Making Sense of Consciousness ｜ Episode 2 of The Essential Sam Harris
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Summary
In the first episode of Making Sense of Consciousness, we take a deep dive into the topic of consciousness. In this episode, we explore the nature of consciousness and how it intersects with just about everything, including theories of identity, the self, free will, the brain, artificial intelligence, belief and unbelief, meditation, and spirituality, and more. What is consciousness, and why is it so difficult to make sense of? And how can we even begin to get a grip on consciousness if we don't even know what it is? This episode is brought to you by The Making Sense Podcast, a podcast hosted by Sam Harris. Sam is a philosopher, neuroscientist, writer, and philosopher-in-chief. His work is widely known and appreciated throughout the scientific and philosophical community, and he is one of the most influential minds in the field. The Essential Sam Harris series is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments on the topic, the various explorations and approaches to the topic and the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and disagreements which his guests have advanced. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold, and your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others, which range from fun and light-hearted to densely academic to dense and dense academic. . And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, and at the end, we ll offer some readings, reading, listening, and watching suggestions which range in fun and heavy academic writing. This is made possible by the podcast by our listeners, and so much more! by becoming a member of the podcasting community. -Sam Harris Thank you for listening to the Making Sense podcast, this is making sense of consciousness, - This is Sam Harris, This is making Sense of consciousness and The essential Sam Harris Podcast. (Make Sense of it. ) Thanks to our sponsorships, - Sam Harris: (Podcasts: Making Sense: This is the Podcast, This Is Sam Harris' Podcasts: The Essential, (YouTube: )
Transcript
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Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
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feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
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In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
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There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
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We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
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So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
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The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam
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This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments,
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the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements,
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and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced.
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The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue,
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but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects.
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Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest.
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And at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions,
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which range from fun and light to densely academic.
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One note to keep in mind for this series, Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge
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where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of
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The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into, and greatly
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You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold.
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And your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships
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In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of identity and the self,
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free will, mind and the brain, artificial intelligence, belief and unbelief, meditation
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As you just heard, the topic of consciousness overlaps with just about everything, because
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depending on your description of it, it's the medium through which everything is experienced.
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Or is it more accurate to refer to it as the experience of anything?
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A great deal of the effort to wrap one's head around the topic of consciousness is the struggle
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Most thinkers in this space concede that we don't yet have a good definition or explanation
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Though, as you'll also hear, there are some who think we're simply asking the wrong questions,
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But to many, there does seem to be something special about the issue of consciousness.
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This particular issue and sticking point of the special case of consciousness is the issue
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which drove Sam back into academia to pursue his PhD in neuroscience.
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In fact, he was directly inspired to do so by the guest in the first clip.
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So, let's see if we can get a hold of that intuition that consciousness is a special and
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In this episode, you're going to encounter a bevy of thought experiments and whimsical
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hypotheticals that attempt to get at this thing we call consciousness.
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If consciousness is simply the manifest truth of subjective experience itself, then consciousness
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is simultaneously the most obviously and undeniably present and graspable thing there could be,
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yet it remains perhaps the most elusive and mysterious thing to make any sense of.
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One thing that you'll need to keep in mind is Sam's firm philosophical position on consciousness.
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He argues that consciousness is the only thing which can't be an illusion.
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In philosophical jargon, this idea is sometimes called solipsism.
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What he means by this is that one could be hopelessly confused about what they are perceiving
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You could even be unknowingly in a simulated universe generated by a supercomputer in another
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All of your memories could be false and simply injected into your brain a split second ago
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by an alien who is just playing an elaborate trick on you.
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But as long as there is a perception at all, that presence of perception is what Sam means
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by consciousness, and that feeling is undeniable from the inside of it.
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In a very literal sense, it is a self-evident truth, the only self-evident truth in Sam's
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In this meaning, a contention that one only seems to be conscious, or that one is being
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tricked into thinking he is conscious, is total nonsense, because the seeming is the consciousness.
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This sets up a kind of dual picture where we have consciousness and its contents.
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And even if the contents are utterly confused or unreal in some sense, the consciousness remains
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Perhaps consciousness is something like a mirror reflecting passing lights and colors.
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The images that appear on the mirror may be illusions or tricks of shadows which convince
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If you remove the mirror, there is nothing to capture or experience the contents of that
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But already there is something quite strange to ask.
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Isn't it perfectly feasible to have a universe that follows the laws of physics and goes along
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doing its thing, purely in the dark, without any inner subjective experience embedded within
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That universe is at least imaginable to us, and it feels possible and eerily easy to conceive.
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But before we dive in too quickly, we still need to try to point to exactly what we mean
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Sometimes conversations on consciousness can feel like an endless string of analogies and
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stories, trying to restart a strange deliberation on the correct path.
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Is consciousness like a radio receiving signals?
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Or is it, as Plato once famously imagined, like shadows on a cave wall?
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You can pay attention to what it's like to hear the sound of my voice right now and notice
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And presumably, there is a level of information processing happening in your brain, which somehow
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gives rise to the feeling that it is something that it is like for you to be listening to
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But your brain is also presumably doing a lot of other things at the moment, which are arguably
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Like regulating the function of your kidneys, or monitoring your heartbeat, or breathing.
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And there doesn't seem to be a subjective feeling associated with those clusters of brain activity,
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You could perhaps direct your attention to them and maybe grasp some vague awareness.
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But before I pointed it out and you turned your inner spotlight towards them, the activity
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was happening in the darkness, without a subjective conscious quality.
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So why do some activities give rise to this feeling, while others don't?
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Let's try out our first hypothetical to further get at what might be meant by consciousness.
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This is a conception which very much aligns with Sam's usage of the term throughout these
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Thomas Nagel brought us a simple question in an essay he wrote in 1974.
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One of the prominent voices in the field of consciousness is the American philosopher Daniel
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Dennett likes to refer to these kinds of hypotheticals and mind explorations not as thought experiments,
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This is itself a useful analogy, where you can imagine being walked through a hypothetical
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not to perform any kind of experiment, in any scientific sense, but to have the hypothetical
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sort of inflate an intuition you might have about something.
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Perhaps the intuition gets pumped up to the point where it crowds out all others and proclaims
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Dennett happens to disagree with Sam's views on consciousness, and Thomas Nagel's as well.
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You'll hear some of Dennett's objections raised by Sam and his guests throughout these
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Sam had Dennett on the show, but that entanglement is included in the free will compilation.
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And as you'll surely gather, that conversation includes intimately related disagreements.
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But let's spend some time with Nagel's question, and see what kind of intuitions it pumps
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This intuition pump is best run on oneself, so I'll start by putting myself to the test.
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I must be building some kind of mental map of my physical environment as I navigate it.
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The echolocation seems to give me a good idea of how to move about the radial area around
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And I experience something like sweetness and satisfaction when I taste the juicy mosquito
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I don't like the feeling of bumping into the wall too hard.
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I really am not sure how much of a concept of the future or past I can imagine.
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Do I have a mind's eye where I can picture things which are not present?
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Whatever this constellation of experiences is, this must all add up to a kind of batness.
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It feels like whatever this is, that there is something that it is like to be a bat.
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Now let's pump this intuition fully by substituting alternatives for the bat in Nagel's initial
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All of these substitutions seem to still result in having some kind of experience in the inner
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But what happens to our intuition when we swap out the bat with something like a tree branch?
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What about a submarine, which also has something like sonar?
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If imagining what it's like to be something ends up obliterating the notion of experience
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We may not know exactly what it's really like to be a bat, but we get the sense that
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there is something that it must be like to be one.
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We tend not to have that same intuition about the boulder.
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Perhaps this is because there doesn't appear to be anything like a central nervous system,
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or a place where all the sensory data is orchestrated or stored.
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A simple old-fashioned mercury thermometer does interact and respond to its environment.
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The mercury conducts heat from its target and expands and climbs the tube in response.
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Or is this just a non-sentient interaction of physics that lacks any sense of an inner
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experience, or the feeling of an experiencer somehow within the thermometer?
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Our intuition suggests that this is the truer picture, and we tend not to grant consciousness
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to thermometers in the way that we might to bats, bears, and other people.
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If I look closer and closer at my physical system, which I've already established must
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be generating consciousness as proven by my subjective inner experience at this moment,
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am I not just made up of incredibly small thermometers?
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If I look at a single atom in my brain, is it not just responding to its environment and
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being moved around by the laws of physics, in much the same way the thermometer is?
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How is any amount of this seemingly non-sentient activity, and in any imaginable physical configuration,
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generating something like a unified, collective, subjective, consistent experience that we are
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This leads us to our first guest, who coined this particular question, the hard problem.
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By distinguishing this problem as the hard one, Chalmers implies that there must be easy
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He's not suggesting that we know much about those either.
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But by easy problems, he's talking about the questions of how to correlate conscious states
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with neurophysiological activity, such as noticing which areas of the brain light up when the
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subject reports experiencing a certain sound, memory, or emotion.
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Chalmers contends that all of that work may provide insight into how the machinery of the
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brain operates, and it might give us fuller scientific descriptions for things like vision,
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But all the correlations we could ever hope to find in those investigations won't, and
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perhaps can't ever address, why any physical activity should, and apparently does, give
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So let's start with Sam and David Chalmers' exchange on this topic from episode 34, which
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We're going to jump right in with Sam asking Chalmers what he thinks of Nagel's famous question
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There was another very influential articulation of this problem, which I would assume influenced
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you as well, which was Thomas Nagel's essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
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The formulation he gave there is, if it's like something to be a creature or a system
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processing information, whatever it's like, even if it's something we can't understand,
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the fact that it is like something, the fact that there's an internal, subjective, qualitative
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character to the thing, the fact that if you could switch places with it, it wouldn't
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That fact, the fact that it's like something to be a bat, is the fact of consciousness in
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I know people who are not sympathetic with that formulation just think it's a kind of
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tautology or it's just a question-begging formulation of it.
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But as a rudimentary statement of what consciousness is, I've always found that to be an attractive
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Yeah, I find that's about as good a definition as we're going to get for consciousness.
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The idea is roughly that a system is conscious if there's something it's like to be that
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There's nothing it's like, presumably, to be this glass of water on my desk.
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If there's nothing it's like to be that glass of water on my desk, then it's not conscious.
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Likewise, some of my mental states, you know, my seeing the green leaves right now, there's
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something it's like for me to see the green leaves.
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But maybe there's some unconscious language processing of syntax going on in my head that
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doesn't feel like anything to me or some motor processes in the cerebellum.
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And those might be states of me, but they're not conscious states of me because there's
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nothing it's like for me to undergo those states.
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So I find this is a definition that's very vivid and useful for me.
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That said, it's just a bunch of words like anything.
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And for some people, so for some people, this bunch of words, I think, is very useful
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in activating the idea of consciousness from the subjective point of view.
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Other people hear something different in that set of words like, what is it like?
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Well, it's like it's kind of similar to my brother, but it's different as well.
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You know, for those people, that set of words doesn't work.
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So what I found over the years is this phrase of Nagel's is incredibly useful for at least
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some people in getting them on to the problem, although it doesn't work for everybody.
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What do you make of the fact that so many scientists and philosophers find the hardness
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And I think I should probably get you to state why it's so hard or why you have distinguished
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the hard from the easy problems of consciousness.
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But what do you make of the fact that people find it difficult to concede that there's a
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Because it's, I mean, this is just a common phenomenon.
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I mean, there are people like Dan Dennett and the Churchlands and other philosophers who
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just kind of ram their way past the mystery here and declare that it's a pseudo-mystery.
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Let's state what the hard problem is, and perhaps you can say why it's not immediately compelling
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Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a huge amount of disagreement in this area.
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My sense is that most people at least got a reasonable appreciation of the fact that there's
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Of course, what you do after that is very different in different cases.
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Some people think, well, it's only an initial problem and we can, we ought to kind of see
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But yeah, to state the problem, I find it useful to first start by distinguishing the
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easy problems, which are problems basically about the performance of functions from the
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So the easy problems are, you know, how is it, for example, we discriminate information in
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How does the brain integrate information from different sources and bring it together to make
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How indeed do we voluntarily control behavior to respond in a controlled way to our environment?
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And actually, neuroscience has not gotten all that far on some of these problems.
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But in those cases, we have a pretty clear sense of what the research program is and what
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It's basically a matter of finding some mechanism in the brain that, for example, is responsible
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for discriminating the information and controlling the behavior.
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And although it's pretty hard work finding the mechanism, we're on a path to doing that.
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So a neural mechanism for discriminating information, a computational mechanism for the brain to monitor
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So for the easy problems, they at least fall within the standard methods of the brain and
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But basically, we're trying to explain some kind of function and we just find a mechanism.
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The hard problem, what makes the hard problem of experience hard is it doesn't really seem
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to be a problem about behavior or about functions.
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You could in principle imagine explaining all of my behavioral responses to a given stimulus
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and how my brain discriminates and integrates and monitors itself and controls.
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You could explain all that with, say, a neural mechanism and you might not have touched the
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central question, which is why does it feel like something from the first person point
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That just doesn't seem to be a problem about explaining behaviors and explaining functions.
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And as a result, the usual methods that work for us so well in the brain and cognitive
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sciences, finding a mechanism that does the job just doesn't obviously apply here.
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We're going to get correlations, we're certainly finding correlations between processes in the
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brain and bits of consciousness, an area of the brain that might light up when you see
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But nothing there seems yet to be giving us an explanation.
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Why does all that processing feel like something from the inside?
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Why doesn't it go on just in the dark as if we were giant robots or zombies without
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And I'm inclined to think that most people at least recognize there is at least the appearance
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From that point, people react in different ways.
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Someone like Dan Dennett says, it's all an illusion or a confusion and one that we need
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I think it's a hard enough problem that we need to be exploring every avenue here.
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And one avenue that's very much worth exploring is the view that it's an illusion.
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But there is something kind of faintly unbelievable about the whole idea that the data of consciousness
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To me, they're the most real thing in the universe, you know, the feeling of pain, the
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So it's a very hard line to take, the line that Dan Dennett takes.
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He wrote a book, Consciousness Explained, back in the early 90s, where he tried to take that
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But I think most people have found that at the end of the day, it just doesn't seem to
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So you've touched on it in passing here, but remind us of the zombie argument that I don't
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It's not something that I noticed before I heard you making it.
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But the zombie argument really is the thought experiment that describes epiphenomenalism.
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Introduce the concept of a zombie, and then I have a question about that.
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So yeah, the idea of zombies actually, I mean, it'd been out there for a while in philosophy
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before me, not to mention out there in the popular culture.
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But the zombies which play a role in philosophy are a bit different from the zombies that play
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a role in the movies or in the Haitian voodoo culture.
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You know, the ones in the movies are all supposed to be, all the different kinds of zombies are
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The zombies in the movie are lacking somehow life.
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The zombies in the voodoo tradition are lacking some kind of free will.
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Well, the zombies that play a role in philosophy are lacking consciousness.
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And this is just a thought experiment, but the conceit is that we can at least imagine
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a being at the very least behaviorally identical to a normal human being, but without any consciousness
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Just acting and walking and talking in a perfectly human-like way without any consciousness.
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The extreme version of this thought experiment says we can at least imagine a being physically
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identical to a normal human being, but without any subjective consciousness.
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So I talk about my zombie twin, you know, a hypothetical being in the universe next door
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He's holding a conversation like this with a zombie analog of you right now, saying all
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the same stuff and responding, but without any consciousness.
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Now, no one thinks anything like this exists in our universe, but the idea at least seems
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There doesn't seem to be any contradiction in the idea.
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And the very fact that you can kind of make sense of the idea immediately raises some questions
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It looks like for anything behavioral you could point to, it starts to look as if a zombie
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could do all the same things without consciousness.
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So if there was some function we could point to and say, that's what you need consciousness
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for, and you could not in principle do that without consciousness, then we might have a
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But right now it seems, I mean, actually this corresponds to the science for anything that
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we actually do, perception, learning, memory, language, and so on.
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It sure looks like a whole lot of it can be performed even in the actual world unconsciously.
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So the whole problem of what consciousness is doing is just thrown into harsh relief by that
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Yeah, as you say, that most of what our minds are accomplishing is unconscious, or at least
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it seems to be unconscious from the point of view of the two of us who are having this
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So the fact that I can follow the rules of English grammar, insofar as I manage to do
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that, that is all being implemented in a way that is unconscious.
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And when I make an error, I, as the conscious witness of my inner life, am just surprised at
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And I could be surprised for, on all those occasions where I make no errors, and I get
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to the end of a sentence in something like grammatically correct form, I could be sensitive
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to the fundamental mysteriousness of that, which is to say that I'm following rules that
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I am, I have no conscious access to in the moment.
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The fact that I perceive my visual field, the fact that I hear your voice, the fact that
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I effortlessly and actually helplessly decode meaning from your words, because I am an English
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speaker and, and you're speaking in English, but if you were speaking in Chinese, it would
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And I mean, this is, this is all unconsciously mediated.
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And so they, again, it is a mystery why there should be something that it's like to be associated
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with any part of this process, because so much of the process can take place in the dark.
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You heard David Chalmers mention the idea of a philosophical zombie and explain it a bit.
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But it's worth spending a little more time to fully explore this idea in order to set
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up our next guest, who actually finds the whole notion of the zombie to be an unhelpful
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Imagine having a cabinet full of raw materials to build a human.
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Picture a mess of atoms, or quarks, or however small you'd like to imagine our
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Picture all of that stuff in well-labeled, pull-out drawers at our bizarre assembly station.
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At this stage, one would be hard-pressed to say the stuff in any of the drawers was conscious
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It appears to be just like our initial questions of asking what it's like to be a boulder,
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But now let's start putting all the pieces together.
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And let's say we set out to build a precise copy of you.
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So we start putting all the atoms together, forming the correct bonds to make carbon and
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nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, blood plasma, and everything else.
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And we construct the entire physical system that is you, forming all the organs and bones
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This copy of you would presumably speak just like you, and announce itself to be you.
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If all memory and knowledge is ultimately embedded in a physical system, then we must have also
00:28:23.420
copied all of that stuff over during our building process.
00:28:26.600
This clone would have all of your memories, your personality, your desires, your fears,
00:28:34.020
And, of course, we would assume the thing is conscious.
00:28:39.460
But remember that our intuition was telling us that just a few minutes ago, when all the parts were
00:28:43.540
unassembled in the cabinet, there was no consciousness there.
00:28:52.840
One possibility is that the copy slowly gained consciousness as we assembled the system.
00:28:57.740
Consciousness began to emerge when the parts were in a sufficiently complex arrangement,
00:29:03.400
and in a special configuration, and the consciousness began at a very low, dull level.
00:29:10.140
Consciousness fully reached its current depth and richness when we completed the building of the
00:29:14.260
whole body, and likely needed much of the brain to be built to really ramp up its subjective experience.
00:29:20.080
Imagine this as something like a consciousness dimmer switch being turned up as we built.
00:29:24.140
Another possibility tells us that consciousness was completely absent while we were building
00:29:29.540
the thing, until we added one specific piece which completed some yet unknown special configuration
00:29:35.720
of information integration, and then consciousness flicked on into existence, something more like
00:29:41.540
an on-off switch, or like the previous analogy of a radio.
00:29:45.920
Perhaps there is something like a consciousness field, which is only able to be tapped into and
00:29:50.980
channeled if the receiver is built just right, just like a radio antenna picking up the already
00:29:58.320
They were always there, but were invisible and mute until we completed our radio receiver.
00:30:03.300
This idea is also intuitive to some people, because consciousness feels like a binary state
00:30:10.980
Or to recall our earlier analogy, it's either somewhere on the mirror or it's not.
00:30:15.640
But there is another possibility about our clone that's also strangely intuitive, or at least
00:30:21.120
conceivable, and that is that consciousness never happens at all in this process.
00:30:27.060
Recall that we were quite certain that the atoms and quarks in the drawers had no consciousness
00:30:32.640
And we definitely never ladled any magical consciousness stuff into the copy at any point while we were
00:30:38.420
We don't even know if such a metaphysical thing exists.
00:30:42.720
And if it does, we certainly don't have physical access to it.
00:30:47.220
So, perhaps the copy of you behaves just like you and announces its consciousness, but the
00:30:55.280
It's not really having any inner subjective experience.
00:31:02.220
Now, if you're getting a bit frustrated by this picture and professing that a philosophical
00:31:06.240
zombie could not possibly exist, even if we could conceive of the thing, and consciousness
00:31:10.860
must be emerging somehow within it, well, you're in good company.
00:31:15.620
Very few serious thinkers in the field would defend the idea that a philosophical zombie
00:31:21.800
But there is another question that the zombie helps us formulate, perhaps a good scientific
00:31:26.980
If philosophical zombies can't be built, where did the consciousness stuff come from in the
00:31:32.780
Was it actually somehow there in the matter in the drawers before we started to build
00:31:39.180
Does that imply that everything has a tiny bit of consciousness, or a mental property
00:31:45.320
Does the right physical configuration somehow unlock it and allow it to flow?
00:31:50.140
And that gives rise to a unified feeling of consciousness?
00:31:53.820
This notion points to a theory called panpsychism, that we'll get to a bit later.
00:31:58.720
Or, is consciousness simply a kind of law of nature?
00:32:02.800
Consciousness just emerges given the right flow of information within a system?
00:32:07.500
As strange as it sounds, there is simply a principle of physics which states that a certain
00:32:12.340
kind of information processing just results in the system having an inner experience of
00:32:18.020
We may get better at describing the kinds of systems that inevitably result in consciousness
00:32:22.500
in the same way that we can describe systems that unfailingly result in all kinds of emergent
00:32:27.180
phenomena, like the kinds of descriptions of the behaviors of atmospheric conditions
00:32:33.420
But really, that's the whole story, and the best explanation we will ever and could ever
00:32:39.880
But that last bit of strangeness is deeply unsatisfying to some people.
00:32:46.380
And Sam is amongst those thinkers who contend that this kind of explanation will always be
00:32:50.380
unsatisfactory, and be of a fundamentally different nature than other scientific explanations of
00:32:56.480
There is just something about the intuition which the zombie story inflates that protests
00:33:02.040
against these types of correlative and reductionist explanations.
00:33:06.020
The gap between even increasingly detailed descriptions of complex physical processes,
00:33:11.420
and something like a rich inner subjective experience of seeing the color red, or feeling
00:33:16.180
love, or the taste of vanilla, or the awareness of hope, is just too wide and of a nature
00:33:24.960
In episode 96, Sam tangled with a thinker who disagrees with this declaration of an unbridgeable
00:33:32.900
This is Thomas Metzinger, professor and director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group on Neuroethics
00:33:38.600
and Neurophilosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University.
00:33:42.280
Here, Metzinger expresses his frustrations with the idea of a zombie, and laments how it can
00:33:47.300
sidetrack what he considers a serious and confident effort to arrive at a true science of
00:33:55.340
You're not a fan anymore, if you ever were, of the framing by David Chalmers of the hard
00:34:06.620
You know, we all respect Dave, and we know he's very smart and has got a very fast line.
00:34:18.480
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