The ‘Self’ You Can’t Find with Sam Harris

Most of us feel like there's a "me" behind our eyes, a thinker of our thoughts and author of our choices. Author and Waking Up founder Sam Harris argues that when you look closely enough, that self disappears. Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch dig into why the sense of self may be something the brain constructs moment to moment, and why free will, in Sam's view, doesn't hold up to either physics or careful attention. Along the way they explore what meditation and psychedelics reveal about the mind, why denying free will isn't fatalism, and why Sam sees that as grounds for optimism about how much we can change. Sam’s exploration into free will reveals a central idea of the Perception Box, a framework developed by Elizabeth R. Koch for understanding the forces within us that shape how we see ourselves, relate to others, and move through the world. Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found. Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show. Visit unlikelycollaborators.com for more information. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 6:50 Self-consciousness and the neuroscience of self 12:50 Do we have free will? 24:00 Waking up: lucid dreaming and meditation 29:20 Intrusive thoughts and what we can control 31:00 Psychedelics and meditation 38:45 Can free will be settled?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears.

• 0:05Heather Berlin?

  Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a perception box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder, or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger. In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception.

• 0:50Heather Berlin?

  I'd like to introduce our esteemed hosts, Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Kristof Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box. This week, our guest is Sam Harris. Through the lens of the perception box, what we experience as me, the one controlling events, may be an illusion the mind is constructing in real time. Training ourselves to see that construction process can transform how we relate to challenges, how resilient we are to stress, and how to hold our fears with compassion rather than resistance.

• 1:36Heather Berlin?

  Kristof, I want to ask you, when you look at yourself or you think about yourself or what you're directly experiencing right now, how does that, how does that work in your mind? What does your mind do?

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Well, it seems that it strongly believes, like most people, there's a person sitting inside my head, a little guy among us called Kristof, in my case, looking out at the world. That person is the thinker, is the carrier of my thoughts. It's, that's the person who experienced. That person carries all my behavioral traits and all my, all my autobiographical memories. And that person really essentially remains the same throughout my life.

• 2:14Heather Berlin?

  So your subjective sense is that there's this unique unified self within you?

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Looking out.

• 2:19Heather Berlin?

  Looking out at the world and experiencing it.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Yes. And then, of course, it goes hand with, in most of us, with this voice inside my head. You know, I talk to myself. This is running commentary. And sometimes it gets really annoying and then you want to shut it up. So you go into states of flow like running or any other activity where you get totally absorbed by your work, right? Whether it's mathematics or writing code or whatever. We lose our sense of self, but that's rare.

• 2:45Heather Berlin?

  But enjoyable.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Very enjoyable.

• 2:47Heather Berlin?

  We have someone here who's an expert on all things self and mind. So welcome to the podcast, Sam Harris.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, great to see you guys.

• 2:54Heather Berlin?

  When you think of, when you look at yourself via your sort of direct experience right now, what do you think your mind is doing? What does it feel like and what do you think is going on?

• 3:04Speaker 00

  I think the, the brain for most people is doing three things. It's, it's forming a representation of the world. It's forming a representation of the body in the world. And then for most people, this is, this is going to be the self where we're going to kind of deconstruct and ultimately, you know, from my point of view, deconstruct as an illusion. There's this third representation of a subject interior to the body. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies, paradox. They might know, you know, if they're scientifically sophisticated, they know that they're identical to their bodies. Or that, you know, certainly a physicalist view of, of the mind would say the, the mind is what the brain is doing

• 3:48Speaker 00

  or the, the mind is what the entire central nervous system is doing. And when you're actually talking about the, the first person experience of most people, that's not what it is. People don't feel merely coterminous with their bodies. They feel like there's a subject in the head that is this kind of unchanging locus of conscious awareness and conscious will. And it's the place from which the spotlight of attention can be moved. And those movements can be kind of voluntary or involuntary. And when you ask someone to meditate and to look for this thing they're calling a self, the starting point for everyone is to, you know, whether they close their eyes or not, but it is even heightened when you close your eyes, you feel like, okay, now I'm, I'm this interior witness to the world

• 4:34Speaker 00

  and to the body in the world. And there is this strangely paradoxical relationship to, to the body. Whereas you sort of know it's you, but you know, if you have a pain in your knee, the you, the conscious subject, has a relationship to that pain. You're not liking it. You're wanting it to go away. And it's, everything points back to this feeling of being a kind of passenger in the body that witnesses everything, that, that, that is the one that is having experience, appropriating experience moment to moment. It is the thinker of your thoughts. So in addition to the flow of thought, there's this sense that there's this author of the thoughts. In addition to the next intention that arises to, you know, reach for a glass, say,

• 5:19Speaker 00

  there's a feeling that there's a one who intends. And again, subjectively, it's not felt to be the whole body. It's felt to be this kind of inner witness. And it's that inner witness, when you look for it closely enough, is not findable. And, and in that not finding, you can actually

• 5:37Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Discover his absence.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  It's not findable.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  In my experience, it's possible to look precisely enough for this, this feeling that we're calling I, moment to moment, and to recognize that it's something we're doing. It's almost like you're making a fist and you've been making a fist your whole life. And by a very kind of precise use of attention, I can get, I can make you aware of the fact that you're making this fist. This just feels like, this just feels like what a hand is for you. But if you, if we could just pay close enough attention to what's happening here and, and you could relax your hand, realize the thing you thought you were holding doesn't exist.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  But there's still the locus of attention, right? There's me intending to close a fist. That's what it feels like subjectively.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  The illusion is that there's, there's experience. And then there's a, a self that's on the edge of experience or in the center of experience to, to whom experience refers. But that, if, if that is experienced at all, that's just more experience, right? That's just part of the field of experience. Whatever this wrinkle is you're calling I, whatever it feels like to be me. I mean, so you can imagine intensifying it in, um, you know, we're all walking around with this feeling of, of I, but there are conditions under which it can, it can contract even further. So if you suddenly become acutely self-conscious, right?

• 7:03Speaker 02

  You have something between your teeth.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Someone says, oh, no, what's that? And you're, and you're, and you're like, what, me? And, and so you're, you, you realize that you, you're this thing that feels implicated behind your face. And people, people feel like they're, it's almost like your, your face is a mask and you're behind this mask. And if someone sort of points to you and it kind of implicates you, or if there's a crowd that suddenly draws his attention to you, you know, you're on stage and you've done something that, that, you know, that's acutely embarrassing, say. That, that collapse of attention where everyone else's, you know, gaze suddenly, you know, impressed itself upon you almost as to form a kind of singularity of, of self, right? It's an experience of, of energy, of the physiological changes in your body.

• 7:46Heather Berlin?

  So just to like pull that apart a little bit. So from a neuroscience perspective, you know, we think of a sense of self. It's just made up of really different parts of the brain acting different. You know, parts of our brain that encode our sense of our body and our, you know, that construct this reality of a self that's experiencing things. When you have more activation in certain parts of the brain, like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, your sense of self-awareness and self-consciousness and inner critic sort of turns up. But in certain states, when you can get that to turn down, you kind of lose a sense of self. And there are different ways to get to those states as well and becoming more open. If we, you know, think about a perception box, you know, when you're closing in or you can expand it and open up and the sense of self can dissolve,

• 8:30Heather Berlin?

  which makes it clear that it is a construct of the brain.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's something, it's something the brain is doing and it's something the brain can cease to do.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  But that doesn't make it an illusion. I mean, it's as much a construct as pain is or seeing you. I have a picture of you. I know it's created in part of my visual cortex, right?

• 8:47Speaker 00

  There's one type of illusion, certainly, that you, you, you think something is so. I mean, like the classic, you know, from Indian literature is that you think there's a, there's something coiled in the corner of a room and you mistake it for a snake, but you pay closer attention to it and then you recognize it's just a coil of rope. The true perception is revealed by what remains when you actually bring your full attention to the thing. Like if a snake always collapses into a rope

• 9:17Speaker 00

  and, and it never goes the other way. It's not, you're looking closer still and then suddenly the rope becomes, becomes a snake. You then draw the conclusion, well, it's not really a snake. It's a rope, even though out of the corner of my eye.

• 9:27Heather Berlin?

  You're saying the more you look into the self, the more it kind of disappears. There's nothing to be found there.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Once you have this insight, again, this is just within the frame of, of meditation and specifically of a non-dual approach to mindfulness. What becomes stable is every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears. You couldn't actually feel like a self on demand if you wanted to. Right? So like it's, it's unstable in a way that whenever, whenever you look for it, it's gone.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  But you can make similar arguments for any conscious perception. I submit that the consciousness of self is a subset of all conscious experiences.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  But I can't do that with you. Like if, if every time I look at your yellow sweatshirt, I see your yellow sweatshirt and I can't, I can't look at it closely enough for it to disappear. It is a stable percept for me.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  There are certain things that are more stable, like pain. Unfortunately, chronic pain is more stable and visual perception. Yeah, but the character of them really, I mean, do you think that, that consciousness of self is different from consciousness of seeing yellow?

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Or pain?

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It's based on a mistake and it's what it's like. To be identified with thought without knowing you're identified with thought. I mean, the flow of thought is the thing that is dragging this sense of of subjectivity into consciousness moment to moment. I mean, I actually think our sense of self is interrupted much more than people realize. You mentioned flow states and this condition of kind of losing yourself in your work. We're constantly breaking it without clear awareness of it being broken. What meditation is, by this specific exercise of paying attention in a certain way, you can make these breaks in this subject-object dualism very salient.

• 11:18Heather Berlin?

  I want to get into free will a bit. I would just dare to say that I think a lot of time we are not aware of ourself when we're just in a flow state, or you're just driving on your way to work and your mind is wandering. It's only when you start to begin to focus on self that it almost like constructs itself in that moment to be there again, and it's always there when you're kind of look to it. I don't constantly have this awareness of my sense of self until I focus on it. But what I find with patients is that, you know, who are suffering, they are hyper-focused on their thoughts and the rumination. And when we look at, you know, and our imaging studies show that they have hyperactivation in parts of their prefrontal cortex. And when you get them to let go, whether it's through meditation or flow states, creativity,

• 11:59Heather Berlin?

  psychedelics, that part of the brain, the rumination kind of parts of the prefrontal cortex calm down. And you can't simultaneously be in flow and also be, you know, ruminating and anxious and depressed because you're kind of turning down those parts of the brain, so they're antithetical to each other. I want to get into this idea. So if self is a kind of, whatever you want to call it, an illusion, a construct of the brain, it's malleable, it can change. How much control do we really have over our agent? I know our sense of agency can be an illusion, but, you know, do we have control? Do we have any kind of free will and, you know, in any kind of philosophical sense? Or what about just in the sense of having control over actions? Because when I'm treating patients and I'm like, okay, you have control over your thoughts,

• 12:42Heather Berlin?

  you have OCD, you have a sense of, you can change this. How does free will mix into that equation?

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Yes, there are really two levels at which you can talk about control and agency. I mean, there's the conventional level at which, yes, we have control over all kinds of things and not as much of it as we want in other areas. There's one way of framing the whole project of having insight into the nature of mind and adopting a practice like meditation as a project of actually gaining yet another degree of freedom. Once you learn a practice like mindfulness, you can actually notice this, sort of the wheelworks of your own neurosis and unhappiness, and you can notice, okay, I just thought, I had that angry thought about this argument I had with my friend yesterday, and I'm now

• 13:34Speaker 00

  kind of ruminating about the things I wish I said or wish I hadn't said. But now I can be mindful of it, I can notice the physiological changes that these thoughts are producing. I can separate them, I can notice the physiology is one thing, and the imagery and the bits of language in my mind are a different stream, and I can get some space from it. One way to summarize that whole thing is that you can, you're getting some freedom that you didn't have before. I mean, now you can actually get off the ride. You can decide, okay, anger is no longer useful, you know, this conversation I'm playing in my head already happened.

• 14:09Heather Berlin?

  So would you, it's like a Dandene, kind of like degrees of freedom, right? Versus actually having free will.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  But this is sort of a compatibilist framing of all that, which, this is the sort of free, this is what we mean by freedom.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  In a practical sense.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. In a legal sense, in a medical sense. This is a freedom worth wanting. This isn't sort of radical libertarian free will where you're free of the laws of physics. In my view, free will is a concept that doesn't map onto anything deep about us. There's a difference between voluntary behavior and involuntary behavior. That's phenomenologically, that's still true, whether free will is a thing or not. I mean, having a tremor that you can't control is different than just doing this on purpose. But on a deep level, we know that, you know, the dominos of physics are just falling, and our brain is part of the universe. Traditionally, it's been, it's been very hard to map the sense of libertarian free

• 15:05Speaker 00

  will that everyone feels they have onto the physics of things, whether you're going to talk about determinism or determinism plus randomness. And however you turn those dials, it doesn't give people the libertarian free will they think they have, which is the feeling in each moment that I could have done otherwise a moment ago. I mean, when I actually pay attention to my experience, I don't know what, there is no free will. I don't feel that there's free will. It's not that I feel like I have alien hand syndrome and I can't control my hand, but when I actually look closely at my behavior, everything is simply springing out of the darkness.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Once again, when I, when I raise my hand to make this point, you're saying that just came out of...

• 15:50Speaker 00

  It's just like you're hearing this.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  ...ontological nothingness.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Like, you can hear this, you can't, you can't choose not to hear it, right? You can be distracted from it, but...

• 16:01Speaker 02

  I can choose not to pay attention to it.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  But, but still, it's an adventitious intrusion into the theater of your conscious life. So is that intention to raise your arm. Like, you could have spent an hour deciding, okay, I'm going to prove that I have free will. I know I'm going to raise my right hand or my left hand, but I'm not sure which one. Let's just figure this out. I'm going to go back and forth, you know, maybe, you know, I'm right-handed, that's, maybe, maybe it should be the right, but no, but it may be more creative somehow to use the left. There's no place to stand, subjectively, where that, where you can explain. It really is as mysterious as someone sitting in another room with a keyboard deciding for you.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  The only mystery is if you don't accept the primacy of consciousness. If you have a different ontology where you see first and foremost, existence means to be conscious, and that existence has causal power, and the causal power arise from that. Physics, of course, correlates. So clearly, you can read up, you know, Ben Libet and all of that. If I raise my right hand, we know 300 milliseconds before, there's a signal that I can pick up with EEG or even with fMRI much earlier, but that's correlation. As we tell all of our students, correlation is not causation.

• 17:11Heather Berlin?

  But you're taking a very radical...

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Well, because otherwise, Sam is suggesting, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't you saying the fact that I raised my hand, leaving aside noise, which we all agree isn't that important, actually was determined 12, 13.4 billion years ago in the Big Bang?

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Or it could be, it could also be, you know, randomness as well.

• 17:32Heather Berlin?

  How would you describe your philosophical view of free will?

• 17:36Speaker 00

  That it's, it doesn't map onto anything. It doesn't map onto the physics of things, whether randomness or determinism or any combination thereof. And the truth is, it doesn't actually map onto our experience when we pay attention. See, the traditional conundrum is, we know it doesn't map onto the physics of things, but we know in our bones that we have this thing, so that we, because we feel it moment to moment. So the endurance of free will as a topic of philosophical interest is based on the common experience that people think they have.

• 18:09Heather Berlin?

  So this has been a perspective that I've taken is, okay, the brain is this complex, you know, information processing machine. It's based, you have, you have certain constraints, your genetics, your history, the environment, all these things. The brain is doing these calculations. It decides in any given moment, based on all this, all this data, what to do in that moment. You know, we have the Benjamin Libet, 350 milliseconds before you're even consciously aware of the intention to move, the brain is sort of gearing up to make a movement. But there is some randomness that goes on as well. Would you say that the unconscious, in a way, has some sort of more free will than our consciousness, because that's the sort of afterthought?

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Nobody thinks they're a robot, right? But we are just wet robots, you know, from the, from the point of view of the physics of things. The reason why that's so difficult to swallow is, this is a line from my friend Paul Bloom, the psychologist who you probably know. He describes people as common sense dualists, and I think that really is the case. People feel like their mind, their agency, their subjectivity, their sense that they are the author of their thoughts and intentions.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Must it must somehow float free of the physics of things.

• 19:20Heather Berlin?

  But if there's no free will, let's just say, we still have the capacity to have self-control. We still have responsibility for our actions. We're still held accountable.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  The sense that I could have done otherwise is a total illusion. Right. There was no other way for me to finish this sentence. It is subjectively mysterious that I can do any of this. So like the fact that you can decode what I'm saying, you have no, you have no first person insight into that. It's just happening. You're just a witness to the fact that your brain accomplishes this thing. So consciousness is is epiphenomenal, certainly with respect to your being able to decode these sounds meaningfully. I mean, the semantics, it's all just getting.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Most of it's unconscious, but consciousness is not, per definition, it is the phenomena per excellence. I can deny everything. I cannot deny my unconscious.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  The way I would summarize that.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  You seem to come close to it. You say the self is an illusion.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  No, no, no.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  The sense of agency is an illusion.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  The one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion is consciousness. I'm not, I'm making a very strong epistemological claim. I'm very slow to make any ontological claims. Right. So, so my, so when I say I'm a consciousness is the one thing that cannot be an illusion, epistemologically. Right. Also, I guess that has ontological implications, but by my asserting that I'm not claiming to know what happened before the big bang, or how consciousness relates to brains, or what happens after death.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  And so it's not an ontological, unlike for instance, integrated information theory that makes us ontological point of view.

• 20:47Heather Berlin?

  And you guys just break down for.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Consciousness.

• 20:51Heather Berlin?

  For listeners, the difference between ontological and epistemological, just to.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so epistemology is the question of what we know and how we can know it. What can we be certain about is a question of epistemology? Is there anything we can be certain about?

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Is there anything we can know that's, that's not based on axioms that we can't justify? And do we always have to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps? And just assert something as a brute fact being true, but you know, we really can't argue, we can't get behind it.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  This is where Rene Descartes comes in.

• 21:23Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And there's, you know, and there are many, this is where all philosophy struggles to, to make sense of our, our, our knowledge of reality. Ontology is a question of what actually exists. What is real? What is out there? Is this a physical universe only? Is it, is it a mental universe only? Is there some marriage of the two? And this is some kind of dualistic.

• 21:42Heather Berlin?

  So you're not asking any of those larger questions about what is actually reality?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Can we just have a bookmark? I just wanted to finish the, the debate on free will. So what do you tell, let's say, someone who has a suffers, let's say alcoholism, and he tries to stop alcohol. Do you tell him, well, don't worry, you don't have a free will. There's nothing you can do about it.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  What do you tell people that want to change, but are unable to for whatever reason?

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Okay. So, so one way of mistaking what I'm claiming, when I deny the existence of free will is to, is to kind of lurch into fatalism. Like, so if there's no free will, then I'm just going to sit here and see what happens. You can't step out of the mechanics of things by just deciding to, to do nothing, because that is as much of a decision as deciding to do something.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  All of these decisions are merely arising based on states of the brain and, you know, which states of the universe that you didn't consciously author. If you want to learn to play the piano, the only way to do that is to do the things that, that, that encode that skill into your nervous system. And so such that you wake up one day, actually being able to play the piano, it's not just going to happen to you by, by accident. What I know is that I am a system that is open to influence. So if I watch a movie that inspires me to, to want to learn to play the piano, if someone, if someone, if I meet someone who's even older than I am, who says they learned to play the piano in the last 18 months, and it's the greatest thing they've ever done.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  And, and, and that suddenly corrects a, a view of myself that I didn't even know I had, which it was just my tacit assumption that in your late 50s, you can't learn to play the piano. It's a perturbation of my nervous system that came from outside. It came from the, you know, gene transcription. It can't, it's, it's part of the physics of things.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  So what do you tell the alcoholic who wants to kick the habit? Don't worry, someday it'll happen.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  No, no. I mean, the optimistic thing is you are, you have no idea how radically you can change. I mean, you could, you are, you are this open system. You, you have no idea how deeply the next conversation you have can affect you. How, how the look on your, on your child's face, the look of disappointment, seeing you drunk again, how deeply that could land for you. And you might've seen it a thousand times before, but this one time where you really see it might completely change your sense of, of who you need to be in the world.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Again, it's like the, the causality here is, is everywhere. I'm just saying that there's no one who in the middle, there's no man in the boat who's really controlling things.

• 24:17Heather Berlin?

  But then I want to talk about the kinds of things that we can do to sort of, in a way, help us gain a little bit more control or shift our perspective or perception. You know, we have this constant narration in our head, but how does your perception or your perception box shift when you move into a state of full absorption of attention or focusing on the self or some sort of meditative state?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  My book and the, and the app that was derived from my book, the title was waking up. And it's just, it's not original to me. I mean, the, the notion that the analogy to waking up from, from a dream, waking up from sleep and waking up from a dream is, is kind of everywhere in the contemplative literature. I mean, the, the word Buddha means awakened one, right? So there's, but it's a very deep analogy. It's more than an analogy. I think just, it is also neurologically the case that there's something very similar. Being lost in thought, thinking without knowing you're thinking is very much like being asleep and dreaming without knowing you're dreaming. And there's this, there's this transition that many people have experienced from, from kind of ordinary dreaming to so-called lucid dreaming,

• 25:24Speaker 00

  which you can, you can suddenly be kind of wake up within a dream and yet the dream persists. And that gives you a kind of degree of freedom within a dream, which is, is objectively pretty interesting. And people have played with that a lot and there are traditional practices. And in Tibetan Buddhism, there's a lot of, there's something called dream yoga. And there's a whole, you know, practice around that, which anticipates, you know, what was later done in, you know, in Western psychological circles around lucid dreaming.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  But the phenomenology there is interesting. And then also, of course, you can just wake up from a dream totally and realize, okay, I'm safely in my bed. I thought I was, you know, running in a jungle, being chased by a jaguar, but, and my physiology was, was appropriate to that hallucination. But now I'm, I'm restored to my real circumstance, which is safely in my bed. We certainly, once you learn to meditate, but even people who know nothing about meditation can experience something like that transition where your, your thinking thoughts that are made, that are, that are really driving your experience. I ask you to, you know, think of a celebrity that you, you can just, the first celebrity who comes to mind, right?

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Just a movie star, right? Just, just bring that image to mind.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Jennifer Aniston.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's just.

• 26:39Heather Berlin?

  I went with Brad Pitt.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Okay. So.

• 26:41Heather Berlin?

  It's gone.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  And so you might interrogate your intuition around free will here. And the phenomenology is someone comes to mind or a couple of people come to mind. And then there's a sort of a selection process where you think, maybe the first person comes to mind is someone who you'd be sort of embarrassed to, to have been the first person you thought. Like, I don't, I don't want to, for, you know, it's sort of unseemly for me to think of whoever Sylvester Stallone. Like, maybe I can think of somebody more highbrow than Sylvester Stallone. So now I go search, I, the search space continues to light up. And, but crucially, there are all the people you couldn't think of because you, you don't, you don't know their names. Right. Like, or you don't even have imagery in your head around them. They're the people whose images you know, like you've seen them in a bunch of movies, but you don't know their names.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  You couldn't, you couldn't form the sentence.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  I could still have the image. So actually I've done this experiment in a clinical context where we record from the heads of people here at UCLA. It's like free. That's where we discovered these Jennifer Aniston neurons. And that's where Jennifer Aniston comes to mind because I think about her a lot in, in my, in a scientific academic context.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  So you do have neurons for some of these people.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The Bill Clinton neuro, yeah.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. When you asked me to think about that, once some of these neurons by top down get activated. And then they, the ones presumably that are strongest in some sense, they make it into my conscious awareness.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Try to map free will onto this. So people have a deep sense that, so one, you'll admit you couldn't think of the people who you don't know. Right. There's no free will there. Then let's say there's 2,000 people who you could have known, you could, you could have thought of. But only a few were vying for inclusion. So what does it mean to say that you could have thought of Oprah Winfrey? Well, all it means to say, this goes back to your question earlier, what, what does it mean to, how do I map on the sort of old free will language onto, onto the way I think about human experience? To say that you could have thought of Oprah Winfrey a moment ago is to say that. You do know who she is, you could think of her next time, right?

• 28:44Speaker 00

  But you could not have thought of her a moment ago.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  It's a slightly different paradigm. I'm now thinking both Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer Aniston. And then I, so I both have the fork in the road up ahead in my mind. I think about both consciously.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  And then I decide one versus the other.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could do that with 10 people.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Always 10 people, that I would submit is a free decision.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  But there's still another person who, okay.

• 29:11Heather Berlin?

  You didn't think of.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  You see, there's another person, there's another person that you know just as well as any of those 10 who you didn't think of.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  So now, now that you have your 10 to select from, I say, pick a card, any card, you can't explain, it is subjectively inscrutable.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Oh, I like, I like for whatever reason, I prefer Jennifer Aniston consciously. I've decided that this is, you know, when you choose to marry someone and move to a city, you think about the two possibilities, that's sort of your paradigmatic decision. You think about the two possibility, then you think on benefit, I want to do A for whatever reason that I'm mostly unconscious.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Well, yes, so you're, so you're the last to know. So I'm saying that our experience of the world is completely compatible with there being no free will.

• 29:54Heather Berlin?

  Okay, so, you know, again, coming from a clinical perspective as well, like both neuroscience and clinical, patients have these intrusive thoughts. I think they're just thoughts like, you know, on hyperdrive, right? We can't really control when thoughts come into our mind. They're coming, it's like a flow of water coming through, or whatever you want to call it. Once they're there, we can then maybe control or think about or decide what to do with them or how to react to them or whatever. But the thoughts themselves are in some sense out of our control. They're coming.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Even if you feel like you, but people feel like they can consciously author a thought, like I'm going to think of a celebrity right now.

• 30:31Heather Berlin?

  You can purposely make a thought.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  I'm thinking of, yeah, but the thing is you can't because that would be to think it before you think it. I mean, really, something, it just springs out of the darkness. We're talking about physical states of, we're talking about changing physiology moment to moment. We're talking about electrical potentials. We're talking about, you know, what's happening at the synapse.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Are those the causes or the correlates?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  I'm saying that, that our experience, again, this is, this is the mystery that I'm saying doesn't exist. The, the mystery for most people is we have an experience that doesn't seem at all like that mere physical causation, just, just, just chemical billiard balls, you know, just, just banging away. I'm saying our experience, when we really pay attention to it, is totally compatible with that.

• 31:21Heather Berlin?

  I want to get to what we can do pragmatically outside of this philosophical, you know, conundrum, let's say that we're in right now. Because we can debate about free will for, for hours, but I do want to.

• 31:33Speaker 00

  People have. The reason why people are so energetically taking the other side of this debate is because they feel a certain way.

• 31:41Heather Berlin?

  So you're saying the closer you look, the more you pay attention, the more you can get closer to reality and sort of dissolve these illusions.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:49Heather Berlin?

  So what is that practice pragmatically?

• 31:52Speaker 00

  The practice is to notice that the self you think you have on the edge of consciousness and on the edge of experience isn't there. I mean, you look for it and you can't find it and the, and the not finding it feels like something.

• 32:06Heather Berlin?

  Meditation would be a way to get there. What about psychedelics?

• 32:11Speaker 00

  I mean, what's incredibly useful about psychedelics and the reason why so many of us have found them to be indispensable is that it takes, it almost doesn't matter which drug we're talking about, but I mean, obviously these drugs are very different. But it takes kind of ordinary lumpen materialists, you know, Western thinkers who are, you know, overeducated people who have just have never noticed that there's anything else to do with a mind but think. It overrides their patterns of, of thinking and feeling so fully. I mean, whether you're talking about something like MDMA or, or, which is not classically a psychedelic, or psilocybin or LSD, which are, it changes the contents of consciousness

• 32:55Speaker 00

  so fundamentally that one thing you realize beyond any possibility of doubt is that it is possible to have a radically different, different experience of being a self in the world than you're tending to have.

• 33:09Heather Berlin?

  So you, you'd in some sense expand your perception box with these different methods?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it just advertises to you that there's just, the, this experience you have of being virtually identical to who you were yesterday and having your waking life be kind of one moment after another of that is just this sort of arbitrarily trimmed down, you know, like you've, you've, you've sort of plunged into some kind of local basin of attraction on a much larger landscape and you never got out of it because you didn't even know that there was a larger landscape. And what, what, you know, 200 micrograms of LSD does is it just takes you and puts you over here on the landscape and some, it could be, it could be pathological, it could be heroin, it could be, you know, psychotomimetic as, as, you know, these drugs

• 33:59Speaker 00

  were often described to be, you know, early on. You know, you could be, you could be very happy to return back to your local basin of attraction and be yourself again because you, you hated that. But there are other places on the landscape and many of us, you know, happily have, you know, very positive encounters with, with radical difference in these psychedelic states. They're not the, you know, this is, this is a difference between meditation and psychedelics. I would say that many of the places you visit on the landscape through psychedelics are not really normative in the, in the spiritual sense or the contemplative sense. They're not that, you're not really trying to, you know, recapitulate those for the rest of your life.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  But what they do show you is that there's just a vast landscape of mind that you're not noticing.

• 34:50Heather Berlin?

  But you can get to places through meditation that are, can be just as transformative.

• 34:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and more so in that the, the real difference is, the, the thing that can be misleading about psychedelics is that you, let's say you, you take any one of these drugs and have an incredibly positive experience, right? You don't have a bad acid trip, you have a good acid trip. It's very easy to form the impression based on a so-called good trip that, okay, freedom, you know, radical psychological freedom is about changing the contents of consciousness fundamentally, right? So like to be.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Using yourself.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like, and, and, and loss of self must entail radical energetic changes in one's perceptual field, right? So like, you know, to be on acid or on mushrooms at any significant, significant dose, if you're walking in the forest, you know, you walk up to a tree and you put your hand on it and you have this overwhelming feeling of energetic continuity with nature, right? Those experiences are possible. I wouldn't say they're normative. I mean, they're, they're possible in, they're normative in the sense that.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  They show you the way.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  They show you that, that.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  They show you what's possible.

• 36:04Heather Berlin?

  But I would say, you know, ultimately, I don't want to scare people away from meditation that you have to go to a retreat for a year and try, you can do it in small doses and you don't need psychedelics, psychedelics might be a quick path there, but you also don't need to spend a year in a retreat or whatever. People could do it in their daily lives every day.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah. And, and dualistic mindfulness is also very helpful. You can be much more precise in, in the instruction around this and that's what I attempt to do, you know, over waking up. I mean, the analogy I often make here is to the optic blind spot, right? So we know that there's a very simple experiment you can perform with just, you put two dots on a piece of paper, you just create a fixation cross and a dot and you close one eye and you move the paper back and forth and, and that dot, you know, the, the dot disappears. So people, obviously, most people on earth have no idea this, this is there to be noticed. You can describe it to people and they still can't notice it. But then you give them this very simple experiment and virtually everyone notices it.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  And so we can understand how that's done. If you, all of that's just a matter of having the information, right?

• 37:12Heather Berlin?

  For some reason, I was just thinking of those, like, those 3D images that you like are staring at.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  The mind's eye images.

• 37:16Heather Berlin?

  The mind's eye and like you have to let go and then suddenly it comes and it's there.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's similar. I mean, it's right, it's right on the surface and you're just not, it's like a plane of focus problem.

• 37:25Heather Berlin?

  Right, and then once you get it, it transforms you.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  I give you one more analogy, because I think people find it useful. It's, it's also like looking, you know what it's like to see your reflection in a window? I mean, you can be looking through a window and using it as a window. You see what's outside, but if you just subtly change your plane of focus, you can see your face looking back at you in that window. And it's, it's hard to describe what is, is entailed there, but it's not a, a major effort to change that.

• 37:55Heather Berlin?

  It's a shifting of attention.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Shift of attention and focus.

• 38:03Heather Berlin?

  So every episode, we ask one question that to try to open our own perception box. And I chose this week's question, and neither of you know what it is. So the question is, in moments of deep solitude, what major concerns or questions about yourself tend to dominate your thoughts?

• 38:24Speaker 00

  The frame around all of this, for me, is one of understanding the preciousness of life and its impermanence. Right? So it's like, you know, thoughts about if I'm going to be thinking about my life and whether it's going well. Again, this is kind of a level of mental activity that this is a dream that I like to wake up from as often as possible. But if I'm going to be thinking about my life, it's often a matter of wondering whether I'm using my time and attention in light of the reality of death

• 39:05Speaker 00

  and the fundamental uncertainty around how much time any of us have left, whether I'm using my time and attention well. I mean, I just, to live without regret is kind of my master utility function at this point. I mean, I just, I don't want to be spending my time in any way that I can look back on and wish I had not spent it that way. So.

• 39:29Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, that's very beautiful and profound and important. I think about that a lot, too. So and having had recently a near-death car experience, it brought it all the more like just to the forefront, how important every moment we have is and to use it well. And Kristoff, do you have a?

• 39:48Speaker 02

  No, I don't worry too much about myself. Maybe I simply don't. It's just a tight, I know.

• 39:54Heather Berlin?

  So you have this ever-present self, yet it doesn't worry about itself.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  It doesn't worry too much about itself. Worry, it's outward, you know, seeking what the world, what exists.

• 40:04Heather Berlin?

  You care about the big questions of this world out there.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Because they always success me for better or worse. And I don't worry about, I lost, I had an experience where I lost an NDE, when near death experience, where I totally lost my fear of death. So I don't think about that. I used to think about that. You know, you wake up middle of the night and you say, oh, my God, I'm going to die. What am I going to do about it? And you get this existential vertigo looking down, you know, like when you climb and there's this cliff that goes down, has no bottom, but all of that's gone. So now it's just thinking about, trying to think about big questions and the love I have for a lot of people.

• 40:40Heather Berlin?

  I am going to say, I feel like I could, first of all, I can talk to you for hours. And I'm sure, you know, most people can't.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  I'm long-winded, so.

• 40:49Heather Berlin?

  No, I mean, it's a privilege.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  You're making an ontological assumption that causality is all in the physical.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  No, I'm not. Let's add ectoplasm to it or some mental magic or something we don't understand.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Consciousness. I see consciousness has.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Okay, let's just say idealism is true. It's all consciousness. There's no physical. We can run the ontology any way you want. I'm saying the phenomenology is, when you pay attention, there's this deep mystery that things are simply emerging into consciousness. Right? And they don't emerge before they emerge. It's deeply mysterious why you raise the right hand versus the left hand, even if you spent two hours making the decision. And so it is with marrying your wife. And if we discover that really, really at bottom, it was the pheromones that you can't consciously notice, but like some people smell better to you than others.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  And it turns out all your friends have pheromone, you know, XYZ 12, and all of your enemies have some other molecule. If that's the answer at the back of the book of nature, it's not, it actually doesn't deflate anything. For me, it actually fundamentally, it wouldn't change the story.

• 42:09Heather Berlin?

  So we're going to agree to not be able to resolve this completely right now. I think it's a really.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  I thought we could kneel upon the tree of will today.

• 42:16Heather Berlin?

  Damn it, in this short podcast. But I think it's really insightful and it's going to help people think about it in a different way and maybe sort of get out of their own perception box and expand a bit. On that note, thank you so much, Sam, for joining us today. And if you'd like to learn more about your own perception box, spend some time this week answering the same perception box questions that we asked our guests and check out other questions on our website at unlikely collaborators.com. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcasts. This has been Science of Perception Box, created by unlikely collaborators in collaboration with Podpeople. I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  And I'm Dr. Kristoff Koch. Thank you.