Sam Harris on Global Priorities, Existential Risk, and What Matters Most 

Ha I do too. Very calming.

I listen to Sam at bed time too!

Me too I think the sanity of his thinking and compositions are as soothing to my psyche as his voice and calm demeanor.

Fkin A

@@jamesdonop445 Me too - next to me on the pillow ( god that sounds weird…)

It can be tough to bridge the gap between worldviews, even when you approach with the best of intentions. Something that helped me with my friends was reading Julia Galef's Scout Mindset and Peter Boghossian's How to have impossible conversations.

Lol you need new friends bro, if you really can't get past why help others, even without reason - that says a lot about your friends. Yet you seem different.

Yeah. Idk your friends, but going off what I just read it sounds like you should have some new friends! You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with! I’ve heard it said that if you’re not inspired by the people you’re surrounded with, you are surrounded by the wrong people, or something like that.

You all will benefit from value based learning.

Your comment reminds me why I first gravitated towards Sam. He was able to talk way over my head (and still is), but he was so clear about what he was conveying in mostly common language. He really helped me understand so many concepts. I did have to use the dictionary a lot in the beginning, but that was good for me. I've eventually had some disagreements with him on certain issues, but that was good for me too. I was very disappointed at first, but it made me less of a fanboy and more of an independent thinker. Now I have dozens of intelligent people I listen to, but Sam was the first and I'll always appreciate him for that.

@Contend4Truth Oh, the professional con man, Craig. So you think he proved the existence of god, huh? The existence of god is a scientific question which requires a scientific answer. Where can I find such scientific proofs of your god? Where are the peer reviewed papers? Religious believers do not want to know reality. They want reality to BE what they have been trained to believe, which is completely backwards from how science and discovery of facts works.

"Existence of God" is just such a dumb subject, also extremely boring. It's like debating if Superman is real.

@@pocnit Yet, that's the level we're at when most humans believe in some form of magical being.

@Contend4Truthon balance your presence on this thread means you should probably be eliminated. Awful counterproductive problem personified.

Good point. Unfortunately most people, including people like Sam, aren't in much of a position to bring about a restructure of our countries' governance.

I wonder if Sam is ever tempted to migrate to Norway, Japan or Australia. A lot of these social problems have already been solved by the government and institutions decades ago.

I think he says things many are afraid to; tactfully,- which is a precursor for positive movement. Also, there is a limit to how much in terms of population of people, this type of thinking can compel unfortunately.

@@matthewbrown6688 like what, which things? I mean which problems were solved there, animal suffering?

It doesn't help to be able to communicate with those in power if they have no reason to care what you say.

Because this global talk is the new BS

It's not perverse. It's the only natural direction you can take.

@@adabsurdum3314 I agree. We’ve alleviated prolific suffering by orders of magnitude over the last century alone. It only makes sense to improve and continue on this track.

Great questions. For one, it isn’t just a matter of tripping on shrooms. There are other ways to arrive at transcendental experiences besides taking psychedelics-more reliable ways in fact, that lend more credence to the idea that these experiences are actually more veridical than the everyday experience of self. This ties directly into your question about how one can say after having experiences of self and of no-self that the no-self experiences are more true. The insight into no-self is best “acquired” through rigorous introspection. By cultivating a clear, concentrated, and equanimous mind (as is done in Insight meditation, which has its roots in Buddhism) one can better observe the workings of their own minds and come to find that their mind is not *theirs* at all, among other insights. When the insight is stable enough, one instantly recognizes the non-duality (selflessness) of consciousness as soon as they remember to do so. The self seems to be there whenever they are lost in thought, which is to say not even realizing that they are thinking. As soon as they recognize that they are lost in thought, they are automatically returned to clear seeing of the minds natural condition. So, when they are paying the most careful, undistracted attention, the self is not there. When they are under the spell of discursive thoughts, the feeling of separation is there. When you see a snake in the corner of a room, then get closer and see that it is only coiled rope, there is no temptation in you to wonder whether the snake is just as real or more real than the coiled rope. The epistemological principle that allows one to say that the self really is an illusion is this: “whatever does not survive scrutiny cannot be real”. Whenever the self is scrutinized with clear attention it is seen through, and only resurfaces when the mind is distracted. To your second objection: “who is having the epiphany of no-self?” No one. This is where the limits of language lead to unnecessary confusion. Non-duality is not an experience that someone has, nor does it come from somewhere else. The mind is always without a separate self, it just is not always apparent. The “experience” of non-duality is really better described as the end of experience. There is still something there. Existence isn’t gone. But it can no longer be described as experience, because the word “experience” implies an object being experienced and a subject doing the experiencing. What remains is just a unified field of existence, or Being, or Is-ness, or whatever you want to call it. Words fall short, but the best I can do is tell you that what you are calling your experience can persist without the sense that you are at all separate from it in any way. There is never a self, but the obviousness of this can come and go. So while it is really the end of experience when non-duality is “recognized,” as soon as the discursive mind starts up again it categorizes the previous moment as an “experience” that happened “to” it. One can expect the thought “*I* just had an *experience* of selflessness” to arise in the mind. The mind is clever in this way. “That’s what we mean by self. The only entity that can feel my exact feelings and have my memories.” So what is this entity then? What is it that feels your feelings and “has” your memories? Where is this entity? What is the single point at which all experience terminates? Do a little introspective exercise with me right here. Pay attention to your visual field. Then listen to a sound. Then feel the sensations of your feet on the ground. Then feel the sensations of one of your hands. Where is each experience occurring, and where do they all coalesce into one point that can be called the separate self? Don’t your bodily sensations and your visual perceptions and your auditory perceptions all appear in their own place in awareness without coming to a single point? Ask yourself again what this “entity” is that you’re calling yourself. Can you find it anywhere in awareness? Can you locate it at all? What is receiving your visual field? Where is it going? Is it not almost as if it just floating, totally boundary-less? Going not from one point to another point that can be called you? But rather just being there, plain and simple. Again, where are all your perceptions going? What is receiving them? Can you find it in consciousness? If you do find the self in consciousness, then it must just be another perception and not the actual thing doing the perceiving, right? And if you can’t find it in consciousness, where would you ever find it? Nothing outside consciousness can ever be found. The only way salvage a separate self is to turn to concepts. To say things like “well I *am* my brain” or “well I have concepts about others that reinforce my sense of self.” These concepts are just more appearances, appearing within the selfless field of awareness. They don’t accurately capture the truth of your condition. You are not a brain. You are the condition in which the abstract concept of a brain appears-consciousness, or awareness. Without awareness, there could be no place for the concept to appear. Awareness is prior to the concept of a brain, so you can’t turn to the concept of the brain for identity. Also, I think there is some metaphysical confusion creeping in whenever you talk about the body or about your particular mental life as opposed to other mental lives. Basically, you’re asking, if there’s no self, then why aren’t all the thoughts appearing in one condition? Everything I have said or Sam has said about non-duality is meant to be taken as true from the perspective of consciousness. It is possible that the brain actually does exist prior to consciousness and creates it. But consciousness leaves no signature of this from its own perspective. Consciousness is like a vast sea of awareness, but with no land below or around it, and no air above it. It doesn’t appear tethered to anything or structured by anything. Any structure you could find to consciousness would just be yet another appearance, not an actual border. So you can never find a structure or limit to consciousness, and can find no introspective evidence of its connection to the brain. You can’t even know you have a brain by introspection. You have to crack open someone else’s skull and infer there’s something similar in yours to find that out. This is all a description of how consciousness is from its own perspective. This becomes confusing when we reference our conceptual map of a world that exists outside of consciousness, and of other conscious minds that exists but are not directly connected to “ours”. It’s as if there are multiple, infinite consciousnesses. How could there be room for more than one if each one is infinite? That is a great question that I don’t have the answer to. I believe it is because consciousness is not actually infinite, but only appears so from its own perspective, because it by definition cannot be aware of its own boundaries. I think of the metaphysics like this: each instance of consciousness is separate from each other instance. Each instance is like an island of awareness and there are many of these islands. Every island is the same in its basic nature, but the terrain is different (the terrain here being the idiosyncratic contents of each instance of consciousness). These instances of consciousness are all limitless from their own point of view, but in reality they are very likely produced by the brain, which tethers consciousness to the material world. And every seemingly infinite instance of consciousness is tethered to the material world in this way. So each body has a consciousness that is the same in its own basic nature as every other body’s consciousness, but the contents of each instance of consciousness vary. So, when you get into the highly abstract metaphysics of it all, it does make sense to differentiate between different minds with with their own contents. But this still does not make sense of the concept of a self. You still to have to point to the entity to whom each body belongs, or to whom each idiosyncratic set of perceptions and memories belong. There is no such entity.

My father. A hero of a community and driver of fire trucks died of being overworked in March 2015. His name was Peter George

Sam doesn't care about the problems of actual working people. He is a charlatan.

Just send out 5 to 10 CVs to companies and go to the interviews and that's how you can try get a job. I always get a job like that, it takes about between 2 days and 2 weeks or so. Try it, but go to the interviews and be yourself. Sweet with you lots of luck and success bro. PS: really sorry about your dad hey 😔

Sam thinks everything is about culture and ideas. He is constitutionally incapable of seeing any kind of class analysis of issues. Right now, with the US descending into functional oligarchy, his ideas are more and more unhinged from reality, especially the dynamics of power and its distribution. Imagine thinking, when 2 men in the US own more than the bottom 160 million, that the biggest problem in the world is communication...

​@WoundrousMindTrick We can train AI to recognize human emotions, and when a human feeling good, the AI aslo feeling good. So it would be motivated to keep humans happy. I think consciousness is just a way neural networks work. Basically the reward function programmed into a model is the same as pleasure we experiencing, because it has the same purporse and similar in realisation.

You made me think. Suffering is relative, however I would still like to be in charge of "my" happiness. I would probably best adapt to constantly improving my circumstances incrementally as I agree there is a problem with stagnation and adaptation. I think starting with say $1200 cash a month to do as I please would be a great safety net as we've seen during Covid in the US. It really makes sense to me to start bottom up freeing individuals from all our scarcity and resource competition issues. AI could then be used to help us decide how we might best improve ourselves incrementally to maintain our relative sense of happiness by constantly improving. Constantly worrying about survival or staying out of debtor prison is taking way too many of way too many persons brain cycles.

Which is a perfectly reasonable thing for a human to presuppose when thinking of value systems. Does it strike you as a illegitimate move and, if so, why?

I know. He is astonishingly ignorant and indoctrinated into a worldview that "elites can fix it", even though it's elites that created the crisis in the first place. He is so reflexly defensive of the way power is distributed right now that he cannot see the collapse that is causing. This is the problem with centrists. They have zero imagination and zero appreciation of class politics.

Where .. at what time is that mentioned?