Pod Insights Making Sense with Sam Harris #482 — More From Sam: The Iran Deal, College in the AI Age, Mamdani's DSA, and More About this episode In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss topics from Making Sense Community, including one-world government, the value of a degree as AI reshapes careers, and factory farming ethics, along with Mamdani's DSA-aligned candidates, Trump's humiliating capitulation in the Iran deal, the Tulsi Gabbard guru story, and other topics.
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0:02 Speaker 00 You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam. Hello, Sam.
0:28 Sam Harris? Hey, good to see you.
0:30 Speaker 00 Good to see you as well. This time, we're not taping live in front of subscribers. I'm traveling and didn't want the stress of whether the internet would hold. So if you're hearing this, obviously, it did. Making Sense community now has over 26,000 people in it, and it's humming along nicely. I've really enjoyed many of the exchanges with so many thoughtful people there. Everyone has been behaving, and I think it's because they too wanted to see this succeed. And you've been getting some good feedback and pushback in there. It's definitely not been an echo chamber.
0:59 Sam Harris? No, no worries of that.
1:01 Speaker 00 No, and you've been in there quite a bit yourself. It's almost like an Easter egg, where I'm reading a thread, and then I see a comment from you. We don't have a follow feature, and I think that works out better, because we didn't want to build this community to be dependent on you, and it certainly hasn't been. So for today's episode, I'm going to try something a little different. Rather than running down a bunch of topics related to the news cycle, I'm going to grab a sampling from the posts in our community and get you to comment on them here. We'll also get your reactions to the Iran deal, whatever's happening over there, and to whatever current events are necessary. So for those of you who are looking for that, don't worry. And just a quick note before we get going, if you want to join community or become a
1:42 Speaker 00 subscriber to the podcast, you can find subscription options by going to samharris.org/subscribe. Okay, let's get started. One world government: Is global political unification inevitable? And would it be good? Should nation-states eventually operate the way US states do under a federal umbrella?
2:01 Sam Harris? Yeah, actually, this is not something I've thought about recently, but now that you mention it, this is probably something I've changed my mind about. I think in my first First book, The End of Faith, I wrote somewhere, probably in an end note, that it was just obvious that the end game for civilization is some version of one world government. What we want in the end, if things work out, is for the prospect of war between China and the US, say, to be just as ridiculous and therefore unthinkable as the prospect of war is now between Vermont and Massachusetts. Right? It's just not going to happen. Nobody's worried about it. And that's the case because they're unified under a single government that has a monopoly on the use of force.
2:46 Sam Harris? So something like that for the entire world must be where we're headed, unless we're going to keep killing one another. I don't think I believe that now, or if I do believe it, I think that goal is far enough away and quixotic enough that you really can't argue for it in the current environment. The idea that, in our case, the United States could ever be truly subordinate to the political whims of Europe or to say nothing of going further afield and greater cultural distance from us. I just, you know, our own society is so dysfunctional politically at this point
3:26 Sam Harris? that the idea of a global version of this just seems genuinely unthinkable to me, so.
3:33 Speaker 00 You don't think some super AGI of some kind would be able to solve that for us? Or you're saying maybe?
3:39 Sam Harris? Well, I could imagine the dystopian version of this. I mean, one world totalitarianism, like tech-enabled, I could well imagine that being in our future. But in terms of a desirable future where we realize that we have converged so fully on our cultural priorities that we're just gonna, you know, un-Brexit the whole world because it's just obviously good and we really trust our brothers and sisters over there in Belgium and Congo and just everywhere else. I mean, it's not going to happen in the lifetime of our children or their children or any of their... Robots, I just don't, don't see it.
4:22 Speaker 00 Really, you just, you really think there's just no version where AI comes up with like all the best answers? And we've all just gathered around and said, oh my God, this is just, this is not comparable.
4:30 Sam Harris? Well, you can't, if you're going to put it all on AI, then the successful, perfect, super intelligence that then I, I really don't know what the world looks like. I mean, then, then the whole thing perhaps becomes a self-driving car and we forgot we ever wanted a steering wheel. But the dystopian versions of something like that are, I think so much more numerous and easier to think about that. I just don't see us overcoming our political fragmentation to a degree that makes even the aspiration for one world government, something that you can talk about with a straight face.
5:04 Speaker 00 Okay, next topic. Are you a hard materialist or do you leave room for genuinely unexplained phenomena? How do you handle people you trust who report experiences science can't account for?
5:14 Sam Harris? Well, those aren't mutually exclusive. You could be a hard materialist and freely acknowledge that they're unexplained phenomena, right? You just think that the, the explanation, should we find it, will resolve itself within the materialist frame, right? So it's just not, I don't think there's anyone who's denying that they're unexplained phenomenon. I'm not a hard, I mean, I wouldn't consider, I'm certainly open-minded with respect to some other ontology other than materialism. Are you, is more commonly called physicalism at this moment? To remind people, you know, if you're a physicalist, you think that we live in a physical universe and that everything, including minds,
5:53 Sam Harris? uh, and their subjective experiences are, are by some mechanism, we don't currently understand emerging properties of all of those physical forces and structures that really exist out there in the world. I think it's totally plausible that physicalism as currently thought about can't explain consciousness in particular. Uh, and that consciousness either is just something we can't understand in terms of, you know, the normal physical reductionism, or it requires some other discussion about what is, what is real. Uh, and maybe everything that we're considering physical has. Some mental properties or some interior dimension on some level. But if it is just in fact, the case that there's really just a
6:39 Sam Harris? a universe of quote, physical, you know, and insentient fields and forces and consciousness emerges out of some combination of, you know, blind, unconscious events. You know, information, information processing or otherwise, that may in fact be true. That's not an explanation that is ever going to be intelligible to anyone. So I think the hard problem of consciousness is very real intellectually. And I don't know what the answer is to it. So I don't know. I can't say I'm a quote, a hard materialist. Uh, I simply don't know what, how consciousness emerges out of the physics of things.
7:14 Speaker 00 All right, way out over my skis. So we're moving on. Does philosophy deserve its prestige or is it mostly sophisticated opinion making? Where's the line between genuine intellectual rigor and pseudo scientific hand waving dressed up in academic jargon?
7:28 Sam Harris? Hmm, I feel like that question has it backwards. I don't think philosophy has much prestige in neither in science nor in popular culture. Does, um, you know, certainly a degree in philosophy give you much gravitas, right? That's not when on the list of, on the short list of useless degrees or imagine or degrees that are imagined to be useless by entrepreneurs and academics. And, you know, just toss one out there. Philosophy is usually on the tip of everybody's tongue. I mean, they just like, you're going to get a degree in gender studies or, you know, I don't know, dance or philosophy.
8:08 Speaker 00 Basket weaving.
8:09 Sam Harris? Yeah. So as to be unemployable. I think it's actually one of the best degrees and selects for some of the best people in, in, in a university campus. And I think that's been true for a very long time, but increasingly it's, um, I think it's one of the best degrees. If you want to be a generalist who can just think and clearly and write clearly and speak clearly. I just think it's good training for all of that. You know, you know, under the shadow of AI, I think it only becomes a better degree rather than worse. I think it becomes more. Practical, and we've talked about this. I just think we're going to want the human curation of digital products ultimately, more and more. If anyone's going to be left standing, it's going to be the massage therapists and the people with good taste intellectually,
8:53 Sam Harris? who can kind of point in the right direction toward the robots that make more sense rather than less sense. I mean, I've always felt it was a good degree to get and prepared you for anything else that you might want to do pretty well, even if you're going to go into science. Because when you go into science, at the graduate level, you have to, you basically have to relearn everything anyway. I mean, you take all the same basic courses to get started. So, yeah, I don't think it has much gravitas. I think it, I think it should have more. It's true that it depends what philosophy you focused on. I think there are corners of philosophy that are just word salad, or mostly word salad. And yeah, those are, I think rightly denigrated. But yeah, I've averted my eyes from most of that stuff.
9:39 Speaker 00 All right. Thanks for that. Why are we here? Can you live a genuinely examined life without arriving at a satisfying answer to that question? Or is the asking itself the point? Or is neither?
9:50 Sam Harris? I think it's the wrong question. I don't think you can extract much of value out of that question. It's certainly not the question that, that science asks. I mean, it's much more of a how question. How are we here? How did this happen? That's a scientific question. The why question attributes a, or seeks to attribute a reason behind all of this, and perhaps an intention. It's a very theistic framing of the nature of the problem.
10:18 Speaker 00 What about the what? What is the meaning of life?
10:21 Sam Harris? Well, again, that just sort of smuggles in the same question under what. It's, there need not be a meaning to life. It's just, why should there be? You know, without people, you would never be tempted to ask that question. It's like, you know, let's say people become extinct. You know, there's just a world filled with, with non-human animals. You know, look at, look at that creation. Look at the wolves and the owls and the cockroaches. You would never be tempted to wonder, well, what is the, what's the meaning of this? You know, why did this happen? It's interesting. It's no less interesting to consider how it
11:00 Sam Harris? happened and what's actually happening. And, but, purpose? That's just, it's a very anthropomorphic lens to look at all of this through. There's just the fact that the cosmos exists and you are part of it. Right. And the why ask why in the face of that mystery? The mystery isn't resolved. I mean, just imagine the answer that if you could believe it, if an answer were given to you, would it really resolve that mystery? You know, if a voice boomed out of the heaven saying, oh, why? Because I want it to, or why? Because this is what I thought was beautiful. Does that really answer anything? Certainly, it just throws up more questions than you want to ask that maniac in the sky. You know, what about smallpox? It can't possibly satisfy that.
11:45 Sam Harris? It's not going to scratch the itch that anyone thinks it's going to scratch.
11:48 Speaker 00 So what is the right question to ask? Or is there just no question to ask?
11:52 Sam Harris? Yeah, I think that I think this questioning mode, so the emotional question, you know, the feeling that there's a problem here emotionally that has to be solved, you know, on the other side of which your happiness and tranquility will be found. That's an illusion and that's that's the cramp introduced by the question itself. Right. And that's a failure of your attention to actually contact the mode of feeling good enough in the present moment. Right. Like you're distracted enough, you're you don't recognize thoughts as thoughts. You don't recognize any space around thoughts. You don't know how to meditate. You don't know what your mind is really, you know, you're just being used by it in each moment. You know, you're you're effectively asleep and dreaming.
12:34 Sam Harris? And now you're dreaming that you're sitting in a classroom, wondering, you know, what's the point of it all? It's not the place from which you're you're going to answer this question. And it's not the place where you could receive an answer that would be satisfying. I mean, your problem is you just don't feel as good as you might feel if you paid closer attention to what it's like to be you in each moment. Right. If you broke the spell of your identification with thought, it could actually rest. Right. And and you glimpse that kind of experience, you know, when you, you know, are really working out hard or, you know, thrown into the in some, you know, collision with the beauty of nature, or you're having sex, or you're, you know, appreciating art, or something has moved you out of yourself. And or you've taken the right drugs, right? Something has.
13:20 Sam Harris? Placed you in a quote, "non-ordinary state of consciousness" or a peak experience. And then you've certainly forgotten this question. You're not asking any questions. You're just, you know, if the mind is going to come online again at that moment, you'll be asking questions like, "Well, why can't I feel like this more of the time?" Or, "How do I maintain this experience?" Or, "Maybe, you know, is it possible to move here?" Where I can have this beautiful, beautiful view of the ocean? Or, like, the thing you think that has moved you into that profound embrace of the present moment, you think it's exogenous to yourself, right? Again, it's the landscape, or it's the relationship, or it's the, you know, whatever it is. The fun you're having in the company of friends.
14:03 Sam Harris? You're going to attribute that as its cause. And then you'll be left thinking, "How can I get more of that?" And again, that's a failure to understand the attentional basis of these changes and experience.
14:15 Speaker 00 So how do you answer this question if your seven-year-old nephew says, "Uncle Sam, why are we here? What is the purpose of all of this?"
14:25 Sam Harris? Then I would say, I don't know, but the mystery isn't the problem. And the mystery can be the source of a very fun exploration of the world, right? That's everything, whether you're going to explore, you know, the mountains, or you're going to explore jungle, or you're going to explore science. Or, I mean, it's just your curiosity is not something you're ever going to get rid of, right? So curiosity is not a problem.
14:50 Speaker 00 All right. In a recent episode of Making Sense, Noah Smith says, "Fixing the debt means cutting healthcare for the poor, while the wealthy give up a vacation or two." Is that the "we're all in this together," or is it obscene? And is this exact frustration what's actually driving the populist wave?
15:09 Sam Harris? I guess I don't understand the connection there. We think the populist wave might... You're asking whether wealth inequality is driving...
15:15 Speaker 00 Well, he's saying in the recent episode, I believe the question is, is that when Noah was talking about saying, "Look, we're all going to have to be in this together. The poor are going to have, not the poor, but the middle class are going to have to handle this, and the wealthy are going to have to give up a vacation or two." And he's, I think he's, the question is, is that really what it means we're all in this together? That the wealthy are gonna have to give up a vacation or two? And that's.
15:37 Sam Harris? I forgot he said that. I mean, I would quibble with the definitions of the cohorts here. I mean, the wealthy, when you're talking about the wealthy, you're talking about wealthy people who are not gonna give up anything. Right? No matter how much we tax them, they're not gonna have to give up a vacation or two. I would draw the line at wealth where you're not, you're, there's not a conceivable change in your style of living that could matter. I mean, that most of your money is always just gonna be numbers on a spreadsheet. It's never gonna be implicated in how you spend your money, right? That's the true, those are the truly wealthy people in our society.
16:12 Speaker 00 The question I think is directed toward those people. Why can't those people bear more of the burden?
16:18 Sam Harris? I think, I think what Noah was saying though is that even if you manage to tax those people quite onerously, it's still not enough money, right? We like, the middle class is gonna have to pay more in taxes too, right? And the, and the almost wealthy, right? The people who will feel it, there's just not, I mean, it's just that that's not, we're not gonna tax our way successfully out of a $40 trillion hole. And I think he was saying, as many people have, that really it's gonna require growth and inflation to get us out as well, right? It's just not, you can't redistribute your way out of it. But there's gonna be, have to be a fair amount of redistribution too.
16:56 Speaker 00 A 26-year-old is about to start medical school and wondering if it's a mistake. In eight years, will there still be a meaningful role for human physicians? Or is this the wrong career bet at the worst possible moment?
17:08 Sam Harris? It seems as good a bet as any, really. I mean, if you're, if you're going to worry that being a doctor is, is a dead end now. I think almost, almost everything else is on that list at the same level. As it's just as likely that there will be no lawyers and there'll be no, you know, even, you know, CEOs of companies, right? It's like, do you wanna found a company? Well, what's to say that two years from now, that company won't even be more successful if a robot were running it, right? So it's not, I think, I don't think. You can close the door on most professions like that at this point. It's just that it's going to be some way of being a doctor and using all the AI tools.
17:49 Sam Harris? Uh, and if there's not, there's going to be some role for a person who almost became a doctor to use those, you know, use these tools better than most other people. I mean, this guy, there has to be some human layer to this. Otherwise, we're going to have to solve everybody's problem all at once by just spreading, spreading the trillions of dollars around that the robots have produced for us. So it's, um, yeah, I mean, I, I can't say that you should be pessimistic about whether being a doctor is even going to be a thing in a few short years. Because if, if that's, if that happens, basically everything is gone, I would say.
18:24 Speaker 00 Well, but if the doctors are gone, that's probably, I mean, there's, there's an upside to that or a silver lining as well. That would, that would mean that.
18:30 Sam Harris? Yeah, well, it's, but again, we, then we've, we have to confront this at every level of employment. Right. It's just, I mean, again, there, there'll be a few things that are probably more impervious than being a doctor. Again, things like being a massage therapist or, you know, something where you could just, there's this categorical difference between whether there's a human doing it or a robot doing it. And it's, you could imagine a preference for humans, but I mean, now that, I mean, maybe even that is not real, that preference.
18:57 Speaker 00 I could just imagine where people would want the, the analog version still. And they'd want their doctor to show up with the, the black bag coming over like they used to many years ago. All right. With, with AI reshaping every career path, this is a related question. Is a six-figure degree still a reasonable bet?
19:13 Sam Harris? Uh, I hope so. I mean, it just culturally, it seems like we want, we want our kids to still have that experience. There's something great about the college experience because it gives you four years to be a student and to just be interested in, in, in anything that you find interesting. And to be surrounded by people doing the same thing, you know, so it's not that there's no pressure, but it's a very specific type of pressure. It's not the pressure to make your life work out in the world. It's not the pressure to find a career immediately. It's, it's a very, it's a very useful crucible and it's over far too fast. For most kids, I think, and it's culturally, I think it's valuable. I mean, there are other things that are valuable that, you know, I haven't experienced.
19:57 Sam Harris? Like, you know, being in the military, I'm sure is valuable and is, you know, imparts its own lessons for people. And I think probably having mandatory public service that we've never had in my lifetime, which you could certainly make the case that that would be a good thing for our society. I mean, as a way of overcoming hyper-partisanship and building culture, you know, intelligently and intentionally. But I think college is very useful for some people. You can certainly make the case that we have a lot of miseducated people out there now starting to run our institutions, right? I mean, if I'm sure we'll get into the Zoran Mamdani of it all.
20:41 Sam Harris? But I mean, the people who are finding the democratic socialists of America to be credible voices for the future of democratic politics. I mean, all of that's frankly terrifying and it is, you know, perfectly correlated with being a miseducated dummy coming out of a school like Columbia. Right? So it's like, it's possible for the whole college experience to sum to something that's truly embarrassing intellectually and morally. But in the general case, I just don't think that's, that's the outcome and it shouldn't be. And we can certainly guard against it. And I think it's, if not college, I do think we want a stage in life
21:21 Sam Harris? that's kind of, you know, a monastic immersion in the good parts of culture for people. I think that's good.
21:30 Speaker 00 So I wasn't planning to bring up Mamdani, but do you want to get into that now?
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