Sam Harris: The One Thing That's Real

Sam says consciousness is more certain than physics itself — and that free will isn't merely an illusion, it's incoherent. That's the single sentence that made me rethink the entire consciousness/free-will pairing. 📬 Full transcripts, bonus material, and my Monday M.A.G.I.C. Message → https://briankeating.com/yt The 3 moments worth re-watching: ▸ 0:43 — "Consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion." ▸ 1:58 — Why free will is incoherent regardless of how you tune determinism ▸ 3:00 — The Maxwell 's-demon machine that could disabuse you of even the FEELING of free will Question for you: Does Sam's predictive-machine thought experiment actually do the work he wants it to, or does it just push agency back to the experimentalist who chose the sensor?

Very interesting! I just watched your interview with Paul Steinhardt. That was really good. Did you know the Weyl Tensor is based on gravitational waves in the vacuum? The magnetic part of the Weyl tensor is the curl (gravitomagnetic frame dragging) while the electric part is the stretching and squeezing of spacetime.

Sam: "That's you doing it. The problem is mapping that onto the physics of things seems impossible." Me: But Sam, you've just conceded that the "physics of things" is unreliable...that consciousness is all you can count on.

"I think therefore I am." Glad to see Sam is finally catching up. I'm fed up with academic elites trying to debunk free will so the simple peasants will fear their all-knowing wisdom and submit to their murmurings. Sam makes choises every day, yet seems to lack the honesty to admit it to himself, lest he loses that sense of higher wisdom he seems to crave. Rush - Free Will. Give it a listen 😎👍

The problem is in assuming that certainty and realness would be identical concepts - they're not. It's uncertainty that makes something real, certainty is a kind of truth. I recommend questioning your beliefs, instead of being so certain. If we're questioning our beliefs, then we have to believe in questions, this is the certainty we start with. When questioning your beliefs, you'll find there are beliefs that are avoidable, and beliefs that are unavoidable. Saying a belief is an illusion is unsatisfactory, if you were unable to avoid it, we need to be clearer about such distinctions. When doing this exercise, questions themselves appear to be unavoidable beliefs. Also, asking why, when, where, how, etc. also appear to be necessary questions in certain circumstances. Asking yourself questions related to language: syntax, meaning, truth appeared to be unavoidable when reading this comment. What makes you conscious isn't so much the answers you give, it's the questions you're asking. We're certain that we're asking questions, and uncertain about the answers we're going to find, that's the nature of consciousness. Hard to say where the questions come from, they seem to occur at just the right moment. it's worth thinking about another distinction to address this observation: unconsciousness.

Just because something is emergent, doesn't mean it's an illusion. The mistake is trying to detach your thoughts from your body when they actually emerge from it. If your body has a need, you will make decisions based on that. Freewill is emergent, not an illusion.

When you dream, you do not have free will, things happen to you, that you cannot control. But if you learn to do lucid dreaming, becoming conscious within your dreams, you can alter the dream and change the outcomes. I have wondered if this could also be possible within your waking life? if there is some kind of mechanism where you could become kind of ultra conscious in waking life and effect your reality in some way to change things to your advantage? become a god or magician or sorcerer if you will? needles to say i have not found anyway to do this, and i have never really tried, and it is probably impossible. But i did learn to lucid dream, but gave it up as it seemed to be a pointless endeavor. But it is interesting that we all have this ability.

"Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. ... Consciousness is just the ground truth." Daniel Dennett thought that awareness is not something extra added to brain processes. His point was that awareness IS parallel, organized and dynamic brain processes and there is no separate observer. His counter-argument for the philosophical zombie argument was that zombies are a philosopher’s illusion: Once you specify all the physical, cognitive, behavioral, and self-monitoring facts, you have already specified everything that consciousness consists in. Dennett believed that computers can be built “into structures of indefinite discriminative power, indefinite discerning power, indefinite reflective power. You can make a whole mind […] you can get ideas to think for themselves.” Consequently he together with a MIT team tried to construct a conscious robot called "Cog". It remains to be seen in practice how consciousness emerges from mechanistic machines like the brain, LLM or Cog. At the moment the emergent theory of consciousness remains that, an abstract and highly speculative theory.

The universe wouldn't be built on logic if there were agents that had free will. But if an agent didn't believe they had free will then would they really be conscious?

If you can't square your consciousness of physics and neurons with free Will, explore the possibility that you only perceive things about which you do not have free Will. We used our free Will to focus only on aspects we could predict, so we ignore anything which someone's Will might affect, because those are inherently unpredictable. Then we look at the world, perceived by ignoring any vestige of the unpredictable, and proclaim that free Will is a myth. Free your perception, and your freed Will will become undeniable.