Making Sense by Sam Harris

Making Sense Reviews

• 
  Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤

  Audiobooks are very popular right now and I envy all of you who are able to listen to them. If I could listen and do other things, I would get more books read. Also, many people point out how much more personal a book is when the author reads it themself. And then there's the added entertainment value.
  
  However, my brain doesn't absorb audio nearly as well as visual. If I listen to a book, I have to go back and read it because I don't retain the information.  Even watching movies - If there are no subtitles, I can't watch them. Sure, I see the action, but the spoken words don't translate well in my brain and I flounder around not knowing what's going on. 
  
  Because of this, I miss out on all the great podcasts available. Thankfully, Sam Harris decided to take several of his favourite shows from his podcast, transcribe them, and put them into a book. 
  
  The result is amazing! Topics include the nature of consciousness, the future of artificial intelligence, the question of whether or not we are living in a simulation, the Fermi Paradox, racism, the multiverse, and more. 
  
  Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity is intellectually stimulating and exciting to read. While some chapters and guests were more interesting than others, all of them were thought-provoking and had me absorbed into the conversation. 
  
  My only complaint is that there are no conversations with women. I do not know if Sam Harris does not often have women on his show or it's simply that his favourite ones over the years have been with men. It's his book and he gets to decide which he likes the most, but it irked me.
  
  If you enjoy mentally stimulating books, you will find much to appreciate in this book. I didn't 100% agree with everything everyone said, but that doesn't matter. It had my brain firing neurons all over the place and that's what's important!  
  
  I leave you with a few of my favourite quotes from the book: 
  
  "One test of whether you are a free person is whether you can change your mind."  (~Timothy Snyder)
  
  "If you do away with the belief that there are facts, you’ve gone straight to the heart of the matter. You’ve destroyed democracy."  (~Timothy Snyder)
  
  "If people say, Wow, that’s dehumanizing—to view us as just biological machines with mechanical problems,” well, that’s a hell of a lot better than demonizing us as having bad souls." (~Robert Sapolsky)
  
  "What makes me a scientist is that I’d much rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question."  (~Max Tegmark)
  
  "If you’re... worried about living in a simulation, I’ll give you some advice: live a really interesting life and do interesting things, so that whoever’s running it doesn’t get bored and shut you down."  (~Max Tegmark)
• 
  Infinite Jen

  Friends, a moment of your time. Have you ever, while sermonizing to your fully bound partner about the fascinating nature of the Peak-End Rule (a psychological heuristic in which the remembering self is at odds with the experiencing self in judging how miserable you were during an experience, based on peak intensity and how said experience ended, rather than the total suffering endured over time), demonstrated its validity by punctuating your soft playful flogging with a sudden, crushing, kadiddly-swarp to the chairman of the erogenous party? Did their limbs jerk spastically and hitch against their bindings as they attempted to collapse into the incandescent node of their genital anguish and fuck themselves completely out of the physical realm with its screaming central nervous system and concomitant throw-uppy & “Dear God she’s assassinated the chairman!” kind of vibes? And then, thwarted by like the material properties of their bindings with its (first rate non-abrasive Twisted Monk Shibari rope) deceptively powerful tensile strength, elected to shout, in rather course language, insisting and demonically retching, that they (the recipient of a sharp, unexpected, spinning back-fist to the chairman) didn’t, and would never, under any circumstances, sign up for this shit? Did you point out that last session you utilized Saint Andrew’s Cross, Butt plug, Cane, Floggers, Nipple clamps, Riding crop, Spanking Paddles (and belt), Vampire Gloves, Whip, Sybian, and life sized replica of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, all this lasting four times as long as the current session, and the worst that was ever said was like; “Mistress, I think I’m going to be ill.”? Why do you suppose that was? You ask. Surely the total amount of suffering was far greater? And, confirming the rule, they reply; “The pain was never more than mild. You played with my hair after untying me and told me how precious I was.”
  
  Perched sidesaddle on a human sofa, I strike the red phosphorus across the stubble adorning my armrest. I touch the flame to the metal bowl of my Kiseru, causing the fine hairs of Kizami tobacco to curl with rapid oxidation. I drag the match languidly through the air with a turn of the wrist then drop the smoldering ember onto the naked flank of the quivering furniture below me, the barest tremor of pain transmitting itself up through the quaking arms and into my Black Lace-up Giaro “DOMINIQUE” Thigh Boots. I recross my legs and take a few puffs, tapping the genkubi across the bare buttocks serving as my ash tray. I narrow my eyes against the smoke and scoff; “A sofa that can’t even summarize for me Claude Shannon’s concept of information...” Taking a long draw, I blow the smoke into his face, my acid-tongue trailing behind with merciless enunciation. “Paaaaaaathetic.”
  
  “Jen, uhhh, I mean.. Mistress. Don’t you think you’ve been getting too weird and maybe like.. sexual with your reviews lately?”
  
  Listlessly blowing perfect rings skyward, I award this mewling no response.
  
  “Well, anyway... if, as Shannon says, information is a reduction in uncertainty, then I think it’s safe to say that your reviews are low in information, as a person reading this would have absolutely no idea what this book is about.”
  
  “Isn’t that what the summary is for you pitiful configuration of carbon?” Touching the scalding metal of my pipe to his fanny.
  
  “Ah! Yes! Yes Mistress!”
  
  “And wouldn’t it be redundant for me to recapitulate all of that here? Hmmm? As a matter of fact, wouldn’t it be a dereliction of basic human decency to merely reformulate that terse summary into something more verbose? Hmm? Answer me! Do you want me to perform some urethral sounding? AS YOU WISH, WORM!”
  
  “NO MOMMY NOOOOOOOOOO!”
  These are just a couple of the fascinating ideas I’ve learned from being a longtime listener to Sam’s podcast, where he frequently engages in substantive conversation with some of the world’s most brilliant minds across the disciplinary spectrum. This is a collection of some of the best conversations that are most pertinent to Sam’s primary interests as a philosopher and neuroscientist. Topics touched upon include: The hard problem of consciousness (why it’s ‘like’ something to be you). Artificial Intelligence. Psychedelics. The possibility that the universe is a simulation. Foundations of morality. Religion. The neurobiology of belief. Perception as a controlled hallucination. Meditation. The significance of WWII in the history of ideas. The role of intuition in science. The ethics of building conscious AI. The peak-end rule. System one and two of human decision making. The Vulnerable World Hypothesis. The Fermi Paradox. Complementary and competitive cognitive artifacts. The nature of Mathematics. The multiverse. The threat of totalitarianism. And much much more.
• 
  Lou (nonfiction fiend)

  Since 2014, Sam Harris—neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author—has been exploring some of the most important questions about the human mind, society, and current events on his podcast, Making Sense. With more than one hundred million downloads, these discussions have clearly hit a nerve, frequently walking a tightrope where either host or guest—and sometimes both—lose their footing, but always in search of a greater understanding of the world in which we live. For Harris, honest and frank conversation, no matter how difficult, is the only path beyond a scientific ignorance, political tribalism and personal delusion. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, consciousness, tyranny, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. It is a book simply packed with intriguing information and interesting dialogues with prominent guests.
  
  This adaptation of some of Harris’s most thought-provoking and controversial podcast episodes is engaging from beginning to end with a wide-ranging set of fascinating topics explored in depth in an accessible manner. They are deeply perceptive, incisive and presented in a lucid and eminently readable format which I raced through. Even his discourse with those he vehemently disagrees with is considered and intelligent with no unnecessary theatrics you often receive from other commentators or broadcasters. The written form is especially great for allowing a more detailed analysis of a topic than perhaps the spoken word and I felt it worked exceptionally well. If you are a fan of psychologists such as Dr Jordan Peterson and the like then this is a book worth your time. If you enjoy hearing brain-boosting material or information that'll cause cranium conflagration then give this a read. Many thanks to Bantam Press for an ARC.
• 
  Lauren Rosano

  I've never listened to Harris' podcast (I tend to lean towards reading content rather than listening to it), but the topics broached in this book were fascinating. To be completely honest, I'm sure some of the information went over my head - I am not a philosopher, and one of my gripes with this book is that I don't think it's user friendly for the vast majority. I took philosophy courses in college which give me some background to speak of, but there were many concepts and thought processes that were discussed in this book without being properly introduced, in my opinion. I also felt it was a little bit strange to be essentially reading a transcript of his podcast. I thought there would be additional content (and there were little intros at the beginning of each chapter, but they didn't really flesh out the topics being discussed, and I think that could've been valuable). Maybe this is the type of book that's meant to only be fully enjoyed by those with a deeper background in philosophy, I don't know, but I was ultimately disappointed by how little I got from it. I am so interested in the topics of conversation in this book, they're things I discuss and contemplate regularly, but I repeatedly felt like a child trying to keep up with an adult conversation - and that is NOT something I'm used to. That being said, while it was a challenge, I did learn at least one thing from each chapter, I just wish it had been less of a struggle and more of a conversation including the reader rather than one where I constantly felt one step behind. This book is called Making Sense, but I don't know that it made enough sense of itself to be a truly enjoyable experience for most readers.
  
  Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the e-galley in exchange for my honest review.
• 
  Sam Harvey

  Ben Stiller continues his multi-year project masquerading as a philosopher-turn-podcast host. Tricks very smart people into having conversations with him. Said conversations recorded here in text form.
• 
  Stephanie

  Sam Harris' Making Sense is for those looking for some intellectual stimulus.
  
  His newest book covers the gamut of current topics relevant to almost anyone. He uses the conversations from his notable podcast to form the basis of his book. As he says, by putting it into writing it gives both him and his interviewees the time to reflect and refine their arguments. I particularly loved his conversations on race in America and consciousness.
  
  While this book didn't make me want to stay up all night reading it, it did get me thinking.
  
  This review is based on Edelweiss+ ARC provided in exchange for an honest, unbiased opinion.
• 
  Ashley

  I’ve been listening to Sam’s podcast for years now and it’s been one hell of a journey. I remember when he mentioned putting together a book on some of his favourite conversations from the podcast, which perked my initial interest. I wasn’t disappointed. The conversations in here are fascinating, even though they are copied from the already existing content on the podcast. Reading things slowly really gives you an opportunity to take stock in the conversation in comparison to listening to a conversation, which is valuable in its own way. I think Sam sums it up best when he mentions in the introduction that the main reason for making this book was so that he and the person he’s talking to can really refine their ideas, arguments, and general conservation.
• 
  Al Bità

  I, for one, am grateful to Sam Harris for favouring us with this hard-copy access to a number of his podcasts. As Harris himself says, this provides the reader with a greater control over the subjects discussed, especially in regard to the details of the topic under discussion. The current popularity of podcasts is increasing exponentially, it seems, and they provide outlets for many to express and disseminate their views readily and extensively. Whether this is a good thing or not is a moot point: it depends on who is disseminating what.
  
  My personal take on this matter is linked to the traditional interpretation that “Seeing is believing”. That insight, stemming from the “realism” of personal visual experience and/or on the “truth” of photographic realism, has been quite undermined both by deeper understanding of the way humans’ perceptions of what is going on around them can be highly misleading on the one hand, and by the extensive developments of adulterated photographs and movies through time-altering complex editing techniques, and impressive and virtually invisible graphic manipulation of images on the other hand. The final result is that we can be subject to deception on the largest scale possible. Simply “seeing” is no longer a firm basis for conferring justification for reality.
  
  That same potential for propagating beliefs can be attributed to the more ephemeral, time-constrained reality of listening: oratorical techniques will acknowledge that most listeners are selective. We hear only what they want to hear. Therefore the emphasis and reiteration of sound-bites, repeated catch-phrases and generic unquestioned blanket concepts that appeal primarily to the emotions are more important in disseminating ideas than the truth, reality or validity of those ideas. Historically, this has been the most dominating form of communication in the history of humanity. It is perhaps “truer” to say that “Hearing is believing”; we pick and choose the sounds and words we want to hear and disregard the rest.
  
  While written words do not necessarily escape all criticism, the hard copy they represent are at least one step removed from the more evanescent impact of sounds; and are more readily exposed to more critical evaluation and analysis — and this is what Harris has provided for us with this book.
  
  The reader is permitted more intimate contact with the thoughts and opinions of eleven experts in their fields, shaped by the passionate clarity of Harris’ questioning and comments, as they grapple with concepts of Consciousness, Morality, and associated matters such as Free Will, Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, etc. as they relate to the present (2020) and to their possible implications for the future of Humanity in general. My use of the word “grappling” is very appropriate, since these concepts are very slippery indeed. The use of “thought experiments” is often utilised to explore this slipperiness, frequently subjecting sub-topics with qualifying adjectives which can both clarify and possibly complicate things further… Each step can be re-examined by the reader and meditated upon further if one so wishes.
  
  I can appreciate that not all potential readers will necessarily be attracted to these ideas, but for those who might be tantalised by them, this book is a superb snap-shot of current thinking in these areas of discourse, especially as presented as clearly and as precisely as here.
  
• 
  Steve

  Liked this a lot. Harris is smart and clever and interested in a lot of the same things I am - but something about his attitude often bugs me. I’ve read several of his books, but I think I really like him in this format better, having interesting discussions with other people. And they’re definitely discussions, not interviews.
• 
  Sandra

  
  DEUTSCH: Well, I see human history as a long period of virtually complete failure—failure, that is, to make any progress. Our species has existed for, depending on where you count it from, maybe a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years. And for the vast majority of that time, people were alive, they were thinking, they were suffering, and they wanted things. But nothing ever improved. The improvements that did happen happened so slowly that archaeologists can’t distinguish between artifacts from eras separated by thousands of years. There was generation upon generation upon generation of suffering and stasis.
  Then there was slow improvement, and then faster improvement. Then there were attempts to institutionalize a tradition of criticism, which I think is the key to rapid progress—that is, progress discernible in a human lifetime—and there was also error correction, so that regression was less likely. That happened several times and failed every time except once—in the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
  What worries me is that the inheritors of that unique instance of sustained progress are only a small proportion of the population of the world today. It’s the culture, or civilization, that we call the West. Only the West has a tradition of institutionalized criticism. And this has made for various problems, including the problem of failed cultures that see their failure writ large by comparison with the West and therefore want to do something about it that doesn’t involve creativity. That’s very dangerous. And even in the West, what it takes to maintain our civilization is not widely known. As you've also said, the prevailing view among people in the West, including very educated people, is a picture of the relationship between knowledge and progress and civilization and values that’s wrong in dangerous ways. Although our cultural institutions have now preserved stability despite rapid change for hundreds of years, the knowledge of what it takes to keep civilization stable in the face of rapidly increasing knowledge is not widespread.
  We're like people on a huge, well-designed submarine which has all
  sorts of lifesaving devices built in, who don’t know they’re in a submarine. They think they’re in a motorboat, and they’re going to open all the hatches because they want a nicer view.
  
  HARRIS: What a great analogy! The misconception that worries me most, frankly, is the fairly common notion that there’s no such thing as progress in any real sense, and there’s certainly no such thing as moral progress. Many people believe that you can’t justify the idea that one culture is better than another, or one way of life is better than another, because there’s no such thing as moral truth. They’ve somehow drawn this lesson from twentieth-century science and philosophy, and now, in the twenty-first century, even very smart people—even physicists whose names would be well known to you, with whom I’ve collided on this point—think there’s no place to stand where you can say, for instance, that slavery is wrong. They consider a condemnation of slavery a mere preference that has no possible connection to science.
  I'll give you an example of just how crazy this hypocrisy and doublethink can become among well-educated people. I was at a meeting at the Salk Institute to talk about things like the alleged gulf between facts and values, which I consider one of the more spurious exports from philosophy that has been widely embraced by scientists. I was making an argument for moral realism and said something like, “If there’s any culture that we can be sure has not given the best possible answer to the question of how to live a good life, it’s the Taliban. Consider, for instance, the practice of forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating them or killing them when they try to get out. If we know anything about human well-being, we know that this is an idiotic and immoral practice.”
  It turns out that to disparage the Taliban at an academic conference is to court controversy. After my talk, a woman who holds multiple graduate degrees in relevant fields—she’s technically a bioethicist, but she has graduate degrees in science, philosophy, and law
  
  DEUTSCH: That doesn’t fill me with confidence.
  
  HARRIS: Right. I should also say that this prodigy has gone on to serve on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She’s now one of thirteen people advising President Obama on the ethical implications of current advances in medicine.
  After my talk, she said, “How could you possibly say that forcing women and girls to live under the veil is wrong? I understand you don’t like it, but that’s just your Western notion of right and wrong.”
  I said, “The moment you admit that questions of right and wrong relate to the well-being of conscious creatures—in this case, human beings—then you have to admit that we know something about morality. And we know, in this case, that the burqa isn’t the best solution to the mystery of how to maximize human well-being.”
  “That’s just your opinion,” she said.
  “Well, let’s make it simpler. Let’s say we found a culture on an island somewhere that was removing the eyeballs of every third child. Would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human well-being?”
  “It would depend on why they were doing it,” she said.
  “Let’s say they’re doing it for religious reasons. They have a scripture which says, ‘Every third should walk in darkness,’ or some such nonsense.”
  Then she said, “Well, then you could never say that they were wrong.”
  The fact that these hypothetical barbarians were laboring under a religious precept trumped all other possible truth claims for her, leaving us with no way to declare anything better or worse in moral terms. I’ve had the same kinds of conversations with physicists who say, “I don’t like slavery. I personally wouldn't want to be a slave, or to keep slaves. But there’s no place to stand scientifically that allows me to say that slaveholders are in the wrong.”
  Once we acknowledge the link between morality and human wellbeing, or the well-being of all possible conscious persons, this kind of moral relativism is tantamount to saying not only that we don’t know anything about well-being, but that we will mever know anything about it. The underlying claim is that no conceivable breakthrough in knowledge would tell us anything relevant to navigating the difference between the worst possible misery for everyone and every other state of the universe that is better than that.
  What worries me is that many of the things you've said about prog. ress, and about there being only a subset of humanity that has found creative methods for improving human life, will seem controversial~ even bigoted—to many of the people who make decisions about how we should live.
  
  DEUTSCH: Yes, that is scary. But it has always been so. The thing is, our culture is wiser than we are in many ways. The people who defeated communism, for instance, might well have said that they were doing it for Jesus. In fact they weren’t. They were doing it for Western values, which they had been brought up to reinterpret as “doing it for Jesus.” They'd say things like “The values of democracy and freedom are enshrined in the Bible.” Well, those things aren’t enshrined in the Bible. But the practice of saying that they are is part of a subculture which was extraordinarily good, and did good. So things are not as bad as the existence of perverse academics like those might lead you to think.
  
  HARRIS: One thing that makes it not as bad as one might think is that it’s impossible, even for someone like her, to live out the implications of such hypocrisy. I could have said, “You've convinced me. I'll send my daughter to Afghanistan for a year abroad, forcing her to live in a burqa with a Taliban family. What do you think? Is that the best use of her time? Am I a good father? After all, there’s really no basis for judging that this could be bad for her, apart from my succumbing to my own xenophobic biases, so presumably you support me in this decision.” I have to imagine that even she would balk at that, because we all know in our bones that certain ways of living are undesirable.
  
  DEUTSCH: Right. There’s another, related irony, which is that she’s willing to condemn you for not being a moral relativist. But moral relativism is a pathology that arises only in Western culture. Every other culture has no doubt that there’s such a thing as right and wrong, they’ve just got the wrong idea of what right and wrong are, but they don’t doubt that there is such a thing, and she wouldn’t condemn them for that, although she does condemn you for it.
  You say “hypocrisy.” I think this all originated in the same mistake we discussed at the beginning of this conversation—empiricism, or the idea that knowledge comes to us through the senses, which has led to scientism, which is the idea that science, by itself, constitutes the whole of reason—that the scientific method constitutes the whole of rationality. Which leads to the idea that there can’t be such a thing as morality since we can’t do an experiment to test it. Your answer to that seems to be, “But we can, if we adopt the simple criterion of human well-being.” But we can’t just leave it at that. The idea that there can’t be any morality because it can’t be derived from the senses is the same argument chat there can’t be any scientific knowledge because it can’t be derived from the senses.
  In the twentieth century, empiricism was found to be nonsense, and some people therefore concluded that scientific knowledge was nonsense. But the real truth is that science isn’t based on empiricism, it’s based on reason, and so is morality. So if you adopt a rational attitude toward morality, and therefore say that morality consists of moral knowledge—and knowledge always consists of conjectures, doesn’t need a basis, only needs modes of criticism; and those modes of criticism operate by criteria that are themselves subject to modes of criticism—then you come to a transcendent moral truth. If all knowledge is conjectural and subject to improvement, then protecting the means of improving knowledge is more important than any particular piece of knowledge. That idea—before one even invokes ideas like “humans should flourish,” and then “all humans are equal,” and so on—will lead directly to, for example, the fact that slavery is an abomination. Human well-being is a good approximation in most practical situations, but not an absolute truth. I can imagine, for example, situations in which it would be right for the human race as a whole to commit suicide.
  
• 
  M. Sarki

  Discovering the work of Sam Harris both in print and in podcasts has been nothing short of amazing. Over the last several months he has already taught me so much and in ways that make sense and is accessible to a person like me. And now because of Sam I am able to understand a lot more about artificial intelligence, free will, religion, and a host of other interesting facts, concepts, and beliefs. Science was never my strong suit but Sam Harris makes it both fun and rewarding. Please read the rest of my review here:
  
  https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/ma...
• 
  Ben Rogers

  It was good. Just not particularly the content I was expecting. I went in thinking it would be like Tools of Titans, but it didn't resonate as well as ToT, likely due to the format of the conversations mostly transcripts from podcasts and not particularly summarized per se.
  
  2.8/5
• 
  Kunal Sen

  This is the most influential and thought-provoking audiobook I have read in recent times. It is a selection of conversations taken from Sam Harris' podcast of the same name. Sam Harris is one of my favorite contemporary thinkers both because his range of interests coincides with mine and because of his sharp intelligence. In this collection, he talks with a range of thought leaders who have some of the most interesting things to say about our mind, consciousness, morality, free will, the future of humanity, and artificial intelligence. Even though I have read most of the books written by these authors, Sam Harris can bring dig deeper into these ideas by asking the right questions.
  
  If nothing else, I am sure listening to these conversations, you will feel a little smarter and feel proud that we share the planet with such intelligent and original thinkers. If there is one book you read this year, this could be it.
  
  
• 
  Vlad Pîrvu

  Audiobook și nu prea. Dialogurile pe care le poartă Sam Harris cu diverși filosofi și oameni de știință nu sunt altceva decât o selecție de episoade din podcastul lui. Calitatea audio nu se ridică la standarde, iar pasajele concepute special pentru audiobook sunt minimale. Dincolo de ambalarea asta nefericită a unor întâlniri de pe Skype și din conferințe, rămâne faptul că discuțiile sunt în mare parte fascinante și livrează fix acel lucru pe care îl căutai când te-ai apucat de ascultat. Materialul are peste 22 de ore și curge bine în tren și la plimbările lungi.
• 
  Elena Diaconu

  I have been following Sam Harris for a while and have read a couple if His books, The End of Faith and Letters to a Christian Nation, with yet another couple on my to read list.
  He is a brilliant mind and what I like most about his writing is the clarity of his message while using highly complex language. He takes very complicated ideas and issues from a couple different domains, mostly philosophy and neuroscience, and tries(successfully in my books) to weave an image that is clear enough for even the layman to perceive it.
  This particular book, Making Sense, is a little different in the sense that it’s a collection of the best conversations that Harris had on his hugely successful podcast. The subjects are complex, including the hard problem of consciousness and the fundamentals of morality. The guests are themselves intellectual powerhouses like David Chalmers, David Deutsch, Anil Seth,Timothy Snyder, to name a few. Each a specialist in his own niche, they bring their own perspective and try to answer the same age old questions. A must read.
• 
  Paula

  First off, I am not into identity politics but I did notice that Harris has conversations with 11 people in this book, all men. Only 1 is a black man, Glenn C Loury and I believe Anil Seth is biracial. The rest were all white males. I have nothing against white males but to me this book is heavily biased towards men. I know there are women in AI, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, etc. so I do find it disappointing that someone like Harris doesn't bother to find females. This is heavily biased and unacceptable.
  
  Secondly, some of the conversations he has having were boring to me and I felt some topics to be intellectually shallow. Some of the conversations were interesting so from this perspective, the book is ok. There are certain sections where his political bias is showing and I have a problem with that since he's touting his bias as fact, rather than just his political opinion. Harris needs some intellectual humility in the realm of politics because he's very blind about politics and the media.
• 
  Sam Howard

  Heavy going. Think I understood possibly three sentences in total.
• 
  Keven Wang

  This book definitely inspires future reading
• 
  Gregory Eakins

  The sea squirt—a very simple marine creature—swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia. - Anil Seth
  
  I'm not usually one to enjoy podcasts. I find that the casual conversational format and overproduced transitions result in frustratingly low information density. But what Sam Harris has put together here in Making Sense is brilliant.
  
  Harris has gathered together and transcribed (for the text version) a number of his best episodes from his podcast channel of the same name. In it, he has conversations with some huge names in the fields of artificial intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, history, and other big idea topics. The list includes David Chalmers, David Deutsch, Anil Seth, Thomas Metzinger, Timothy Snyder, Glenn Loury, Robert Sapolsky, Daniel Kahneman, Nick Bostrom, David Krakauer, and Max Tegmark.
  
  Harris is one of the finest hosts I've ever heard. He gives every person a ton of room to speak while keeping them on topic and also ensuring that the guest does not get too far into the weeds without filling in the audience on what they need to know. Harris's deep knowledge on all of these topics also allows him to pull out some of the most interesting lines of thought from the people he speaks with.
  
  A couple of the interviews did venture into some claims that will not age well, such as the concerns raised in, "The Road to Tyranny" where the guest suggests that Donald Trump is an evil genius that was going somehow drive the country into the same direction as Nazi Germany, rather than an incompetent populist that would end up doing very little due to the checks and balances designed into our country.
  
  Amazingly, the interview discussing racism with Glenn Loury was sensible and level-headed, unlike most of the popular books on racism that have come out in the last decade or so. I don't think this is an area Harris has a deep knowledge of, but he still manages to have an intelligent conversation with Loury on the subject.
  
  These thought provoking talks are a fantastic launching pad for deeper dives into each of the topics covered, especially for those interested in AI and consciousness.
• 
  SeaShore

  Firstly, his preface on acknowledging podcasts is relevant and tells you how fast our world is evolving. And, in fact this book needs to be updated and so 1.5 out of 5 stars for me.
  
  I discovered many authors, scientists, philosophers through reading the conversations organised in this book -for example, Nick Bostrom, a Sweden-born philosopher now at the University of Oxford and is the author of over 200 publications -born 10th March 1973 -age 49. He works at the Future of Humanity Institute. For some of his research see From Artificial Intelligence to Superintelligence: Nick Bostrom on AI & The Future of Humanity. on YouTube (2020).
  
  I'm reading the hard cover version of his conversations. Published August 2020, some of the conversations were in 2015, 2016, 2017 so I can see the necessity of a more recent podcast. So much has happened in the last 6 years. I am writing this review in June 2022. Uppermost in my mind is the pandemic of 2020, 2021 and from current news we might have another flare up but the changes in social media, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, advancements in technology, missions to space, robots, AI and Electric vehicles -things not spoken off so much four years ago.
  
  The conversation with Max Tegmark is the best for me because I was introduced to Max Tegmark, who is a physicist and wrote the book
  Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
  
  Tegmark says ..It is about Us giving meaning to the Universe ...
  ...It took many years to build a mechanical bird for flying and the that idea was squashed and replaced with a new idea of an airplane which is successfully used. Likewise, the the space X, and this logic can be extended to building a 'successful' human-like AI .. He says that he is a 'tech geek'.
  
  The question for everyone to ask is, "what sort of future would we like to see?" We should envision a positive future and work at this goal --AI safety research, understand how to make computers unhackable, and amplify human intelligence with artificial intelligence.
  
  David Deutch in conversation with the author, says: "There is no guarantee that civilization or our species will survive, but there is a guarantee that we know in principle how both can survive."
  Chapter 2
  
  Thomas Metzinger in conversation with the author: His competencies are in something called "analytic philosophy of mind" In Germany, he says, Philosophy means the history of philosophy.
  Every German child, at one age or another, learns what happened --- the atrocities my tribe had committed. He says he learned about the Holocaust at age 10 when he read
  The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe, 1933-1945.
  Metzinger founded the Association for Scientific Study of Consciousness. He wrote
  The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self -Life isn't a mystery anymore and similarly, Consciousness will not be a mystery.
  Harris: Our intuitions were designed to avoid getting hit over the head by another ape and to mate with his sister. Our intuitions are very crude ---- They are discussing AI, consciousness and computers ---Question: are the AI machines ethically conscious?
  This conversation was most interesting... brings out the worst and the best in both. They are both in late 50's Let's hear from them again when they retire age 60, 70 or older like Paul McCartney. This month he reached the age of 80.
  
  Conversation with Snyder -> He discusses his little book 'On Tyranny", which I read and was one of those readers that said -I did not like it- but will take another look now, a few years later when so much has happened including the pandemic, the intense desire to visit Mars etc
  Snyder says we are trapped in the present and have trouble seeing the past. The first globalization ended in the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War.. He adds that globalization can boomerang and that some of the reactions to it can be quite extreme.
  
  In conversation with Glenn C. Loury: Loury born 1948, is a Professor of Economics at Brown University. Loury defines racism. He references a number of authors including Ta-Nehesi Coates, who said in an interview,
  "There ain't nothing wrong with Black people that ending white supremacy wouldn't fix. What do you expect people to do? [say] They're rats in a barrel. You've got the lid on the barrel. You open the lid and peek down in there and you find they're at each other's throats. Well, what do you expect to happen? It's the friggin' barrel, man. You gonna blame the rats?"
  Behaviors are a consequence of the system and oppression.
  I thought of,
  Noam Chomsky, who said that children are excellent at critical thinking but something happens as they grow up to suppress this. It's not us, humans enclosed in our home, Planet Earth but it's the friggin' barrel (the system), by which we are bound, just for survival and or just to be 'successful'.
  Robert Sapolsky discusses 'The Biology of Good and Evil.' Sapolsky is a neuro-endocrinologist and a primatologist. He talks about the effects of stress on health ...
  
  Other conversations are with Nick Bostrom,
  Daniel Kahneman, who wrote
  Thinking Fast and Slow -excellent book- a must read, David Krakauer and
  Max Tegmark, who works at MIT on AI and Physics and asks, "What is Ultimate Reality?" Max Tegmark is super passionate about Future AI developments.
• 
  Daniel Hageman

  A fun trip through memory lane of a few of the old podcast episodes. It felt a little disjointed at times moving between topics/episodes, but overall seemed to do a decent job of taking deep dive into relevant topics without too much overlap. Also, it's quite easy to progress through written/audiobooks when they are dialogue-based, so the length of this shouldn't be intimidating to anyone, especially those newer to Sam's work and looking to familiarize themselves with his major topics of interest.
  
  Also, looks like I'll have to see him live again, to re-complete the signed collection of his work :D
• 
  Giles Field

  
  OK, I’m biased - I’m a huge fan of Harris and have been for many years. This book consists of edited transcripts from a handful of his best conversations lifted from his ‘Making Sense’ podcast. There’s some great ones here, I loved Nick Bostrom, Glenn Loury and Timothy Snyder’s contributions in particular. (I think I’m going to seek out Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’ very soon in fact).
  There’s something nice about reifying, or at least making less ephemeral, these podcasts. I’ve also been a big fan of the dialogue as a way of imparting information in philosophy so it was a pleasure to read these which of course by their very nature ARE dialogues. Recommended.
• 
  Will Ford

  I'm a big fan of Sam Harris and the making sense podcast. I found with this "book" that the podcasts seem life changing whilst you're listening to them, but then totally forgettable once you finish them.
• 
  Wade Z

  interesting
• 
  Tarun Rattan

  This book is the concise summary of Sam Harris’s podcast conversations with number of influential thinkers of our time. The common theme in Sam Harris’s works is to debunk the notion that there is anything like Free Will and he says in the preface again of this book that most of the evil in our world—all the needless misery we manufacture for one another—is the product, not of what bad people do, but of what good people do once in the grip of bad ideas.
  
  The first conversation is with David Chalmers who is the resident philosopher at New York University and at the Australian National University, Chalmers is also a co-director of the Centre for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU. The dialog centred around the hard problem of consciousness and future of AI. David makes very interesting observations in the course of this discourse. At one point he observed that if we built a robot that could do all the things we can, it seems that at no point in refining its mechanisms would we have reason to believe that it was conscious, even if it passed the Turing Test. It seems increasingly likely that we will build machines that will seem conscious, and the effect could be so convincing that we might lose sight of the hard problem. In discussing the problem of other minds, he wondered how do you know that anybody apart from yourself is conscious? Descartes said, “Well, I’m certain of one thing: I’m conscious. I think, therefore I am.” That only gets you one data point. It gets me the me being conscious—and only being conscious right now, because who knows if I was ever conscious in the past? Anything beyond right now has to be an inference or an extrapolation. A similar pertinent point was made by him on evolution that the very fact that you can make sense of it immediately raises questions like “Why aren’t we zombies?” Evolution could have produced zombies; instead, it produced conscious beings. Why didn’t evolution produce zombies? If there were some function we could point to and say, “That’s what you need consciousness for; you couldn’t do that without consciousness,” then we might have a function for consciousness. But right now, for anything we actually do—perception, learning, memory, language, and so on—it sure looks as if a whole lot of it could be done unconsciously. The whole problem of what consciousness is doing is thrown into harsh relief by the zombie thought experiment. Another interesting idea, he said is that consciousness may be present at a fundamental level in physics. This corresponds to the traditional philosophical view called panpsychism—the view that basically everything has a mind where mind equals consciousness. Thus, every system is conscious, including fundamental physical systems like atoms or quarks or photons.
  
  Next conversation is with David Deutsch who is a visiting professor of physics at the Center for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford University, where he works on the quantum theory of computation, and constructor theory. The conversation further explore the nature of knowledge and the implications of its being independent of any specific, physical embodiment. David says that the way he think of knowledge is broader than the usual use of the term—and yet, paradoxically, closer to its common sense use. Knowledge is a kind of information, which is to say that it’s something that is one particular way and could have been otherwise; additionally, knowledge says something true and useful about the world. Knowledge is in a sense an abstraction, because it’s independent of its physical instantiation. One can speak words which embody some knowledge and can write them down. They can exist as movements of electrons in a computer, and so on. So knowledge isn’t dependent on any particular instantiation. But it does have the property that when it is instantiated, it tends to remain so. He mentioned about Karl Popper’s concept of knowledge as not requiring a knowing subject. It can exist in books, or in the mind, and people can have knowledge they don’t know they have. He further adds that among the rational approaches to knowledge, there’s an important difference between science and things like philosophy and mathematics. Not at the most fundamental level, but at a level which is often of great practical importance. That is, science is the kind of knowledge that can be tested by experiment or observation. He hasten to add, that doesn’t mean that the content of a scientific theory consists entirely of its testable predictions; the testable predictions of a typical scientific theory are a tiny sliver of what it tells us about the world.
  
  Next talk is with Anil Seth who is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex and founding co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. The aim of the Sackler Centre is to translate an understanding of the complex brain networks underpinning consciousness into new clinical approaches to psychiatric and neurological disorders. Anil said that there is a distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness. Our conscious experience of selfhood is part of our conscious experiences, but is only a subset of those experiences. And then there are arguments about whether there’s such a thing as a “phenomenal” consciousness that’s different from “access” consciousness—where “phenomenal consciousness” refers to the impression we have of a rich scene before us which might exceed whatever we have cognitive access to, and “access consciousness” refers to the way in which the contents of consciousness can be flexibly deployed for a variety of different functions. Anil further says that the hard problem of consciousness has been—and rightly so—one of the most influential philosophical contributions to the consciousness debate for the last twenty years or so. It encapsulates the fundamental mystery that for some physical systems there is also an inner universe. For some systems, there is the presence of conscious experience, there is something-it-is-like-to-be that system. Whereas for other systems—tables, chairs, probably all current computers—there is nothing-it-is-like-to-be that system. He cited the comment from his friend the musician and playwright Baba Brinkman—whom he worked with on The Rap Guide to Consciousness—put it beautifully: “What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”
  
  Next conversation is on the topic of Nature of Consciousness with Thomas Metzinger whose research centres on the analytic philosophy of mind, applied ethics, and the philosophy of cognitive science. He is a senior research professor at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, where he was previously a professor of theoretical philosophy and director of the research group on neuroethics and neurophilosophy. He rebukes the theory of nothingness and says that to make a cosmological analogy: it’s like the idea that everything, including the laws of nature, emerged out of nothing. Now, that may be true, but I’d argue that it’s the statement of a miracle. He explains his theory called the self-model theory of subjectivity described in his book called Being No One. What it says is that you have no self, but you have a self-model active in your brain, and it’s a naturally evolved representational structure that’s transparent. “Transparent” means you cannot experience it as a representation. Right now, as you’re listening to me, you’re identifying yourself with the content of your self-model. If you can rest for a while in a nonfragmented state, in an effortless form of mindfulness, you’ll have no sense of self. And then you’ll be jolted out of it by the next mind-wandering phase. This is the usual cycle for the meditator. The biggest problem in meditation is the meditator, as everybody knows. You’re trying to coax or manipulate yourself into something that’s rewarding. And that’s effortful.
  
  Next topic on discussion does not fit in well with the other themes of this book but still was important topic to address. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The conversation primarily focuses on his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and also touch on themes he further develops in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Harris asks Tim a pertinent question that why American’s at this moment are so blinkered and are being pulled by the tide of history in a very unlucky direction, toward the ruination of everything they care about. Tim says that there are three factors at play here. The first is the long-standing religious tradition of exceptionalism, the notion that Americans escaped from an evil old world into a pure new world, which is, of course, ridiculous on a whole number of fronts. The second is the obvious fact that in many ways they’re a world unto ourselves. The historians of American history rarely venture beyond American history, so you can hardly expect the American citizen to do so. And the third factor, and maybe the most relevant, is metaphysical laziness. He says Americans are not reading much and reading is a precondition of conversation, and conversation is something we very much need politically. On Racism he says that it is the suspension of the rational faculty and a perception of unfitness for intimate relations, a presumption about intelligence, an imputation of bad character—this kind of thing—vis-à-vis another person or group of people because of what one understands their racial identity to be.
  
  Next conversation in the book is about the biology of good and evil with Robert Sapolsky who is a neuroendocrinologist and a primatologist. He is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation ���genius” grant. About his domain he says that it’s a fascinating domain—the fact that the insular cortex, which tells you if you’re eating something rotten, also mediates moral disgust in us. That a part of the brain that does temperature sensing for you is also activated when you perceive that somebody has a warm or a cold personality. That the parts of your brain involved in pain detection in a literal sense also activate when you’re feeling empathic about somebody else’s pain. As often pointed out, evolution is not an inventor, it’s a tinkerer; it makes do with what’s already there.
  
  Next comes one of my favourite authors Daniel Kahneman who is an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University, and also an emeritus professor of public affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the Nobel Prize in economics for the work he did on decision making under uncertainty, with Amos Tversky. He first explains the concept of System 1 & System 2. He says that before starting with anything else, there are clearly two ways that ideas come to mind. If one say two plus two, then an idea comes to your mind. You haven’t asked for it, you’re completely passive, and something happens in your memory. If one asks you to multiply twenty-four by seventeen, you have to work to get that idea. So, it’s that dichotomy between the effortless and the effortful. And that is phenomenologically obvious—you start from there. How you describe it, and whether you choose to describe it in terms of systems or in other terms—that’s a theoretical choice. He says that theory is less important than the basic observation that there are two ways for ideas to come to mind. And then you have to describe it in a way that will be useful. Next, he says that there are ways to solve societal problems. Around the end of World War Two, the social psychologist Kurt Lewin developed ideas about how you can change behaviour, and he distinguished two central ways of changing behaviour: You can apply pressure in the direction that you want people to go, or you can ask a very different question—why aren’t they going there by themselves? What is preventing them from doing what you think they should do? And then remove the obstacles. Make it easier for people. It’s perhaps the best psychological idea I know. This distinction between applying pressure, and making things easier, removing obstacles in the key here. Next, he talks about there’s another distinction he makes that is incredibly useful and troubling for those of us who want to be happy in this life: it’s the distinction between the “remembering self” and the “experiencing self.” selves. There is the self that is living your life, and it’s having all those experiences in real time. That’s the experiencing self. Then there is the self that comes to life when you ask someone what they think about their life, how happy they are, if their vacation went well—all of those retrospective questions—and this is the remembering self.
  
  Next Talk is with Nick Bostrom who is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, artificial intelligence, and many other interesting topics. Officially he is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute. The talk delves in exploring Bostrom’s views on existential risk by focusing on three of his papers. The existential risk is concept of a risk either to the survival of Earth-originating intelligent life or a risk that could permanently and drastically reduce our potential for creating desirable future developments. In other words, a risk that could permanently destroy the future. The three papers on which this talk is based are 1) “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.” 2)“Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” And 3) “Where Are They?” (which is analysis of the Fermi problem, asking where is the rest of the intelligent life in the galaxy).
  
  Next conversation in the book is with David Krakauer who is president and William H. Miller professor of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute. His research explores the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms that support intelligence. He says during the talk that information is mathematically a reduction of uncertainty. Similarly, intelligence is what we do that ensures that the problem is efficiently solved. Stupidity is a set of rules that guarantees the problem will take longer than chance to be solved, or will never be solved, and yet is nevertheless employed with alacrity and enthusiasm. Numbers are in some sense the lowest-hanging fruit in our mathematical education. There are many number systems in the world. There are ancient Sumerian cuneiform numbers, about four thousand years old. There are ancient Egyptian numbers. And here is a good example of stupidity in culture: western Europe, for fifteen hundred years, used Roman numerals—from about the second century BC well into the fifteenth century AD. Roman numbers are good at measuring magnitude, the number of objects, but terrible for performing calculations. What’s X + V? What’s XII multiplied by IV? It just doesn’t work, and yet for fifteen hundred years the human brain opted to deliberate over arithmetic operations using Roman numerals that don’t work. The consequence was that for much of their history Europeans could not divide and multiply. It’s extraordinary, because it’s unbelievably stupid when you realize that in India and Arabia, they had a number system.
  
  Last talk in the book is on future of humanity with Max Tegmark who is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the cofounder of the Future of Life Institute. He is the author of Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0. He explains his views on reality as that something out there independent of him.He says that the Andromeda galaxy would continue existing even if we weren’t here, for example. The scientist says, very humbly, “Okay, if there’s some stuff that exists out there—physical reality, let’s call it—let’s look at it as closely as we can and try to figure out what properties it has.” If there’s confusion about it, that’s our problem and not reality’s problem. He next explains his concept of mathematical universe. The only difference between a quark and an electron is what numbers they have as their properties. And if you take seriously the fact that everything is made of these elementary particles that have only mathematical properties, then you can ask, “What about the space itself that these particles are in? What properties does space have?” Well, it has the property three, for starters—its number of dimensions. Which, again, is just a number. Einstein discovered that space also has properties called “curvature” and “topology,” but they’re mathematical, too. If both space itself and all the stuff in space have only mathematical properties, then the idea that everything is completely mathematical and we’re just a part of this enormous mathematical object starts to sound a little less ridiculous. He says that John Wheeler’s “It from Bit” is right — the concept that at some level the universe is a computation. Then he delves in Metaverse and says that there are a lot of hints now in physics that what we call empty space is also like that: It can freeze and melt and come in many different variants. And inflation is so violent that if space can take many forms, inflation will create each of those kinds of space—and an infinite amount of it at that. So if you go really, really far away, you might find yourself in a part of space where there aren’t six kinds of quarks, as there are here, but maybe ten kinds, that is a different universe altogether. He ends on optimistic note that for humans it’s our ability to design and upgrade our own software that has enabled humans to become the planet’s dominant species.