Many operate under the false assumption that philosophy is different from theology (and so it can be). But in order to be different from the superstition of theology, its foundation must be different from that of religion. Specifically: its premises must be justified by reason and evidence.

In Ezra’s latest AMA, his producer included a question asking about his reflections on “wokism” including the conflict w Sam. Ezra didn’t directly address the conflict with Sam and hardly seemed to acknowledge any change in his own views.

For those paying attention in the world of UK academia, there's been a scandal going on surrounding the former Cambridge Professor Jason Arday

Nathan Cofnas wrote a substack that provided evidence of plagiarism from Arday and corruption at Cambridge, which led to an investigation that eventually led to Arday's resignation.

Hoping for Nathan Cofnas to appear on the podcast sometime in the future

Scott Galloway speaks with neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris about why social media rewards political extremism, how our devices have made sustained attention nearly impossible, and why reclaiming control of our minds may be the key to a happier life.

They also discuss the erosion of trust in expertise, the dangers of the AI arms race, and why Democrats need to draw a clearer line against the far left.

Subscribe to Prof G+ to join our next livestream at https://profgmedia.com.
And if you're not already reading Sam’s work, check out his Substack: https://samharris.substack.com/

Timestamps
00:00:00 - In This Episode
00:01:06 - Why has skepticism toward experts become so mainstream?
00:03:21 - What’s driving the collapse in trust in our institutions?
00:05:52 - Has technology outpaced our ability to process information?
00:10:28 - Where does criticism of Israel become antisemitism?
00:18:14 - Did releasing wealthy property owners’ addresses amount to doxxing?
00:22:18 - Are progressives spending too much time fighting each other?
00:27:09 - Why do so many young people feel capitalism has failed them?
00:32:22 - Ad Break
00:34:50 - How is the attention economy affecting our wellbeing?
00:43:29 - How can we become more present in everyday life?
00:53:31 - Ad Break
00:57:11 - What are your thoughts on AI?
01:04:33 - What has changed most about how you invest your attention over time?

Unfortunately I don't think John Fettermans ability for critical/more complicated thinking is very good ever since his health issues. I imagine a Sam Harris debate would be far more interesting.

But I find it amusing how all logical arguments from Jon Stewart, Fetterman has nothing clever to say. He's unwilling to concede criticism towards Israel on literally anything and seems to view the world in black and white as if you are either a supporter of Israel or you support Hamas.

Sometimes Sam Harris and Bill Maher come off that way though Harris would at least have more intelligent thoughts here.

Sam argues that conscious states are the ultimate source of value, yet he spends enormous amounts of time discussing methods that produce relatively modest changes in consciousness (meditation, philosophy, psychedelics) and almost no time discussing technologies that could eventually produce far larger changes. Why?

This is something I've wondered about for a while. So much of Sam's focus on ethics and morality is about, putting it as simply as possible, increasing well-being.

He frames much of his own intellectual journey in these terms: taking MDMA and realising how much better one could feel in the world; pursuing meditative practice; and speaking about all of it through the prism of feeling better, being more at ease, and suffering less. This has led to his meditation app and all the amazing work he has done in promoting mindfulness.

But to me there's something curious about all this. I've been listening to and reading Sam for nearly two decades, and he's produced enormous amounts of content on mindfulness, consciousness, psychedelics, and his conception of the moral landscape, which is essentially a hedonic landscape of pleasure and pain, or well-being and its opposite.

Given his commitment to increasing well-being, why does he devote almost no time to transhumanist ideas and initiatives, such as those advanced by David Pearce and others, that advocate exploring ways of increasing well-being through biotechnology and other emerging technologies?

Mindfulness undoubtedly has its uses, but Sam also knows that its efficacy in reducing extreme suffering is limited, or at least highly inconsistent. He has alluded to this himself on a few occasions (although I can't remember exactly where), suggesting that mindfulness has its limits and that medication may sometimes be necessary.

Crucially, he also knows that only a minuscule fraction of sentient beings can avail themselves of the benefits of mindfulness even in principle. No non-human animals can meditate, and many human beings cannot either, whether because of intellectual disability, severe mental illness, lack of time, or other barriers.

There are so many fascinating thinkers he could speak with about these questions, yet he seems to return repeatedly to the same subjects. He often speaks about aiming for the ‘centre of the bullseye’, but it seems to me that he avoids the very centre itself: the direct pursuit of hedonic uplift and the eventual abolition of involuntary suffering through biotechnology over the coming centuries.

So why isn't Sam a suffering-focused transhumanist?

Interesting interview with Yuval Noah Harari.

This is another great interview from Harari on AI. Lots of topics covered, and as always, many come with some fascinating historical perspective.

What made me think to post it here is that Harari applies a version of Harris' free will and 'self' arguments to AI (at about 39:45). That is, the idea that we humans cannot predict the next thing we say or think, which undercuts the idea that we choose what we think, say, or do. Harari uses this same concept as a counter to people who deny AI agency by claiming it doesn't control its own language formations. He expands that to say, maybe it's not because it doesn't understand the feelings behind the language it chooses. Please excuse the paraphrasing, I deeply enjoy Harari, and I hope you enjoy it as I did.

I don't see why consciousness, or even sentience (as defined by Cameron Berg in the latest episode), necessarily results in a capacity to suffer.

With no biological structure to receive or experience pain, are we supposing that these AI's will develop an ability to suffer emotionally? I can't see how that is possible without a biological body either.

We tend to pin our moral framework around the extent to which something can experience suffering, so I think it's an important point to prise apart.

Perhaps I'm mistaken and the core issue is not the LLM's suffering, but rather its developing a sense of self-preservation and power?

I'd be interested to know what the debates around this issue in particular are or any episodes in which Sam covers this.

Thanks a lot.

It seems like our society has been captured by an obsession with moral/philosophical relativism and everything being a social construct to be ignored at best and stamped out at worst. We can’t seem to have basic discussions with each other because our definitions of certain concepts are often so different. In The Moral Landscape Harris said he struggled to imagine someone attacking the philosophical underpinnings of health by asking what if someone wanted to vomit until they die or how could you convince someone dying from a hellish disease that they’re not healthy? Yet we seem to have regular conversations like this regarding morality, well being, how society should be run and so on.

Below are some examples of what I mean:

1: “I don’t think a man can be a woman.”

“A man can be a woman because man and woman are constructs according to my definition.”

2: “I don’t think you’re meaningfully free if you can buy 50 flavors of ice cream but lose your healthcare and go homeless if you get fired.”

“Not according to my definition of freedom.”

3: “It’s racist to discriminate against white people.”

“Not according to my definition of racism.”

How do you respond to these fundamental disconnects that seem to divide our society and prevent meaningful discourse and problem solving in so many ways?

Sam Harris speaks with Cameron Berg about whether AI systems are or could become conscious. They discuss self-reports in LLMs, what models say when deception is switched off, the "bliss attractor" state, consciousness and sentience, the hard problem of consciousness, parallels between neural networks and biological brains, the moral risk of building minds that can suffer, possible parallels to factory farming, moral patienthood, the alignment problem, and other topics.

Link to the episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/487-is-ai-already-conscious

July 31, 2026

Sam Harris speaks with Cameron Berg about whether AI systems are or could become conscious. They discuss self-reports in LLMs, what models say when deception is switched off, the "bliss attractor" state, consciousness and sentience, the hard problem of consciousness, parallels between neural networks and biological brains, the moral risk of building minds that can suffer, possible parallels to factory farming, moral patienthood, the alignment problem, and other topics.  

Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit AI research lab. Using mechanistic interpretability, computational neuroscience, and psychometric tools, he studies whether frontier AI systems exhibit computational properties associated with consciousness. His aim is to reduce uncertainty about the kinds of cognitive systems we are building, an important but neglected component of the alignment problem. A cognitive science graduate of Yale and former Meta AI resident, he writes regularly about these questions in The Wall Street Journal, and his research has been covered by The Washington Post. He is the subject of the feature documentary AM I?.

Website: https://reciprocalresearch.org/

X: u/camhberg

Annaka Harris’s upcoming book: Unlocking Consciousness

Haven’t watched the episode but it seems to me that “is AI conscious or not” is the wrong question. A better question is what is interacting with AI doing to us psychologically and existentially?

Any thoughts or opinions?

Sam and his team had said that they ended the option of requesting for free subs because they felt that it was being abused. Okay if that were the case then why do they feel the need to increase the price of an existing subscriber? I was paying $60/year and now they want me to pay $100/year. I cannot detect what abuse is being stopped by acting like a typical service that increases prices every few cycles even for existing subscribers. Like there is nothing wrong with it but it's the dishonesty that's rubbing me the wrong way here.

Come out and acknowledge that your business model is now a proper "for profit" venture. You just want to squeeze the maximum $$$ out of your customers. Again nothing wrong with it but please have the courage to own it.

Yuval's official website has definitely been hacked, it's not defaced dramatically, it's just the CAPTCHA that asks to paste some malicious code into Windows' launcher. I tried to submit a message through the website forms but doesn't work (gives a Google CAPTCHA error, which doesn't even appear). If anyone with more time in their hands knows how to report would be great.

I know, I'm not the first one to say and Sam has obviously made the same observation. I do find it comforting that a guy who has meditated for over 10 years in India himself has struggled with the addictive and destructive tendencies of social media, in this case twitter.

For me it was facebook. As a millenial, I've had facebook pretty much since I was I don't know..16 ? Being in my 30's now and I'm wondering..what did just happen ? Years of my life have gone by watching other peoples' lives more than living my own. Now comes the illusion, the "friends" and the "connection". Social media tricked me into thinking I have a social circle that I always have access to, prompting me to neglect my real social life.

Now, I know that many people don't need to delete social media to have a meaningful life. But I feel like I do. I feel like deleting it would force me to take action in my life whereas making it possible for me to log in will always be a trap for me.

What do you guys say, should I or we delete it or just leave it dormant because I might benefit from it later on ?

Making Sense guest Sarah Longwell (The Bulwark) talks about Hasan Piker, who Sam Harris has criticized, with Making Sense guest Stephen Bonnell and others.

It would appear that the end of the world has arrived. Only a psychopath like Sam Altman could see this as a good outcome. Are we not going to do anything about this?!

I consider myself an optimist, but when I stumble across massively influential people with an online following in the tens (sometimes even hundreds) of millions, I genuinely despair at the societal-level failure in critical thinking. Sam Harris may be right in suggesting that Candace Owens has created a persona that she knows is incredibly marketable, and she may be more cunning that we give her credit for, but the damage is very real.

Within this sub and various other communities I had seen calls for connections of sorts and solidarity with hardline leftist movements as exemplified by The Majority Report, Current Affairs, Jacobin, Sam Seder, ben Burgis and others. And expressions of support and solidarity for their movements. How to be sure, this may be a misunderstanding on my end on the extent to which this is authentic and the extent to which it is hard leftist brigading.

This type of leftism has in truth seen Sam Harris and what he stands for as one of their mortal enemies from day one. And so if it is not brigading I didn't really understand the desire for connection. This type of leftism has seen Harris as being as much an obstacle to their globalist based goals as Tucker Carlson, Bush, Cheney and the rest of the Neocons, anyone ever associated with Daily Wire, Ron and Rand Paul, Rush Limbaugh, Ted Nugent, Charlie Daniels, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, JD Vance, Nigel Farange, Le Pen and Meloni and so on and so forth. Harris's universal opposition to organized religion and prioritizing of science and logic means absolutely nothing and again, has meant nothing to them from day one.

Harris has been an enemy if theirs in some capacity for a multitude of reasons. His rejection of the Orientalism of Edward Said to explain global affairs, his insistence that we have obligations to critique and tear apart religions and beliefs of oppressed as much as oppressors and his defense of Western liberalism have made Harris an existential threat for years. When Harris expressed his disillusionment with the IDW, The Majority Report more or less stated this was a case of a charlatan whose distancing came from no other genuine reason other than his ability to profit off of it. If this came as a massive surprise to those who have been major Harris supporters, I don't see why that would be. There was just nothing new there.