Is social media driving us insane?

That's what famed American neuroscientist and bestselling author Sam Harris says in describing the post-modern platforms as a psychological experiment that none of us signed up for yet all of us are a part of.

Dr Harris, who's visiting Australia in August this year for the Day of Reckoning conference in Sydney, discussed a variety of issues with the ABC's The World program ranging from United States President Donald Trump's rewriting of reality, the illusion of free will, as well as the divisiveness of identity politics in 2018.

Here are a few excerpts from that conversation.

Social media is 'driving us all insane'

"Social media is clearly driving us all insane. This is a psychological experiment that nobody signed up for and we are all in it, and we each have to curate the contents of our own consciousness a little more carefully than we have been, and rethink our relationship to these platforms. We have to resist this slide into a false equivalency. In America now we have people, most of them support Donald Trump, who think there is an equivalence between something like the New York Times and a website like Breitbart, and that comparison is so obscene that it really need not even be criticised. But the problem is that every time the New York Times gets something wrong it seems to lend credence to the fact that, you know, there's really no objective standard of journalism in the first place, you can just pick whatever kind of misinformation you like and the whole world becomes social media essentially. So, the burden is upon the impeccable news sources to stay impeccable and really apologise and correct their errors as soon as possible. To some degree that standard in even the best organs of journalism seems to have eroded and that's troublesome as well."

How Donald Trump rewrites the rules of reality

"Honestly, thus far, that [the casualty of truth] is the most harmful aspect of his presidency. Just the complete ruination of any standard of honesty in political discourse and it's astonishing to me. I have not yet accepted that this is even possible, much less actual. I don't think I'm alone, but I'm continually having the bewildering experience that I just cannot believe that this person is president. It is all focused on this particular aspect of his presidency, where he lies more than any person has ever lied in human history and not only does he get away with it, his supporters seem to delight in his running roughshod over any expectation that a public figure would be honest. It's not a bug, it's a feature for them and that's really disturbing. He has enough people that support him for whom the lying is not actually a problem, it's a technique. It's a kind of naked declaration of power, where he doesn't have to observe your expectations about what is logical or coherent or responsive to facts. He can just say what he wants, because it's the impression he wants to leave with you. He wants a certain language in the air and he just puts it there. But all lying is just destructive of the social fabric, even so called white lies undermine trust, they undermine relationships, they destroy reputations — that is in a context where people care about the truth. But what's amazing now, we seem to be in some kind of freefall with respect to this and so many people do not care if you are caught lying. And Donald Trump seems to have rewritten the rules.

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Is free will just an illusory perception?

"I think free will as most people think of it, is an illusion. It's not that people can't be influenced. The fact that we don't have a radical kind of free will to invent ourselves is of a piece with the claim that we are open to influence at every moment, we are open to with better conversations and better arguments and more evidence. What we need are good ideas to triumph over bad ideas and this is really the lever that we can get in hand which will move more than anything else in our societies. It's not so much that there are so many bad people in the world doing evil things —there are some bad people in the world doing evil things — but for the most part there are psychologically normal people under the sway of bad ideas doing evil things. And that is a problem that is, in orders of magnitude, larger than the problem of bad people or psychopaths."

The divisiveness of identity politics