Waking Up, by Sam Harris, is a book about how to think about yourself. It’s a book that almost no one I know has read, and it delves into subject matter that is extremely precarious, but also pertinent. It is far from the first introspective book ever written, but it is uniquely powerful, as it completely dismantles the universal concept of the human self.
The closest thing I've found to a modern day bible.
Waking Up provides an essential component to the understanding of internal thoughts, and to the tearing down of barriers that keep out truth and cling to lies. It is essential to fully embracing rationality and evidence, and to fully rejecting illusions of the mind.
It is obvious to me that faith, religious or otherwise, is a massive impediment to objectively evaluating and understanding the world. Faith and evidence are hardly compatible, often stepping on each other’s toes. It is extremely difficult, for instance, to firmly believe humans possess immortal souls, while simultaneously being open to newfound truth. There are many practical problems with faith, but the soul problem is perhaps the most destructive. Many people would never give a second thought to something so universally accepted, but it doesn’t require extensive reflection to render this concept almost entirely ridiculous.
It is obvious to me that faith, religious or otherwise, is a massive impediment to objectively evaluating and understanding the world. Faith and evidence are hardly compatible, often stepping on each other’s toes. It is extremely difficult, for instance, to firmly believe humans possess immortal souls, while simultaneously being open to newfound truth. There are many practical problems with faith, but the soul problem is perhaps the most destructive. Many people would never give a second thought to something so universally accepted, but it doesn’t require extensive reflection to render this concept almost entirely ridiculous.
But why is the soul so bad? Why would it be destructive for people to just have differing opinions? Well for one, belief in souls causes dramatic misconceptions about the formation of human life, and thus has drastic consequences on views about abortion. “Life begins at conception” is a statement rooted in faith, not in science. We cannot pretend life is so simple that a “switch” goes from all the way off to all the way on at the moment of conception. Life surely exists on a spectrum, as evidenced by the fact that humans don’t consider bugs, bacteria, or animals to be living equals (or equal to each other for that matter), despite the fact that they are all alive. There are varying degrees of life, and they warrant varying degrees of consideration. Human embryos are obviously not the same as bacteria, but they’re not the same as fully formed humans either.
Understanding souls and the complex beginnings of human life is important, but it’s not the utility of this information that ultimately makes it worth knowing: it’s the simple fact that it is true, and truth is what gives us the best chance to make useful decisions. In Waking Up, Harris talks about conscious experience, present-moment fulfillment, and the absurdity of soul arithmetic. Most people operate under the assumption that they have a permanent soul, but studies on split-brain procedures, head injuries, and brain diseases all produce enormous evidence to suggest that the concept of the soul is complete and utter nonsense.
“What we’re being asked to consider is that: you damage one part of the brain and the mind, subjectivity is lost, damage another and yet more is lost. Yet if you damage the whole thing at death, we can rise off the brain with all our faculties intact, recognizing Grandma, and speaking English.”
Complexity of “Mystical” Language
In Waking Up, Sam Harris makes an attempt, and reflects on an attempt, to clarify certain questions and discussion points about the mind, especially pertaining to illusions and fallacies. The book covers a tremendous range of intricate topics, taking well-known categories and constructs and fragmenting them into their component parts. The goals of Waking Up are fairly ambitious, so in order to avoid numerous potential misconceptions, Harris makes an assortment of qualifying arguments, fleshing out anecdote after anecdote in order to give his viewpoints exceeding clarity. There are significant connotations associated with many of the words he uses, mainly from a religious context, but the book attempts to use these religiously associated terms to explain non-religious concepts while acknowledging the likelihood that they will be misconstrued.
The analysis of language, which is used as a preface, is one that takes many different shapes and forms, and exists within various intellectual realms and arguments. Harris argues that religion is a “suitcase term”, which he describes to mean that it has a broad spectrum of possible interpretations. Here is how Harris defines “suitcase term” within this context:
Waking Up is built on a foundation of deconstructed language barriers, which is increasingly necessary when discussing polarizing subjects like religion and spirituality. Harris navigates through thorny issues, essentially playing a game of Operation with his words. There is enormous potential for misunderstanding and emotional response from a reader perspective, so the preliminary statements about the possible confusion of vocabulary words seem adequate to say the very least.
Misinterpretation of words is an obvious problem. It doesn’t seem to be addressed nearly as much as it should, but Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness, and Antifragile, is an example of another notable intellectual who believes in making this point.
Language misconceptions are always relevant, but even more so when debating lightning-rod subjects like religion, spirituality, and of course, politics.
Lenses of comprehension
The complexity problem with words transitions into a complexity problem with just about all of the topics addressed in Waking Up. The problem is also highly pertinent in politics, as many voters suffer from a lack of understanding of words and are too unwilling or lazy to derive meaning from them. As a result, voters are often less informed than they ought to be. Additionally, there can be a lack of complexity when analyzing issues, so even if the words of the politicians are understood in full, the voters still may be misguided in the sense that they do not see the entire picture of each issue. Going beyond that, there is a need for complex understanding when determining which issues are relevant, so even if a voter were to fully grasp the words they are taking in, and then fully grasp the concepts of each issue, they may still fail to comprehend the relevance or hierarchal significance of the political spectrum.
Problems with complex understanding manifest way down in the neurological functions of the brain. Harris begins his analysis of the brain by outlining the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, tying back to the disassembling of religiously fueled misconceptions. The mind is far more complex than we tend to realize, as human beings have much more going on inside their heads than what can possibly be recognized. There are a lot of questions that are impossible for humans to simply intuit the answers to. Harris explains that the conscious mind is aware of what we see and is responsible for senses and perceptions to some extent, but at the same time there are always underlying subconscious influences that alter the way we think, acting as lenses on our thoughts. There is always a screen in front of the images on a TV, and because of that, people with different settings of brightness and definition have different interpretations of what they are seeing. Just as Taleb says that different types of people think in different forms, people with different types of minds and experiences think and see in infinitely different ways.
If it were true that human beings produced predictable outputs solely based on observable information, then it would be conceivable to predict emotions like anxiety, fear, etc. entirely based on physiological measurements. This is not the case however, as much of the conscious experience is unable to be reduced to sheer mathematical measures of neurological function, meaning that someone who is showing completely normal brain activity could still complain of suffering from anxiety or fear, and there would be no possible way to invalidate their suffering. The implication here is that there are objective measures of emotion, like brain activity, cortisol levels, sweat, and more, but the subjective component of a person will always present the lurking possibility of proving contradictory to the subject’s physiological outputs. Two people with the exact same measurements do not share the exact same experience.
In Waking Up, Sam Harris makes an attempt, and reflects on an attempt, to clarify certain questions and discussion points about the mind, especially pertaining to illusions and fallacies. The book covers a tremendous range of intricate topics, taking well-known categories and constructs and fragmenting them into their component parts. The goals of Waking Up are fairly ambitious, so in order to avoid numerous potential misconceptions, Harris makes an assortment of qualifying arguments, fleshing out anecdote after anecdote in order to give his viewpoints exceeding clarity. There are significant connotations associated with many of the words he uses, mainly from a religious context, but the book attempts to use these religiously associated terms to explain non-religious concepts while acknowledging the likelihood that they will be misconstrued.
The analysis of language, which is used as a preface, is one that takes many different shapes and forms, and exists within various intellectual realms and arguments. Harris argues that religion is a “suitcase term”, which he describes to mean that it has a broad spectrum of possible interpretations. Here is how Harris defines “suitcase term” within this context:
“As I have pointed out on many occasions, ‘religion’ is a term like ‘sports’: Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (‘free solo’ rock climbing, street luge); some are safer but synonymous with violence (boxing, mixed martial arts); and some entail no more risk of serious injury than standing in the shower (bowling, badminton). To speak of ‘sports’ as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do, or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common, apart from breathing? Not much. The term ‘religion’ is scarcely more useful.”
Waking Up is built on a foundation of deconstructed language barriers, which is increasingly necessary when discussing polarizing subjects like religion and spirituality. Harris navigates through thorny issues, essentially playing a game of Operation with his words. There is enormous potential for misunderstanding and emotional response from a reader perspective, so the preliminary statements about the possible confusion of vocabulary words seem adequate to say the very least.
Misinterpretation of words is an obvious problem. It doesn’t seem to be addressed nearly as much as it should, but Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, Fooled By Randomness, and Antifragile, is an example of another notable intellectual who believes in making this point.
“Mathematicians think in (well precisely defined and mapped) objects, philosophers in concepts, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators (...), and idiots in words. … Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others.”
Language misconceptions are always relevant, but even more so when debating lightning-rod subjects like religion, spirituality, and of course, politics.
Lenses of comprehension
The complexity problem with words transitions into a complexity problem with just about all of the topics addressed in Waking Up. The problem is also highly pertinent in politics, as many voters suffer from a lack of understanding of words and are too unwilling or lazy to derive meaning from them. As a result, voters are often less informed than they ought to be. Additionally, there can be a lack of complexity when analyzing issues, so even if the words of the politicians are understood in full, the voters still may be misguided in the sense that they do not see the entire picture of each issue. Going beyond that, there is a need for complex understanding when determining which issues are relevant, so even if a voter were to fully grasp the words they are taking in, and then fully grasp the concepts of each issue, they may still fail to comprehend the relevance or hierarchal significance of the political spectrum.
Problems with complex understanding manifest way down in the neurological functions of the brain. Harris begins his analysis of the brain by outlining the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, tying back to the disassembling of religiously fueled misconceptions. The mind is far more complex than we tend to realize, as human beings have much more going on inside their heads than what can possibly be recognized. There are a lot of questions that are impossible for humans to simply intuit the answers to. Harris explains that the conscious mind is aware of what we see and is responsible for senses and perceptions to some extent, but at the same time there are always underlying subconscious influences that alter the way we think, acting as lenses on our thoughts. There is always a screen in front of the images on a TV, and because of that, people with different settings of brightness and definition have different interpretations of what they are seeing. Just as Taleb says that different types of people think in different forms, people with different types of minds and experiences think and see in infinitely different ways.
If it were true that human beings produced predictable outputs solely based on observable information, then it would be conceivable to predict emotions like anxiety, fear, etc. entirely based on physiological measurements. This is not the case however, as much of the conscious experience is unable to be reduced to sheer mathematical measures of neurological function, meaning that someone who is showing completely normal brain activity could still complain of suffering from anxiety or fear, and there would be no possible way to invalidate their suffering. The implication here is that there are objective measures of emotion, like brain activity, cortisol levels, sweat, and more, but the subjective component of a person will always present the lurking possibility of proving contradictory to the subject’s physiological outputs. Two people with the exact same measurements do not share the exact same experience.
The brain’s biggest illusion
There are various ways to describe differences in human perception, and Harris chooses to do it by addressing what he believes to be the most prominent impediment to the acknowledgement of the differences. The self, or the feeling of first-person consciousness, is essentially the experiential component, or process of experience, that each person lives through. It is the summation of both the objective and subjective human components.
The concept of mind misinformation is a problem for people because it represents chaos, and unknown or even unknowable information. I think this is why many people, whether consciously or subconsciously, artificially assign themselves an ability to understand and comprehend to degrees that are far greater and more impressive than what they are actually capable of. My own interpretations of the philosophies dictated by Sam Harris in Waking Up are surely imprecise to some degree, because my mind is operating in ways that I cannot possibly be consciously aware of. Harris takes this argument a step further, and perhaps many steps further, depending on the accuracy of my perceptions of his intent, to say that the sense of “self” that all humans feel is in fact an illusion. He states that the feeling we get called “I”, or more descriptively the feeling of “being a passenger inside your own head”, is a sensation that only arises through a subjective lens, and can be lessened or even wiped away through intensive introspection and meditation.
To back up a bit, the experiential self, or the idea that “you are yourself” is not an illusion. Everything about consciousness must be true by definition (consciousness is fully entangled with perception), but some of it is only true merely because it is perceived. It is the “feeling of self” that is the illusion, because that feeling is only perceived through a false lens. It is a shield to internal truth, and it can fully disappear when looked at from afar. Harris seems to be arguing that first-person conscious experience creates this illusion of the “thinker of one’s own thoughts”, as there is no part of the brain reserved for the ego, no scientific evidence that thoughts can be generated on command, and no reasonable expectation that the idea that you “have” a body, rather than the obvious concept that you simply “are” a body, has any validity whatsoever. Harris then goes into the ways that this illusion can be dismantled, and this is the crux of the conversation, as it becomes increasingly murky, with the inevitable confusion that ensues when spiritual and mystical concepts are discussed in a non-religious context. Harris explains that meditation can diminish this illusion of the self, but says this does nothing to purport any grandiose claims about the universe. Meditating, self-reflecting, and introspecting will reduce the effect of the sense of self, and with the right mindset, lead to an increased understanding of reality and truth.
Spirituality and religion are heavily intertwined, and therefore falsely considered by many people to be synonymous. With the knowledge of Harris’s highly nuanced arguments, however, it will become obvious why this connection is both absurd and highly destructive. Truths about the universe are essential to scientific progress, the fostering of happiness, and most importantly, the reduction of suffering. Truth (in the truest sense of the word) certainly has its benefits, but there’s also the fact that truth is simply what it says it is: True. And there is in inherent value in knowing what is true and untrue. I acknowledge that it is extremely difficult for someone to adopt these credible spiritual claims in a non-religious context, but the resulting “awakening” that comes from honestly sifting through the arguments is certainly worth the trouble.
There are various ways to describe differences in human perception, and Harris chooses to do it by addressing what he believes to be the most prominent impediment to the acknowledgement of the differences. The self, or the feeling of first-person consciousness, is essentially the experiential component, or process of experience, that each person lives through. It is the summation of both the objective and subjective human components.
The concept of mind misinformation is a problem for people because it represents chaos, and unknown or even unknowable information. I think this is why many people, whether consciously or subconsciously, artificially assign themselves an ability to understand and comprehend to degrees that are far greater and more impressive than what they are actually capable of. My own interpretations of the philosophies dictated by Sam Harris in Waking Up are surely imprecise to some degree, because my mind is operating in ways that I cannot possibly be consciously aware of. Harris takes this argument a step further, and perhaps many steps further, depending on the accuracy of my perceptions of his intent, to say that the sense of “self” that all humans feel is in fact an illusion. He states that the feeling we get called “I”, or more descriptively the feeling of “being a passenger inside your own head”, is a sensation that only arises through a subjective lens, and can be lessened or even wiped away through intensive introspection and meditation.
To back up a bit, the experiential self, or the idea that “you are yourself” is not an illusion. Everything about consciousness must be true by definition (consciousness is fully entangled with perception), but some of it is only true merely because it is perceived. It is the “feeling of self” that is the illusion, because that feeling is only perceived through a false lens. It is a shield to internal truth, and it can fully disappear when looked at from afar. Harris seems to be arguing that first-person conscious experience creates this illusion of the “thinker of one’s own thoughts”, as there is no part of the brain reserved for the ego, no scientific evidence that thoughts can be generated on command, and no reasonable expectation that the idea that you “have” a body, rather than the obvious concept that you simply “are” a body, has any validity whatsoever. Harris then goes into the ways that this illusion can be dismantled, and this is the crux of the conversation, as it becomes increasingly murky, with the inevitable confusion that ensues when spiritual and mystical concepts are discussed in a non-religious context. Harris explains that meditation can diminish this illusion of the self, but says this does nothing to purport any grandiose claims about the universe. Meditating, self-reflecting, and introspecting will reduce the effect of the sense of self, and with the right mindset, lead to an increased understanding of reality and truth.
Spirituality and religion are heavily intertwined, and therefore falsely considered by many people to be synonymous. With the knowledge of Harris’s highly nuanced arguments, however, it will become obvious why this connection is both absurd and highly destructive. Truths about the universe are essential to scientific progress, the fostering of happiness, and most importantly, the reduction of suffering. Truth (in the truest sense of the word) certainly has its benefits, but there’s also the fact that truth is simply what it says it is: True. And there is in inherent value in knowing what is true and untrue. I acknowledge that it is extremely difficult for someone to adopt these credible spiritual claims in a non-religious context, but the resulting “awakening” that comes from honestly sifting through the arguments is certainly worth the trouble.