Sam Harris speaks to Kieran Setiya about the relevance of philosophy to living a good life. They discuss the existence of objective moral truths, being happy vs living well, our response to grief, the difference between "telic" and "atelic" activities, the power of reframing, FOMO, bias toward the future, regret, the asymmetry between pain and pleasure, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Today I'm speaking with Kieran Setia.
Yeah.
Kieran is a professor of philosophy at MIT, and he's the author of Midlife, a philosophical guide, as well as Life is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.
His writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Aon, and the Yale Review.
And in this conversation, we talk about the relevance of philosophy to the ongoing project of living a good life.
We discuss the existence of objective moral truths, being happy versus living well, a response to grief, meditation as a remedy for psychological suffering, How to understand the claim that the self is an illusion, the difference between telic and atelic activities, the power of reframing, FOMO, bias toward the future, regret, the asymmetry between pain and pleasure, and other topics.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
I hope you find it useful.
And now I bring you Kiran Setia.
I am here with Kiran Setia.
Kiran, thanks for joining me.
Thanks so much for having me.
So, we have many shared interests.
I loved your book, Midlife, A Philosophical Guide, and you have a new book, which I just have a PDF of.
It's coming out soon, and I've just glanced at that, but I think we can sort of merge the themes in both your books over the course of this conversation.
But before we jump in there, maybe you can summarize your background academically and intellectually.
What kinds of problems and concerns have you focused on?
I'm a philosophy professor, I teach at MIT, and my work on the academic side has been about questions about the nature of human agency, human knowledge, and broadly speaking in ethics, anything related to the problems of how we should live.
And then over the last, I guess, five, seven years, I've been doing more outward-facing work.
We'll talk about midlife and how it came out of my own experience, but I've been trying to think about how the tools of academic philosophy could be applied to the kinds of problems about how to live that my friends and I seem to be facing and going through.
Some of which philosophers talk about, many of which they tend not to spend so much time on.
So, the midlife crisis is one, and then in the new book, Life is hard, loneliness and grief and failure and the kind of challenges that we confront when we're living lives that are inevitably imperfect.
Yeah, I've often marveled, and I'm not alone in this, in the marveling at the broken connection between philosophy and the project of living well.
That used to be the whole point of philosophy, to come up with some vision of life and the world that made securing As durable a possible form of well-being, you know, we'll talk about just, you know, what can be hoped for there.
And it was just intrinsic to the project of, you know, literally, you know, loving wisdom.
And that's the very concept of philosophy.
And then it became this far more abstract and arcane discipline where it seemed to want to emulate mathematics and science more and it became a, you know, following Wittgenstein, a really just a kind of language game which viewed everything in terms of, you know, the parsing of concepts.
And I just feel like we lost our purchase on something important there.
I don't know if you share that feeling.
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
Philosophers are often embarrassed by the idea of self-help, but in a way, when you think of the long trajectory of the history of philosophical ethics, the idea that thinking about how to live should make your life better, should enable you to live better, is a very attractive, plausible one, and that makes the line between Moral philosophy, ethics, and what would nowadays be thought of as self-help, pretty blurry.
And they really only start to diverge in the 18th century.
You get philosophers who want to pull apart the project of understanding morality or ethics from the project of making people virtuous, making people better.
And A lot of what philosophers do now is relevant and is closely relevant to practical questions about how to live, and some of that people know about through things like effective altruism, so bits of philosophy that are directed to the question, what are your obligations to other people?
The relevance of philosophy is much broader than that, but it's very much concealed by the way in which philosophy is sort of now formulated as and structured institutionally as an academic discipline.
And I kind of wanted to reconnect those two and bring them back into conversation.
Yeah.
Well, that's what I loved about your book, Midlife, and what I know I will love about Life is Hard.
And in Midlife, you remind us all of three questions that Kant asked, which are really foundational to the whole project of philosophy, at least the first two.
I guess I have some concern about the third, but the questions are, what can I know?
What should I do?
And what may I hope?
And I think you and I both have some caveats to add to the concept of hope.
But, you know, what can I know that really is all of epistemology?
And what should I do that really crystallizes moral philosophy and ethics and, you know, ultimately, even meta-ethics?
In what sense can things matter, and how do we solve this navigation problem of life?
In my mind, morality is pretty much always a question of what we should do next, given the space of all possible experience in which we're navigating.
And there's a deeper question about how any claims we might make about what we should do relate to claims about what is true and what is knowable.
How do you think about just the grounding of moral truth in a larger set of truth claims, the central problems of meta-ethics?
Do you spend much time thinking about that?
Yeah, so I do.
And I tend to be sort of sympathetic to the idea that there are objective ethical truths.
I mean, there's various kinds of lines that get drawn here that I think, drawing which sort of, I think, played a role in the divorce between, say, philosophical ethics and self-help, like drawing a line between Morality as concerned with our obligations to others, and then ethics as concerned with sort of how we should live more broadly.
Those two, I think, are sort of interconnected in ways that make them hard to separate.
And similarly, you sort of mentioned meta-ethics, and there was a kind of period in mid-20th century moral philosophy, where a lot of philosophers wanted to do something say something about ethics, sort of meta ethics, in a way that didn't really engage with the question how to live, they want to separate the question of the nature of morality, from practical questions about what, what the ethical standards were.
And I think that there's a kind of tendency in recent moral philosophy ethics that I think is right to blur those lines and to suggest that we can't really draw those distinctions.
And I think that That sort of blurring of lines also applies to the kinds of questions about objectivity that you're raising.
So, on the one hand, you know, there's a lot of moral disagreement, a lot of disagreement in ethics.
And when we try to engage in ethical arguments, we often sort of come to loggerheads with other people.
And it seems like there's a kind of question about how we could know the answer or whether there are really objective answers.
And that can seem like a challenge to the idea of objective ethical truth.
On the other hand, when you think about questions about what we know or what the standards of scientific rationality are, one lesson of thinking about determined conspiracy theorists or science deniers is that if you insist on rejecting any premise that could be used to
dislodge your view, you can maintain consistency at the cost of an increasingly warped but internally coherent perspective on how the world is scientifically.
And so I think these problems about how do you actually persuade people and how does our failure to persuade people, what significance does that have for the idea of objective knowledge and objective truth are much broader than ethics.
And I think in both cases, the right response is to say something like, Well, you know, dialectical efficacy, like being able to actually persuade people is one thing.
But the fact that you can't persuade someone who's a conspiracy theorist or a committed flat earther and will say anything it takes to avoid internal inconsistency, that shouldn't make us think that that's a legitimate view.
It's still an unjustified response to the evidence, even if it can be made strictly logically compatible with the evidence.
And in the same way, in ethics, I think we shouldn't be dissuaded from the idea that there really are objective, knowable answers to questions about how we should live by the fact that we find ourselves sometimes faced with intractable ethical disagreements.
That's not to say that there aren't differences between the case of science and ethics.
I think a kind of pluralism about the variety of different good ways to live is appropriate in ethics and maybe That kind of pluralism doesn't have the same role to play in our thinking about science.
I think the questions of how do we know, what do I know, and what should I do are deeply entangled.
It's very hard to explain why one should be skeptical about objective ethical truth in a way that doesn't just eat up the whole idea of objective rationality altogether.
Well, you just seem to have argued for the thesis of my book, The Moral Landscape, in a wonderfully concise way.
I don't know if you've seen that book or heard me talk about it.
I do know the book, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously, I agree with everything you just said.
You made a point, which I make there, but you sort of made it from the other side, which I find pretty illuminating.
I mean, the complaint I've often lodged is that scientists and philosophers They do something with the diversity of opinion on moral topics that they don't do with diversity of opinion on any other topic, which is to say they conclude from the mere existence of disagreement that there is no ground truth to be known, right?
So the fact that someone can show up at your morality conference and say, well, I happen to like the morality of the Taliban.
What are you guys going to do with that?
Basically, the conference just dissolves at that point because people begin to say, well, clearly, you know, it's all just made up.
It's all cultural convention.
There's no, there can be no objective or universal claims about good and evil or right and wrong because we've got the Taliban over there doing, you know, cutting people's heads off at halftime of their soccer games and that's, and they tell us that's how they want to live.
What are we going to do?
But my point has always been If you ask the Taliban about physics or epidemiology, you're not going to get a lot of good sense either, right?
The fact that they have opinions on those topics is never read by experts in those fields as evidence of anything other than their ignorance, right?
And so the idea that you can find an island of people who are living in some starkly awful way by our lights
shouldn't convince you, you know, on its face that they have an equal claim to having thought through the problem of, you know, what is good, what is right, you know, what is the moral structure, you know, if there is one in human affairs or in the larger affairs of conscious creatures, and that, you know, that their language game needs to be taken seriously the way the language games of our experts do.
And so it's just the fact that we just sort of throw out the rule book of what it would mean to just try to push the conversation further into persuasion, and to also recognize that in every other sphere of life, there are people who are unpersuadable, because there are people who, as you say, they're committed to some form of dogmatism that's causing them to just
Change the rules of conversation on their side so as to be immune to any stream of evidence or argument that would destabilize their worldview.
We don't read into that when, you know, when we're talking to young earth creationists.
We just, you know, we don't view that as a real challenge to our geology or astronomy or paleontology or anything else.
And yet that's not the, not the feeling you get when talking about questions of right and wrong and good and evil among academics generally.
I think that's exactly right.
I mean, there's this phenomenon or kind of idea that comes out of 20th century philosophy of science, mid-20th century philosophy of science, of the underdetermination of theory by data.
The idea is, if you're willing to adjust your auxiliary hypotheses, You can always avoid accepting any theory that seems to be supported by the data by reinterpreting how exactly the observations were related to theory, or how they were gathered, or disputing the reliability of such and such instrument.
And the standard response, not the only response in philosophy of science, is to say, well, yeah, there's more to scientific rationality than just bare consistency with the evidence, like just not contradicting the evidence.
is not all there is to coming up with the best, most justified, most illuminating, most explanatory, best theories.
And I think it's a puzzle to which there are kind of interesting historical answers why we don't take the same view in ethics of saying, well, yeah, someone can hold a consistent, internally coherent, but abhorrent moral view, an abhorrent view in ethics, that doesn't mean that there's no fact of the matter, or that there's no justification.
What it means is, well, there's more to ethical rationality, sort of thinking well about ethics, than just not contradicting yourself.
And put that way, it really shouldn't be that surprising that mere consistency is not all there is to, you know, ethical virtue in one's thinking about ethics itself.
So I think, you know, the degree of disagreement historically and socially is maybe different.
And that maybe invites people to suppose that there's some dramatic contrast between ethics and science.
But it's really a difference of degree.
And, you know, as conspiracy theorists become more prevalent, the differences of degree may start to diminish.
Yeah, well, the problem of persuading people about ordinary facts, journalistic facts at this point, has become fairly excruciating.
So the idea that it remains difficult to persuade people about divergent moral facts is somehow no longer surprising.
We can't even agree about what should Be on the front page of a newspaper at this point.
But that concern notwithstanding, let's plunge in.
I think a good place to start is the distinction you make between being happy and living well.
How do you think about those two concepts?
Yeah, so I think this is sort of a kind of distinction that gets drawn in various ways in philosophy, but also in ordinary life.
So I think one way to sort of see the contrast between being happy and living well and sort of asking yourself, you know, what is the object of self-help?
Is the goal to be happy or to live well?
Is to think about Either there are sort of abstract, wild, philosophical thought experiments like people plugged into simulation machines in which nothing they're experiencing is real.
They're actually completely alone.
Everyone they seem to be interacting with is fake.
Nothing that they think they're doing, or almost nothing, are they really doing.
Many people have the thought, well, that is not a life I want for people I love.
That's not a good human life.
That's barely living at all.
But of course, the person who's in that situation of deception and illusion could feel incredibly happy.
They feel great.
If we think of happiness as the subjective state of mood or satisfaction, They have it.
And what that suggests is, yeah, there's more to living well than happiness.
It's not that we should not care about happiness or strive to be unhappy, but that's not really the goal of life.
The goal is to live well, and that sometimes involves unhappiness, and the unhappiness that comes with confronting reality.
So there's also, as well as these wild thought experiments, I think it's something that people are very vividly confronted with when they think about grief.
The idea that the pain of grief, and the unhappiness of grief, and the sadness of grief, among the other complex array of emotions that grief involves, the idea that somehow, well, it would just be better if we could get rid of that, that just doesn't seem right.
The relationship between the pain and suffering of grief and living well is much more complicated than that.
I think that's a more general phenomenon, that the relationship between negative emotions, negative feelings, and living well doesn't always make your life worse.
In fact, it's very important to living well to recognize when things are bad, to live in the world as it is, not the world as you wish it would be.
And so, I think it's very important to frame the philosophical project of ethics and the self-help project in terms of living well, primarily, And happiness only secondarily.
And one thing that does is to make clear that the boundaries between oneself and others are much more porous.
So when you start to think about living well, part of living well is living as you should.
And the question of how should I live Well, it doesn't immediately tell you how you should care about other people, but invites you to ask, well, if I'm going to live as I should, how should I integrate the rights and needs of other people into my life?
And if you were just thinking about happiness, it might seem like, well, any connection between happiness and caring about other people is contingent, and often caring about other people makes you vulnerable to unhappiness.
But once you think, no, the goal is not just to feel happy, it's to actually live a good life, You start to sort of break down the boundaries between what we might think of as self-interest and what we might think of as morality.
And I think that's a useful way of sort of reframing what the project of self-help might look like if it was inspired by a kind of philosophical approach to ethics.
Yeah, there's a lot in what you just said.
There's so many intersecting questions and problems to sort out.
I mean, so one point you made about grief, which I find really interesting, and I think at a certain point it is going to be a An actionable use case for all of us that will pose some interesting psychological and ethical challenges.
And the way I've put it elsewhere, I think I might have been in the moral landscape.
It certainly was in some things I said while talking about that book.
I just I asked people to imagine what It's going to be like when we develop, if we develop, that seems pretty likely, a real cure for grief and bereavement, right?
So let's just say we have a grief pill that you could take and, you know, within an hour you will no longer feel sad about that thing you've been completely brokenhearted over, whether it's the death of a loved one or the loss of a relationship or Pick your poison there.
If we had a cure for grief, the question immediately arises whether to take it, ever, and if to take it, how long do you wait, right?
And clearly it seems like some kind of Awful norm violation and even a break of trust with the person we ostensibly love if, while their body is still warm, we pop the pill and, you know, 45 minutes later we're out in an arcade playing video games.
Uh, to date myself with an anachronistic reference, but it's like it's the idea that the love of your life dies and that you would want to take a pill which nullified your bereavement immediately.
That somehow seems incompatible with love itself.
Of course, some real experience of grief seems appropriate and desirable, but then the question is, is there any point where grief itself becomes maladaptive and no longer a sign of just how important that person was to you, but also a sign of a failure of resilience and a failure to thrive and a failure to live in precisely the way your loved one would want you to live?
After they're gone, right?
So, at some point, you could imagine a grief pill really could be a necessary intervention for someone whose life has just unraveled under the pressure of bereavement.
So, there's a half a dozen other things that occurred to me as you were talking, but maybe we could take that case.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
Sure.
I mean, it's a fascinating thought experiment.
I mean, in fact, there's already a kind of natural experiment that prompts anxieties of the kind you're describing.
So the empirical work on grief suggests that most people tend to be quite resilient, even in the face of loved ones that they were deeply attached to.
And often within, you know, six months, their lives are almost back to normal.
And that actually occasions a lot of discomfort and anxiety, the sort of sense that something has gone wrong with one's attachment Given how rapidly it's possible to recover.
So even without the grief pill, we sort of have a kind of emotional immune system that restores us to equilibrium much faster than many of us expect.
And in fact, much faster than many of us are comfortable with.
And when you try to think through why that is, I mean, part of the answer seems, leads to another puzzle you raised about how long.
So part of the answer seems to be, well, when you think What am I grieving for?
Well, there's the loss of the relationship, there's how bad it was for the person who died, the life that they could have had.
But there's also just a kind of recognition of the sheer loss of life.
And grief is a kind of rational response to that, like in the same way as we have reasons for other emotions, like anger is a response to a sort of perceived insult, or fear is a response to danger or threat.
Grief seems to be a kind of The reason for it is a certain kind of loss.
And the puzzle is, well, actually, that's what starts to answer the question why we shouldn't take the pill.
The thought is, if we didn't grieve in response to the loss of someone we love, we wouldn't be taking in reality.
This goes back to the contrast between being happy and living well.
We want to take in reality, and in reality we should feel grief.
We should respond in a way that acknowledges the terribleness of that loss.
But then the puzzle is, hold on, if the reason for grief is just that my loved one is dead, that's not going to change.
I mean, the reason, that just stays the same, and it stays the same forever.
So now we face the question, the puzzle is less why should we grieve or whether we should grieve, but how can we ever justifiably stop?
grieving.
And there's a real puzzle there.
I mean, you know, when you try to describe how the situation has changed later, you think to yourself, it's true, they died a while ago, and I've grieved for a while.
But those things all seem irrelevant to the scale of the loss, like that those things don't make it any don't sort of diminish their loss in having died.
So how can they make it rational to stop grieving?
And I think this is this is kind of a puzzle I talk about in the chapter on grief in life is hard.
I think this is where Really what's happening is that our emotions respond to reasons.
And this is a case where if we just look at the object of the emotion and try to proportion our emotional response to changes in it, we'll find that there's just a kind of indeterminacy.
We don't know.
There's nothing in the object of grief that tells you how long to grieve for.
And this is, I think, one reason why rituals of grieving, sort of Practices of mourning, which are not rationally mandated, they take various cultural forms, are so important because what they do is allow you to sort of grab onto something to sort of guide and shape the process of grieving in a way that enables you to at least, you know, in practice, get through this sense of the arbitrariness of grieving for a certain length or others.
Often what they have is distinctive temporal shapes, like you sit Shiva for seven days, or in ancient Roman customs there were guidelines for how many months you should mourn for a child, or a wife, or What they do is precisely try to regulate something that, if we just look at the object of grief, would seem unregulable.
I think that is a deep feature of the nature of grief, and the way in which it responds to loss.
So yeah, I think we can sort of answer the question, what would we lose if we took the grief pill by saying, well, we wouldn't be responding to reality the way we should, and then we face this problem, okay.
How can we ever justifiably stop recognising that loss for what it is?
And we sort of rely on what are to some extent conventional arbitrary social practices to help us do that.
Yeah, that's all very interesting and useful, although there's a mystery on the other side of the continuum here, which is that one could ask how one ever justifiably starts grieving in the sense that, and this has a direct connection to, you know, meditation and mindfulness and just the nature of consciousness that, you know, I know you know that's an interest of mine, because, I mean, just for instance, take my present circumstance, right?
You know, I'm recording this conversation with you, I'm alone, which is to say that no one I love is present in my studio now.
They're never going to be more absent for me than they are now.
My wife and kids, I know them to still exist.
I have no reason to be bereaved.
But the truth is, I also know that I am totally fine in their absence.
So the question is, how do I ever become someone who is not fine in their absence?
Not only not fine, but how does their absence become synonymous with really the ruination of my well-being for whatever half-life that suffering has for me, you know, in the case of, you know, everyone I love dying.
And, you know, it seems like a, perhaps a callous question, or at least a bizarre one, but in terms of the mechanics of psychological suffering, It's a very real one because the way we suffer is to think about the reasons we have to suffer in this case.
It is a kind of abstraction and the thought, I will never see her again, meets out its punishment to you in the act of identifying with it.
And that's why meditation promises to be a truly generic remedy for psychological suffering because it's, you know, It's in being able to break the spell of thought that one can recognize that consciousness is, if only for that next moment, free of the implications of thought.
I know from reading Midlife you have some concerns about what's considered the center, the bullseye here, the illusoriness of the self, and perhaps we'll get there.
I'd love to speak with you about that.
The conundrum you posed about how it ever becomes reasonable to stop grieving, I do think is actually mirrored on the other side by this property of the mind.
How is it that it becomes so reasonable to start grieving, when in this moment, I know that, and you know, and any listener must know, that it's totally possible to not only endure the next moment of solitude, you can thrive in this next moment of solitude.
And how does that fundamentally change ever?
That's really, that is very interesting, and I think it relates to a distinction I want to draw between different objects of grief and sort of the plurality of things that grief attaches to.
So a distinction I think is useful is between relational grief, or grief about the end of a relationship, and grief for the sake of the one who's died.
And they come apart, so when you have a terrible breakup.
And the person hasn't died.
Nevertheless, there's something like grief, the sort of devastation of rejection and loss of a relationship.
And then when someone you love dies, there's both.
You both have this phenomenon that the relationship is now, I think, not really ended, but it's ruptured and changed in a dramatic way.
And then you have, I think, also grief for their sake.
And I think part of what you're pointing to is that If we focus on relational grief, the kind of relationship you think, well, insofar as I was capable of being happy in my relationship with someone in their absence, all I have to do to get through grief is more of that.
And so, yeah, why shouldn't I just sort of stay in the mode of being fine in their absence?
And I think that is a very interesting puzzle, but I think it deals with one side of grief, the sort of relational side, the relationship-focused part about, you know, I'll never see them again, I'll never interact with them again.
And I think there is also a dimension of grief that is not in that way – it's not that relational grief is self-regarding, but it involves you as one of the two sides of the relationship.
I think there's also grief that is just not relational, it's just about the death of someone else.
And there, I think, The issue of how you could survive their absence doesn't seem to offer consolation.
The thought is, it's just a fact that they are dead.
And the appropriate sort of emotional response to the enormity of that fact is to grieve, to begin this sort of complicated, difficult emotional process.
And I think that kind of sort of outward looking, for the sake of them grief, It's not clear to me that it's subject to the same therapy you just gave.
I think the therapy for that would have to be something much more radical, which would point us towards the non-existence of the self and more radical Buddhist ideas where the thought would be, if we could fully take in that we don't really exist and no one we're attached to really exists in the way we think they do, if that was really true and we could really take it in,
Then the thought might be, well, the kind of loss that attachment would bring, this sort of outward-looking loss where the value of something irreplaceable is just gone, and you're devastated by that.
It would be answered by denying that We really existed in the kind of way that would make us fit objects of that kind of attachment.
I mean, there are many puzzles about this we could talk about.
And one puzzle for me is that it's never been clear to me really why this sort of revelation of no-self isn't like sort of discovering that everyone you know and love, including you, is already dead.
I mean, it's itself a kind of devastating discovery.
And in fact, there's this idea of mindfulness meditation as a kind of therapy that is stress-reducing.
There's sort of empirical literature on that that's sort of divorced from the kind of insights that Buddhist mindfulness meditation is supposed to bring us to.
But there are some aspects of the Buddhist tradition in which Meditation of this kind is not really stress reduction.
It's a form of stress induction.
The process is supposed to be one of confronting something very, very difficult.
The non-existence of yourself and those you love is a devastating thing to confront.
What's true is that once you've confronted it, You come out on the other side and you've, as it were, already pre-processed the grief.
You're through, as it were, through to the other side of grief.
And that sort of makes sense to me.
What I feel like might be having it both ways is a kind of picture of mindfulness meditation on which both the process itself involves stress reduction and the outcome involves a kind of equanimity.
I feel like that is the thing that I find it harder to make sense of.
Hmm.
Okay, yeah, so maybe we'll deal with it now.
Yeah, I think there's some confusion about what is meant by no-self in Buddhism, or really in any contemplative tradition, certainly any of the Indian contemplative traditions that spread east and north.
So, this is now encompassing all variants of Buddhism, including Vajrayana and also
Indian teachings like Advaita Vedanta, not to say that the adherents of all those traditions think they're all teaching precisely the same thing, but at their core, I think there is the same insight at the end of the day that is being described and entangled with various forms of religious belief and dogmatism, and it's more or less mingled with helpful or harmful concepts to varying degrees in these various traditions.
But the core insight is that, first, we can mean many different things by the term self, and not all of them are illusory.
So it's not the claim that people are illusions, or that you can't say anything coherent about the biographical or psychological continuity of a person, right?
I mean, it's not mysterious that I wake up today as me and not as you.
In a different house, in a different life, etc.
I mean, that's not a puzzle that anyone is trying to solve.
And I do think there are very interesting puzzles around identity, you know, a la Derek Parfit.
But the real insight here, and the illusion that is cut through, and again, it's cut through not merely Conceptually, but experientially, is the apparent default condition of feeling like there's a subject in the center of experience.
Most people don't merely feel identical to experience.
They feel like they're having an experience.
They feel like they're appropriating their experience from some point, very likely in their heads, That is just the witness, the thinker of thoughts, the guider of attention, the willer of will, the guy in the boat who has free will, who can decide what to think and do next.
That's the default state for more or less everybody, as far as I can tell.
And it's a peculiar point of view As commonplace as it is, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
It certainly doesn't make biological sense.
It's not the same thing as feeling identical to your body, because people, again, don't feel identical to their bodies.
They feel like they're subjects who have bodies.
To a large degree.
I mean, they feel this is kind of a Cartesian dualism here that is intuitive for people.
And this is, I think, my friend Paul Bloom has said that people are common sense dualists.
And I think that's true.
And that does link up with many beliefs about the divorceability of mind from brain and, you know, the immortality of the soul and all the rest.
I mean, it seems somehow intuitive that your mind must be something other than what the brain is doing.
And it may in fact be, you know, I'm not actually somewhat agnostic as to how consciousness is arising in this universe.
And it's, you know, I take the hard problem of consciousness seriously.
That's a separate question.
But as a matter of experience, there's this feeling that I'm a subject behind my face, In some cases, certainly under conditions of being embarrassed or you're being suddenly made the object of other people's attention, I can almost feel like I'm wearing my face as a mask, right?
I mean, you think of what it's like to feel acutely self-conscious and to be blushing, say, in front of somebody.
You know, you're at odds with your own face.
And so where the hell are you in this situation?
You're the subject who's thinking.
And so it's that point of view who we represent.
So now this is sort of the totality of conscious experience here.
We represent the world.
So we have the deliverances of our senses.
We see and hear and smell and taste and touch.
And so there's the full set of our perceptions and there's more to it than that.
There's proprioception and everything else you can be consciously aware of.
Your body in space.
So there's the world, and then you represent your body in the world.
But again, from the point of view of the subject...
Your body is a kind of object in the world.
It's out there, to some degree, and you're in it.
And you, so then there's this final representation of being a subject internal to the body that is directing attention, thinking thoughts, willing its will, and vulnerable to the warp and woof of life.
So it's that final representation of the subject That is the illusion.
And to put this in neurological terms, you know, this is, let's just say for the sake of argument, that all of this is just, you know, neurophysiological events in the brain delivering these representations.
It is plausible, or at least should be plausible, that any one of these processes can be interrupted, right?
So you can cease to faithfully or coherently represent a world, right?
You can suddenly You know, go blind.
You know, you can suddenly not be able to name living things, but still be able to name tools.
You can suddenly not be able to perceive motion or location.
You know, those things break apart.
All kinds of things can be disrupted, for worse, certainly.
But what these contemplative traditions have recognized is that certain things can be disrupted or brought to a halt for the better, right?
The thing that really does, really can interrupt the usual cascade of mediocrity and suffering, psychologically speaking, is this representation of self as subject in the middle of experience.
It is a kind of, again, I realize I've been bloviating for quite some time here, giving you a lot, and there's much more to say on this, but the You can represent the world, and you can represent your body in the world, and you can cease to represent a subject internal to the body, or cease to, I should say, construct a subject internal to the body.
And what remains in that case is A sense that the mind is much vaster than it was a moment ago, because it's no longer confined to this sense that there's this central thinker of thoughts.
There's the recognition that thoughts simply arise all by themselves, just the way sounds do, right?
No one is authoring your thoughts.
You certainly aren't.
In fact, the sense that you are is what it feels like to be identified with this next Spontaneously arising thought.
So you lose the sense that you're on the edge of your life.
You're on the edge of the world, sort of looking over your own shoulder, appropriating experience.
And what you can feel, you know, very vividly, again, this is not a new way of thinking about yourself in the world.
This is a A ceasing to identify with thought.
What you can feel is a real unity, and again, there's fine print here in whether we want to talk about this as unity or as emptiness.
My preferred formulation here is non-duality.
A non-duality of subject and object such that there really is just experience, right?
Again, I'm not making any metaphysical claims about how this relates to matter or the universe.
But as a matter of experience, you can feel identical to experience itself, right?
You're not having an experience.
You're not on the edge of the river watching things go by.
You are the river.
And that solves a very, very wide class of problems, psychologically speaking, with respect to suffering.
So it does land In a surprising kind of equanimity and even eudaimonia that may seem counterintuitive in the midst of the cacophony of ordinary life.
But it's there to be found.
But again, it's not the negation of personhood.
It doesn't introduce all kinds of conundrums about How am I me and not you?
It's just a recognition that as a matter of experience, there is just experience.
And the feeling that there's an experiencer is yet more experience, right?
So if you drop back, there is just everything in its own place.
Anyway, so I gave you a lot there, but that's my attempt to perform an exorcism on the concept of no self that you seem to be working with.
Well, I mean, I think there's something deeply right about the line of thought you're pushing.
What I find hard to get in view, and so I still struggle with, is this sort of...
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