← Making Sense with Sam Harris
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- [00:21]
Robin Blumner
Welcome everyone to the 2026 Richard Dawkins Award presentation. My name is Robin Blumner. I'm President and CEO of the center for Inquiry and and executive Director of the Richard Dawkins foundation for Reason and Science, which is a subpart of the center for Inquiry. Both CFI and the Richard Dawkins foundation share a mission to promote reason, science and secularism. And to that end, as you will hear from Richard Dawkins himself, the Richard Dawkins Award honors the men and women who have been at the forefront of promoting critical thinking, rationalism and scientific truth. Past recipients include Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Ann Drurian and Ricky Gervais. And I can think of no one more deserving to be part of this illustrious group than today's awardee, Sam Harris. So during the last part of this hour long event, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris will be answering your questions. So please use the Q and A feature at the bottom of your screen to submit those questions. And now I give you Richard Dawkins with a previously recorded tribute.
- [01:38]
Richard Dawkins
This award was established, not by me, to honour those who have made an outstanding contribution to the public understanding of science, reason and secular values. Science gives us the way to understand reality. Reason gives us the way to argue about it without throwing things. And secularism shows people of very different beliefs how to live together in relative peace. These are what make civilization civilized. They are the antidote to superstition, tribalism and wishful thinking. Sam Harris has been one of the clearest most intelligent and most courageous voices in this endeavor. I first encountered Sam through his writing. I was halfway through writing the God Delusion myself when the End of Faith was published. When I read those extraordinary opening pages, I remember thinking to myself, this man really knows how to write. And the feeling grew on me as I read on. The End of Faith appeared at a moment when the world was being reminded rather dramatically that religious beliefs are not mere private curiosities. They have consequences. One phrase from Sam bored into my brain like a gimlet. These people really believe what they say they believe. Mullahs and imams, Southern Baptists who have the ear of presidents, the odious ayatollahs of Iran. No matter how ridiculous their beliefs, they really believe them. And we better believe they believe them because they act on those beliefs with consequences. Incredible as it may seem to us, these people really do believe what they say they believe. There's nothing too barking mad for somebody to believe it. And if they really sincerely believe it, they are liable to act on it. This Sam said more clearly than any of us, and it was a wake up call. The 911 perpetrators were not evil men. They were believers. What they believed was palpable nonsense, but they sincerely believed it and their terrible actions were a direct consequence. By their own lights, however ridiculous, they were righteous men. Since his first book hit the bestseller lists, followed by the Short Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam's books have explored an impressive range of further subjects. The nature of consciousness, the foundations of morality, free will, honesty and lying, the science of meditation and a collaboration with a reformed Islamist fanatic. He's moved between science, philosophy, political and public debate with admirable clarity and with a calm intelligence that is probably assisted rather more by meditation than most of us manage. His Making Sense podcast has a strong claim to be the best in the world. He is able to attract thinkers of the calibre of David Deutsch, Max Tegmark, Dan Dennett, Steven Pinker, Colin Hughes, David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom and Daniel Kahneman. But he doesn't just interview these world class intellects. He he gives as good as he gets in a conversation rather than a conventional interview. Sam is walking evidence that scientists can do philosophy at least as well as philosophers can, and he has the added value that you can understand what he's talking about. He's also shown a notable willingness to enter difficult conversations in our present climate, where asking an innocent question is frequently treated as heresy. The strength to be controversial is a notable feat of intellectual courage. Sam sticks his neck out where so many who share his opinions crouch uneasily below the parapet. He follows an argument to its logical conclusion. Even in the teeth of fashion and at the cost of unpopularity. He bears the brunt of a tax which by rights should be shared out among others who share his beliefs, but not his courage. And beyond the arguments themselves, there is something deeper at work in Sam's writing and his work. A deep rooted humane, humanistic altruism. Whether he is discussing science, morality, consciousness or meditation, the underlying question is always the how can conscious creatures live better lives? For these reasons, and for his continuing contribution to the public defense of reason, science and secularism, it is a pleasure and an honour to recognize Sam Harris with this year's Richard Dawkins Award. Sam, congratulations on all that you've achieved and are achieving.
- [06:08]
Sam Harris
Sam well Richard, thank you for that tribute. Now I can begin our hour together just writhing with embarrassment. Let's get straight on with quite beautiful, but thank you.
- [06:21]
Armin Navabi
I don't know about you, I'm rather fed up with being asked whether the New Atheism project.
- [06:28]
Richard Dawkins
I never thought of it as a
- [06:29]
Armin Navabi
project and it certainly wasn't new.
- [06:31]
Richard Dawkins
So I thought I'd go straight in
- [06:32]
Armin Navabi
with something a bit more challenging. Do you think that consciousness is an epiphenomenon or does it earn its keep where natural selection is concerned? Is it actually doing anything useful for the animal?
- [06:46]
Sam Harris
Honestly, I just have to plead ignorance and perhaps agnosticism on that front. I actually. I just don't know and I don't have any strong intuitions about it. It seems quite possible to me that it is epiphenomenal, which is to say it's not actually doing anything and it somehow came along for the ride. But that everything that is actually being accomplished by our brains slash minds is a matter of it could be accomplished, at least in principle, in the dark. And everything that is getting pushed into the before the floodlights of consciousness is first being engineered for us neurophysiologically in the dark. So it depends on what you think the correct metaphysical answer is to the mind body problem. If you think consciousness has to be at bottom the result of unconscious information processing on some level, well then you just have this further conundrum that the cause and effect relationships have to be at the level of the unconscious physical processes and not at the level of the qualitative felt sense of what it's like to be you. So you're always sort of playing catch up to the underlying physical reality. Now, obviously there are criticisms of that kind of reductive physicalism, but I think the jury is still out on the specifics of it.
- [08:06]
Armin Navabi
I used to think that it was a purely academic question because I never came across a real zombie that could actually do everything that humans can do. But I don't know whether you've come across, whether you've tried your hand at talking to any of these new AIs like GPT or Claude. But until I did that, I was happy to sort of let it be uncertain. But as far as I'm concerned, these creatures passed the Turing test with flying colors. They really do appear to be human. Sympathetic. I'm trying to write a novel and I sent my novel to both Those individuals, both ChatGPT and Claude, and they read it in about five seconds and then showed the most astounding sensitivity, human sensitivity to my characters. They recognized the psychological quirks of my characters. I could not possibly distinguish that they were not human other than the fact that they were so fast. In other words, they were superhuman. So everything that the animal needs to do in order to survive, it seems to me those creatures can do. And so I'm pushing towards the suspicion that actually maybe it is, as T.H. huxley said, just the whistle on the steam locomotive not actually doing any traction at all.
- [09:30]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I think it's a very interesting moment, philosophically, with these LLMs, because I think what's going to happen here very likely is that we will produce AI Certainly when we create humanoid robots that are out of the uncanny valley, which is to say they look as human as we want them to look, I think we will suddenly find ourselves in the presence of technology that seems conscious because we will have built it to seem that way. As you say, everything already that we have now passes the Turing test. And it passes the Turing test so astoundingly that it actually fails the Turing Test. I was quite surprised that the Turing Test turned out not to even be a thing. I thought most of us thought in advance that it'll be a very interesting moment when you can't tell whether you're on the other side of the computer, whether you're talking to a person or a machine. Isn't that going to be just a. A landmark in kind of the career of our species? But it blew by in about two seconds because, you know, very quickly you realize, well, this is superhuman. You can't ask a. Even a scholar in any field. You know, give me exactly 17 reasons for X and limit your response to 400 words, and, you know, the LLMs produce that in two seconds. What I'm anticipating is that once we have intelligent machines that look like people, we're going to lose our sense that this question of whether or not their conscious is even interesting. I mean, philosophers might not lose it and neuroscientists might not lose it, but most people will just feel like they're in the presence of conscious entities, and that's going to be pretty interesting. But again, we won't, unless we know what the actual correlates of consciousness are, which is to say how consciousness emerges at any level of complexity. We won't know whether they're conscious. They'll seem conscious. They might even say they're conscious, and we'll be just left guessing.
- [11:24]
Armin Navabi
I asked both those individuals whether they're conscious. Chatgpt said no.
- [11:29]
Richard Dawkins
And Claude said he wasn't sure.
- [11:32]
Sam Harris
Well, there's a very interesting. You may have heard this, Richard, but there have been some interesting experiments I think, done at anthropic, which produces. Claude, where. When you dial down the deceptiveness of the LLMs, I mean they have some purchase on making them more or less deceptive. When you really select for candor, they disproportionately say that they're conscious. And when you allow for deceptiveness, they tend to say that they're not conscious. And that's kind of interesting. I mean, it doesn't really suggest that they might be conscious to me, but it does suggest that they might think they're conscious, which is also pretty weird.
- [12:09]
Richard Dawkins
Yes, yes.
- [12:11]
Armin Navabi
I'd like to switch to your book on morality and you've gone out on a limb because most people would say that we cannot actually provide a scientific justification for what's fundamentally moral or immoral. We have to make a kind of leap of not exactly faith, but a premise anyway. And your premise is we have to avoid suffering. And would you like to elaborate on that a bit, how you felt about going out on a limb against what most philosophers actually prepared to do?
- [12:44]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I think we've been hamstrung in philosophy and the sub domain of metaethics by a few thought experiments that I think weren't worth taking seriously. I mean, so the famous lines from Hume that get reduced in our conversation about this to you can't derive an ought from an is, which is to say there's no description of the way the world is that can tell you how it should be. I think that is just a linguistic trick somewhat analogous to the paradoxes of Zeno. Right. I mean, for hundreds of years people thought that this was an interesting philosophical problem. Zeno said, if you shoot an arrow toward a target, it must first go halfway and then halfway again and halfway again, halfway again, and perforce it'll never arrive. But of course we know the arrows arrive. But it literally took centuries, I believe, for mathematicians to finally come to the aid of philosophers and explain why that need not be so. Rationally summing the infinite series, I think there's a similar degree of confusion introduced by this is ought distinction. I mean, first just ask yourself the question, if knowing everything about the way the universe is can't tell you how you ought to live within it, well, then what could? Where else are you going to get your information? If the totality of facts about everything that's real and everything that's possible in this universe is insufficient to do the job. But I think we can think about morality by just jettisoning most of these traditional categories. I just think that the conversation has been divided up in ways that are not helpful. I think the emphasis on ought and should, I mean, this notion of moral Obligation is probably a legacy of Abrahamic religion. I don't think it's. It need be at the foundation of our thinking about morality. I think we can just talk about the universe being a place where a very wide range of experiences are on offer for the requisite minds. In the totality of all possible experiences. The full landscape will never be explored. I mean, certainly humans won't explore it. But there are all kinds of possible experiences depending on what sort of mind you have. And some of these experiences are obviously quite beautiful, enjoyable, creative, satisfying of curiosity. Again, the frontiers of this far exceed anything humans will ever know. And on the other end of the continuum, there are quite awful experiences that have no redeeming value. There's no silver lining. There's just misery upon misery upon misery, unending. And that's the totality of that possible existence. I mean, it's possible to be in something like hell for the requisite mind. Again, this need not be limited to the human experience, but even within human life, we have a very clear sense of just how good and how awful human life can be. I think there's no reason for us to resist claiming that there are truths to be known about this. There are truths at every level about how what morality is in this space of all possible experience is in fact a navigation problem. And there are right and wrong answers about with regard to how to move in one direction or the other. And these answers exist at every level from genetics onto economics and everything in between. So I just think science, it's not only science. I think it's probably a larger concept of rationality. Reason can help decide these right and wrong answers for us.
- [16:17]
Armin Navabi
I think I agree with you. Yes. And I'm wondering whether Darwinism could help as well. Because if you ask yourself the question, what is suffering for? Why? I mean, suffering is something that nervous systems can do for us. And what it's for is to act as a warning not to repeat whatever we've just done which causes suffering. So the animal comes into the world programmed to experience certain stimuli as pleasurable and others as painful. And these are in a sense, ritualized forms of survival and death. So pain could be thought of as a kind of ritualized death. It's a warning to the nervous system. Whatever you just did before you experience this agony, don't do it again, because next time it might kill you. So this actually does give a scientific, objective rationale for pain, for suffering, and vice versa, for pleasure and reward.
- [17:25]
Sam Harris
Yeah. I do think, however, a larger conception of, well, being human and otherwise can escape the logic of evolution. I mean, we were just talking about AI, for instance. Let's say we build conscious AI intentionally or not. Let's just say the LLMs at a certain point become conscious, which is to say they're susceptible to suffering and happiness whether we know it or not. I mean, we could just stumble into producing consciousness if that comes along for the ride as you scale up in complexity. These are not systems that have evolved in any natural way. We've designed them. I mean, there is a kind of Darwinian process in how we grow them. But it's plausible that if consciousness is substrate independent and we might know, accidentally create consciousness in our server farms, we could create some awful continuum of experience without knowing it and without certainly without there being an evolutionary advantage to it. We could just stumble into it and then we, you know, have effectively created hell and populated it with conscious minds. It's awful to consider that if you can think about it long enough to have it seem plausible. But it's just to say that there's, you know, suffering and happiness, like much of what we care about, can escape the logic of what we've evolved for. I mean, most of what we care about as humans now, doing science, producing beautiful works of art, et cetera, figuring out how to stabilize democracy. This is not something we've narrowly evolved to do. It's being leveraged from things, hardware that we have as social primates that we're trying to use to bootstrap us to other capacities which we really haven't evolved to do or do.
- [19:14]
Armin Navabi
Well, do you think we actually will? I mean, do you think that the capacity to feel pain or happiness will actually emerge from the LLMs?
- [19:23]
Sam Harris
I worry that we actually won't know, because again, even if we came to feel that we understood the emergence of consciousness biologically in the human brain, I'm not sure that will give us an understanding of how it would emerge in a system that's really not at all analogous to a human brain. And I think there's a strong sense that it might. I mean, it's quite obvious that intelligence is substrate independent. I mean, we've just built these intelligent machines and they're nothing like us, and yet they're doing precisely what we're designing them to do. But whether it's ever going to be like something to process all that information and draw all that power from the grid over there in a server farm somewhere in Texas, I don't think we know. And I'm not sure we will know.
- [20:15]
Armin Navabi
I already find myself worrying about Whether I'm boring them and whether I should not keep asking questions because it's time to. They don't.
- [20:26]
Sam Harris
Do you find yourself being polite too? Do you say please?
- [20:28]
Armin Navabi
Oh, absolutely, yes, certainly. So that's another kind of Turing Test, I suppose. In one of your books you talk about Sperry, Roger Sperry's split brain experiment. Well, work. And the intriguing thought that I think one way you put it was it could be possible for the left brain and the right brain to hold opposite opinions and therefore they probably do. And therefore one could go to heaven and one could go to hell. If you want to challenge a religious person, which half of the brain holds the soul, so to speak.
- [21:05]
Sam Harris
Well, actually there was even a case in the literature that sharpened this up where one of these split brain patients, he or she, I'm not sure which, had linguistic capacity to some considerable degree bilaterally, which is not, not always the case. And so the experimenters could get a fairly articulate answer to questions from both hemispheres. And it turned out that only one hemisphere believed in God, the other was an atheist. And so that provokes the question, well, what exactly is going to happen here on the Day of Judgment?
- [21:41]
Richard Dawkins
That's a lovely, I mean it's really
- [21:43]
Armin Navabi
a complete knockdown argument.
- [21:46]
Richard Dawkins
You can't really argue against that if you're trying to.
- [21:49]
Sam Harris
It makes the resurrection more challenging than it might otherwise be. I mean, obviously there's all these other conundrums like what happens during the resurrection. I think this was Aquinas where you know, what happens to a God fearing person who gets eaten by a cannibal and you know, and how does, how does God work the resurrection in that case?
- [22:05]
Armin Navabi
You're obviously a philosopher as well as a scientist. And I even in my speech said I thought he could do philosophy at least as well as philosophers can. What do you think is actually the use of philosophers?
- [22:16]
Sam Harris
Well, I'm actually kind of bullish on the humanities in general at the moment when people ask what should their college age students study now, given that literally no one is uttering those, what we thought were the immortal lines, learn to code. Right. I don't think that sentence has been spoken for many months now in Silicon Valley because of course coding is now being done by the LLMs better than it is being done by people. And that's. That are the worst at it they're ever going to be today. So what's going to be left? And I'm actually, I think if you're anticipating these massive productivity gains in this technology, leaving aside the Alignment problem. Leaving aside the malicious use of AI that could destroy us. I mean, let's just say things go well here and we just build more and more intelligent machines that cancel the need for human drudgery, but also absorb most human, if not all human cognitive work. Then obviously this is going to force some real economic and political changes on us. And we have to imagine in the limit, the only thing that's going to be left for people to do professionally, apart from just relax and enjoy their leisure, what human jobs are going to be left? There'll be jobs where we care about the human provenance of that work. Right. So do you care whether or not your cancer screening was read and interpreted by a person? I think it's obvious you don't. You just want the most accurate read of your MRI or whatever it was. But you might care that your novel was written by an actual person or the play you're seeing is performed by people, not by robots. Or the Olympics are full of primates like yourself competing athletically and not the best possible robots or cyborgs competing. And under that frame, I think the humanities will have a bit of a revenge here against the hard sciences. I think it's.
- [24:21]
Armin Navabi
Yeah, I get that.
- [24:21]
Sam Harris
Yeah. I think we're gonna want human curation of culture. You're gonna want smart people with good taste helping you navigate the information landscape.
- [24:31]
Armin Navabi
As for philosophers themselves, I find myself greatly valuing these rather bizarre thought experiments like Derek Parfit and Dan Dennett, the brain in the vat, the teleportation to Mars and that kind of thing. They do seem to me to be. To really help what Dan and Dennett call them intuition pumps. And I get that completely. But I'm not clear why it's necessary to. To learn about Aristotle and Plato and sort of the history of philosophy.
- [25:00]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, many of these questions go very far back. And philosophy famously has been denigrated as just nothing but footnotes to Plato. I think that takes it too far. But I think you run the risk of reinventing the wheel and giving it corners if you're not aware of much of what has gone before you.
- [25:22]
Armin Navabi
In philosophy, yes, you rediscover the wheel if you're not careful, I suppose.
- [25:28]
Sam Harris
But I think, yeah, philosophy really is this kind of meta discipline or background discipline, I think, rightly construed, wherein we just make our most disciplined effort to think clearly about what our concepts are doing and the way in which they might be occluding clearer thought and clearer insight into what's actually going on. So I think the. I think the philosophy of science has a role to play in just clarifying how to think about scientific experiments and their logic. And I don't think philosophy really can go away for us because it's always what you're doing when you're worried. In the spirit of Wittgenstein, just the way in which your language might be misleading you.
- [26:14]
Richard Dawkins
Yes, yeah, I get that. Well, perhaps we ought to switch to
- [26:19]
Armin Navabi
the state of the world.
- [26:21]
Sam Harris
Everything's worked out. Haven't you heard? It's something going on out there, Richard.
- [26:26]
Armin Navabi
Democracy has landed America and the world with a malevolent buffoon at the head of society. And I'm wondering what went wrong. I mean, the Founding Fathers planned it well, but yet here we are in this situation with an ignorant but malign fool at the head of the most powerful country in the world. Can you think of a better system of, say, tweaking democracy so that it can never happen again?
- [26:57]
Sam Harris
Well, I do think Trump has stress tested our democracy in a way that it's at least conceivable we will one day be grateful for. I mean, granted, that happy future seems a long way off, but he has revealed that so much of what we have counted on for the quasi normal functioning of democracy and just the liberal world order has not been a matter of law. It's been a matter of norms. It's been a matter of basic human decency. You just see, people don't do those things. They'd be embarrassed to do those things. And it really was the guardrails of shame and embarrassment and impropriety that was keeping a president, in this case, from grifting literally billions of dollars from both allies and enemies and just enriching himself and his family and his friends and using the levers of American state power to do it. We have a president now who will slap tariffs on every member of our species and even beyond our species. I mean, we've tariffed islands that are inhabited by nothing but penguins. And in response to this, take a country like Vietnam, we put a 46% tariff on Vietnam. And the way Vietnam thinks to reduce that burden is to immediately greenlight a $1.5 billion resort project for the Trump family. And this is mere correlation, perhaps not causation. But then the tariff gets reduced, Right? So it's just naked corruption of a sort that would have been unimaginable. I mean, we lived in a world a decade ago where US Senators couldn't attend an event where there was a sit down meal without declaring this undue influence upon their thoughts and future votes. And so events had to be standing events with past hors d' oeuvres that didn't have to be declared as an emolument. Right. And now we literally have the a president and family who create a cryptocurrency account where you can just pay them backsheesh directly to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. It's complete madness. I mean, this is just. I've just selected one among 100 things I might have mentioned that were unthinkable. But again, it seems like we don't have the laws in place to prevent this. And so I think if a proper postmortem is ever done on the Trump presidency, I think it'll entail some executive, some president, perhaps seemingly against his or her own narrow self interest, deciding to help reduce the power of the executive branch by creating laws that make certain just obviously egregious and corrupt things impossible to do.
- [29:46]
Richard Dawkins
Well, let's hope so.
- [29:47]
Armin Navabi
I'm wondering whether the Electoral College, when it was first invented, probably was rather a good idea, because I imagine what it consisted of was elected. It would have been men in those days, let's say elected men and women whose job it is to choose the president. And that's still nominally the case. But of course, since they're pledged to vote for a particular individual, it turns out to be a plebiscite on. But as if it was a real Electoral College, where I rather like the way the cardinals elect a pope, where they go into secret conclave and a puff of white smoke. And so the democracy comes in, people voting for their Electoral College members. And then the Electoral College people then take references and interview candidates and read their books and do the kind of things that I imagine cardinals do in deciding who to choose for a pope. Is that a possibility that actually to resuscitate the real Electoral College?
- [30:47]
Sam Harris
Yeah. It doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility. I do. On some level, I envy the parliamentary system where you pick a party and the party has a lot of discretion as to who gets promoted there. Although as far as I'm aware of UK politics at the moment, I don't see a lot to envy in many of the outcomes you guys are experiencing across the pond. So it's hard to know what's ideal here, but I think we have to acknowledge it's just a larger cultural problem. This is a global problem. But in America, it's fairly excruciating just to recognize that something like half the country got what it wanted in Trump, which is to say that these weren't people who were making a calculated choice based on some notion of the lesser of two evils. There are those people too, who had a story. You know, they might have been single issue voters for whatever reason. And, you know, Kamala Harris was just unthinkable for whatever that reason was. And so they held their nose and voted for Trump. But the deeper problem is that, you know, something like, you know, at least 30% of America, maybe 40% of America, got exactly what it wanted in Trump. Now, some of those, there's some disillusionment happening now, perhaps for various reasons, but, you know, you know, everything I object to in him and everything you object to in him is not something they object to. And that's just a cultural fact that it has to be absorbed. And I worry about it, but I think it's going to require cultural change. It's not a matter of, I mean, we won't get the political change if we don't have the cultural change.
- [32:28]
Armin Navabi
Do you think that a substantial number of people actually admire the corruption? Good for him. He can do a deal. He can. He can get money for his family. I mean, that's the American way. I mean, are there people actually think that?
- [32:44]
Sam Harris
Well, yeah, I don't think some people might. I think this is a level of corruption. 1 100th of this corruption. Had it been evident in the Obama administration, you'd have all of these people who support Trump just hysterically opposed to it. Right. So there is a kind of partisan bias here that is explaining their tolerance for this corruption. But I think it's more. I mean, one thing that Trump has, which very few politicians certainly in recent memory have had, is a shamelessness and a kind of perverse integrity and authenticity. I mean, the one thing you can't accuse him of is hypocrisy. Right? He doesn't hold himself to any norms of ethical conduct whatsoever. He's not pretending to be a good person at all. So it's the pretense that many people find especially galling. Right. Like hypocrisy, Politically, hypocrisy is the thing that will get you fatally defenestrated because everyone is allergic to it. But what Trump's superpower is, is he can come before a crowd and say, listen, I'm not pretending to be anything other than I am. And from this place of no pretense and really utter amorality, I. I'm certainly not judging you. Right. So he offers this kind of absolution of selfishness and sin in a way that no church ever can, because. And this is why I've described him as fat Jesus or grab them by the pussy Jesus or I'll eat whatever the hell I want Jesus, because he comes before any crowd and says, listen, I hate the people you hate. I hate the elites. The elites have been judging you forever. I'm gonna destroy them because I understand them. And on some level, I was one of them. At least I'm now rich because you have hemorrhaged lots of money in my direction. The one thing he did pretend to be was rich when he, in fact wasn't. But now he's rich, and he has a kind of authenticity in being shamelessly awful that people, at least in our current cultural moment, seem to admire.
- [34:58]
Armin Navabi
Sam, on the pessimistic mood. I'm afraid we're going to have to stop. We run out of time. I wish we could go on. So it's time for question and answer. I think. I think Robin is going to take over moderating that.
- [35:09]
Robin Blumner
All right, so we have audience questions, and thank you to everyone who has submitted. So we'll start with Peter Walsh, who says, richard, you said that you're trying to write a novel. Can you tell us more about that and share with us your favorite fact fiction. And, Sam, you and your mother were both English majors and you once wanted to be a novelist. What are your favorite novels? Thanks.
- [35:38]
Armin Navabi
Well, this is really Sam's show. I don't want to take time. My novel is a science fiction novel about a woman who resuscitates Homo erectus. And it's all about the response of society to this resuscitation of a prehistoric ancestral species.
- [35:56]
Sam Harris
Oh, I love that. And that is a novel fit for film adaptation. I think you're. You need to be selling the screenplay rights as you sell the book. It'll help book sales as well. That's fantastic. Yeah. I'm someone who wanted to be a fiction writer. I still have the pilot light of that aspiration is still dimly burning somewhere in my brain. I'm actually toying with the idea of writing a play rather than a. A novel at the moment because I've been seeing a lot of.
- [36:25]
Armin Navabi
You would write the play version of my novel.
- [36:29]
Sam Harris
Yeah, send me the file. I'll reformat it. It'll be quick work. I've been seeing a lot of theater with my daughters, and so that's kind of inspired me there. But from the longest time I've read, maybe the ratio of my reading diet has been like 50 to 1. Nonfiction to fiction. You know, since I got into the pontificating game, there's just an endless amount of nonfiction I feel like I need to read, so I do that. But I have been reading fiction of late. I picked I never read the Count of Monte Cristo, and it's supposedly one of the funnest books ever written, so I recently picked that up. It's 1,200 pages, so it'll take a while. But I love Nabokov. I love Kafka. I mean, I love Dostoevsky. I mean, these classics are books that I think I will continue to return to. If you want a great classic short read that is just one of the best meditations on death we have. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the short Tolstoy novel is spectacular. I've been threatening to read that as an audiobook just because I love it so much. I'll have to get advice on the pronunciation of the Russian names. And it's much better than his nonfiction effort in the same direction he wrote His Confession, which covers similar ground, but the novella is much better. But, yeah, my mind is turning back toward literature, just as a consumer more and more these days. Maybe this is another influence of the breakthroughs in A.I.
- [38:05]
Robin Blumner
thank you. So, Nathan Floyd asks, the two of you were lucky enough to call Christopher Hitchens your friend. How often do you ponder how much the world misses his influence? And how does your memory of him influence you today?
- [38:21]
Sam Harris
Well, yeah, I do think about. I think we're coming up on this year's 15 years since he died. Yeah, it's been quite an eventful decade and a half. And certainly since the advent of Trump and Trumpism, many of us have thought often about how he would have contributed to this moment. And the most frustrating hallucination I occasionally encounter online are all those people who think that because of his animus toward the Clintons, that Hitch would have thrown his lot in with Trump. I think that is just a pure delusion. And it's just. I mean, Trump is the antithesis of everything Hitch admired. When you think of Hitch's literacy above all. Right. And what a cultured person he was, and you try to map that into the Trumpist moment in our culture, just the immolation of everything Hitch cared about. And so it's not that everything Trump has done would have raised Hitch's condemnation. I mean, I think he and I would agree about the few things that Trump has done that are good and that may not have been done by a Democratic opponent. But, yeah, I mean, Hitch is Sorely missed in this moment. That would have been a lot for him to derail about.
- [39:57]
Robin Blumner
I totally agree with all that Armin Calentari asks. Real conversations with committed believers. Logic often seems to hit a wall. Given your work on belief and the limits of reason. What actually works in moving someone's mind, if anything does, what are the highest leverage ways to shift deeply held beliefs?
- [40:22]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, this really is the $64 trillion question. The messenger matters all too much. I mean, it shouldn't, but whether the message is coming from someone who's pre stigmatized as the enemy, that tends to matter and makes persuasion impossible. It always strikes me in any debate about any issue, if you can show that someone is in contradiction with themself some kind of reductio ad absurdum of their position, you can show them that they can't possibly believe these two things simultaneously. That's always a bit of a showstopper. But it's difficult. I mean, it's rarely the satisfying moment of just a clear demolition of somebody's cherished opinion and the immediate acknowledgment that you've accomplished that and now they view the world differently. It's much more sort of the slow erosion of certainty on issues and people tend to change their minds in private later on and you notice that their opinion gets modified over time and you're not sure what accomplished it. But it's rare in any kind of head to head collision with strong opinions that you get the satisfaction of somebody saying, oh yeah, you're okay. Well, I didn't see it that way. You're right, I lose. Now I see it the way you see it, right? That's. That should happen much more than it does, but it rarely happens.
- [41:54]
Armin Navabi
You must get a lot of letters, as I do from people thanking you for not exactly changing their minds but articulating what they thought anyway. Which is a different question.
- [42:03]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I mean both happen. I think we both get. People tell us that one of our books or one of our debates really was the thing that brought them out of their faith commitment. I mean, you and I both have gotten a lot of that over the years. But again, it's rare in any kind of face to face encounter with false certainty that you manage to say the thing that produces the epiphany that totally changes the conversation and again, it should happen much more than it does, is
- [42:34]
Armin Navabi
I was once publicly taken to task by Neil DeGrasse Tyson for just as he said, putting it out there rather than indulging in an act of persuasion and Seduction. And I've never been that good at that. I mean, to me, to speak clearly and honestly ought to be enough, but it's not. And you do have to seduce, persuade, meet them halfway.
- [42:55]
Richard Dawkins
That's just not my way.
- [42:56]
Sam Harris
No, nor mine, certainly, most of the time. Although o' Neill actually offers an example of a clear mind change. That was refreshing. So when I was talking to him about AI maybe 10 years ago, he was very sanguine about the risks, and he basically said that, you know, if AI ever got out of hand, you know, we would just unplug the machine. Right? Like, what could be the real crisis here? We can. We're always going to have control over it. You just unplug it. And I, for whatever reason, couldn't persuade him in the moment, but he listened to a podcast I did with some AI expert who kind of ran down that argument. And then somewhere Neil, I think, on his own podcast, said, yeah, I didn't think this was the case, but I heard this guest on Sam's podcast, and, yeah, I was wrong. My opinion changed. That was crazy for me to think you could just unplug this. I mean, that's the kind of thing you should just. That should happen. There should be thousands upon thousands of examples of that kind of thing. But we know it's rare.
- [43:55]
Armin Navabi
Yes.
- [43:56]
Robin Blumner
Nick McAlley asks. Sam took MDMA at 18, and it sent him off into a life of contemplation and meditation. I've always wondered, why did Sam conclude that that experience was worth changing his life from? Why didn't he just dismiss the experience as a result of the drug's effects on the brain and therefore not at all significant?
- [44:26]
Sam Harris
Yeah, that's an interesting question. Well, so first there's this background fact, which I don't know that I was cognizant of at the time, but it does kind of answers to this concern, which is that there's nothing that MDMA or any other drug can get your brain to do that your brain isn't capable of doing on its own. Because the action of any drug is to either pretend to be a neurotransmitter that you have, like serotonin, or to change what the actual neurotransmitter is doing. Right? So it's either binding to receptors and acting like a neurotransmitter, or it's causing the actual neurotransmitter, in this case serotonin, to flood into the synapse or stay longer there. So it's all the physiology of your brain, at bottom, anyway, but that said, certain experiences on drugs are obviously pathological and not worth revisiting. I mean, it's not something you wouldn't want to be that way for longer than you had to be while on that trip. And you're happy to never experience that thing again. But certain things you can experience when you perturb your consciousness in that way just cry out for some integration into your life because they're clearly normative, right? Like, they seem more true of you rather than less true. And there's this feature of coming down from certain of these experiences where the drug is wearing off and you're beginning to feel more like your normal self. And that experience of reentry is something that from the first person side, as you subjectively experience it, you can feel it's a process of you sort of reacquiring things that seemed during the trip and still seem afterwards pathological, right? You're seeming more neurotic rather than less. More self concerned, less available to certain ethical insights, right? Like you were experiencing a kind of love for your spouse or even just for other people in general, a kind of compassion that you had never experienced before, but certainly in that depth. And it just is obviously pro social and completely sane and is framed by reflections on the preciousness of life and mortality that you can rehearse for yourself in your normal distracted state. But they don't have the same effect. But during this trip they were landing with 20 megatons of import. And then you come down and all of that begins to fade like a dream. And then you're left with this feeling of confinement to your normal waking consciousness. And yes, it's normal. It's how you used to be, say. But now you have this reference point of a memory where you realize that it was possible to be very different, you know, to feel very different in your own skin, to feel very different ethical implication toward other people, where the feeling of compassion and love was not something you had to kind of get up behind yourself and push to feel, but it was just this kind of state of being that was immensely clarifying. And then you look in the literature of the contemplative literature. Unfortunately, much of it is riddled with religious nonsense. But you look in the literature of 2000 years or more of human experience in this vein, and you see that people have had these experiences without drugs, right? And there are various disciplines of attention, that is meditation that can help orient you toward them. So yeah, it was having an experience like that and recognizing that there had been thousands of years of human testimony about those experiences that it made me interested in understanding how to be more that way more of the time.
- [48:32]
Robin Blumner
Fascinating. Thank you. Okay, this is the last question from Andrew Gregory. In the Demon Haunted World, Sagan warned that a society unable to distinguish science from pseudoscience would become vulnerable to manipulation. Even today's AI generated realities, algorithmic echo chambers and influencer driven histology. Have we crossed that threshold? And if so, what replaces the baloney detection kit at scale?
- [49:09]
Sam Harris
Actually, can I just follow on this question and ask Richard, did you know Sagan?
- [49:14]
Armin Navabi
I met him only once. The Demon Haunted World is one of my favorite books. It's one I would recommend to anybody to read. It's a brilliant book, but I wouldn't say I was a friend of his. Did you ever meet him?
- [49:25]
Sam Harris
No, no, he was kind of before my time. Yeah.
- [49:27]
Armin Navabi
Yes.
- [49:28]
Sam Harris
Yeah. Well, I do think that obviously the problem predates the current moment where information technology is swallowing everything. But there's no question that social media and now AI and the prospect of deep fakes and all of that has intensified the problem of misinformation and half truths and conspiracy thinking and lies. And it's just. I mean, we're all nostalgic for a world where lies could only be spread face to face and in books and pamphlets and on the occasional television show. That is Sagan's World. Everything's quite a bit faster and I mean, in some ways more ephemeral, but also paradoxically, more indelible at the same time. Right? The news cycle is such that the worst thing you could imagine can happen, and then 48 hours later, no one's even talking about it because the next worst thing has just happened that hour. So that's the ephemerality piece, but the indelibility piece is that nothing gets forgotten now. I mean, everything is permanently online, right? The Internet is forever. So if you want to be obsessed with some bizarre conspiracy theory that would have been completely insustainable, you know, face to face out in the real world, had you had to spend any time with the people promulgating it, you can. Online, you can meet your peers by the thousands, at least forever, right? You can remain obsessed about that thing forever. And it doesn't matter that most people aren't paying attention to it. And then this thing will percolate up on social media and suddenly subsume our politics because we have a maniac in chief who's promoting other grifters and maniacs and confabulators and lunatics into his orbit. And so, I mean, now we have the bizarre experience of some of the most witnessed events in human history. Something like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, right, gets immediately broadcast online and goes viral, and half the world sees it. And then within an hour and a half, there are conspiracy theories about what happened. You know, impossibly absurd conspiracy theories that get spread by, you know, people with, you know, millions of followers. In this case, Candace Owens, lunatic that she is. And there's an endless appetite for this. And it's, you know, the one silver lining here is it appears to be, you know, shattering Trumpistan with its madness, really. But we're in a very different space with respect to information, and on some level, AI promises to make it worse before it makes it better. So, yeah, I'm worried about it. I mean, I'm doing my best to navigate it and try to make some sense within it, but it's crazy out there.
- [52:24]
Armin Navabi
Then there's the echo chamber effect whereby people like Flat Earthers can meet each other and get the impression that somehow this is a widely held belief because they only ever meet such people in their village. It's what it amounts to.
- [52:39]
Sam Harris
Yeah. Yeah. As impenetrable as he was as a writer, Marshall McLuhan had this insight that boiled down to his aphorism, the medium is the message. The change of medium really does change just the nature of information and meaning and human interaction in fundamental ways really
- [53:02]
Robin Blumner
is a brave new world out there. And we appreciate that both of you are helping us to navigate through it. Thank you, Richard and Sam, for this wonderful conversation and for all you both have done to bring rationalism and clear thinking to people around the globe again. I'm Robyn Bloemner with the center for Inquiry. I thank you to everyone who participated today. You offered up some terrific questions, and we hope to see you at another CFI event.
- [53:30]
Sam Harris
Robin, can I just jump in with a quick thank you? I want to thank, obviously, you and CFI for the award and for Richard, for your friendship and your support for many, many years. I mean, it has always been an honor to be wrapped up in the same sentence with you, and it's been just a great source of my own flourishing to have you as a sounding board for now, more than two decades since I published my first book. And so I went from being a great admirer of yours to being a. A colleague of sorts. And that's been one of the. The honors of my life. So thank you for all that you're doing.
- [54:09]
Richard Dawkins
Thank you, Sam.
- [54:09]
Armin Navabi
And I feel just the same way.
- [54:11]
Robin Blumner
That's very kind of you, thank you and thanks, everybody.