us, frighten us, you know, I mean, just like how should we feel about evil people? Like like what is what is? What is this whole uh uh demarcation of our of

our world into these concepts of good and evil. How should we think about all that all of these things shift to a greater or lesser degree once you get rid of this notion of free will. And Dan Dennett's project acknowledges none of that, right, And that's that's the problem I have. That's why we he and I have never agreed on this topic. He you know, the analogy I use is, you know that we're living in a

world where most people believe in Atlantis. Right, they believe all the the spooky things people tend to believe about Atlantis. They believe in an underwater kingdom and a you know, just some prior civilization that had all the answers and then got submerged, and you know, and like that's what really preoccupies them. And Dan comes along saying, no, no, no, no,

do you realize Atlantis is actually Sicily? And here are all the reasons why Sicily and Atlantis just you know, just historically, and you go into the what Plato was writing, and it's pretty clear he might have been talking about an island in the Mediterranean, and here's the argument. And okay, so now let's talk about Sicily. Right, Okay, we can talk about Sicily, but Sicily is not Atlantis right sicily is not what people think that. It's not what has

infatuated generations of people who've been talking about Atlantis. And people are infatuated by this idea that again, this is just libertarian free will, that they could have done otherwise right, Like it seems to most people that if you rewound the movie of their life to a few seconds ago, they could have thought or acted or wanted or intended

and therefore behaved differently than they did. And when you do something that angers me, if you say something that offends me, you do something that you know, you break a promise, you do, you do something, my anger also tends to presuppose that ability in you to have a moment ago to have done otherwise like you should have done otherwise right. I'm pissed now because you shouldn't have done that right. And and when you actually trace the you know that my my emotional reactivity there down to

its roots. I am relating to you differently than I would be relating to a gust of wind, or a wild animal, or a miscalibrated robot, or something else that was also behaving the laws of nature about which I would never say it should have done otherwise, right, Like when when a machine is malfunctioning, I have it may

cause tremendous harm in my life, right. Or or if a wild animal, you know, shows up and starts you know, if if a cougar shows up in my yard and starts attack me or my kids, that's an that's a horrifying problem to figure out how to solve, right, And it certainly would warrant killing the thing if I can

do it right. But at no point am I under the illusion that this is living out the consequences of its free will, and that I'm in a relationship to the kind of thing that could and shouldn't do it, could and should do otherwise if I could rewind the universe to a moment ago and people, So people are the rules ethically and psychologically seem to change entirely for people. When you're talking about people, you know, they don't think this way about chimpanzees. They don't think about this way

about people with certain kinds of brain damage. So there's a certain layer of human ability, right, behavioral regulation, linguistic production, goal setting. Right, there's that layer of our humanness, which arguably is the most important. Some of that certainly some of the most important stuff we do that convinces us that we are not part of the clockwork of the universe anymore. Right, and then, and there are other spooky ideas that that get inserted here where people wonder about

their souls. You know, they might have an immortal soul that somehow pulling the strings of the brain, or maybe there's kind of some quantum events here that that give us some degree of freedom that you know, mirror monkeys don't have, right and all, from a scientific point of view,

there's no reason to grant any of that credence. But the crucial piece here, and this is really my honestly my only original contribution to this conversation, because this is for two thousand years it's been obvious that free will did make any sense. Yeah, I mean, it's the problem is that just it doesn't make any sense. There is no way to describe causality where this, this notion of I could have done otherwise makes sense, because randomness doesn't

get you there. But the only thing that's original that I've contributed to this, or at least it's original in the sense that I didn't get it from anyone else. So I'm sure someone else has made this precise point, because is there to be made is that the starting point for this conversation is deeply mistaken. That the starting point for everyone is listen. We know we have free

will because we experience it. We have this experience of free will, the experience of I can choose to move my right hand and my left hand, and clearly I'm doing it. No one's forcing me to do it. I can take a long time and decide, and I can go back and forth like this is I am the author of my behavior here. I know this from the

first person's side. But it's very difficult to figure out how to make sense of this in terms of the streams of causality that I'm not aware of, in terms of you know, gene transcription and you know neurotransmitter behavior, and you know all of the causes reaching back to the Big Bang that I didn't author. That are you know, the state of the universe that counts for me for what I'm doing, you know, whether it's deterministic or random, all of that causality. It's hard to map free will

onto all of that. But I know I have it from the experiential side. Right. The truth is that is an illusion, right, It's not even an illusion. My point is that the illusion of free will isn't even there if you look closely at it. So there is no there is no mystery to solve experientially, right, everything about your experience is totally compatible with determinism or determinism plus randomness, neither of which gives you this freedom people think they have.

But honestly, your your behavior right now, your emotion, your intention, your thought is totally compatible with the most deterministic picture possible, Like like the novel of your life has already written. Say, let's say, let's say we live in a block universe where the future exists just as much as the past, right,

where there's literally zero degrees of freedom. There's no such thing as possibility, there's only what is actual, right, Like, so like the next thing you think, and do you know your reaction to the thing I'm saying now is is already written. Right, Let's say that's true. I'm not saying that's the universe we live in, but I am saying that your experience of yourself in the world in this moment is totally compatible with that sort of universe.

So there really is no problem to solve here. Now, there's there are many things that follow and don't follow from that, but we simply do not have an experience of free will. We have an experience of there being a difference between voluntary and involuntary action, and we can talk about the things we do experience. But free will, uh, is just not something that is that It's impossible to find a place in your subjectivity to make sense of

the claim. It's no, it's no. It makes no more sense subjectively than it does objectively or in terms of third person causes and effects. You're really hung up on the magical free will part of this of this. It's it's not hung up. It is what people mean. It is when when you have someone who feels that someone should be punished for the really punished because they deserve

their punishment, desert that just deserts, right. That is someone who feels that the logic of retribution is anchored to libertarian free will, not that their genes and their environment one hundred percent conspired to make them do what they did. It seems like the argument you're making is besides the point, though, because I think compatibleist free will when you really look at the philosophy of mind literature on compatibist free will.

I think it's a lot more like full conceptions of free will than sicily is like Atlantis in your analogy, because you know, the point is that let me let me, let me outline what I think the why what you're saying is besides the point, and you tell me why I'm wrong. I'd love to hear why I'm wrong. If I'm wrong. It seems like people can do all the things they care about if they think that they care about making choices that are somehow on cause they just

aren't understanding what that literally means. As you point out, what people really mean when they insist that free wall is important is they don't want to feel coerced. They think of causes as sources of coersion. But that's a confusion. I think people want to make choices that are consistent with their own goals and be able to deliberate about the causes where their desires aren't totally clear, and they can do those things, and it's pretty clear their consciousness

participates causally in that process. I would dispute that. I think that's uncertain, But I mean the boy, Baumeister did a global review of the literature and all this. You know, you focus on the obey we bet, I don't forget how you pronounce l ib Et studies. Yeah, but that doesn't really get at the issue, because when you actually look at the role of consciousness as playing a causal role in human behavior, you see it's a very pervasive,

strong effect of sciousness. I guess the way I view the situation is that we have certain degrees of freedom in depending on the role of the mix of conscious and unconscious processes that we can bring to bear to a task at are conscious at any moment of time. And you don't see there being a wigle room there in the degrees of freedom of a meaningful sense of

the term of free will of what people care about. Well, well, my criticism of free will is happening on another level, and bringing in consciousness is conscious is additionally a difficult thing to talk about, right, So yeah, So I'm familiar with Baumeister's work on consciousness and agency, but it doesn't get at the issue that I'm raising here. So I mean, for instance, there are certain things I'm conscious of, right, and I'm conscious and they seem to have a relationship

to my behavior. Right, So I'm conscious of you know, just deciding to do this podcast with you, right, So, like it seemed like consciousness was necessary to get us

both here to do this podcast. Right, But we've also read it no, no, no, not at all, but the so so to decide to do something in the future to organize your behavior such that you actually arrive at the appointed hour to care about right, Well, so this this is, this is voluntary behavior, and it is it's it's in conformity with various goals and promises, and you know, it's it's hard to get uh chickens to behave any

anything like this. And there's really no other animal that we know of that does a good job of organizing their behavior in this way. And we seem to do it based on uh consciously thinking, thinking about certain things and paying attention to certain things. And there's something that to say that it's conscious is to say that that

there's a qualitative character to all of that. And there's there's something that it's like to be me deciding to do a podcast with you and then you know, showing up and being here and making small mouth noises of the sort that I'm now making. And yes, this is all illuminated by consciousness in our case. Now the question is one, what what what is really going on there?

And I mean, first of all, everything that I that either of us is conscious of is being promoted into consciousness on the basis of neural activity of which we're not conscious. Right, So there's a there's a kind of base layer of neurophysiological causality that we can't inspect, and that is simply producing. It's producing everything like I'm getting to how am I getting to the end of this sentence? Right? It's in conformity with the grammar of English somehow? Sometimes right,

I make errors. I sometimes I notice them. I'm this pronounce certain words I. But but basically I'm, you know, somehow I'm getting to the end of this sentence in something like grammatically correct form. And I can't inspect the micro events that are I'm not conscious of any of the micro events they're allowing me to do that, right, So there's a there's all the unconscious processing that our

conscious phenomenology sits on top of. Now the question is, and this is you know, essentially a criticism of of what Baumeister was up to there. There's much much of what we seem to do consciously. It remains mysterious why

consciousness need be associated with any of these things. Right, Like, we could imagine building robots that were that could pass the tour the Turing test, that could do all of these things without there being something that it's like to be those robots, right and so and and maybe that's not in fact possible. Maybe conscious maybe a certain level

of intelligent behavior just produces consciousness. You know that that, you know, the jury is still out on that fact that I like the idea that free will evolved in humans. You don't. You don't like that argument at all? Well, no, it was. But what would for if we could if we build a robot that can do a podcast, that can agree to do a podcast, that will show up at the appointed hour, that will put it in its calendar, and that we'll that that will have a touring, a

touring test, passing conversation with you? At what point in our building and at what point in the manufacture of that robot and in your interaction with it, however pleasant? Will you imagine that we inserted free will into its code? You know? From my perspective, it's just when we've been able to give it conscious control in some way, to be able to override its programming so to speak. You know,

I mean humans evolved, you can't override its programming. It's first, we are just so of course we are just our biology. What else would we be. But isn't the point that our biology encompasses all the interesting stuff that we all are? I mean, you could still say the robot it means something for the robot too, to be a unique, unique robot, right, I mean don't don't you don't you think that that the interesting thing is that you know the biology that

the biology encomplashes. You know all the unique aspects of of what Sam Harris is and who Sam Harris is, including your unconscious and your consciousness. But but so the things of which I'm unconscious. Right, So so here's here's the I'm just trying to think of how to how to get it get at this so as to have it have the point Land. Thanks for listening to this

episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in on the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the psychology podcast dot com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.