Making Sense with Sam Harris

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#360 — We Really Don’t Have Free Will?

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about the widespread belief in free will. They discuss the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Dennett, complexity and emergence, downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism, Benjamin Libet, the primacy of luck, historical change in attitudes about free will, implications for ethics and criminal justice, the psychological satisfaction of punishing bad people, understanding evil, punishment and reward as tools, meritocracy, the consequences of physical beauty, the logic of reasoning, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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  #393 — Is History Repeating Itself?

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  #392 — Technology & Culture

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  #391 — The Reckoning

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  #390 — Final Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential Election

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  #389 — The Politics of Risk

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  #388 — What Is Life?

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  #387 — Politics & Power

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  #386 — Information & Social Order

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  #385 — AI Utopia

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  #384 — Stress Testing Our Democracy

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  #383 — Where Are the Grown-Ups?

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  #382 — The Eye of Nature

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  #381 — Delusions, Right and Left

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  #380 — The Roots of Attention

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  #379 — Regulating Artificial Intelligence

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  #378 — Digital Delusions