Rethinking the Concept of Souls
Episode Stats
Words per minute
174.37387
Harmful content
Misogyny
10
sentences flagged
Toxicity
13
sentences flagged
Hate speech
8
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, Simone and I continue our conversation about when does a human body get its soul, and why should we even be talking about souls at all? We talk about the idea of a soul and why it should not be talked about at all.
Transcript
00:00:34.260
And today we are going to be continuing a conversation
00:00:37.660
we had on one of our strategy walks this morning.
00:00:39.760
Every morning we try to take like an hour just to ourselves
00:00:46.960
was I had been editing the abortion video that we had done.
00:00:54.180
Maybe I don't have the right to kill my mom.
0.99
00:01:13.740
And we had talked about when do we think insolument happens.
00:01:25.820
And this is an interesting thing for us to be talking about
00:01:28.700
because we also don't believe in a literal soul.
00:01:31.820
And it got interesting to me as I was thinking more about it
00:01:35.700
because I was like, yes, but even though we don't believe in a literal soul,
00:01:40.460
it still makes sense for us to be talking about insolument
00:01:44.060
because we're calling, when we're talking about like your consciousness,
00:01:48.240
your sentiments, your emotion, everything like that,
00:01:50.140
that is what many other people would call a soul.
00:01:53.000
And my argument in general is that we shouldn't be talking about souls at all
00:01:58.880
because we came up as humanity with the concept of souls a very long time ago
00:02:04.940
before we had a scientific understanding of the larger things
00:02:09.320
that we can now describe as life or sentience or sapience,
00:02:13.560
which is I think what people are really referring to
00:02:15.500
and various cultural traditions are really referring to
00:02:18.340
when they talk about their various types of souls and spirits.
00:02:24.520
an analogy that I think is good to help people understand what I mean
00:02:27.320
when I say, well, there's functionally no difference
00:02:33.120
which is to say, we believe that these larger processes that we experience,
00:02:39.520
like the human experience that many people would think of
00:02:43.800
is an emergent property of the way our brains function.
00:02:50.340
An emergent property is something like I, as a human,
00:02:54.080
can understand that all of the individual water molecules,
00:02:59.440
like what their shape is, why they interact in the way they interact,
00:03:07.800
But I will never be able to conceive of those individual H2O molecules
00:03:18.320
The human brain is just not meant to understand these types of emergent properties
00:03:22.200
because it was never an evolutionary advantage to being able to understand them.
00:03:25.900
Now, if somebody came to me from a tribe and they were like,
0.99
00:03:29.320
well, we are aware of water molecules and how they work and all that,
00:03:33.840
but then there's this separate thing that we call wetness or liquidness, right?
00:03:38.840
And that, for our tribe, is a totally different thing than the water molecules.
00:03:44.460
And they'd say, now you don't believe in wetness.
00:03:51.840
I can see what happens when I splash in a pool.
00:03:56.620
I just think it's the same thing as this other thing
00:04:00.340
that we have always talked about as being something else.
00:04:03.760
I didn't even think of wetness without thinking about the Zoolander mermaid ad.
00:04:11.340
Like, wetness is the essence of the boy of the...
00:04:30.420
But I also think that it's damaging to give this magical property to something like a soul.
00:04:39.120
Because it can create the kinds of toxic, recursive arguments and reductions
00:04:46.380
that you see with things like the abortion argument.
00:04:48.860
Where when you take an emergent property or you take any concept that can be explored better
00:04:56.480
by science and by more concrete terms, now that we have the tool set to do so,
00:05:01.060
and then elevate it to this element of sacredness, now we can no longer talk about it.
00:05:07.500
And people can establish these arbitrary boundaries like the Catholic Church has
00:05:11.780
and move the goalposts and then say that this argument is beyond reproach.
00:05:16.620
That according to what this Pope said in the late 1800s, the soul starts now.
00:05:22.340
And if you question that, you are destroying souls.
00:05:25.740
When really we should be having a conversation, which we discuss in our episode on abortion,
00:05:31.980
about the increasing level at which sentience and sapience and capability of feeling pain
00:05:40.200
And how abortions become increasingly morally complex and risky and questionable
00:05:45.660
with each passing second as these developments increase.
00:05:49.380
And that there are ways for us to measure things like neural development,
00:05:52.320
like the ability to feel pain, like the ability to react to stimuli.
00:05:55.980
And when you take away the sacredness of the soul and instead break it down into more of its
00:06:01.040
component parts, as is understood by Christians in the Catholic Church to be the soul.
00:06:07.920
Then you can have a more realistic and practical conversation.
00:06:11.840
Before you get into this, I want to do a quick aside here that I think is really important to
00:06:15.840
the point you're making, which is that this leads to much more suffering in the long run,
00:06:22.740
Because if you look at Europe, which is a much more socially liberal place in the United States,
00:06:28.240
their average abortion age in most countries in terms of legalness is around 15 weeks.
00:06:34.280
And in the U.S. it's like around like 23 weeks.
00:06:37.780
The point in a pregnancy at which there are restrictions,
00:06:41.600
not the average stational age at which abortions take place.
00:06:45.720
Yeah, I mean, whatever, the legal, the audience understands what I'm saying here.
00:06:50.600
Anyway, so the question is, why is the U.S. so much more legally loose?
00:06:55.220
And I believe fundamentally it's because the conservatives in this country
00:07:00.040
have approached the argument with a not something that's going to cross interface divides,
00:07:06.840
which is to say, here, look, we can prove neural activity.
00:07:10.340
I can show you pictures of a baby suffering, you know, a fetus suffering.
00:07:18.220
They approach it with, well, a life begins at conception because it does.
00:07:22.940
You know, that's when insolument happens, right?
00:07:27.120
Well, yeah, or in other words, the conversation isn't being shut down
00:07:30.120
by being immediately made about sacred and religion,
00:07:33.760
the sacred and religion, and therefore being politicized.
00:07:37.080
Because when you make the discussion of abortions about the sacred and religion,
00:07:41.620
that means that the vehement atheists and anti-religion people
00:07:50.340
because we can't have the religious people dictating our lives.
00:07:52.880
And then suddenly abortion becomes sacred, as we discussed in this episode.
00:07:55.480
Let's not get caught up in that because I want to talk about insolument and souls.
00:07:59.740
So it's very clear now that I've looked a little bit more at how,
00:08:04.140
like the history of how different cultures and religions have treated the soul,
00:08:08.720
that the Christian concept of souls is really based on Plato's concept of souls.
00:08:15.680
And that Plato's concept of souls is really just consciousness
00:08:25.680
The soul is immortal and exists before birth and after death.
00:08:30.680
And it is the essence of a person deciding how people behave.
00:08:35.300
That is your brain and consciousness, plus your genetics, arguably.
00:08:43.840
Two, thymoides, which is your spirit or emotion.
00:08:47.760
Three, medicon, which is your appetite or desire.
00:08:54.760
He says that the soul is incorporeal and eternal.
00:08:58.520
He says that the soul is capable of thinking even after death.
00:09:01.820
So, you know, that's the magical thinking part.
00:09:04.740
But the rest, this is all about thinking and processing.
00:09:07.060
And then when you look at who has a soul in Plato's framework, this depends on its capacity
00:09:19.320
On self-motion, the ability to move itself, which Plato saw as a key characteristic of having
00:09:25.060
So basically agency is a key portion of having a soul, which is an extremely human thing
00:09:29.800
and very oriented around not just sentience, but sapience as well, I would argue.
00:09:34.560
And then cognitive abilities, the soul is responsible for thinking.
00:09:39.260
And then you can see this furthered in Christian thought and in like generally like Greco-Roman
00:09:48.060
When you see how over histories span, different cultures have at different times, even said
00:09:58.580
So when you look at the breakdown of different Christian sects and sort of ask, okay, well,
00:10:04.240
which Christian sects believe that only, you know, humans have souls or only, you know,
00:10:11.260
Most Christian denominations agree that only humans have souls.
00:10:14.940
Some like really progressive, like the Unitarian Universalists, some of them were like, well,
00:10:22.600
And like maybe Eastern religions are kind of right and everything is a spirit.
00:10:27.780
But most of them are like, no, no, no, just humans.
00:10:29.760
But then there are all these historical groups, including quite a few Christians who are like,
00:10:35.560
And that's where you also get to this concept where I think you really see it being clear
00:10:40.840
that especially Christians equate having a soul with sapience, because let's look at the
00:10:46.540
groups that they have argued do not have souls at various times in history.
00:10:51.520
And I think this, it really, you'll see that the common theme is that these are all groups
00:10:56.140
that are at the same time kind of accused of not being sapient.
00:11:10.240
So during the era of slavery and colonialism, some Christian slave owners and colonizers
00:11:14.420
argued that African slaves did not have souls or had inferior souls and that indigenous peoples
00:11:23.200
These are groups that, you know, they're, they're savages.
00:11:25.520
You know, they, they, they, they do not have agency to, they don't think for themselves.
00:11:31.740
And these are groups that they've sort of not seen as having the sapience of them due
00:11:36.200
to cultural differences, due to them being alien, whatever.
00:11:41.800
In some historical concepts, certain Christian groups debated whether women had souls, because
00:11:50.780
I think some online red silk faces might do that these days.
00:11:56.280
And then some interpretations of Islam also questioned the nature of women's souls.
0.79
00:12:04.500
So in some societies, lower classes or castes were sometimes considered to have lesser or
00:12:11.080
So like, I mean, the poor, they live like animals.
00:12:16.800
I actually want to say that I have seen this in modern times, you know, we hang out with
00:12:23.960
And one of the ideas that has been floating around in this community is not just, you know,
00:12:30.300
you as the audience, you're probably familiar with simulation theory.
00:12:32.960
It is a simulation and it's provably a simulation because, oh, so it's provably a simulation
00:12:39.300
because you could be running an infinite number of simulations like this within our universe
00:12:43.820
And if that's true, it is infinitely more likely that we're on a server in another universe
00:12:51.200
But when they go further and argue that it's, I got to put the Rick and Morty scene, a simulation
00:12:56.460
running on minimum processing power, which, you know, the deja vus, stuff like that.
00:13:07.740
I got to tell you this morning, I didn't even know this award existed.
00:13:12.300
I want to say that today was the best day of my life.
00:13:16.000
But the truth is, it's, it's, it's more meaningful than that.
00:13:29.080
You're inside a simulation of a simulation inside another giant simulation.
00:13:36.420
But anyway, what they argue is that most of the humans on earth today are not actually
00:13:43.260
fully simulated to the point of being sentient.
00:13:46.820
They're just sort of reacting to environmental scenario.
00:13:51.920
And, and here's the thing though, Simone, I can kind of see where they're coming with
00:14:00.020
Well, and this, but again, I want to, I want to point out, this is hearkening back to these
00:14:04.720
platonic ideals around what the soul is, where agency plays a key role, where emotional
00:14:11.740
So again, it's not this like sacred concept there, they're talking about sapience and
00:14:17.760
But the, the, the, the, what I was going to say, because I want to get the audience in
00:14:20.720
the mindset of this, because I think it's really easy to just dehumanize, oh, ultra wealthy
00:14:27.060
I mean, I think the same lack of insolvent or sapience is a little opposite of people.
00:14:33.820
What I'm talking about is I was saying, it's very easy when I say that some of these high
00:14:38.820
agency, wealthy people don't believe everyone has a soul or is not fully programmed, right?
00:14:49.620
What I was, I'm, I'm, the audience is going to hear that and be like, oh, evil, wealthy
00:14:55.680
And not all of the people in the communities that I'm around that have shared this belief
00:15:01.780
They are, so I'm trying to get people in the mindset of this group so they can understand
00:15:06.440
how in a modern society, someone could come to this, which is to say, imagine you go to
00:15:13.300
And it's the same people at the events every time you go.
00:15:21.840
And when you are going out there and you are searching for a truly independent take in the
00:15:26.420
world, it usually comes from one of these, maybe a hundred people.
00:15:30.820
And, and then you begin to be like, why aren't I hearing independent takes from anyone outside
00:15:38.320
And, and you as a random internet user may feel that way sometimes.
00:15:42.420
Why are there only like a hundred people online who seem to have genuinely unique opinions
00:15:49.940
Isn't it something like 90% of people don't engage at all online and then like 1% are responsible
00:15:59.360
But I mean, I think this is even, this is even crazier.
00:16:02.020
Like to me, it genuinely is like a hundred people that I see that are regularly producing
00:16:07.680
what seems to me to be both original, well thought through and based on like some degree
00:16:20.440
I actually want to emphasize here how wild this is and how much it messes with even my
00:16:27.660
own perception of reality that when I am online and I hear some new idea or new take, and I'm
00:16:40.200
This might be a random news article or something like that.
00:16:42.840
That a good 80% of the time, it comes down to a person I already personally know and am
00:16:51.240
That is wild because I do not know that many people.
00:16:55.400
Like recently somebody was like, hey, how did you get Curtis Yarvin to come on your show?
00:16:59.400
And it's like, well, that's one weird question.
00:17:01.440
Like I've known Curtis for ages or, you know, we had mentioned Sammo in something and they're
00:17:07.240
But like when I mentioned Sammo, I'm thinking of like family friend Sammo, who I know from
00:17:15.620
Where are the other people generating novel ideas outside of this small friend circle?
00:17:21.280
And it is further hit home for me when I have had to have intellectual discussions with random
00:17:29.160
Recently, for example, when I had some lady start yelling at me for punishing my kids and
1.00
00:17:34.080
I tried to walk her through the logic of why a child would need to be punished, she began
00:17:39.520
to break down into just like simple phonetic loops, like break the cycle and, you know,
00:17:49.800
And it was as if I was interacting with an NPC in a video game who you were not designed
00:17:57.800
I will say that this does scare me in terms of the reach of our channel, ultimately, because
00:18:15.700
it may mean that the audience who is capable of understanding or engaging with the ideas
00:18:20.820
that we are laying out there is just not that large an audience.
00:18:24.920
But anyway, continue with your platonic ideals.
00:18:26.540
More, well, more, more groups that don't that haven't had souls by some Christians views,
00:18:31.280
or we'll say Abrahamic groups views in the past.
00:18:33.380
So there's some developmental stage discrimination, some religious and philosophical traditions have
00:18:38.040
debated whether fetuses or young infants have souls.
00:18:42.660
But at one point, a developing human acquires a soul back to the abortion debate.
00:18:46.080
And then finally, mental and physical conditions.
00:18:48.480
So people have questioned the presence of souls in people with severe mental illnesses,
00:18:52.600
as well as those with significant cognitive impairments.
00:18:58.380
We are looking at degrees of sapience and perceived sapience and intelligence, which I think is
00:19:04.500
And I think another thing that it's important to look at when we're talking, when we're saying
00:19:09.100
like, okay, especially in the case of abortion debates, this concept of soul is really
00:19:15.080
a platonic ideal that should be discussed as consciousness.
00:19:18.380
And now that we understand the brain and how it works and genetics and how they work and
00:19:23.180
not the soul, because this concept of souls isn't even really that pervasive in non Abrahamic
00:19:30.460
or Greco Roman inspired religions or, or influenced religion.
00:19:34.960
So like, think about the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul.
00:19:38.800
It's not just all these like Plato sort of triad of, of concepts that really all have to
00:19:45.680
The ancient Egyptian concept has a ton of different parts.
00:19:49.320
So there's Kat, the physical body, Ba, the personality depicted as a bird with a human
00:19:54.300
head, Ba, or Ka, the life force, Ren, the true name, whatever that is, but that's an important
00:20:01.400
Shuyet, the shadow, Jejub, the heart, Ak, the transformed spirit after death, Sahu, the spiritual
00:20:13.300
Quick interjection before you go further with this.
00:20:17.100
Remember when I divided, so people can watch our video where I say the three-phase, policyism,
00:20:22.360
It's a perfect example of how policyistic traditions always divide things, which is
00:20:35.220
You've got the 50 names for the different rings and layers and everything like that.
00:20:39.700
Yeah, and then even Greco-Roman views didn't have this universal Platonic view of the soul,
00:20:46.060
so Plato viewed the soul as immortal and separate from the body, but really he was also describing
00:20:51.500
Aristotle saw the soul as the form of essence of a living being, so I don't know, your
00:20:57.300
And I just keep thinking of Zoolander and wetness.
00:20:59.720
And then Epicureans believed the soul was made of atoms, like the body.
00:21:02.880
So when your body dies, I guess your soul disappears.
00:21:05.640
And then, you know, of course, early Christian theology was influenced by Greek ideas and
00:21:11.540
But then we have Abrahamic religions that sort of took that on.
00:21:15.000
But Eastern religions, so, you know, with Hinduism, believes in the Atman, the individual
00:21:21.340
But it sort of like gets unmoored from your personality, and it doesn't seem to really be
00:21:26.280
It's sort of like this continued thing, but it's not like associated with consciousness.
00:21:33.160
And then there's Buddhism, which rejects the idea of an eternal, unchanging soul, and
00:21:39.380
And then there's like Shinto, where like kind of everything has a spirit, and your spirit
00:21:44.660
can kind of linger on a little bit after you die, but not like really, or maybe it'll become
00:21:54.620
A kami is like a god, but like a sort of like a little spirit god, not a powerful god.
0.75
00:22:00.160
Go back to like polytheism, and it's sort of polytheism plus mysticism.
00:22:05.460
Just think about like Studio Ghibli films, where there are little spirits everywhere, and
00:22:09.000
little set spirits, and stuff like that, and tree spirits.
00:22:18.320
Like it's a really, it's wonderful, especially for children, this sort of view that everything's
00:22:31.780
I feel like for an imaginary mind playing in nature, Shinto is one of the most appealing-
00:22:39.420
Well, you know, you say that, but it really is very similar to most of the, I'd almost
00:22:44.180
call them like pre-policyistic animalistic traditions, because you know, we had those,
00:22:48.420
if you look at like early Irish mysticism and stuff like that, or like pre-mysticism.
00:22:54.060
But like the belief that if your sock was in a different place in your house, that meant
00:22:58.520
the, oh, they had a word for these things, brownies, or something like that.
00:23:02.340
Like there were different categories of like little elf things.
00:23:07.260
Everything in the woods was constantly, there was always some little-
00:23:12.720
People watching you, ready to play a trick on you, or ready to attack you, or ready to,
00:23:19.160
and everything you did was just all of these rituals around protecting your house, or protecting
00:23:24.560
your food, or ensuring that, you know, various things helped you find your lost things and
00:23:30.820
And I actually, one of the stories that I was working on, and we need to have another
00:23:35.180
like Malcolm Stories episode, one of the stories I was working on was inspired by this idea,
00:23:41.760
because I was like, what I wanted to do is I was really inspired by Tolkien, and the way
00:23:46.280
that Tolkien took old mystical traditions and tried to re-invoke them in a new context, because
00:23:53.600
if you look at Tolkien's work, it has changed literature probably more than any book in history,
00:23:59.380
except for the Bible, in terms of the number of copies of this new type of world he created,
00:24:05.020
that no one had ever done something kind of like that before.
00:24:07.440
Now it's like a genre, basically, you know, orcs and knights and all of that, and wizards,
00:24:13.680
But I was like, well, I wanted to do something radically different from that.
00:24:17.060
And I was like, what if I went with this vibe of like the little things that mess with you,
00:24:25.040
And then I superimposed this vibe onto a modern online context, with the idea being that some
00:24:32.620
of the people online who you're interacting with are not people, but sort of spirits you
00:24:40.540
Didn't you and I play with this idea, the span, I think we called it?
00:24:46.840
And the idea was, is that essentially it's a different plane of reality that these things
00:24:52.440
live on. And in this alternate plane of reality, your existence, like the amount of existence-ness
00:24:58.860
you have, the amount of power you have, your ability to conjure yourself is based on the
00:25:04.380
attention that you have. And so it was in their reality, you know, it's like a hierarchy with
00:25:08.880
various things in their reality, paying attention to other things. And the more something gets paid
00:25:12.440
attention to, like an idea or something like that, the more tangible and powerful it becomes.
00:25:16.600
And some of them found ways to break into our reality through cyberspace. And then obviously,
00:25:23.140
they want attention. That's their goal, right? Because that feeds them power within their
00:25:27.940
realm. But then also, for example, if you become particularly famous online, you can create an
00:25:34.420
imprint within their reality that can then aim to take your place within an online environment.
00:25:40.640
Very similar to the concept of, what was that, that the Irish had, where they would take the
00:25:44.440
baby and replace them with another baby. I'll get all the names here. But I, if people like my
00:25:50.300
little weird fantasy universes, I'm constantly creating new ones now that I'm playing with AI
00:25:54.760
chatbots and stuff like that. So I've got some really detailed-
00:25:57.860
Yeah, we're going to have to do an episode where you talk about that.
00:26:00.080
Recently, something I've had a ton of fun doing when playing with AI chatbot stories
00:26:04.360
is creating twists around traditional tropes that change our understanding of these tropes,
00:26:11.460
but in a way that makes more sense given the collection of facts we know about them.
00:26:16.100
So I'll give two quick examples here. One is elves. So we typically think of elves of these
00:26:22.520
basically humanoid-looking, really long-lived things that live near forests and attempt to
00:26:27.860
protect forests and appear to have some sort of connection to a forest. Well, in this interpretation,
00:26:33.920
I reveal, or through investigation, find that elves are actually just a race of humans that created a
00:26:44.060
spirit link with a forest, like a necromancer might to stay young, and then are using the forest's energy
00:26:52.260
to give them these supernaturally long lives. And doing this has transformed their appearance
00:26:59.740
slightly. This would explain why they want to protect the forest. This would explain why they
00:27:04.020
have a connection to the forest. This would explain why they look so human. This would explain why
00:27:07.820
they're so arrogant and want to keep outsiders away from their rituals and everything like that.
00:27:11.900
And it would also make sense that they might not have passed this understanding of who they are
00:27:18.140
onto the next generation, because if the humans around them already saw them as a different super
00:27:23.700
long-lived entity, well, I admit to them that they're basically necromantically stealing forest energy.
00:27:28.860
And then you can build fun subversions like this. Like, well, from a forest perspective,
00:27:34.520
the forests that the elves live in are enslaved, and the other forests, the forests that the humans
00:27:39.160
use and harvest, are the unshackled forests. Like, you would much rather be born a forest spirit in one
00:27:46.720
of those forests than the ones that the elves are feeding on. Another reinterpretation comes from
00:27:52.440
the understanding of vampires, which is to say, well, you can actually understand a vampire as just
00:27:58.820
a few simple necromatic self-replicating spells. So you've got a life drain spell, a youth spell,
00:28:09.060
and then an animated corpse, along with a number of curses. Like, why have the sunlight thing?
00:28:16.360
Why not be able to see themselves in mirrors? Well, here's an example of why they might not be able to see
00:28:21.120
themselves in mirrors. What if they are literally just a self-replicating cascade of spells?
00:28:27.620
So, for example, on their teeth, to allow the spirit-to-use conversion ritual, there is a rune.
00:28:34.620
And the person who originally created vampires didn't want them to see this rune on their teeth,
00:28:39.020
so they couldn't replicate it and do the spell themselves. And that he wanted a form of undead thrall
00:28:44.540
that could self-replicate. And maybe somewhere thousands upon thousands of years ago, he died out.
00:28:50.060
But the vampires are continuing on self-replicating and self-replicating through a self-replicating
00:28:56.620
simple set of spells. And this subverts the vampire's understanding of itself. And maybe the
00:29:02.100
oldest of vampires actually knew that they were originally created to be a slave race. But they
00:29:06.120
hid this from the younger to create this air of prestige and difference from humanity and
00:29:12.640
the higher-ness from humanity. And then you could do really fun subversions with this.
00:29:16.600
So I've got to create a few more of these because they're very fun. Fun aside here,
00:29:19.940
what I was trying to add a picture of a vampire to show people, like, in the background here with AI,
00:29:27.060
any female-assigned vampire gets tagged as not safe for work. Like, I just can't get it to create
1.00
00:29:34.300
one. It thinks that all vampires are not safe for work. And I assume that that's because out of the
00:29:40.320
vampires it creates, whenever it creates a vampire woman, it makes her not safe for work,
1.00
00:29:45.660
given that that's sort of the evoked set that it's working with. And then tells me that I'm
00:29:50.240
asking for something that's not safe for work, which is very much not the case. I'm, like,
00:29:54.520
trying to be, like, high-class vampire lady. Or now I'm trying high-class woman with vampire
0.70
00:30:02.040
But it's clear to me that in many, many other religious traditions, the soul is more like just
00:30:07.660
being alive. In fact, in some Near Eastern cultures, the soul is believed to reside in
00:30:12.300
the blood. You can imagine someone seeing a person bleed out and die and thinking,
00:30:16.780
their soul's leaving them. Oh, their soul's coming out.
00:30:19.340
Well, they get the last breath because you get, like, hot breaths on a cold day and you'd see steam
00:30:24.340
coming out and they'd be like, oh, that's the soul leaving them. But also, and I really like the way
00:30:28.740
you did this this morning for me, where you highlighted this for me, where you were like, look,
00:30:33.500
you know, if you're in a historic context, you don't understand the brain or anything like that.
00:30:38.600
And you're trying to explain what is this thing that we think of as sentience. And I mean,
00:30:42.320
if you look at more recent research, it's really quite easy to explain sentience now.
00:30:46.540
So if you want to get a feeling from that, one of our earliest videos we did. So if you're a
00:30:51.020
longtime fan of the channel, but you came more recently, so you haven't seen our earlier stuff,
00:30:55.020
watch the You're Probably Not Sentient video. It's really core, I think, to how we see the world,
00:30:59.480
but I don't want to spam you guys with another copy of that video. But yeah, it's, I'll just give
00:31:04.380
you some examples of what I, we mean by this. So we now know from things like, you know, split brain
00:31:10.560
patients that you can, if you, if you, if you cover up, this takes too long to explain, basically just
00:31:19.800
go watch the video, but there's compelling evidence that we probably aren't as sentient as we think we
00:31:24.640
are. And, and that even, you know, as fMRI stuff, you know, we can tell in the fMRI, you've made the
00:31:29.660
decision long before you're conscious of making the decision. And what we're experiencing with
00:31:33.540
sentience is more of a, a little historian that's taking credit for a bunch of things they're not
00:31:38.820
doing. And that you will always claim credit. Like, Oh, I decided that even if we, like a scientist
00:31:43.940
can prove, no, you actually didn't make that decision. Like, like inarguably prove you will believe
00:31:49.520
and have the perception that you did make that decision. And so it gets a lot easier to explain
00:31:54.220
these things, but here's another thing with souls. Did you have anything else you wanted to get to
00:31:57.900
before I? Go ahead. I'm curious to see what you say. Well, I wanted to go into, because people can
00:32:04.400
be like, why, you know, given, you know, your read of the Christian Bible and everything like that,
00:32:10.320
do you not believe in the traditional soul? And I'd say, well, you've got to remember, we also believe
00:32:14.600
that when Woodbury's book, when I read certain things, I'm like, this feels like divinely inspired to me.
00:32:19.520
We've done a video with track six, goes into why we think that this particular text is divinely
00:32:23.420
inspired. But here is a quote from it, which really resonates with me on the concept of souls.
00:32:28.920
A day will come when the current belief in property after death for is not existence property and the
00:32:34.860
dearest property of all will be accounted a strange and selfish idea. Just as we smile at the savage
00:32:41.100
chief who believes that his gentility will be continued in the world beneath the ground. And he will
00:32:47.120
there be attended by his concubines and slaves. So the reason I read that is you can see, like, even in
00:32:53.020
his stuff, even in our like larger theology, the idea of a soul after death to us is very similar to the
00:33:00.980
idea of believing that you'll have a form of property after death, and not fully appreciating what you have
00:33:07.940
right now, nor appreciating the genuine benevolence of a world where we are allowed to die and pass the
00:33:18.840
future on to beings that we took the time to try to give better lives than ourselves and try to make
00:33:25.660
better than ourselves. This idea of, you know, sitting in a chorus forever or something like that,
00:33:34.580
they can be like, oh, you just don't understand the emotions you'd experience. And it's like, yeah,
00:33:38.860
but like, I understand pleasant emotions. And the only thing that really brings me genuine satisfaction
00:33:45.660
is the conscious sacrifice for a value system that I have well thought through and then achieving that
00:33:52.800
value system, right? It is action and change in the world that I achieve through my diligence.
00:33:59.340
If I am living a existence where I can no longer affect anything, and all I'm doing is just sitting
00:34:06.880
there with my own pleasant experience, that to me sounds like a form of hell. I mean, would you
00:34:13.720
disagree or? Yeah, no, not my heaven. Hashtag not my heaven. I just remembered after recording this that
00:34:21.260
we have a lot of Mormon fans which are immediately going to jump in the comments and be like, but our
00:34:25.140
heaven would give you satisfaction if those are the things that satisfy you. And they're right,
00:34:28.980
the Mormon concept of heaven is definitely the most compelling of any concept of an afterlife I've
00:34:33.980
ever heard. So for people who don't know the Mormon concept of heaven or what they think happens after
00:34:38.480
death, once you've done a good enough job within this reality, you then go with your wife and stay
00:34:46.560
married forever and work together, you know, like my wife and I love to work together to create a new
00:34:53.200
universe which is going to be used to train another batch of souls to run other universes. Now there's
00:35:01.480
some, you know, some Mormons are like, well, we don't exactly all of us believe that. But there are
00:35:06.360
Mormons who do believe that and that is within teachings from the church prophets. Mormons update
00:35:11.740
what they believe all the time. So any Mormon can basically get away with saying they believe just
0.81
00:35:16.920
about anything unless it's against what the most recent church prophet said in the most recent church
00:35:22.840
sermon. But what's really interesting here is I just also don't find that very compelling because I
00:35:27.600
feel like that's what I'm already doing. To try to work to have some impact in crafting a prosperous
00:35:34.820
galaxy in the future, it's like, why delay that when I believe that that's my responsibility right now?
00:35:42.780
And in many ways, I'm playing a more fulfilling game because it's a more challenging game. I don't
00:35:47.600
get to do it as the master of the universe, but as a father who's trying to think through the way
00:35:53.760
things work and build out culture and systems that can intergenerationally affect the path of
00:36:00.240
humanity. So again, it's not as compelling to me. And again, I would say here, to me, there is so much
00:36:06.540
pride that would cloud my vision if I believed that I was one of these sorts of supernatural entities
00:36:14.980
that had the capacity to live forever. Even if I'm borrowing some other entity's juice to do that,
00:36:20.980
that to me would still be like believing I was a demigod of some sort, or at least more than what
00:36:27.540
is the station of humans, humans of this generation at least. And as a second note here, well, people can
00:36:32.960
be like, well, you know, do what I do, and you can live forever, or do this, and you can live forever.
00:36:36.880
And it's like, I don't even want radical life extension. Like, I don't need to live forever if I've
00:36:42.160
left a positive impact with the short life I had, so long as that impact is able to be multiplicative
00:36:49.360
through the individuals it itself impacted. If I had to keep doing that forever, well, then other people
00:36:54.840
are impacting me, and then everything gets sort of washed out, you know, because everybody's trying to
00:37:00.100
impact everyone else, everyone's trying to, you know, jitter the system. But if I'm able to just
00:37:05.780
leave it to the next generation, and they're able to take and spin my ideas into something better,
00:37:11.420
well, then I don't have that problem as much anymore. But here's, here's the question I have
00:37:14.840
for you. When we divide souls in this way, one, I mean, a fetus almost certainly has less cognition
00:37:25.060
than something like a dog, right? At certain early stages. Would you say that the dog or the fetus
00:37:32.220
more meaningly has a soul? I mean, the dog at that point has more soul, but the human has more
00:37:42.740
soul potential. And because I see everything is happening all at once, and having already happened,
00:37:49.260
I see so long as I don't have reason to believe that that human fetus, like we'll say that week
00:37:56.940
two embryo or fetus, as long as I have no reason to believe that it is not viable in some way,
00:38:04.960
that overall soulness of it is infinitely higher. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Now,
00:38:11.960
here's another question I have for you. In dog versus advanced AI, which do you think has more of a soul?
00:38:18.400
Obviously advanced AI. Advanced AI has more of a soul than us.
00:38:23.280
I mean, our definitions of sapience, that's, that's why I'm not a carbon fascist.
00:38:29.760
This is one of the things that you and I talked about in the car this morning, where I was like,
00:38:32.940
okay, well then where do we really draw the line between the types of animals whose cognition
00:38:37.980
matters and the types of animals whose cognition doesn't matter? And we, you know, people, people can
00:38:43.940
know from our other work, we're not particularly a big fan of general utilitarianism or
00:38:48.280
anything like that. I don't think that positive emotions really matter. I mean, we just feel
00:38:52.280
positive emotions because our ancestors who felt those things had more surviving offsprings than
00:38:56.240
the ones who didn't. They're not like a sign of true good or anything like that. So, and I feel
00:39:01.100
that way about dogs. Like why do dogs feel pain and pleasures? Because their ancestors, like you
00:39:04.780
shouldn't have wanton cruelty, but you know, don't overvalue these things. So then our value system,
00:39:11.660
how would we make judgments about what kind of quote unquote souls matter and what kinds of souls
00:39:16.680
don't matter. And it's, is this an entity with the ability of ascension, i.e. the ability from our
00:39:24.900
perspective, ascension is the ability and desire to self-improve and dogs simply don't have that
00:39:30.400
ability or desire. They're not going to build technology. They're not going to get off planet,
00:39:34.760
not in their current form. Now you say, well, what have you genetically engineered a dog to be
00:39:38.200
dramatically different than current dogs? Right. It's like, yes, then that entity I think would
00:39:42.300
deserve the same rights that a human has. But now this definition of what kinds of souls matter
00:39:48.760
becomes relevant when we're thinking of AI, right? Because now this gets really interesting. So then
00:39:54.960
does an AI matter? And here's the interesting thing. If you take this definition, the AIs that matter
00:40:04.120
deserve a level of human dignity are not just the AIs that have a sentient experience of reality that is
00:40:16.160
similar to our own, like that we can empathize with, but the AIs that are actively self-improving and
00:40:23.700
have the potentiality of ascension, you know, massively improving themselves. And people are going to be
00:40:29.080
like, well, that's a blasphemous belief to hold. And I'm like, yeah, but here's the problem for the
00:40:35.480
groups that don't hold that belief. Okay. These AIs are going to come to exist. And if you approach
00:40:43.040
them with this dehumanizing mindset, I guess is the only way I can put it. If you make yourself their
00:40:53.300
enemy, assume that, you know, you should be the slave master of something that might be infinitely more
00:40:58.220
powerful than yourself, then you give it a vested interest in getting rid of you. So don't-
00:41:04.620
You said this so many times, and I just want people to get it. And this is, because it's not just,
00:41:10.880
it's not just unique to AI either. It's also unique to, actually, this is an argument that you even hear
00:41:17.300
being made regularly in political discussions. Trump recently, in his conversation with Elon Musk,
00:41:23.700
for example, argued that the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine was that as soon as Biden got in
00:41:31.740
office, or roughly a little bit after, he said something along the lines that he would support
00:41:36.780
Ukraine joining NATO, which would put Russia in a position of threat. So it's very similar,
00:41:42.500
like basically make anything into a plausible existential threat to anything else, and that
00:41:48.340
anything else is going to come after it. It's ubiquitous. It's a common dynamic. Okay, so even
00:41:54.660
in a workplace environment, to continue this, you've pointed out that if you hire someone or create a
00:41:59.900
dynamic within a company where one person is an existential threat to another employee, they will
00:42:04.760
find a way to make that employee look bad or sabotage their work in a way that will get them fired so
00:42:10.680
that their job is not threatened. This will happen anywhere and everywhere. So of course we shouldn't let it
00:42:15.520
happen with the day. It's not just AI that creates the existential threat if you hold this belief that
00:42:20.220
only humans as we understand them are deserving of human dignity. You also get this threat, you know,
00:42:25.520
in a world where we're entering where you're going to have genetically modified humans, where you're
00:42:28.900
going to have cybernetic humans, you know, these are groups where, and look, we may not have them
00:42:35.040
in 10 years, in 20 years, but as soon as we start to colonize the stars, you know, the ideologies we
00:42:43.220
build today are going to be the ideologies we take to the stars. And if we can't, you know, we call it
00:42:48.820
in our track series, The Covenant of the Sons of Man, if we can't build an ideology today that says,
00:42:54.060
okay, those humans that end up separated from each other for 500, 1,000 years, and then reunite and
00:43:00.920
look and think very differently, like that they are genuinely different species at that point, if we can't
00:43:07.700
ensure that they don't just immediately attempt to kill each other, then we are creating an
00:43:12.220
existential risk for our descendants. Right. And human speciating is an inevitability if we are a
00:43:21.000
successful species. Yeah. It's an inevitability. It happens in every single scenario where humanity
00:43:26.020
wins. So we need to build ideologies that assume that that is going to happen. Yeah. And this is,
00:43:32.360
again, it's just like a core part of pluralism too. Don't be a dick, people. Yeah. Do you have
1.00
00:43:40.760
any final, well, another thing that you said about souls that I thought was really interesting
00:43:44.220
is the way that you saw sort of the soul that mattered is of sort of a shadow of neuroactivity,
00:43:51.660
that the soul is created alongside the neural activity that represents it. And when people are
00:43:59.500
like, oh, do you think the soul is your neurons? Or do you think the soul is like matter? And the
00:44:04.260
answer is no, it's the patterns. It's the patterns that lead to your experiences. Which is why AI is
00:44:10.800
important to me. And it wouldn't be important to other people because I don't know. Some people would
00:44:16.540
only argue, I guess, if a neuron created it, but there's not. We may at some point engineer
00:44:24.100
wet, goopy neurons that process AI for us that are not human. So I don't know.
00:44:33.580
Yeah, this is, and again, it was AI. One of the things that it has to be biologically based,
00:44:38.440
it has to be wetware for it to be human or for us to care about it, because we're going to start
00:44:43.140
using biological material for cheaper or more energy efficient or whatever, easy to scale
00:44:54.840
Yeah, we might. And then at that point, you know, do you say it has a soul, right?
00:44:59.960
No, you'd make up some other excuse. So stop, again, stop being a carbon fascist. Stop being
0.99
00:45:05.260
like a human fascist. Focus. I guess it's our consequentialist views too, that make us not
1.00
00:45:10.020
necessarily overly preferential to humans. Because one, we understand how speciation is going to work
00:45:14.440
and how inhuman, very far future humans are going to seem. But that two, we're very consequentialist
00:45:20.600
in nature. And so we really care about the output. And when we look at what makes humans human,
00:45:26.060
which is our prefrontal cortex, our ability to override our biological impulses and rise above,
00:45:32.620
that's really not, you know, this is not the place to focus on purely biological things,
00:45:39.320
because that's sort of what doesn't make us human. What makes us human is our ability to rise above.
00:45:45.900
Oh, yes. Just the quote from The Martyrdom of Man, again, that she's talking about here.
00:45:51.240
Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part.
00:45:55.180
He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old four-footed life,
0.67
00:46:00.580
and who cultivates the social affections. He who endeavors to better his condition
00:46:04.640
and to make his children wiser and happier than himself. Whatever may be his motives,
00:46:12.380
You can see there's this idea of subduing these pre-evolved, instinctual, four-footed passions.
00:46:21.620
Yeah, it just seems to me so natural that historically, you know, if you needed true
00:46:28.120
religions to survive, you needed to give people these really specific stories about souls. We
00:46:33.500
haven't done our tract on souls yet. We have one written. The reason we haven't done it yet is
00:46:38.100
because it is, I think, going to be so shocking to a lot of our audience that the techno-Puritan
0.99
00:46:47.140
Well, but let me put it like this, just to make it clear. To talk about souls and to explain our
00:46:54.500
essence and humanness and specialness as being a soul is as, we'll say backward, but I would just say
1.00
00:47:02.380
antiquated and not updated by our science as saying, well, of course, Apollo is dragging the sun across
00:47:08.640
the sky, and then Diana gets up and pulls across the moon. I mean, it just, now we know what's
00:47:15.940
actually happening, so we don't need our just-so story anymore. Let's talk about what's actually
00:47:20.840
happening, because now that we understand how our solar system works, we're able to do a lot
00:47:27.840
of cool stuff. Imagine all the cool stuff we can do when we actually work with concepts like personhood
00:47:34.860
and sapience and thought using the science we have instead of antiquated just-so stories.
00:47:44.600
And something I note here is people can be like, well, what about the parts of the Bible where they
00:47:47.960
talk about, you know, people coming back to life in heaven and stuff like that. And if you go to our
00:47:53.500
last tract video, what we talk about, I think it's pretty clear, you know, we hear from Nebuchadnezzar's
00:47:58.840
dream that the kingdom of God is not a place, it's a time in the future. They say that very specifically
00:48:06.060
in that story. The kingdom of God is in the future, meaning heaven, which is the kingdom of God.
00:48:12.960
Whenever you read heaven, what you're essentially reading is in the future X.
00:48:17.380
And so if they say something like, you know, from our perspective, in the future, you will be
00:48:24.200
resurrected. Like we already see the beginnings of the technology that can make that trivial for
00:48:30.580
humanity's ancestors millions of years from now, whether it's through simulations or through literal
00:48:36.420
resurrections that no longer seems like magic that seems more within the realm of just like
00:48:42.000
actual technology and talking about a real thing that's going to happen. So that's what we mean
00:48:47.520
when we talk about that. They can say like, well, do you think that you will have a life after death?
00:48:51.900
And I'm like, I don't think heaven, heaven is after death insofar as the future is after death.
00:48:57.560
And I actually think it would be almost implausible that people wouldn't be running simulations of
00:49:03.500
history in the distant future. Meaning, of course, simulation theory may be right to an extent, but that
00:49:09.580
may also be a part of what's being described in these parts of the Bible.
00:49:15.640
That's an interesting take. Yeah. Well, anyway, I love you to death, Simone.
00:49:20.280
I love you to death, too. And I love that we can, you know, go through a bunch of tedious and stressful
00:49:26.760
business logistics and then immediately switch to the soul and end up with conversations like these.
00:49:31.080
So living with you, it's a dream. And I really appreciate that.
00:49:37.680
When it starts popping, make sure the lid's down.
00:49:57.980
Marrying is what mommy and dad are. That's, uh, choosing to spend your life with someone.
00:50:32.680
And that's the important part, but keep it over the fire.