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Sam Harris: Your mind is all you have. Is yours working?
Mar 29, 2025
"I think we need a truly open-ended conversation with 8 billion strangers, and what makes that hard to do increasingly is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and partisanship born of our engagement with these new technologies."
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It's been widely thought that we have something like a crisis of meaning, especially in the developed world at this point
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There's a sense that culture has atomized, right? We're all kind of on our own with our phones and laptops and our digital media experiences
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No one knows what everyone else is seeing on some level. And we spend so much time thinking about and reacting to the digital lives we and others have created
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that there has been this shattering effect of culture. So I think we need a truly open-ended conversation
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with now 8 billion strangers. And what makes that hard to do increasingly
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is a level of political fragmentation and extremism and partisanship born of our engagement with these new technologies
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born of the fact that we just simply can't agree about who is lying most of the time, right
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And, you know, who is misinformed? Who is in possession of only half the story
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And the greatest question that we face individually and as a society is what to do next
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I'm Sam Harris. I'm a writer and neuroscientist, a podcast host, and the creator of the Waking Up app
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I'm increasingly concerned that something like half of us can't quite agree
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that we have a stake in the maintenance of a global civilization
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We're witnessing a fairly stark zero-sum contest between those of us who want to maintain
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open societies and anything like democracy and capitalism as we've come to understand them
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And those who increasingly want to build closed ones and belligerent ones that make it impossible
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to share space in this increasingly common world. The thing to recognize is that we live in perpetual
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choice between conversation and violence. Those are really the two alternatives. When we have to get people in line
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when people have to cooperate, well then we got persuasion or coercion Either we gonna get everyone on the same page through the noises we make with our mouths or we going to have to force people or imprison people
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and, in the limit, fight a war and kill people in the service of goals that we find non-negotiable
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The importance of conversation can't possibly be exaggerated because it is the bulwark against perpetual violence
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It is the bulwark against murder. It's the bulwark against war. It's the only thing keeping those things out of our daily experience
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And we're finding it harder and harder to have a conversation that converges on a shared set of facts
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And that makes violence, in my view, of all sorts and at several different scales, more and more likely
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The challenge is always how to get strangers to cooperate and solve a wide variety of coordination problems
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Almost everything that we can do personally and, needless to say, at scale that is important, you know, for good or for ill, is made possible by this capacity to represent the nature of the world in our thoughts
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And to trade those representations in speech or writing or other forms of communication with other people
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And to persuade other people of certain things being true. I don't think the story of all of our mayhem and unnecessary suffering has much to do with bad people doing bad things
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I think for the most part, it's good people, or at least normal people, under the influence of bad ideas
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These ideas were communicated by people and acted upon on the basis of concepts
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It's a set of arguments. It's a rehearsal of history and expectations about the future
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And if you're rational, those reasons can be explained. If your beliefs are not falsifiable, if there's no scenario that could convince you that your most cherished opinions are in error
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well, then that's proof that you didn't get them by being in contact with reality
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if most of human misery and inequality and conflict and violence is a matter of the stories that people are telling themselves then you see that virtually all of human suffering and chaos
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is just tissue thin. I mean, it's a bad dream. It's just thoughts that people are finding
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compelling, and they could cease to find those thoughts compelling. So the consequence of all
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that is that it really matters what you believe. It certainly matters what millions and billions of
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us believe in any given moment, because it's our beliefs that will dictate what we do next
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One basis for hope is there's almost no problem human ingenuity can't solve in the end
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this is a point that the physicist david deutch made recently which i find compelling
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unless there's some law of physics that rules it out any change in the universe that is possible
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is possible in the presence of sufficient knowledge right and i would add you need
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sufficient cooperation to to implement that knowledge all the progress we've made to arrive
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at anything like a universal conception of human flourishing and scientific rationality
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all of that has been a matter of getting rid of dogma and having an open-ended and intellectually
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honest conversation based on facts and arguments. Really, the sky's the limit in terms of how good
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we can make human life on the basis of our understanding how the world works and to cancel
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the truly unconscionable disparities in good and bad luck we see in this world
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But the question is, how unhappy do you have to be in the present
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as you struggle to figure out how to solve the problems in the world
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And what is the optimal state to be in once the world has got your attention
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How useful is anger 30 seconds later or 30 minutes later? How fearful do I want to be? How impatient do I want to be
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How angry do I want to be right now? All of our failures of compassion are failures of mutual understanding There just an inability to be kind and patient and curious about what happening on the other side of the wall or the other side of a
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conversation. All of those strong negative emotional reactions like anger and fear
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they're necessary as information. They're salience cues. They tell you that something
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has happened in the world or in your body that is worth paying attention to
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I think it's important to recognize that your mind is all you have, really
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Your mind is the basis of your experience in each moment. And therefore, it makes sense to train it
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It makes sense to understand it. It makes sense to pay attention to it directly
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And until you learn to recognize thoughts as thoughts and emotions as emotions
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until you break this spell of just kind of helpless identification with each new appearance in consciousness
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You are just condemned to be as angry as you will be for as long as you will be
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And the reason why meditation becomes a great tool of emotional regulation
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is that it introduces a degree of freedom here. Even if you haven't changed the world in any significant sense
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your response to the world can be radically transformed. Hey, big thinkers
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