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

Choose a practice mode

Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.

633 sentences

If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.

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?

100

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

101

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

102

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,

103

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

104

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

105

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

106

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

107

So just to like pull that apart a little bit.

108

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

109

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

110

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

111

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

112

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

113

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

114

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

115

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

116

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,

117

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

118

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

119

But that doesn't make it an illusion.

120

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

121

I have a picture of you.

122

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

123

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

124

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

125

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

126

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

127

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

128

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,

129

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

130

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

131

There's nothing to be found there.

132

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

133

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

134

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

135

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

136

But you can make similar arguments for any conscious perception.

137

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

138

But I can't do that with you.

139

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

140

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

141

It is a stable percept for me.

142

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

143

Unfortunately, chronic pain is more stable.

144

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

145

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

146

or pain yeah it's based on a mistake

147

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

148

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

149

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

150

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

151

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

152

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

153

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

154

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

155

I want to get into free will a bit.

156

I would just dare to say

157

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

158

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

159

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

160

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

161

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

162

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

163

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

164

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

165

that they have hyperactivation in parts of their prefrontal cortex and

166

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

167

or flow states creativity psychedelics

168

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

169

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

170

and also be you know ruminating and anxious and depressed

171

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

172

I want to get into this idea.

173

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.

174

How much control do we really have over our agent?

175

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

176

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

177

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

178

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

179

You have OCD.

180

You have a sense of you can change this.

181

How does free will mix into that equation?

182

Yes.

183

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

184

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

185

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

186

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

187

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

188

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.

189

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

190

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

191

But now I can be mindful of it.

192

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

193

I can separate them.

194

I can notice the physiology is one thing and the imagery

195

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

196

And I can get some space from it.

197

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

198

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

199

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

200

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

201

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

202

Versus actually having free will.

203

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.

204

This is a practical sense.

205

Yeah.

206

This is a, this is a freedom worth wanting.

207

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

208

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

209

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

210

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

211

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

212

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

213

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

214

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

215

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

216

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

217

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

218

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

219

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,

220

everything is simply springing out of the dark.

221

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.

222

Like you can hear this.

223

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

224

Right.

225

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

226

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

227

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

228

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

229

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

230

Let's just figure this out.

231

I'm going to go back and forth.

232

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

233

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

234

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

235

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

236

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

237

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

238

and the causal power arrives from that.

239

Physics, of course, correlates.

240

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

241

If I raise my right hand,

242

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

243

But that's correlation.

244

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

245

But you're thinking a very radical...

246

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,

247

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

248

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

249

How would you describe your philosophical view of free will?

250

That it doesn't map on to anything.

251

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

252

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

253

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

254

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

255

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

256

that people think they have.

257

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

258

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

259

The brain is doing these calculations.

260

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

261

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

262

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

263

But there is some randomness that goes on as well.

264

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

265

Because that's the sort of afterthought.

266

Nobody thinks they're a robot, right?

267

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

268

the reason why that's

269

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

270

he he describes people as common sense dualists and i think

271

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

272

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

273

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

274

We still have responsibility for our actions.

275

We're still held accountable.

276

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

277

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

278

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

279

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

280

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

281

that your brain accomplishes this thing so

282

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

283

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

284

Per definition, it is the phenomena per excellence.

285

I can deny everything.

286

I cannot deny my unconscious.

287

I totally agree with that.

288

So the way I would summarize that.

289

You seem to come close to it.

290

You say the self is an illusion.

291

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

292

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

293

I'm making a very strong epistemological claim.

294

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

295

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

296

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

297

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

298

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

299

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

300

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

301

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

302

Is there anything we can be certain about?

303

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

304

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,

305

we can't get behind it?

306

And this is where René Descartes comes in.

307

Yeah.

308

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

309

Ontology is a question of what actually exists.

310

What is real?

311

What is out there?

312

Is this a physical universe only?

313

Is it a mental universe only?

314

Is there some marriage of the two?

315

And this is some kind of dualistic?

316

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

317

Can we just have a bookmark?

318

I just wanted to finish the debate on free will.

319

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

320

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

321

There's nothing you can do about it.

322

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

323

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

324

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

325

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

326

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

327

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

328

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

329

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

330

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

331

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

332

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

333

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

334

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

335

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

336

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

337

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

338

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

339

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

340

It came from the, you know, gene transcription.

341

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

342

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

343

Don't worry, someday it'll happen.

344

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

345

I mean, you are this open system.

346

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

347

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

348

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

349

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

350

Again, the causality here is everywhere.

351

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

352

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

353

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

354

And we have this constant narration in our head.

355

But how does your perception or your perception box shift

356

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

357

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

358

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

359

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

360

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

361

I mean, the word

362

Buddha means awakened one.

363

Right.

364

So there's this.

365

But it's a very deep analogy.

366

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

367

it is also neurologically the case

368

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

369

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

370

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

371

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

372

and yet the dream persists and

373

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

374

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

375

And there are traditional practices in Tibetan Buddhism.

376

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

377

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.

378

But the phenomenology there is interesting.

379

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

380

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.

381

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

382

Um, we certainly once you learn to meditate,

383

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

384

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

385

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

386

Just a movie star, right?

387

Just bring that image to mind.

388

Jennifer Anson.

389

I went with Brad Pitt.

390

Okay.

391

So you might interrogate your intuition around free will here.

392

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

393

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

394

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,

395

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

396

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

397

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.

Download App

Everything you need to speak fluently

AI PronunciationScore every sentence

IPA PracticeMaster every sound

VocabularyBuild your word bank

Vocab GameLearn while playing

Scan QR

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

FOR YOU

Recommend Video

65 sentences

The shock of doing nothing | Andrew Holecek

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

251 sentences

Things That Are Not What They Seem and the Truth About Life | Advanced Podcast for Conversations

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

11 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “The ‘Self’ You Can’t Find with Sam Harris”. This video has 633 sentences and 7901 words to shadow. The speech runs for 43:16. The speaker talks fast, about 183 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
consciousness noun	/ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/	The state of being conscious or aware; awareness.
perception noun	/pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/	The organisation, identification and interpretation of sensory information.
illusion noun	/ɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/	A distortion of sensory perception where real stimuli lead to a false or misleading impression of reality.
physics noun	/ˈfɪz.ɪks/	The branch of science concerned with the study of the properties and interactions of space, time, matter and energy.
conscious adjective	/ˈkɑn.ʃəs/	Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active.
meditation noun	/mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/	A devotional exercise of, or leading to, contemplation.
landscape noun	/ˈlan(d)skeɪp/	A portion of land or territory as defined by its landform, its geographical (and architectural) features.
awareness noun	/əˈwɛɹ.nəs/	The state or level of consciousness where sense data can be confirmed by an observer.
radical noun	/ˈɹædɪkəl/	A root (of a number or quantity).
piano noun	/piˈænɪː/	A percussive keyboard musical instrument, usually ranging over seven octaves, with white and black colored keys, played by pressing these keys, causing hammers…
analogy noun	/əˈnæləd͡ʒi/	A relationship of resemblance or equivalence between two situations, people, or objects, especially when used as a basis for explanation or extrapolation.
consciously adverb		In a conscious manner; knowingly, volitionally.
stable noun	/ˈsteɪ.bəl/	A building, wing or dependency set apart and adapted for lodging and feeding (and training) ungulates, especially horses.
expand verb	/ɪkˈspænd/	To change (something) from a smaller form or size to a larger one; to spread out or lay open.
snake noun	/sneɪk/	Any of the suborder Serpentes of legless reptiles with long, thin bodies and fork-shaped tongues.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
wake up verb	/ˌweɪk ˈʌp/	To stop sleeping; to awake.
get out of verb		To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of.
turn down verb		To refuse, decline, or deny.
calm down verb		To become less excited, intense, or angry.
check out verb		To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
close up verb	/kləʊzˈʌp/	To close (remove a gap) completely or fully.
come through verb		To come into a room or other space through a door or passageway.
get behind verb		To come to believe or support something.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

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?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if there's no free will
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	we've made · you've done · it's been
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	can be moved · is revealed · be found
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	person who experienced · one that is · one who intends

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 209 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, you're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: theater /ˈθi(ə)tɚ/, thinker /ˈθɪŋ.kɚ/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: consciousness /ˈkɑnʃəsnəs/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, illusion /ɪˈl(j)uːʒ(ə)n/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, meditation /mɛdɪˈteɪʃn̩/
Long words — get the stress right: analogy /əˈnæləd͡ʒi/, mysterious /mɪˈstɪɹi.əs/, philosophical /ˌfɪl.əˈsɑ.fɪ.kl̩/, experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, representation /ˌɹɛp.ɹə.zɛnˈteɪ.ʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like consciousness, perception, illusion.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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

Choose a practice mode

Download App

The shock of doing nothing | Andrew Holecek

Things That Are Not What They Seem and the Truth About Life | Advanced Podcast for Conversations

Stop Blindly Following Your Thoughts

PNTV: Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life by Steven C. Hayes

The Surprising Reason Your Past Still Controls You

Sam Harris basically breaks down the secret to life (again)

Command Your Life: The Neuroscience of Self-Worth & Power

What science can’t answer, according to physicist Jim Al-Khalili | Big Think

You're Too Self-Aware to Be Happy | The Psychology of Deep Thinkers

How Different Are Our Inner Monologues?

Stop Rehearsing The Life You Don’t Want | Dr Joe Dispenza Motivation

Psychology of Life (And How To Spend It Wisely)

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?