#247 Constructing Minds, with Lisa Feldman Barrett

https://samharris.org/podcasts/247-constructing-minds/

This was one of the best podcasts aired in a few months, because Sam managed to find an expert who actually had stuff to say that was a revelation, not just some political opinion.

"Culture as operating system" isn't a particularly ground-breaking insight (and I'm not even sure how accurate the analogy is) but it lays out more clearly a critical fact: we are not freely independent hardware units, able to crunch any problem and always come up with the best possible solution. We are products of our native culture.

The "myth of the triune brain" which Lisa discusses is also interesting: I learned that the model of three separate evolutionary structures of the brain--the reptilian, or amygdala; the limbic, or emotional center; and the cerebral cortex, or hominid brain--has been discarded as inaccurate. These structures may well be identifiably different, but they aren't stages of evolution. All creatures with brains have these three structures. Ours are just differently proportioned.

Lisa says that the most important role of your brain is the regulation of your body's functions. Humans' brains have simply evolved to do more than that. Our brains all their time also analyzing current inputs (visual, smell, sound) to make a predictive model of what is going to happen next. It helped hominids survive in the Great Rift Valley, and it helps their descendants write blogs.

There's an amusing moment when Sam starts to say that something like "disgust may be a universal state of mind," and Lisa tries diplomatically to contradict that. "We have to be careful saying that," she repeats about 20 times. "Nausea is ontological, but maybe disgust isn't." Or words to that effect.

I wish I could test the concept with something like a Venn diagram of the cognitive states of people from every culture when confronted with a video of this scene which I witnessed 35 years ago as a freshman in college: I was sitting on the steps of the main quad, eating lunch with a couple of friends, and watching the daily parade of people. A large black dog stopped right in front of us and took a huge dump. To make matters worse, the poop was covered with a bright green slime. But the absolute topper--the detail which pegged out our disgust-o-meter--was when the dog turned around and proceeded to eat the entire Log 'O Green Feces right there in front of us. I confess that we expressed our revulsion in the most raucous and unequivocal way you can imagine eighteen-year-old American males would.

But maybe Lisa is right, and in Finland they would merely applaud politely. I don't know.

#244 (Food, Climate, Pandemic) & #245 (Scary Ideas)

I'm going to be blunt here. Unless you're a hardcore Sam Harris fan, like I am, I wouldn't say there was anything memorable in either of these podcasts.

In #244, we're reminded that carnivores are responsible for a lot of bad things, and we're tantalized with the possibility of animal-free meat.

In #245, we're reminded that scientists have to kowtow to political pressure, and tantalized with the possibility of a politics-free journal.

Yeah, and while we're at it, I'd like a work-free income and a hangover-free cocktail.

#246 - Police Training & Police Misconduct

I asked my brother, a cop with 20 years experience, to listen to this podcast, and he agreed that it was an excellent take on one of the biggest problems he faces on the force: lack of training in grappling with unwilling criminals.

Which I knew anyway. There are a few videos of my brother struggling with whackos out on the internet. They've gone viral, for precisely the reason Rener Gracie says: my brother is clearly struggling with people that he would have been able to easily master with just a tiny bit of training.

And the people filming these videos that went viral? One was a police-brutality numbskull who was trying to prove that all cops are pigs. It doesn't come off all that convincingly since the drug addict my brother is arresting had been terrorizing the entire street, screaming obscenities and stealing things out of shops, and then fighting with the cops before trying to run away. My brother finally succeeds in pinning him to the sidewalk and pressing the crazy man's head to the ground with his knee in order to get the cuffs on him.

Meanwhile, the best thing the young airhead filming the incident can do is complain about police brutality. And post a deceivingly edited version of it it to the internet in the delusion that he's making his point. Only my brother's department actually posted a more complete recording of the entire incident, which was pretty compelling, and clearly showed the idiocy of the original.

The other video with my brother in it was filmed by some citizen in a building across the street while my brother in an open parking lot tries to subdue a larger man who is clearly off his meds. He had been breaking into cars looking for stuff to pawn. My brother tries to get the cuffs on the guy, but loses control. A fight ensues, and then you can clearly see the man trying to grab the pistol out of my brother's holster. He yanks on it several times while my brother has him in a chokehold. Eventually the guy gives up, (the holster has a trick release for exactly this reason) and then he's cuffed. But let me tell you, that was a scary fight to watch.

Now, my brother is the first to admit that cops are called to plenty of situations that really require a social worker. And that reforming the 911 response for a lot of calls makes sense. But he completely agrees that training to help with the grappling situations would be enormously helpful, for those calls where violence is inevitable.

And here's the tragedy of the situation: although he's exactly the kind of empathetic, level-headed, fair-minded person we need on our police forces, he's sick of getting stuck between felonious addicts and brainless "anti-policing advocates" intent on portraying everything he does as "brutality." So my brother is quitting. Retiring early, at reduced pension.

I suppose that's exactly what the "defund the police" crowd want-- all cops to quit. At least, until the next felonious addict comes raging down their street.

#241: Final Thoughts on Free Won't

I have an ingrained objection to the claim that we don’t have free will. Maybe I don't have a choice in my objection because I have no free will. I guess that's what Sam would say.

Why am I so obstinate? Because in my experience, I feel I am freely willing myself to do stuff... every minute of every day. Yes, I understand that science says that's just my left brain trying to trick my consciousness into thinking that it's making the choices freely. But here's the thing. Science doesn't even know what consciousness is. So can any scientist really make a pronouncement about whether this unknown thing--the consciousness--is self-deterministic? Science agrees that something within us is making that decisions, and that we just cannot identify what the decider is. An unknowable entity Sam refers to as "the void." Or occasionally as the "puppet strings." But science doesn't identify who's on the other side of the strings. Or what in the void these random thoughts come from. And so, since science does not yet understand this part, it cannot conclude that we are not the ones in control.

Let's follow Sam's arguments, point-by-point:

1. You are a slave to environment and genes. A computer program that will always 100% be determined by them (or possibly also by something random, like a quantum probability) but never able to make a decision on your own. If somebody backed you up to exactly who you were at some previous point in your history, you would slavishly do and say exactly the same things that you did then.

Hey, here's a thought: just because science do not have a mathematics--YET--to describe a closed system that exerts self-determined choices, that does not mean that such a mathematics cannot exist. What would happen if, next week, someone were to discover a logical structure whereby the variables in a field get to choose what they do next? This might sound absurd, but if we can believe that crappy-ass theory called quantum mechanics, we ought to at least be open to the possibility of a "self-deterministic mechanics."

2. We don’t get to choose our heartbeats or how fast we metabolize food. That's a metaphor for how we have no control over which thoughts and impulses we act on.

Actually, the evidence that we don't have any control is not very convincing. Maybe I haven't heard about the best proof yet. I've heard about a few studies that were done where the scientists present a subject with different choices and ask him to pick one, but have predeterminedly rigged his ability to choose—via some trick like mood music or other environmental influence. They ask him to explain why he made his choice, and the subject’s left brain comes up with some BS answer, sometimes even a completely disprovable one. So the scientists conclude from this that our every action is determined by fixed factors like genes or environment, and our left brains simply go along making up stories about why we do what we do so as to provide us with the comfortable illusion that we have free will.

Anyway, just because it’s possible to manipulate a subject into picking one photograph over another without understanding why, it does not logically result that we have zero ability to control our choices. So I posit the existence of a possibility which Sam doesn't consider: that even if you, the listener, have some mysterious entity, the "void" that Sam refers to, which gives you a menu of options, there is still the "you" that Sam objects to, the "observer by the stream," who makes the choice.

3. Our morality improves if we stop believing in free will.

Obviously, this isn't a proof of anything, and he wasn't trying to use it as one. After all, if Sam would only believe in God, then he would get the happy vision of heaven. But that isn't a logical proof of God's existence.

Besides, it's possible to imagine a society which does not brutishly torture and hate criminals, but works on rehabilitating and helping them, without having to stop believing in free will. In fact, even this heathen recognizes that this is the essence of Christianity.

4. We are not the authors of our thoughts, but they simply arise within us.

Which is to say, he doesn’t know where they come from, and so he is prescribing them to some unknowable force, and postulating that this force has nothing to do with our conscious decision-making ability. So here I again push back: this kind of Aristotelian “guessing about how a system works when you don’t really know” is exactly the sort of behavior that scientists should eschew. It is nothing more than neurologist hubris.

5. There is no "observer by the stream of consciousness" based on meditation experience, since a meditator will observe thoughts arrive which are not of his/her making.

This is a ball of wax which I don’t want to get into here, so for now, all I'll do is re-phrase: is it an illusion to believe that a surfer has any control (free will) over her surfing, since the waves are not of her own making? Obviously, not. She chooses which wave to ride. She has some control over which way she rides it. Just so, her ability to choose which thought to act upon is there, even if she isn't in control of the generation of those thoughts.

Suppose you choose to think about flowers. It's your anniversary, and you’ve made a conscious choice: "think about flowers for my Honey." Sam may be right that you don't get to choose whether images of irises or Cala lilies appear in your mind next. But it is still true that you have made a larger choice of the activity in general, and that has controlled at least which types of images will come next. You didn't generate those waves, but you did choose to go surfing for flowers in the first place. Sam would only be correct that you have no free will to think any thoughts if you tried to think about flowers but the next thought that cames into your head was, say, Charles Murray.

6. “If your next thought is ‘what the hell is Sam talking about?’ what I am talking about is that you didn’t choose that next thought."

Ah-ha, Sam, but I would claim that we have exerted already our free will by choosing to listen to your question. And so, even if our specific reaction may not have been one we chose, the class of reactions that we had to pick from are a result of our conscious choice--our free will, choosing to continue to listen.

Of course, Sam might object that we are deluded if we think we have the choice to continue to listen to him--that is just an illusion and in reality some hidden thinker is making the choice for us. That our sneaky left brain is telling us sweet little lies and giving us the illusion that we have made the choice ourselves with our own free will.

His reason to think so is because he--and science in general--can't figure out who the "hidden thinker" could be. Since empirical science does not know how consciousness works, therefore it is an illusion. (Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but so much of this podcast really does boil down to this one--very weak--point.)

7. We experience the illusion of free will. We feel ourselves making choices and wrongly believe that we have authorship of them. We are not the observer standing by the stream of consciousness, because there is no observer, only the stream.

In our finite and dim understanding of the structure of the universe, we don't understand how it is possible for matter to have agency. We don’t know where consciousness comes from--we have not solved the hard problem. We don’t know why electrons can choose to interact before they are even created. Or how matter bends space-time. Or why it even exists at all. Pretty much all we know are a few simplistic mathematical models only invented in the last hundred years. So I'm not drinking this kool-aid here. If every possible response that I can think of to the next moment of my life feels like is within my power to choose, this overwhelming preponderance of evidence that I have free will trumps whatever mystical experience you had in yoga, or on quaaludes, or whatever, Sam-o.

8. Think of a movie, and observe that since your mind comes up with movies unbidden, this is evidence of the lack of free will.

In my surfer metaphor, we are out bobbing in the waves of consciousness, and the first wave we free-will choose to ride is whether to go along with his challenge and think of a movie at all. Maybe we'll be contrary and think of something else, instead, like a City. But okay, now we're on the movie wave he threw at us. And now we see that someone else--the Void? Or even Sam; it doesn't matter--has split our wave into two parts, a Chinatown part and an Alien part. So we choose. He then says that it isn't really us who chooses, because that fits his deterministic view of the universe.

But I say back that a choice was made, and he can't prove that it wasn't us that made it. Indeed, if you think about it, the argument that we don’t really make any choices of our own free will but instead merely adopt choices made by some kind of neurological "black box" is reminiscent of those kinds of spooky models of existence that aboriginal philosophers used to make about why volcanoes erupt or how the moon and the sun split up. And any self-respecting empiricist ought to try to avoid such "gremlins in the closet" pseudo-physics.

9. We didn't create ourselves.

Okay. But I don't see how this has any logical bearing on whether we have free will.

10. We don’t get to choose whether we're interested enough to learn Mandarin. Or collect rocks.

The fact that we exert the free will to not collect rocks is not an argument that we don’t have free will. If anything, it's exactly opposite: it is the very definition of free will. And Sam's demanding why we don't choose to be interested in Madarin? Interestingly, this is almost exactly a choice I did make, eight years ago, when I began to study Russian. Which I consider to be a triumph of my own free will.

11. Brain damage (Charles Whitman) can cause people to lose control.

This is not convincing either. The fact that it is harder to maintain free will in a damaged brain doesn't mean that undamaged brains aren't capable of exerting free will.

I'll skip the last third of the episode, on the moral implications of not believing in free will. It's not relevant to the question of whether free will exists.

#238, #239 & # 240: Physics, Humor, and Poetry

You might wonder why I'm lumping these three very different podcasts together in one review: #238, How to Build a Universe, is a conversation with Frank Wilczek, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist. #239, with Ricky Gervais, is an amusing phone call about humor, among other things. And #240, The Boundaries of Self, is another conversation with famous poet David Whyte.

Well, let's have a quick look at each in turn:

Physics
Matter is made of quarks and leptons. We don't know what there is outside of the boundary of the universe. And time is a field like space only not really.

All of this was well-known decades ago, when I was a physics student. But after getting a doctorate in quantum field theory, I left the field completely, and rarely turned back. So I was excited by the possibility that in this podcast I could learn if anything interesting has been discovered since My day.

Sadly, the answer is, "no."

Oh, there’s dark matter. 85% of the universe is dark matter. We didn’t used to know much about that. And now, in contrast we can say...

Nothing, actually. They still know nothing about dark matter. 85% of the universe, and we can't see it, we can't detect it, we can't say anything about it. In fact, the only reason we think it's there is because, if it isn't, then somebody (Einstein?) got something terribly wrong.

Humor
Ricky Gervais is back--three times, actually. And he has plenty of funny things to say. I laughed often in the course of each of his phone chats with Sam. Wouldn't all of us love to able to call up Sam and ask him something like, "What are dreams for?"

I particularly appreciate his musing about the very nature of humor, because, as a writer of fiction, I often wonder what I can do to give a scene more levity. How to find the humor of a situation. The funny (ahem) thing about Ricky, though, is that despite his deep intelligence, one does not get the feeling that one has experienced anything substantial or profound after hearing him. He comes off as complete inconsequential fluff.

Poetry
And David Whyte is back, after the original appearance in February of 2020, and also an appearance in the Waking Up app. As a bit of a disclaimer, I will acknowledge that I didn't think much of his "headless wonder" podcast #184 with Sam. And perhaps because of that, the first time I played the new episode, it sounded more like the Buddhist aisle of a Hallmark store than anything I'd call poetry. But then I thought maybe I'd been letting Ricky Gervais rub off on me, and maybe that was just too snarky. So I waited a week and came back and to replay the episode.

But the second time around, the main thing which struck me is how everyone with a British accent has this immediate unfair advantage--at least, to the American ear. There's something about it which makes the speaker sound so erudite and profound. They could just be reading their flipping grocery list, and you want to give them the Nobel Prize for lit'rachor.

So, in an effort to be fair, I'm putting in writing a few quotes from the conversation. If these strike you as profound without the benefit of hearing them read in his Yorkshire/Irish lilt, then I will concede that there really was something there:

Regret
Regret is a frontier to your future.
I find it useful to choose a moment in my life that I regret, and use it as a pair of eyes and ears to pay attention to the future.

Friendship
Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.

Honesty
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.

Ambition
Ambition may be essential for the young, but becomes the essential obstacle for the any attempt at a mature life... The ease of having an ambition is that it can be readily explained to others. The very DIS-ease of is that it can be so easily explained to others... What is worthy of a life's dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence.

You will decide for yourself whether this sort of sentiment is indeed as profound as it sounds out loud. Personally, I found much to nitpick about the these snippets, and plenty more to object to in the essays Whyte read from in this podcast. I do concede that it's very hard to construct a monologue consisting entirely of profound observations. I'm sure I would be much worse at it than Whyte is.

One final observation: I didn't find anything in this conversation to fit my definition of poetry, namely: heightened languange and metaphor that leads to a more profound experience. It might well be that if there was a more poetic and less prosaic thrust to this whole conversation, then I'd have felt a little bit less like I was listening to John Cleese reading corporate inspirational posters from the 1980s.

#234, The Divided Mind, with Ian McGilchrist

The last few Making Sense podcasts have felt... well, shall we say, below par. I mean, how interesting is it to interview someone whose claim to fame is that she was right about the pandemic before other people were? Or a guy who says that violent insurrection may be bad for democracy?

But this episode more than makes up for that dry spell!

Not that I had any problem with the content of the previous guests or their conversations—indeed, if I could have run into any of them and had those exact conversations, that probably would have been the highlight of my life. Or at least of the past few years. I don't run with such a distinguished crowd, I guess. Those episodes did have plenty of what I love most about listening to Sam Harris: erudition, common sense, and insight. The problem was, the guests just weren't that illuminating.

On the other hand, this Ian fellow has some intriguing and surprising knowledge to share. And, as his expertise is how the brain works, it is all not only revelatory, but impactful.

Ian's latest book covers the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. It is called The Master and His Emissary and he discusses some highlights on this podcast. Spoiler alert: the popular understanding of those differences—which I shared until yesterday—that the left brain handles reasoning and language, and the right brain is the seat of creativity? Misconception!

A lot of the discussion was based on case studies and medical history. They discuss strokes in the left brain which were no big deal—survivors were able to carry on pretty much as usual. But the right-brain strokes were debilitating—survivors had trouble making sense of the world.

Let's go back to that misconception that the left brain is logical, and the right brain is creative. Ian says both sides have creativity and both have logic, and the correct thing is not to ask what each side does, but rather, how.

But we don’t get to this immediately; we have to wade through an enormous interruption. Eventually we learn the how: the left brain is the spotlight and the right brain is the whole stage. Or, put it another way, the right brain is the master, and the left brain his emissary. Ian proposes the hypothesis that this distribution of function evolved from lower animals who needed to be able to focus on prey (left brain) while at the same time remaining aware of possible predators (right brain).

Another fascinating datuum is that the left brain, without the benefit of the right brain's context, cannot be trusted. Because what the left half doesn't understand, it makes up explanations which to an outsider can look completely nonsensical. Ian gives the example of someone after a right-brain stroke explaining that the immobile left hand next to them belongs to someone else, rather than recognize it as their own.

Other fascinating questions arise: for one, are we actually two distinct consciousnesses, one for each hemisphere? In which case we are only aware of one or the other at any given moment? Sam finds it "spooky" to imagine an unconscious self constantly looking over the shoulder of your conscious self. Another question: what is it like to be only your left brain? Or your right brain?

And some surprising facts come out: animals' brains are all divided in two, for all mammals and birds and reptiles, on down to fairly unevolved critters. Here's another curiosity: there's no connecting neurons in lower vertebrates (corpus callosum, in humans). Why not? It's also fascinating that if part of the human brain dies and facility is lost, the brain can teach itself to perform that function using a different part that doesn’t usually do it.

Finally, there are fascinating metaphysical discussed about whether the brain attenuates consciousness or propagates it? And what happens to our consciousness when we die?

They skirt a few times the issue of Dunning-Kruger incompetence and the recent veering of western civilization toward the jingoistic left brain and away from the nuanced right brain. The glaringly orange elephant in the room and his delusional followers are only obliquely mentioned, as well as the punishingly simplistic "wokerism." Ian points out that when a society fails, it is because things veer too far to the left brain, which is not able to recognize the interconnectedness of the society, but instead is all about grasping and acquiring and rationalizing the greediness with insane justifications.

I don't know about you, but I find it comforting to contemplate the current downward slide of western civilization as a mere artifact of the human brain. In a way, it kind of absolves any of us of responsibility.

#232 Inequality and Revolution with Jack Goldstone

Jack Goldstone is historical sociologist whose studies have focused on revolutions. I think he's great--I agreed with him on pretty much every point he made, even when he was contradicting Sam.

He told Sam the reason revolutions happen is not because the rich get too much richer, per se, but rather that their motivations change from helping their society to mere self-enrichment. Because the rest of the population does not care so much about the increase in wealth of the rich--we don't care about their gold plated toilets or million-dollar yachts--but we do care if we find that we are working harder amd harder for less benefit. When enough of the population decides that the system is no longer working for anyone but the elites, then conditions are ripe for a revolt.

Jack said this inequality of living conditions is higher now in the US than it has been since the 1800s.

He also pointed out that a map of the US counties that Trump carried in 2016 almost perfectly overlaps the counties whose populations experienced a decline in life expectancy in the past 20 years. (It's worth noting that both Sam and Jack draw a connection between voting for Trump and participating in a revolution of sorts.)

The precursors to the life expectancy decline were, of course, loss of real wages and diminished employment opportunities in those counties. The system was no longer working for them. And so people in those counties have an image of greedy elites on the coasts hoarding and off-shoring their wealth at the expense of the rest of the country.

Sam asked Jack if increasing taxes on the wealthy is the right approach to solving that problem. He pointed out that a common argument against paying taxes is that government doesn’t work well. Though he observes that's really only an argument to improve government and not for wealthy people to stop paying taxes. But Jack didn't go there with Sam. Instead, he mentioned three things that need to happen before we can expect people to willingly pay higher taxes.
1: Convince people that government is capable of effective action (like we used to believe in the 1950s, when the government built the highway systems, developed vaccines, and such).
2: Elites need to work together and find common ground for improvements instead of merely dividing into two political camps and competing against each other.
3: We need people to feel that the tax system is fair and that the middle class are not paying a greater percentage than the rich.

They turned to the question of the flight of high-tech out of California, and Jack took a point of view that I share, that the recent flight of certain high-tech companies from California should not be a cause for concern for Californians left behind, for three reasons.
1: The impact on California may be positive if real estate prices go back down into the range of the rational.
It's better for the California economy--as well as the economy of the whole country--if one industry isn't too concentrated and powerful here.
3: Finally, let them leave! Those of us left behind in the Bay Area won't be losing much if the people leaving have a higher commitment toward their own personal greed than toward a functional society with a diverse and robust urban experience.

Jack wasn't enthusiastic about Sam's pet project of UBI. But he did like the same thing I do: a mandatory universal service program where everyone at 18 goes into the military or the peace corps or the social services for something for a year. Jack added that after that, everyone can get paid a chunk of money like $30k for their time, and to set them on the road toward their futures. I hadn't considered that possibility before but that's a nice idea!

One last note I'll make is that I think Jack's spot on that all of these talking heads referencing the progress of the Dow Jones as though that were the measure of anything fundamental to the US economy are all deluded. The stock market is no longer best measure of quality of life in the US. It now mostly reflects the financial and tech sectors, which are not big employers, and does not give a picture of the health of manufacturing or services or even employement, as we have seen in this recent COID blow to the economy which was not reflected in the Dow.