Making Sense - Sam Harris - #282 — Do You Really Have a Self？

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.840 okay well sorry for the long hiatus here but i finally caught covid or it caught me

00:00:55.260 there's not much to report about my actual experience it was not especially terrible

00:01:02.260 given the possibilities but it was also not just a cold either i was left feeling quite grateful to

00:01:11.540 have been vaccinated and boosted and to have had paxlovid available to me i'm not sure what it did

00:01:20.300 apart from produce a truly galling taste in my mouth but um i just don't know what the

00:01:27.340 counterfactual was i don't know how i would have done if i hadn't taken it anyway it was not a lot

00:01:32.920 of fun but it was also manageable so happy to be back and uh to give you today's podcast today i'm

00:01:42.320 speaking with jay garfield jay is a professor in the humanities and professor of philosophy logic and

00:01:48.900 buddhist studies at smith college and he is also a visiting professor of buddhist philosophy at harvard

00:01:54.480 divinity school and he is the author of most recently the book losing ourselves learning to

00:02:01.400 live without a self and we get deep into that topic i found it a really useful conversation we talk

00:02:10.200 about how the self is an illusion must be an illusion can't be what it seems etc from a wide variety of

00:02:20.700 angles and we do that fairly systematically so i hope you find it both useful and interesting i think the

00:02:32.520 nature of what we are as subjects as persons as experiencers in the world really is central to

00:02:41.380 everyone's concerns whether they know that or not it is as i point out inextricable from the question of

00:02:49.100 why we suffer and how we can be happy how we can live better lives what it means to be a good person

00:02:57.320 in the world how we can be ethical all of these questions are interlinked anyway we get deep into

00:03:04.280 it so without further delay i bring you jay garfield

00:03:07.780 i am here with jay garfield jay thanks for joining me well thanks for having me it's a real pleasure

00:03:19.140 so um you are a philosopher who uh is um focused on areas that are really dear to my heart let's

00:03:27.300 um before we jump in can you summarize your your intellectual and academic background and

00:03:34.060 orientation sure i tend to move around a lot that is i work in foundations of cognitive science

00:03:40.740 philosophy of mind logic indo-tibetan buddhist philosophy cross-cultural hermeneutics ethics

00:03:47.340 a little bit of this and that i'm not really a specialist

00:03:49.840 hmm well so i want to focus on the topic of your recent book and that book is losing ourselves

00:03:56.800 learning to live without a self and um that is an explicitly buddhist framing of the you know

00:04:05.420 what could be considered one of the central mysteries slash paradoxes slash illusions of our

00:04:12.940 being in the world and so i my goal for this conversation is to make the claim that the self

00:04:20.880 is an illusion as uh understandable as possible for people and this is something that people find

00:04:28.980 really inscrutable uh even those who are seeking to penetrate this illusion through practices like

00:04:35.820 meditation i mean even if they admit that this is a a worthy goal to have an insight on this front

00:04:42.620 uh and are not at all skeptical about it they still find it very difficult to think about

00:04:48.680 and uh and to say nothing of all of the people who think it's a preposterous claim on its face and

00:04:55.820 that it sounds even undesirable if such a thing could be understood or experienced directly

00:05:01.840 so um before we jump into that central question and and either this will link up with

00:05:07.600 with ethics and cognitive science and other areas first tell me how did you come to be influenced by

00:05:16.520 the buddhist framing of all of this what's your entanglement with buddhism and and meditation

00:05:23.060 practice and any other related issue there sure first let me say that while there are certainly a lot

00:05:29.540 of buddhist ideas in this book and i draw on some buddhist texts i also draw on the western

00:05:35.940 philosophical tradition yeah in particular on the work of david hume but also contemporary

00:05:41.000 phenomenology so i really take it to be a more cross-cultural look at this than a specifically

00:05:46.240 buddhist look but to answer your question i began working in buddhist philosophy quite a while ago

00:05:54.220 largely at the instigation of students at the college where i then taught at hampshire college

00:06:00.200 who were really interested in buddhist philosophy and dragged me into it kicking and screaming

00:06:04.680 and it was um as a result of getting interested in teaching this material that it became

00:06:10.600 an important research interest for me and so for the last 30 years or so i've been spending a lot of

00:06:16.580 my intellectual time with indian and tibetan buddhist texts and some east asian buddhist texts

00:06:21.400 and trying to place them in conversation with western philosophy and to bring buddhist philosophy more into

00:06:28.220 the mainstream of the philosophical curriculum around the world i find the buddhist tradition

00:06:34.060 a very rich very complex very large tradition and i think that to ignore buddhist ideas when we're

00:06:40.220 doing philosophy is simply um irresponsible given the uh the extent and the depth and the rigor

00:06:46.860 of that tradition and in particular when we're thinking about questions like the nature of the human

00:06:53.420 person or the nature whether there's a self there or not buddhists have been working on this problem

00:06:58.220 for a long time western philosophers have as well of course but the buddhists have distinctive

00:07:03.020 contributions and when we place the buddhist and the western ideas together we often get a lot more

00:07:08.060 clarity and that's what i'm trying to do in this book yeah yeah and what what's been your engagement

00:07:13.900 with the methodologies whereby buddhists have traditionally come to have their insights and

00:07:21.260 opinions on these topics specifically meditation yeah well there's a lot of methodologies within

00:07:27.660 buddhism many different meditative traditions but also a lot of specifically academic philosophical

00:07:33.740 practice i'm not a religious person and i'm not much of a meditator i'm somebody who engages with

00:07:41.820 this work philosophically and that's something that many buddhist scholars have done as well

00:07:47.340 i mean there's always this myth that if you go to a buddhist monastery you're going to find lots

00:07:51.420 of people sitting in meditation in fact what you find is lots of people sitting in classrooms in

00:07:56.700 offices in kitchens and people doing various jobs but among those jobs teaching and debating philosophy

00:08:03.980 and so i think of my practice as more in the line with academic buddhist practice that is working on

00:08:10.940 ideas debating analyzing writing asking questions that's what i do have you had more contact with

00:08:18.940 galupas than with any other tradition within vajrayana buddhism yes my my principal teachers in the buddhist

00:08:26.380 tradition have almost all been in the galupa tradition and many of the commentaries on which i rely and a lot

00:08:33.180 of the work that i've translated is galuk work yeah so i also certainly read in other traditions i'm not a

00:08:39.660 sectarian defender of the galuk lineage i also read work in the sakya kagu and yingma lineages

00:08:47.420 and in the rima or non-sectarian movement of the 19th century so i read pretty broadly in that area

00:08:55.180 and of course when you're reading in chinese and japanese buddhist philosophy these tibetan lineages

00:08:59.900 have no relevance at all so yeah i try to be pretty broad but my the people from whom i've learned the most

00:09:06.060 are certainly people in the galuk lineage yeah yeah and that and that would certainly bias everything

00:09:12.540 in the direction of scholastic scholarly philosophical emphasis you know and conceptual analysis as being

00:09:21.100 intrinsic to any path of practice you know you get you certainly get more of that with the galupas than

00:09:27.180 with the ning mapas or kagu schools that's true but of course the sakya lineage is also highly academic

00:09:34.700 and scholastic yeah and i think the way to put this is if you're somebody like me who's trained as a

00:09:40.300 professional philosopher and is trained to be scholastic when you encounter the galuk and the sakya

00:09:46.300 lineages you kind of feel like you've come home yeah yeah okay so let's jump in here the self what do you

00:09:55.020 think most people mean by the term self so when we propose to the the naive listener that the self

00:10:06.300 is an illusion or it's a construct and those those are different claims obviously or that it's it's not

00:10:13.820 what it seems to be what is the the object that's coming under conceptual or empirical attack there

00:10:24.860 sure let's begin by drawing a distinction and then by talking a bit about illusion and then coming to

00:10:33.420 the self illusion so i'm going to try to be a little bit systematic here there's a distinction

00:10:37.820 that runs through my book and one that i think is very important between the self and the person and

00:10:44.540 so while i argue in the book that the self is a non-existent thing and a chimera i'm not denying that

00:10:51.820 we exist as persons and i want to replace the idea that we exist as selves with the idea that we exist

00:10:58.540 as persons yeah the second thing to say is that when i think about illusion i tend to think of this

00:11:04.940 in a very indian way and in most indian philosophical traditions including the buddhist tradition an illusion

00:11:13.100 is always defined as something that exists in one way but appears in another way so for instance when we

00:11:19.980 say that a mirage is an illusion we mean that it exists as a refraction pattern of light but it

00:11:26.140 appears to be water when we look at the muller-lyer illusion we say that those two lines exist as equally

00:11:34.300 long but appear to be different so when i talk about the self illusion i'm going to be talking about the

00:11:40.540 person existing as a person but often illusorily taken to be a self so what do i mean by a self

00:11:50.220 i mean by the self the thing that we kind of instinctively atavistically think that we are

00:11:57.100 the me that owns my body the me that stands behind and owns my mind the subject of my mental states the

00:12:06.460 agent that acts upon the world but isn't quite in the world and it's a hard illusion to really get

00:12:13.420 people to see in part because it's so atavistic and in part because when you put it into words

00:12:20.940 it sounds preposterous so when i say that i naively and instinctively don't take myself to be

00:12:29.100 my body or to be my mind but to own them as a separate thing well that sounds crazy but it is

00:12:35.820 how we think and i use a thought experiment in the early part of the book to illustrate that

00:12:41.180 and the thought experiment's really simple just imagine somebody whose body you'd like to have

00:12:47.500 for a little while or for a long time the moment you form that desire whether the desire makes sense

00:12:54.140 or not you've told yourself that you are not your body you're something that has a body and that

00:12:59.260 could in principle have some other body and you can do the same thing with your mind you can imagine

00:13:04.460 a mind you would really love to have for a little while or for a long time and if you can form that

00:13:09.900 desire then you don't regard yourself as identical to your mind you regard yourself as something that

00:13:16.460 has a mind and could have a very different mind maybe a better one maybe a worse one but it's

00:13:21.740 that thing that we think of behind our experience the thing that's pure subject and never object

00:13:28.540 that's pure agent that acts upon the world that we take to be free of the causal nexus that's the

00:13:34.940 thing that i take to be the self and i think that it's almost maybe a universal illusion that that's the

00:13:42.220 way in which we exist even though when we subject it to analysis we find that it doesn't make a lot of

00:13:49.020 sense but we also find that lots of philosophy not just western philosophy but also indian philosophy

00:13:57.020 also philosophy and other traditions takes that atavistic idea of a self and then ramifies it

00:14:04.700 into a kind of philosophical theory about what that self must be like in greek we get the psuche the kind

00:14:10.620 of soul that then moves its way works its way into the judaic and christian and islamic traditions in

00:14:18.380 india we get the atman the thing that persists through lives and remains constant while everything

00:14:24.300 else changes and what we get then is a kind of sophisticated philosophical theory about what that

00:14:31.580 self might be like and my take is that those theories are kind of like theories of how deep the water is in

00:14:38.620 a mirage you start out with something that doesn't exist and then try to figure out what its nature is

00:14:44.140 where what i think we need to do is to try to work our way out of that illusion and come to understand

00:14:49.660 ourselves as persons things that are part of the world that are embedded in the world that are

00:14:55.580 embodied that are interdependent that are causally conditioned that are kind of continua of

00:15:03.660 psychophysical processes rather than individual things and that are in that only exist in interaction

00:15:10.620 with other persons in a social context and if we understand ourselves that way we get a much deeper

00:15:16.460 and much richer understanding of what it is to be a human being yeah so let me see if i can ground this

00:15:22.220 in the experience of our listeners this is something i've done at many points before in discussing

00:15:28.140 meditation but it's i think it's important to make this um visceral for people because i think most

00:15:34.700 people many people intellectually would repudiate the concept of the self that you just put forward

00:15:42.780 you know if i pulled in my friend dan dennett here he would say well i don't believe in any self of

00:15:48.300 that sort i the self i believe in is simply the person right the whole person and he would be right to

00:15:55.180 say that but he would not be honest about the nature of most people's experience virtually every

00:16:02.540 person's experience and i would allege his experience as well which is that of being a kind

00:16:08.380 of passenger in the body of a sort you just described where you're but most people don't feel identical

00:16:14.220 to their bodies they feel that they have bodies they feel that they're appropriating the body

00:16:20.140 from some position of subjectivity very likely in the head right they feel like a locus of consciousness

00:16:26.860 and attention and will this connects us to the perennial debate about the nature of free will and it's that

00:16:35.660 inner homunculus that sense that you're behind your eyes as a subject and therefore as a center

00:16:45.420 to experience that we refer to when we say i or me most of the time now of course we we do think

00:16:54.380 of ourselves as people we think of our bodies as being ours we understand intellectually that that whatever

00:17:01.500 we are as minds and agents is arising out of the the whole body but when you pay attention when you

00:17:09.420 feel what in you is implicated when someone looks into your eyes or points at you or refers to you

00:17:16.780 when you become self-conscious before a crowd there is this experience of being

00:17:23.580 an inner subject that is threatened or implicated right you feel and in that case just take the case of

00:17:31.420 acute self-consciousness your own face becomes a kind of mask right you're not identical to your

00:17:38.140 face you're you're behind your face and in some sense your face is is misbehaving i mean think think

00:17:43.580 of what it's like to be so embarrassed that you're blushing right here and you're blushing obviously against

00:17:51.980 your will and you are the the one implicated in the center of it all feeling at war with your experience

00:17:59.420 and you're and and in those moments your body is in some sense part of the world right you are you

00:18:05.820 are the inner man or woman and everything else is out there and it is from that place of being this

00:18:14.140 embattled subject that virtually everyone seeks to have a better experience in life to get out of the

00:18:22.060 position of always looking over your own shoulder and being abstracted away from your experience but

00:18:27.740 rather to have experiences that are so good and compelling that you are unified with them and

00:18:33.500 then we call these experiences flow experiences or peak experiences those moments of unselfconscious

00:18:39.020 unity with an athletic performance or an intellectual engagement or pure pleasure whatever it is those

00:18:45.980 become highlights of the day and the rest is us as subjects thinking thinking thinking talking to

00:18:53.740 ourselves in a way that is paradoxical and perhaps we can examine but it is a subset of the person it is

00:19:00.140 the subject inside that is the self whatever you may believe about its emergent dependency on the brain and

00:19:08.460 the rest of the body and its entanglement with the world yeah that's a very nice way of putting it and

00:19:13.580 i'd like to emphasize something that you said in passing and that was you talked about having a kind of

00:19:19.420 inner experience or inner world and part of the self illusion is the illusion that our experiences

00:19:26.860 and our actions happen in a kind of inner space that's outside of physical space and time and that

00:19:34.940 somehow physical space and time is all exterior to us but that we have this inner life happening in

00:19:40.780 an inner space and what that does is it kind of removes us in consciousness from the world and takes the

00:19:46.940 world to be something of which we're a kind of spectator or upon which we can act but to which we don't

00:19:53.260 belong and again the moment we say it it might sound crazy so that nobody thinks that on reflection

00:20:00.940 perhaps well some people probably do but most of us don't but the moment we stop reflecting we fall right

00:20:08.220 back into it and that's the illusion just as you could measure those lines in the mueller liar diagram

00:20:14.140 convince yourself that they are the same same length but still when you look at them they

00:20:20.700 look different just when we look at our experience it feels broken into subject and object inner and

00:20:27.820 outer agent and action and that all implicates this idea of a non-spatio-temporal inner ego or self

00:20:37.660 that inhabits our body and mind or makes use of our body and mind in engaging with the world

00:20:43.500 and that's the illusion that i'm i'm i'm really concerned with here okay well before we perform

00:20:48.940 surgery on this concept and experience why do you think this is important right i mean this is i'll

00:20:56.460 i'll give you my answer in a second but i would love to know what you think the significance of

00:21:03.100 of all this all this inquiry is i think it's important for several reasons one reason is that i really

00:21:11.340 do believe that part of our task as human beings is the socratic task right no know thyself to try to

00:21:19.660 understand who we are and what it is to lead a human life and so the clearer we can get on that the more

00:21:26.140 we actually have a kind of authentic self-understanding but the other issue is a moral issue that is that

00:21:32.860 very often the self-illusion functions as a kind of foundation for moral egoism that i think can be

00:21:41.820 extraordinarily corrosive it also can be the foundation of a lot of moral reactive attitudes

00:21:49.020 that can be very corrosive reactive attitudes like blame and anger where we take other people to be

00:21:55.660 selves acting freely and forget about the kinds of causal relations in which they're implicated so i

00:22:02.780 think that the self-illusion actually inhibits our relationships i also think as you pointed out earlier

00:22:10.780 the place where the self-illusion disappears is when we're in flow states and when we're in flow states

00:22:18.220 we're in states of real expertise as well as states of real happiness and if we can understand that the

00:22:26.380 self-illusion is one that breaks flow and takes us out of real expertise and can often suck the joy out of

00:22:35.900 our lives then becoming more aware of the self-illusion might enable us to be more attentive to what brings

00:22:42.860 us into flow and so lead us to live happier more effective lives so for all of those reasons i think

00:22:49.820 this isn't a matter of kind of idle philosophical curiosity but one that can actually enrich our lives

00:22:56.940 if we get clearer about it hmm yeah i would i would just add that the the obverse side of that coin

00:23:03.740 of flow is you know all of the psychological suffering that is anchored to this feeling of self and when you

00:23:10.940 you can cut through the illusion that suffering itself can evaporate right that it's it this insight

00:23:20.460 into selflessness is a kind of psychologically speaking a kind of universal solvent of psychological

00:23:28.060 suffering uh and that's really i mean that is the the explicit promise of buddhist you know soteriology

00:23:34.940 right i mean the suffering and the end of suffering right we're talking the whole buddhist project was

00:23:39.580 to or the the buddha's whole project was to diagnose why we suffer and an insight into selflessness is at

00:23:50.140 the root of the the remedy there and i mean i would just say personally this is something obviously i'm

00:23:57.900 interested in the philosophical and conceptual side of this but um for me personally being able to

00:24:06.060 to experience the illusoriness of the self has been the most important thing i've ever learned in my

00:24:14.140 life and it's just with it and it's really it's really one without a second and it shouldn't be

00:24:20.300 surprising that it can be experienced right because we're making a claim about what's true about the

00:24:26.540 nature of consciousness in each moment and the claim is not that there is a self and you can by some

00:24:34.060 process of analysis or meditative insight get rid of it it's no there's it is not there in the first

00:24:42.540 place and it can be discovered its absence can be discovered in a way that changes the character of

00:24:50.940 experience i mean its absence can be felt its absence can be be made salient and that isn't a not a claim

00:24:59.340 that needs to be taken on faith by anyone it's merely an empirical claim that is there to be

00:25:05.340 investigated so the goal of a conversation like this you know if not to actually precipitate that

00:25:10.780 experience in the listener is to make the terrain sound plausible enough that a person has some indication

00:25:21.340 of of of where they would look to find it and the you know the path by which they they might actually

00:25:28.860 arrive there so it's essentially describing the map to the territory as clearly as we can and to that end

00:25:35.980 let's talk about this from both the so-called objective or third person side and the subjective or or

00:25:43.740 first person side because they they yield substantially the same view in my experience but they seem very

00:25:50.860 different from the third person side when we're talking about the physical universe that includes bodies and

00:25:58.300 brains and you know everything that science and most of western philosophy is going to acknowledge to

00:26:06.380 be real there the existence of a truly separate self a truly dualistic picture of what a person is

00:26:18.380 doesn't make any sense at all i mean it's just it's obvious from that point of view that there is

00:26:22.700 simply the physical universe and you are arising within it as an expression of it you're inseparable from

00:26:29.740 it materially you're constantly exchanging atoms with it across the boundary of your skin you're breathing

00:26:37.340 yourself out and you're breathing in the environment there is no bound there's no real boundary that a

00:26:43.580 physicist is going to want to fight for here and it's on that basis that any radical disjunction

00:26:52.860 between a person and the world can be denied and and this is where this is why a notion of free will

00:27:01.020 you know as in libertarian free will never made any sense to anyone who thought about it i mean it's just

00:27:06.700 obvious that there's the total set of all that happens in the universe and fully within that part

00:27:14.140 of the venn diagram as a subset of what happens are all the things that quote you do right your actions

00:27:21.820 are part of the physics of things and can't be otherwise and so i guess throwing it back to you here do you

00:27:28.780 see that as a an incontestable and a non-controversial starting point from the outside yeah i think that's

00:27:35.340 an extremely important starting point i would only add one aspect to that if i might and that is that as

00:27:43.020 hyper social beings which we are in which we you know we've evolved into that kind of status we don't

00:27:50.700 only find ourselves inseparably embedded in the physical universe we find ourselves inseparably

00:27:58.300 embedded in a social universe embedded with other people with other persons and that becomes

00:28:05.740 extraordinarily important because one of the mechanisms of that embedding one of the many

00:28:11.020 mechanisms is language and when we acquire language we acquire a medium through which we introspect

00:28:19.980 and through which we understand ourselves that's entirely transformative and we can have the kind

00:28:26.860 of illusion that when i find myself for instance believing right now that i'm talking to you that i

00:28:33.100 do that by introspecting and finding a little sentence in there that says hey jay right now you're talking

00:28:38.460 to sam but that's of course crazy i'm interpreting my own myself in terms of a language that's socially

00:28:45.420 constituted i understand myself as a philosopher or as a teacher or as a son or as a father in terms of

00:28:53.740 social relations and so we end up being constructed not as autonomous beings who enter a world and then

00:29:02.860 interact with it but we're constructed and emerge out of a world that is both physical and social and

00:29:11.100 everything we are reflects that fact and reflects that constant interdependence and that dynamic

00:29:17.660 interplay between our bodies and the physical environment around us between our psychological

00:29:24.940 states and the psychological states of others and you just can't understand who we are without that i think

00:29:31.740 that's extraordinarily important and as you put it if we were to do physics or chemistry or biology or

00:29:38.940 psychology we can do all of that and we do all of that without ever saying oh yes and then there's

00:29:44.780 the self and we've got to think about that too because it simply falls out of the equation it's not part

00:29:50.540 of that that illusion isn't one that's propagated by our best science yeah you used a word interdependent

00:29:59.100 there which obviously has buddhist overtones and links up with a another concept of that we might refer to

00:30:08.780 by the phrase conventional existence of things yes so maybe we should uh explain some of that uh or

00:30:18.060 introduce some of those distinctions and you know this in your book you reference the um the story of

00:30:25.020 uh king melinda nagasena to do this and and you also uh you use a few other examples i you know hume has

00:30:31.900 um an approach here with his church analogy so maybe talk about the way in which the things you know

00:30:40.940 including people uh in the world exist but their existence is a kind of paradox and or things exist by

00:30:50.380 convention which is not quite the same thing as something existing truly independently from everything

00:30:56.620 else that's right oftentimes when people hear the idea of conventional truth as opposed to ultimate

00:31:04.700 truth they think that what this is is a kind of second class sort of reality an ersatz sort of reality

00:31:12.540 that isn't really real something you do until ultimate truth comes along but that's a deep

00:31:18.060 misunderstanding so let's begin with the idea of dependent origination and then work our way into

00:31:23.340 into conventional existence when in the buddhist world we talk about dependent origination we mean

00:31:31.100 that everything that occurs occurs in dependence on a vast network of countless causes and conditions

00:31:39.820 my speaking depends upon all kinds of things happening in my nervous system but it also depends

00:31:45.820 upon my being able to breathe and there being oxygen in the air it depends upon the things that

00:31:51.020 i've been taught the things upon which i've reflected it depends upon the fact that you're

00:31:55.980 at the other end of this conversation and that i see you as an interlocutor when we talk about that

00:32:01.500 dependence in the buddhist world we often distinguish three different dimensions of that interdependence the

00:32:09.980 first the one i've been stressing so far is causal interdependence effects depend upon their causes and there

00:32:17.100 are many different kinds of causes some of which are antecedent some of which are simultaneous we

00:32:23.180 don't need to worry about that botany now but even when you think about an ordinary event like say turning

00:32:29.100 the lights on you might say that flicking the switch is the cause you might say that the power plant and

00:32:34.780 the electric grid are the cause of the lights being on you might say that your desire to read is the cause for

00:32:40.700 the lights being on all kinds of different causes to which we can appeal so the causal nexus isn't

00:32:46.220 linear it's a real mesh but secondly we talk about part whole dependence the technical term for that is

00:32:54.300 myriological dependence so a whole entity depends for its existence on its parts i depend on my liver and

00:33:03.900 my spleen and my lungs and my hair and all of that stuff to be who i am but parts also depend upon their

00:33:11.180 holes my heart can't function as a heart without being embedded in my body my liver isn't my liver

00:33:17.340 unless it's in me and so forth or to take other kinds of analogies the college at which i teach depends

00:33:24.220 upon its faculty and its students and its library and its buildings and its administrators and so forth

00:33:29.340 but each of those things depends upon the college in order to be a classroom building or a teacher

00:33:36.060 or a student or an administrator so that's a bi-directional myriological interdependence

00:33:42.460 yeah but the third form of interdependence the hardest one for most people to get their minds around

00:33:49.100 but the most important one in some ways for the present purposes is dependence on conceptual imputation

00:33:56.780 that is things depend for their identities upon the ways in which we understand them and i want to

00:34:04.380 start with a really easy example to make that clear and it's an example that i use throughout the

00:34:10.140 book and that's the example of money if i've got a five dollar bill in my hand nobody denies that

00:34:16.940 it's actually true that i've got five dollars there unless it's counterfeit of course but what i've got is

00:34:22.300 a piece of paper in green ink there's nothing about the paper and the green ink that make it worth five

00:34:28.460 dollars it's worth five dollars because we've got the institution of the federal reserve because i can

00:34:36.700 exchange it for five ones because i can buy something with it people will accept it for as as a five dollar

00:34:44.140 note unlike say an iou or some confederate money and it's important to see that the identity of that

00:34:51.180 piece of paper as a five dollar note depends upon this vast network not only of physical causes and

00:34:57.580 conditions but of conceptual activity that constitutes its value as a five dollar note i mean after all

00:35:05.900 if i've got a five dollar note and a twenty dollar note the paper and the ink are worth exactly the same

00:35:11.980 in both of those cases it's not like there's four times as much really cool paper and ink in the twenty

00:35:17.340 dollar note as there is in the five but we have different conceptual responses to them and those

00:35:22.780 conceptual responses don't reflect the identity of the two notes as a five and a ten rather they

00:35:29.660 constitute that identity and the more we look the more we see that almost everything that we take

00:35:36.860 seriously as a real existent is interdependent in all of these three senses it's causally interdependent

00:35:44.620 it's myriologically interdependent but it's also dependent for its identity on our conceptual

00:35:51.420 resources now that's important because when we think about things that are extended in time

00:35:58.060 like persons who often live for you know 60 70 80 90 100 years and we think about the difference

00:36:05.420 between what that person was when its body was brand new when it first you know was delivered out of

00:36:11.740 the womb and what it might be like when it's an adult or an aged being those are very different

00:36:17.820 bodies but we unite them through a conceptual imputation by seeing that they're physically

00:36:23.900 causally connected that they share some parts that they that one is the secret that one part of the

00:36:29.500 sequence is caused by earlier parts of the sequence and we conceptually decide to say let's call that one

00:36:35.980 thing and that gives us a person but that person is something that is every bit as constructed as an

00:36:43.260 entity as a dollar bill is but just because the dollar bill or the twenty dollar bill or the five

00:36:48.940 dollar bill just because the fact that those are constructed doesn't make them unreal but rather

00:36:55.340 describes that in which their reality consists when we understand the constructed nature of our own

00:37:02.780 identities a construction in which we are not the only agents in which other people participate as

00:37:08.460 well we see that our existence as constructed beings doesn't amount to our non-existence rather

00:37:15.900 it constitutes our mode of existence when we understand ourselves as persons we understand ourselves

00:37:23.260 as interdependent artifacts in that sense hume in the in the treatise of human nature makes the beautiful

00:37:31.180 point that human beings are natural artificers that we are born to make things among the things we make

00:37:39.180 are cookies and cakes houses and cities but we also make cultures we also make ideas and i think that the

00:37:49.660 deepest part of this whole um our activity as artificers is that one of the things that we make is

00:37:55.980 ourselves and in a lot of ways we persons are the most sophisticated things that we human beings

00:38:03.820 make as natural artificers and so oftentimes you can understand the illusion of the self as the illusion

00:38:13.180 that something that we've in fact made was something that existed independently and that we just found

00:38:18.940 it would be as though you thought that here's how money originated somewhere on a beach somebody saw lots

00:38:25.420 of pieces of paper and coins and then noticed that they were each valuable and that you could exchange

00:38:31.580 them for things and that you could put them in the bank and so they started doing that but that the

00:38:36.060 value in the coins in the papers was just there before we did anything with them nobody would accept

00:38:42.460 that view i want to suggest that it's exactly that way with us that we're not just great apes who happen

00:38:48.940 to be to discover that they were persons but we've constructed ourselves as persons and then erroneously

00:38:55.980 think that that's because we noticed that we had selves okay so i can imagine some listener being very

00:39:04.060 skeptical about this analogy to the dollar the claim would be well it's obvious that there are different

00:39:11.580 types of existence among all the the myriad objects and properties in the world and yes some things are

00:39:19.740 socially constructed some things only exist by virtue of our agreeing that they exist and money is among

00:39:27.500 those many things you know something is a dollar because we say it is and the moment we stop saying it is

00:39:33.500 well then it ceases to be that and there are you know there are cocktail parties and corporations and other

00:39:39.580 things might be constructed in this way but there are other things that exist whether or not we even know about

00:39:46.860 them much less have formed the right concepts about them but and and had conversations about them so you

00:39:54.060 know if a new virus comes flying out of a bat next week and begins to spread surreptitiously

00:40:01.100 throughout the world making people sick well that virus is what it is whether we know

00:40:07.340 about it or not and its efficacy in making people sick will be what it what it is whether

00:40:14.220 we've learned to even talk about it or not much less cure it so there are different ways in which things

00:40:21.260 exist and perhaps the self is much more like a an unknown an unnamed virus than it is like a

00:40:31.020 a dollar that was the mere invention of people at a certain moment in time

00:40:37.260 and that the self has and now i'm referencing your book and and your own terminology this self has the

00:40:44.860 properties of priority and unity and subject object duality and agency of the kind that

00:40:54.620 we discover in ourselves it's me in here and i can think and do whatever the hell i want and i have

00:41:02.460 free will i'm a me yes i'm in my body perhaps in some paradoxical way and i'm sure i'm dependent

00:41:09.820 on my brain in ways that i can't introspect about but all of this highfalutin talk about

00:41:15.740 interdependence and emergent causation and all the rest maybe there's something of interest to say

00:41:24.380 there with respect to the neuroscience of being a self or the the the information processing aspect

00:41:32.300 of of what's actually happening in my brain but as a matter of phenomenology as a matter of lived

00:41:39.260 experience there's a simple point of view that is as undeniable as any conceivable feature of

00:41:48.140 experience and it's that i'm me and i'm not you and so none of what you've said really has put that

00:41:56.140 into question that's right not nothing that i've said so far in this conversation has but now maybe

00:42:01.500 it's time to start doing that because what you've done is very ably characterized the self-illusion

00:42:09.740 and part of the uh the kind of tell there the giveaway is that you talked about it as a kind of

00:42:16.700 undeniable phenomenological fact a fact about our experience and i think that we have to be really

00:42:24.780 careful when we go from how things seem to us to how they are because of course we know that we're

00:42:33.100 all subject to illusions of all kinds some of those illusions are what you might call accidental

00:42:39.740 illusions like the mueller lyre illusion that you've got to kind of you encounter sometimes but not others

00:42:45.180 or the bent stick illusion or something like that other illusions are pretty constant so for instance

00:42:52.380 the illusion that our visual field is uniformly colored or that it doesn't have a hole in the

00:42:57.180 center of it the illusion that our senses simply deliver the world to us just as they are instead

00:43:05.020 of thinking about perception as a complicated neurological construction system and so forth so that we can

00:43:12.380 we know that we can't simply go from the the phenomenology to metaphysics directly and so that's an

00:43:19.660 important cautionary right there now when we start looking at the properties that you correctly assigned

00:43:27.420 to the illusory self things like primordial independence free agency pure subjectivity unity simplicity all of

00:43:37.900 those those are properties of the illusion and we can kind of see that in a bunch of different ways

00:43:46.460 let's start with the one that you've mentioned um several times already and that i haven't really

00:43:50.860 addressed and that's the question of free agency oftentimes especially in modern western cultures

00:43:59.100 we part of the self illusion is the illusion that we can literally do whatever we want that we've got

00:44:06.060 libertarian freedom and that's the illusion that while everything else is part of the causal matrix that

00:44:14.220 somehow we stand outside of that causal matrix the real locus classicus for that of course in the

00:44:21.100 western tradition is saint augustine who basically invented the idea of free will and when he did that

00:44:28.620 he invented two things one was the idea of a will as a kind of component of of the ego and the other was

00:44:35.660 its exemption from the laws of causality and the theological reasons for doing that have to do with

00:44:40.620 the odyssey and we don't have to go there but it is worth pointing out that if you've taken a psychology

00:44:45.660 course you don't suddenly find oh yes and there's the will that's the will part of the brain or first

00:44:51.660 there's a cause a perception then there's a bit of will and then there's an action the idea of the

00:44:56.940 will simply is completely inert in psychological theory let's um spell that out a little more because

00:45:03.740 there's a point that i'm embarrassed i've never made before given my bona fides as a critic of

00:45:09.500 organized religion and organized abrahamic religion in particular but this idea of the will from

00:45:17.500 augustine is really the whole point is to get god off the hook for human evil right that's right i mean

00:45:25.820 this is all about the garden of eden yeah and the fall yeah so it's worth reminding ourselves of this

00:45:31.340 i guess i mean i don't want to bash the entire christian tradition that's not my my my axe to

00:45:39.340 grind but this one is a pretty serious one augustine was worried about whose fault it was that we fell

00:45:48.700 from eden and the problem is that if we understand god as omniscient omnipotent and omnibenevolent

00:45:57.420 it sounds like he should have known he had to have known that eve was going to take the apple from the

00:46:03.500 snake he had to have really wanted her not to do that because he knew what a bad thing that was

00:46:09.260 and because he was omnipotent he had to be able to stop it but he didn't and so if you put those

00:46:14.700 things together it makes it sound like the fall is god's fault and augustine was worried about that

00:46:20.860 because you can't blame god for stuff like that and the way that he got god off the hook was to invent

00:46:26.860 this faculty of voluntas of will which was a new faculty to create and he said that we have this

00:46:32.860 general faculty to act and what's more that faculty is special in that it's exempted from causation

00:46:41.660 and so there's nothing god could have done because eve was free and could do things free of causation

00:46:48.140 so even though he was omnipotent omniscient and omnibenevolent he couldn't have stopped her from

00:46:54.220 doing what she freely did now if you are worried about talking snakes and apples from magical trees

00:47:03.980 and the origins of evil and a triple omni god then perhaps you should take the idea of a free will

00:47:11.980 seriously but my point here is that if that's not what drives you metaphysically then you better

00:47:19.500 recognize that that's the origin of this idea and that to the extent that we think of ourselves as

00:47:26.460 selves and so as free agents outside of the causal nexus even though we know that we are biological

00:47:34.300 organisms in a causally determined world then you've really got a crazy picture of who you are

00:47:40.700 an alienating picture and it's a picture that as i said earlier both can lead to illegitimate

00:47:48.380 feelings of pride shame guilt i did this but can also lead to very dangerous attributions of blame

00:47:56.460 and anger failing to see that other people just like me fail to have this kind of free will and

00:48:03.100 i think that extirpating this myth of freedom is a really important task of philosophy but what i'm

00:48:09.420 trying to also do in this book is to show that that myth of freedom is tied deeply to the idea of the self

00:48:16.060 yeah and so one of the reasons that we want to say that the self isn't something that we just found

00:48:23.500 is because to find it we'd have to find something that was causally exempt and there isn't anything

00:48:29.180 that's causally exempt we also have to find something that's simple and when we look at who we are

00:48:35.740 how we act how we perceive and how we understand what we discover is a complex of constantly changing

00:48:43.100 phenomena not some simple single thing that persists through those phenomena when we look

00:48:49.740 at subjectivity we don't find a single eye lying behind all of that we see perceptual subjectivity

00:48:58.620 affective subjectivity within perceptual subjectivity auditory visual tactile olfactory subjectivity

00:49:07.500 what we see is a complex more like a committee than an individual thing so when you start losing

00:49:14.780 simplicity and and this kind of perfect subject and free agency you start seeing that this kind of

00:49:23.180 mythical apparent thing really isn't there at all it's as though you were looking at those lines of

00:49:29.260 the mueller lyre illusion and as you erase the arrowheads on each side the lines come back into a perception of

00:49:36.060 equality and when you see them that way you see them correctly when we see ourselves as natural

00:49:42.700 organisms in a enmeshed in a causal nexus with an identity that we constitute then you begin to see

00:49:51.820 who we are and that's very different from the eye that i think that i am when i succumb to the self-illusion

00:49:59.580 well it's interesting i think we you can get there by taking the dualistic starting point of pure subjectivity

00:50:10.860 seriously so in taking duality seriously one can move this way i mean you're so you you are the subject aware of

00:50:20.220 objects and you're this you know you're let's whatever your beliefs about this subject or not leave that aside but as a matter of

00:50:26.880 experience there is this experience to be had of just being a pure witness of all the things that can be noticed

00:50:34.880 sights sounds sensations thoughts feelings etc objects out in the world and because you can be aware of them

00:50:44.480 as objects that testifies to the fact that they are not you right you are something else over here

00:50:51.520 that is aiming attention like a spotlight upon all the all the objects and the fact that you can be aware

00:50:58.320 of something proves that it's on the object side of the subject object chasm and therefore not you

00:51:06.400 right you are just the subject but if you persist in doing that what you notice is that this feeling

00:51:13.520 of being of being a self is itself a kind of object right it is an appearance of a kind however inscrutable

00:51:21.040 otherwise you would never sense that it was so right and and certainly you could never experience a loss

00:51:28.640 of this feeling unless it is in fact a feeling right so there's some signature in experience that we're

00:51:36.480 calling self there is a sense that it feels like something to be me or in the middle right that

00:51:44.320 this thing that's being that we're criticizing this thing we're saying doesn't exist the denial of that

00:51:50.400 critique feels like something and if that feeling suddenly went away then there'd be no basis upon which

00:51:58.960 to say i'm a self in the appropriating experience from the middle of experience and so the if you take

00:52:06.560 this duality seriously you notice that well okay consciousness that that which is aware of the feeling of

00:52:14.080 self must be prior to it and actually unimplicated in it in the same way it's unimplicated in the existence

00:52:21.920 of the water bottle i can see on my desk right that that's over there as an object and so this feeling in

00:52:27.680 the face or in the head or in the body whatever it is the energetics of it that whatever the signature

00:52:34.640 is of feeling individuated internal to the body that is itself a kind of object we and therefore

00:52:41.760 doesn't actually constrain what consciousness is in itself as a matter of experience this is a it's a

00:52:48.000 logical point but more importantly it's a phenomenological one because you can if you keep

00:52:53.680 falling back into that position of just recognizing that everything including this feeling of being

00:53:01.280 a subject is appearing all by itself in a condition that is aware of appearances that you can begin to

00:53:09.920 feel that the condition itself doesn't feel like i it doesn't feel like a self right i mean that that is

00:53:16.480 the the way to punch through to this base layer of just consciousness and its contents which can be

00:53:24.960 experienced without that usual subject object duality that's right and it's subject object duality that's

00:53:31.680 you know kind of the bogeyman in this particular context because when we experience the world

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 23, 2022

#282 — Do You Really Have a Self？

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