Making Sense - Sam Harris - #112 — The Intellectual Dark Web

00:00:00.000 Okay, well, for this episode, the first of the new year, I am presenting the audio of

00:00:24.060 my live event with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro that we did in San Francisco a few

00:00:29.440 weeks back. To say that this audio has been much anticipated really is an understatement.

00:00:37.980 Ben has an enormous following online, and I have been hearing from all of you, mostly on social

00:00:45.600 media and in comment threads. I really haven't been sitting on this audio for any other reason

00:00:50.620 than I had many other podcasts in the queue, and I couldn't decently hold them for much longer.

00:00:56.820 But the time has arrived, and I just have a few things to say by way of preamble. I introduced

00:01:03.320 both of these guys on stage, so I don't need to do that here. Eric Weinstein, many of you know from

00:01:08.620 a previous podcast, he's always great. Ben, as many of you know, is quite a polarizing and controversial

00:01:16.340 figure. I got a fair amount of grief when I announced that we would be doing a podcast

00:01:22.240 together. Also, a ton of enthusiasm from his fans. Needless to say, I can't take responsibility for

00:01:29.680 everything Ben has said or written in the past. I'm certainly unaware of most of what he's said and

00:01:35.400 written, but I'm aware of enough to know that he has, like many of us operating in this space on these

00:01:45.020 topics, been unfairly maligned and demonized by his detractors. I think any comparison between him

00:01:53.600 and Milo Yiannopoulos is quite unfair, given the differences in how they operate. This is something I say

00:02:01.600 on stage at the beginning of this event, but that's a comparison that's often made. Ben and I disagree about

00:02:08.960 some fundamental things here, and it was really, I found myself in a situation which I often find

00:02:13.920 myself in on the podcast, where I have to play host and debate partner simultaneously, and I've begun to

00:02:22.540 feel that there really is no perfect way to split that baby, and I certainly didn't do it perfectly here.

00:02:31.980 More and more I try to err on the side of being the gracious host who is not going to let things get

00:02:37.520 bogged down. But the scientist and philosopher in me who can't let a bad point stand invariably flirts

00:02:45.800 with the ditch on the other side of the road. So you can decide whether I struck the right balance

00:02:51.780 here. Ben and I disagree fundamentally about religion and its connection to human values. We disagree about

00:02:59.180 free will. I tackled some of these points as they came up and let others go in the interest of not

00:03:06.080 getting bogged down. But I think Ben and I did about as well as we could here where we disagreed given

00:03:13.500 the nature of the event. But you be the judge. I should say that despite our disagreements, the vibes

00:03:19.700 with Ben were great. In the green room beforehand, afterwards, this was a very fun and collegial

00:03:27.500 experience for everyone. And I'm very grateful for Eric and Ben's participation, as well as to all of

00:03:33.780 you who came out for the event. We had a packed house at the Masonic in San Francisco. And from

00:03:40.160 what I can tell, most of you had a lot of fun. So without further delay, I give you the Wake

00:03:47.400 a podcast live from San Francisco with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro.

00:03:59.400 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris.

00:04:17.400 Thank you.

00:04:24.660 Okay, well, sorry for the late start. I'm going to jump right into it because we have a lot to talk

00:04:30.580 about. I've got two guests tonight. And the first is a mathematician. He has a PhD from Harvard and he

00:04:39.040 has held research positions at Harvard and MIT and Hebrew University and Oxford. You may have heard him

00:04:46.820 before on my podcast. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. And honestly,

00:04:54.000 that's saying a lot. And he has, along with his brother, Brett, who I just did a podcast with last

00:05:03.660 night in Seattle, he has become one of the most valuable defenders of free speech in our time. So

00:05:11.080 please welcome, Eric Weinstein. Thank you for coming. And our next contestant is the editor in chief of

00:05:33.260 dailywire.com. He is the host of the Ben Shapiro show. So guess his name, which is the top conservative

00:05:43.520 podcast in the nation. He is the author of seven books. And he has been a nationally syndicated

00:05:51.380 columnist since the age of 17. Pity he got such a late start. He's a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law

00:05:59.200 School. Please welcome Ben Shapiro. Thank you for coming. So we have a lot to get into here and

00:06:19.280 there are areas of agreement. I mean, many of you know who these two guys are and you know,

00:06:24.820 you can imagine the course we're going to chart here. I want to start with Ben because he's had

00:06:33.100 a truly unusual experience. And many of you may not be aware of just how unusual. And this will take

00:06:40.300 us into areas of agreement, Ben, where we definitely agree, which is around the primacy of free speech

00:06:45.860 and how strange our national conversation is on so many topics. So Ben is, if you don't know,

00:06:53.320 is the person who, when he goes to Berkeley, requires, Berkeley University, requires $600,000

00:07:01.660 worth of security to give a speech. We have a little bit less security here tonight. So please

00:07:08.180 behave yourselves. But it's a bit, Ben, what's been going on? What has it been like to be you in the

00:07:15.080 last two years? Confusing. It's, I've always been a little bit bewildered by the scope of the

00:07:22.820 opposition at these college speeches because I don't actually think that my message is supremely

00:07:27.520 controversial. It's pretty mainstream conservative. And yet when I show up on campuses at Cal State,

00:07:33.920 Los Angeles, there was a near riot. When I went to Berkeley, obviously they required a fair bit of

00:07:37.140 security thanks to Antifa. And when I was at DePaul, DePaul University banned me outright. They

00:07:43.540 threatened to arrest me if I set foot on their campus, even though students had invited me.

00:07:47.800 University of Wisconsin, they actually tried to pass a law banning the heckler's veto basically

00:07:52.360 after I spoke at University of Wisconsin. So I think it has far less to do with me than it does

00:07:57.200 with this kind of mood in the country that's so polarized and so crazed. And I would say with

00:08:03.700 regard to college campuses, unique to the political left. I'm not seeing a lot of it from the political

00:08:07.040 right. The political right certainly has its own problems at this point in time. But what's going on

00:08:10.760 on campuses is something that, you know, I've been speaking on college campuses for most of my career,

00:08:15.720 so 15 years. And only in the last couple have I needed security. The first time I ever acquired

00:08:20.060 security guards was last year. And now, you know, every place I go, I have to have security guards

00:08:25.320 when it's a public event. So. And you also, you're getting it from both sides in a way that's

00:08:28.960 completely surreal. Because so, for instance, you were often disparaged as a Nazi or a white supremacist.

00:08:34.580 And yeah, it's the yamaka that gives me away on that one. Yeah, yeah. But even if you were not

00:08:39.960 going to notice the yamaka, you were actually the most targeted victim of anti-Semitism in,

00:08:47.680 what, 2016? Yeah, among journalists on Twitter, anyway. Yeah. It is upside down. And you're also

00:08:52.880 often compared to your former Breitbart colleague, Milo Yiannopoulos, right? And that's an unfortunate

00:09:00.520 pairing. Because the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because, while I think you and I will

00:09:07.440 disagree about several maybe foundational things, I see you as someone who is sincerely defending a

00:09:14.420 position based on a rational chain of argumentation, based on first principles that we may or may not

00:09:20.060 share. But you're not a performance artist. And that's a crucial distinction. I mean, that's at

00:09:26.220 least what I'm going for, right? I mean, I've always thought that what I'm trying to do anyway is say

00:09:30.280 things that I think are true. And if they piss you off, they piss you off. But I'm not going in there

00:09:33.660 with the idea I need to piss somebody off to make a headline. That's why I've always found this a

00:09:37.340 little bit puzzling. Because there are provocateurs whose job it is to go into a university, say

00:09:41.320 something deliberately provocative, just to get a rise out of people and get a headline. And since

00:09:46.280 that really is not my MO, I've been sort of puzzled, frankly, by the level of opposition

00:09:50.220 on all sides. It was a very weird year. I mean, last year was a weird year. I had the alt-right

00:09:55.600 calling me a Black Lives Matter activist and Black Lives Matter calling me an alt-riter. So it was

00:10:00.640 a unique time. 2016, we're still living in a parallel universe in which Marty McFly

00:10:06.000 actually did not stop from using the sports yearbook.

00:10:11.780 One lens through which I want us to view this conversation is really two lenses. It's what

00:10:19.360 most worries you and what most interests you at this point. Let's start with the worry. Where

00:10:24.500 are you at this moment?

00:10:26.700 Well, I guess for me, I've tried to localize my concern with the breakdown of what I call

00:10:35.140 semi-reliable communal sense-making. If something happens...

00:10:40.520 That's a very Eric Weinstein phrase.

00:10:41.920 My Twitter follower count is the orders of magnitude below yours. The idea being that if something

00:10:52.660 happens and everybody in the audience processes it, we will fall into certain clusters. And

00:10:59.700 those clusters are fairly reliable and dependent. And so to Ben's point that he is both Black Lives

00:11:05.920 Matter and Alt-Right in this Schrodinger superposition. So what is that? And it has to do with the fact

00:11:16.020 that traditionally we've used institutions to guide our sense-making and to make sense of things

00:11:23.200 collectively. And that has now gone away. And so depending upon what institutions I'm hooked up to,

00:11:30.520 what was my last... Where did the fox last have the scent? I can be at odds with somebody I love,

00:11:38.440 somebody who I've thought about as somebody I've shared a life with, because there's no longer any

00:11:43.700 way to do this communal. And the semi-reliable, I don't think that Walter Cronkite was actually

00:11:48.200 always telling us the truth. But it was in some sense, to first approximation, close enough that

00:11:54.160 there was a national consciousness belief structure. There was enough shared

00:12:00.000 sort of complex for us to function as a country. And I think that that's gone away. So I think

00:12:07.620 this is the parent of the crisis, which I increasingly think of as this, you know, I call it the no-name

00:12:15.480 revolution or the N-squared revolution, where in some sort of new regime, which doesn't look like

00:12:21.400 any revolution we've seen before, it's much less physically violent so far. It's digitally

00:12:27.180 extremely violent. And it has to do with the fact that we can't make sense of things communally

00:12:31.600 at some semi-reliable level.

00:12:34.760 And what are the ideas or sets of ideas that you think are most culpable for bringing us here?

00:12:41.540 Well, it's tough. I think that what really happened, if we think about it historically,

00:12:47.640 is that we had this beautiful period of fairly reliable, high, evenly distributed, technologically

00:12:55.500 led growth after World War II, up until about, let's say, 1970. And we predicated all of our

00:13:02.600 institutions on this expectation that this growth was some sort of normal thing that we could depend

00:13:08.420 upon in the future. When it ran out, we were left with all of our institutions looking in some form or

00:13:14.620 another like Ponzi schemes. And in order to keep running an institution that expected growth

00:13:20.180 in a steady state condition, let's say, you need to change the narrative to create some sort of as-if

00:13:26.840 growth story. So you start stealing from the future. You start stealing from groups that are too weak to

00:13:32.560 defend their own economic interests so that certain slices can keep growing, even if the pie doesn't

00:13:37.420 grow so well. There are certain areas that kept growing, like communications and computation.

00:13:42.780 So there was some real growth, maybe fracking. But that in general, what we have is we have a bunch

00:13:48.640 of institutions that used to be capable of honesty that had to develop narratives. And that the problem

00:13:54.800 is we've had as-if growth across the spectrum for most of our adult lives. And that story, which is a

00:14:01.540 fiction, ran out.

00:14:02.920 You're not one of these anti-capitalists I've been hearing about, are you? You're the managing director

00:14:07.280 of teal capital, so that wouldn't be good.

00:14:09.120 If this gets out, I'm toast.

00:14:14.620 I'm sorry. So is that the, well-

00:14:16.280 That's the genesis of it.

00:14:17.540 I mean, so you actually think economics is the longest lever here that's influencing the machine?

00:14:23.680 I mean, like this breakdown of our, this failure of polite conversation to get us to converge

00:14:29.460 on a meaningful worldview.

00:14:31.280 Well, if you chase it all the way up the chain, I mean, markets are in some sense the

00:14:35.440 continuation of natural and sexual selection by other means. And so what you have is that

00:14:40.820 markets take over from-

00:14:43.280 That sounds like a very creepy, come online from a conference.

00:14:47.020 Yes. The night is young. I don't know how to record.

00:14:55.360 No, sorry. That's right. This is, let me just acknowledge, I'm actually a bad podcast host.

00:15:00.920 I see.

00:15:02.660 You're not with an expert here. You're a good sport.

00:15:05.660 Yeah. I think that we don't realize that when we look at the city, that nobody is telling

00:15:10.460 people where to drive, what to do. It's sort of self-organized with the markets being this

00:15:15.940 kind of invisible fabric that keeps us together. And so, yeah, it's really important that when

00:15:21.340 growth stops proceeding at the levels that it's expected, people can't form families in

00:15:27.600 real time. So fertility is threatened. People can't plan for, for coupling and for a future. 0.97

00:15:35.080 So I think it gets right into the most intimate details of our lives when, when the markets don't

00:15:40.600 materialize in the way that we need them.

00:15:44.340 So what is keeping you up at night?

00:15:47.260 Well, I worry a lot less about economics as the basis for social collapse. I don't think,

00:15:52.460 I think it's, it's easy to, to overstate the extent to which growth has stagnated. I mean,

00:16:00.060 we are at 4% unemployment. The, the economy is not, I mean, this is not 1935. This is not

00:16:08.160 even 1975. There's still, you know, significant economic growth. To me, it seems like the social

00:16:15.100 fabric has been completely ripped apart. And some of that is due to social media and the fact that

00:16:19.860 we coordinate with each other in a different way. But I think a lot of it has to do with loss of

00:16:23.300 common values, like even the ability to have a common conversation. In order to have a conversation

00:16:27.260 with one another, we have to take certain things for granted, like human reason, like objective truth.

00:16:32.140 If we don't take these basic things, at least for granted, then how are we even speaking the same

00:16:36.300 language? And it seems to me that a lot of those things have disappeared in favor of radical

00:16:39.840 subjectivism that may make us feel good, but doesn't provide the common framework for a

00:16:43.480 conversation. And objective truth goes by the wayside, because if we can't agree on the fact,

00:16:48.620 how are we going to have a conversation? You see this, particularly in our politics,

00:16:51.400 where it seems like there's two bubbles that have been created. And if you read Huffington Post,

00:16:55.240 you are in a completely different world than if you read Breitbart. And my mom actually first

00:16:59.920 noticed this in 2012, because she said, you know, I was working at Breitbart at the time,

00:17:02.940 and she said, well, it looks like from Breitbart, Romney's definitely going to win. I was like,

00:17:05.740 yeah, he's definitely going to win. And she said, and then all my friends at work read Huffington

00:17:09.080 Post, and they say that Obama's definitely going to win. And I don't know who to believe. And I

00:17:13.080 said, well, I really don't know who to believe either, because no one knows the answer to that

00:17:15.900 question. But you can see that it's broken down in incredibly radical ways now, because even things

00:17:21.040 where there should be a common basis of fact, people are disagreeing on, right? To take the Senate

00:17:24.940 race in Alabama, right? There's pretty good, reliable accounts that the Republican candidate in that race

00:17:32.340 is likely guilty of some form of sexual abuse of underage girls. And a huge percentage of the

00:17:39.580 Republican base, you know, my party, my group, a huge percentage of them will outright deny that

00:17:44.400 that's the case, because they'll say this is a witch hunt, people are out to get Roy Moore,

00:17:47.840 it's a conspiratorial attack on Roy Moore. So that's one example from the right. Then on the left,

00:17:52.880 you'll have examples where, you know, you will say things that are biologically true,

00:17:58.940 take a controversial example, like, there is a male sex, and there is a female sex. And if you

00:18:03.500 say that, then people will lose their minds, because you're somehow insulting their subjectivity.

00:18:08.100 And, you know, when you do that, it's hard to have a conversation, because people will change

00:18:13.960 the terms they're using, they'll change the frame of reference they're using. And how are we, and then

00:18:18.320 they'll toss reason out altogether, they'll say, you know, your specific bias as a person prevents you

00:18:22.760 from even having a reasonable conversation, right? Your white privilege, or your background,

00:18:27.240 or your ethnicity, or all of this prevents us from even discussing on a one-on-one level. Like,

00:18:32.440 I can recognize my background in having an impact on how I think. But if that is supposed to be a

00:18:37.780 conversation stopper, then how exactly are we supposed to have a conversation?

00:18:42.420 Yeah, so that's why identity politics is so toxic, in my view, because if identity is paramount,

00:18:49.780 communication is impossible. Exactly. Like, because you haven't shared my specific experience,

00:18:54.720 or because you don't have the same skin color, you're not the same gender, there's no bridge

00:18:58.520 between us, right? And you're, and there's no chain of reasoning from you to me that should trump

00:19:05.020 anything I currently think, because what I think is anchored to identity. Exactly. And we don't share

00:19:10.420 an identity. Yeah, well, we're atomized individuals kind of bouncing off one another as opposed to being

00:19:13.900 able to form some sort of molecular bond. Yeah. And I think that that's completely, it seems like

00:19:19.720 that's completely collapsed. Right. Right. And is, do you think social media is the main engine of

00:19:26.100 that collapse? Or is it just where we were headed there anyway? I mean, obviously Fox News and the

00:19:32.000 fragmentation of media precedes social media. So we had our echo chamber. Yeah, I mean, I really don't

00:19:36.780 think it's social media. And there was a, there's a study that came out from, I think it was Harvard

00:19:39.680 actually, reported by the New York Times, talking about how the impact of social media on polarizations

00:19:44.520 overstated, that if you look at the most polarized populations in the country, it's actually older

00:19:47.640 people. That people who are older are more polarized politically and are having fewer conversations

00:19:52.940 with people on the other side of the aisle than younger people. And younger people are obviously

00:19:57.000 more apt to use social media. I really don't think it's that. I think that there is a ground shift

00:20:01.260 in the way people think that's taken place even within our lifetime and has gained steam. And as I say,

00:20:09.140 even basic concepts like reason are being thrown out in favor of a philosophy of feeling because

00:20:15.900 maybe it does come down to lack of success for people. Maybe people do feel that they can't

00:20:21.360 succeed in other ways. And so the way that they feel fulfilled, the way that they feel whatever

00:20:24.780 need they have for fulfillment is by wallowing in themselves. If I can't find fulfillment in the

00:20:31.360 outer world, then I will look inside me and I will look at what makes me special. And we've all been

00:20:35.700 taught that we're special by Barney. And therefore, since we are all special, then you saying anything

00:20:40.660 that disagrees with me is taking away my specialness. And that can't be infringed upon.

00:20:45.180 You can actually try to look at the history of these ideas. Like, for example, you mentioned

00:20:49.560 white privilege. And I, at some point, tried to track it down. And there's some two-page,

00:20:55.020 it's not even an academic paper, so unpacking the knapsack in the late 80s coming out of Wellesley.

00:21:00.820 Or, you know, intersectionality comes out of apparently UCLA Law School. A lot of these ideas

00:21:06.320 actually began as kind of minor, interesting ideas, heuristics, that couldn't support an entire

00:21:13.980 epistemology. And what happened was, is that you had some sort of vaguely approximate concepts

00:21:20.380 that got pushed so far beyond their domain of applicability, that they led to a kind of madness

00:21:28.120 when they became sort of the substrate for thought. You can't really have conversations where,

00:21:34.500 you know, white privilege is a barrier. If Ben has a drinking problem, and I have a gambling problem,

00:21:41.420 we may not be able to understand each other's addictions directly. But if I think about Ben's

00:21:48.160 problem... I asked you not to talk about that publicly.

00:21:51.840 Step one, admit that you've got a problem.

00:21:56.580 The issue is that this idea of being able to hack empathy and hack understanding by using

00:22:03.360 our own personal experiences, our lived experience, to use the jargon, and the felt experience,

00:22:09.560 in order to empathize across these dividing lines, shows this incredible failure of imagination.

00:22:16.220 It's as if there was no screenwriter who was able to write both male and female characters

00:22:20.580 that men and women, you know, identify with. And so I think it has to do with pushing

00:22:26.440 interesting but very limited heuristics so far beyond their domain of applicability.

00:22:32.940 You can track each one of these things using Google n-grams to find out where they came from.

00:22:37.940 Right. It seems to me that we're struggling, and it's not just us, all of us are struggling

00:22:42.480 to find a way to capture meaning and value in the context of a rational worldview.

00:22:50.760 And I think that is a challenge that just doesn't go away. That is a kind of a perpetual challenge

00:22:57.080 insofar as we understand the situation we're in. We need to find ways of talking about that

00:23:05.020 so as to converge with a basic life plan with seven billion strangers. And the one difference

00:23:12.260 between us is what we think the value of religion is in that picture. So just to get a little bit of

00:23:19.120 the context here, you're an Orthodox Jew. What does that actually commit you to with respect to

00:23:24.540 belief? I mean, what do you believe that I don't believe that is salient here? I'm an atheist, so.

00:23:30.880 Well, let's see. In case you hadn't heard.

00:23:33.060 That gives you a clue, yeah. I hadn't picked up on that, but it's going to be so awkward now.

00:23:39.000 You kids have fun.

00:23:39.940 This is Ali G, yeah.

00:23:40.980 Well, I mean, I believe in a creator of the universe. I believe that he set certain guidelines

00:23:51.840 for human behavior, that he cares what happens to us. I believe that he endowed us with,

00:23:58.460 in American sense, certain inalienable rights that accrue to us as virtue of being human.

00:24:05.020 You know, from a Judaic perspective, which doesn't really impact public policy so much,

00:24:10.100 one of the reasons that I think we can have a conversation is that when it comes to public

00:24:13.260 policy discussions, I try as little as possible to refer to biblical texts, which means I almost

00:24:18.180 never do. Mainly because what would an appeal to authority that you don't believe in do? I mean,

00:24:23.880 it's a waste of time. So in the areas where I think we can actually have a conversation,

00:24:28.040 where we're not talking about the value of kashrut or keeping Sabbath, which I think has very little,

00:24:32.380 you know, relevant input for public policy and the kind of social fabric building that we're

00:24:36.960 talking about doing. The stuff that I think is important where we disagree is man-made in God's

00:24:42.720 image, created, taking the premise by faith that God created us with certain inalienable rights,

00:24:50.200 endowed us with the capacity to choose, endowed us with the capacity to reason,

00:24:54.320 and cares about what happens to us. Right. So...

00:24:59.380 Not sure if you can say right any more cynically there, but...

00:25:03.040 Well, so...

00:25:04.280 One word can do so much.

00:25:06.800 Unintended, but...

00:25:08.140 And yet.

00:25:09.160 So, I mean, so what I'm interested in is in a worldview that could be rebooted or rediscovered now. I mean,

00:25:20.060 just imagine we lost all of our, you know, we had all the libraries burned,

00:25:23.560 the internet went down, we lost all of our texts. How would someone rediscover this thing? Now, I can,

00:25:30.820 we can make an easy case that we could rediscover science. You know, it might take some time, but

00:25:35.620 if the literature of Judaism, in your case, were lost,

00:25:41.220 it seems to me patently obvious that whatever is true about reality is still there to be discovered.

00:25:46.940 And if there's some part of reality that is ethical or spiritual or divine or spooky,

00:25:55.300 it's there, it is there to be discovered by sentient creatures such as ourselves. So what would,

00:26:00.780 how would you reboot religion, the religion that's true? Because you are by accident born a Jew. 1.00

00:26:07.780 Right.

00:26:08.160 Right. And there's, you know, there are a billion people in India who weren't.

00:26:11.120 And I must imagine that on your account, they have by sheer bad luck, the wrong version of this

00:26:17.400 story. Well, I mean, so Judaism is actually not quite as exclusive as a lot of other religions

00:26:21.460 with regard to this. I mean, Judaism actually says that as long as you fulfill seven basic

00:26:25.420 commandments, like don't kill people, don't steal, don't eat the flesh of a living animal,

00:26:29.160 that you actually have a pathway into heaven. So Judaism is not particularly exclusive. And we

00:26:34.340 actually try to discourage converts. So it's not quite the same as some of the other converting

00:26:39.160 religions in monotheism. But as far as what's discoverable, I would agree with you. If the

00:26:44.020 Torah were to disappear tomorrow, it would not be discoverable, which is why there is a necessity

00:26:47.660 for revelation in the Jewish view. Right. The idea is that revelation was necessary, not that

00:26:52.340 revelation was unnecessary and that if people had not been graced with revelation, they would have

00:26:55.700 come to this on their own. But the principles you just gave me, you don't think those are

00:26:59.520 discoverable? Those are discoverable. Right. And that's the reason why I say that I think that the

00:27:03.700 principles that are granted through revelation are not necessarily, I think that they caused a

00:27:10.600 ground shift historically from certain ways of thought to other ways of thought. Like the advent

00:27:15.200 of Judeo-Christian thought changed the way of thinking. But I think that they are also things

00:27:20.580 that you can discover through contemplation, for example. So all of the things that I said about

00:27:25.860 free will and reason and the presence of an unmoved mover, that's more Aristotelian than it is

00:27:31.480 Judeo-Christian. Right. Right. And that is stuff that was essentially discovered through

00:27:35.560 philosophy, not through revelation. So that is the stuff when I talk about the necessity for

00:27:41.460 reason, that's the stuff I think that is more relevant. Now, I think that you do need a religious 0.84

00:27:47.000 system in order to inform people who are not going to sit around philosophizing all day

00:27:51.120 what are good and bad modes of behavior. And, you know, Voltaire thought the same. So I think that

00:27:58.280 the notion of a dual... But is it important to believe that those good and bad modes were approved

00:28:05.900 of or discouraged by an omniscient being? I mean, can't we just chart a course toward greater

00:28:12.500 fulfillment, greater peaceful collaboration based on just an intelligent analysis of what it is to be

00:28:17.600 social beings? So I don't think you can unless you're willing to acknowledge that reason,

00:28:22.700 the capacity to choose, the capacity to act in the world, that these things exist. And that has to

00:28:30.600 be done based on assumption because you actually oppose some of these things, right? Like you don't

00:28:33.420 think free will exists. Yeah. But I also don't think you need free will to live a moral life.

00:28:38.000 Right. I've never really understood that position. So we'll have to get into it.

00:28:40.320 But, you know, to me, if you're going to have a conversation with someone and convince them,

00:28:45.940 then we need to agree on the value of reason. The value of reason is not something that

00:28:48.720 evolutionary biology suggests, right? What does reason have to do with evolutionary biology per

00:28:53.600 se? It's a mode of action that is more likely to preserve your species. It doesn't create

00:28:58.380 objective truth. The notion of an objective truth that exists apart from you and would exist

00:29:01.940 whether or not you were living. This is not something that can necessarily be gathered from

00:29:06.380 science alone, right? You have to make certain assumptions about the universe and the way that

00:29:09.620 your mind reflects what is present in the universe, right? As Kant would argue.

00:29:13.240 Well, it's true that an evolutionary perspective on ourselves suggests that we have not evolved

00:29:22.240 to know reality perfectly. I mean, if you believe that we are apes that have been selected for

00:29:28.100 and all of our cognitive architecture is built by virtue of its adaptive advantage in evolutionary

00:29:34.800 terms, yes, it's hard to believe that we are perfectly designed to do mathematics or anything

00:29:41.740 else that is true. But you do feel that we can still gather objective truth.

00:29:45.820 But even that picture suggests a wider context of minds more powerful than our own that could

00:29:53.980 have evolved or our own future minds. I mean, it's like there's no...

00:29:58.340 Why would you appeal to minds that have not yet evolved or future minds as opposed to just a

00:30:01.800 creator who put us here with certain capacities?

00:30:03.820 Well, no, because that we, I would argue, we don't have any evidence for. What we do have evidence

00:30:08.940 for is that we're here. We understand a lot about the mechanism that is operating now that got us

00:30:14.860 here and that is causing us to be the way we are. We can see our relationship to other life forms. We

00:30:21.080 know that we can look at chimps that share 99% of our DNA and they obviously share a lot of the

00:30:27.500 evolved precursors of our own social and cognitive architecture, but they have no idea what we're up to,

00:30:34.380 right? So they're cognitively closed to most of what we're doing and most of what we care about.

00:30:39.180 And by analogy, we know that we could be cognitively closed to what we might be capable

00:30:45.460 of in a thousand years now. I mean, that our sense of what engagement with the cosmos promises...

00:30:50.820 I know, but I guess the argument is if you're arguing that we're cognitively closed to certain

00:30:55.320 things, then why are you arguing which specific things we are cognitively closed to?

00:30:58.080 Well, no, I'm just saying that once you admit it's possible to not know what you're missing,

00:31:03.640 factually, ethically, spiritually, I mean, in any domain of inquiry, it's possible to come up

00:31:10.280 against a horizon line where the known meets the unknown.

00:31:13.480 You sound kind of religious here.

00:31:14.980 Well, you wouldn't be the first to say it, but it's clearly possible not to know what you're

00:31:20.420 missing. And if you, I mean, if you kill... 0.93

00:31:22.580 I agree, you should come with me to synagogue. 1.00

00:31:23.960 If you kill the hundred... 0.99

00:31:25.640 I tried that already. 1.00

00:31:28.140 But I mean, if you kill the hundred smartest mathematicians on earth right now, you would... 0.97

00:31:33.760 Eric, you're in trouble. 0.51

00:31:34.440 You would close the door to certain conversations maybe for 200 years.

00:31:39.340 Right.

00:31:39.460 But so, again, by analogy, it would be just sheer hubris to think that the 7 billion of

00:31:46.760 us who are currently here collectively or anyone individually have pushed the human conversation

00:31:53.900 to the limit of what's rationally apprehendable about the universe.

00:31:57.440 So we know there's more out there in every sense.

00:32:00.940 So what you're imagining is that...

00:32:03.460 Not every sense, right?

00:32:05.120 Well, no.

00:32:05.800 In every sense that...

00:32:07.420 I mean, this is why from...

00:32:09.220 Really?

00:32:09.540 I'm going to have to have you over for Sabbath.

00:32:10.900 But from the atheist perspective, or from the perspective of not being convinced of any

00:32:16.720 religion, this is what's so limiting about this notion of revelation.

00:32:23.040 Because what you have, you're anchoring a worldview to a book that we know, we just know by the

00:32:30.200 time of its composition and by its actual contents, can't subsume the larger worldview that we're

00:32:38.180 gathering every day.

00:32:39.240 So you're arguing past me a little bit, right?

00:32:40.700 Because the argument that I was making was based on an Aristotelian philosophical view of an

00:32:44.440 unmoved mover and certain properties that we have to have as human beings in order to create a

00:32:49.260 civilization.

00:32:50.060 And you're arguing back to Revelation, which I freely admitted, that if Revelation were to be

00:32:53.660 destroyed tomorrow, I could not recreate the Torah from memory.

00:32:56.460 Right?

00:32:56.560 Well, no.

00:32:56.760 It's not a matter of not being able to recreate it.

00:32:58.400 It's just what is its importance apart from being one among millions of books that have

00:33:05.160 inspired people to...

00:33:06.380 Well, I mean, the importance of Judeo-Christian revelation in our particular context is it

00:33:10.840 is the creator of the entire chain of events, or it is at least the progenitor, along with

00:33:16.380 Greek thought, largely, of an entire chain of events and thought that lead to the establishment

00:33:20.600 of the modern science that you rely upon.

00:33:23.600 Well, no, but that's, again, that's a set of historical contingencies that are...

00:33:28.820 But they're not coincidences.

00:33:29.880 They are contingencies.

00:33:30.580 Well, no, but there was no one else...

00:33:32.120 I mean, my argument here is that you could also say that virtually everything that has

00:33:36.220 been accomplished in human history was accomplished by people who didn't know a damn thing about 0.75

00:33:40.900 biology. 0.82

00:33:41.780 Right?

00:33:41.960 Like, there was no one else to do the job.

00:33:43.560 Every bridge that was built...

00:33:44.940 That's true.

00:33:45.220 ...every beautiful building that was built was built by somebody who knew nothing about

00:33:49.340 DNA.

00:33:50.060 Okay.

00:33:50.640 But that's not an argument that ignorance of molecular biology is a good thing or that it should be

00:33:56.060 maintained.

00:33:56.340 And I'm not arguing that ignorance is a positive.

00:33:59.700 What I'm arguing is that...

00:34:00.720 Well, no, but I'm just...

00:34:01.280 Well, I would say that any kind of religious sectarianism is a species of ignorance now that

00:34:06.860 we should be outgrowing.

00:34:09.060 And that's, again, an assumption that you're making based on premises that I don't necessarily

00:34:15.920 agree with.

00:34:16.800 But on your account, the Hindus have to have it wrong. 0.99

00:34:20.220 I mean, they're worshipping an elephant-headed god and a monkey god and, you know, I mean... 0.98

00:34:25.480 I mean, I do think that...

00:34:27.460 What's up?

00:34:28.040 I do think...

00:34:28.520 So, I don't think everybody is right.

00:34:30.540 I mean, I do think that the Hindus are not correct. 1.00

00:34:33.480 Otherwise, it wouldn't be Jewish, right? 1.00

00:34:34.720 I mean, like...

00:34:35.340 But that's what I'm fishing for.

00:34:36.940 What's the significance?

00:34:37.980 If you're going to go to Aristotle and you're going to go to seven precepts that anyone could

00:34:41.640 discover so as to lead a well-ordered life, what is the significance of being Jewish?

00:34:46.400 So, the significance of being Jewish is that even the foundations of what Aristotle believed,

00:34:51.600 that he's trying to arrive through, that he's trying to arrive at logically, have to

00:34:56.080 be undergirded by a faith in a god who also provides us some level of moral guidance.

00:35:01.460 Because even the precepts of Aristotle are too broad to actually create the civilization

00:35:06.140 upon which we stand.

00:35:07.840 Meaning, this is not a Greek civilization.

00:35:09.440 This is a Greek-slash-Judeo-Christian civilization. 1.00

00:35:11.480 It's the Athens and Jerusalem in the typical phraseology.

00:35:13.940 And if you just knock out the pillar of Jerusalem, then you're ignoring the impact that Jerusalem 0.84

00:35:19.220 has on Athens and that Athens has on Jerusalem, historically speaking.

00:35:22.780 Well, this is kind of reminding me of the moment when I debated Rick Warren once at Saddleback,

00:35:28.800 just in his office.

00:35:29.920 It was just the two of us and John Meacham who was moderating. 0.77

00:35:33.160 And he was telling me that basically without God, you know, people would just be raping and

00:35:38.320 killing and that you require this as an anchor for an ethical life.

00:35:41.840 And he even said of himself, I mean, I don't believe this when anyone says this, but this

00:35:46.220 is sort of the bluff that never gets called. 0.92

00:35:47.940 He said of himself that without, if he didn't believe there was a hell, he would be raping 0.99

00:35:52.180 and killing and... 0.98

00:35:53.060 Yeah, and I don't agree with that.

00:35:54.620 That's actually not something that I fully agree with.

00:35:57.360 But I do agree with the idea that without a...

00:36:00.000 I'm glad to hear that.

00:36:00.860 Fair enough.

00:36:05.860 But, you know, but...

00:36:07.080 But what I do believe is that a scientific materialist worldview cannot construct a moral

00:36:17.140 system because is has nothing to do with ought.

00:36:19.940 Science is about is and has no capacity to say anything about ought other than constructions

00:36:25.680 that are based in a notion of free will that you yourself reject.

00:36:28.660 I mean, I'm happy to get into all of that.

00:36:32.000 You know, time is short, but I've written two books on those two...

00:36:35.420 I know, I've read them.

00:36:37.180 But if that were true, how would you explain the moral character of my life?

00:36:43.100 I mean, assuming I'm not raping and killing people or living a very...

00:36:47.320 A life that you would recognize to be...

00:36:49.120 Glad to hear that, yeah.

00:36:50.340 ...well-structured, yeah.

00:36:51.060 I mean, as I just said moments ago, I don't think that you have to be a religious person

00:36:56.640 to lead a moral life.

00:36:57.480 I do think that there has to be a religious underpinning to a moral system because I don't

00:37:02.100 think that you can...

00:37:03.400 You're using terminology that is based in certain assumptions about human nature that I'm not

00:37:07.480 sure that you are recognizing that you reject, right?

00:37:11.620 Let's take the scientific materialist worldview at its very base, okay?

00:37:14.480 At its very base, we are basically balls of meat wandering through the universe with a bit

00:37:17.500 of self-awareness attached.

00:37:19.000 We're sort of Spinoza's stones that have been thrown, and we know that we've been thrown.

00:37:22.520 We don't have control over our own behavior.

00:37:24.200 We don't have control over what we do.

00:37:25.860 We don't have the capacity to react.

00:37:27.220 No.

00:37:27.400 First of all, many people who would take an evolutionary picture of ourselves also imagine

00:37:32.460 that we have free will.

00:37:33.600 I've never understood that perspective, to be honest with you.

00:37:35.480 I'll put the free will piece in play here because actually I think there are moral insights

00:37:40.520 we can have when we see through the illusion of free will, which we really can't easily

00:37:45.620 have without doing that.

00:37:47.800 And then I want to bring you in here, Eric.

00:37:50.900 You're very, very patient.

00:37:53.700 I've fallen for that twice.

00:37:56.560 Well, I mean, I think one of the problems, one of the problems is that in some very weird

00:38:01.760 way, because Ben is wearing a kippah, we think of him as being very orthodox, pious, and religious.

00:38:08.220 In fact, I'm always struck by just how much he eschews any appeal to text in his public

00:38:15.500 argument.

00:38:16.120 So for functional reasons, I very often see him in a largely atheistic context.

00:38:22.160 I find, Sam, that you're always focused on what is, to my way of thinking, very clearly

00:38:29.160 a form of Judaism expressed as atheism.

00:38:32.580 And that really does sound anti-Semitic somehow.

00:38:38.940 I'll have to ask my rabbi how I just got insulted.

00:38:42.680 I don't know, Sam, how much are you being paid tonight?

00:38:46.440 And, you know, as much as I take a scientific worldview, I find that if I'm really honest

00:38:52.260 with myself, I have a lot of certainly dialectical tensions that I can't resolve, needs for meaning

00:39:02.000 that I can't find easily met within the rational systems.

00:39:06.880 I think that the is and ought is a good distinction.

00:39:10.700 I think a lot of this has to do with pre-existing architecture that predisposes us, even though

00:39:17.380 our rational minds may know better, towards something that functions very much in an as-if

00:39:22.860 religious context.

00:39:24.120 Well, let's just take is and ought for a second, because here's one way those two things collapse

00:39:28.060 for me.

00:39:29.180 If understanding how the universe is altogether, you know, all the possibilities of experience,

00:39:36.420 all the ways minds emerge, all of the kinds of good lives and bad lives and all of the mechanisms

00:39:42.160 that would determine one path over another, a complete understanding of the mind and the

00:39:48.460 cosmos, that's all the is, all the is that is there to be understood.

00:39:54.220 If understanding that couldn't give you a complete picture of what you ought to do, where would

00:40:02.020 you go to get that picture?

00:40:04.300 If you sum all the facts, how does that not give you a way to chart your course in this universe?

00:40:10.000 Well, what else is there to inform your life?

00:40:15.260 Well, there are these things that we notice in our minds that we can, you know, that run

00:40:20.980 through our fingers like Quicksilver that aren't exactly facts, these intuitions, these things

00:40:26.060 that gnaw at us, even though we know the answer, we feel superstitious, we feel guilt.

00:40:32.100 You know, economists talk about utility as a one-dimensional object, but how many kinds of utility

00:40:38.160 and dis-utility, I can be happy, I can be interested, I can be fulfilled, you know, all these different

00:40:44.040 ways of tagging, you know, utilities and dis-utilities. And if you just notice your mind,

00:40:49.320 you'll notice that there are all sorts of things going on in it that really aren't about,

00:40:54.500 aren't about facts. And I don't know where they originate, neither do you.

00:40:58.680 But see, but just translate what you're saying, I mean, how I'm hearing what you're saying,

00:41:02.140 you're telling me facts about the mind, which I agree with. I mean, there's kind of a congress in there.

00:41:08.020 I mean, you guys decided that there was an objective reality when you were having that

00:41:11.780 conversation. And I suppose that there's probably objective reality, but I think that a lot of what

00:41:20.220 goes on is that we've been in the shallow end of science where more or less, you know,

00:41:26.820 me and let's say this gentleman over here share enough that we can probably agree that the square

00:41:35.640 root of two is provably irrational. I believe that that's probably an objective fact, but I don't

00:41:40.360 believe proof checking is objective because we have things like the Amabi problem that sit in the 0.66

00:41:44.900 literature for years and we think it's proved, but it turns out we didn't have the right proof,

00:41:49.360 you know? So we have situations in which we've been picking low-hanging, easy fruit to console

00:41:55.580 ourselves that we can all get at the objective reality. We've all seen optical illusions where,

00:42:01.640 you know, some color is exactly the same wavelength, but it looks two different ways because of the

00:42:05.480 surroundings. But so that's a great example. Let's linger there for a second. So again, we thought we

00:42:11.980 knew what we were talking about and then we find out at a deeper level that we didn't. And then we

00:42:15.580 think we know what we're talking about again and then it can reverse again. But that move to the

00:42:19.760 deeper level is more facts. It's more context. It's more objectivity. Right. But we already agreed

00:42:26.400 on something that turned out not to be true as objective fact. And then so the point is, is that

00:42:32.300 I'm not entirely sure in any of these, like if I take this irrationality of the square root of two,

00:42:38.600 there's a concept called not worth worrying about. You know? It's just not worth worrying about whether or

00:42:46.140 not somebody is going to find a mistake in that proof because it's so short. You know, when it

00:42:50.320 comes to something like the ABC conjecture, you know, it's been going on for how many years? We

00:42:54.800 still haven't, you know, gotten our arms around it. We're now not in the shallow end quite so much.

00:42:59.800 And so my concern is, is that it doesn't do a lot of damage to say we can prove that the square

00:43:06.180 root of two is irrational and that that's an objective fact up until you start trying to extend that,

00:43:12.700 you know, to more and more complicated proofs. And, you know, then it, it actually matters that

00:43:19.340 the original concept was the outside proof may exist, but proof checking isn't objective. And

00:43:23.860 therefore we may never exactly know, but there are things that aren't worth worrying about. We call

00:43:28.080 them objective fact for convenience. Sorry. Let me make an objective, what I think is an objective

00:43:34.880 claim of fact that I think has moral, that you won't agree with Ben, that I think has moral

00:43:40.960 consequence that we should grapple with. So the, and it connects to a very real world

00:43:47.220 issue like wealth inequality, right? So wealth inequality is a problem if you think it's a

00:43:52.640 problem or, or it's inevitable if you think it's inevitable, but it's, I think everyone would

00:43:58.020 agree that some level of wealth inequality would be intolerable and that we would want to correct

00:44:02.180 for it. But wealth inequality is just one kind of inequality. There's every other kind of

00:44:06.720 inequality. And there's this fact that, that none of us, and this, this goes to the free will issue.

00:44:13.440 So, so what we, what we imagine is that people, they have some, a certain inheritance, they have,

00:44:18.980 they have their genes, they have their environments. They, you know, you didn't pick the fact that you

00:44:23.280 weren't born yesterday in Syria. You were born in a stable society when you were born. We don't own,

00:44:30.060 we can't truly own all of our advantages. We didn't make ourselves, but most people feel that

00:44:35.320 there's something like a ghost in the machine that has free will that can make the best of even a

00:44:42.960 bad situation. Now, I think you probably agree that some situations are so bad that, you know,

00:44:46.980 that that can be so stacked against you that, you know, it's just life is unfair. I think, I mean,

00:44:52.660 here are claims about you that I, that, that I think are true and have, have kind of, should be

00:44:58.540 morally salient. You didn't make yourself, you didn't determine anything about yourself that you

00:45:07.200 would use as an exercise of your own free will. So you're, you're very intelligent, you're very

00:45:12.320 literate, you're very interested in things that get you ahead in, in all the ways you've gotten

00:45:16.940 yourself ahead. You didn't create that about yourself, right? And obviously there's, there's a

00:45:22.580 genetic component to that. There's an environmental component to that. There's a, maybe there's just,

00:45:25.980 you know, cosmic ray bombardment that can help or hurt who knows what, what influences are there,

00:45:31.120 but none of that is something that you have authored. And that's true of everyone in the

00:45:36.360 room. You have exactly the disposition you have, the effort you have. If you wake up tomorrow morning

00:45:41.720 with twice the capacity for effort and grit that you had yesterday, you won't know where that came

00:45:47.220 from. If it, if it comes from a book you read, you can't determine the fact that the book had

00:45:52.100 precisely the influence it had and not a little bit less or a little bit more. Well, you are part

00:45:56.100 of a system of influences. And so this is a picture in my view that just makes a mockery of the notion

00:46:01.120 of free will, right? And it goes down to the smallest possible case of, you know, my getting to the end

00:46:06.940 of the sentence, right? It's just, you know, like if, if I have a stroke now, well then, you know,

00:46:10.640 sorry, I can't do it, but I didn't. And I didn't choose that either. So now that I think, I think

00:46:18.760 taking that on board does not rob us of morality. I think because, because we still have a preference

00:46:25.940 between an excruciating plunge into civil war and needless misery and building a viable global

00:46:33.140 civilization where the maximum number of people thrive. So you're using a lot of active verbs for

00:46:37.920 a person who is a product of environment and genetics. Well, no, but no, but it's all, it's

00:46:44.140 all happening. Like if I were, we can build robots that act, right? And we are, I'm moving my hands

00:46:50.020 now, but I honestly don't know how. But is the robot moving the hands? I mean, is it, but the point

00:46:54.760 that I'm making is when you say we can, we can discern, we can build, we can create, we can, you know,

00:47:00.240 we can decide. But it's exactly like, it's exactly like you speaking now. You are, you don't know how

00:47:05.240 you follow the rules of English grammar. I'm not arguing that you can't make a convincing case

00:47:08.980 that I don't have free will. I'm arguing that you can't make a convincing case you can build

00:47:11.760 a civilization on lack of free will. Take this case. I mean, the moral relevance of this, and

00:47:16.800 Eric, I'd be interested to know if you agree with this. It seems to me that once you admit you, you

00:47:22.360 either won the lottery or you didn't on some level, that conveys a kind of ethical commitment or an

00:47:29.500 ethical obligation that you wouldn't otherwise have. You can't be the person who, who then says

00:47:34.000 everyone just is basically, you're, you're on your own. You either make it based on your

00:47:38.940 effort or not. I mean, this goes to questions of, you know, should we have universal healthcare?

00:47:44.060 It's not just a question. It's not just an economic answer.

00:47:46.240 You're going directly from is to ought with no stop on the trade at all.

00:47:49.560 Well, no, it's just for, for, for literally decades, there, there were very wealthy and very

00:47:55.600 sophisticated countries that took the premises that you are building upon and built some of

00:47:59.020 the most repressive regimes in history.

00:48:00.400 Well, no, but the idea that- But they had other things going on. They

00:48:03.760 had bad ideas of economics.

00:48:05.320 I agree.

00:48:05.840 They had personality cults.

00:48:07.260 They had-

00:48:07.620 I agree with all of that.

00:48:09.260 But the point that I'm making is that you are, you are making definitive statements about

00:48:12.860 value judgments with reference to a naturally selected interaction of, of biology and environment.

00:48:22.600 I just don't know how you're getting from one to the other.

00:48:24.360 Owning the, the truth of biology does not-

00:48:26.680 I mean, do robots have morality is what I'm asking you.

00:48:28.460 Well, no, they certainly would if we built them to have conscious states that they could

00:48:32.520 allow for suffering and well-being.

00:48:33.860 I mean, that, that's coming.

00:48:35.000 We're going to have to ask that question.

00:48:36.720 So then we can be God, but God can't make us those kinds of robots is the argument.

00:48:40.140 Well, no, but-

00:48:40.740 Should we maybe try taking the fun out of this?

00:48:42.880 I thought I was trying.

00:48:44.820 So, you know, one possibility is that there's like a layer cake and at the bottom you've got,

00:48:49.800 you know, quantum field theory and then you get organic chemistry and you build this

00:48:53.840 thing up and you've got natural and sexual selection, then you get, you know, systems

00:48:57.900 of morality riding on top of this.

00:48:59.900 And there's some sort of weird category error between the layers of this cake.

00:49:05.260 So it may be that if you can get rid of quantum indeterminacy that you have effectively Laplacian

00:49:13.500 determinism and everything is a product of initial conditions.

00:49:17.140 Uh, and that takes place at the lowest level, but there's no morality at the level of, uh,

00:49:22.480 you know, exciting fields and electrons and quarks.

00:49:25.820 So, you know, you don't put pair that observable, which is like, you know, that quark is being

00:49:32.240 unethical right now, uh, you know, with some behavior, which, you know, affected whether

00:49:37.920 some synapse, you know, fired.

00:49:39.780 So that's, that morality thing has to do with this very high up layer, which is some sort

00:49:45.820 of social organization, which is not fundamental.

00:49:50.680 And so what I hear us doing is talking about free will down here and talking about morality

00:49:55.940 up here.

00:49:57.240 And, you know, one of the lessons of physics is, is that you, every layer of the cake

00:50:02.660 has, well, it has its own language game associated with it.

00:50:05.740 And yes, we call those observables, right?

00:50:07.680 And so those observables are paired with what we might call effective theories, right?

00:50:12.640 And so these effective theories are not to be mixed up.

00:50:16.500 And so every time we get into one of these free will conversations, I don't know whether

00:50:20.160 you're talking about free, we have as if free will, who was forced to buy a ticket to the

00:50:24.720 night's event, you know?

00:50:25.960 Well, no, no, but answer that question.

00:50:27.460 Really?

00:50:27.860 So like, like, did, did you, did you actually, I didn't have to buy one.

00:50:31.860 Yeah.

00:50:34.920 I don't know.

00:50:35.500 The night, the night is young.

00:50:36.500 You guys should totally get in on this.

00:50:37.640 But, but the point is, is that I'm perfectly happy with the idea that I have as if free

00:50:43.760 will at the top of the layer cake.

00:50:45.220 And, and if we can get rid of quantum observation and get back to Laplacian determinism at some

00:50:51.400 higher level that I have no free will.

00:50:52.680 But, but it's as if free will only because you actually are not aware of the proximate

00:50:57.140 cause of your action in each moment.

00:50:59.460 If I look at a chaotic pendulum over the exploratorium, it may have a very clear path that's determined

00:51:06.580 through Newtonian mechanics, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

00:51:09.460 So effectively, I'm super surprised. 0.98

00:51:11.360 I just sit there like an idiot twirling it thinking, oh, wow, I didn't think it was going 0.99

00:51:14.680 to do that, you know, even though I know the physics, right? 0.96

00:51:17.260 So, so the point is, is that if I try to compute something that's much larger than I am, my computer

00:51:23.580 can't handle that much larger system.

00:51:25.800 So, you know, this is why sort of self-reflection leads to madness very often.

00:51:30.640 And I thought you said this was going to be fun.

00:51:34.420 Hopefully it's not that often.

00:51:36.580 I'm still really interested in the app that you're coming out with for meditation.

00:51:44.200 Don't hold your breath, but it is coming.

00:51:46.140 Okay.

00:51:46.720 But, but what I'm trying to get at is, is that the fun part of these conversations comes

00:51:51.120 from making these category errors and the unfun part comes from sorting it out.

00:51:55.780 And then, you know, when I, when I play Johnny Raincloud, everybody will say, well, okay,

00:52:00.260 I guess that makes sense, but it's no fun anymore.

00:52:02.280 And so that's, that's what I'm worried about.

00:52:03.820 Well, but you would still, you're not disparaging the idea of a unity of knowledge, right?

00:52:10.600 Each layer of the cake, you can make a smooth transition between layers that doesn't usurp

00:52:15.980 your understanding of each layer.

00:52:17.600 I mean, I have a fair idea when my wife's going to be angry at me for not doing the dishes, 1.00

00:52:23.220 but I can't recover it from quantum field theory, right?

00:52:26.300 So the idea is that maybe that the quantum field theory determines her behavior.

00:52:30.660 No, but you're, but there's nothing about doing dishes that it, that violates quantum field

00:52:34.480 theory.

00:52:35.940 You hear that?

00:52:36.540 I mean, so it's, it's not that you have to live in a different worldview in order to

00:52:43.260 talk about the human relations layer, the moral layer, the free will layer or not.

00:52:48.100 I can do my best, but I don't find it useful to try to think about human psychology from

00:52:53.200 the point of view of, uh, of quarks, but you know, could organic chemistry, if some neurotransmitters

00:53:01.400 depleted, yeah, you know, so, so there are some ways in which these different layers can

00:53:06.080 talk to each other, but there's no reason that I should be able to compute necessarily

00:53:09.800 across these layers successfully, even if there is some sort of concept of entailment or

00:53:14.900 determination.

00:53:16.040 What I'm interested in is kind of a first principle methodology of moving forward into the unknown,

00:53:24.600 right?

00:53:24.780 So like it was, so what I, what I object to in religion and in this notion of revelation is

00:53:29.100 that there was some prior century where we were given the best ideas we're ever going to have

00:53:36.200 on a specific topic and we must cling to those ideas until the end of time.

00:53:41.120 This is the analogy that, or the, the rubric that, that I find most convincing.

00:53:45.820 I, I, it's like there's, there's only ever been people talking about reality here, right?

00:53:51.460 And you can, so you, therefore you can either locate yourself in a current, modern, open-ended

00:53:57.540 conversation or you can anchor yourself to an ancient one and never give yourself the

00:54:03.220 freedom to rethink it.

00:54:04.340 So, and then you could have done it with Homer, you could have done it with Aristotle, you could

00:54:07.860 have done it with Shakespeare and the Hindus have done it with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata 1.00

00:54:12.980 and you're, you're losing no sleep over whether or not you should do likewise, right?

00:54:17.820 And so my sense is that we need to, every question of societal importance requires that

00:54:24.860 we now outgrow the accidents of merely contingent history, outgrow the fact that people used

00:54:31.520 to be living in geographical isolation from one another and linguistic isolation from one

00:54:36.860 another for centuries and outgrow, therefore, our religious provincialism and just get to

00:54:42.660 a common humanity that's using the best tools available to solve the hardest problems.

00:54:46.960 So, I have a couple of...

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 02, 2018

#112 — The Intellectual Dark Web

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