u/DrBrianKeating

Pulling out a specific argument from a Sam Harris conversation that I think is worth scrutinizing here:

Harris' claim: consciousness is uniquely immune to skeptical attack because every act of doubting is itself a conscious experience. We could be brains in vats, in a simulation, on an alien supercomputer — the seeming-to-be-happening IS consciousness. He calls it "the ground truth."

This is roughly Descartes' move with cogito, but Harris extends it: even the *illusion* of consciousness would itself be a conscious experience, so the regress closes immediately.

Two questions for the sub:

Is this just a restatement of the cogito, or does Harris add something? He seems to think he does — specifically by arguing that you don't need to defend "I think" to get the result, only "something seems to be happening."
Where does this leave illusionists like Frankish and Dennett, who argue consciousness itself is the illusion? Harris would presumably say: the illusion-of-consciousness is still consciousness, full stop. Does the illusionist have a reply?

Sharing a clip from the Sam Harris conversation that ran on the channel in 2024. Sam articulates a distinction that I keep returning to:

— Consciousness can't be an illusion. Every act of doubting it is itself a conscious experience, so the regress closes immediately. He calls it "the ground truth."

— Free will is a different category entirely. Not illusory in the same Cartesian sense — incoherent. The concept doesn't survive any consistent metaphysical commitment about causality.

There's a thought-experiment Sam describes — a predictive machine that could disabuse a subject of even the FEELING of free will — that I think is the most interesting move he makes in the whole conversation. Brian pushes back with an infinite-regress objection.

Worth a watch if you missed it the first time around.

Avi Loeb: The Evidence for Aliens Is Being Ignored

Sam Harris: "consciousness is the one thing in the universe that can't be an illusion" — does this argument hold?

Sam Harris on the asymmetry between consciousness and free will (clip from the 2024 conversation)

Joscha Bach: Why Mind Uploading Probably Won't Work

A neuroscientist's 15-year-old prediction about GPS and dementia just came true. She says ChatGPT is next.