Making Sense - Sam Harris - #295 — Philosophy and the Good Life

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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00:00:32.500 therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy

00:00:36.540 what we're doing here please consider becoming one today i'm speaking with kieran setia kieran is a

00:00:50.860 professor of philosophy at mit and he's the author of midlife a philosophical guide as well as life is

00:00:58.980 hard how philosophy can help us find our way his writing has also appeared in the los angeles review

00:01:04.900 of books the times literary supplement the london review of books the new york times aeon and the

00:01:12.420 yale review and in this conversation we talk about the relevance of philosophy to the ongoing project

00:01:19.420 of living a good life we discuss the existence of objective moral truths being happy versus living

00:01:27.040 well a response to grief meditation as a remedy for psychological suffering how to understand the

00:01:34.640 claim that the self is an illusion the difference between telic and atelic activities the power of

00:01:41.900 reframing fomo bias toward the future regret the asymmetry between pain and pleasure and other topics

00:01:52.260 i really enjoyed this conversation i hope you find it useful and now i bring you kieran setia

00:01:59.520 i am here with kieran setia kieran thanks for joining me thanks so much for having me so um we have

00:02:13.300 many shared interests i loved your book midlife a philosophical guide and you have a new book which

00:02:20.240 i just have a pdf of it's coming out soon and i've just glanced at that but i think we can

00:02:26.720 sort of merge the themes in both your books over the course of this conversation but before we jump

00:02:32.620 in there maybe you can summarize your background academically and intellectually what kinds of

00:02:39.640 problems and concerns have you focused on well i'm a philosophy professor i teach at mit and my work

00:02:46.520 on the sort of academic side has been about questions about the nature of human agency

00:02:50.380 human knowledge and broadly speaking in ethics sort of anything related to the problems of

00:02:56.720 how we should live and then over the last i guess five seven years i've been doing more outward

00:03:03.920 facing work that we'll talk about midlife and how it came out of my own experience but i've been

00:03:09.740 trying to think about how the tools of academic philosophy could be applied to the kinds of problems about how

00:03:18.260 to live that my friends and i seem to be facing and going through some of which philosophers talk about

00:03:24.260 many of which they tend not to to spend so much time on so the midlife crisis is one and then in the new

00:03:29.880 book life is hard loneliness and grief and failure and the kind of challenges that we confront when we're

00:03:36.280 living lives that are inevitably imperfect yeah i've i've often marveled and i'm not alone in this

00:03:43.240 in the marveling at um the broken connection between philosophy and the project of living well

00:03:52.400 that used to be the whole point of philosophy to come up with some vision of life and the world

00:03:59.120 that made securing as durable a possible a form of well-being you know we'll talk about just you

00:04:09.100 know what can be hoped for there and it was just intrinsic to the project of you know literally

00:04:15.380 you know loving wisdom and that's the very concept of philosophy and then it became this far more

00:04:21.860 abstract and arcane discipline where it seemed to want to emulate mathematics and science more and it

00:04:31.480 became a you know following wittgenstein a really just a kind of language game which viewed

00:04:39.020 everything in terms of you know the parsing of concepts and i just feel like we lost our purchase

00:04:45.860 on something important there i don't know if you share that that feeling i mean i think there's a lot

00:04:50.000 of truth to that you know philosophers are often embarrassed by the idea of self-help but in a way

00:04:57.640 when you sort of think of the long trajectory of the history of philosophical ethics the idea that

00:05:02.620 thinking about how to live should make your life better should enable you to live better

00:05:06.160 is a very kind of attractive plausible one and that makes the line between moral philosophy

00:05:13.180 ethics and what would nowadays be thought of as self-help pretty blurry and they really only start

00:05:18.580 to diverge sort of in the 18th century you get philosophers who want to sort of pull apart the

00:05:23.940 project of understanding morality or ethics from the project of sort of making people virtuous making

00:05:30.200 people better and philosophy a lot of what philosophers do now is relevant i mean it's

00:05:36.340 closely relevant to practical questions about how to live and some of that people know about through

00:05:41.140 things like effective altruism so bits that are bits of philosophy that are directed to the question

00:05:45.480 what are your obligations to other people but the relevance of philosophy is much broader than that

00:05:50.460 but it's very much concealed by the way in which philosophy is sort of now formulated as and structured

00:05:56.920 institutionally as an academic discipline and i kind of wanted to reconnect those two and bring them

00:06:02.500 back into conversation yeah well that's what i loved about your book midlife and what i know i will love

00:06:08.920 about life is hard and in midlife you remind us all of three questions that kant asked which are really

00:06:18.380 foundational to the whole project of philosophy at least the first two i guess i have some concern about the

00:06:24.760 the third but the first the questions are what can i know what should i do and what may i hope

00:06:32.160 and uh i think you and i both have some caveats to add to the concept of hope but um you know what can

00:06:39.520 i know that really is is all of epistemology and what should i do it really crystallizes moral philosophy

00:06:47.740 and ethics and you know ultimately even meta-ethics in what sense can things matter and how do we solve

00:06:58.700 this this navigation problem of life in my mind morality is pretty much always a question of what

00:07:05.200 we should do next given the space of all possible experience in which we're navigating and there's a deeper

00:07:12.800 question about how any claims we might make about what we should do relate to claims about what is

00:07:20.040 true and what what is knowable how do you think about just the grounding of of moral truth in a larger

00:07:28.600 set of truth claims i mean the central problems of of meta-ethics do you spend much time thinking about

00:07:34.900 that yeah so i i do and i i tend to be sort of sympathetic to the idea that there there are

00:07:41.860 objective ethical truths i mean there's various kinds of lines that get drawn here that i think

00:07:47.020 drawing which sort of i think played a role in the divorce between say philosophical ethics and self-help

00:07:53.620 like drawing a line between morality as concerned with our obligations to others and then ethics as

00:08:00.180 concerned with sort of how we should live more broadly those two i think are sort of interconnected

00:08:04.800 in ways that make them hard to separate and similarly you sort of mentioned meta-ethics and

00:08:09.380 there was a kind of period in mid-20th century moral philosophy where a lot of philosophers wanted to

00:08:14.160 to do something say something about ethics sort of meta-ethics in a way that didn't really engage

00:08:20.380 with the question how to live they wanted to separate the question of the nature of morality

00:08:23.800 from practical questions about what what the ethical standards were and i think that there's a kind of

00:08:30.460 tendency in recent moral philosophy ethics that i think is right to blur those lines and to suggest

00:08:36.060 that we can't really draw those distinctions and i think that that sort of blurring of lines also

00:08:41.380 applies to the kinds of questions about objectivity that you're raising so on the one hand you know

00:08:46.600 there's a lot of moral disagreement a lot of disagreement in ethics and when we try to engage

00:08:51.660 in ethical arguments we often sort of come to loggerheads with other people and it seems like

00:08:56.460 there's a kind of question about how we could know the answer or whether there are really objective

00:09:00.200 answers and that can seem like a challenge to the idea of objective ethical truth on the other hand

00:09:06.240 when you think about questions about what we know or what the standards of scientific rationality are

00:09:11.560 one lesson of thinking about sort of determined conspiracy theorists or science deniers is that if you insist

00:09:19.220 on rejecting any premise that could be used to dislodge your your view you can maintain consistency

00:09:27.760 at the cost of an increasingly warped but internally coherent perspective on how the world is scientifically

00:09:36.300 and so i think these problems about you know how do you actually persuade people and how does our failure

00:09:42.800 to persuade people what what significance does that have for the idea of objective knowledge and objective

00:09:47.460 truth are much broader than ethics and i think in both cases the right response is to say something

00:09:52.200 like well you know dialectical efficacy like being able to actually persuade people is one thing but the

00:09:59.160 fact that you can't persuade someone who's a conspiracy theorist or a committed flat earther and will say

00:10:05.300 anything it takes to to avoid internal inconsistency that shouldn't make us think that that's a legitimate

00:10:11.340 view it's still an unjustified response to the evidence even if it can be made strictly logically

00:10:17.180 compatible with the evidence and in the same way in ethics i think we shouldn't be dissuaded from the

00:10:23.120 idea that there really are objective knowable answers to questions about how we should live

00:10:28.000 by the fact that we find ourselves sometimes faced with intractable ethical disagreements that's not to

00:10:35.100 say that there aren't differences between the case of science and ethics i think a kind of pluralism

00:10:39.200 about the variety of different good ways to live is appropriate in ethics and maybe that kind of pluralism

00:10:45.020 doesn't have the same role to play in our thinking about science but i think that the sort of questions

00:10:50.920 of you know how do we know what do i know and what should i do are sort of deeply entangled and i don't

00:10:57.700 think that there's a sort of it's very hard to explain why one should be skeptical about objective

00:11:03.700 ethical truth in a way that doesn't just eat up the whole idea of objective rationality altogether

00:11:09.440 well you just seem to have argued for the thesis of my book the moral landscape in a wonderfully concise

00:11:16.060 way i don't know if you've seen that book i do know the book yes yeah yeah i mean i obviously i agree

00:11:22.100 with everything you just said you you made a point which i make there but you sort of made it from the

00:11:26.280 other side which i find um pretty illuminating i mean the complaint i've often lodged is that scientists

00:11:35.200 and philosophers do something different they do something with the diversity of opinion on moral

00:11:42.900 topics that they don't do with diversity of opinion on any other topic which is to say they conclude

00:11:48.920 from the mere existence of disagreement that there is no ground truth to be known right so the fact that

00:11:55.740 someone can show up at your morality conference and say well i happen to like the morality of the

00:12:00.960 taliban what are you guys going to do with that basically the conference just dissolves at that

00:12:06.120 point because people begin to say well clearly you know it's all just made up it's all cultural

00:12:11.620 convention there's no there can be no objective or universal claims about good and evil or right and

00:12:17.960 wrong because we've got the taliban over there doing you know cutting people's heads off at halftime

00:12:23.380 of their soccer games and that's and they tell us that's how they want to live what are we going to do

00:12:27.580 but my point has always been if you ask the taliban about physics or epidemiology you're not going to

00:12:34.080 get a lot of good sense either right the fact that they have opinions on those topics is never read

00:12:40.140 by experts in those fields as evidence of anything other than their ignorance right and so the idea that

00:12:46.900 you can find a an island of people who are living in some starkly awful way by our lights shouldn't

00:12:55.360 convince you you know on its face that they have an equal claim to having thought through the problem

00:13:03.320 of you know what is good what is right you know what is the moral structure you know if there is one

00:13:09.900 in human affairs or in the larger affairs of conscious creatures and that you know they that their language

00:13:17.620 game needs to be taken seriously the way the language games of our experts do and so it's just the fact

00:13:24.620 that we just sort of throw out the rule book of what it would mean to just try to push the conversation

00:13:31.020 further into persuasion and to also recognize that in every other sphere of of life there are people

00:13:38.260 who are unpersuadable because there are people who you know as you say they're they're committed to some

00:13:43.340 form of dogmatism that's causing them to just change the rules of conversation on their side so as to be

00:13:49.600 immune to any stream of evidence or argument that would destabilize their worldview we don't read into

00:13:55.680 that when you know when we're talking to young earth creationists we just you know we don't view

00:14:00.620 that as a real challenge to our geology or astronomy or paleontology or anything else and yet that's not

00:14:07.400 the not the feeling you get when talking about questions of right and wrong and good and evil among

00:14:12.980 academics generally.

00:14:14.240 I think that's exactly right I mean there's this phenomenon or kind of idea that comes out of 20th

00:14:19.860 century philosophy of science mid-20th century philosophy of science of the underdetermination

00:14:24.500 of theory by data the idea is if you're willing to adjust your auxiliary hypotheses you can always

00:14:31.480 avoid accepting any theory that seems to be supported by the data by reinterpreting how exactly the

00:14:37.520 observations were related to theory or how they were gathered or disputing the the reliability of such and

00:14:44.120 such instrument and that the standard response not the only response in philosophy of science is to

00:14:48.480 say well yeah there's more to scientific rationality than just bare consistency with the evidence like

00:14:55.920 just not contradicting the evidence is not all there is to coming up with the best most justified most

00:15:03.620 illuminating most explanatory best theories and I think it's a puzzle to which there were kind of

00:15:09.820 interesting historical answers why we don't take the same view in ethics of saying well yeah someone

00:15:16.360 can hold a consistent internally coherent but abhorrent moral view an abhorrent view in ethics that doesn't

00:15:23.540 mean that there's no fact of the matter or that there's no justification what it means is well there's

00:15:29.060 more to ethical rationality sort of thinking well about ethics than just not contradicting yourself and

00:15:35.440 put that way it really shouldn't be that surprising that mere consistency is not all there is to you

00:15:42.740 know ethical virtue in one's thinking about ethics itself so I think you know the degree of disagreement

00:15:49.820 historically and socially is maybe different and that maybe invites people to to suppose that there's

00:15:56.060 some dramatic contrast between ethics and science but it's really a difference of degree and you know

00:16:01.920 as conspiracy theorists become more prevalent the differences of degree may start to diminish yeah

00:16:08.320 yeah well the uh the problem of persuading people about ordinary facts I mean just you journalistic

00:16:15.740 facts at this point has become fairly excruciating so that the the idea that it remains difficult

00:16:22.500 to persuade people about divergent moral facts that's somehow no longer surprising we can't even agree

00:16:31.520 about what should be on the front page of a newspaper at this point but uh that concern notwithstanding

00:16:37.580 let's plunge in I think a good place to start is the distinction you make between being happy and

00:16:45.280 living well how do you think about those two concepts yes I think this is this is sort of a kind of

00:16:51.240 distinction that gets drawn in in various ways in in philosophy but also in ordinary life so I think it one way

00:16:59.080 to sort of see the contrast between being happy and living well and sort of asking yourself you know

00:17:04.040 what is the object of self-help and is the goal to be happy or to live well is to think about

00:17:09.040 either there are sort of abstract wild philosophical thought experiments like people plugged into

00:17:15.680 simulation machines in which nothing they're experiencing is real they're actually completely

00:17:20.440 alone everyone they seem to be interacting with is fake nothing that they think they're doing or

00:17:24.460 almost nothing are they really doing many people have the thought well that is not a life I want

00:17:29.280 for people I love that's not that's not sort of a good human life that's barely living at all

00:17:33.800 but of course the person who's in that situation of of deception and illusion could feel incredibly

00:17:41.200 happy they feel great they're in terms if we think of happiness as the kind of subjective state of

00:17:46.160 mood or satisfaction they have it and what that suggests is yeah there's more to living well than

00:17:52.480 happiness it's not that we should not care about happiness or strive to be unhappy but that's not

00:17:57.680 really the goal of life the goal is to live well and that sometimes involves unhappiness and the

00:18:04.560 unhappiness that comes with confronting reality so there's also as well as these wild thought

00:18:08.800 experiments I think it's something that people are very vividly confronted with when they think about

00:18:12.520 grief where the idea that that the pain of grief and the unhappiness of grief and the sadness of

00:18:18.740 grief among the other complex array of emotions that grief involves the idea that somehow well it

00:18:25.460 would just be better if we could get rid of that that just doesn't seem right this the relationship

00:18:29.920 between the pain and suffering of grief and living well is much more complicated than that and I think

00:18:36.480 that's a more general phenomenon that the relationship between negative emotions negative feelings and

00:18:42.480 living well doesn't always make your life worse in fact it's very important to living well to

00:18:48.700 recognize when things are bad to sort of to live in the world as it is not the world as you wish it

00:18:57.060 would be and so I think it's very important to sort of frame the philosophical project of ethics and the

00:19:03.620 self-help project in terms of living well primarily and happiness only secondarily and one thing that does is to make clear that the

00:19:12.480 boundaries between oneself and others are much more porous so when you start to think about living well

00:19:18.660 part of living well is living as you should and the question of how should I live well it doesn't

00:19:24.540 immediately tell you how you should care about other people but invites you to ask well if I'm going to

00:19:29.220 live as I should how should I integrate the rights and needs of other people into my life and if you were just

00:19:36.460 thinking about happiness it might seem like well any connection between happiness and caring about other people

00:19:42.240 is contingent and often caring about other people makes you vulnerable to unhappiness but once you

00:19:47.240 think no the goal is not just to feel happy it's to actually live a good life you start to sort of break

00:19:53.300 down the boundaries between what we might think of as self-interest and what we might think of as

00:19:57.820 morality and I think that's a useful way of sort of reframing what the project of self-help might look

00:20:03.600 like if it was inspired by a kind of philosophical approach to ethics.

00:20:08.620 Hmm yeah there's a lot in what you just said I mean there's so many intersecting questions and

00:20:14.860 problems to sort out I mean so one point you made about grief which I find really interesting and I

00:20:21.840 think it's a certain point it is going to be a an actionable use case for all of us that will pose some

00:20:28.820 interesting psychological and ethical challenges and the way I've put it elsewhere I think I might have

00:20:35.380 been in in the moral landscape it certainly was in some things I said while talking about that book I just

00:20:40.580 I asked people to imagine what it's going to be like when we develop if we develop as seems pretty likely

00:20:47.980 a real cure for grief and bereavement right so let's just say we have a grief pill that you could take

00:20:56.240 and you know within an hour you will no longer feel sad about that thing you've been completely brokenhearted

00:21:03.080 over whether it's the death of a loved one or the the loss of a relationship or pick your poison there

00:21:08.740 if we had a cure for grief the question immediately arises you know whether to take it ever and if to

00:21:17.420 take it how long do you wait right and clearly it seems like some kind of awful norm violation

00:21:26.160 and even a break of trust with the person we ostensibly love if while their body is still warm

00:21:35.180 we pop the pill and you know 45 minutes later we're out in an arcade playing video games

00:21:43.600 to date myself with an anachronistic reference but it's like it's the idea that the love of your life

00:21:52.040 dies and that you would want to take a pill which nullified your bereavement immediately that somehow

00:21:59.660 seems incompatible with love itself of course you some you know real experience of grief seems

00:22:09.000 appropriate and desirable but then the question is is there any point where grief itself becomes

00:22:15.480 maladaptive and no longer a sign of just how important that person was to you but also a sign of

00:22:23.200 a failure of resilience and a failure to thrive and a failure to live in precisely the way your your loved

00:22:30.360 one would want you to live after they're gone right so like at what point at some point you could imagine

00:22:35.960 a grief pill really could be a a necessary intervention for someone whose life has just

00:22:42.440 unraveled under the pressure of bereavement so i get there's a half a dozen other things that

00:22:47.520 occurred to me as you were talking but maybe we could take that case do you have any thoughts about

00:22:52.440 sure i mean it's a fascinating thought experiment i mean in fact there's already a kind of natural

00:22:58.180 experiment that that prompts anxieties of the kind you're describing so that the empirical work on

00:23:04.700 grief suggests that most people tend to be quite resilient even in the face of loved ones that they

00:23:10.540 were deeply attached to and often within you know six months their lives are almost back to normal

00:23:16.240 and that actually occasions a lot of discomfort and anxiety the sort of sense that there's something

00:23:22.800 something has gone wrong with one's attachment given how rapidly it's possible to recover so even

00:23:29.380 without the grief pill we sort of have a kind of emotional immune system that restores us to

00:23:34.700 equilibrium much faster than many of us expect and in fact much faster than many of us are comfortable

00:23:39.400 with and when you try to think through why that is i mean part of the answer seems leads to another

00:23:43.760 puzzle you raised about how long so part of the answer seems to be well when you think what am i

00:23:48.860 grieving for well there's the loss of the relationship there's how bad it was for the person who died the life

00:23:54.780 that they could have had but there's also just a kind of recognition of the sheer loss of of life

00:24:00.180 grief and grief is is a kind of rational response to that like in the same way as we have reasons for

00:24:07.180 other emotions like anger is a response response to a sort of perceived insult or fear is a response to

00:24:14.400 danger or threat grief seems to be a kind of the reason for it is a certain kind of loss and the puzzle is

00:24:22.380 well actually that that's what starts to answer the question why we shouldn't take the pill the thought is

00:24:28.660 if we didn't grieve in response to the loss of someone we love we wouldn't be taking in reality

00:24:34.700 this goes back to the contrast between being happy and living well we want to take in reality

00:24:38.660 and in reality we should feel grief we should respond in a way that acknowledges the the terribleness

00:24:46.280 of that loss but then the puzzle is hold on if the reason for grief is just that my loved one is dead

00:24:54.140 that's not going to change i mean the reason that just stays the same and it stays the same forever

00:24:59.780 so now we face the question the puzzle is less why should we grieve or whether we should grieve but

00:25:05.900 how can we ever justifiably stop grieving and there's a real puzzle there i mean it you know

00:25:12.400 when you try to describe how the situation has changed later you think to yourself it's true they

00:25:18.660 died a while ago and i've grieved for a while but those things all seem irrelevant to the scale of

00:25:24.200 the loss like those things don't make it any don't sort of diminish their loss in having died so how

00:25:30.180 can they make it rational to stop grieving and i think this is this is kind of a puzzle i talk about

00:25:34.600 in the chapter on grief in life is hard i think this is where really what's happening is that our

00:25:40.180 emotions respond to reasons and this is a case where if we just look at the object of the emotion

00:25:46.440 and try to proportion our emotional response to changes in it we'll find that there's just a

00:25:52.860 kind of indeterminacy we don't know it does there's no there's nothing in the object of grief that tells

00:25:58.300 you how long to grieve for and this is i think one reason why rituals of grieving sort of practices of

00:26:05.680 mourning which are not rationally mandated they take various cultural forms are so important because

00:26:12.300 what they do is allow you to sort of grab onto something to sort of guide and shape the process

00:26:18.180 of grieving in a way that enables you to at least you know in practice get through this sense of the

00:26:25.640 arbitrariness of grieving for a certain length or or others and and you know often what they have is is

00:26:32.640 sort of distinctive temporal shapes so like you sit shiva for seven days or you know in ancient roman

00:26:39.100 customs there were sort of you know guidelines for how many months you should mourn for a child or a

00:26:45.160 wife or you know what they do is precisely try to to regulate something that if we just look at the

00:26:52.180 object of grief would seem unregulable and i think that is a kind of a deep sort of feature of the nature

00:26:58.560 of grief and the way in which it responds to to to loss so yeah i think we can sort of answer the

00:27:04.800 question what would we lose if we took the grief pill by saying well we wouldn't be responding to

00:27:08.720 reality the way we should and then we face this problem okay how how can we ever justifiably stop

00:27:15.400 recognizing that loss for what it is and we sort of rely on what are to some extent conventional

00:27:22.040 arbitrary social practices to help us do that yeah that's all very interesting and useful although

00:27:28.800 there's there's a mystery on the other side of the continuum here which is that one could ask

00:27:34.520 how one ever justifiably starts grieving in the sense that and this has a direct connection to

00:27:41.980 you know meditation and mindfulness and just the nature of consciousness that you know i know you

00:27:47.740 know that's an interest of mine because i mean just for instance you take my present circumstance

00:27:52.200 right you know i'm recording this conversation with you i'm alone which is to say that no one i love

00:27:59.000 is present in my studio now they're never going to be more absent for me than they are now right my wife

00:28:07.500 and kids or i you know i know them to still exist i have no reason to be bereaved but the truth is

00:28:14.480 i also know that i am totally fine in their absence right so the question is how do i ever become

00:28:23.640 someone who is not fine in their absence not only not fine but how does their absence become

00:28:31.680 synonymous with really the ruination of my well-being for whatever half-life that suffering

00:28:41.340 has for me you know in the case of you know everyone i love dying and you know it seems like a

00:28:48.560 perhaps a callous question or at least a bizarre one but in terms of the mechanics of psychological

00:28:56.300 suffering it's a very real one because the way you the way we suffer is to think about the reasons

00:29:05.200 we have to suffer in this case it is a kind of abstraction and the thought i will never see her

00:29:11.340 again meets out its punishment to you in the act of identifying with it and that's why meditation

00:29:18.380 promises to be a truly generic remedy for psychological suffering because it's you know

00:29:24.640 it's in being able to break the spell of thought that one can recognize that consciousness is if only

00:29:33.040 for that next moment free of the implications of thought and i actually i know from reading midlife

00:29:40.100 you have some concerns about the you know what's considered the center of the bullseye here that the

00:29:44.740 illusoriness of the self and and perhaps we'll we'll get there i'd love to speak with you about

00:29:48.600 that but you're the conundrum you posed about how it ever becomes reasonable to stop grieving

00:29:54.320 i do think is actually mirrored on the other side by this property of the mind how is it that it becomes

00:30:01.380 so reasonable to start grieving when in this moment i know that and you know and any listener must know

00:30:10.240 that it's totally possible to not only endure the next moment of being of solitude you can thrive

00:30:19.280 in this next moment of solitude and and how does that fundamentally change ever that's really that

00:30:27.340 is very interesting and i think it relates to it to a distinction i want to draw between different

00:30:32.980 objects of grief and sort of the plurality of things that grief attaches to so a distinction i think

00:30:38.300 is useful is between relational grief or grief about the end of a relationship and grief for the

00:30:45.540 sake of the one who's died and they come apart so you know when you have a terrible breakup and the

00:30:51.240 person hasn't died nevertheless there's something like grief the the the sort of devastation of

00:30:56.160 rejection and loss of a relationship and then when someone you love dies there's both you both have

00:31:01.600 this the phenomenon that the relationship is is now i think not really ended but it changed it's

00:31:06.940 ruptured and changed in a dramatic way and then you have i think also grief for their sake and i think

00:31:12.380 part of what you're pointing to is that if we focus on relational grief the kind of relationship you think

00:31:17.600 well insofar as my relationship i was capable of being happy in my relationship with someone in their

00:31:25.080 absence all i have to do to get through grief is more of that and so yeah why why shouldn't i just

00:31:33.220 sort of stay in in the the mode of of being fine in their absence and i think there's an that is a

00:31:39.180 very interesting puzzle but i think it deals with one side of grief the sort of relational side the

00:31:43.780 relationship focus part about you know i'll never see them again i'll never interact with them again

00:31:48.320 and i think there is also a dimension of grief that is not in that way it's not that relational

00:31:54.420 grief is self-regarding but it is it involves you as one of the two you know sides of the relationship

00:32:00.280 i think there's also grief that is just not relational it's just about the death of someone

00:32:04.400 else and there i think the issue of how your you could survive their absence doesn't seem to offer

00:32:12.560 consolation the thought is it's just a fact that they are dead and the appropriate sort of emotional

00:32:18.660 response to the enormity of that fact is to grieve to to to go to begin this sort of complicated

00:32:26.020 difficult emotional process and i think i think that kind of sort of outward looking for the sake

00:32:32.500 of them grief it's not clear to me that it's it's subject to the same therapy you just gave i think the

00:32:39.020 therapy for that would have to be something much more radical which would point us towards the

00:32:43.460 non-existence of the self and sort of more more radical buddhist ideas where the thought would be

00:32:48.800 you know if we could fully take in that we don't really exist and no one we're attached to really

00:32:54.940 exists in the way we think they do if that was really true and we could really take it in

00:32:58.500 then the thought might be well the kind of loss that attachment would bring this sort of outward

00:33:05.160 looking loss where the value of something irreplaceable is just gone and you're you're sort of

00:33:10.040 devastated by that it would be sort of answered by sort of denying that we really existed in the kind

00:33:17.900 of way that would make us fit objects of that kind of attachment i mean there are many puzzles about

00:33:22.520 this we could talk about and one puzzle for me is that it's never been clear to me really why

00:33:26.660 the sort of revelation of no self isn't like sort of discovering that everyone you know and love

00:33:34.060 including you is already dead i mean it's itself a kind of devastating discovery and in fact there's

00:33:40.500 this idea of mindfulness meditation as a kind of therapy that is stress reducing the sort of

00:33:48.140 empirical literature on that that's sort of divorced from its the kind of insights that buddhist mindfulness

00:33:53.880 meditation is supposed to bring us to but there are sort of aspects of the buddhist tradition in

00:33:58.300 which meditation of this kind is not really stress reduction it's a form of stress induction like the

00:34:04.280 process is supposed to be one of confronting something very very difficult like the non-existence of

00:34:11.000 yourself and those you love is a kind of devastating thing to confront what's true is that once you've confronted it

00:34:18.140 you come out on the other side and you've as it were already pre-processed the grief you're through

00:34:23.260 as it were through to the other side of grief and that sort of makes sense to me what what i feel like

00:34:28.660 might be having it both ways is a kind of picture of mindfulness meditation on which both the process

00:34:34.940 the process itself involves stress reduction and the outcome involves a kind of equanimity i feel like

00:34:41.920 that is the thing that it i find it harder to make make sense of okay yeah so maybe we'll deal with it now

00:34:49.380 yeah i think there's some confusion about what is meant by no self in buddhism or really in any contemplative

00:34:57.200 tradition and certainly any of the the indian contemplative traditions that you know spread east and and north so

00:35:04.640 this is now encompassing all variants of buddhism including vajrayana and also indian teachings like

00:35:12.380 advaita vedanta and not to say that the adherents of all those traditions think they're all teaching

00:35:18.400 precisely the same thing but at their core i think there is a the same insight at the end of the day

00:35:25.080 that is being described and entangled with you know various forms of religious belief and dogmatism and

00:35:33.680 it's more or less mingled with with helpful or harmful concepts to varying degrees and in these

00:35:39.160 various traditions but the core insight is that well first we can mean many different things by the

00:35:46.720 term self and not all of them are illusory so it's not the claim that people are illusions or that you

00:35:55.660 can't say anything coherent about the biographical or psychological continuity of a person right i mean it's

00:36:03.120 not mysterious that i wake up today as me and not as you in a different house in a different life

00:36:09.000 etc i mean that's not that's not a puzzle that anyone is trying to solve and i do think they're

00:36:14.380 very interesting puzzles around identity you know a la derek parfit but the real insight here and the

00:36:22.520 illusion that is cut through and again it's cut through not merely conceptually but experientially

00:36:28.820 is the apparent default condition of feeling like there's a subject in the center of experience

00:36:39.360 most people don't merely feel identical to experience they feel like they're having an experience they

00:36:48.280 feel like they're appropriating their experience from some point very likely in their heads that is

00:36:54.560 just the witness the thinker of thoughts the guider of attention the the willer of will the free will

00:37:00.240 the guy in the boat who has free will who can decide what to think and do next that's the default

00:37:07.380 state for more or less everybody as far as i can tell and it's a peculiar point of view as commonplace

00:37:15.160 as it is it doesn't make a lot of sense it certainly doesn't make biological sense it's not the same thing

00:37:20.340 as feeling identical to your body because people again don't feel identical to their bodies they feel

00:37:26.580 like they're subjects who have bodies to a large degree i mean they feel this is kind of a cartesian

00:37:32.460 dualism here that is intuitive for people and this is i think my friend paul bloom has said that people

00:37:40.400 are common sense dualists and i think that's true and that does link up with many beliefs about

00:37:46.760 the divorceability of mind from brain and you know you know the immortality of the soul and all the

00:37:52.280 rest i mean it seems somehow intuitive that your mind must be something other than what the brain is

00:37:56.380 doing and it you know it may in fact be you know i'm not actually somewhat agnostic as to how

00:38:01.640 consciousness is arising in this universe and it's you know i take the hard problem of consciousness

00:38:06.940 seriously that's a separate question but as a matter of experience there's this feeling

00:38:11.800 that i'm a subject behind my face in some cases certainly under conditions of being embarrassed or

00:38:20.640 you're being suddenly made the object of other people's attention i can almost feel like i'm

00:38:25.600 wearing my face as a mask right i mean you think of what it's like to feel acutely self-conscious and

00:38:30.500 to be blushing say in front of somebody you know you're at odds with your own face and so where the hell

00:38:37.640 are you in this situation you're the subject who's thinking and so it's that point of view who we

00:38:44.980 represent so now this is sort of the totality of conscious experience here we represent the world

00:38:50.020 so we have the deliverances of our senses we see and hear and smell and taste and touch and so there's

00:38:54.820 the full set of our our perceptions and there's there's more to it than that there's proprioception

00:39:00.800 and everything else you can be consciously aware of your body in space so there's the world and you

00:39:06.320 then you represent your body in the world but again from the point of view of the subject

00:39:10.380 your body is a kind of object in the world it's out there to some degree and you're in you're in it

00:39:17.760 and you so then there's this final representation of being a subject internal to the body that is

00:39:24.880 directing attention thinking thoughts willing its will and vulnerable to the the warp and woof of of

00:39:31.920 of life so it's that final representation of the subject that is the illusion and to put this in

00:39:40.080 neurological terms you know this is let's just say for the sake of argument that all of this is just

00:39:45.080 you know neurophysiological events in the brain and delivering these these representations it is

00:39:51.200 plausible or at least should be plausible that any one of these processes can be interrupted right so you

00:39:57.420 can cease to faithfully or coherently represent a world right you can suddenly you know go blind you

00:40:03.560 know you can suddenly not be able to name living things but still be able to name tools you can

00:40:10.800 suddenly not be able to perceive motion or location you know those things break apart all kinds of

00:40:16.920 things can be disrupted for worse certainly but what these contemplative traditions have recognized is that

00:40:23.900 certain things can be disrupted or brought to a halt for the better right and the thing that

00:40:32.100 that really does really can interrupt the usual cascade of of mediocrity and suffering psychologically

00:40:39.600 speaking is this representation of self as subject in the middle of experience it is a kind of

00:40:46.680 again i realize i've been bloviating for quite some time here giving you a lot and there's much more to

00:40:52.000 say on this but the you can represent the world and you can represent your body in the world and you

00:40:58.440 can cease to represent a subject internal to the body or cease to i should say construct a subject

00:41:05.280 internal to the body and what remains in that case is a sense that the mind is much vaster than it was a

00:41:16.380 moment ago because it's no longer confined to the sense that there's this central thinker of thoughts

00:41:23.640 there's the recognition that thoughts simply arise all by themselves just the way sounds do right

00:41:29.620 there's no no one is authoring your thoughts you certainly aren't in fact the sense that you are is yet

00:41:35.560 is what it feels like to be identified with this next spontaneously arising thought so you lose the sense

00:41:42.440 that that you're on the edge of your life you're on the edge of the world sort of looking over your own

00:41:48.320 shoulder appropriating experience and what you can feel you know very vividly again this is not a new way of

00:41:55.940 thinking about yourself in the world this is a a ceasing to identify with thought what you can feel is a real

00:42:04.520 unity and again there there's fine print here and whether we want to talk about this as unity or as

00:42:10.160 emptiness my preferred formulation here is non-duality a non-duality of subject and object such that

00:42:17.740 there really is just experience right again i'm not making any metaphysical claims about how this relates

00:42:23.300 to matter or the universe but as a matter of experience you can feel identical to experience itself

00:42:29.820 right you're not having an experience you're not on the edge of the river watching things go by you

00:42:35.320 are the river and that solves a very very wide class of problems psychologically speaking with respect

00:42:43.160 to suffering so it does land in a surprising kind of equanimity and even eudaimonia that may seem

00:42:52.740 counterintuitive in the midst of the cacophony of ordinary life but it's there to be found but again it's

00:42:59.340 not it's not the negation of personhood it's not it doesn't introduce all kinds of conundrums about

00:43:05.360 how am i me and not you it's just a recognition that as a matter of experience there is just experience

00:43:14.360 and then the feeling that there's an experiencer is yet more experience right so there's like you if you

00:43:19.460 drop back there is just everything in its own place anyway so i've given it gave you a lot there but

00:43:27.040 that's my attempt to perform an exorcism on the concept of no self that you seem to be working

00:43:32.240 with well i i mean i think there's something deeply right about the line of thought you're

00:43:37.520 you're pushing i what i find hard to get in in fields i still struggle with this sort of

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 09, 2022

#295 — Philosophy and the Good Life

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