Shadowing Practice: The ‘Self’ You Can’t Find with Sam Harris - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears.

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch.

What's a perception box?

It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs,

life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences.

You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity,

awe, and wonder, or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger.

In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception.

I'd like to introduce our esteemed host,

Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Christoph Koch,

chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.

This week, our guest is Sam Harris.

Through the lens of the Perception Box, what we experience as me,

the one controlling events, may be an illusion the mind is constructing in real time.

Training ourselves to see that construction process can transform how we relate to challenges, how resilient we are to stress,

and how to hold our fears with compassion rather than resistance.

Christoph, I want to ask you, when you look at yourself or you think about yourself or what you're directly experiencing right now,

how does that work in your mind?

What does your mind do?

Well, it thinks that it strongly believes, Like most people, there's a person sitting inside my head, a little guy, homunculus called Christophe,

in my case, looking out at the world.

That person is a thinker, is a carrier of my thoughts.

That's a person who experienced.

That person carries all my behavioral traits and all my autobiographical memories.

And that person really essentially remains the same throughout my life.

So your subjective sense is

that there's this unique, unified self within you looking out looking out at the world

and experiencing it yes

and then of course

it goes hand with in most of us with this voice inside my head

you know i talk to myself this is running commentary

and sometimes it gets really annoying and then you want to shut it up

so you go into states of flow like running

or you know any other activity where you get totally absorbed by your work right whether it's mathematics

or writing code or whatever we lose our sense of self

but that's rare but enjoyable very enjoyable we have someone here who's an expert on all things self and mind.

So welcome to the podcast, Sam Harris.

Yeah, great to see you guys.

When you think of, when you look at yourself via your sort of direct experience right now, what do you think your mind is doing?

What does it feel like?

And what do you think is going on?

I think the brain for most people is doing three things.

It's forming a representation of the world.

It's forming a representation of the body in the world.

And then for most people, this is going to be the self where we're going to kind of deconstruct and ultimately,

you know, from my point of view, deconstruct as an illusion.

There's this third representation of a subject interior to the body.

Most people don't feel identical to their bodies.

They feel like they have bodies paradoxically.

They might know, you know, if they're scientifically sophisticated, they know that they're identical to their bodies or that, you know,

certainly a physicalist view of the mind would say the mind is what the brain is doing

or the mind is what the entire central nervous system is doing.

And when you're actually talking about the first person experience of most people, that's not what it is.

People don't feel merely coterminous with their bodies.

They feel like there's a subject in the head that is this kind of unchanging locus of conscious awareness and conscious will.

And it's the place from which the spotlight of attention can be moved

and those movements can be kind of voluntary or involuntary.

And when you ask someone to meditate and to look for this thing they're calling a self, the starting point for everyone is to,

whether they close their eyes or not, but it's even heightened when you close your eyes,

you feel like, okay, now I'm this interior witness to the world and to the body in the world.

And there is this strangely paradoxical relationship to to the body whereas you sort of know it's you

but you know if you have a pain in your knee

the you the conscious subject has a relationship to

that pain you're not liking it you're wanting to go away and it's everything points back to this

feeling of being a kind of passenger in the body that witnesses everything, that is the one that is having experience,

appropriating experience moment to moment.

It's the thinker of your thoughts.

So in addition to the flow of thought, there's the sense that there's this author of the thoughts.

In addition to the next intention that arises to reach for a glass, say, there's the feeling that there's a one who intends.

And again, subjectively, it's not felt to be the whole body.

It's felt to be this kind of inner witness.

And it's that inner witness, when you look for it closely enough, is not findable.

And in that not finding, you can actually discover its absence.

What do you mean by that it's not findable?

In my experience, it's possible to look precisely enough for this feeling that we're calling I,

moment to moment and to recognize that it's something we're doing.

It's almost like you're making a fist and you've been making a fist your whole life.

And by a very kind of precise use of attention, I can make you aware of the fact that you're making this fist.

This just feels like what a hand is for you.

But if we could just pay close enough attention to what's happening here and you could relax your hand,

realize the thing you thought you were holding doesn't exist.

But there's still the locus of attention, right?

There's me intending to close up.

That's what it feels like subjectively.

The illusion is that there's experience

and then there's a self that's on the edge of experience or in the center of experience to whom experience refers.

But if that is experienced at all, that's just more experience, right?

That's just part of the field of experience.

Whatever this wrinkle is, you're calling I.

Whatever it feels like to be me.

I mean, so you can imagine intensifying it in, you know, we're all walking around with this feeling of I,

but there are conditions under which it can contract even further.

So if you suddenly become acutely self -conscious, right?

You're something between your teeth.

Yeah, yeah.

Someone says, oh, no, what's that?

And you're like, what, me?

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And so you realize that you're this thing that feels implicated behind your face.

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People feel like they're, it's almost like your face is a mask and you're behind this mask.

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And if someone points to you and it kind of implicates you, or if there's a crowd that suddenly draws his attention to you,

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you're on stage and you've done something that's acutely embarrassing, say.

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That collapse of attention where everyone else's gaze suddenly impresses itself upon

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you almost as to form a kind of singularity of self, right?

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That's an experience of energy, the physiological changes in your body.

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So just to like pull that apart a little bit.

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So from a neuroscience perspective, you know, we think of a sense of self,

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it's just made up of really different parts of the brain acting different,

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you know, parts of our brain that encode our sense of our body and our,

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you know, that construct this reality of a self that's experiencing things.

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when you have more activation in certain parts of the brain, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

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your sense of self -awareness and self -consciousness and inner critic sort of turns up.

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But in certain states, when you can get that to turn down, you kind of lose a sense of self.

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And there are different ways to get to those states as well, becoming more open.

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If we think about a perception box, when you're closing in or you can expand it and open up and the sense of self can dissolve,

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which makes it clear that it is a construct of the brain.

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Yeah, it's something the brain is doing and it's something the brain can cease to do.

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But that doesn't make it an illusion.

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I mean, it's as much a construct as pain is or seeing you.

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I have a picture of you.

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I know it's created in parts of my visual cortex, right?

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There's one type of illusion, certainly, that you think something is so, I mean, like the classic from Indian literature is

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that you think there's something coiled in the corner of a room and you mistake it for a snake,

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but you pay closer attention to it and then you recognize it's just a coil of rope.

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The true perception is revealed by what remains when you actually bring your full attention to the thing.

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If the snake always collapses into a rope and it never goes the other way,

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it's not you're looking closer still and then suddenly the rope becomes a snake, you then draw the conclusion, well, it's not really a snake,

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it's a rope, even though out of the corner of my eye.

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You're saying the more you look into the self, the more it kind of disappears.

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There's nothing to be found there.

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Once you have this insight, again, this is just within the frame of meditation and specifically a non -dual approach to mindfulness.

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What becomes stable is every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears.

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You couldn't actually feel like a self on demand if you wanted to, right?

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Like, so like it's unstable in a way that whenever, whenever you look for it, it's gone.

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But you can make similar arguments for any conscious perception.

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I submit that the consciousness of self is a subset of all conscious experiences.

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But I can't do that with you.

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Every time I look at your yellow sweatshirt, I see your yellow sweatshirt.

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And I can't look at it closely enough for it to disappear.

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It is a stable percept for me.

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There are certain things that are more stable, like pain.

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Unfortunately, chronic pain is more stable.

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And visual perception, yeah but the character of them really i mean do you think

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that that conscience of self is different from consciousness of seeing yellow oh yeah

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or pain yeah it's based on a mistake

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and it's what it's like to be identified with thought without knowing

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you're identified with thought i mean the flow of thought is the thing

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that is dragging this sense of of subjectivity into consciousness moment to moment

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i mean i actually think our sense of self is is interrupted much more than people realize.

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You mentioned flow states and this condition of kind of losing yourself in your work.

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We're constantly breaking it without clear awareness of it being broken.

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What meditation is by this specific exercise of paying attention in a certain way,

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you can make these breaks in this subject -object dualism very salient.

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I want to get into free will a bit.

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I would just dare to say

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that I think a lot of time we are not aware of ourself

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when we're just in a flow state or you're just driving on your way to work and your mind is wandering.

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It's only when you start to begin to focus on self

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that it almost like constructs itself in that moment to be there again.

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And it's always there when you're kind of look to it.

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I don't constantly have this awareness of my sense of self until I focus on it.

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But what I find with patients is that, you know, who are suffering, they are hyper focused on their thoughts and the rumination.

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And when we look at you know in our imaging studies show

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that they have hyperactivation in parts of their prefrontal cortex and

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when you get them to let go whether it's through meditation

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or flow states creativity psychedelics

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that part of the brain the rumination kind of parts of the prefrontal cortex calm down

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and you can't simultaneously it's be in flow

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and also be you know ruminating and anxious and depressed

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because you're kind of turning down those parts of the brain so they're antithetical to each other.

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I want to get into this idea.

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So if self is a kind of whatever you want to call an illusion, a construct of the brain, it's malleable, it can change.

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How much control do we really have over our agent?

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I know our sense of agency can be an illusion, but do we have control?

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Do we have any kind of free will in any kind of philosophical sense?

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Or what about just in the sense of having control over actions?

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Because when I'm treating patients and I'm like, okay, you have control over your thoughts.

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You have OCD.

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You have a sense of you can change this.

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How does free will mix into that equation?

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Yes.

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There are really two levels at which you can talk about control and agency.

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I mean, there's sort of the conventional level at which,

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yes, we have control over all kinds of things and not as much of it as we want in other areas.

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There's one way of framing the whole project of of having insight into, into the nature of mind and,

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and adopting a practice like meditation as a project of, of actually gaining yet another degree of freedom.

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Once you learn a practice like mindfulness, you can actually notice this, the sort of the wheelworks of your own neurosis and, and, and, uh, unhappiness.

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And you can notice, okay, well, I just thought I had that angry thought about this argument I had with my friend yesterday,

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and I'm now kind of ruminating about the things I wish I said or wish I hadn't said.

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But now I can be mindful of it.

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I can notice the physiological changes that these thoughts are producing.

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I can separate them.

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I can notice the physiology is one thing and the imagery

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and the bits of language in my mind are a different stream.

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And I can get some space from it.

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One way to summarize that whole thing is that you can, you're getting some freedom that you didn't have before.

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I mean, now you can actually get off the ride.

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You can decide, okay, anger is no longer useful.

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You know, this, this conversation I'm playing in my head already happened.

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So would you, it's like a Dan Dennett kind of like degrees of freedom, right?

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Versus actually having free will.

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But there's a sort of a compatibilist framing of all that, which is, this is the sort of free, this is what we mean by freedom.

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This is a practical sense.

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Yeah.

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This is a, this is a freedom worth wanting.

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Um, this isn't sort of radical libertarian free will, where you're free of the laws of physics.

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In my view, free will is a concept that doesn't map onto anything deep about us.

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There's a difference between voluntary behavior and involuntary behavior.

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Phenomenologically, that's still true, whether free will is a thing or not.

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I mean, having a tremor that you can't control is different than just doing this on purpose, but on a deep level.

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we know that, you know, the dominoes of physics are just falling and our brain is part of the universe.

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Traditionally, it's been very hard to map the sense of libertarian free will

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that everyone feels they have onto the physics of things, whether you're going to talk about determinism or determinism plus randomness.

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And however you turn those dials, it doesn't give people the libertarian free will they think they have,

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which is the feeling in each moment that I could have done otherwise a moment ago.

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I mean, when I actually pay attention to my experience, I don't know what, there is no free will.

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I don't feel that there's free will.

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It's not that I feel like I have alien hand syndrome and I can't control my hand, but when I actually look closely at my behavior,

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everything is simply springing out of the dark.

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Once again, when I raise my hand to make this point, And you're saying that just came out of just like you're hearing this logical nothingness.

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Like you can hear this.

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You can't you can't choose not to hear it.

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Right.

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You can be distracted from it, but I choose not to pay attention to it.

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But still, it's an adventitious intrusion into the theater of your conscious life.

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So is that intention to raise your arm like you did.

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You could have spent an hour deciding, OK, I'm going to prove that I have free will.

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I know I'm going to raise my right hand or my left hand, but I'm not sure which one.

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Let's just figure this out.

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I'm going to go back and forth.

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You know, maybe, you know, I'm right -handed.

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That's that maybe, maybe it should be the right, but no, but it may be more creative somehow to use the left.

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There's no place to stand subjectively where that, where you can explain it.

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It really is as, as mysterious as someone sitting in another room with a keyboard deciding for you.

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It's only mysterious if you don't accept the primacy of consciousness.

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If you have a different ontology where you say, first and foremost, existence means to be conscious, and that existence has causal power,

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and the causal power arrives from that.

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Physics, of course, correlates.

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So clearly, you can read up, you know, Ben Libet and all of that.

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If I raise my right hand,

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we know 300 milliseconds before there's a signal that I can pick up with EG or even with FMI much earlier.

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But that's correlation.

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As we tell all of our students, correlation is not causation.

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But you're thinking a very radical...

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Well, because otherwise, Sam is suggesting, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Arne, you're saying the fact that I raised my hand,

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leaving aside noise, which we all agree isn't that important, actually was determined 12, 13 .4 billion years ago in the Big Bang.

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Or it could also be, you know, randomness as well.

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How would you describe your philosophical view of free will?

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That it doesn't map on to anything.

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It doesn't map on to the physics of things, whether randomness or determinism or any combination thereof.

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And the truth is it doesn't actually map on to our experience when we pay attention.

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See, the traditional conundrum is we know it doesn't map on to the physics of things,

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but we know in our bones that we have this thing because we feel it moment to moment.

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So the endurance of free will as a topic of philosophical interest is based on the common experience

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that people think they have.

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So this has been a perspective that I've taken as, okay, the brain is this complex, you know, information processing machine.

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You have certain constraints, your genetics, your history, the environment, all these things.

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The brain is doing these calculations.

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It decides in any given moment, based on all this, all this data, what to do in that moment.

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You know, we have the Benjamin Libet, 350 milliseconds before you're even consciously aware of the intention to move,

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the brain is sort of gearing up to make a movement.

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But there is some randomness that goes on as well.

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Would you say that the unconscious, in a way, has some sort of more free will than our consciousness?

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Because that's the sort of afterthought.

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Nobody thinks they're a robot, right?

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But we are just wet robots, you know, from the point of view of the physics of things.

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the reason why that's

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so difficult to swallow is this is a line from my friend paul bloom the psychologist who you probably know

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he he describes people as common sense dualists and i think

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that really is the case people feel like their mind their agency their subjectivity their sense

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that they are the the author of their thoughts and intentions must it must somehow float free of the physics of things.

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But if there's no free will, let's just say, we still have the capacity to have self -control.

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We still have responsibility for our actions.

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We're still held accountable.

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The sense that I could have done otherwise is a total illusion, right?

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There was no other way for me to finish this sentence.

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It is subjectively mysterious that I can do any of this.

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So like the fact that you can decode what I'm saying, you have no first person insight into that.

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It's just happening you're just a witness to the fact

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that your brain accomplishes this thing so

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so consciousness is is epiphenomenal certainly with respect to your being able to decode these sounds meaningfully

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i mean the semantics it's all just getting most of it is unconscious but consciousness is not

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Per definition, it is the phenomena per excellence.

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I can deny everything.

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I cannot deny my unconscious.

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I totally agree with that.

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So the way I would summarize that.

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You seem to come close to it.

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You say the self is an illusion.

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No, no, no. The sense of agency is an illusion.

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The one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion is consciousness.

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I'm making a very strong epistemological claim.

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I'm very slow to make any ontological claims, right?

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So when I say consciousness is the one thing that cannot be an illusion, epistemologically, right?

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Also, I guess that has ontological implications, but by my asserting that,

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I'm not claiming to know what happened before the Big Bang or how consciousness relates to brains or what happens after death.

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And so it's not an ontological, unlike, for instance, integrated information theory that makes us ontological point of view.

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And you guys just break down for our listeners the difference between ontological and epistemological just to...

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Yeah, so epistemology is the question of what we know and how we can know it.

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What can we be certain about is a question of epistemology.

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Is there anything we can be certain about?

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Is there anything we can know that's not based on axioms that we can't justify?

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Do we always have to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps and just assert something as a brute fact being true, but we really can't argue,

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we can't get behind it?

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And this is where René Descartes comes in.

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Yeah.

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And there are many, this is where all philosophy struggles to make sense of our knowledge of reality.

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Ontology is a question of what actually exists.

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What is real?

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What is out there?

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Is this a physical universe only?

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Is it a mental universe only?

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Is there some marriage of the two?

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And this is some kind of dualistic?

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So you're not asking any of those larger questions about what is actually reality.

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Can we just have a bookmark?

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I just wanted to finish the debate on free will.

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So what do you tell, let's say, someone who suffers, let's say, alcoholism, and he tries to stop alcohol?

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Do you tell him, well, don't worry, you don't have a free will.

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There's nothing you can do about it.

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No, no. What do you tell people that want to change but are unable to for whatever reason?

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Okay, so one way of mistaking what I'm claiming

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when I deny the existence of free will is to kind of lurch into fatalism.

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Like, so if there's no free will, then I'm just going to sit here and see what happens.

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You can't step out of the mechanics of things by just deciding to do nothing

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because that is as much of a decision as deciding to do something.

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All of these decisions are merely arising based on states of the brain

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and states of the universe that you didn't consciously author.

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If you want to learn to play the piano, the only way to do that is to do the things

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that encode that skill into your nervous system such that you wake up one day actually being able to play the piano.

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It's not just going to happen to you by accident.

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What I know is that I am a system that is open to influence.

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So if I watch a movie that inspires me to want to learn to play the piano,

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if I meet someone who's even older than I am,

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who says they learned to play the piano in the last 18 months and it's the greatest thing they've ever done,

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and that suddenly corrects a view of myself that I didn't even know I had,

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which it was just my tacit assumption that in your late 50s, you can't learn to play the piano.

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It's a perturbation of my nervous system that came from outside.

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It came from the, you know, gene transcription.

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I mean, it's part of the physics of things.

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So what do you tell the alcoholic who wants to kick the habit?

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Don't worry, someday it'll happen.

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No, no. I mean, the optimistic thing is you are, you have no idea how radically you can change.

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I mean, you are this open system.

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You have no idea how deeply the next conversation you have can affect you.

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how the look on your child's face, the look of disappointment seeing you drunk again, how deeply that could land for you.

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And you might've seen it a thousand times before, but this one time where you really see it might completely

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change your sense of who you need to be in the world.

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Again, the causality here is everywhere.

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I'm just saying that there's no one in the middle, there's no man in the boat who's really controlling things.

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But then I want to talk about the kinds of things that we can do to sort of,

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in a way, help us gain a little bit more control or shift our perspective or perception.

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And we have this constant narration in our head.

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But how does your perception or your perception box shift

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when you move into a state of full absorption of attention or focusing on the self or some sort of meditative state?

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My book and the app that was derived from my book, the title is Waking Up.

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And it's just that it's not original to me.

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I mean, the notion that the analogy to waking up from from a dream,

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waking up from sleep and waking up from a dream is is kind of everywhere in the contemplative literature.

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I mean, the word

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Buddha means awakened one.

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Right.

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So there's this.

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But it's a very deep analogy.

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It's more than an analogy, I think, just.

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it is also neurologically the case

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that there's something very similar being lost in thought thinking without knowing your thinking is very much like being asleep

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and dreaming without knowing you're dreaming and there's this there's this uh transition

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that many people have experienced from from kind of ordinary dreaming to

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so -called lucid dreaming which you can you can suddenly kind of wake up within a dream

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and yet the dream persists and

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that gives you a kind of degree of freedom within a dream

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which is subjectively pretty interesting and people have played with that a lot.

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And there are traditional practices in Tibetan Buddhism.

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There's a lot of, there's something called dream yoga.

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And there's a whole practice around that, which anticipates, you know, what was later done in, you know, in Western psychological circles around lucid dreaming.

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But the phenomenology there is interesting.

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And then also, of course, you can just wake up from a dream totally and realize, okay, I'm safely in my bed.

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I thought I was, you know, running in a jungle being chased by a jaguar, but, uh, and my physiology was, was appropriate to that hallucination.

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But now I I'm, I'm restored to my real circumstance, which is safely in my bed.

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Um, we certainly once you learn to meditate,

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but even people who know nothing about meditation can experience something like that transition where you're,

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you're thinking thoughts that are really driving your experience.

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I've asked you to, you know, think of a celebrity that you can just, the first celebrity who comes to mind, right?

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Just a movie star, right?

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Just bring that image to mind.

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Jennifer Anson.

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I went with Brad Pitt.

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Okay.

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So you might interrogate your intuition around free will here.

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And the phenomenology is someone comes to mind or a couple of people come to mind.

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And then there's a sort of a selection process where you think,

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maybe the first person comes to mind as someone who you'd be sort of embarrassed to, to have been the first person you thought you like,

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I don't, I don't want it for, you know, it's sort of unseemly for me to think of whoever Sylvester Stallone,

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like maybe I can think of somebody more highbrow than Sylvester Stallone.

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So now I go search, I search space kind of continues to light up.

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And, um, but crucially, they're all the people you couldn't think of because you, you don't, you don't know their names, right?

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Like, or you don't even have imagery in your head around them.

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They're the people whose images, you know, like you've seen them in a bunch of movies, but you don't know their names.

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So you couldn't, you couldn't form the sentence.

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I could still have the image.

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So actually I've done

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this experiment in the clinical context where we record from the heads of people here at UCLA with Hitzig Fried.

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That's where we discovered these Jennifer Anson neurons.

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And that's what Jennifer Anson comes to mind.

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I think about her a lot in, in my, in, in a scientific academic context.

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So you do have neurons for some of these people.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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When you ask me to think about that, some of these neurons by top down get activated,

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and then the ones presumably that are strongest in some sense, they make it into my conscious awareness.

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Let's try to map free will onto this.

414

So people have a deep sense that, so one, you'll admit you couldn't think of the people who you don't know, right?

415

There's no free will there.

416

Then let's say there's 2 ,000 people who you could have known, you could have thought of, but only a few were vine for inclusion.

417

So what does it mean to say that you could have thought of Oprah Winfrey?

418

All it means to say, this goes back to your question earlier, what does it mean?

419

How do I map on the sort of old free will language onto the way I think about human experience?

420

To say that you could have thought of Oprah Winfrey a moment ago is to say

421

that you do know who she is.

422

You could think of her next time, right?

423

But you could not have thought of her a moment ago.

424

But here's a slightly different paradigm.

425

I'm now thinking both Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Aniston.

426

And then I, so I've both, I have the fork in the road up ahead in my mind.

427

I think about both consciousness.

428

Right.

429

And then I decide one versus the other.

430

Yeah, so you could do that with 10 people.

431

Or with 10 people.

432

But there's a free decision.

433

But there's still another person who, okay.

434

Who you didn't think of.

435

There's another person who you know just as well as any of those 10 who you didn't think of totally

436

so now now now

437

that you have your 10 to select from i say pick a card any card

438

you can't explain it is subjectively no i like i like for whatever reason

439

i prefer jennifer anson consciously i've decided that this is what you know

440

when you choose to marry someone

441

and move to city you think about the two possibilities

442

that's sort of your paradigmatic decision right you think about the two possibility

443

then you think on benefit i want to do A for whatever reason that I'm mostly unconscious.

444

Well, yes.

445

So you're, so you're the last to know.

446

So, so I'm saying that our experience of the world is completely compatible with there being no free will.

447

Okay.

448

So, you know, I, again, coming from a clinical perspective as well, like both neuroscience and clinical.

449

patients have these intrusive thoughts.

450

I think they're just thoughts like, you know, on hyperdrive, right?

451

We can't really control when thoughts come into our mind.

452

They're coming, it's like a flow of water coming through or whatever you want to call it.

453

Once they're there, we can then maybe control or think about

454

or decide what to do with them or how to react to them or whatever.

455

But the thoughts themselves are in some sense out of our control.

456

They're coming.

457

Even if you feel like you, but people feel like they can consciously author a thought, Like, I'm going to think of a celebrity right now.

458

You can purposely make a thought.

459

I'm thinking of, yeah, but the thing is you can't because that would be to think it before you think it.

460

I mean, really something, it just springs out of the darkness.

461

We're talking about physical states.

462

We're talking about changing physiology moment to moment.

463

We're talking about electrical potentials.

464

We're talking about, you know, what's happening at the synapse.

465

Are those the causes of the correlate?

466

I'm saying that that our experience again this is this is the mystery

467

that I'm saying doesn't exist the mystery for most people is we have an experience

468

that doesn't seem at all like

469

that mere physical causation just just just chemical billiard balls you know just just banging away I'm saying our experience

470

when we really pay attention to it is totally compatible with that.

471

I want to get to what we can do pragmatically outside of this philosophical, you know, conundrum, let's say that we're in right now,

472

because we can debate about free will for hours.

473

But I do want to have the reason why people are

474

so energetically taking the other side of this debate is because they feel a certain way.

475

So you're saying the closer you look, the more you pay attention, the more you can get closer to reality and sort of dissolve these illusions.

476

So what is that practice pragmatically?

477

The practice is to notice

478

that the self you think you have on the edge of consciousness and on the edge of experience isn't there.

479

I mean, you look for it and you can't find it and the not finding it feels like something.

480

Meditation would be a way to get there.

481

What about psychedelics?

482

I mean, what's incredibly useful about psychedelics and the reason why

483

so many of us have found them to be indispensable is

484

that it takes it almost doesn't matter which drug we're talking about.

485

But I mean, obviously, these drugs are very different, but it takes kind of ordinary lumpen materialists, you know, Western thinkers who are,

486

you know, overeducated people who have just have never noticed that there's anything else to do with a mind but think.

487

it overrides their patterns of thinking and feeling so fully.

488

I mean, whether you're talking about something like MDMA, which is not classically a psychedelic, or psilocybin or LSD, which are,

489

it changes the contents of consciousness so fundamentally

490

that one thing you realize beyond any possibility of doubt is

491

that it is possible to have a radically different experience of being a self in the world than you're tending to have.

492

So you would, in some sense, expand your perception box with these different methods.

493

Yeah, it just advertises to you

494

that this experience you have of being virtually identical to who you were yesterday

495

and having your waking life be kind of one moment after another of that is just this sort of arbitrarily trimmed down,

496

you know, like you've sort of plunged into some kind of local basin of attraction on a much larger landscape

497

and you never got out of it because you didn't even know that there was a larger landscape.

498

And what 200 micrograms of LSD does is it just takes you and puts you over here on the landscape.

499

And it could be pathological, it could be heroin, it could be psychotomimetic as these drugs were often described to be early on.

500

You could be very happy to return back to your local basin of attraction and be yourself again because you hated that.

501

But there are other places on the landscape, and many of us, you know,

502

happily have, you know, very positive encounters with radical difference in these psychedelic states.

503

They're not the, you know, this is a difference between meditation and psychedelics.

504

I would say

505

that many of the places you visit on the landscape through psychedelics are not really normative in the spiritual sense

506

or the contemplative sense.

507

You're not really trying to, you know, recapitulate those for the rest of your life.

508

But what they do show you is that there's just a vast landscape of mind that you're not noticing.

509

But you can get to places through meditation that can be just as transformative.

510

Yeah, and more so in that the...

511

The real difference is the thing that can be misleading about psychedelics is that you,

512

let's say you, you take any one of these drugs and have an incredibly positive experience, right?

513

You don't have a bad acid trip.

514

You have a good acid trip.

515

It's very easy to form the impression based on a so -called good trip that,

516

okay, freedom, radical psychological freedom is about changing the contents of consciousness fundamentally, right?

517

So like to be using yourself.

518

Yeah.

519

So like, and, and, and loss of self must entail radical energetic changes in one's perceptual field.

520

Right.

521

So like, you know, to be on acid or on mushrooms at any significant, significant dose, if you're walking in the forest,

522

you know, you walk up to a tree

523

and you put your hand on it and you have this overwhelming feeling of energetic continuity with nature, right?

524

Those experiences are possible.

525

i wouldn't say they're normative i mean they're possible in they're normative in the sense

526

that they show you the way they show you

527

that they show you what's possible

528

but i would say you know ultimately i don't want to scare people away from meditation

529

that you have to go into a retreat for a year

530

and try you can do it in small doses

531

and you don't need psychedelics might be a quick path there

532

but you also don't need to spend a year in a retreat

533

or whatever people could do it in their daily lives every day.

534

Oh, yeah.

535

Yeah.

536

And dualistic mindfulness is also very helpful.

537

You can be much more precise in the instruction around this.

538

And that's what I attempt to do over at Waking Up.

539

I mean, the analogy I often make here is to the optic blind spot, right?

540

So we know

541

that there's a very simple experiment you can perform with just you put two dots on a piece of paper.

542

You just create a fixation cross and a dot

543

and you close one eye and you move the paper back and forth and, and, and that dot, you know, the dot disappears.

544

So people, obviously most people on earth have no idea this, this is there to be noticed.

545

You can describe it to people and they still can't notice it, but then you give them this very simple experiment and virtually everyone notices it.

546

And so we can understand how that's done.

547

If you, all of that's just a matter of having the information, right?

548

For some reason, I was just thinking of those, like those 3d images that you like are staring at the mind's eye images,

549

the mind's eye and like you have to let go

550

and then suddenly it comes

551

and it's there it's sort of similar i mean it's right it's right on the surface

552

and you're just not it's like a plane of focus problem right

553

and then once you get it it transforms you i give you one more analogy uh uh

554

because i think people find it useful it's it's it's also like looking

555

i mean you know what it's like to see your reflection in a window

556

i mean you can be looking through a window

557

and using it as a window you see what's outside but

558

if you just suddenly change your plane of focus you can see your face looking back at you in that window.

559

And it's hard to describe what is entailed there, but it's not a major effort to change that.

560

It's a shifting of attention.

561

It shifts attention and focus.

562

So every episode, we ask one question to try to open our own perception box.

563

And I chose this week's question and neither of you know what it is.

564

So the question is in, in moments of deep solitude,

565

what major concerns or questions about yourself tend to dominate your thoughts?

566

The frame around all of this for me is one of, um, understanding that the kind of preciousness of life and,

567

and it's, and it's impermanence, right?

568

So it's like, you know, thoughts about if I'm going to be thinking about my life and, and whether it's, um, it's going well.

569

Again, this is, this is kind of a level of mental activity that, that this is a dream that I,

570

I can't, I like to wake up from as often as possible.

571

But if I'm going to be thinking about my life, it's, it's, it's often a matter of,

572

um, wondering whether I'm using my time and attention in light of,

573

of, of, um, the reality of death and, and, and, and the, the, the fundamental uncertainty around how much time any of us have left,

574

um, whether I'm, I'm using my time and attention.

575

Well, I mean, I just, I did to live without regret is kind of my master utility function at this point.

576

I mean, I just, I, I, I don't want to be spending my time in any way

577

that i can look back on and

578

and wish i had had not spent it that way

579

so yeah that's very beautiful and profound and important i think about

580

that a lot too so

581

and having had recently a near -death car experience it brought

582

it all the more like just to the forefront how important every moment we have is

583

and to use it well um and christophe do you have a no i don't worry too much about myself.

584

Maybe I simply don't.

585

It's just, I tried, I know.

586

So you have this ever -present self, yet it doesn't worry about itself.

587

It doesn't worry too much about itself.

588

It's outward, you know, thinking about the world, what exists.

589

Think about the big questions of the world out there.

590

Yeah, because they have always obsessed me for better or worse.

591

And I don't worry about, I lost, I had an experience where I lost an NDE

592

when near -death experience where I totally lost my fear of death.

593

So I don't think about that.

594

I used to think about that.

595

You know, you wake up in the middle of the night and say, oh my God, I'm going to die.

596

What am I going to do about it?

597

And you get this existential vertigo looking down, you know, like when you climb and there's this cliff that goes down,

598

has no bottom but all of that's gone

599

so now it's just thinking about trying to think about big questions

600

and the love i have for a lot of people

601

i am going to say i feel like i could first of all

602

i i can talk to you for hours

603

and i'm sure you know most people can it's it's i'm long -winded

604

so no i mean it's a privilege you're making an ontological assumption

605

that causality is all in the physical no i'm not let's let's add ectoplasm to it

606

or or some mental magic

607

or it was something we don't understand consciousness

608

i see consciousness has okay let's say let's let's just say idealism is true

609

it's all it's all consciousness there's no physical

610

we can run the ontology any way you want i'm saying the phenomenology is is

611

when you pay attention there's this deep mystery that things are simply emerging into consciousness, right?

612

And they don't emerge before they emerge.

613

It's deeply mysterious why you raise the right hand versus the left hand, even if you spend two hours making the decision.

614

And so it is with marrying your wife.

615

And if we discover that really, really at bottom, it was the pheromones that you can't consciously notice,

616

but like some people smell better to you than others.

617

And it turns out all your friends have pheromone, you know xyz 12 and all of your enemies have some other molecule

618

if that's the answer at the back of the book of nature

619

it it's not it actually doesn't deflate anything for me it actually fundamentally it's

620

that wouldn't change the story we're gonna agree to not be able to resolve

621

this completely right now i think it's a really thought we could be on the palm of free in this short podcast.

622

But I think it's really insightful

623

and it's going to help people think about it in a different way

624

and maybe sort of get out of their own perception box and expand a bit.

625

On that note, thank you so much, Sam, for joining us today.

626

And if you'd like to learn more about your own perception box, spend some time this week answering the same perception box questions

627

that we asked our guest and check out other questions on our website at unlikelycollaborators .com.

628

You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

629

This has been Science of Perception Box created by Unlikely Collaborators in collaboration with pod people.

630

I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.

631

And I'm Dr. Christophe Koch.

632

Thank you.

633

Thank you.

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Esta lección de conversación se basa en el vídeo “The ‘Self’ You Can’t Find with Sam Harris”. Este vídeo tiene 633 frases y 7901 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 43:16. El hablante habla rápido, unas 183 palabras por minuto, así que espera sonidos enlazados y reducidos. El 84 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés; conviene repasar el resto antes de empezar.

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

15 palabras del vídeo que vale la pena aprender, con su pronunciación y significado:

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
consciousness sustantivo	/ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/	conciencia
perception sustantivo	/pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/	percepción
physics sustantivo	/ˈfɪz.ɪks/	física
conscious adjetivo	/ˈkɑn.ʃəs/	consciente
landscape sustantivo	/ˈlan(d)skeɪp/	paisaje, terrazo
piano sustantivo	/piˈænɪː/	piano
analogy sustantivo	/əˈnæləd͡ʒi/	analogía
consciously adverbio		conscientemente
stable sustantivo	/ˈsteɪ.bəl/	establo, cuadra
expand verbo	/ɪkˈspænd/	ampliar
snake sustantivo	/sneɪk/	serpiente, culebra
mysterious adjetivo	/mɪˈstɪɹi.əs/	misterioso
disappear verbo	/dɪsəˈpɪɹ/	desaparecer, desparecer
rope sustantivo	/ɹoʊp/	soga, maroma
construct verbo	/ˈkɑn.stɹʌkt/	construir

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
wake up verbo	/ˌweɪk ˈʌp/	despertarse, recordar
get out of verbo		salirse de, ponerse fuera de
turn down verbo		rechazar
calm down verbo		calmarse
check out verbo		investigar, chequear
get off verbo		bajarse
go away verbo		irse, marcharse
leave aside verbo		pretermitir

Frases que vale la pena repetir

Frases cortas y completas del vídeo que puedes reutilizar en la conversación diaria:

What does your mind do?
What do you mean by that it's not findable?
Is there anything we can be certain about?
Can we just have a bookmark?
What am I going to do about it?

Gramática en este vídeo

Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:

Estructura	En el vídeo
Oraciones condicionales if + oración, will/would + verbo — una condición y su resultado	if there's no free will
Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora	we've made · you've done · it's been
Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace	can be moved · is revealed · be found
Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa	person who experienced · one that is · one who intends

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

El hablante usa 209 contracciones y formas reducidas, como I'm, you're, don't. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.

Los sonidos de “th”: theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/, thinker /ˈθɪŋ.kɚ/
Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, illusion /ɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, meditation /mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/
Palabras largas — cuida el acento: analogy /əˈnæləd͡ʒi/, mysterious /mɪˈstɪɹi.əs/, philosophical /ˌfɪl.əˈsɑ.fɪ.kl̩/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/

Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:

s + consonante al inicio — sin añadir una “e” delante: stable /ˈsteɪ.bəl/, snake /sneɪk/, strongly /ˈstɹɔŋli/, skill /skɪl/, spiritual /ˈspɪɹɪt͡ʃuəl/
/v/ — no es /b/: los dientes tocan el labio inferior: versus /ˈvɝsəs/, discover /dɪˈskʌvə/, virtually /ˈvɚ.t͡ʃə.wə.li/, voluntary /ˈvɑ.lənˌt(ɛ)ɹi/, vast /væst/
/z/ — sonora, no /s/: physics /ˈfɪz.ɪks/, representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/, physiology /ˌfɪziˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/, physiological /ˌfɪz.i.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como consciousness, perception, physics.

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.

Técnica de shadowing: lee la guía completa paso a paso →

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

Frases que vale la pena repetir

Gramática en este vídeo

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?