Sam Harris says consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion — more certain than physics itself. Free will, on the other hand? Provably incoherent.
Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and host of the Making Sense podcast. We cover: why consciousness is the bedrock fact of reality (not physics), why free will is incoherent regardless of how you tune determinism vs quantum indeterminism, the thought-experiment machine that could disabuse anyone of the feeling of free will, where Sam agrees and disagrees with Robert Sapolsky, and the infinite regress problem in any "Maxwell's demon" of consciousness.
"Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion." — Sam Harris
⏱ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 The one thing that can't be an illusion 00:30 Why consciousness beats the universe in certainty 01:05 Brains in vats, the matrix, and what survives the doubt 01:38 The illusion that proves you're conscious 01:58 Free will is incoherent — here's why 02:37 The mind-reading machine thought experiment 03:18 The Maxwell's demon problem of consciousness 03:42 Sam's unique contribution to the free will debate 04:35 Mapping first-person experience onto third-person physics
Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion.
Robinson Polsky told me that free will is basically a complete illusion.
And Sam Harris agrees, but here's the puzzle I put to Sam.
If free will is dead, can consciousness even be studied?
Or are we lying to ourselves the whole way through the experiment?
They seem like they're adjacent cases, but they're very far apart in my mind
in terms of what it takes to operationalize them scientifically and define them, etc.
I think consciousness is, you might think it's a circular definition,
but I just think it's a brute fact of our engagement with the world.
And I would say that consciousness is, and I've said this many times before,
consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion.
Right? It's the one, it's more certain of consciousness than we are of the universe.
Right? Because everything we are certain of or purport to be certain of
or confused about or distracted by is announcing the reality of consciousness.
No matter how confused we are about anything.
I mean, we could be living in a simulation.
All of our physics could be wrong. We're not in touch with the base layer of reality.
We're just on some alien supercomputer.
However confused we are, we're all brains and bats. We're in the matrix.
This is just a dream. All of this, whatever it is about,
the one thing we can't be confused about is that something seems to be happening.
And that seeming is consciousness. Right?
It's just the fact that the lights are on.
The fact that there's something that is like to be you right now.
However confused you are, you might be asleep and dreaming and not know it,
and you're going to wake up now and realize, oh my God, that was just a dream.
We didn't even do the podcast yet. Right?
And yet you were conscious even in the presence of the illusion.
That's what the illusion is. Right?
So consciousness is just the ground truth,
and yet it's very hard to operationalize and study neuroscientifically or in any other way.
And there are reasons why that's the case, and they're interesting,
but free will is a very different case.
I think free will is an incoherent idea.
I very much agree with Sapolsky that we know that it doesn't exist,
and we know that what people think they have is an illusion,
and it just doesn't make any sense.
No matter how you construe causality in this universe,
whether you think it's determined, everything's determined,
or you think there's some bit of randomness thrown in,
and there's quantum indeterminism,
some stochastic process added to the clockwork, or it's all clockwork,
however you tune those dials,
what people seem to mean by free will makes no sense. Right?
And I think that's provable.
I think you could easily imagine designing an experiment
that would disabuse people of their feelings of free will too. Right?
You could build a machine that predicted what people were about to do
before they were about to do it,
and you could tune it in such a way that they would feel like
they were in the presence of a mind-reading machine.
Just as I was about to reach for the right-hand button,
the right-hand button illuminated. Right?
That relied on an experimentalist, or a sensor,
or some perceptive device,
to sense, then feedback, causally implant this sensation
that you did not have the free will.
In other words, if another experimentalist had chosen some different sort,
you know, you're talking about sort of a Maxwellian demon
that knows exactly which levers and dials and stuff to use
to trick Sam into thinking that he does not have free will.
It seems to be an infinite regress at work here,
where the sensor is chosen by an agent.
That's not the issue.
It's just that if I've made any unique contribution
to the conversation about free will, it's on this point,
which is the problem that most people see,
and even people who agree with me that free will is an illusion,
even someone like Robert Zabolsky sees it this way.
Most people think that we have this experience of free will. Right?
And so subjectively we know we have this thing,
and yet objectively it's very hard to make sense
of how we could possibly have this thing. Right?
So you know that your acts of will are effective
and that you really are the author of your thoughts and intentions.
Like you can decide what you're going to do next,
and you don't have to do it until you do it.
It assumes you're under a condition where you're not being coerced
and you're not hooked up to some machine that's driving your nervous system. Right?
You're driving it. You're the subject.
You can decide what to do.
You can wait for an hour and talk to yourself back and forth, back and forth,
and then finally decide, all right, now I'm going to push the button.
And that's you doing it. Right?
And the problem is mapping that onto the physics of things seems impossible.
And then people try to finesse that marriage
between the first person and the third person.
And the results of those efforts are fairly unpersuasive,
but people just feel stuck doing that
because they know they have free will,
and they know they have to understand the world causally, scientifically,
and they have to fit together somehow.
Sam and I went a lot deeper on free will and consciousness
and where physics actually breaks down.
Full conversation is here,
and if you want to see my interview with Robert Sapolsky, click here.
And if you know someone who insists they have free will,
send them this and tag them down in the comments.
