SAM HARRIS & BRIAN GREENE FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER! Physics, Religion, Consciousness & more! 

JOIN US IN NYC ON JUNE 1st for ALEX O'CONNOR vs DINESH D'SOUZA on "IS THE BIBLE TRUE?" Tickets available here: www.pang-burn.com/tickets

Truly miss conversations and discussions like this. A dying breed.

That was AWESOME!! Up there at the top of list for best communucation and conversation from both of you. What a joy and priviledge to be witness to the exchange of ideas, growth of knowledge, and really good humor. Thank you Sam and Brian, you bring so much richness to our lives and learning.

Brian Greene really inspires me to learn more about math and physics. Seems so elegant how things work in this realm.

My neighbor leaned over our yard fence and stated, "I did not come from apes" while eating a banana.

So good to hear Dr Harris talk about something that isn’t religion. And so good to get these two people together for a chat. We are lucky.

Longtime benefactor of Brian Greene's brilliant perspectives on quantum physics and the state of reality and our interaction with it. Always grateful for his holistic, humane, and interogative approach.

Brilliant format. You’ve found something with it. More more more videos like this please. Keep up the good work. Respect

Conversation is brilliant and comment section is awesome.

Oh man. Thank you! Fantastic conversation

As an atheist since age 13, I agree Dr. Harris. "You can only hit so hard with a carrot." Most people are just too brainwashed to reason with.

Frequent listener of Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast. Read both their books. Brian Greene's book is quite complex mathematically, despite the physicist's best effort in simplifying concepts for the laymen, whereas some of Sam's deep dive pieces on morality are complicated in terms of philosophical labyrinth. Thank you for merging great minds.

Absolutely loving this discussion of time. I am very interested in understanding time more effectively. Thank you to these men.

Excellent. It’s so much fun to mute and watch Brian’s hands! Same message!

I can't ever get to watch a discussion between Plato and Newton... but this will do just fine

Fascinating conversation. Thanks.

Brilliant conversation ! Thanks !

thank you for this ..

Absolutely love both of these guys, and appreciate the discussion, but I didn't think they really meshed as well as I thought they would.

So much to unpack in this extraordinary discussion. As to the question of free will it’s obvious that the vast majority of people believe they do have free will. Probably everyone in positions of power believe that. It’s not possible to change one’s mind about something that one’s experience supports. That is, we feel that we have free will, that we are freely making up our minds and choosing our behavior. That’s because our instincts, drives, appetites, thoughts and desires are all willed, freely willed from within us. So, we experience that as having free will. We don’t have free will but our wills are free, autonomous. In Chance and Necessity (1970), Jacques Monod, a physicist and microbiologist, writes, "…a living being's structure…owes almost nothing to the action of outside forces, but everything, from its overall shape down to its tiniest detail, to "morphogenetic" interactions within the object itself. It is thus a structure giving proof of an autonomous determinism: precise, rigorous, implying a virtually total 'freedom' with respect to outside agents or conditions - which are capable, to be sure, of impeding this development, but not of governing or guiding it, not of prescribing its organizational scheme to the living object." And also, "…it is in the structure of living molecules that one must see the ultimate source of the autonomy, or more precisely, the self-determination that characterizes living beings in their behavior." The knowledge that contradicts free will probably never be generally taught nor ever popularly accepted. What we want to believe trumps reality. And that is what inevitably leads us astray. For instance, the want/need to believe that communism can serve as a viable social system while it is blatantly obvious that its record has been and continues to be absolutely deplorable can only be attributed to a perception that one is innately confined to. That perennial perception can be catastrophically disruptive to a free society.

Perhaps we should understand that skepticism is the lynchpin of science, and science is actually an advanced and revolutionary ideology. Thanks for your work.

"A significant number of Americans will say fuck your cosmology" was not a sentence I would ever have thought would make sense let alone been spot on...

1:38:47. Brian’s curiosity is legit. How did atomic particles create humans? The whole mechanism of how these subatomic particles have created humans over last 4 billion years is described in the book titled ‘Journey to Center of DNA’ ..it’s about the journey of these atomic particles into the DNA. A Noble Prize worthy research into evolution of life and living world. I thoroughly enjoyed the this fascinating read..

BOTH THESE GUYS ARE AWESOME! Love to hear them speak!

Food for Thought. Thanks to you both.

On the right car driving age. Couldn't we if we somehow had the ability, take all the possible arguments for each age (that's most likely to be around the right age to allow driving) and then analyze all those propositions which would in many cases will be based on values or what is important. Which then would have separate propositions for why a certain value is more important then another. If you go far enough to evaluate all of those if only we could and then we could "solve" , this is more important then that and somehow come to a score. That would than give us what age would be better or worse even when we are at the blurry zone rather than at the extremes where it's clear what's worse or better. So could we not somehow solve the blurryness closer at the place where the best possible ages for allowing driving exist, if only we had the reasoning power to analyze all arguments and then assign scores to which value is more important is more important and wherever it all took us to figure out a right age. Isn't it just that it's currently too much to figure out rather than there is best answer or rather than it's merely arbitrary

Its an honour and a privilege for everyone. Thank you for sharing. The flip side…. Is the more you know the more you are responsible. Assume you know nothing, and assume complete responsibility for yourself. Everyone everything will fall into place. None of which will be an outcome of our design. Just do what needs doing. Love you guys. Jeremy

Brian Greene does not encounter the problems that are faced by biologists. I suspect his views about the threats of religion to our understanding would be different if fundamentalist religions that subscribe to Genesis decided that it was blasphemous to assert that there is a limit to the speed of light.

All the answers to all the questions can be discovered within. The fundamental invisible force that moves the universe, flows within each human being. What's missing is the conscious recognition of this awesome power. Be quiet, stay still and feel the magic flowing in every moment.

Around 50:00 Brian talks about ultimately the reading from the instrument doing the measurement of a quantum state needs to be seen by some conscious agent and thus some may think consciousness has some role. That is a very misleading analysis. There is a confusion between two events: - event E1 where a instrument (say a video camera) makes a measurement on a quantum state to make it collapse and records the reading - event E2 when a conscious entity - say Alice reads that recorded reading and groks what it was. Note this can happen 10 years later and 1 billion miles away. - event E3 when a conscious entity - say Bob reads that recorded reading and groks what it was. Note this can happen 20 years later and 2 billion miles away. sure. But Event E1 is when the collapse happened. The lab may even have been destroyed the next day after the instrument with recorded reading was taken out and sent first to Alice and then to Bob. What does it even mean to talk about Alice collapsing the quantum state after 10 years, when the lab was destroyed the next day. That is absurd. E1 is not the same as E2 E1 is not the same as E3 E2 is not the same as E3 but the measurement only happened at E1 and the quantum state collapsed then. So this shows us that a instrument like a video camera - which every one will agree collapsed the wave function. Sure a macroscopic, conscious entity present in the lab could have done the "measurement" to collapse the wave function, but not because it is conscious, but because it is macroscopic. The labs that develop quantum computers do not shiels the quantum state from consciousness of human lab personnel. They put the quantum state in vaccum separated from air molecules lest they will destroy it. SO can we please stop bringing in consciousness into Quantum Physics context from now on?

Thank you

Had the following thought with respect to the vegan question and the question of free will; If it is not by free will that one chooses to be vegan or to remain a carnivore it seems ludicrous for vegans to preach to meat eaters that they should choose to be like them.

The comment section = Dead Internet Theory

If consciousness is a quantum mechanical process, which many like Sir Roger Penrose thinks it is, and in reality it is rather unreasonable to think its not, then it actually DOES play a role, a rather simple and reasonable role at that, in the notion of taking measurement, without having to insert some wu-wa into the mix. It may not be essential, but the process of consciousness simply might be another tool the universe uses to achieve decoherence and make sure the wave function collapses. Otherwise conscious beings might be able to see the whole wave function, which the universe prohibits. It's probably just some complex iteration of entanglement between the whole system of consciousness and everything it interacts with.

Great respect. Imagine, inform, enlighten.

Around 41:00 Brian says that in the current funding environment it is hard to build a particle accelerator of the size of a galaxy (duh of course), but misses the same point of funding about String theory. The point is not that String theory is still young because the issues it is dealing with are difficult, and will eventually give us some good results. The issue is that of funding. String theory had dominated the physics community and gobbled up majority of the available funding for extended period of time. This was done at the expense of other promising theories. Also some String theorists behaved like gatekeepers and prevented other theories from getting funding. Eric Wienstein rants about this all the time, to the point of being annoying itself, but has the core truth in it. That is the point Brian is missing, may be even intentionally ignoring as he is a member of String theory community. Maybe the time has come for String theory to a back seat for a while, give other theories a chance to flourish and come back for a second bit at the apple in 30 years.

Why can’t people not just ask their damn question:-)

To solve the Fermi Paradox, remember how long it takes light to reach us from "out there", we are seeing the past not the present when we look "out there". Where were we that long ago?

The only free will is virtue.

Why cant we see this in something better than 360p?

Existence is time. Change is flow of time. When there is a sub system of the universe that is cyclic, only then we can measure the rate of flow of time with the resolution of period of the cycle or fractions there of. Time only flows in one direction - before to after. When universe reaches an equilibrium and where the entropy is maximum, as long as there is change in configs time still flows. NOTE: I am talking about time of physics - not psychological time that humans perceive.

Love Brian. But just realizing what a fun and learned fellow Sam is too.

I nominate Brian Greene and Sean Carol to interact with other intelligent beings that have crossed space/time to visit Earth.

Free will is the ability to override an impulse and nothing more.

It's easy to say that, just as it is easy and known why we have not travelled to any other system or actually beyond our own yet.

Bloody brilliant Ngā mihi

Sam and Brian remember carry thy comfort with Thee! Thank you for attending!

I never thought there was any paradox in Fermi’s statement. Brian’s “ant” analogy has to be a possibility. The 150 lya v 92 billion lya gotta rate up there too….

Sam humour is very under rated.

Why is "String Theory" called a theory when it's not testable. String Hypothesis is what it should be called.

A question. If the primary function of every form of life known is to evolve, what is the ultimate purpose. A tool, a weapon, reproduction? Is there evidence of design. Or is it simply the mindless play of enthalpy verses entropy.

Finally!

I think intelligent life would be extremely rare, just 50 interchangeable factors that lead to intelligent life ends up at something like 8x10 to the power of 60. The number of atoms in the earth is basically zero compared to that number. Intelligent life is very special. And here we are on the cusp of immortality, fighting over holy rocks and lines in the sand.

Sam Harris talked about the difficulties in communication because of ideological differences in our societies causing extreme polarization with no remedy in sight. The US Constitutional system certainly is broken and the cause is political parties which are not constitutional. The Constitution does not call for political parties so they are not given a legitimate role to play. They are outliers and function in their own interests which is to amass power for themselves. There is no constitutional remedy for this state of affairs. But science can serve to drastically mitigate the ideological divide. Conservative and liberal aspects are found throughout the world, throughout the nature of things, which can be instructive to our social systems. For example, comparing our social systems to our anatomical systems can be insightful. Our immune systems, for instance, need to make judgements about what belongs in one’s body and what does not. What is harmful and what is not. And it does this within liberal and conservative margins. However, an immune system can be too conservative and also too liberal in its judgements. A too conservative immune system identifies things that belong to the body as not belonging resulting in autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis. While a too liberal immune system does not, or is too slow to recognize invasive viruses. A social body makes the same kind of judgements with respect to liberal and conservative margins. Overly conservative judgements by the likes of a Stalin, Mao or Hitler, et al., result in the destruction of those who are not threats to the social body and are even valuable contributors to it. On the other hand, too liberal an outlook allows for harmful deviations to be allowed. The open border policy of the Biden administration, for example. In order to be accurate a social body's assessment of what is and is not harmful to it must be contained and balanced within the bounds of conservative and liberal margins. That is a law of nature relevant to social bodies as well as human bodies.

All biological creatures (of necessity, and for survival), from the simplest amoeba to the most advanced human are simply pattern recognition machines (some with a more elaborate form of communication than others). But nothing said so far (up to 11:53) falls outside that. We just have more advanced tools for exploring patterns than other biological creatures. But all of these tools must serve some adaptive purpose or we would not be discovering them. Some of these tools will allow a form of evolutionary progress not achievable without them. But it's all Darwinian evolution. Darwin all the way down. I don't think we have reached the point where we are outside of that yet. Now AI adds a whole interesting new twist to this because of what Mustafa Suleyman said recently in a TED talk: AI is just us. All of humanity distilled down into a tool we can interact with. Presumably it will be either the best of us, or the worst of us (or possibly both), but the evolutionary advantage it provides if we train on "the best of us" will be, I believe, exponentially accelerating in terms of evolution.

44:33 "essentially everything that can possibly happen - happens somewhere" "if it's compatible with the laws of physics" ERROR: "Laws of physics" are written📜 ✒by what? The scientific rules 🔢themselves could change in an alternate universe

I think there are people that are really concerned with humans running into the wall, when it comes to the limits of our ability to understand, and many of them are hoping the marriage of the biological, and synthetic technology will be a our next quantum leap (no pun intended) in our evolution.

❤

i guess the saying is then: "if no one is there to observe IT, did IT really happen"

The universe and life didn't exist before we were born, right? From our prospective. It only exists because we are here talking about it. Eventually when we die we will be non existent again and from our prospective there will be nothing. Life has given us a window into reality for a very limited amount of time! Some would say, in a blink of an eye.

Don’t worry my friend brian, i am stepping down, i already thought that

Even the smartest people in the world say, "but...yet." Take a shot every time B.G. says it.

I agree with the guy who says its impossible for us to meet aliens we couldn't understand. Theres a difference between us and dogs, ants etc. We understand our place in the world, they dont. They dont understand what intelligence even is, let alone how intelligent they are compared to us. We do.

＼(^o^)／ This is the artistic proof that the universe was created. When you paint a shadow its the opposite color of the object that made the shadow. Nobody knew what the opposite color of white was so the artists avoided painting white on white. The opposite color of white is baby blue and baby pink. The first artist to figure it out was Norman Rockwell. I was the second artist to figure it out. I saw it in the corner of a white room. The lighting was perfect to see it.

We are all living on the highest expression of the DNA’s impulse to ascendance

NO WAY!

Double a penny a day for a month doesn't give you a billion dollars or more. It's just over 5 million over a period of 30 days.

The Soul is not redundant. It does not need an opposite experience of every option to exist in reality. The Soul has come here with a database of expertise and clear ideas on what Virtues and Abilities to master in this one. Almighty Creator, Pure Consciousness and Emptiness, is not redundant. Multiple timelines occur when the Soul has advanced in its learning and wants to learn 2 lessons simultaneously, where a part of the Soul branches off and experiences the opposite of a decision for the purpose of Mastery. Every decision does not have an opposite, as that is super redundant.

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Nobody has complete answer because truth is emotional and logic and science are the tools To get to truth one needs only humility and not knowledge and it is totally personal experience Logic and science are the mechanism of nature that includes everything that includes emotions However great is an computer that has no emotions is no match to anything that has life and emotions

I understand u my friend

Wish they’d just read written questions. Even when they say be brief these people can’t resist their big moment!

Funny to see the difference of the amount of gesturing of these two people. Brian a lot. Sam not so much.

Somehow I missed Sam in Toronto, again. Big sad.

Depending on what takes down the human species

-GR & QM can’t mesh? -views on Double slit? -Nobel prize guy proving SPACE time is dead??? -consciousness fundamental? ^plz discuss why or why not…or SOMETHING new (at least)

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ahh I remember, _Thick Milky_ ... this one was hard to get thru without wanting to scream at both of them.

Remember it's ok to correct one another nor to bring to remembrance and comes with comfort concerning...together!

MAN!!!! Haven't seen this yet

There are many electrons and each of us are one of them. They bond together by magnetic pole and observe particles within the wave, or frequency, that is created by that bonding. This is my theory but see Tao Of Physics video.

(´Д｀) This is artistic proof that the universe was created. When you paint a shadow its the opposite color of the object that made the shadow. Nobody knew what the opposite color of white was so the artists avoided painting white on white. The opposite color of white is baby blue and baby pink. The first artist to figure it out was Norman Rockwell. I was the second artist to figure it out. I saw it in the corner of a white room.

We are estimated to be a species that is at least 1 in a billion to 1 in 100 billion.

Would Brian say that the question of how many birds are in flight is underdetermined? - Possibly, but we know that at any one time there is an answer. The driving age question can be considered to be similar. At any one time we could say there is an optimal answer in that there is a point at which benefits outweighs negative consequences, but it would still be inevitable that this point would vary constantly.

Sam Harris, please look into the work and theories of Salvatore Pais on the SuperForce and His theory of everything? Please Please take his work Seriously. Take it seriously, as if its already been proven in secret. ;) "Its not new physics, its a new perspective on old physics", "String theory is the final theory of everything"-Salvatore Pais.

Yes Brian. Yes. You are processing beautiful

When Brian is talking about how he doesn't agree with how many atheists attack theists, or otherwise aggressively defending their positions, instead choosing a more peaceful approach.......Brian reminds of a parent who is about to have their first child, and he talks about how he will never get angry with their child and he will always be understanding and will gladly answer all his child's questions..... And Sam, who already has 4 children, who are now adults, and Sam is looking at Brian, slowly shaking his head thinking...."This man has no idea what he's talking about. He will soon realize the folly of such beliefs." There are some theists out there where peaceful interactions are not just impossible, but they aren't deserved by these theists. Dealing with willfully ignorant people is very taxing. And there are only so many times you can hear things like..... "Evolution is only a theory, not a fact.". Or..."God is going to send you to hell for eternity, but he loves you.". ....and not eventually lose your cool.

Brian Greene doing the math in 1:25:19😂

Are any of these comments real?

Sorry i am so sleepy u both have a wonderful night

The comment section has been lobotomized.

space and time .. sounds like shades of Wolfram

I love you now, thanks

They're just floating there in their chairs!

These men obviously have read "Our Amazing Minds" by Neville Gazing

These people aren’t bad !

Hinduism provides an entire knowledge system of consciousness, physics, religion, mathematics, culture, art, music. That is why all prior physicists read Hindu scripture. It is all there in Hinduism from Ancient India

That he had to stop talking to poor tells our story, historically.

Sam Harris ties himself in knots when it comes to animal exploitation. There is no such thing as a happy animal who ends up in the food chain, although a very tiny few do lead far better lives than the vast majority. He knows however that they all get stabbed during their childhood years, they all get sent to the same slaughter house and they all have selectively bred bodies that are not conducive to a life of health and well-being. Sadly Sam clings to his steak in a muddle of attachment and delusion. Love Brian Green, brains and compassion 💚

Humankind needs to evolve it's current unifying beliefs. 25:45 Who also would like to see Brain Greene's reaction on Daniel Schmachtenbergers work and perspective...??? 32:53 Brain Greene's paradox: The carrot and the stick work on different people, but you only need the carrot to "convert" there religion to science...? The people that need the stick probably don't justify criminal behavior with religion. Is Brain Greene surprisingly naive on these topics or is it just me?