00:11:15.680That is the the the the nurture element of what causes you to do what you do.
00:11:21.560So these things, your beliefs, your viewpoints really, really matter.
00:11:25.160And I think what's interesting about our mechanistic view of the universe and how it also dovetails
00:11:31.340with Calvinism and other like sort of more theistic mechanistic views of the universe is that it really,
00:11:39.600to me, has kind of the opposite effect.
00:11:41.900Instead of making me think, oh, none of my choices matter.
00:11:46.600I'm not responsible for anything I ever do.
00:11:49.780I have this feeling like, oh, my gosh, I could really matter.
00:11:54.240I'm really extra super responsible for what I do because everything that I believe will affect how I act.
00:11:59.820And so my beliefs really, really matter.
00:12:01.360And you see a lot in Calvinist tradition or history, you know, you see the like early colonial pilgrims writing like, oh, gosh, like, am I saved?
00:12:17.140And they're really thinking a lot about their position in the mechanistic universe.
00:12:21.880Am I going to be something that matters?
00:12:23.380Am I not going to be something that matters?
00:12:25.180And I think they're also acutely aware of how their beliefs affect these things.
00:12:29.820If you have the hubris to believe that you are redeemed, you are saved, maybe that means that you're depraved and that you're not saved.
00:12:38.560Because what kind of holy person would believe that they're superior and actually good, right?
00:12:44.360But then once you believe that you're damned and you're super dedicated to try to redeem yourself, then you start to see, you know, there's this weird oscillation between.
00:12:53.280This is something which I think is really important in terms of radical self-responsibility is when you see the world this way, it means you're responsible even for your own thoughts.
00:13:04.140You know, if you have a thought, and this is something you saw in colonial Calvinists and stuff like that, which would make you a bad person, then you had to think, oh my God, this thought may mean that I actually am one of the people who is predestined to go to hell.
00:13:19.600That I actually was created as like this joke, this foil to the saved.
00:13:23.920And so you are responsible for everything that goes through your head, everything that's a component of who you are.
00:13:36.080And this is, when we talk about hyper-agency, you know, I think a way to explain this to somebody who might have trouble, you know, gonking, I guess is the word they use these days, what you're saying.
00:13:51.700So, suppose you have a murderer, right?
00:13:54.640And this murderer says, oh, I'm not really fully responsible for murdering these people because I was abused as a kid, right?
00:14:03.620That is a level of not taking responsibility that is possible even in a universe where people believe in free will, because they still believe that some things influence an individual.
00:14:13.560When you take full ownership over the fact that, yes, you are a creation of the things that happen to you in life, and you get to, to some extent, choose, and you are destined to either choose or not choose, to overcome those things and take total self-ownership.
00:14:31.220You don't get to ever say, I don't have responsibility for this decision, or I don't have responsibility for this emotion I'm allowing myself to feel, because it's who I am as a human, or because my parents did X, Y, or Z.
00:14:44.960No, everything you have is part of who you are.
00:14:49.060And so, what you're searching for constantly within yourself and you're trying to prevent is that you're the type of pre-programmed person who does evil things, who succumbs to the flow of society, rather than trying to determine what's good and what's bad and going down the good path, no matter what you have to face going down that path.
00:15:09.980And I love that level of radical self-determinism, that you never can say it's not my fault because something that happened to me before, because I was abused, because of something in society, because of, because all of us are complete constructs of the things that have happened to us in the past.
00:15:29.240And the way we judge ourselves is whether or not all of those things created somebody who tries to overcome that and take responsibility for themselves or not.
00:15:39.980And I really love the way you put that, sort of, what is it, radical agency.
00:15:45.380Yeah, I'm trying to think about how, because I don't think either of us held this mechanistic view of the universe when even we first met.
00:15:54.400A little bit, but not as strongly as I do now, because it was always sort of a weird outlier thing I thought before.
00:16:00.080And then I started talking with Simone about it and it became part of our like regular daily conversation, part of the way we held ourselves to account for everything.
00:16:08.740You know, there's, there's never an excuse.
00:16:13.740You either made the decision that was optimal given your moral framework or you didn't.
00:16:19.160And you either developed a moral framework as dissociated from the influences of society as possible.
00:16:25.300And they tried to go to a first principles approach as much as possible while still being true to sort of your traditional view of the world.
00:16:31.940You know, understanding that you are a product of those traditions, but trying to optimize them or you don't.
00:16:37.040And I, I think what it was is I held this view before, but I didn't live by it.
00:16:43.760When I met you, you really lived by it in a way that sort of almost shamed the portion of my brain that said, no one can really handle this level of responsibility.
00:16:56.100And through that shining example, you proved to me who I could be.
00:17:13.760Now I'm just trying to model or understand the key differences in worldview between a universe in which everything that will happen has happened.
00:17:24.200And time is an illusion that we're experiencing based on sort of our biology and some weird glitch of our consciousness.
00:17:33.340That, that view versus a view in which, I guess, what would we call this a procedural world, a procedurally generated world?
00:17:54.480I think to have the other perspective, you need to believe that the physical world doesn't really exist in a meaningful sense.
00:18:00.960And that the thing that exists in a meaningful sense is people's consciousnesses and people's sentiences.
00:18:05.500And that they are manifesting the physical world to some extent.
00:18:08.880I think that's really the opposite perspective.
00:18:11.000Well, yeah, because I'm genuinely struggling to understand how you could not believe that the world is.
00:18:18.080Well, and again, I think this is a cultural thing.
00:18:20.920So it's one of the things we talk about in our book is people hugely underestimate how quickly humans evolve and how quickly humans can co-evolve with a belief system.
00:18:30.240And that if, you know, if we both have come from Calvinist traditions, that the individuals who didn't naturally just see the world this way left the tradition and that individuals in their community, you know, regardless of their ethnic background or where they came from, who did see the world this way drifted into the community at a much higher rate.
00:18:48.140This is what we mean when we say the sociological aspects of an individual are determined at the genetic level or much less determined by things like ethnicity, which takes hundreds of thousands of years to change.
00:18:59.860And more things like opt-in community, such as religious traditions or where an individual chose to live ancestry, like where they moved.
00:19:08.060Like Silicon Valley is a good example of this, you know, in the gold rush, people who moved to Silicon Valley disproportionately were taking really high payout, low probability of success bets.
00:19:19.100And then is it any surprise that like the Silicon Valley ecosystem arose there for a completely different set of reasons?
00:19:25.580And it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't based on like one ethnic group or anything like that.
00:19:29.760It was basically a beacon from everyone from everywhere in the world who was like, okay, I have a mindset that is predispositioned to low probability, high reward payouts.
00:19:42.940And this is how you can get people who like us, who see things in a culturally biased way and are just incapable of seeing it outside of that cultural bias.
00:19:53.620And this is something that I think we should try to correct for if we have some sort of biological bias towards seeing the world in an incredibly deterministic fashion.
00:20:02.800However, I don't really know, like, if you look at like our wider philosophy, this is why we believe in cultural pluralism.
00:20:09.380I actually think that there are some benefits to having specialized ways of seeing the world within some subpopulation groups.
00:20:15.760And that, you know, like, there's some aspects of Judaism that I like try to engage with and I just can't get like the snake oven story.
00:20:24.560I can do that as a cultural outsider and it just feels wrong to me.
00:20:29.600You should probably explain this story for context.
00:20:33.120Three rabbis are having a disagreement around whether a, an oven is kosher or not.
00:21:17.300That building over there I just pointed to will randomly explode.
00:21:20.080Like, I don't remember all the things he did, but he just did a number of, like, impossible miracles on command saying, God, if you believe this, do this miraculous thing in the universe.
00:21:48.680Like, he takes this humorously, and he's like, well, I guess, what is it?
00:21:51.040It is not in heaven or something like that.
00:21:52.660And the point being is that sort of the legalistic interpretation of things, the cultural interpretations of things matters more than the objective truth of those things from, like, a fun – because I'm assuming that God has more access to, like, objective truth than humans.
00:22:08.220I mean, there's different ways you can read this, but, like, from a different cultural perspective, I just – it seems so obviously wrong.
00:22:20.560And I think the same way that many people can look at our deterministic view of reality, and it just seems obviously wrong, but I believe we live in a better world where certain humans are programmed to see the world one way, and certain humans are programmed to see the world another way, and that I can talk to those humans congenially and gain access to this different perspective of reality they have.
00:22:44.500And this is why it is so important to us to maintain this cultural pluralism.
00:22:49.520People wonder why we're so, like, fervently and fanatically worried where they're like, well, you believe that you and your descendants will be okay in the face of population collapse.
00:22:59.860Why are you worried about saving other people?
00:23:01.500It's because other people are different from us.
00:23:11.700What we're terrified about is the people who see things in a way that we can't begin to understand, that's what we're afraid is going to disappear, because they have some perspective of reality that our brains aren't built to model.
00:23:26.280Like, I see it as a genuine moral failing on my part that I'm having difficulty modeling or understanding a non-mechanistic view of the universe.
00:23:34.940And imagine a world in which I couldn't go on to, like, Reddit or some other place online, YouTube, and, like, find someone's, multiple people's explanations of this.
00:23:45.160Imagine a world in which I can't course correct for that.
00:23:51.000Yeah, but, I mean, that's also part of a Calvinist perspective, your intrinsic wretchedness.
00:23:54.820Well, no, but this is also something that we really believe about ourselves, is that humans, at any specific point in time, are a failed race.
00:24:03.760We are wretched and horrible, and we will constantly fail.
00:24:08.320That doesn't absolve us from responsibility to try to overcome our limitations.
00:24:13.020And so, we can accept that we have these intrinsic limitations.
00:24:17.840They may even be biological limitations to the way our brains process reality.
00:24:22.020But the fact that we are wretched and limited does not free us from the responsibility of trying to overcome that.
00:24:32.240And to that extent, I love that you take that responsibility on.
00:24:35.220And I am just so honored that you really forced me to live with my values, Simone, because that wasn't something I was doing before we got into a relationship.
00:24:48.980I am glad that you are deluded into thinking that somehow I'm making you a better person.
00:24:57.080But, yeah, I mean, this is all very interesting stuff.
00:25:00.480And I love having these conversations with you, because I can just kind of dumbly muse about something, and you'll make it a thing.
00:25:08.080And then suddenly, our lives are different, because we're committing to some kind of new worldview or set of values that, like, really changes our views and makes us better people, more effective.
00:25:19.040So, I think the one final thing I'd like to talk about within this subject is the concept of, in Minority Report, there are the precogs, right?
00:25:29.540There are these psychic people who are able to tell when you are about to commit a crime, and they will arrest you before you commit your crime so that you don't commit it.
00:25:40.280And then there's this sort of moral question of, well, but if you haven't committed the crime yet, can you really be arrested?
00:25:48.160And we're entering an age in which now there are polygenic risk scores for all sorts of things.
00:25:53.660You know, right now they're for things like gum disease and brain fog and certain types of cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's.
00:26:01.280But I'm sure in the future there will be polygenic risk scores for, like, murdering people and stealing things and violence, assault, risks of all sorts of bad behaviors, embezzlement.
00:26:14.360And, you know, there could probably be polygenic risk scores for all sorts of behaviors.
00:26:50.280But what I would say is that god is already punishing or rewarding us based on the decisions we're going to make from a Calvinist cultural perspective.
00:27:00.060So, we already live in a minority report, okay?
00:27:05.380So, it's irrelevant as a question to pontificate upon.
00:27:10.460It is the height of human immorality to think they can pass these judgments on other humans.
00:27:15.580In fact, passing these judgments on other humans means that you probably deserve to be punished.
00:27:22.440You know, that's the classic Calvinist perspective, which is to say, if you think that you are in the saved group, you almost certainly are not.
00:27:31.800There's Schrodinger, you know, the, I love you because you're beautiful.
00:27:35.800No, it's you're beautiful because you don't know you're beautiful, which, of course, creates the recursive loop, which is as soon as she realizes that someone could be beautiful because they don't know they're beautiful, then she knows she's beautiful.
00:27:48.280But through knowing she's beautiful, she's not beautiful.
00:27:50.600It's the same thing with being a good person from a Calvinist or secular Calvinist perspective.
00:27:56.780Well, what would you say about also the recent, I would say, surging meme that people, I guess, shouldn't be arrested or punished if they have gotten a bad roll of the dice in our mechanistic universe?
00:28:12.340Like, oh, well, you were born to an abusive family, you've lived a tragic life, and now you're assaulting people on the streets, you shouldn't be jailed, it's not fair.
00:28:23.460Some things that you inherited, everything you are is a result of the reality that existed before you.
00:28:29.760Therefore, you are always 100% responsible for who you are.
00:28:33.780I mean, that's unfortunate, but it is who you are.
00:28:37.160It is the painting that was painted by reality.
00:28:40.420The problem with that mindset is they want the world to be fair.
00:28:44.920And this is one of the many ways that fairness causes evil because it removes moral responsibility from the individual.
00:28:52.360So the response that our worldview has to that view is essentially, the world is not fair, rise above.
00:29:02.060Yeah, and these people are not any more or less responsible for their actions than anyone else in the world.
00:29:09.400Everyone is completely a product of their environment, their genes, and their past experiences.
00:29:14.620The fact that that's the case does not absolve you from responsibility.
00:29:19.000Those things may have made that person a bad person deserving of punishment, but it made that person a bad person deserving of punishment.
00:29:30.900And when you absolve a person of that, you lead to much higher rates of negative actions across society.
00:29:37.080When a person thinks they're not responsible for their own actions.
00:29:40.500Actually, this brings me to a point that you see historically.
00:29:45.840And it's something that, you know, one of the things we ask in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion is why, you know, suppose the Calvinists and the Quakers were anti-slavery.
00:29:54.720Yet, if you look at Calvinist slave ownership rates, they were like 0.5%.
00:29:58.420You look at Quaker slave ownership rates, which you can see from wills, go through the books for citations on this, don't just take it from me.
00:30:12.980Like morally, they thought slavery was bad, but they just did it anyway.
00:30:16.800And so the question is, what was happening there, right?
00:30:20.400And I think here you have the two extremes on these ideas of free will.
00:30:24.720From the perspective of a Calvinist, if they even thought about owning a slave, if they even considered the idea,
00:30:30.600they were proving to themselves that they were a bad person and that they were always going to go to hell no matter what.
00:30:39.700Through having those threats, through allowing yourself to become a bad person, through allowing yourself to even be the type of person who might do that,
00:30:48.380you prove your inevitable fate at the end of the timeline.
00:30:51.260Whereas to the Quaker, well, you know, in the moment, they were really doing it for good need.
00:32:51.300And this is why I rely on her guidance to be a good person and why I, and this is one of the great things.
00:32:59.680Even if I had all of my environmental conditions, you know how we talk about two people can become a single entity when they get married?
00:33:05.600Well, I went into marriage knowing all of my flaws, all of the things that were etched into my identity that made me a bad person.
00:33:14.800And through combining my identity with Simone's, I was able to partially overcome those things through to an extent having her as a voice in my ear for the rest of my life.
00:35:02.960But we always try to respond to criticism.
00:35:05.320And again, this is something we mentioned in other things.
00:35:07.300People, they don't understand how receptive we are to criticism if it's based on reality and facts.
00:35:13.120It's so often we get criticism, and then we chase down whatever the criticism was, and it's just wrong, or the person, like, didn't know about something, and they didn't.
00:35:24.380Because, yeah, I'm very open to changing my mind, and so are you, where we are capable of changing our minds.
00:35:29.720Well, because we feel that we're extremely responsible, which, again, I think feels very counterintuitive to people.
00:35:37.360If there's a person with a mechanistic view of the universe, I don't think that people simultaneously expect that they're going to be extremely neurotic about course correction and changing their views and changing and, like, controlling their behavior.
00:35:51.140But Calvinists have always been neurotic about that.
00:35:53.400Yeah, so it's a fun thing to think about.
00:35:55.540It is conditional to a deterministic universe view, because every wrong thing you do proves who you are.