New Book of short fiction is being released

It's been quite a week to look woebegone: no new SH podcasts. But at least we're closer to removing the National Boil!

In the absence of any new SH work, here's a shameless plug for my newest book:

A Thousand Ways to Fail, & Other Stories
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081XHKGNC

#174: Life & Mind, with Richard Dawkins

This was a nice, juicy one and a great introduction to a Sam Harris conversation for any Sam-curious folk.

I don't have an over-arching theme to extract from the conversation, but here are a few tidbits that struck me as interesting:

Dawkins points out that we are mostly descended from young ancestors, which is why the species doesn’t live very long. In general, what promotes a species' ability to reproduce at an early age is usually antithetical to living to an old age. The classic example is a brightly colored songbird--the great colors in sure his appeal to the opposite sex, but also his visibility the predators

Dawkins invented the word "meme" to be some concept or artifact adopted by a human population. (I don't think other species can have memes...?) 

Dawkins introduces an elaboration, the "meme complex" such as buildings or religion. He is careful to explain these are not the same as "extended phenotypes." The latter are dictated by genes. So a cave dwelling might be an extended phenotype if every human, naked and unprotected and looking for shelter, would move in an stay there. But a castle or apartment building, whose design has to be learned through the surrounding culture, is a meme complex.

Here's a fun little throwaway most of the way through the conversation: "the only remaining problems in genetics are the origin of life, sex, and consciousness." Oh, is that all?

They moved into religion and mysticism later on, and Sam monologued for quite a while on the paradox that those enlarged spirits in history had to interpret their epiphanies through some iron-age mysticism. But he says that in this modern age we should be able to reach an profound understanding of reality through isotropic drugs or meditation. You don't need some primitive superstition, but instead an understanding of the plasticity of consciousness.

This invokes one of my objections to Sam’s belief in meditation as a way to free one’s ego from illusion. He thinks that because you cannot identify where a thought comes from, and that means it doesn’t come from you. But it seems to me that not being able to identify where you are located, where your seat of consciousness exists, in no ways means that it doesn’t exist. It just means that you can’t see the other side of a mirror. For Godel, it made sense that you couldn't measure the span of a mathematical system from within the system.

In his closing statements at the end of the interview, Sam talks about gives reasons to the skeptic for trying meditation. I felt that this really spoke to me, as I have become less and less enamored with his meditation app, the further I get into it. I have begun to suspect that people who meditate are in search of some sort of mystical non-reality, an escape from their day-to-day mind. Perhaps some out-of-body experience? Proof that our existence is more than mere software inside a meat computer? Why spend an hour upon hour trying for some elusive goal of non-experience? 

Sam suggests that the doubting novitiate might consider himself an explorer or a scientist embarking on the study of his own mind. What if he is more like a fisherman sitting by the bank of an empty lake, waiting for nothing to bite?