Interview with Sam Harris, "The End of Faith"

A while back, The Raving Atheist asked me if I wanted to take part in a group interview with Sam Harris, author of the excellent book The End of Faith. What follows is Part 1 of that interview, with an introduction written by The Raving Atheist. The interview is focused on one particular issue (scientific validity of mysticism). But the book is about much more, and I highly recommend it.

Interview With Sam Harris (Part 1)

Sam Harris is no friend of religion. In The End of Faith, he openly mocks god-belief as primitive superstition and condemns it as a threat to human survival. Harris argues that the great modern religions belong on "the scrap heap of mythology," and his zero-tolerance policy applies to religious fundamentalists and moderates alike.

TRA, in turn, invited three other atheist bloggers to join in the grilling: (1) Strange Doctrines, a lawyer/musician who writes frequently about religion and politics; (2) Brian Flemming of Brian Flemming's Weblog, a playwright and filmmaker and (3) Under No Circumstances, a graduate student in the Biomedical Sciences Department of George Washington University (tentatively planning on pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience). Starting today and continuing on successive Wednesdays, this interview will be "simulcast" in installments on all four sites. Each installment will conclude with the question which will open the next week's continuation of the interview; readers are invited to supply their own answers, or predict Harris' response, in the comments section.

RAVING ATHEIST: Many hardcore atheists like myself are wary of meditation, viewing it as religious or spiritual practice akin to prayer. How is what you're proposing different?

HARRIS: Well, the first thing to realize is that "meditation" is a word like "learning" - it can mean many things in different contexts. It is certainly possible to practice a kind of "meditation" that is indistinguishable from prayer, in that it rests on very dubious assumptions about divine agency, the supernatural, etc. Needless to say, this is not the sort of meditation I endorse in my book.

There are, however, many forms of meditation that merely require that a person pay extraordinarily close attention to the flow of his experience. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes the only rational basis upon which to make detailed claims about the nature of one's own experience.

RAVING ATHEIST: When I've tried that sort of introspection I've found my mind gets stuck in a loop, obsessed with the thought that "here I am thinking about my thinking process" and not progressing anywhere beyond that. What am I doing wrong?

HARRIS: Meditation is definitely not a matter of thinking about experience in a new way; it is a matter of witnessing the flow of experience (including the flow of thought) from the perspective of consciousness itself. For most people, this is not easy to do. Serious training is usually in order.

A case in point: one of the easiest forms of meditation to learn entails nothing more than mere attention to the process of breathing. A person sits comfortably, closes his eyes, and simply attends to the sensations of the breath as it comes and goes at the tip of the nose. The moment a person attempts to do this, however, he begins to notice that he easily gets distracted by his thoughts. In the beginning, he will be a very poor judge of how distractible he is, in fact. While attempting to meditate on the breath, he will think thoughts like, "So I'm feeling the breath at the tip of the nose... so what? What's the big deal about the breath?", and he won't notice that each of these thoughts diverts his attention from the breath itself. He will, in other words, spend most of his time thinking without knowing that he is thinking. Of course, this is precisely how most of us spend every waking moment of our lives. If a person really wants to get to the bottom things, he might go on a silent retreat and engage a practice like this, to the exclusion of all else, for 12 to 18 hours a day. In the beginning of such a retreat, many people feel that they can pay attention to the breath for several minutes at a time, before getting distracted. They are inevitably wrong about this. The truth is, they are so distracted by torrents of thought that they can't even begin to notice how distracted they are. After some days, or even weeks, they begin to report that they can only stay with the breath for a few seconds at a time before thoughts intervene. Eventually, however, there does come a point when a person gains extraordinary powers of concentration, and then he can actually see some things of real interest about the nature of his mind.

This is simply to say that the fact that you don't see anything of immediate interest when you look inside should not be taken as a sign that there is nothing of interest to see. Before a person learns how to read a CT-scan, all he sees is a gray mess. After a little training, anatomical details begin to emerge. The details were there all along, of course, they were just difficult to see. This is by no means a perfect analogy, but it works up to a point.

RAVING ATHEIST: Christians are fond of telling me that if I pray hard enough, Jesus will come into my heart. Many of them swear that during prayer they experience some real communication or conversation with God, and that if I don't, I'm either doing it wrong haven't done it long enough. But I'd never sit in a church for 12 to 18 hours a day to test their hypothesis, any more than I'd trying sleeping for two weeks straight on someone's mere say-so. What empirical data do you have, different from theirs, that could induce me to go on that retreat? Stated another way, what exactly are these things of "real interest" about my mind that I'd discover, and what is the evidence that others have discovered them derived extraordinary benefit?

HARRIS: Needless to say, the difficulty of mastering a skill (or any domain of knowledge) doesn't make it intellectually suspect. If you came to me and said, "I want to understand the brain in great detail from the perspective of neuroscience," I would say, "okay, go get your Ph.D. in neuroscience." This would take years. Likewise with anything else. There's an old saw from psychology that expertise in any domain usually takes about 10,000 hours to acquire. This seems true enough, whether you are talking about chess, physics, or meditation.

Still, you have raised a reasonable concern. Some projects are bogus. There is, in fact, a big difference between the above invitation to prayer and the claim I am making about meditation. There is a difference in what one must assume about the world to get these two projects off the ground. And there is a difference in the theory by which one will subsequently interpret the data of experience. I have
no doubt that interesting experiences await the man or woman who prays to Jesus for 12 to 18 hours a day. In fact, I have no doubt that some of those experiences would be normative (that is, desirable and worth seeking out). I just dispute the logic by which such experiences are sought and interpreted. Whatever happens to you while you are praying to Jesus, it is unlikely to confirm the claim that he was born of a virgin, rose bodily after death, etc. If it makes you a more loving person, however, the effort was not totally wasted.

The only claim I making with respect to meditation is that there are methods of training our powers of attention, such that we can come to observe the flow of our experience with astonishing clarity. And this can result in a range of insights that, for millennia, people have found both intellectually credible and personally transforming (mostly in the East). The primary insight being that the feeling we call "I"-- the sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our experiencer -- really disappears when looked for in a rigorous way. This is as empirically confirmable at looking for one's optic blind spot. Most people never notice their blind spot (caused by the optic nerve's transit through the retina), but it can be pointed out with a little effort. Loss of the feeling of "self" can be pointed out and discussed in a very similar way. It's just a little harder to get someone to notice it, because most people can't stop thinking for more than instant.

RAVING ATHEIST: You've written that during this state of selflessness, the subject/object distinction vanishes but "consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience." I have to say this sounds incoherent to me, in a way that the notion of a God secretly and simultaneously tapping into all our brains and knowing all our thoughts does not. It seems to me that someone has to be vividly aware, someone has to be sensing that the sense of individuality has disappeared - in the same way that Descartes' "I" still remains after the evil demon has deceived it about all reality (if only to notice that it is perceiving the deception). Are you saying that the thoughts that exist during mediation are (1) nobody's thoughts, (2) everybody's thoughts flowing together (or at least all those who are then mediating) or (3) something else?

HARRIS: When I say that "consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience" after the feeling of "self" vanishes, I simply mean that nothing necessarily changes at the level of perception. If the birds are chirping, you will still be able to hear them. The difference is that rather than feeling like "you" are hearing "them" (subject and object), there will simply be the pure experience of hearing (without hearer and thing heard).

Another way to think about this is that the feeling of being a separate self has a kind of qualitative feel to it. As such, it is an appearance in consciousness. It stands to reason, therefore, that consciousness might be able to recognize this feeling from a position that stands outside it. This is, in fact, the case. It is possible to recognize that just as consciousness is not itself itchy when cognizing an itch, it is not a self when feeling the feeling we call "I." Granted, this can all sound a little spooky until you've had this experience, but it really does capture the flavor of it.

Neurologically speaking, this possibility should sound quite plausible to you. Whatever stream of processing is doing the job of representing the organism as standing apart from the world of its experience, it is not surprising that this processing could be inhibited, or cease to occur. It is not a logical requirement of sensory perception that a system represent itself in the world in order to represent the world. And there is certainly no requirement that it represent itself as a subject that is somehow interior to its own body (rather than merely existing as its body), which is more or less how we tend to define ourselves as conscious agents. After all, most of us feel that we are riding around inside our bodies, inside our heads especially, thinking thoughts. Meditation reveals that this feeling is itself a product of thought. More precisely, it is what if feels like to be identified with the process of thinking (that is, to not recognize consciousness itself as the prior context of every thought that arises).

As far as Descartes is concerned, he seems to have been entirely identified with his thoughts and, for that reason, mistook thinking for subjective bedrock. What the Demon really cannot deceive us about is not the sense of self, but the fact of consciousness. Even if this is all a dream, consciousness is no less a fact: because even if nothing is as it seems, the fact that anything seems any way at all is itself the fact of consciousness.

Next Week's Question:

RAVING ATHEIST: You advocate a scientific, rational exploration of consciousness and assert that "[s]uch an enterprise becomes irrational only when people being making claims about the world that cannot be supported by empirical evidence" (p. 211). Yet you state that "no science that conflates consciousness with reportability will deliver an answer to the question [of the definition of consciousness] (p. 208), and conclude that "[t]he recognition of the nonduality of consciousness is not susceptible to a linguistically oriented analysis" (p. 228, fn19)." You also concede that "we simply do not know what happens after death."

Your latter statements suggest to me that no scientific findings regarding consciousness can ever be observed or communicated, and that for all we know our minds are immaterial and eternal. If that's the case, why should we reject out of hand the Muslim claim of an avenging Allah, now existing in some invisible realm but appearing after death? How is that theory unsupportable by empirical evidence, or linguistically incoherent, in a way that yours is not?