A place to discuss Sam Harris and to have difficult conversations with civility.
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Exercise and be social when you don’t feel like it. Be grateful. Change the code. SAVED YOU A CLICK
And be conscious of your thoughts so you don’t get lost in them (which is a precursor to being able to “change the code,” but I think is really a separate step)
Person: I’m depressed
Sam: no you’re not, just think better.
I say this with love. It’s actually good advise
Yeah, obviously any 2 minute answer to 'how to combat a severe mental illness' is going to be a bit trite. Gratitude exercises can be pretty useful. Ultimately though you do need to be doing some sort of behavioral approach (which I assume is the 3rd of the options Harris mentioned; in this clip he only covered pharmacotherapy and cognitive therapy).
Yeah I have personally taken some of what Sam says on the matter and used it in my life to success. The guys knows what he’s talking about
Not really. If you're depressed the best 2 minute advice is getting yourself into therapy. It's that simple. If you cannot afford therapy then you need to read 1 self help book a week until something clicks in your brain.
I kind of agree with the therapy bit, strongly disagree about the self help book thing. but that’s obviously not the context here. The question is what could YOU (Sam) say to someone to help them.
Oh, well I think it's hard to distill good advice down to a sound byte or two, for all people.
Yeah, that would have been a sensible caveat to begin with.
Sometime I wonder if Sam is secretly a computer programmer.
I have a hard time reconciling the statement in this clip of 'changing the code', using gratitude to help interrupt negative thoughts for example, with Sam's position on free will. This type of thought exercise (our ability to chose freely to interrupt our own negative thoughts) seems to contradict Sam's belief in determinism and our lack of free will. What am I missing?
Determinism doesn't mean you can't exert your will to change your thoughts. It only means you were determined to do so, and couldn't have done otherwise. Your mind's decision to exert its will, and the effects that has, are all part of the predetermined series of events.
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I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding here. Determinism is not the same thing as fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that we each have a fate or destiny which can't be avoided, no matter what we do. Determinism is just the theory that our thoughts and actions are determined by prior events.
With determinism, making changes to your diet and exercise-regime is understood to be part of the causal process which will cause you to be healthy or not, will determine whether you'll be homeless or not, etc. With fatalism, if it is your destiny to be homeless, you will end up homeless regardless of what you think, say or do.
Here's a handy infographic with more info - https://i.redd.it/ekohekbelc541.png
Doesn't it amount to the same thing though?
No. In a fatalistic universe the script of your life is already written out. Nothing that happens during it will change its direction.
In a deterministic universe there is no pre-written script. There's your genes ofcourse that have been pre-determined but other than that the "script" of your life is more like a log file containing all of your past experiences. No matter how determined you were to go to work tomorrow by bike - when you wake up in the morning and see it's pouring rain outside you're going to change your mind and take the car anyways. This isn't something you as the author of your decisions chose to do. There was input from the outside world combined with your pre-existing preferences of not getting to work soaking wet that made you change your mind. No matter how many times you rewind the clock of your life and go back to that same morning you're helplessly going to choose the car every single time.
It's a good question and I think, yes, in a way it does amount to the same thing. According to both worldviews, your future is already decided and not by you. Whether it is a god/fate deciding the final outcome of your life, or it is the causal chain in a materialistic universe, your future has already been determined. Perhaps then the fact that we don't know what exactly has been determined necessitates that we live as if we have free will. Stephen Hawking said something to that effect:
Even though we have no choice but to conduct ourselves in this way, for many people occasionally acknowledging the truth of determinism is helpful for dissolving feelings of hate, guilt, anger and also pride.
Lack of free will doesn’t mean you don’t make decisions . You still make decisions. You still make choices .
That’s the simplest way to understand it.
You only made those decisions and choices because prior events caused you to make them. You really had no say in the matter. So are you really making your own decisions? I mean you didn't really make them, they just happened.
That would be a lot more to unpack lol
Correct, ultimately “you” didn’t have a say in the matter as the factors in your decision ultimately weren’t authored by “you”. There’s that quote, “a man can do what he wants, be he cannot want what he wants”. Sort of like that.
But still yes, “you” made those decisions. They did happen. You had the experience of making a choice, and you were able to decide something.
But now we are at this idea of “you”, and that is another long conversation .
A self driving car makes decisions based on external data, does it have free will?
Humans are not that much different, preprogrammed to make certain decisions based on data available.
Except if this was true we'd never invent anything or discover anything new.
You are the system itself. It might be electromagnetism and gravity that drive 100% of our actions throughout our lives but we are identical to the entities that are being buffeted by these forces. We don't need to consider our neurochemistry and the impact of surrounding inputs to decide our next action. It should have no impact on our decision making.
I think I understand this, but if it has no impact on our decision making, then what's the point in knowing it?
It impacts other things like whether you should want retributive punishments for criminals. If they don't have free will, only rehabilitation makes sense or locking away comfortably if rehabilitation is impossible.
But as far as setting goals for example, if you view your future self as a being that is subject to environment, you will be better at executing goals since you don't view your future self as a being that can simply exert free will to overcome environmental influence.
However, even that latter point does not require thinking about free will vs determinism, though it's a handy paradigm.
Think of everything in the past as being the result of determinism. However, since the future is not known, your choices will influence the outcome and therefore matter. the illusion of free will only seems to exists as the idea that you could have chosen to think or act differently. So with regard to the past, let go, but with regard to the unknown outcome of your current chooses today it makes sense to give it your best effort.
When someone tells you to do something that you find valuable and you decide to do it; you've heard information external to you that you don't have control over, and you're predisposed to listen to certain advice and often act on it, the disposition is also not in your control. You exerting your will feels like in your control but every single step preceding it isn't.
Determinism, the most meaningless and useless concept in existence.
I kind of agree. I think a lot of people who have issues with it don't really understand what it's saying. They think it implies a lot more than it does.
Eeer, I have bad news for you... At least if we are talking hard determinism. But really, anyone arguing for hard determinism has to tie themselves into a knot to get around the basic incompatibilities with the human experience, or smaller but no less insolvable problems like morality. Sam's arguments in this area are weak and unconvincing.
Now, if you were to say you believe in soft determinism (people have a choice, but are constrained by external and internal factors) then I'd happily agree. Unfortunately, soft determinism pretty much equals a non deterministic world view.
Think of it like this perhaps: you couldn’t possibly have chosen it unless you were first shown or otherwise made aware of the possibility. Perhaps you would’ve struck on it through some great stroke of inspiration. Once you were shown and became convinced of the worthwhile nature of attempting to reproduce the effect yourself, would you have a meaningful choice but to test it out for yourself? If not, I think one is rather bound to admit that a question of will in such circumstances hangs on how one believes one comes to be convinced of things.
Ah, lightbulb! The source (or cause) of the idea to use gratitude to interrupt a series of negative thoughts is me having listened to that SH audio clip. So when I make the conscious decision to use this technique, it's not free will, it's determined based on that specific experience combined with all other prior experiences. Thank you for that perspective.
Yeah that's the ticket - cheers!
His take on free will is simplistic and laughable.
If you experience that you have free will, then you effectively have free will. Act accordingly. SH can worry about causality of elementary particles, but it has almost no useful bearing on our lives.
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Consciousness and subjective experience are actually more fundament to your existence as they don't need to be wired in from an external world into your mind. They literally are your mind.
Radical materialists don't like to think about this truth, but it does take more of a leap of faith to trust that the external world exists, than it does to trust that your own subjective conscious mind exists.
We just take that leap because it turns out to be extremely useful to do so when wanting to live a fulfilling life. Reducing your experience of agency to the cause and effect of impossible to see particle interactions adds very little utility, if any to our lives so most thinkers move beyond it without endless thought experiments that don't map to lived experience.
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Can you live your life as though you have free will? If you can then why spend time and energy doubting this clearly compelling emergent phenomena?
When you look at objects that are red, do you constantly remind your self that color isn't real... but just what our brain and mind use to construct a useful model out of different energy photons hitting our eyes?
I think it means, that if a deterministic state of being has lead you to listening to this clip:
It may be the nudge to push you over a cliff.
It may be a tug in an eternal tug-of-war.
It may be a broadband signal that you have yet been equipped to receive.
I'm personally entrapped in that tug of war. I keep realising, in my own personal life, and now able to observe, that the average human uses their own psyche to set the bar for concept development.
In other words, no matter how smart you are, you will at least assume you can keep pace with the other smartest people in the room. At least in the Sam Harris club.
You are not alone. It doesn't make sense on the instinctive, common sense level.
Submission Statement - This link directs you to a short segment from Sam Harris' appearance on Tom Bilyeu's podcast. Sam gives his advice for people sliding toward depression due to a lack of meaning/purpose.
This was maddeningly vague. Was honestly looking for some good advice from Sam.
It's not really vague, just simple.
Sit down and start listing all the things that could be worse, empirically. So any bone that isn't broken is a plus, any relationship not broken is a plus, any pain not felt is a plus, any thought that is coherent is a plus, vision is a plus, speech is a plus, etc... Start from basics and keep going.
This overwhelms the left brain with evidence that the depression narrative is logically flawed, because you can logically imagine it worse. As bad as you're feeling, it would be even worse of any of these variables changed for the worse.
The trouble is this: It won't necessarily or at least immediately change your emotional/physical state of depression/anxiety, though it may help reinterpret the emotional/physical sensations with a more positive narrative. Also, it doesn't necessarily help the "my life is fine and I'm a shit that doesn't deserve it!" thoughts.
Good message.
What always amazes me about the hatred and animosity that Jordan Peterson gets. He has helped millions of people bring order to their lives and is ridiculed as some sort of white supremacist because many of those he’s helped are white males.
Everyone deserves support and guidance that helps people become productive humans.
I don’t think people ridicule Jordan Peterson for the self help. It’s more about the other stuff he says.
You are very confused about why he is ridiculed. It has nothing to do with him helping white males. That is absurd.
You make a compelling argument.
I like that component of Peterson's message too, much of his self-help advice and advice for alcoholics is just basically objectively good stuff. The problem comes when people who have been helped by Peterson then absorb more of his political perspective without thinking through which aspects they agree/don't agree with, which I've also seen a lot of unfortunately. People seem to do that for public intellectuals generally though so I wouldn't say it's necessarily a Peterson-specific problem
It always amazes me that Peterson isn't universally regarded with utter contempt. And he isn't often "ridiculed as some sort of white supremacist". What he's ridiculed for is being a self-aggrandizing narcissist, a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual charlatan, and a muddled, rambling, incoherent nincompoop.
You seem well adjusted.
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No
I’m sorry, I’ve upset you! Here: “Something something Jesus lobsters Patreon link buy my book.” Is that better? Are we all friends now?
Hahaha. "Something something Jesus lobsters" ... I'm pretty sure that could be a direct quote. Great characterization.
Well, you see, it's all very complicated. I could explain it to you, but it would probably take me about 40 years - and I'm very good at explaining things.
I don’t think the ridicule comes because he helped white males. It sounds so melodramatically wanting to be a victim
I don't want to come across as criticizing Sam, but I feel like he's just so much better at being negative. Whenever he's asked a question like this I get the sense that he's not really into it. I feel like he wakes up every day wanting to go after Religion, or Trump, to really have it out over the biggest questions of the day. Intellectual Pyrotechnics that light up the sky. Transitioning to some banal suffering is a bit of a downer. Maybe its me who's not into it.
I felt the same about the Hitch. He would be challenged on "secular meaning" and awkwardly talk about familial love or the beauty of science, but I was always waiting for him to get back to the good stuff: accusing his opponents of being stupid or immoral.
Yeah I couldn’t feel more different than you lol. Having dived deeply into his meditation app the last month, he is far more grounded and positive than you’d think.
Agreed. It's so odd that fans of Sam Harris just want him to do the "god stuff". Like he's a monkey used for entertainment.
So many here have echoed those thoughts. I have found Sam to be 10x more interesting after reading about everything but the god stuff.
Exactly. I would say his life project has been examining consciousness whether that be through meditation or neuroscience. It is very clear from his meditation app that it’s by far his primary concern.
He is. He’s actually so dedicated to making peoples lives better in the way that he made his life better, that he developed an app for it and gives it away for free to anyone that can’t afford it. No questions asked
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for this, you’re just stating your opinion.
That being said, I don’t agree. He is actually very dedicated to answering questions like these and helping people reframe negativity in a way that makes me think he has reframed negativity in his own life to some success. His waking up app is entirely dedicated to this and he gives it away for free to anyone who needs it. In the app he doesn’t talk about religion or politics at all, he just talks about the benefits of mindfulness and takes you on guided meditations.
Also things like this
Yeah exactly. From my perspective its very clear that Sam is trying to unpack the fundamentals and the mechanism of negative thoughts, and how to spot and be aware of them. He states that they cannot be forced away, but by recognising them you can identify them for just what they are, bad thoughts.
I formed my opinion on this years ago but now that the apps been out a while I have to admit I should listen myself or defer to those who do.
Where in the app have you found this side of his? Anywhere in particular?
The whole app lol. The practice and the theory. If you want really specific, check out the Metta Meditation lessons.
I’ve been holding off on the loving kindness section, but I’ll check it out soon. Thanks.
When I’m in a bad mood or negative mental state I am receptive to anger, hostility, sadness, etc.
When I’m in a good mood and feeling positive or even optimistic, I’m more receptive to the hopes, well-wishes, and love from others.
We’re all emotional animals haha
Sounds like it's just what you want them to talk about.
Now, I'm aware this is a sure-fire route to downvotes, but this is a JP moment.
Its literally the part of what JP says that does hold value and is worth listening to.
Stop listening to Sam’s shitty podcast and you’ll feel better instantly.