Profile – Sam Harris (b. 1967)

Trained as both philosopher and neuroscientist, Sam Harris has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA, has written books on faith, religion, morality, and free will, and runs the Waking Up podcast. He is fiercely critical of organised religion and along with Dennett and Dawkins is considered one of the ‘four horsemen’ of the new atheism – although, unlike them, he is a long-term meditator, believing that some Buddhist and Hindu traditions offer valuable empirical insights into consciousness. Experiences with psychedelic drugs, including LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA, led him to leave Stanford in his second year to seek spiritual insight without drugs. Travelling to India, he pursued strenuous methods of meditation, including a year on silent retreat, concluding that the key aim is to look into the sense of being a separate self until it dissolves. He thinks free will is an illusion, morality can be studied scientifically, everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (though having little to do with consciousness) is surprisingly relevant to the illusoriness of the ego.