Spirituality for Atheists – Sam Harris

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Come to my UK tour, tickets still available: https://www.livenation.co.uk/alex-o-connor-tickets-adp1641612.

Sam Harris is a Israel Zionist which is very wierd considering he doesn't believe in a God.

Panpsychism is an unfalsifiable metaphysical proposition, very similar to the metaphysical assertions of religion.

1:38:05 it doesn't realise anything! It's reproducing patterns based on the text it's tuned to! Deception in standardized tests is a pattern in the texts we've produced!

1:30:42 – If we can't know that AGI is conscious simply because we don't believe it when it says so, then we also can't be sure that consciousness really exists in humans, simply because the only way we know this is by asking other humans if they are conscious.

I was a big fan of Sam until I realised he is racist Zionist

Sam is bonkers

It is an atheist bias to say that no self exists. We do not know, if that is the case.Reality allows for both of the two extreme interpretations of itself, namely that existence is one or nothing exists.

So, agnosticism is the best bet for now.

With that it is also important to say that god as portrayed by holy books is 100% BS.

My attention deficit brain ends up attentively listening to him for the whole podcast

wow a free 2hr of sam harris

Does this Sam guy doesn't know Buddhism is Indian philosophy? So when he says Buddhists and indian philosophy.. What does he mean by that? India has so many different philosophies. Jain philosophy, Buddhists philosophy, hindu philosophy, and many more. Does that mean they're not Indian? There is not one Indian philosophy. So when he say Indian philosophy . It's confusing and misleading. Take proper names and don't say random names which make it look like it's not from India. Jain, Buddhists, shankhya, vedanta. All are Indian philosophies

Do you even read your comments? I liked your perspective, you have failed to live up to your position in my veiw. Search my comments.

https://youtube.com/shorts/mA1wBYIj_0c

If at the speed of light time stops, this means in order to even have the experience of a "moment", you have to be slower than the speed of light. Therefore, awareness, time, and consciousness are only a property of something going slower than light. Time is an emergent property of sub-light speed matter.

I spent about the last 5 years being so utterly convinced that I was the ego (the thing doing the thinking) that I had stopped perceiving any emotions. Like I could go months without having ever having experienced anything that resembled an emotion of any kind.

I then got so curious about how my experience of thinking works that I thought myself into an ego death, but from the perspective of the ego. After having felt this, I highly recommend that if you ever get curious enough to try and work out what this "self is an illusion" thing really means, you do so by meditating and not by thinking too much for your own good.

For me, the excruciating "prison of thought" is sitting here listening to this speculative bombast. 🙄

An Englishman asks, "What would Daycart say?"

Sam "starting meditation in the day and cheerleading genocide in the night" Harris

Boooorrrrring.

Sam Harris is a fuckwit.

Alex, I thought this was a fascinating exchange, but I wonder whether Sam’s dismissal of emergent consciousness as “magic” or as “something arising from nothing” is unjustified.

He is right to object when “emergence” is used as a placeholder rather than an explanation. Simply saying “consciousness emerges” does not solve the hard problem. But serious emergence in biology does not mean that something appears from nothing. It means that organised systems can display real higher-order properties that are not present in the isolated components, but arise lawfully from their relations, constraints, feedbacks, and dynamics.

A useful example comes from systems biology. In the MAPK cascade discussed by Huang and Ferrell in their 1996 PNAS paper, the individual kinases and phosphatases do not themselves possess the higher-order switching behaviour of the pathway. Yet, when arranged in a cascade with the relevant kinetic structure, a graded input can be transformed into an ultrasensitive, switch-like output. That switch has real causal power: it can stabilise downstream transcriptional programmes involved in processes such as cellular differentiation. But it is not magic. It is a lawful consequence of molecular organisation.

This suggests that “not present in the parts” does not mean “arising from nothing.” No single molecule is alive, no isolated kinase is a molecular switch, no individual neuron is conscious, and no single word is an argument. But organised systems can display real higher-order properties that are not visible in their isolated components.

This is also how physicalists usually explain life. Life is not present in the Standard Model of particle physics as a fundamental ingredient. There is no “life particle.” Yet we do not therefore conclude that life is magic. We explain life through chemistry, self-organisation, metabolism, boundaries, information-bearing polymers, energy gradients, and evolution. In other words, through emergence.

Of course, consciousness is harder than life because it has a first-person character. The question is not merely how a system behaves, but why there is something it is like to be that system. That is the force of Chalmers’s hard problem. But that difficulty does not justify treating emergence itself as a miracle.

I would be interested to hear you press Sam on this distinction: is his objection to lazy appeals to emergence, or to emergence as a serious explanatory strategy? Because the former objection seems valid, but the latter seems to risk dismissing much of what makes biological systems intelligible.