Sam Harris: The One Thing That's Real

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Consciousness [music] is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion.

[00:00:08]Robert Sapolsky told me that free will is basically [music] 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?

[00:00:22]>> 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 [music] and define them, etc. I think consciousness is you might think it's a circular definition, but I I I just think it's a brute fact of our engagement with the world. And I I I would say that consciousness is I've said this many times before.

[00:00:43]Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion.

[00:00:47]Right? It's the one it it it's it's more we're 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. Right? Like 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 we're just on some alien supercomputer. You know, what whatever ever confused we are, we're all brains in vats, we're in the matrix.

[00:01:15]>> [music] >> This is just a dream. All of this that whatever 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 it's 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?" So, and yet you were conscious that you you were conscious even in the presence of the illusion.

[00:01:43]That's what 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, right? And and it's you know, there are reasons why that's the case and they're interesting, but it's just free will is a very different case. I think free will is is an incoherent idea. I mean, I very much agree with Sapolsky that it's we know that it doesn't exist. I mean, we know that what people think they have is an illusion, and um it just doesn't make any sense, no matter how you construe causality in this universe, whether you you think >> [music] >> it's determined, everything's determined, or you think there's some bit of randomness thrown in, and or you know, there's >> [music] >> quantum indeterminism, some stochastic process 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? So, I I and I think that's provable. I think it you could easily imagine designing an experiment that would disabuse people of their their feelings [music] of free will, too, right? Like you could you could build a a 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 [music] like they were in the presence of a mind-reading machine. Like, just as I was about to reach for the the the the right-hand button, the right-hand button, you know, illuminated, >> [music] >> right? That relied on an experimentalist or a sensor or some perceptive device to sense then feedback causally implant this the sensation that you did not have the free will. In other words, if another experimentalist had chosen some different sort, >> [music] >> 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 at work here, where the the sensor is chosen by an agent.

[00:03:35]>> That's not the the issue. It's just that but if I've made any unique contribution to the conversation about free will, it's it's on [music] the this point, which is the problem that most people see, and this is and even people who agree with me that free will is an illusion, even someone like, you know, Robert Sapolsky sees it this way. Most people think that >> [music] >> we have this experience of free will, right? And and so subjectively we know we have this thing [music] and yet objectively it's very hard to make sense of how we could possibly have this thing, right? [music] So you you you know that you your acts of will are effective and that you really are the author of your thoughts and intentions.

[00:04:12]Like you can decide what you're going to do next >> [music] >> and you don't have to do it until you do it always 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 like you're driving it, you're the subject, you can decide what to do. You're going to 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.

[00:04:34]And that's you doing it, right? And it's 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 uh those the results of those efforts are fairly unpersuasive, but people are just feel stuck doing that because they know they have free will >> [music] >> and they know they have to understand the world causally, scientifically and this they have to fit together somehow.

[00:05:01]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.