Every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears.
Hi, I'm Elizabeth Ko. 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 Christof 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. Christof, 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 strongly believes, like most people, that there's a person sitting inside my head, a little guy homunculus called Christof in my case, looking out at the world. That person is a thinker. It's a carrier of my thoughts. 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 at the world and experiencing it.
Yes. And then of course it goes hand in hand, 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 any other activity where you get totally absorbed by your work, right? Whether it's mathematics or writing code or whatever, and we lose our sense of self, but that's rare.
We have someone here who is an expert on all things self and mind. So, welcome to the podcast, Sam Harris.
Yeah, great to see you guys.
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, right? So 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 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, you know, whether they close their eyes or not, but it is 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 kind of strangely paradoxical relationship to the body, whereas you sort of know it's you, but you know, if you have a pain in your knee, me, the you, the conscious subject, has a relationship to that pain. You're not liking it. You're wanting it to go away. And 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, you know, reach for a glass, say, there's a 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...
Its absence. 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 a fist. 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. 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 have something between your teeth.
Yeah. Yeah. Someone says, oh no, what's that in your... and you're like, what, me? And so you realize that you're this thing that feels implicated behind your face. And people feel like it's almost like your face is a mask and you're behind this mask. And someone points to you and it kind of implicates you. Or if there's a crowd that suddenly draws its attention to you, you're on stage and you've done something that you know is acutely embarrassing. Say that collapse of attention where everyone else's gaze suddenly impresses itself upon you, almost as to form a kind of singularity of self, right? It's an experience of energy, like the physiological changes in your body.
So just to pull that apart a little bit. So from a neuroscience perspective, you know, we think of a sense of self, it's just made up of really different parts of the brain acting differently, you know, parts of our brain that encode our sense of our body and, you know, that construct this reality of a self that's experiencing things. When you have more activation in certain parts of the brain, like the dorsal prefrontal cortex, your sense of self-awareness and self-consciousness and inner critic sort of turns up. But in certain states when you can get that to turn down, you kind of lose a sense of self. And there are different ways to get to those states as well, becoming more open. If we, you know, think about a perception box, you know, when you're closing in and where you can expand it and open up, and the sense of self can dissolve, which makes it clear that it is a construct of the brain.
Yeah, it's something the brain is doing, and it's something the brain can cease to do.
But that doesn't make it an illusion. I mean, it's as much a construct as pain is, or seeing you. I have a picture of you. I know it's created in part of my visual cortex, right?
There's one type of illusion, certainly, that you think something is so. I mean, like the classic, you know, from Indian literature is that you think there's something coiled in the corner of a room and you mistake it for a snake, but you pay closer attention to it and then you recognize it's just a coil of rope. The true perception is revealed by what remains when you actually bring your full attention to the thing. Like if the snake always collapses into a rope, and it never goes the other way. It's not that 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, it's a rope, even though out of the corner of my eye.
You're saying the more you look into the self, the more it kind of disappears. There's nothing to be found there.
Once you have this insight, again, this is just within the frame of meditation and specifically a non-dual approach to mindfulness, what becomes stable is every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears. You couldn't actually feel like a self on demand if you wanted to, right? Like, so it's unstable in a way that whenever you look for it, it's gone. But you can make similar arguments for any conscious perception. I submit that the consciousness of self is a subset of all conscious experiences.
But I can't do that with you. Like, if every time I look at your yellow sweatshirt, I see your yellow sweatshirt, and I can't look at it closely enough for it to disappear. It is a stable percept for me.
There are certain things that are more stable, like pain. Unfortunately, chronic pain is more stable than visual perception. Yeah. But the character of them, really, I mean, do you think that consciousness of self is different from consciousness of seeing yellow or pain?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's based on a mistake, and it's what it's like to be identified with thought without knowing you're identified with thought.
I mean, the flow of thought is the thing that is dragging this sense of subjectivity into consciousness moment to moment. I mean, I actually think our sense of self is interrupted much more than people realize. I mean, you mentioned flow states and this condition of kind of losing yourself in your work. We're constantly breaking it without clear awareness of it being broken. What meditation is, by this specific exercise of paying attention in a certain way, you can make these breaks in this subject-object dualism very salient.
I want to get into free will a bit. I would just dare to say that I think a lot of times we are not aware of ourselves when we're just in a flow state, or you're just driving on your way to work and your mind is wandering. It's only when you start to begin to focus on self that it almost like constructs itself in that moment to be there again, and it's always there when you kind of look to it. I don't constantly have this awareness of my sense of self until I focus on it.
But what I find with patients is that, you know, who are suffering, they are hyperfocused on their thoughts and the rumination. And when we look at, you know, neuroimaging studies, show that they have hyperactivation in parts of their prefrontal cortex. And when you get them to let go, whether it's through meditation or flow states, creativity, psychedelics, that part of the brain, the rumination kind of parts of the prefrontal cortex calm down, and you can't simultaneously be in flow and also be, you know, ruminating and anxious and depressed because you're kind of turning down those parts of the brain. So they're antithetical to each other. I want to get into this idea. So if self is a kind of, whatever you want to call it, an illusion, a construct of the brain, it's malleable, it can change, how much control do we really have over our agency? I know our sense of agency can be an illusion, but, you know, do we have control? Do we have any kind of free will in any kind of philosophical sense? Or what about just in the sense of having control over actions? Because when I'm treating patients and I'm like, okay, you have control over your thoughts, you have OCD, you have a sense of you can change this, how does free will mix into that equation?
Yes, there are really two levels at which you can talk about control and agency. I mean, there's the conventional level at which, yes, we have control over all kinds of things, and not as much of it as we want in other areas. There's one way of framing the whole project of having insight into the nature of mind and adopting a practice like meditation as a project of actually gaining yet another degree of freedom. Once you learn a practice like mindfulness, you can actually notice the sort of wheelworks of your own neurosis and unhappiness. And you can notice, okay, I just had that angry thought about this argument I had with my friend yesterday, and I'm now kind of ruminating about the things I wish I said or wish I hadn't said. But now I can be mindful of it. I can notice the physiological changes that these thoughts are producing. I can separate them. I can notice the physiology is one thing, and the imagery and the bits of language in my mind are a different stream, and I can get some space from it. One way to summarize that whole thing is that you're getting some freedom from that you didn't have before. I mean, now you can actually get off the ride. You can decide, okay, anger is no longer useful. You know, this conversation I'm playing in my head already happened.
So would you say that's like a Dennettian kind of degrees of freedom, right, versus actually having free will.
But there's a sort of compatibilist framing of all that, which, okay, this is the sort of free, this is what we mean by freedom. This is a practical sense. Yeah, in Dennett's sense, this is a freedom worth wanting. This isn't sort of radical libertarian free will where you're free of the laws of physics. In my view, free will is a concept that doesn't map onto anything deep about us. There's a difference between voluntary behavior and involuntary behavior. Phenomenologically, that's still true whether free will is a thing or not. I mean, having a tremor that you can't control is different than just doing this on purpose. But on a deep level, we know that, you know, the dominoes of physics are just falling, and our brain is part of the universe. Traditionally, it's been very hard to map the sense of libertarian free will that everyone feels they have onto the physics of things, whether you're going to talk about determinism or determinism plus randomness. And however you turn those dials, it doesn't give people the libertarian free will they think they have, which is the feeling in each moment that I could have done otherwise a moment ago. I mean, when I actually pay attention to my experience, I don't know what, there is no free will. I don't feel that there's free will. 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, everything is simply springing out of the dark.
Once again, when I raise my hand to make this point, you're saying that just came out of...
It's just like you're hearing this logical nothingness. Like, you can hear this. You can't choose not to hear it, right? You can be distracted from it, but...
I choose not to pay attention to it.
But still, it's an adventitious intrusion into the theater of your conscious life. So is that intention to raise your arm, like you did. You could have spent an hour deciding, okay, I'm going to prove that I have free will. I know I'm going to raise my right hand or my left hand, but I'm not sure which one. Let's just figure this out. I'm going to go back and forth. You know, maybe I'm right-handed. That's that, maybe it should be the right, but no, it'd be more creative somehow to use the left. There's no place to stand subjectively where you can explain it. It really is as mysterious as someone sitting in another room with a keyboard deciding for you.
It's only mysterious if you don't accept the primacy of consciousness. If you have a different ontology where you say first and foremost existence means to be conscious, and that existence has causal power, and the causal power arises from that, physics of course correlates. So clearly you can read up, you know, Benjamin Libet and all of that. If I raise my right hand, we know milliseconds before there's a signal that I can pick up with EEG or even with fMRI much earlier, but that's correlation. As we tell all of our students, correlation is not causation. A different, a very radical...
Well, because otherwise Sam is suggesting, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't you saying the fact that I raised my hand, leaving aside noise, which we all agree isn't that important, actually was determined 13.4 billion years ago?
Or it could also be, you know, randomness as well. How would you describe your philosophical view of free will?
That it doesn't map onto anything. It doesn't map onto the physics of things, whether randomness or determinism or any combination thereof. And the truth is, it doesn't actually map onto our experience when we pay attention. See, the traditional conundrum is we know it doesn't map onto the physics of things, but we know in our bones that we have this thing, because we feel it moment to moment. So the endurance of free will as a topic of philosophical interest is based on the common experience that people have.
So this has been a perspective that I've taken is, okay, the brain is this complex, you know, information processing machine. It's based, you have certain constraints: your genetics, your history, the environment, all these things. The brain is doing these calculations. It decides in any given moment based on all this data what to do in that moment. You know, we have the Benjamin Libet, 350 milliseconds before you're even consciously aware of the intention to move, the brain is sort of gearing up to make a movement. But there is some randomness that goes on as well. Would you say that the unconscious, in a way, has some sort of more free will than our consciousness, because that's a sort of afterthought?
Nobody thinks they're a robot, right? But we are just wet robots, you know, from the point of view of the physics of things. So the reason why that's so difficult to swallow is, this is a line from my friend Paul Bloom, the psychologist who you probably know. He describes people as common-sense dualists. And I think that really is the case. People feel like their mind, their agency, their subjectivity, their sense that they are the author of their thoughts and intentions must somehow float free of the physics of things.
But if there's no free will, let's just say we still have the capacity to have self-control. We still have responsibility for our actions. We're still held accountable.
The sense that I could have done otherwise is a total illusion, right? There was no other way for me to finish this sentence. It is subjectively mysterious that I can do any of this. Like, so the fact that you can decode what I'm saying, you have no first-person insight into that. It's just happening. You're just a witness to the fact that your brain accomplishes this thing. So consciousness is epiphenomenal, certainly with respect to your being able to decode these sounds meaningfully. I mean, the semantics, it's all just getting...
Most of it is unconscious, but consciousness is not...
Per definition, it is the phenomena par excellence.
I can deny everything. I cannot deny... totally agree with that. The way I would summarize, you seem to come close to it. You say the self is an illusion. The sense of agency is an illusion.
The one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion is consciousness. I'm making a very strong epistemological claim. I'm very slow to make any ontological claims, right? So when I say consciousness is the one thing that cannot be an illusion, epistemologically, right? Also, I guess that has ontological implications. But by my asserting that, I'm not claiming to know what happened before the Big Bang, or how consciousness relates to brains, or what happens after death. Ontologically, unlike, for instance, integrated information theory, that makes this ontological point of view, can re-exist consciousness.
For listeners, the difference between ontological and epistemological, just to...
Yeah, so epistemology is the question of what we know and how we can know it. What can we be certain about is a question of epistemology. Is there anything we can be certain about? Is there anything we can know that's not based on axioms that we can't justify? And do we always have to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps and just assert something as a brute fact being true, but, you know, we really can't argue, we can't get behind it.
And this is where René Descartes comes in, right?
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and many, this is where all philosophy struggles to make sense of our knowledge of reality. Ontology is a question of what actually exists. What is real? What is out there? Is this a physical universe only? Is it a mental universe only? Is there some marriage of the two? And is this some kind of dualism?
So you're not asking any of those larger questions about what is actually reality.
And can we just have a bookmark that I just wanted to finish the debate on free will. But what do you tell, let's say, someone who suffers, let's say, alcoholism, and he tries to stop alcohol? Do you tell them, well, don't worry, you don't have a free will, there's nothing you can do about it? No. What do you tell people that want to change but are unable to for whatever reason?
Right. Okay. So one way of mistaking what I'm claiming when I deny the existence of free will is to kind of lurch into fatalism. Like, okay, if there's no free will, then I'm just going to sit here and see what happens. You can't step out of the mechanics of things by just deciding to do nothing, because that is as much of a decision as deciding to do something. All of these decisions are merely arising based on states of the brain and, you know, which states of the universe that you didn't consciously author. If you want to learn to play the piano, the only way to do that is to do the things that encode that skill into your nervous system. And so such that you wake up one day actually being able to play the piano, it's not just going to happen to you by accident. What I know is that I'm a system that is open to influence. So if I watch a movie that inspires me to want to learn to play the piano, if I meet someone who's even older than I am who says they learned to play the piano in the last 18 months and it's the greatest thing they've ever done, and that suddenly corrects a view of myself that I didn't even know I had, which was just my tacit assumption that in your late 50s you can't learn to play the piano. It's a perturbation of my nervous system that came from outside. And it came from the, you know, gene transcription. It can't, it's part of the physics of things.
So what do you tell the alcoholic who wants to kick the habit?
Don't worry, someday it'll happen.
I mean, the optimistic thing is you have no idea how radically you can change. I mean, you are this open system. You have no idea how deeply the next conversation you have can affect you, how the look on your child's face, the look of disappointment, seeing you drunk again, how deeply that could land for you. And you might have seen it a thousand times before, but this one time where you really see it might completely change your sense of who you need to be in the world. Again, like the causality here is everywhere. I'm just saying that there's no one in the middle. There's no man in the boat who's really controlling things.
But then I want to talk about the kinds of things that we can do to sort of, in a way, help us gain a little bit more control or shift our perspective or perception. You know, we have this constant narration in our head. But how does your perception or your perception box shift when you move into a state of full absorption of attention or focusing on the self or some sort of meditative state?
My book and the app that was derived from my book, the title was Waking Up. And it's just that, it's not original to me. I mean, the notion that the analogy to waking up from a dream, waking up from sleep and waking up from a dream is kind of everywhere in the contemplative literature. I mean, the word Buddha means awakened one, right? So, but it's a very deep analogy. It's more than an analogy. I think it is also neurologically the case that there's something very similar being lost in thought. Thinking without knowing you're thinking is very much like being asleep and dreaming without knowing you're dreaming. And there's this transition that many people have experienced from kind of ordinary dreaming to so-called lucid dreaming, which you can suddenly kind of wake up within a dream and yet the dream persists, and that gives you a kind of degree of freedom within a dream, which is subjectively pretty interesting. And people have played with that a lot, and there are traditional practices. In Tibetan Buddhism, there's something called dream yoga, and there's a whole practice around that which anticipates what was later done in Western psychological circles around lucid dreaming. But the phenomenology there is interesting. And then also, of course, you can just wake up from a dream totally and realize, okay, I'm safely in my bed. I thought I was, you know, running in a jungle being chased by a jaguar, and my physiology was appropriate to that hallucination. But now I'm restored to my real circumstance, which is safely in my bed. We certainly, once you learn to meditate, but even people who know nothing about meditation can experience something like that transition where you're thinking thoughts that are really driving your experience. I ask you to, you know, think of a celebrity, the first celebrity who comes to mind, right? Just a movie star, right? Just that you bring that image to mind.
