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Sam Harris: The Self is an Illusion | Big Think

Big Think | November 27, 2025



Sam Harris describes the properties of consciousness and how mindfulness practices of all stripes can be used to transcend one’s ego.
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Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.

Mr. Harris’ writing has been published in over ten languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Nature, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Mr. Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and holds a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA, where he studied the neural basis of belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). He is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason.
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TRANSCRIPT

Sam Harris: What one of the problems we have in discussing consciousness scientifically is that consciousness is irreducibly subjective. This is a point that many philosophers have made – Thomas Nagel, John Searle, David Chalmers. While I don’t agree with everything they’ve said about consciousness I agree with them on this point that consciousness is what it’s like to be you. If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain in our case because – and people want to do this. Someone like Francis Crick said famously you’re nothing but a pack of neurons. And that misses the fact that half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it’s true you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just a case of tails being down. But that doesn’t actually reduce one side of reality to the other.

And to give you a more precise example, we have very strong third person “objective measures” of things like anxiety and fear at this moment. You bring someone into the lab, they say they’re feeling fear. You can scan their brains with FMRI and see that their amygdala response is heightened. You can measure the sweat on their palms and see that there’s an increased galvanic skin response. You can check their blood cortisol and see that its spiking. So these now are considered objective third person measures of fear. But if half the people came into the lab tomorrow and said they were feeling fear and showed none of these signs and they said they were completely calm when their cortisol spiked and when their palms started to sweat, these objective measures would no longer be reliable measures of fear. So the cash value of a change in physiology is still a change in the first person conscious side of things. And we’re inevitably going to rely on people’s subjective reports to understand whether our correlations are accurate. So the hope that we are going to talk about consciousness shorn of any kind of qualitative internal experiential language, I think, is a false one. So we have to understand both sides of it subjective – classically subjective and objective.

I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about its metaphysics. What I am saying, however, is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like they’re inside the body. And most people feel like they’re inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion.

Transcript continued on: https://bigthink.com/videos/sam-harris-on-self-transendence

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Comments

This post currently has 47 comments.

  2. @mihailamarcel5201

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    i dont agree…if I spit into your face, i will touch something deeper than your experiences…you wount say,its just water, youcould humiliate a merson in moste depraved way but not life threatening..o yes the self is real as your head or hand

  4. @pierreabelard-w5q

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    What a bunch of nonsense. He even dont understand basic "Cogito" argument and basic Descated ontological explanation – concrete – relation between substance and modus of that substance. If "I" is illusion, that implies not contigently, but necessary existence of mental substance which have that illusion, so illusion is modus of my mental substance, but not substance. Illusion can exist if there is not substance who has that illusion. Illusion is impossible without substance who has that illusion. My mentaln substance is ontological primitive, not illusions.
    So, this person is dellusional xaxa, beside he is stupid, a great example he have degree in neuroscience, but obviosuly not smart to understand basic problems with "view" which he here and elsewhere advocate so naively, dont know logic and philosophy, even he want to be a philosopher, but he is miles away from serious philosophy and serious arguments

  8. @F-Zeno-r7h5h

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    years and years had passed, i now figured out the agenda of this taught about self as being an illusion, Sam must have to believe self is an illusion because if you believe self exist, the next problem is there must something existing behind it which is the soul and if soul is real it could be the dead end of atheism, soul must not exist to prove atheism is rational, there must nothing exist in the self so lets believe self is just an illusion.

  10. @richardparker7679

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    I have been studying consciousness and have been long aware of this no-self concept but I never understood it really. Anyone could have tried to explain it as simply as possible but I couldn't have grasped it. And I tried to read and listen and I was like yeah, it makes sense but I just couldn't get it.

    You really have to study and think through very carefully and logically to get to this conclusion yourself. When I did, it really was a revelation and a moment of awe. There is no self.

    I had to work a lot for it. A lot! I studied Buddhism and in layperson level neuroscience, astrophysics, different philosophies and even quantum physics. Obviously I had to think a lot! Buddha would have been proud 😂

    I also used my own experiences to understand it. I have an NDE in my past and I have studied dreams a lot. I understand how my brain works because of dream studies. I had a revelation when I recorded noices during my sleep. And I discovered that one night my brain was talking to my cat. Not me, my brain. My brain reacted my cat while the so called self was blissfully unaware.

    Nowadays we have AI to help become smarter faster. So now off to study the hard problem in consciousness.

    About the speaker. He probably knows what he is talking about. I don't know who he is, I'm just browsing YouTube to find videos about this subject. I couldn't have learned what no-self is by listening to this speech. He speaks about concepts and at a high level.

    Everyone has to find their own "teachers", who speak their "language". For me it was an army of scientists, philosophers, students and laypeople all around the planet. But in the end it was my own hard work, studies even hobbies and individual thinking that led me to the conclusion so many already know and realize.

    Hard work really paid off and it feels amazing.

  11. @Sharkwhisperer

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    His consciousness is let Israel bomb Gaza as long as they want and let them kill children and now breath in and breath out and pray for the idf and bless the bombs…..

  12. @PhilKoay

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    I used to be a huge fan of Sam, purely for this area of knowledge, where I think he is truely insightful. It is such a shame his rationale for his political views are so poorly factual based, and he comes across as one of the world's worst dictators. He comes across as an angry person devoid of compassion or happiness, and wants everyone in the world to join him. Truely dreadful

  13. @slottibarfast5402

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    So becoming transcendent make us more aware of what is true? I would like a test of this idea to see if this is valid. Take all the mind expanded LSD and whatever similar acting drugs that people swear changed their whole life, etc. and compare them to people that have never had that experience or meditated etc. then test them on what is true vs. not true. Start with the enquirer!

  18. @prabhatjoshi8887

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    When people say free will can't exist their point is that thoughts emerge on their own and hence we're not in control. But this idea assumes that "I" am not my thoughts. I am not my brain. Well then what exactly is "I"? I'd argue that I am my thoughts and not a separate entity. And that begs another question: Do thoughts have free will given they arise on their own?

  19. @AR-r2q-l6u

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    Self can be real .. The just feeling of me not my face or made up personality just feeling or me in medtation etc we are not able to pay ateention on ourselves so we not know or feel due to lacke of brain activity.. there is experience and "perception" then it mean someone is perceiving it of no one is perceiving then this perception is occurring to whom????? to whom the green is green we perceive ..? if there is non one perceiving then we should not precieve or experience the green or anything. but we are precieving . who is precieving . thats me thats I .I hope you understand . if not then read again. We are nor real is also not true and conlusive now . simply science says we dont undersatnd bout consciousness then it also should not give these typr of statements. that is not true. and is unsientific and self is not real is not present during meditation or phycedelics it could be due to due to lack of brain activity we are not able tp pay attention to ourselves that here we are means experiencing ourselves not body or madeup personality but the pure me like we experience color for example we eaxperience ourselves the true me. If you say color is illusion in fact this is still "something"if it is nothing we skhuld experience nothing right?. We just dont pay attention to expereince ourselves the self the I that is real So we are there but dont pay attention to ouselves to experience it because in this body we do every thing that brain allows us not other than this. Thats what I think. And is solid argumnet

  21. @catkeys6911

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    Well, we don't really know were thinking comes from. How does our natural mental data processing actually happen? WHY does it happen? All we know is that we are alive, and wish to stay that way. Except we won't. "God" says "Nyah, nyah!"

  22. @beautifulandtoolate

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    consciousness is not a thing it is an attribute. some thoughts have this attribute, others do not. the conscious and the unconscious thought are of the same substance they only differ in form.

  25. @johnwhelan9663

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    If the self is an illusion, who or what is experiencing that illusion? Harris is just piling turtles on turtles here. Bottom line is that there is no reason for a piece of clockwork to be aware of its own existence. And by denying the most intimate of our perceptions, Harris undercuts the entire epistemological basis of science. And the transcendent experience is ultimately just another way to be conscious, for better or worse. In no way does it prove that we are really not conscious at all

  28. @rocknrollermann

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    I've been watching hrs of him talking about this and I'm left with…. whats the point? what are we suppose to understand? He speaks very well..but I don't know what he's saying.

  31. @the_inter_mind

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    I remember the first time I tried to experiment with Self Awareness. I concentrated really hard and was thinking: There it is, I got it. But I quickly realized that I was just being aware of some muscle tensions in my forehead and eyes. I eventually came to the conclusion that it was not possible to be Self Aware. Sure, we can conceptually speculate about a Conscious Self, but I don't think we can be Aware of the actual Conscious Self Thing. So for now, with the state of our understanding being what it is, we should just say that it is the unobservable Observer. But if there really is no Observer, then this is a fantastic new Realization about Being because it releases us from the limitations of Existing as some Point Observer to Existing as a Distributed collection of Experiences. But we still Exist and are not Illusions.

  33. @stanimirvelinov2472

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    You know wen someone is starting to speak nonsense wen basic definition of something is lost. If you claim the chair is an illusion because it has parts that make it a chair. You lost it. Sorry. I think philosophy exists because of poor dictionary. If you have good definition of something, you don't have philosophy. Thats my opinion

  35. @e-t-y237

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    I've been on this very point in my writing recently — the sudden falling away of some internal structure, some artifice, some edifice, some habiliment — that is not the (colloquial) self but something crudely standing in for it, something defending and shielding one's sensitivity and vulnerability, some giant defense mechanism within that has crystallized into an entity or apparatus taking on the work of dealing with being. When that falls away, indeed it is a spiritual and reorienting experience … but the phenomenon just described is not disproving self.

  36. @e-t-y237

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    The whole thing that is "carrying through" from one moment to the next, is the sense-of-self, not any self proper/gremlin/location-in-the-brain/ghost-in-the-machine, etc. The term "sense-of-self" of course implies that the phenomenon is experiential (i.e. coming from the senses) and not (necessarily) physical/unchanging/permanent. He keeps lathering on all these ideas about any self proper (unchanging, permanent, fixed, independent) that simply are not qualities of anything under the sun. So it's a strawman at worst, wayward and misleading at best. It seems he starts with the premise that "no self is a cool, eastern mystical idea," and then organizes the research in a biased way to align with the preconceived idea.

  40. @davidmakinson4528

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    I think perhaps this is a misuse of the word illusion. An illusion after all requires something or someone to be its recipient. Or SomeSelf. It’s a circular argument. I dunno. Just like Sam, or the illusion that calls itSelf Sam.

  41. @sjoerd1239

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    The self is not an illusion. The "self" that Harris is talking about is an illusion. I do not have a separate self that occupies my body, but I do have an identifiable self. Self-transcendence, self-actualisation, becoming who you really are, etcetera, is delusional language. I can identify myself even if not completely, I can identify what I have been, I am what I am, Change is forced on me, I can want to change and I can direct that change within real limitations (don't make free will assumptions). The self is not an illusion.

  43. @amlaaaa479

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    Sam Harris is one of the most annoying authors there. He presents himself as the developer of ideas that are ALREADY well-known in academic circles because philosophers have developed them. He's just out to make money with these ideas who aren't his own

  44. @e-t-y237

    November 27, 2025 at 1:29 am

    We have a sense-of-self and that is where everything is happening … and the whole "Is there a self?" debate is an irrelevant wild goose chase. That's typical of philosophers who venture into psychological waters. "Self as executive function," as the prefrontal cortex evolved, developed, and came online, is the self-referential capacity … it's a process. What are you looking for, a gremlin running around in the skull that is the self??

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