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Every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears.
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Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch.
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What's a perception box?
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It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs,
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life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences.
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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.
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This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity,
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awe, and wonder, or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger.
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In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception.
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I'd like to introduce our esteemed host,
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Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Christoph Koch,
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chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
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Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.
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This week, our guest is Sam Harris.
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Through the lens of the Perception Box, what we experience as me,
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the one controlling events, may be an illusion the mind is constructing in real time.
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Training ourselves to see that construction process can transform how we relate to challenges, how resilient we are to stress,
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and how to hold our fears with compassion rather than resistance.
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Christoph, I want to ask you, when you look at yourself or you think about yourself or what you're directly experiencing right now,
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how does that work in your mind?
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What does your mind do?
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Well, it thinks that it strongly believes, Like most people, there's a person sitting inside my head, a little guy, homunculus called Christophe,
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in my case, looking out at the world.
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That person is a thinker, is a carrier of my thoughts.
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That's a person who experienced.
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That person carries all my behavioral traits and all my autobiographical memories.
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And that person really essentially remains the same throughout my life.
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So your subjective sense is
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that there's this unique, unified self within you looking out looking out at the world
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and experiencing it yes
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and then of course
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it goes hand with in most of us with this voice inside my head
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you know i talk to myself this is running commentary
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and sometimes it gets really annoying and then you want to shut it up
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so you go into states of flow like running
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or you know any other activity where you get totally absorbed by your work right whether it's mathematics
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or writing code or whatever we lose our sense of self
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but that's rare but enjoyable very enjoyable we have someone here who's an expert on all things self and mind.
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So welcome to the podcast, Sam Harris.
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Yeah, great to see you guys.
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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?
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What does it feel like?
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And what do you think is going on?
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I think the brain for most people is doing three things.
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It's forming a representation of the world.
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It's forming a representation of the body in the world.
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And then for most people, this is going to be the self where we're going to kind of deconstruct and ultimately,
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you know, from my point of view, deconstruct as an illusion.
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There's this third representation of a subject interior to the body.
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Most people don't feel identical to their bodies.
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They feel like they have bodies paradoxically.
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They might know, you know, if they're scientifically sophisticated, they know that they're identical to their bodies or that, you know,
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certainly a physicalist view of the mind would say the mind is what the brain is doing
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or the mind is what the entire central nervous system is doing.
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And when you're actually talking about the first person experience of most people, that's not what it is.
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People don't feel merely coterminous with their bodies.
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They feel like there's a subject in the head that is this kind of unchanging locus of conscious awareness and conscious will.
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And it's the place from which the spotlight of attention can be moved
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and those movements can be kind of voluntary or involuntary.
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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,
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whether they close their eyes or not, but it's even heightened when you close your eyes,
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you feel like, okay, now I'm this interior witness to the world and to the body in the world.
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And there is this strangely paradoxical relationship to to the body whereas you sort of know it's you
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but you know if you have a pain in your knee
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the you the conscious subject has a relationship to
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that pain you're not liking it you're wanting to go away and it's everything points back to this
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feeling of being a kind of passenger in the body that witnesses everything, that is the one that is having experience,
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appropriating experience moment to moment.
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It's the thinker of your thoughts.
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So in addition to the flow of thought, there's the sense that there's this author of the thoughts.
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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.
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And again, subjectively, it's not felt to be the whole body.
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It's felt to be this kind of inner witness.
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And it's that inner witness, when you look for it closely enough, is not findable.
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And in that not finding, you can actually discover its absence.
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What do you mean by that it's not findable?
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In my experience, it's possible to look precisely enough for this feeling that we're calling I,
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moment to moment and to recognize that it's something we're doing.
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It's almost like you're making a fist and you've been making a fist your whole life.
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And by a very kind of precise use of attention, I can make you aware of the fact that you're making this fist.
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This just feels like what a hand is for you.
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But if we could just pay close enough attention to what's happening here and you could relax your hand,
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realize the thing you thought you were holding doesn't exist.
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But there's still the locus of attention, right?
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There's me intending to close up.
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That's what it feels like subjectively.
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The illusion is that there's experience
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and then there's a self that's on the edge of experience or in the center of experience to whom experience refers.
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But if that is experienced at all, that's just more experience, right?
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That's just part of the field of experience.
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Whatever this wrinkle is, you're calling I.
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Whatever it feels like to be me.
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I mean, so you can imagine intensifying it in, you know, we're all walking around with this feeling of I,
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but there are conditions under which it can contract even further.
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So if you suddenly become acutely self -conscious, right?
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You're something between your teeth.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Someone says, oh, no, what's that?
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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.
398
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?
399
Like, or you don't even have imagery in your head around them.
400
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.
401
So you couldn't, you couldn't form the sentence.
402
I could still have the image.
403
So actually I've done
404
this experiment in the clinical context where we record from the heads of people here at UCLA with Hitzig Fried.
405
That's where we discovered these Jennifer Anson neurons.
406
And that's what Jennifer Anson comes to mind.
407
I think about her a lot in, in my, in, in a scientific academic context.
408
So you do have neurons for some of these people.
409
Yeah.
410
Yeah.
411
When you ask me to think about that, some of these neurons by top down get activated,
412
and then the ones presumably that are strongest in some sense, they make it into my conscious awareness.
413
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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Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione
Questa lezione di conversazione si basa sul video “The ‘Self’ You Can’t Find with Sam Harris”. Questo video contiene 633 frasi e 7901 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 43:16. Chi parla va veloce, circa 183 parole al minuto: aspettati suoni legati e ridotti. Il 84% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese; conviene studiare le altre prima di iniziare.
Vocaboli chiave di questo video
15 parole del video che vale la pena imparare, con pronuncia e significato:
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| consciousness sostantivo | /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/ | conoscenza, coscienza |
| perception sostantivo | /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/ | percezione |
| physics sostantivo | /ˈfɪz.ɪks/ | fisica |
| conscious aggettivo | /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/ | cosciente, conscio |
| landscape sostantivo | /ˈlan(d)skeɪp/ | paesaggio, panorama |
| awareness sostantivo | /əˈwɛɹ.nəs/ | coscienza |
| radical sostantivo | /ˈɹædɪkəl/ | radice |
| piano sostantivo | /piˈænɪː/ | pianoforte, piano |
| analogy sostantivo | /əˈnæləd͡ʒi/ | analogia, somiglianza |
| consciously avverbio | coscientemente | |
| stable sostantivo | /ˈsteɪ.bəl/ | stalla, scuderia |
| expand verbo | /ɪkˈspænd/ | estendere, espandere |
| snake sostantivo | /sneɪk/ | serpente, serpe |
| mysterious aggettivo | /mɪˈstɪɹi.əs/ | misterioso, ignoto |
| disappear verbo | /dɪsəˈpɪɹ/ | sparire, scomparire |
I phrasal verb che sentirai
| Parola | Pronuncia | Significato |
|---|---|---|
| wake up verbo | /ˌweɪk ˈʌp/ | svegliarsi |
| turn down verbo | rifiutare | |
| calm down verbo | calmarsi, tranquillizzarsi | |
| check out verbo | investigare | |
| get off verbo | scendere | |
| go away verbo | partire, andarsene | |
| go back verbo | tornare | |
| look out verbo | fare attenzione, stare attento |
Frasi da ripetere
Frasi brevi e complete del video che puoi riutilizzare nella conversazione di tutti i giorni:
- 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?
La grammatica di questo video
Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:
| Struttura | Nel video |
|---|---|
| Frasi condizionali if + frase, will/would + verbo — una condizione e il suo risultato | if there's no free will |
| Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso | we've made · you've done · it's been |
| Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa | can be moved · is revealed · be found |
| Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa | person who experienced · one that is · one who intends |
Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione
Chi parla usa 209 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come I'm, you're, don't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.
- I suoni “th”: theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/, thinker /ˈθɪŋ.kɚ/
- I suoni “sh” e “zh”: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, illusion /ɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, meditation /mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/
- Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: analogy /əˈnæləd͡ʒi/, mysterious /mɪˈstɪɹi.əs/, philosophical /ˌfɪl.əˈsɑ.fɪ.kl̩/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/
I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:
- /h/ — va soffiata, non è muta: helpful /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/, whoever /huˈɛvɚ/, whereas /(h)wɛɹˈæz/, wherever /(h)wɛɹˈɛvɚ/, habit /ˈhæb.ɪt/
- Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, physics /ˈfɪz.ɪks/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, landscape /ˈlan(d)skeɪp/, awareness /əˈwɛɹ.nəs/
- /æ/ — più aperta della “e”: radical /ˈɹædɪkəl/, piano /piˈænɪː/, analogy /əˈnæləd͡ʒi/, expand /ɪkˈspænd/, acid /ˈæsɪd/
Come esercitarsi con questo video
- Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
- Inizia a velocità 0,75×, fai shadowing frase per frase e torna alla velocità normale quando diventa facile.
- Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come consciousness, perception, physics.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.