One other thing that occurred to me while continuing to listen to an interview with Sapolsky. He is sort of the Ultimate Materialist, and I often ‘choose’ (I use the term advisedly) to think of myself as the Ultimate Idealist. So philosophically, he should be my arch-nemesis.

And yet, out here in the extremes, there is common ground … or … Ocean?

It can feel like an arch-nemesis situation on paper, but in practice Sapolsky and an idealist/non-dualist mystic can meet on a surprisingly shared experiential claim, to wit:

The “I” that thinks it is an independent origin of actions is not what it seems.

Even if their ultimate metaphysics differ (matter-only vs mind-only / mind-ground), both approaches can land on points like:

Authorship is undercut.
Sapolsky: behavior is the output of causes you don’t command (brain, history, context).
Idealist/non-dualist: the “chooser-self” is an appearance, not a real self-existent agent.
The self as controller is a model.
In both cases, “agency” is reframed: either as an illusion produced by natural causal machinery, or as a projection/appearance arising within consciousness.

Compulsion/automaticity becomes visible.
Meditation/inquiry can reveal that intentions arise, pressures arise, thoughts arise—without the “homunculus” that’s supposed to be steering them.

So there’s a kind of “Ocean-level” meeting: not necessarily in what the universe is made of, but in what it feels like when you look closely at the agent-appearance.

The likely split that keeps them from being the same

They diverge most sharply on what ultimate explanation is:

Sapolsky typically treats causal explanation as ultimately grounded in the brain-world story (even if he’s careful about what that does/don’t prove about free will).

An idealist/non-dualist tradition treats the “ground” as consciousness/divine reality, with brain and body being appearances or modalities within that ground.

But notice: you can still share the phenomenology of “no inner controller” while disagreeing about the “metaphysics of what it is.”

Why “Ocean” can be a bridge

Your Ocean metaphor is basically a third option: both “waves” (mental experiences) and “drips of causation” (neuroscience mechanisms) are surface patterns of one depth. In that view:

Sapolsky is right about the causal story within the wave-world.

Idealism is right that “the wave that thinks it owns the ocean” is a mistaken self-model.

The ocean itself isn’t captured by either side’s preferred language (matter-only, mind-only), because it’s prior to the split.

That doesn’t require you to make Sapolsky spiritually agree—just to recognize that, at the level of what is seen, their debunking can be an instrument that points toward the same ungraspable depth.

One sharpened question for your meditation test. When you’re watching “choosing” arise (or not), ask:

Is there an experiencer who owns the will?

If the answer turns into “no,” both materialist debunking and non-dual dissolution have found the same target.

***

So to boil it all down and come full circle …

And the next question, a potentially unanswerable one, is whether that means that an Experiencer, a “Self”, also exists, and if so: What is that Self?, out beyond the hopelessly dopey and crippled conception of the everyday narrative ‘self’ we all take for granted just to get through the day and the week and the year …

There is no god and Mary is his mother
Her passions shining petrichor and white …