Sam Harris
Everything You Have Wrong About Consciousness (Making Sense with Sam Harris)
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18 thoughts on “Everything You Have Wrong About Consciousness (Making Sense with Sam Harris)”
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Her voice is relaxing af. Their home must be so calming.
There is a quite simple and straightforward way to understand that the perceivable physical world is no more real than a computer generated virtual reality, and that the only thing that is really real is the consciousness that perceives that world, which is really not-a-thing. In Zen, consciousness is called the No-thing, which is the only thing that is really real. The world is no more real than a computer generated virtual reality game that plays for the amusement of the spiritual presence of consciousness that plays the game. The fundamental scientific principle of modern physics that explains this peculiar state of affairs is called the holographic principle of quantum gravity. For a totally consistent scientific discussion of this state of affairs see:
https://scienceandnonduality.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/the-mystery-of-creation-2.pdf
https://scienceandnonduality.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/what-is-real-1.pdf
https://scienceandnonduality.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/what-does-dylans-all-along-the-watchtower-really-mean-4.pdf
This episode with Donald Hoffman is a disappointing suspension of your bullshit detector Sam. Hoffman has a clear agenda, and neither you nor Anaka called him out.
But there is no such thing as "matter". At the Planck levels, there is One Aether field and every "effect" or observation is a perturbation of that field. We cannot and do not see the Universe Energy as it really is. We see it as we create it, as we were programmed to do so….
you didnt explane even one wrong thing I had about consciusness.
I think it must be common among children, as it was with me, to be perplexed by being aware, by having a point of view, and that mine was the same thing that, say, my brother had, only had from my corner of the room. I remember struggling and failing to put into words that it was like nothing else, and nothing was like it. When I was four, this concern possessed me, as did stealing change from my mother's handbag.
Understanding computers will help you to understand how consciousness, or any complex phenomenon for that matter, can emerge from the arrangement of, and interaction between very simple entities.
In computers, complex logic and even memory arise only from configurations of switches, that are either on or off. Simulations and video games exist only as a constantly shifting configuration of these on and off switches. They are nothing but 1 and 0. To my knowledge, the universe is also nothing but a configuration of positive or negative states.
To me, self awareness is simply a by product of having a brain that can do really powerful abstraction. A cat looks at a car, and just sees a giant moving entity with a color, shape, sound, smell. A human sees tyres spinning, doors that open and close, a combustion engine. We know what rubber is, we know what metal is. We understand why the car is made from these materials, and not wood or clay. We have a deep understanding of objects and systems.
Once you have this ability, you begin to understand yourself, as an object, with properties, existing in time and space. We understand that we have a body and a mind. Everytime another person speaks, we understand those words belong to them, and everytime we think, we understand our thoughts belong to us. Just as we understand the tyres belong to the car.
Your brain knows that everything you do, emerges from and belongs to the self. In my opinion, self awareness is nothing more than this simple feedback loop of robust pattern recognition. I dont find it mysterious at all.
Consciousness is merely the experience of having a functioning neocortex. And the neocortex evolved. This blather about the mystery of a bunch of nonconscious material becoming conscious is little different from the prescientific blather about nonliving material becoming living. The latter posits some "vital force" that renders the matter living rather than the configuration of the matter. Most people laugh at that concept now. And I laugh at the endless yammering about consciousness for precisely the same reason.
Humans are being Farmed .. All over the World History tells of Creatures Everyone Calls Devils . They Train Human Egos and Emotions to do Negative to Themselves and All Else . They Made-up Religions to Keep Humans Fighting and Away from Communicating with Nature / Earth . Earth is A Living Being . Show Nature / Earth Reverence , Respect and Humility and You Will Focus On Reality . Be-Well and Do-Good Or The Depth of Our Arrogance Will Be The Worth Of Our Humility .
If we have no free will, why does our conscious mind need coerced by powerful emotions and instinctual drives and hormones in order to make our conscious mind conform to the needs of our biological systems? Surely if we had no free will, there would be absolutely no reason for emotional states and instinctual drives, because our automated biological systems would just do what is needed in order to survive. The mere fact that emotions and instinct exist, for a reason, should be a massive indication that free will really is a thing.
This is kinda like deciding the all cars drive themselves, drivers are just an illusion, when a car is going up hill, the driver merely responds to the cars input so when the car struggles, the driver is instructed by the car to give it more gas, so really the driver is just doing as the car tells him, the driver isn't really in control of the car, the car instructs the driver in his operations, so, the driver is an illusion, the car drives it's self.
Same logical fallacy.
Just because neuroscience can not find a central processor in the brain in order to pin a "sense of self" on to something, does not mean that the sense of self does not exist, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Neuroscience, D- must try harder.
I personally think neuroscience has been given a task that was too difficult for them. "Find the sense of self" ehh, we can't, years we've been looking, can't find it anywhere, should we just say it doesn't exist and pretend that we didn't fail? No, no we didn't find it, but we didn't fail, honest, it doesn't exist! (Do you think they'll buy it? I hope so, we spent all the funding!)
I personally can not get behind the idea that I am a biological automaton, or a theoretical zombie, doesn't quite sit well with me, my conscious mind keeps trying to question it. Although apparently that is an illusion too, I'm just along for the ride, if that is the case, it's a shit ride.
The latest conversation with Michael Weiss and Yascha Mounk is fantastic. Plenty of Trump / execration, a few jabs at Chomsky and a little bit of rubbing the lefts nose in its own cancel culture shit show. Best one in a while. Yes, I'm commenting on the next podcast in the previous podcast comment section.
The illusions of free will and the sense of self really are two sides of the same coin. Very useful phraseology as it can require a bit of contemplation to realize and break these powerful illusions instilled by evolution. It’s not that everything is “predetermined” as though written out, but literally everything, including choices, is affected one way(s) or the other by prior causes that were out of our (libertarian) control. There’s no free will in the universe and we’re part of it.
My free will lead me here……………
Is humans creating artificial intelligence not free will? If not, is it somehow predetermined?
I can't help but feel that Sam Harris isn't engaging with the concept of free will fully. I think he's getting hung up on the "free" part. Do people have a will at all? Nevermind whether it's based on deterministic or random factors.
When I make a choice, and it is based on reasons, whim, or randomness, do those reasons or whims belong to me? I think that's what people mean.
So, certainly, when we say that the self is an illusion, we are also saying that our choices don't belong to us, that's an illusion.
However, it seems that the cooperation of trillions of cells is indeed the reason we have this illusion of self and indeed a mind in the first place. So, everything is an illusion, and yet it still might be meaningful to distinguish between choices that are made by will and ones that are not. Discipline seems to be real. There seems to be a real difference between how well some people adhere to their own professed goals and how well others do.
I'd be interested in finding another thinker who grapples with these concepts a bit more openly.
consciousness is god. groundless and formless. its the mathematical brain which creates boundaries or dualities when in reality it is nonduality. materialism does not exist. provability is a weaker notion than truth according to godels incompleteness theorem which also means science is a religion and the only religion to prove to itself to be a religion.
They really do make the ideal couple. Annaka even sounds like Sam (or vice versa ).
I had no choice but to type this meaningless comment.