#178 — The Reality Illusion

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2019

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam and Annaka Harris speak with Donald Hoffman about his book “The Case Against Reality.” They discuss how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of the world, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, the threat of epistemological skepticism, causality as a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, a mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, and many other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.
0:20.5	Okay, housekeeping. Well, the last housekeeping was intense. Got some new music. All of you
0:30.4	are dealing with emotionally. Got some grief over the new music. Let's just hang out with it
0:36.8	for a while. See how we feel in the new year. Also dropped a paywall on the podcast. For those who
0:46.3	need my rationale around all that, you can listen to the last housekeeping in the public feed.
0:53.4	Those of you who are subscribers never even heard it. Anyway, make a long story short,
0:58.8	unless you subscribe to the podcast through Sam Harris.org. You will only be getting partial
1:05.6	episodes now. For instance, today's podcast is around three hours long. But if you're listening
1:13.9	on the public feed, you'll get the first hour merely. So if you care about the conversations I'm
1:20.4	having here and want to hear them in their entirety, subscribing through Sam Harris.org is the
1:26.6	only option. I'm clearly at odds with the trend here of all podcasts being free and ad supported.
1:35.2	But all I can say is that the response has been fantastic. And the podcast is on
1:42.0	much better footing even after only a week. So thank you for that. As always, if you actually
1:49.5	can't afford a subscription, I don't want money to be the reason why you don't get access
1:55.8	to my digital content. Whether that's the making sense podcast or the waking up app or anything
2:02.4	else that I might produce in this space. And the solution for that is, again, if you can't afford
2:10.0	it, simply send an email to support at Sam Harris.org for the podcast and support at wakingup.com
2:18.6	for the app. And you'll get a free year. And you can do that as many times as you need.
2:24.4	We don't mean test these things. There are no follow-up questions. This is based on your definition
2:31.5	of whether you need this for free. And that's as it should be. So anyway, this is the business model.
2:39.5	The podcast is now a subscription, just like the app. And if you can't afford it,
2:47.2	you can have it for free. Okay. So today I'm speaking with Donald Hoffman. And I'm joined by my wife
	...

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