21 JULY, 2015

Neuroscientist Sam Harris Selects 12 Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read

By: Maria Popova

From Bertrand Russell to the Buddha, or why you should spend a weekend reading the Qur’an.

On an excellent recent episode of The Tim Ferriss Show — one of these nine podcasts for a fuller life — neuroscientist Sam Harris answered a listener’s question inquiring what books everyone should read. As a lover of notable reading lists and an ardent admirer of Harris’s mind and work, I was thrilled to hear his recommendations — but as each one rolled by, it brought with it an ebbing anticipatory anxiety that he too might fall prey to male intellectuals’ tendency to extoll almost exclusively the work of other male intellectuals. (Look no further than Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reading list for evidence.) And indeed Harris did — the books he recommended on the show, however outstanding, were all by men.

I was perplexed, both because references throughout his own excellent books indicate that Harris reads far more widely than this unfortunate lapse of packaging makes it seem, and because he is the loving father of two small female humans who will go through life absorbing our culture’s messages about the value of women’s minds and voices. And since I believe that the best way to complain is to do something constructive, I reached out and asked him for an expanded version of his reading list that includes some of his favorite books by women. He kindly complied and offered a stimulating selection of twelve books to enrich any human life — here it is, beginning with the original eight from the show and Harris’s comments about some of them:

1. The History of Western Philosophy (public library) by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell … is one of the great philosophers of his time… a remarkably clear thinker and writer… a great example of how English should be written and just a great voice to have in your head.

2. Reasons and Persons (public library) by Derek Parfit

Brilliant and written as though by an alien intelligence. A deeply strange book filled with thought experiments that bend your intuitions left and right. A truly strange and unique document, and incredibly insightful about morality and questions of identity.

3. The Last Word (public library) by Thomas Nagel

I’m a big fan of Thomas Nagel’s earlier work… He is a very fine writer — a very clear writer — and just as a style of communication … he’s worth going to school on.

4. The Holy Qur’an (public library)

Everyone should read the Holy Qur’an… Read it — it’s much shorter than the Bible; you can read it in a weekend, and you’ll be informed about the central doctrines of Islam in a way that you may not be, and it’s good to be informed, given how much influence these ideas have currently in our world.

5. Superintelligence (public library) by Nick Bostrom

The clearest book I’ve come across that makes the case that the so-called “control problem” — the problem of building human-level and beyond artificial intelligence that we can control, that we can know in advance will converge with our interests — is a truly difficult and important task, because we will end up building this stuff by happenstance if we simply keep going in the direction we’re headed. Unless we can solve this problem in advance and have good reason to believe that the machines we are building are benign and their behavior predictable — even when they exceed us in intelligence a thousand-, a million-, or a billion-fold — this is going to be a catastrophic intrusion into our lives that we may not survive.

6. Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (public library) by William Ian Miller
7. The Flight of the Garuda: The Dzogchen Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (public library) by Keith Dowman
8. I Am That (public library) by Nisargadatta Maharaj
9. Infidel (public library) by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
10. The Year of Magical Thinking (public library) by Joan Didion
11. The Journalist and the Murderer (public library) by Janet Malcolm
12. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (public library) by Jean Hatzfeld

Complement with the reading lists of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Carl Sagan, and Alan Turing, then revisit Harris on the paradox of meditation and subscribe to The Tim Ferriss Show here.

Top illustration by Marc Johns

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23 FEBRUARY, 2015

This Idea Must Die: Some of the World’s Greatest Thinkers Each Select a Major Misconception Holding Us Back

By: Maria Popova

From the self to left brain vs. right brain to romantic love, a catalog of broken theories that hold us back from the conquest of Truth.

“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact,” asserted Charles Darwin in one of the eleven rules for critical thinking known as Prospero’s Precepts. If science and human knowledge progress in leaps and bounds of ignorance, then the recognition of error and the transcendence of falsehood are the springboard for the leaps of progress. That’s the premise behind This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress (public library) — a compendium of answers Edge founder John Brockman collected by posing his annual question — “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” — to 175 of the world’s greatest scientists, philosophers, and writers. Among them are Nobel laureates, MacArthur geniuses, and celebrated minds like theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, psychologist Howard Gardner, social scientist and technology scholar Sherry Turkle, actor and author Alan Alda, futurist and Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, and novelist, essayist, and screenwriter Ian McEwan.

Brockman paints the backdrop for the inquiry:

Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals.

Many of the answers are redundant — but this is a glorious feature rather than a bug of Brockman’s series, for its chief reward is precisely this cumulative effect of discerning the zeitgeist of ideas with which some of our era’s greatest minds are tussling in synchronicity. They point to such retirement-ready ideas as IQ, the self, race, the left brain vs. right brain divide, human nature and essentialism, free will, and even science itself. What emerges is the very thing Carl Sagan deemed vital to truth in his Baloney Detection Kit — a “substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.”

One of the most profound undercurrents across the answers has to do with our relationship with knowledge, certainty, and science itself. And one of the most profound contributions in that regard comes from MacArthur fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a philosopher who thinks deeply and dimensionally about some of the most complex questions of existence. Assailing the idea that science makes philosophy obsolete — that science is the transformation of “philosophy’s vagaries into empirically testable theories” and philosophy merely the “cold-storage room in which questions are shelved until the sciences get around to handling them” — Goldstein writes:

The obsolescence of philosophy is often taken to be a consequence of science. After all, science has a history of repeatedly inheriting — and definitively answering — questions over which philosophers have futilely hemmed and hawed for unconscionable amounts of time.

The gravest problem with this theory, Goldstein notes, is its internal incoherence:

You can’t argue for science making philosophy obsolete without indulging in philosophical arguments… When pressed for an answer to the so-called demarcation problem, scientists almost automatically reach for the notion of “falsifiability” first proposed by Karl Popper. His profession? Philosophy. But whatever criterion you offer, its defense is going to implicate you in philosophy.

This is something that Dorion Sagan, Carl Sagan’s son, has previously addressed, but Goldstein brings to it unparalleled elegance of thought and eloquence of expression:

A triumphalist scientism needs philosophy to support itself. And the lesson here should be generalized. Philosophy is joined to science in reason’s project. Its mandate is to render our views and our attitudes maximally coherent.

In doing so, she argues, philosophy provides “the reasoning that science requires in order to claim its image as descriptive.” As a proponent of the vital difference between information and wisdom — the former being the material of science, the latter the product of philosophy, and knowledge the change agent that transmutes one into the other — I find the provocative genius of Goldstein’s conclusion enormously invigorating:

What idea should science retire? The idea of “science” itself. Let’s retire it in favor of the more inclusive “knowledge.”

Neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of the indispensable Spirituality Without Religion, echoes this by choosing our narrow definition of “science” as the idea to be put to rest:

Search your mind, or pay attention to the conversations you have with other people, and you’ll discover that there are no real boundaries between science and philosophy — or between those disciplines and any other that attempts to make valid claims about the world on the basis of evidence and logic. When such claims and their methods of verification admit of experiment and/or mathematical description, we tend to say our concerns are “scientific”; when they relate to matters more abstract, or to the consistency of our thinking itself, we often say we’re being “philosophical”; when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests “historical” or “journalistic”; and when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he’s being “religious.”

The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture… The real distinction we should care about — the observation of which is the sine qua non of the scientific attitude — is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones.

In a sentiment that calls to mind both Richard Feynman’s spectacular ode to a flower and Carl Sagan’s enduring wisdom on our search for meaning, Harris applies this model of knowledge to one of the great mysteries of science and philosophy — consciousness:

Even if one thinks the human mind is entirely the product of physics, the reality of consciousness becomes no less wondrous, and the difference between happiness and suffering no less important. Nor does such a view suggest that we’ll ever find the emergence of mind from matter fully intelligible; consciousness may always seem like a miracle. In philosophical circles, this is known as “the hard problem of consciousness” — some of us agree that this problem exists, some of us don’t. Should consciousness prove conceptually irreducible, remaining the mysterious ground for all we can conceivably experience or value, the rest of the scientific worldview would remain perfectly intact.

The remedy for all this confusion is simple: We must abandon the idea that science is distinct from the rest of human rationality. When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically. And when you’re not, you’re not.

Psychologist Susan Blackmore, who studies this very problem — famously termed “the hard problem of consciousness” by philosopher David Chalmers in 1996 — benches the idea that there are neural correlates to consciousness. Tempting as it may be to interpret neural activity as the wellspring of that special something we call “consciousness” or “subjective experience,” as opposed to the “unconscious” rest of the brain, Blackmore admonishes that such dualism is past its cultural expiration date:

Dualist thinking comes naturally to us. We feel as though our conscious experiences were of a different order from the physical world. But this is the same intuition that leads to the hard problem seeming hard. It’s the same intuition that produces the philosopher’s zombie — a creature identical to me in every way except that it has no consciousness. It’s the same intuition that leads people to write, apparently unproblematically, about brain processes being either conscious or unconscious… Intuitively plausible as it is, this is a magic difference. Consciousness is not some weird and wonderful product of some brain processes but not others. Rather, it’s an illusion constructed by a clever brain and body in a complex social world. We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.

Much of the allure of identifying such neural correlates of consciousness, Blackmore argues, lies in cultural mythologies rooted in fantasy rather than fact:

While people are awake they must always be conscious of something or other. And that leads along the slippery path to the idea that if we knew what to look for, we could peer inside someone’s brain and find out which processes were the conscious ones and which the unconscious ones. But this is all nonsense. All we’ll ever find are the neural correlates of thoughts, perceptions, memories, and the verbal and attentional processes that lead us to think we’re conscious.

When we finally have a better theory of consciousness to replace these popular delusions, we’ll see that there’s no hard problem, no magic difference, and no NCCs.

In a related grievance, social psychologist Bruce Hood — author of the uncomfortable yet strangely comforting The Self Illusion — does away with the notion of the self. Half a century after Alan Watts enlisted Eastern philosophy in this mission, Hood presents a necessary integration of science and philosophy:

It seems almost redundant to call for the retirement of the free willing self, as the idea is neither scientific nor is this the first time the concept has been dismissed for lack of empirical support. The self did not have to be discovered; it’s the default assumption most of us experience, so it wasn’t really revealed by methods of scientific inquiry.

[…]

Yet the self, like a conceptual zombie, refuses to die. It crops up again and again in recent theories of decision making, as an entity with free will which can be depleted. It reappears as an interpreter in cognitive neuroscience, as able to integrate parallel streams of information arising from separable neural substrates. Even if these appearances of the self are understood to be convenient ways of discussing the emergent output of multiple parallel processes, students of the mind continue to implicitly endorse the idea that there’s a decision maker, an experiencer, a point of origin.

We know the self is constructed because it can be so easily deconstructed — through damage, disease, and drugs. It must be an emergent property of a parallel system processing input, output, and internal representations. It’s an illusion because it feels so real, but that experience is not what it seems. The same is true for free will. Although we can experience the mental anguish of making a decision… the choices and decisions we make are based on situations that impose on us. We don’t have the free will to choose the experiences that have shaped our decisions.

[…]

By abandoning the free willing self, we’re forced to reexamine the factors that are truly behind our thoughts and behavior and the way they interact, balance, override, and cancel out. Only then will we begin to make progress in understanding how we really operate.

Among the most provocative answers, in fact, is one examining the factors that underlie one of the most complex and seemingly human of our experiences: love. Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studies the brain on love, points to romantic love and addiction as two concepts in need of serious reformulation and reframing — one best accomplished by understanding the intersection of the two. Fisher argues that we ought to broaden the definition of addiction and do away with science’s staunch notion that all addiction is harmful. Love, she argues with a wealth of neurobiological evidence in hand, is in fact a state that closely resembles that of addiction in terms of what happens in the brain during it — and yet love, anguishing as it may be at times, is universally recognized as the height of positive experience. In that respect, it presents a case of “positive addiction.” Fisher writes:

Love-besotted men and women show all the basic symptoms of addiction. Foremost, the lover is stiletto-focused on his/her drug of choice, the love object. The lover thinks obsessively about him or her (intrusive thinking), and often compulsively calls, writes, or stays in touch. Paramount in this experience is intense motivation to win one’s sweetheart, not unlike the substance abuser fixated on the drug. Impassioned lovers distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, experience personality changes (affect disturbance), and sometimes do inappropriate or risky things to impress this special other. Many are willing to sacrifice, even die for, “him” or “her.” The lover craves emotional and physical union with the beloved (dependence). And like addicts who suffer when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved (separation anxiety). Adversity and social barriers even heighten this longing (frustration attraction).

In fact, besotted lovers express all four of the basic traits of addiction: craving, tolerance, withdrawal, and relapse. They feel a “rush” of exhilaration when they’re with their beloved (intoxication). As their tolerance builds, they seek to interact with the beloved more and more (intensification). If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hypersomnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to win back the beloved. And lovers relapse the way drug addicts do. Long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs, or other external cues associated with their abandoning sweetheart can trigger memories and renewed craving.

Fisher points to fMRI studies that have shown intense romantic love to trigger the brain’s reward system and the dopamine pathways responsible for “energy, focus, motivation, ecstasy, despair, and craving,” as well as the brain regions most closely associated with addiction and substance abuse. In shedding light on the neurochemical machinery of romantic love, Fisher argues, science reveals it to be a “profoundly powerful, natural, often positive addiction.”

Astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser, who has written beautifully about the necessary duality of knowledge and mystery, wants to do away with “the venerable notion of Unification.” He points out that smaller acts of unification and simplification are core to the scientific process — from the laws of thermodynamics to Newton’s law of universal gravity — but simplification as sweeping as reducing the world to a single Theory of Everything is misplaced:

The trouble starts when we take this idea too far and search for the Über-unification, the Theory of Everything, the arch-reductionist notion that all forces of nature are merely manifestations of a single force. This is the idea that needs to go.

Noting that at some point along the way, “math became equated with beauty and beauty with truth,” Gleiser writes:

The impulse to unify it all runs deep in the souls of mathematicians and theoretical physicists, from the Langlands program to superstring theory. But here’s the rub: Pure mathematics isn’t physics. The power of mathematics comes precisely from its detachment from physical reality. A mathematician can create any universe she wants and play all sorts of games with it. A physicist can’t; his job is to describe nature as we perceive it. Nevertheless, the unification game has been an integral part of physics since Galileo and has produced what it should: approximate unifications.

And yet this unification game, as integral as it may be to science, is also antithetical to it in the long run:

The scientific impulse to unify is crypto-religious… There’s something deeply appealing in equating all of nature to a single creative principle: To decipher the “mind of God” is to be special, is to answer to a higher calling. Pure mathematicians who believe in the reality of mathematical truths are monks of a secret order, open only to the initiated. In the case of high energy physics, all unification theories rely on sophisticated mathematics related to pure geometric structures: The belief is that nature’s ultimate code exists in the ethereal world of mathematical truths and that we can decipher it.

Echoing Richard Feynman’s spectacular commencement address admonishing against “cargo cult science,” Gleiser adds:

Recent experimental data has been devastating to such belief — no trace of supersymmetric particles, of extra dimensions, or of dark matter of any sort, all long-awaited signatures of unification physics. Maybe something will come up; to find, we must search. The trouble with unification in high energy physics is that you can always push it beyond the experimental range. “The Large Hadron Collider got to 7 TeV and found nothing? No problem! Who said nature should opt for the simplest versions of unification? Maybe it’s all happening at much higher energies, well beyond our reach.”

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of position. You can believe it until you die, and die happy. Or you can conclude that what we do best is construct approximate models of how nature works and that the symmetries we find are only descriptions of what really goes on. Perfection is too hard a burden to impose on nature.

People often see this kind of argument as defeatist, as coming from someone who got frustrated and gave up. (As in “He lost his faith.”) Big mistake. To search for simplicity is essential to what scientists do. It’s what I do. There are essential organizing principles in nature, and the laws we find are excellent ways to describe them. But the laws are many, not one. We’re successful pattern-seeking rational mammals. That alone is cause for celebration. However, let’s not confuse our descriptions and models with reality. We may hold perfection in our mind’s eye as a sort of ethereal muse. Meanwhile nature is out there doing its thing. That we manage to catch a glimpse of its inner workings is nothing short of wonderful. And that should be good enough.

Science writer Amanda Gefter takes issue with one particular manifestation of our propensity for oversimplification — the notion of the universe. She writes:

Physics has a time-honored tradition of laughing in the face of our most basic intuitions. Einstein’s relativity forced us to retire our notions of absolute space and time, while quantum mechanics forced us to retire our notions of pretty much everything else. Still, one stubborn idea has stood steadfast through it all: the universe.

[…]

In recent years, however, the concept of a single shared spacetime has sent physics spiraling into paradox. The first sign that something was amiss came from Stephen Hawking’s landmark work in the 1970s showing that black holes radiate and evaporate, disappearing from the universe and purportedly taking some quantum information with them. Quantum mechanics, however, is predicated upon the principle that information can never be lost.

Gefter points to recent breakthroughs in physics that produced one particularly puzzling such paradox, known as the “firewall paradox,” solved by the idea that spacetime is divided not by horizons but by the reference frames of the observers, “as if each observer had his or her own universe.”

But the solution isn’t a multiverse theory:

Yes, there are multiple observers, and yes, any observer’s universe is as good as any other’s. But if you want to stay on the right side of the laws of physics, you can talk only about one at a time. Which means, really, that only one exists at a time. It’s cosmic solipsism.

Here, psychology, philosophy, and cosmology converge, for what such theories suggest is what we already know about the human psyche — as I’ve put it elsewhere, the stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. Gefter concludes:

Adjusting our intuitions and adapting to the strange truths uncovered by physics is never easy. But we may just have to come around to the notion that there’s my universe and there’s your universe — but there’s no such thing as the universe.

Biological anthropologist Nina Jablonski points to the notion of race as urgently retirement-ready. Pointing out that it has always been a “vague and slippery concept,” she traces its origins to Hume and Kant — the first to divide humanity into geographic groupings called “races” — and the pseudoscientific seeds of racism this division planted:

Skin color, as the most noticeable racial characteristic, was associated with a nebulous assemblage of opinions and hearsay about the inherent natures of the various races. Skin color stood for morality, character, and the capacity for civilization; it became a meme.

Even though the atrocious “race science” that emerged in the 19th and early 20th century didn’t hold up — whenever scientists looked for actual sharp boundaries between groups, none came up — and race came to be something people identify themselves with as a shared category of experiences and social bonds, Jablonski argues that the toxic aftershocks of pseudoscience still poison culture:

Even after it has been shown that many diseases (adult-onset diabetes, alcoholism, high blood pressure, to name a few) show apparent racial patterns because people share similar environmental conditions, groupings by race are maintained. The use of racial self-categorization in epidemiological studies is defended and even encouraged. Medical studies of health disparities between “races” become meaningless when sufficient variables — such as differences in class, ethnic social practices, and attitudes — are taken into account.

Half a century after the ever-prescient Margaret Mead made the same point, Jablonski urges:

Race has a hold on history but no longer has a place in science. The sheer instability and potential for misinterpretation render race useless as a scientific concept. Inventing new vocabularies to deal with human diversity and inequity won’t be easy, but it must be done.

Psychologist Jonathan Gottschall, who has previously explored why storytelling is so central to the human experience, argues against the notion that there can be no science of art. With an eye to our civilization’s long struggle to define art, he writes:

We don’t even have a good definition, in truth, for what art is. In short, there’s nothing so central to human life that’s so incompletely understood.

Granted, Gottschall is only partly right, for there are some excellent definitions of art — take, for instance, Jeanette Winterson’s or Leo Tolstoy’s — but the fact that they don’t come from scientists only speaks to his larger point. He argues that rather than being unfit to shed light on the role of art in human life, science simply hasn’t applied itself to the problem adequately:

Scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It doesn’t constitute a research program.

If we want better answers to fundamental questions about art, science must jump into the game with both feet. Going it alone, humanities scholars can tell intriguing stories about the origins and significance of art, but they don’t have the tools to patiently winnow the field of competing ideas. That’s what the scientific method is for — separating the more accurate stories from the less accurate stories. But a strong science of art will require both the thick, granular expertise of humanities scholars and the clever hypothesis-testing of scientists. I’m not calling for a scientific takeover of the arts, I’m calling for a partnership.

[…]

The Delphic admonition “Know thyself” still rings out as the great prime directive of intellectual inquiry, and there will always be a gaping hole in human self-knowledge until we develop a science of art.

In a further testament to the zeitgeist-illuminating nature of the project, actor, author, and science-lover Alan Alda makes a passionate case for the same concept:

The trouble with truth is that not only is the notion of eternal, universal truth highly questionable, but simple, local truths are subject to refinement as well. Up is up and down is down, of course. Except under special circumstances. Is the North Pole up and the South Pole down? Is someone standing at one of the poles right-side up or upside-down? Kind of depends on your perspective.

When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.

[…]

This is not to say that nothing is true or that everything is possible — just that it might not be so helpful for things to be known as true for all time, without a disclaimer… I wonder — and this is just a modest proposal — whether scientific truth should be identified in a way acknowledging that it’s something we know and understand for now, and in a certain way.

[…]

Facts, it seems to me, are workable units, useful in a given frame or context. They should be as exact and irrefutable as possible, tested by experiment to the fullest extent. When the frame changes, they don’t need to be discarded as untrue but respected as still useful within their domain. Most people who work with facts accept this, but I don’t think the public fully gets it.

That’s why I hope for more wariness about implying we know something to be true or false for all time and for everywhere in the cosmos.

And indeed this elasticity of truth across time is at the heart of what I find to be the most beautiful and culturally essential contribution to the collection. As someone who believes that the stewardship of enduring ideas is at least as important as the genesis of new ones — not only because past ideas are the combinatorial building blocks of future ones but also because in order to move forward we always need a backdrop against which to paint the contrast of progress and improvement — I was most bewitched by writer Ian McEwan’s admonition against the arrogance of retiring any idea as an impediment to progress:

Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! A great and rich scientific tradition should hang onto everything it has. Truth is not the only measure. There are ways of being wrong that help others to be right. Some are wrong, but brilliantly so. Some are wrong but contribute to method. Some are wrong but help found a discipline. Aristotle ranged over the whole of human knowledge and was wrong about much. But his invention of zoology alone was priceless. Would you cast him aside? You never know when you might need an old idea. It could rise again one day to enhance a perspective the present cannot imagine. It would not be available to us if it were fully retired.

To appreciate McEwan’s point, one need only look at something like Bertrand Russell’s timely thoughts on boredom, penned in 1930 and yet astoundingly resonant with our present anxieties about the societal side effects of current technology. McEwan captures this beautifully:

Every last serious and systematic speculation about the world deserves to be preserved. We need to remember how we got to where we are, and we’d like the future not to retire us. Science should look to literature and maintain a vibrant living history as a monument to ingenuity and persistence. We won’t retire Shakespeare. Nor should we Bacon.

Complement This Idea Must Die, the entirety of which weaves a mind-stretching mesh of complementary and contradictory perspectives on our relationship with knowledge, with some stimulating answers to previous editions of Brockman’s annual question, exploring the only thing worth worrying about (2013), the single most elegant theory of how the world works (2012), and the best way to make ourselves smarter (2011).

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29 SEPTEMBER, 2014

Sam Harris on the Paradox of Meditation and How to Stretch Our Capacity for Everyday Self-Transcendence

By: Maria Popova

“Positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.”

Montaigne believed that meditation is the finest exercise of one’s mind and David Lynch uses it as an anchor of his creative integrity. Over the centuries, the ancient Eastern practice has had a variety of exports and permutations in the West, but at no point has it been more vital to our sanity and psychoemotional survival than amidst our current epidemic of hurrying and cult of productivity. It is remarkable how much we, as a culture, invest in the fitness of the body and how little, by and large, in the fitness of the spirit and the psyche — which is essentially what meditation provides.

In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (public library), neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris argued that cultivating the art of presence is our greatest gateway to true happiness. After his extensive, decades-long empirical romp through the world’s major religious traditions and humanity’s most potent psychedelic substances, Harris returns again and again to meditation as the holy grail of self-transcendence, the single most promising practice for slicing through the illusion of the ego to reveal what Jack Kerouac so memorably called “the Golden Eternity.”

Harris writes:

Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.

We know that the self is a social construct and the dissolution of its illusion, Harris argues, is the most valuable gift of meditation:

The conventional sense of self is an illusion [and] spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment. There are logical and scientific reasons to accept this claim, but recognizing it to be true is not a matter of understanding these reasons. Like many illusions, the sense of self disappears when closely examined, and this is done through the practice of meditation.

[…]

The feeling that we call “I” seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.

Such abolition may seem unnerving in the context of personal identity, something to which we are invariably attached, but as soon as we begin to understand just how mutable that identity is, dissolving the self illusion becomes not a punishing negation of free will but a promise of freedom. Harris writes:

The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment — the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one’s head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don’t believe such a homunculus exists — perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein — you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found — and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.

And yet, and yet, this is where the essential paradox of meditation arises — if meditation is about cultivating the capacity to accept the present moment exactly as it is, then the notion of a meditation practice or of mindfulness training, which implies progress toward a future goal, seems at odds with the very concept of such pure presence. Harris captures this elegantly:

We wouldn’t attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn’t feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. As we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one’s life. But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self — and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one’s apparent bondage in each moment.

The solution to the paradox, Harris suggests, is in approaching mindfulness not as a compulsively productive practice of self-improvement — there is the “self” creeping up again — but as a state of active presence with everyday life:

The ultimate wisdom of enlightenment, whatever it is, cannot be a matter of having fleeting experiences. The goal of meditation is to uncover a form of well-being that is inherent to the nature of our minds. It must, therefore, be available in the context of ordinary sights, sounds, sensations, and even thoughts. Peak experiences are fine, but real freedom must be coincident with normal waking life.

He cautions against treating meditation as another to-do item:

Those who begin to practice in the spirit of gradualism often assume that the goal of self-transcendence is far away, and they may spend years overlooking the very freedom that they yearn to realize.

Reflecting on his training with the Burmese spiritual master Sayadaw U Pandita, who teaches meditation as an “explicitly goal-oriented” practice — mindfulness is approached not as freedom from the self illusion in the present moment but as a means of attaining the “cessation” of that illusion in the future — Harris writes:

[This approach] encourages confusion at the outset regarding the nature of the problem one is trying to solve. It is true, however, that striving toward the distant goal of enlightenment (as well as the nearer goal of cessation) can lead one to practice with an intensity that might otherwise be difficult to achieve. I never made more effort than I did when practicing under U Pandita. But most of this effort arose from the very illusion of bondage to the self that I was seeking to overcome. The model of this practice is that one must climb the mountain so that freedom can be found at the top. But the self is already an illusion, and that truth can be glimpsed directly, at the mountain’s base or anywhere else along the path. One can then return to this insight, again and again, as one’s sole method of meditation — thereby arriving at the goal in each moment of actual practice.

Despite the paradoxes of the practice, however, Harris considers it our most promising access point to a fulfilling spiritual life:

It is very difficult to imagine someone’s not being able to see her reflection in a window even after years of looking — but that is what happens when a person begins most forms of spiritual practice. Most techniques of meditation are, in essence, elaborate ways for looking through the window in the hope that if one only sees the world in greater detail, an image of one’s true face will eventually appear. Imagine a teaching like this: If you just focus on the trees swaying outside the window without distraction, you will see your true face. Undoubtedly, such an instruction would be an obstacle to seeing what could otherwise be seen directly. Almost everything that has been said or written about spiritual practice, even most of the teachings one finds in Buddhism, directs a person’s gaze to the world beyond the glass, thereby confusing matters from the very beginning.

But one must start somewhere. And the truth is that most people are simply too distracted by their thoughts to have the selflessness of consciousness pointed out directly. And even if they are ready to glimpse it, they are unlikely to understand its significance.

Harris reframes the paradox with an admonition and an assurance:

Embracing the contents of consciousness in any moment is a very powerful way of training yourself to respond differently to adversity. However, it is important to distinguish between accepting unpleasant sensations and emotions as a strategy — while covertly hoping that they will go away — and truly accepting them as transitory appearances in consciousness. Only the latter gesture opens the door to wisdom and lasting change. The paradox is that we can become wiser and more compassionate and live more fulfilling lives by refusing to be who we have tended to be in the past. But we must also relax, accepting things as they are in the present, as we strive to change ourselves.

[…]

Happiness and suffering, however extreme, are mental events. The mind depends upon the body, and the body upon the world, but everything good or bad that happens in your life must appear in consciousness to matter. This fact offers ample opportunity to make the best of bad situations — changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world — but it also allows a person to be miserable even when all the material and social conditions for happiness have been met. During the normal course of events, your mind will determine the quality of your life.

In a conversation with Tim Ferriss on the altogether excellent The Tim Ferriss Show, Harris argues that the mindfulness meditation cultivates — a quality of mind that allows you to pay attention to whatever arises without being lost in thought — is the most useful way to explore the phenomenon of self-transcendence “without believing anything on insufficient evidence.” He adds:

The human nervous system is plastic in a very important way — which means your experience of the world can be radically transformed. You are tending who you were yesterday by virtue of various habit patterns and physiological homeostasis and other things that are keeping you very recognizable to yourself, but it’s possible to have a very different experience… It’s possible to do it through a deliberate form of training, like meditation, and I think it’s crucial to do — because we all want to be as happy and as fulfilled and as free of pointless suffering as can possibly be. And all of our suffering, and all of our unhappiness, is a product of how our minds are in every moment. So if there’s a way to use the mind itself to improve one’s capacity for moment-to-moment wellbeing — which I’m convinced there is — then this should be potentially of interest to everybody.

Milton, it turns out, was not only philosophically but also neuropsychologically right when he penned his famous verse: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

If you are looking for a good place to start with meditation, or would like slow-burning fuel for your existing practice, I highly recommend Tara Brach, who has truly transformed my life — her teachings and guided meditations are available as a reliably excellent free podcast, and her four-part primer on meditation is indispensable for beginners. (If you are moved and enriched by her generously offered free teachings, consider making a donation — Brach’s work, like my own, is supported by direct patronage, and I am a proud monthly donor.)

Harris has also written about how to begin a meditation practice himself.

Waking Up, which you can sample further here, is a superb read in its entirety, quite possibly the best thing written on this ecosystem of spiritual subjects since Alan Watts’s treatise on the taboo against knowing who you really are.

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15 SEPTEMBER, 2014

Sam Harris on Spirituality without Religion, Happiness, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence

By: Maria Popova

“Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”

Nietzsche’s famous proclamation that “God is dead” is among modern history’s most oft-cited aphorisms, and yet as is often the case with its ilk, such quotations often miss the broader context in a way that bespeaks the lazy reductionism with which we tend to approach questions of spirituality today. Nietzsche himself clarified the full dimension of his statement six years later, in a passage from The Twilight of Idols, where he explained that “God” simply signified the supersensory realm, or “true world,” and wrote: “We have abolished the true world. What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? Oh no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.”

Indeed, this struggle to integrate the sensory and the supersensory, the physical and the metaphysical, has been addressed with varying degrees of sensitivity by some of history’s greatest minds — reflections like Carl Sagan on science and religion, Flannery O’Connor on dogma, belief, and the difference between religion and faith, Alan Lightman on science and spirituality, Albert Einstein on whether scientists pray, Ada Lovelace on the interconnectedness of everything, Alan Watts on the difference between belief and faith, C.S. Lewis on the paradox of free will, and Jane Goodall on science and spirit.

In Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (public library | IndieBound), philosopher, neuroscientist, and mindful skeptic Sam Harris offers a contemporary addition to this lineage of human inquiry — an extraordinary and ambitious masterwork of such integration between science and spirituality, which Harris himself describes as “by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives.” Or, perhaps most aptly, an effort “to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion.”

Harris begins by recounting an experience he had at age sixteen — a three-day wilderness retreat designed to spur spiritual awakening of some sort, which instead left young Harris feeling like the contemplation of the existential mystery in the presence of his own company was “a source of perfect misery.” This frustrating experience became “a sufficient provocation” that launched him into a lifelong pursuit of the kinds of transcendent experiences that gave rise to the world’s major spiritual traditions, examining them instead with a scientist’s vital blend of skepticism and openness and a philosopher’s aspiration to be “scrupulously truthful.”

Harris writes:

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others… Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved.

Noting that the entirety of our experience, as well as our satisfaction with that experience, is filtered through our minds — “If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life — you won’t enjoy any of it.” — Harris sets out to reconcile the quest to achieve one’s goals with a deeper longing, a recognition, perhaps, that presence is far more rewarding than productivity. He writes:

Most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.

Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.

This message, of course, is nothing new — half a century ago, Alan Watts made a spectacular case for it, building on millennia of Eastern philosophy. But what makes our era singular and this discourse particularly timely, Harris points out, is that there is now a growing body of scientific research substantiating these ancient intuitions.

Harris recounts one of his own early empirical dabblings into how physical experience precipitates metaphysical awareness — taking the drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA), commonly known as Ecstasy, with a close friend — which profoundly shifted his sense of the human mind’s potential. Remarking on the “moral and emotional clarity” of the experience, Harris describes it not as a muddling of consciousness but as a homecoming to truth:

It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward… I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes.

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal — and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love — I love you because . . . — now made no sense at all.

The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all… The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. Love was — as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages — a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?

Such a formulation calls to mind the sentiment at the heart of Tolstoy’s letters to Gandhi (where, one can assume based on the time period, there was no Ecstasy involved) — a testament to the immutability of this basic human truth. For Harris, it laid the foundation for what would become his life’s work:

I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.

This sentiment, it turns out, is one shared by about a quarter of the population, who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” – a seemingly paradoxical proposition that, Harris argues, captures the crux of our ancient struggle for integration:

Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.

Even the term “spiritual” itself comes so loaded with cultural baggage — from self-help books to off-the-deep-end kooks — that its usage seems to warrant a special kind of self-conscious, almost apologetic justification, and Harris offers an elegant one:

There is no other term — apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative — with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

Much of our unease with nonreligious spirituality and the integration of science and spirit, Harris argues, comes from the blinders that narrow the view of both camps. Scientists “generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind,” while New Age thinkers “idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics” — a fault line that leaves us with the lose-lose choice “between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science.”

A lucid approach to integration, Harris suggests, requires the acknowledgment of some “well-established truths about the human mind,” ones revealed equally through meditation, in the scriptures of the major religious traditions, and by neuroscience — the illusory nature of what we call the “self,” the notion that how we pay attention shapes our “reality,” the idea that happiness can be taught and its psychological detractors uprooted. Harris writes:

Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience — self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light — constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.

[…]

The feeling that we call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is — the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself — can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are…

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes deeply transformative insights about the nature of one’s own consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and related fields.

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines — such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

Perhaps Harris’s most central focus in the book is the art of presence as a gateway to true happiness — something Alan Watts so eloquently championed more than half a century ago but, crucially, without the advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology that make Harris’s case so compelling. Reflecting on how the hamster wheel of achievement and approval can cheat us of the very happiness with which we so often equate it, Harris writes:

Even in the best of circumstances, happiness is elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside. And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment… Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain?

[…]

If there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying one’s desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed.

[…]

We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of better) than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change?

Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such questions could well be “yes.” And a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. Those who have never tasted such peace of mind might view these assertions as highly suspect. Nevertheless, it is a fact that a condition of selfless well-being is there to be glimpsed in each moment.

In the remainder of the altogether spectacular Waking Up, Harris goes on to outline the practices, mechanisms, and psychoemotional tools that enable us to access that “selfless well-being,” exploring such dimensional themes as the frontier of the conscious and the unconscious mind, the elusive but highly teachable skills of happiness, and the nature of consciousness. Complement it with Alan Lightman’s beautiful meditation on science and spirituality.

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