Interview with Sam Harris, Part 2

Continuing the interrogation of author Sam Harris (“The End of Faith”) by bloggers The Raving Atheist, Strange Doctrines, Under No Circumstances and me.

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?

HARRIS: The point I was making about consciousness is not that first-person data (the contents of consciousness, or even the experience of "nonduality") cannot be talked about, but that consciousness itself poses a unique problem for science. Here is the situation as I see it:

To say that an organism is conscious is not to say anything, in principle, about its behavior. It is perfectly coherent to say that an organism may be conscious, and yet we may have no way of knowing this from the outside. Of course, if the organism isn't doing anything interesting, we are unlikely to suppose that it might be conscious in the first place. But behavior really beside the point when talking about what consciousness is as a phenomenon in nature. A person with "locked-in" syndrome may be as conscious as you and I are, and yet this may utterly escape detection. So, there are both first-person and third-person facts in this world, and the presence of absence of consciousness is a first-person fact. Whether it can be correlated reliably with some third-person facts (e.g. brain states) remains to be seen.

Given this situation, it seems to me that science can never really hope to jettison first-person data in the study of consciousness. As I point out in my book, even a state like anxiety -- which has been very well characterized in third-person terms -- relies upon first-person reports to be understood. If people stopped saying they felt anxious when their cortisol was high, then we would cease to think that cortisol was a good reporter of anxiety, and we would suddenly find ourselves confused about the biochemistry of this mental state. The fact that we have found a reliable correlation between a physiological measure and what people say about their experience is the key to our understanding a state like anxiety. So, first-person report still remains the gold standard for first person facts.

This does not suggest, however, that people can't be wrong about the character of their experience. On the contrary, it suggests that we should bring considerable discipline to our search for first-person data. This is where "spirituality" or "mysticism" (both are, as I have said, terrible words, but there are no alternatives in English at the moment) creep into the picture. There are traditions of
introspection which really do have something to offer us when it comes time to look "within." Granted, there is a lot of mumbo jumbo to be sifted through on this front, but it is simply a fact that a tradition like Buddhism has developed far more sophisticated methods of introspection than we have in the West. Judging from the reaction of certain atheist-readers to my discussion of Buddhism, this fact is not well known to readers of your blog.

Contrary to what you suggest above, the results of first-person experiments can be readily communicated. The usual scientific qualms about "taking a subject's word for it" need not trouble us here anymore than they do in the study of an ordinary mental state like anxiety. Yes, we ultimately have to take (certain) subjects' reports seriously. This isn't a problem. Or, rather, it's a pseudo-problem.

The root question of the relationship between consciousness and matter may not be answerable. Or it may not be answerable given our current concepts (mental v. physical; dualism v. monism; etc.) But this does not mean that everything is up for grabs. It doesn't make the Muslim conception of Paradise, filled with virgins and silk brocade any more plausible. The only claim I have made in my book about
consciousness is that it must be explored, systematically, from a first-person perspective, and that such exploration can yield reproducible discoveries: one of the most interesting being that the subject/object dichotomy (the ego) is a kind of cognitive illusion. The crucial point is that there is an experiment that a person can run on himself (e.g. meditation) that can be used to test this claim. The only experiment the Muslim proposes is death in defense of Islam.

STRANGE DOCTRINES: You state that the physicalist thesis--roughly, that the brain causes (or in your word, that it "produces") consciousness--is an article of faith" among scientists, and that "the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death." (208) Why isn't it more accurate to say that the physicalist thesis is less an object of faith than it is a sound abduction based on our current evidence (and that, a fortiori, we do in fact know what happens after death)?

HARRIS: I think there is an important distinction to be made between consciousness (the fact that it is "like something" to be a physical system) and mind. We can well imagine most mental processes occurring without consciousness -- in fact, most do. Your decoding of this sentence, for instance, is something that takes place outside the sphere of your conscious experience. While the process itself is complicated, there in no fundamental mystery as to how light can be transduced into patterns of neuronal firing and gene-expression, leading to neural circuits capable of processing written language. What is a mystery is that it should be like something, at any level, for a brain to do this -- and this is the problem of consciousness.

The question of what happens after death is really a question about the relationship between consciousness itself and the physical world. If consciousness really is an emergent property of large collections of neurons, then when these neurons die (or become sufficiently disordered) the lights must really go out. The point I make in my book is that, while we know that mental functions (like the ability to read) can be fully explained in terms of information processing, we don't know this about consciousness. For all we know, consciousness may be a more fundamental property of the universe than are neural circuits. Many people have tried to invoke some of the spookiness found in quantum mechanics in support of such an idea. I've never been a fan of such efforts, however. Nevertheless, there is no result in neuroscience that rules out dualism, panpsychism, or any other theory that denies the reduction of consciousness to states of the brain. To my mind, neuroscience has demonstrated the supervenience of mind upon the brain, but the status of consciousness remains a mystery.

STRANGE DOCTRINES: You say that the "self" is a function of a competence in the brain to represent itself to itself as part of the world, and that with meditative practice one can suppress or dissolve this sense of self by interrupting the process of auto-representation. (212-213.) Yet it seems to me that I commonly lose all sense of my self in a myriad of my routine activities--activities that don't involve meditative practice.

Would you say that the loss of self I am referring to is qualitatively different from the loss of self you describe? Or is your point that meditative practice gives one the ability to revert to this state under a greater variety of conditions?

HARRIS: That's a great question. In an important sense, there is a difference between these two types of selflessness, but the experiences you describe really do indicate that loss of self is an ordinary potential of the human mind--or, rather, that the self is something that is conceptually superimposed on the flow of experience. The difference between the selflessness that is the goal (and ultimately the means itself) of meditation and the experiences of selflessness that many people encounter in routine activities (like watching a movie or playing sports ) is that the latter form of selflessness tends to be noticed only in retrospect. Because it happens, more or less inadvertently, a person generally feels that he has come back to himself (so to speak), realizing that the previous interval of time was one in which he had disappeared into (or merged with) the flow of his experience. Genuine meditation requires the ability to do this disappearing act consciously, in the present moment, with the full presence of one's faculties. It also requires that one become increasingly sensitive to the differences between a genuine, vivid break in the subject/object dichotomy and the many dull (though pleasant) states of mind that are its counterfeits. Once again, the one thing that is so impressive about the Buddhist literature (modulo the mumbo jumbo) is that phenomenology here has been described and debated in extraordinary detail.

Next Week’'s Question:

STRANGE DOCTRINES: You state, "[T]he feeling we call 'I' is one of the most pervasive and salient features of human life: and its effects upon the world, as six billion 'selves' pursue diverse and often incompatible ends, rival those that can be ascribed to almost any other phenomenon in nature. Clearly, there is nothing optimal--or even necessarily viable--about our present form of subjectivity." (214) This puts me in mind of W.H. Auden's remark: "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know." I read Auden's irony here as laying bare a central puzzle about the notion that the highest morality (or the most advanced state of being) consists in setting the self and its reflective interests aside: The meaning of my existence surely must include me, and so subjectivity (and whatever degree of egoism that entails) would seem necessary for any meaningful human life.

Is Auden (as I read him) wrong? If so, why? If not, what would the optimal form of subjectivity look like?