The ‘Self’ You Can’t Find with Sam Harris

Sam Harris (0:00)

Every time you look for this feeling of self, it disappears.

Elizabeth Koch (0:05)

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Koch. What's a perception box? It's this invisible mental box that each one of us lives inside, built from the material of our beliefs, life experiences, and the meaning we've made out of those experiences. You could think of it as a kind of reality filter that's constantly shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. This podcast explores how, although the walls of this box are always present, they can expand in moments of curiosity, awe, and wonder, or contract in response to fear, anxiety, and anger. In each episode, we invite experts to share how to create lasting shifts in our perception. I'd like to introduce our esteemed host, Heather Berlin, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Christof Koch, Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.

This week, our guest is Sam Harris.

Through the lens of the perception box, what we experience as me, the one controlling events, may be an illusion the mind is constructing in real-time, training ourselves to see that construction process, can transform how we relate to challenges, how resilient we are to stress, and how to hold our fears with compassion rather than resistance.

Heather Berlin (1:35)

Christof, I want to ask you, when you look at yourself or you think about yourself, or what you're directly experiencing right now, how does that work in your mind? What does your mind do?

Christof Koch (1:48)

Well, it thinks that it strongly believes like most people, there's a person sitting inside my head, a little guy, a monk, called Christof, in my case, looking out at the world.

That person is a thinker, is a carrier of my thoughts. It's, that's a person who we experience. That person carries all my behavioral traits and all my autobiographical memories. And that person really essentially remains the same throughout my life.

Heather Berlin (2:14)

So your subjective sense is that there's this unique, unified self within you. Looking out at the world and experiencing it.

Christof Koch (2:22)

Yes. And then of course it goes hand in hand with most of us, with this voice inside my head. You know, I talk to myself, this is running commentary. And sometimes it gets really annoying and then you want to shut it up. So you go into states of flow like running or any other activity where you get totally absorbed by your work, right? Whether it's mathematics or writing code or whatever.

We lose our sense of self. But that's rare.

Heather Berlin (2:45)

But enjoyable.

Christof Koch (2:46)

Very enjoyable.

Heather Berlin (2:47)

We have someone here who is an expert on all things self and mind. So welcome to the podcast, Sam Harris.

Sam Harris (2:53)

Yeah. Great to see you guys.

Heather Berlin (2:54)

When you think of, when you look at yourself via your sort of direct experience right now, what do you think your mind is doing? What does it feel like and what do you think is going on?

Sam Harris (3:05)

I think the brain for most people is doing three things. It's forming a representation of the world. It's forming a representation of the body in the world.

Then for most people, this is going to be the self where we're going to deconstruct and ultimately from my point of view, deconstruct as an illusion. There's this third representation of a subject interior to the body. Most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies paradox. They might know if they're scientifically sophisticated, they know that they're identical to their bodies.

Certainly, a physicalist view of the mind would say, the mind is what the brain is doing or the mind is what the entire central nervous system is doing. When you're actually talking about the first-person experience of most people, that's not what it is. People don't feel merely coterminous with their bodies. They feel like there's a subject in the head that is this unchanging locus of conscious awareness and conscious will, and it's the place from which the spotlight of attention can be moved, and those movements can be voluntary or involuntary. When you ask someone to meditate and to look for this thing they're calling a self, the starting point for everyone is to, whether they close their eyes or not, but it is even heightened when you close your eyes, you feel like, okay, now I'm this interior witness to the world and to the body in the world, and there is this strangely paradoxical relationship to the body, whereas you sort of know it's you, but if you have a pain in your knee, the you, the conscious subject has a relationship to that pain, you're not liking it, you're wanting it to go away, and it's everything points back to this feeling of being a kind of passenger in the body that witnesses everything, that is the one that is having experience, appropriating experience moment to moment, and it's the thinker of your thoughts. So in addition to the flow of thought, there's this sense that there's this author of the thoughts. In addition to the next intention that arises to reach for a glass, say, there's the feeling that there's a one who intends. And again, subjectively, it's not felt to be the whole body, it's felt to be this kind of inner witness, and it's that inner witness when you look for it closely enough is not findable. And in that not finding, you can actually discover its absence.