Making Sense of Consciousness | Episode 2 of The Essential Sam Harris

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced a new series of audio
documentaries, exploring the major topics that Sam has
focused on over the course of his career.


Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical
perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most
compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you
are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made
up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.


In this episode, we survey the landscape of consciousness and get
acquainted with the mystery of the mind. We start with an attempt
to define consciousness–and veterans of conversations on
consciousness will know that this is a huge part of the
challenge. 


David Chalmers begins with his conception of what he coined “The
Hard Problem of Consciousness” and a famous question offered by
the philosopher Thomas Nagel. 


We then construct a “Philosophical Zombie” before the philosopher
Thomas Metzinger explains why he is thoroughly unimpressed by the
ability to imagine “such a thing,” while he simultaneously warns
us against ever attempting to build one. Anil Seth brings some
hope of whittling away the intuition gap of the hard problem by
pursuing the “easy” problems, with clear scientific reasoning.


Later, Iain McGilchrist lays out the intuition-shattering
implications of the famous Roger Sperry experiments with split
brain patients that suggest that consciousness can be cut with a
knife… at least temporarily. Annaka Harris then shifts the
conversation to the realm of panpsychism, which suggests that
consciousness is nomologically fundamental and potentially
permeates all matter. 


Finally, Don Hoffman explains that consciousness is not only
fundamental and non-illusory, but that the physical world we
appear to be navigating is merely a virtual space-time interface,
which has evolved to hide the true nature of reality from us.