Making Sense of Consciousness | Episode 2 of The Essential Sam Harris

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

🗓️ 15 December 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced a new series of audio documentaries, exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career.

Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

In this episode, we survey the landscape of consciousness and get acquainted with the mystery of the mind. We start with an attempt to define consciousness–and veterans of conversations on consciousness will know that this is a huge part of the challenge.

David Chalmers begins with his conception of what he coined “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” and a famous question offered by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.

We then construct a “Philosophical Zombie” before the philosopher Thomas Metzinger explains why he is thoroughly unimpressed by the ability to imagine “such a thing,” while he simultaneously warns us against ever attempting to build one. Anil Seth brings some hope of whittling away the intuition gap of the hard problem by pursuing the “easy” problems, with clear scientific reasoning.

Later, Iain McGilchrist lays out the intuition-shattering implications of the famous Roger Sperry experiments with split brain patients that suggest that consciousness can be cut with a knife… at least temporarily. Annaka Harris then shifts the conversation to the realm of panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness is nomologically fundamental and potentially permeates all matter.

Finally, Don Hoffman explains that consciousness is not only fundamental and non-illusory, but that the physical world we appear to be navigating is merely a virtual space-time interface, which has evolved to hide the true nature of reality from us.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:48.5	Welcome to the Essential Sam Harris. This is Making Sense of Consciousness.
0:54.3	The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris
1:02.2	in specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's
1:08.8	perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic,
1:14.3	the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his
1:19.3	guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any
1:26.2	issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the
1:32.4	full episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading,
1:38.1	listening, and watching suggestions which range from fun and light to densely academic.
1:43.3	One note to keep in mind for this series. Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the
1:50.6	barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily
1:56.0	partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into,
2:02.5	and greatly affects others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into
2:08.7	the archives unfold, and you're thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its
2:14.6	contingent relationships with others. In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories
	...

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