00:03:03.160And we'll spend the next, I don't know, 90 minutes or so thinking about consciousness.
00:03:06.880but I think you arrive at a place that I've arrived. I don't know if it's stable in the end,
00:03:13.260but I seem to have occupied this spot for quite some time. Thinking about consciousness and
00:03:17.640specifically the hard problem of consciousness, which we'll talk about in a moment, is something
00:03:22.180that just utterly kind of subsumed my intellectual interests somewhere around the mid-90s and held
00:03:30.780them for quite some time. And you wrote a really interesting book on it. I mean, it was about the
00:03:35.540self, but it was really about consciousness. Waking up had a big influence on me.
00:03:40.120Nice. Well, but I think many of us in this game eventually beat our heads against the wall long
00:03:48.580enough that we finally admit to ourselves that we're not going to solve the hard problem of
00:03:53.680consciousness. Now, there are many people in your book who have not admitted that.
00:03:56.780Spoiler alert for this podcast episode.
00:03:59.220We'll talk about this. But I mean, ultimately, there is something more to do or less to do than think about consciousness, which is to say you can simply be consciousness more and more subtly and deeply and continuously.
00:04:14.720and you know that's where things like meditation and psychedelics come in and so your book almost
00:04:20.240takes you full circle back to questions of being more than thinking but the thinking is fascinating
00:04:27.240and um you know we need to do it because we need to talk about it let's just define our terms at
00:04:32.060the outset which you do early in the book we should just distinguish a few concepts there's
00:04:37.340sentience there's consciousness there's cognition there's an intelligence i mean we'll talk about
00:04:44.120AI and intelligence is something that many people are thinking about now and in its various
00:04:50.080instantiations. How do you define or disambiguate these terms? Yeah, so I made a distinction,
00:04:59.100it's not mine alone, but it's not always made, between sentience and consciousness. And you see
00:05:04.400that coming up in the whole discussion about AI. Some people use the word sentient to describe
00:05:09.040these machines that they think may be conscious. Sentience is a more basic foundational term.
00:05:15.440It involves ability to sense your changes in your environment, assess whether they're good or bad,
00:05:22.760and allow you to move toward one and away from the other. It may be a property of life. Single
00:05:28.820celled creatures, you know, bacteria have chemotaxis, which, so they can distinguish
00:05:34.240between molecules that are good food and ones that'll kill them and act accordingly. So sentience
00:05:40.220is kind of very basic, perhaps permeates all of life. I can't be sure about that. Consciousness
00:05:48.400is a more elaborate form of sentience that involves other things such as a sense of awareness,
00:05:56.020feelings. In the case of humans, not only awareness, but awareness, we're aware,
00:06:01.000we layer it and so human consciousness is just how we do sentience and and every creature that
00:06:07.560is conscious does it in a slightly different way presumably reflecting their sensorium their body
00:06:13.720type the scale at which they operate all these kind of things intelligence and consciousness
00:06:19.660are not on a spectrum or on a on a together they're they're orthogonal i think their relationship
00:06:26.620intelligence is i define pretty much as problem solving ability and uh so that's quite a part i
00:06:33.000mean we all know people who are conscious and not intelligent i mean they don't necessarily go
00:06:37.140together cognition is is the taking in and processing of information from the world
00:06:42.380i think that's kind of how i define it so that yeah and and consciousness i define simply as
00:06:48.280experience or subjective experience it pretty simple i don't you don't have to include things
00:06:54.560like self-consciousness or metaconsciousness in it those are kind of bells and whistles that
00:06:58.800humans have added and i doubt many animals have them yeah so consciousness is the fact that the
00:07:07.420lights are on and yeah it's synonymous with the fact of experience whatever we're experientially
00:07:14.840aware of altogether i guess so sentience still can be described i mean i guess the crucial line
00:07:21.480for me or and for many people think about this is that things like life things like sentience can be
00:07:27.260given a description from the outside in terms of their functional characteristics i mean does
00:07:33.080something reproduce does it you know metabolize does it grow etc these are characteristics of life
00:07:38.960and then you know the boundary conditions can be somewhat diffuse and so it can be hard to say
00:07:44.700whether you know a virus is is alive in the way that you know a bacterium is alive etc but and so
00:07:50.300it is, I think, with sentience, at least under the definition you gave it. But consciousness is
00:07:56.300the fact that it's like something, to use Nagel's now immortal phrase, to be what we are. And if
00:08:02.500it's like something to be a bat, well, then that would be consciousness in the case of a bat.
00:08:06.700And that's obviously his famous example from his essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And this
00:08:11.640disgorges what the philosopher David Chalmers has named the hard problem of consciousness,
00:08:18.240which I've already invoked without defining it. But it's just a simple fact that it seems that
00:08:24.240there's no third-person description of the way the world is that reduces the mystery that it
00:08:32.900should be like something from the first-person side to be associated with any collection of
00:08:38.400those facts. Yeah, there's an inside. There's an interiority that third-person perspective
00:08:43.720can't penetrate. It can speculate about. But I think that's a very good point you make about
00:08:47.800sentience and its difference that it it is something we can perceive and make a judgment
00:08:53.280about from the outside i mean there may be some slight inside to it but basically it's uh we can
00:08:59.980we can assess it from the outside and we can't with consciousness and that's a huge i mean that
00:09:05.500is the hard problem i'd put it i'd add also it's i mean it's the problem how do you get from matter
00:09:10.400three pounds of neurons in our head to mind, to subjective experience, if that is indeed the way
00:09:19.320it happens. Yeah. And just to be clear for people, again, it's amazing how hard it is for many people
00:09:25.300to form an intuition about what makes the hard problem hard. And some of the most celebrated
00:09:30.940thinkers in neuroscience and philosophy, many of them to my eye, have not had any kind of natural
00:09:37.840intuition for this. And, you know, the symptom of that is they kind of blow past it,
00:09:42.880asserting some reductive explanation of consciousness as though they had solved the
00:09:46.720hard problem, whereas they really haven't even acknowledged it. And, you know, so we might name
00:09:53.220some of these people. But the hard problem predates Chalmers, and he gave it this name
00:09:58.040that was very, very sticky, but it goes all the way back to Leibniz, at least. Leibniz invoked
00:10:04.220this image of a mill, you know, if you just imagine you blow up the brain to the size of,
00:10:11.540you know, a mill and walk inside it, at no point would you encounter anything that announced its
00:10:18.600sufficiency to produce the inner subjectivity of that organ. And there are many other philosophers
00:10:25.020who've touched this, Saul Kripke and Ned Block and Frank Jackson and Joseph Levine. I don't know
00:10:32.040we pronounce it Levine or Levine, but he gave us this notion of the explanatory gap, which is just
00:10:36.720another way of saying the hard problem. So there's this, the problem is that whatever the right answer
00:10:42.340for the emergence of consciousness is, if in fact it emerges, and so there's some description of
00:10:48.560the functional characteristics of a system or the way the neural correlates of consciousness are
00:10:55.240arranged, and consciousness emerges from that. Even if we had that description in hand,
00:11:00.400the fact that that is the basis of consciousness, that first the lights are not on, then all of a
00:11:06.620sudden you change the wiring diagram ever so slightly and an inner world appears, that is
00:11:14.160just the, you know, it doesn't mean it's not true, but it would be totally non-explanatory. There's
00:11:19.460just, there is this explanatory gap and whatever the right answer is, it's still going to look like
00:11:24.540a miracle. Yeah. Well, Christophe Koch, who was involved at the very beginning of modern
00:11:29.380consciousness science, started out with Francis Crick, the great scientist who cracked inheritance
00:11:36.020when he discovered, co-discovered the double helix. You know, they went looking for the neural
00:11:40.680correlates and they thought that would solve the problem. They would find that group of neurons
00:11:46.240responsible for subjective experience. And it was only a couple of years into that quest.
00:11:51.460and by the way, that quest goes on, that Christophe realized that, oh, even if we found the
00:11:58.340neural correlates, it really wouldn't answer the question we're trying to answer. How did that
00:12:04.500group of neurons, if there was such a group, produced this feeling of being me, this voice
00:12:09.960in my head? And so he was, that was the first of several crises he's had along the way.
00:12:15.420Well, like many of us, Christophe has done some drugs in the meantime.
00:12:18.580uh which that's given him another crisis yeah yeah yeah i mean the influence of psychedelics
00:12:24.480on this conversation is is fascinating i mean it's not it's not surprising given what happened
00:12:29.860a generation and a half ago but we had this hiatus in science where these these drugs could
00:12:35.440not be experimented with and but before we dive into consciousness i maybe just let's let me just
00:12:41.660ask your get your opinion on this i mean how do you view the um almost the the the omnipresence
00:12:49.040of psychedelics now in the discussion here scientifically but also in the culture i mean
00:12:56.040are you at all worried that we're on the verge of recapitulating some of the errors of the 60s
00:13:02.120where we just we get a little too fast and loose with these drugs and there's a we invite some kind
00:13:07.620of backlash? Or how are you feeling about the psychedelic part of this conversation?
00:13:12.480Yeah. I mean, well, first to go back a little bit, it was a real surprise. I thought I would
00:13:17.440mention psychedelics in the introduction of this book as something that inspired it
00:13:21.060and set me on this path. And that would be it. And there would be no psychedelics in the book,
00:13:25.920but they kept popping up and I wasn't bringing them up. It was the scientists working on the
00:13:31.020problem who are partly because they're stuck, partly because they're very open-minded to
00:13:37.300using any tools at hand uh many of them you know would talk to me unbidden about their experience
00:13:43.760with psychedelics and how in many cases it had influenced them they're not doing studies they're
00:13:49.120not involved in the various university studies but they're personally using them and and in some
00:13:54.480cases getting insights that they think are really important in other cases not sure what exactly to
00:14:00.900do with them but it just kind of was this it became this motif in the book of scientists telling me
00:14:06.800about their psychedelic experiences and how it had affected their work. So I thought that was
00:14:11.140really interesting. You know, the whole issue of psychedelics has changed a lot since 2018. I mean,
00:14:18.180it is, first of all, more acceptable for us to have a conversation about it. I think in waking
00:14:23.280up, you know, you were kind of ahead of the curve in your willingness to talk about your own
00:14:27.500experiences. Many people regarded it as a reputational risk back then. What year was
00:14:32.840waking up published 2014 yeah so that was early that was before this uh science at johns hopkins
00:14:40.220had gotten a lot of you know publicity and and and suddenly we were taking psychedelics seriously as
00:14:46.140a therapeutic modality i think we're in a very different moment than the 60s i think there was
00:14:52.040a lot of careless use of psychedelics things went wrong and psychedelics also got really
00:14:59.520entangled in the counterculture and that was part of the backlash i mean nixon targeted psychedelics
00:15:05.760because he thought it was one of the reasons that american boys were refusing to fight in vietnam
00:15:10.220and he may well have been right um well and we should say that people some people like
00:15:14.960timothy leary perhaps most notably made that connection that political connection explicit
00:15:20.640right it's like you know yeah but so did nixon nixon said you know well he said leary was public
00:15:26.520enemy number one. The most dangerous man in America, I think. That's right. Most dangerous
00:15:30.520man in America, which is quite a statement. He also said that about Daniel Ellsberg though. So,
00:15:34.780so most, he had a pretty broad definition of most. Now, psychedelics are not, no longer coded liberal
00:15:42.880or left or counterculture. I mean, they're, I mean, look at, you know, last week the president
00:15:47.940issued an executive order. Yeah. Supposedly easing the approval process and access to
00:15:54.320psychedelics. He's been driven in that direction by concern for soldiers, veterans dealing with
00:16:00.520PTSD and the high rates of suicide among soldiers. And that was a very deliberate, I think, move on
00:16:08.900the part of Rick Doblin at MAPS, who was really one of the pioneers of getting research started
00:16:14.200again. He made overtures to vets groups, to the VA, and to people like Rick Perry,
00:16:21.080um uh former governor of of texas who's a big supporter now of psychedelics so i would say
00:16:28.660if anything there's more support on the right than the left so i don't i don't know that it's
00:16:32.800going to fall into the same backlash politics it may if things go terribly wrong there's also
00:16:38.940so much university research going on so many trials and and it's it's you know rapidly being
00:16:46.580accepted as a legitimate area of study. And there've been NIH grants to support psychedelic
00:16:52.720research. So I don't, I don't see us on the verge of that. I mean, people are still doing stupid
00:16:58.300things with psychedelics and there's still accidents happening. And, um, but I think we0.98
00:17:03.120learned, or I think a lot of people learned a lesson from the sixties, which they're powerful
00:17:08.180substances. They have to be used with, with intention. People are tending to use them more
00:17:12.920in guided situations, which really mitigates a lot of the risk. So yeah, I'm not overly concerned
00:17:21.840about that. I think there's going to be all sorts of nasty things happening. There's going to be
00:17:27.100profiteering and attempts to limit access, attempts to patent things that shouldn't be patented. I
00:17:34.580mean, all sorts of things are going on there. And there's a tremendous hype cycle with lots of
00:17:40.060capital rushing in and then the capital rushes out and now it's back in. So it's going to be
00:17:45.320messy. You know, whenever capitalism gets a hold of something like this, it gets really messy.
00:17:51.080Yeah. Well, it's especially obvious in AI at the moment. We'll talk about
00:17:56.840the implications there. I mean, one concern I have about the influence of psychedelics on
00:18:03.580this conversation is that there's some way in which I think that the psychedelic experience
00:18:10.040to speak generically can be indispensable but also misleading i mean it certainly can be with
00:18:15.440respect to the goal of meditation and what there is to to recognize about the nature of consciousness
00:18:20.700there that is that is liberative or or you know worth paying attention to there's something that
00:18:26.720i think i think the the experiences the peak experiences people have on psychedelics while
00:18:31.820they advertise to them the possibility of living a very different kind of life in the world they
00:18:38.340also can give the false impression that freedom is a matter of radically changing the contents
00:18:44.180of consciousness, radically expanding it and, and achieving something, some kind of permanent
00:18:50.220state that is analogous to what you enjoyed on the peak of whatever it was, you know, acid,
00:18:56.080psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, whatever your, whatever your moment was. And so anyway, we'll talk about
00:19:02.740that because I think the. Yeah, no, and I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of, of
00:19:06.580the mystical experiences which is what you know how people kind of assess these experiences
00:19:13.000that a mystical experience that was permanent would probably be schizophrenia um it's you know
00:19:19.760it's it's something in the context of everyday life it's a period of transcendence but it's not
00:19:25.040something you sustain and you know as i mean you know this history well but many of the americans
00:19:31.320who brought buddhism to america started with psychedelics and then had the similar realization
00:19:36.040to what you're talking about, which is that it's not a practice. It's not something you can sustain
00:19:41.460day after day. And they moved into meditation, which was a place you could have a practice,
00:19:47.320obviously. But the links are very interesting. And I think psychedelics may be a very good way
00:19:53.100to start a meditation practice. I'm always taken with the fact that most of the experience is not
00:19:59.880the profound climax, but this long tail, which can go on for hours and is a meditation and often
00:20:08.720a very good meditation in that you're totally undistracted and you can go really deep, but you
00:20:14.780still have some control over your mind. So I think the links are very interesting. And I do think
00:20:19.780psychedelics are a legitimate tool for the study of consciousness, the scientific study of
00:20:25.760consciousness you know the first big study that was done at johns hopkins by roland griffith was
00:20:30.860was of mystical experience that's a very interesting aspect of human consciousness
00:20:36.380and the fact that we have a tool that can pretty reliably induce it opens up all sorts of
00:20:43.280experimental possibilities yeah i mean the the reliability apart from the tiny percentage of
00:20:50.920people who seem impervious to psychedelics for reasons that, uh, I don't know whether they've
00:20:56.000been explained at the level of, uh, their 5-HT2A receptors or not. But I mean, some people
00:21:01.120apparently, I never believe this. I mean, I accept it as a fact, but I just can't, I can't
00:21:05.060believe that there are people who, if given, you know, 500 micrograms of LSD have no experience.
00:21:09.560The gurus, the guru stories. Yes. No, I'm not, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about
00:21:13.460just people who are ordinary people who are seeking to have an experience on psychedelics
00:21:18.660and they, in the presence of a guide, you know, administering whatever, five grams of mushrooms.
00:21:23.220I mean, I know people like this. I know at least two people who have taken
00:21:25.780whopping doses of psychedelics and literally nothing has happened. And so there are people
00:21:31.540who just, you know, just for whatever reason, don't have the right neurons for better or worse.
00:21:35.700I was thinking more of the, you know, the stories, Ram Dass tells the story of his guru.
00:21:40.960And just upping the dose, upping the dose, getting up to six or 700 micrograms and nothing
00:21:45.420happens. Yeah. Yeah. And then being in doubt as to whether or not he, you know, had just palmed
00:21:51.500the medication and didn't take it. And then, so then when he went back, he did it again and
00:21:57.220it worked the same way or didn't work. So consciousness is the fact that it's like
00:22:02.580something to be us, the fact that the lights are on. And there is a deep intuition or dogma or
00:22:09.340expectation in biology, at least, that the explanation for this must be evolutionary in
00:22:16.080some sense, right? Consciousness must have either evolved for some reason, because certain things
00:22:23.080that are adaptive and indispensable for us can only occur in the light of consciousness. Or I
00:22:32.040guess it could be an epiphenomenon, a view which sounds really counterintuitive to people, but which
00:22:38.600I've always thought had a lot going for it. Famously, T.H. Huxley, who was a great defender
00:22:45.920of Darwin's theory back in the day, said that consciousness was like the steam whistle on a
00:22:52.320train, right? It's this super salient feature of the train's operation, but not at all integral to
00:22:58.140anything that's happening. I don't think he used the word epiphenomenon, but the concept of this
00:23:02.980is a phenomenon that rides alongside the thing you're interested in. It seems to be part of it,
00:23:36.980Why don't we automate everything? Why aren't we zombies? I think that's a kind of subset of the
00:23:41.440hard problem. And you can construct a good evolutionary story that would explain why
00:23:47.660it would be useful. And the best one I heard was from Carl Friston, who's a English neuroscientist.
00:23:55.500And I put this question to him, what good is it? What good is consciousness? And he said that
00:24:01.500For us, creatures who are fundamentally social beings, who depend on other people to survive, who have a long childhood where we're utterly dependent, much longer than any other mammal, consciousness allows us to navigate social life, which is too complex and changeable to program.
00:24:24.300You couldn't hardwire everything you have to know to succeed in a human social context.
00:24:29.420So having the ability to predict what the other person is going to say or do, to imagine your way into their point of view, these are all highly adaptive skills.
00:24:39.780And you can easily imagine a couple of proto-humans, some of whom have that imaginary ability, call it theory of mind or something, proto-theory of mind, and are very good students of the other person and can read facial expressions and figure out what's going to happen next.
00:25:00.760compare that to someone who's kind of dense and doesn't pick up on social signals who's more
00:25:05.660likely to make a good bond and reproduce so you know who knows if that's true but that would
00:25:11.860create a pressure for something like consciousness to emerge from unconscious or from sentience say
00:25:17.200yeah i don't know you buy it no i don't buy any of that members can hear the full conversation by
00:25:22.240subscribing at samharris.org subscribers get a private rss feed you can use with your favorite
00:25:27.600podcast player. We already believe they're conscious, and they will convince us they're
00:25:32.920conscious. It's in their interest to convince us they're conscious. We could inadvertently build
00:25:37.120conscious machines that can suffer and be immiserated, and we will have just built them
00:25:42.220like black boxes. Then we'll have no sense that, you know, we have just created hell and populated it.