Making Sense - Sam Harris - #305 — Moral Knowledge

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.900 okay well a reminder that we're releasing more episodes of the series the essential sam harris

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00:02:15.300 and it's our policy over at waking up too so don't let real concerns about money ever be the reason why

00:02:23.380 you don't get access to my digital work okay well i've been off twitter for about 10 days now

00:02:33.060 and i must say it's been interesting it's almost like i amputated a limb actually i amputated a phantom limb

00:02:43.300 the limb wasn't real and it was mostly delivering signals of pain and disorder but it was also a major presence

00:02:53.060 in my life and it was articulate in ways that i was pretty attached to i could make gestures or seeming gestures

00:03:01.860 that i can now no longer imagine making there's literally no space in which to make those gestures

00:03:08.900 in my life now so there's definitely a sense that something is missing my phone is much less of a

00:03:18.340 presence in my life i've noticed that i sometimes pick it up reflexively and then i think what was i hoping

00:03:24.740 to do with this and my sense of what the world is is different a sense of where i exist in the world

00:03:32.980 is different this might sound completely crazy to those of you who are never obsessed with twitter

00:03:39.620 but twitter had really become my news feed it was my first point of interaction with the world of

00:03:46.740 information each day and now that seems far less than optimal i once went up in a police helicopter

00:03:55.700 and experienced what it was like to have a cop's eye view of a major american city at the time this

00:04:02.260 really was a revelation to me when you're listening to police radio there's always a car chase or shots

00:04:10.660 fired or reports of a rape in progress or some other astounding symptom of societal dysfunction

00:04:19.540 and without a police radio in your life most of that goes away and it's genuinely hard to say which

00:04:26.180 view of a city is more realistic is it more realistic a picture of your life in your city for you to

00:04:34.020 suddenly be told that someone is getting murdered right now a mere four miles from where you're currently

00:04:40.100 drinking your morning cup of coffee is the feeling of horror and helplessness that wells up in you

00:04:46.660 a more accurate lens through which to view the rest of your day or is it distorting of it it does seem

00:04:53.620 possible to misperceive one's world on the basis of actual facts because of what one helplessly does

00:05:02.500 with those facts it's almost like the human mind has its own algorithmically boosted information so

00:05:09.380 misinformation aside and there was obviously a lot of that i now feel like many of the facts i was

00:05:16.180 getting on twitter were distorting my sense of what it is to live in the world as well as my sense of my

00:05:22.980 place in it today's conversation was recorded before i got off twitter so you'll hear it come up

00:05:29.940 briefly actually it was recorded the day before i deleted my account because i did that on thanksgiving day

00:05:37.380 and this was recorded the day before and at a few points you'll hear the residue of how much time i

00:05:43.380 had been spending on twitter that day i complain about it i draw an analogy to it and frankly listening

00:05:50.260 back to this conversation i sound a little more cantankerous than normal this conversation had the

00:05:58.980 character of a debate at times especially in the second half and um listening to it i sound a little

00:06:06.900 bit at the end of my patience and while it had some reference to the disagreement being discussed it was

00:06:14.260 certainly drawing some energy from my collisions on twitter that day anyway today's guest is eric hoell

00:06:22.340 eric is a neuroscientist and writer he was a professor at tufts university but recently left

00:06:30.020 to write full-time he's been a visiting scholar at the institute for advanced study at princeton and a

00:06:37.220 forbes 30 under 30 notable in science he has published a novel titled the revelations and he now writes full-time

00:06:46.900 for his sub stack which goes by the name of the intrinsic perspective and today we talk about the

00:06:53.220 nature of moral truth and by implication the future of effective altruism we discuss the connection between

00:07:00.820 consequentialism and ea the problems of implementing academic moral philosophy bad arguments against

00:07:08.020 consequentialism or what i deem to be bad arguments the implications of ai for our morality the dangers of

00:07:16.020 moral certainty whether all moral claims are in fact claims about consequences the problem of moral

00:07:23.460 fanaticism why so difficult to think about low probability events and other topics anyway i really

00:07:31.540 enjoyed this despite being slightly prickly these are some topics that really are at the core of my interest

00:07:38.180 as well as eric's and now i bring you eric hoell

00:07:48.740 i am here with eric hoell eric thanks for joining me thank you so much sam it's a it's a delight i

00:07:54.740 actually grew up selling your books um um i i grew up in my mom's independent bookstore and uh all through

00:08:03.540 high school which was i think like 2004 or so this was right when the end of faith came out uh-huh

00:08:08.980 and um i sat on the bestseller list for a long time and so i probably sold i don't know 50 maybe

00:08:14.260 even 100 copies of that book i mean i sold that i sold it a lot it was really dominant during that

00:08:18.500 period of time so oh nice nice where was the bookstore or where is the bookstore uh in yeah it's in

00:08:24.820 newburyport massachusetts which is north of boston it's just a uh it's just an independent bookstore

00:08:30.100 up there but it was um yeah it was it was great i i highly recommend growing up in a bookstore if

00:08:36.100 you can get away with it i can only imagine that that would have been my dream at uh really every

00:08:41.220 point from i don't know 12 on that would have been amazing do you guys still have the store we we do

00:08:47.860 actually it survived covid incredibly thanks to the generosity of the local community who who leapt in

00:08:54.340 to support it with a gofundme and it's now going on 50 years amazing it's pretty incredible well

00:09:00.500 let's plug the store what's the name of the store uh the name of the store is is jabberwocky books in

00:09:05.460 newburyport massachusetts i highly recommend checking it out uh jabberwocky as in uh lewis carroll yep

00:09:11.220 cool well that's great i uh i love that story so uh you and i have a ton in common apparently we've

00:09:19.140 never met this is the first time we've spoken i have been reading your essays and uh at least one

00:09:26.180 of your academic papers let's just um summarize your background what what have you been doing since uh

00:09:32.420 since you left that independent bookstore well i originally wanted to be a writer but i became

00:09:38.820 very interested in in college about the science of consciousness which i'm sure you sort of understand

00:09:46.020 uh in the sense of it just being very innately interesting it seemed like a wild west it seemed

00:09:51.700 like there was a lot there that was unexplored and so i became so interested that i went into it and i

00:09:56.500 got a phd and i worked on developing what's probably are arguably the one of the leading theories of

00:10:04.020 consciousness which is integrated information theory now i i think that particular theory has has some

00:10:10.500 particular problems but i think it's it's sort of what a theory of consciousness should look like

00:10:15.700 and i was very lucky to sort of work on it and develop it over my phd but during that time i was

00:10:20.500 still writing and so eventually i that spilled over onto substack and and doing sort of these these

00:10:28.660 newsletters which is almost to me like this emerging literary genre maybe that sounds a bit

00:10:35.300 pretentious but i i really sort of think of it that way um the sort of frictionless form of

00:10:39.940 communication that i really find intriguing um and so that's what i've been devoting a lot of my

00:10:44.420 effort to effort to lately yeah yeah so just to back up a second so you got your phd

00:10:50.180 in neuroscience and um did you do that under tononi yeah i did so i worked i worked with julio tononi and

00:10:57.460 we were working on this was right around the time when integrated information theory was sort of coming

00:11:04.180 together you know he he's the originator of it but there was sort of this early theory team we called

00:11:10.820 ourselves that was all built on shoring up the foundations and it was a deeply formative again

00:11:18.420 an instance of me just being very very lucky it was a deeply formative experience to work on a really

00:11:24.980 ambitious intellectual project even though now i can sort of see that that like frankly i i don't think

00:11:32.340 that the theory is is probably 100 true i think maybe some aspects of it are true i think some aspects

00:11:37.540 of it are incredibly interesting i think it sort of looks very much like what we want out of the

00:11:41.860 science of consciousness but regardless of that i think as an intellectual project it was incredibly

00:11:47.060 ambitious and intricate and it had just a huge it to go into that environment of really high level

00:11:53.940 science at a frontier when you're 22 is is mind expanding yeah right i mean it was just it was just

00:12:01.460 absolutely mind-blowing and it was a privilege to be to be a part of that yeah yeah well there's so many

00:12:06.020 things we could talk about obviously we can talk about consciousness and free will the the brain uh

00:12:12.980 ai i know we share some concerns there digital media we the you just raised the point of your migration to

00:12:20.580 substack i mean maybe we'll linger on that for a second but there's it's just we could talk about uh

00:12:26.020 we have we have many many hours of ahead of us if we want to cover all those things but there's

00:12:31.060 something else on the agenda here which is more pressing which is the your views about effective

00:12:38.020 altruism and consequentialism which um have been only further crystallized in recent weeks by the um

00:12:46.260 the fall of sam bankman freed so i think maybe we'll get to some of the other stuff but um we

00:12:52.500 definitely want to talk about moral truth and the larger question of just what it takes to live a good

00:12:59.620 life which you know it really are yeah those are questions which i think are central to everyone's

00:13:05.140 concern whether they think about them explicitly or not but before we jump in let's just just linger

00:13:10.020 for a second on your bio because you you made this jump to substack which really appears in at least in the

00:13:16.980 last what 10 days or so to have actually been a jump you you have you were a professor of

00:13:23.700 of neuroscience at tufts was that correct yeah so i'm resigning my professorship at at tufts in order

00:13:31.220 to to write full-time on my substack the intrinsic perspective yeah and one of the one of the reasons

00:13:37.700 i'm doing it is just that you know it the the medium itself offers uh a huge amount to people who are

00:13:45.540 interested in in multiple subjects right i mean you you surely have sort of felt some of these constraints

00:13:51.540 wherein you know you're really expected to be hyper focused on particular academic problems and you

00:13:58.900 know i do do like technical work and so on but i'm also sort of just more interested in general

00:14:03.700 concepts and there hasn't been you know at least for someone who's who's a writer there hasn't been a

00:14:08.100 great way to to make a living off of that and actually substack is now sort of providing that so i think i

00:14:13.860 can i can do stuff that's as in depth as some of my academic work but sort of do it do it in public

00:14:21.620 and create conversations and i think that that's that's really important and i should seize the

00:14:25.380 opportunity while i can so but why resign your post at tufts what's the i mean what what do most people

00:14:34.660 not understand about academia at this moment that um would make that seem like a an obvious choice

00:14:43.060 because i guess from the outside it might seem somewhat inscrutable i mean why not maintain your

00:14:48.020 professorship continue to be a part of the ivory tower but then write on substack as much as you

00:14:54.020 want or can yeah i i think what is is not quite understood is how focused you have to be on the

00:15:03.780 particular goal posts that are within academia that move you towards tenure track so basically

00:15:11.940 what every professor wants is this this tenure at some major institution and to do that now it's not

00:15:21.220 really just a matter of doing your research right it's a matter of sort of crafting your research so

00:15:27.140 it will receive big governmental grants and the areas in which i work which is like science of

00:15:32.660 consciousness formal mathematically formalizing the notion of emergence these are not areas where

00:15:37.940 there is a huge amount of of funding to begin with right but but beyond that it also means being

00:15:44.260 you know involved with the student body in not just having students but in all sorts of ways like

00:15:50.820 extracurricular activities volunteering taking on you know essentially busy work of editing journals and

00:15:58.180 it involves you sort of citation maxing and paper maxing and uh sitting on all the right committees and

00:16:05.460 and i sort of have tried to avoid doing that and thought maybe i could make a career within academia

00:16:11.620 without really leaning in heavily into all that into sort of the all the goal posts and hoops of

00:16:19.060 academia and i think it's it's effectively just impossible like i've sort of been very lucky to have gotten

00:16:24.420 as as far as i have and the simple truth is is that like you know last year i i published a novel and

00:16:32.900 i've been publishing essays on substack and the simple truth is is that a tenure committee will never

00:16:36.900 sit down and say oh you you wrote a novel and a a bunch of popular essays that's you know just this

00:16:42.660 massive plus for our biology department it it's like totally inscrutable to them and um i've never had

00:16:48.980 anyone in any sort of administrative or hiring or grant giving capacity show anything but like

00:16:55.780 hesitation and and trepidation about about sort of my my my work outside of either direct academic

00:17:03.620 stuff or direct research stuff hmm yeah but has something changed or has that always been the case

00:17:10.020 do you think i think it's it's essentially always been the case it's just that you know i'm not you know

00:17:16.580 my fear is that people think oh you know this is someone hopping on substack as some sort of life

00:17:22.180 raft i i think if substack didn't exist i would sort of happily split the difference and just take the

00:17:28.900 career head and keep writing and and and probably you know not get tenure where i want to get tenure or

00:17:34.660 even if i could but i would still try it but i think substack as a as this sort of emerging genre like

00:17:41.300 you you know you you're an author you've written books and there's a certain sensation at least that

00:17:48.260 that i have and i imagine most authors have at a certain point where when you're publishing a book

00:17:52.340 it's like you're entering this queue behind a line of like massive titans who've all written incredible

00:17:58.660 works and you're sort of offering up you know this sort of meager here's my book i i hope it's sort of

00:18:05.220 at all the lives up to any of this stuff and um and i just don't feel that way and i

00:18:11.300 i just don't feel that way on substack right i feel like oh this is this is new people haven't

00:18:15.540 really done this i mean of course there's been many great essays throughout history but this sort of

00:18:20.500 constant contact of of the the newsletter form and the frictionlessness of it it strikes me as

00:18:25.780 like a new a new genre and i want to sort of explore it yeah i mean the the huge difference is

00:18:30.660 the the cadence of publishing i mean to be able to hit publish on your own schedule and then to see it

00:18:39.220 instantaneously land in the hands and minds of readers or listeners in the case of a podcast

00:18:46.020 that strikes me as genuinely new i mean you know the the rhythm of book publishing now i mean it's

00:18:51.540 been some years since i've been engaged in it and it's really hard for especially for a non-fiction

00:18:56.420 book i guess with a novel it would probably feel differently or this wouldn't be quite the pain

00:19:02.180 point but if you have an argument to make that you think has pressing intellectual and even social

00:19:08.340 importance and it it all relates to issues of the day to spend a year or more crafting that argument

00:19:18.180 and then to wait nearly a year i mean in the usual case it's something like 11 months for that to be

00:19:25.140 published i mean it's just it just seems like a bizarre anachronism at this point and and so as a

00:19:31.080 counterpoint to that sub stack and podcasts and blogs generally uh you know anything digital that

00:19:38.180 you have that you for which you're the publisher uh it's just a different world yeah absolutely publishing

00:19:43.420 moves at a at a glacial speed and it's funny as well just as someone who grew up as i said selling

00:19:49.600 books i mean there are a lot of people who have moved to reading primarily on their phone

00:19:55.060 and what i don't want is is is reading to to sort of die out right like i i want read i want to

00:20:02.160 have high level you know book level content that that people can read on their phones and and one

00:20:10.040 reason for that is just that when you wake up in the morning what a lot of people do is is check

00:20:14.620 their phones and they'll look through their social media messages and they'll read their emails but

00:20:19.280 they'll also read an essay they'll read an essay with their head right on their pillow and that is

00:20:26.500 so powerful if you can sort of direct that towards things worth attending to and i realized this by

00:20:32.580 looking at my own behavior like i as much as i love books i mean i'm sitting in my office surrounded by

00:20:38.220 you know books uh free books stolen from my mother's bookstore but uh you know as much as i absolutely

00:20:44.480 love books i don't wake up in the morning and and put a book in my face right i wake up in the morning and

00:20:49.280 i check my phone right and and so i realized this and i and i thought well what am i doing

00:20:53.520 right like why why am i putting all this effort into something that yeah i still i still read books

00:20:59.320 but clearly there's this huge open market for um sort of good high level content that you can you can

00:21:05.700 read online or on your computer and i want to bring a lot of the old school sort of literary and

00:21:11.540 scientific qualities i mean that's my hope right is to bring that sort of stuff online but anyways yeah

00:21:17.720 yeah yeah yeah well i i think you're executing on that hope because your substack essays are great

00:21:24.240 and they're quite uh literate and you also have a great artist you're collaborating with i love the

00:21:30.320 illustrations associated with your essays yeah it's a huge amount of fun it's he he does these artistic

00:21:36.040 reactions to the post so he reads draft and then somehow knocks out you know with no direction from me

00:21:42.320 his sort of reaction to it and it's it's just it's it's a lot of fun yeah nice well so let's jump into

00:21:50.080 the the topic at hand because this was kicked off by my having noticed one of your essays on effective

00:21:56.880 altruism and then then um i think i signed up for your substack at that point and then i noticed

00:22:02.480 maybe i was already on it and then you uh wrote a further essay about sam bankman freed and uh his

00:22:12.000 misadventures so we're going to jump into effective altruism and consequentialism and there are now many

00:22:19.340 discontents perhaps we should define and differentiate those terms first how do you think about ea and

00:22:25.920 consequentialism yeah absolutely i think um effective altruism has been a really interesting

00:22:32.480 intellectual movement you know in my lifetime it's it's sort of made contributing to charity

00:22:39.440 intellectually sexy which i find very admirable and they've brought a lot of attention to causes

00:22:45.980 that are more esoteric but just to give like a very a very basic definition maybe of effective

00:22:53.520 altruism and how i think about it is that you can view it at two levels so the broadest sort of

00:23:00.080 definition is something like money ball but for charities so it's looking at charities and saying

00:23:06.280 how can we make our donations to these charities as effective as possible and and again this is

00:23:12.700 something that immediately people say that sounds really great but there's also you know it comes out

00:23:18.420 of a particular type of moral philosophy so the movement has its origins in a lot of these

00:23:25.620 intellectual thought experiments that are based around utilitarianism and you know where i've

00:23:34.640 sort of criticized the movement is in its sort of taking those sort of thought experiments at too

00:23:41.860 seriously and actually back in august i i wrote i wrote i think the essay that you're referring to and

00:23:47.540 it's not just because i've decided to you know critique randomly effective altruism which at the time was

00:23:53.720 just people you know contributing money to charity like what what's there exactly to to critique about

00:23:59.900 it but they actually put out a call for criticism so he said please we'll pay you to to criticize us

00:24:05.240 again something that's that is very admirable and so you know i ended up writing a couple essays

00:24:11.060 in response to this this call for self-criticism and my worry was that they were taking the maybe

00:24:18.220 the consequentialism you could call it you call utilitarianism a bit too seriously and my worry

00:24:25.720 was that they would kind of scale that up and in a sense the ftx implosion that recently occurred which

00:24:34.040 now over a million people it seems like have lost money in that that occurred perhaps arguably this is

00:24:43.100 arguably in part because of taking some of the deep core philosophical motives of effective

00:24:50.300 altruism too seriously and trying to bring it too much into the real world and and just to give like

00:24:57.140 a definition maybe we should give some definitions here okay so i've said utilitarianism i've said

00:25:01.120 consequentialism so yeah you know very broadly i would say consequentialism is when your theory of

00:25:09.020 morality is based around the consequences of actions or to be strict about it that morality is

00:25:16.440 reducible in some way to only the consequences of actions and utilitarianism is maybe like a specific

00:25:24.980 form of consequentialism people use these terms in a little bit different ways but utilitarianism is

00:25:29.840 kind of a specific form of consequentialism where it's it's saying that the consequences that impact

00:25:37.340 let's just be reductive and say the happiness or pleasure of individuals is sort of all that

00:25:43.180 matters for morality and all of effective altruism originally comes from some moral thought experiments

00:25:52.480 around how to sort of maximize these properties or how to be a utilitarian and i think that that's

00:25:59.620 i think that that's in a sense the the part of the movement that we should take the least seriously

00:26:05.580 and then there's a bunch of other parts of movement that i think are are good and should be emphasized

00:26:10.500 so i just want to sort of make that clear okay great well let me go over that ground one more time

00:26:17.180 just to fill in a few holes because i think i just don't want anyone to be confused about what these terms

00:26:23.240 mean and what we're talking about here so yeah it is in fact descriptively true that many effective

00:26:30.760 altruists are consequentialists and the as you say the the the original inspiration for ea is uh you know

00:26:41.740 arguably uh the thought experiment that peter singer came up with about the shallow pond which has been

00:26:48.900 discussed many times on this podcast but briefly if you were to be walking home one day and you see a

00:26:55.680 child drowning in a shallow pond obviously you would go rush over and save it and if you happen to be

00:27:03.520 wearing some very expensive shoes the thought that you you can't wade into that pond to save the life

00:27:08.760 of a drowning child because you don't want to damage your shoes well that that immediately brands you as

00:27:14.280 some kind of moral monster right anyone who would decline to save the life of a child over let's say a

00:27:20.120 500 pair of shoes you know it's just deserves to be exiled from our moral community but as singer

00:27:28.580 pointed out if you flip that around all of us are in the position every day of receiving appeals from

00:27:35.300 valid charities any one of which indicates that we could save the life of a of a drowning child in effect

00:27:43.000 with a mere allocation of let's say 500 but none of us feel that we or anyone else around us

00:27:49.980 who who is declining to send yet another check to yet another organization for this purpose

00:27:56.240 none of us feel that that we or anyone else is a moral monster for not doing that right and yet

00:28:01.520 if you do the math in consequentialist terms it seems like an analogous situation it's just a greater

00:28:07.520 remove the the moral horror of the inequality there is just less salient and so we just we you know we

00:28:15.880 we walk past the pond in effect every day of our lives and we do so with a clear conscience and so

00:28:21.720 it's on the basis of that kind of thought that a few young philosophers were inspired to start this

00:28:29.380 movement effective altruism which you know as you say is i like the analogy to it's essentially money

00:28:34.600 ball for charity you just let's just drill down on what is truly effective and how can we do the most

00:28:41.680 good with the limited resources we have and then there are further arguments about long-termism and

00:28:46.820 and other things that get layered in there and i should say that peter singer and the founders of

00:28:52.540 ea toby ord and will mccaskill have been on this podcast and you know in some cases multiple times and

00:28:58.680 um there's a lot that you know i've said about all that well i guess i would make a couple of points

00:29:05.660 here one is that there's no i guess a further definition here you brought in the term utilitarianism

00:29:12.340 so that's the sort of the original form of consequentialism attributed to jeremy bentham and

00:29:18.440 john stewart mill which when it gets discussed in most circles more or less gets equated with some

00:29:26.120 form of hedonism right but people tend to think well this utilitarians really just care about pleasure

00:29:31.940 or happiness in some kind of superficial and impossible to measure way and so there's there

00:29:39.000 are many caricatures of the view that like you should you should avoid pain at all costs there's

00:29:44.500 no you know there's no form of pain that could ever be justified on a utilitarian calculus so there's

00:29:50.580 a lot of confusion about that but i guess the you know to if you if we wanted to keep these terms

00:29:55.620 separate i just tend to collapse everything to consequentialism you could argue that consequentialism as

00:30:01.480 you said is the claim that moral truth which is to say you know questions of right and wrong and good

00:30:07.280 and evil is totally reducible to talk about consequences you know actual or perhaps actual

00:30:14.020 and potential consequences and i would certainly sign on to that you could make the further claim which

00:30:19.960 i've also made is that all of the consequences that really matter in the end have to matter to some

00:30:26.040 conscious mind somewhere at least potentially right so that we we care about the in the end the the

00:30:33.320 conscious states of conscious creatures and you know anything else we say we care about can collapse

00:30:39.720 down to the actual or potential conscious states of conscious creatures so i i i would i've argued for

00:30:45.460 that in in my book the moral landscape and and elsewhere but much of the confusion that comes here

00:30:51.820 is you know as i i think we're going to explore comes down to an inadequate picture of just what

00:30:58.760 counts as a consequence so i want to get into that but i guess the the final point to make here just

00:31:04.980 definitionally is that it seems to me that there's no direct connection or at least not there's no two-way

00:31:12.420 connection maybe there's a one-way connection between effective altruism and consequentialism so which

00:31:17.820 is to say i think you could be an effective altruist and not be a consequentialist though though i would

00:31:23.680 i would agree that probably most effective altruists are consequentialists i mean you could be a

00:31:29.080 fundamentalist christian who just wants to get the the souls of people into heaven and then think about

00:31:36.880 effective altruism in those terms just how can i you know how can i be most effective at accomplishing

00:31:41.580 this particular good that i'm defining in this particular way and you know so i do think ea and

00:31:48.320 consequentialism break apart there although i guess you could say that if that any consequentialist

00:31:53.980 really should be an effective altruist if you're concerned about consequences well then you should be

00:31:59.100 concerned about really tracking what the consequences of your actions or charities actions are and you should

00:32:06.700 care if one charity is doing a hundred times more good you know based on your definition of good

00:32:12.960 than another charity and then that's the charity that should get your your money and and time etc so

00:32:18.660 i don't know if do you have anything do you want to modify that all that no no i i think that that's

00:32:24.080 correct and i and i agree actually that you could sort of separate out the utilitarianism or

00:32:30.140 consequentialism from effective altruism in in some particular ways but i think that where it gets a

00:32:37.220 little bit difficult is that the whole sort of point is this effective part of the altruism so when one

00:32:44.680 makes a judgment about effectiveness they have to be choosing something to maximize or prioritize so

00:32:52.460 you want to be choosing the biggest bang the biggest moral bang for your buck which again strikes me as

00:32:58.680 quite admirable especially when the comparisons that you're making are local so let's say that you set

00:33:04.720 out with your goal of saving lives in africa well maybe there are multiple different charities and some

00:33:11.520 are just orders of magnitude in terms of the expected results of just no broad number of lives saved and this

00:33:19.520 is actually a big part of precisely what the effective altruism movement has done it's isolated some of these

00:33:26.120 charities you know there's a couple of them somewhere around like mosquito bed nets and things like

00:33:31.140 that that are just really really effective at saving lives but what if you're comparing things that are

00:33:40.080 very far apart so let's say that you have some money and you want to distribute it between you know

00:33:46.320 inner city arts education versus domestic violence shelters well now it gets it gets a lot harder and it

00:33:55.960 becomes a little bit clearer that what we mean by morality isn't as obviously measurable as something

00:34:04.620 like an effective economic intervention or an effective medical intervention maybe it is to some

00:34:10.180 hypothetical being with like a really perfect good theory of morality and one way to that you know

00:34:17.760 effective altruists essentially get around some of these issues is just to say well actually both of those

00:34:22.700 are essentially waste of money like you shouldn't really be contributing to inner city arts education

00:34:30.400 or domestic violence shelters you really should be arbitraging your money because your money is going

00:34:34.460 to go so much further somewhere else and again this all sounds good like i i don't um i don't think

00:34:41.840 that this is bad reasoning or anything like that but the issue is is that the more seriously you take this

00:34:48.520 and the more literally you take this what happens is is that it's almost like you begin to instantiate

00:34:53.660 this academic moral philosophy into real life and then it it begins to become vicious in a particular

00:35:00.080 way like why are you donating any money within the united states at all yeah why not put it where it

00:35:07.520 goes much further and that's where people begin to get off the bus to a certain degree right like again no

00:35:14.100 one can blame anyone for maximizing charities but to say that okay wait a minute a dollar will go so

00:35:19.440 much further in africa than it will here so why donate any money to any charity that sort of operates

00:35:25.280 within the u.s and that's where again people begin to say wait wait wait some something is going on here

00:35:31.520 and i think what's going on is that this maximizing totalitizing philosophy within that you can have

00:35:40.260 this hardcore interpretation of utilitarianism or consequentialism and you can take it really really

00:35:45.280 seriously and if you do i think it can lead to some bad effects just like the way that people who take

00:35:51.260 religious beliefs and i don't want to make the comparison i'm certainly not saying that effective

00:35:56.140 altruism is a religion but in sort of the same behavioral way that people who take religious beliefs

00:36:01.760 really really seriously and they have some sort of access to moral truth and that allows them to

00:36:08.760 strap a bomb to their chest or something and that is this level of sort of fanaticism and i think that

00:36:15.500 if you take academic philosophy too seriously you should sort of take it as interesting and maybe as

00:36:19.680 motivating but you shouldn't really go and try to perfectly instantiate it in the world you should

00:36:24.140 be very wary about that and that's what this sort of arbitrage leads it is right it's this like taking it

00:36:30.620 really really seriously yeah well that's that's a great place to start i mean this really is the core

00:36:37.780 of the issue and and so i'm going to make a couple of claims here which i think are

00:36:43.080 true and foundational and i would love to get your reaction but before i do that i just want to

00:36:51.380 acknowledge that the issues you just raised are are issues that i've been thinking about and talking

00:36:56.740 about you know all the while defending consequentialism this is really the the fascinating

00:37:02.120 point at which our reasoning about what it means to live a good life and the the practical

00:37:09.340 implementation of that reasoning is um it's just very difficult to work out in practice and i mean so

00:37:17.760 the first thing i would want to claim here is that consequentialism is a theory of moral truth

00:37:25.120 right it's a claim about what it may what it means to say that it that something is morally true

00:37:32.120 that something is really good or really bad it's a claim about value and in the end it's a claim

00:37:39.320 about what it's possible and legitimate to care about but it isn't a decision procedure right it's

00:37:46.140 not a way of doing the math that you just indicated may be impossible to do and there's a distinction i made

00:37:53.280 in the moral landscape between answers in practice and answers in principle and i you know it just should

00:38:00.620 be obvious that there are a wide variety of questions where we know there are answers in

00:38:05.320 principle we know that it's possible to be right or wrong about you know any given claim in this area

00:38:11.500 and what's more to maybe not even know that you're wrong when you in fact you are wrong and yet there may

00:38:18.800 be no way of deciding who is right and who is wrong there and or ever getting the data in hand

00:38:24.980 that could adjudicate a dispute and so the the example i always go to because it's both vivid and

00:38:31.640 and obviously true for people is that the question of you know how many birds are in flight over the

00:38:37.980 surface of the earth right now has an answer right it has a you at one you just think about it for a

00:38:44.280 second and you know it has an answer and that answer is in fact an integer and yet we know we'll never

00:38:50.220 get the data in hand we could not possibly get the data in hand and yet and the data have changed by

00:38:55.680 the time i get to the end of the sentence so there is a right answer there and yet we know no one knows

00:39:00.300 it but it would be ridiculous to have a philosophy where a claim about you know birds and flight would

00:39:08.080 rule out the possibility of there being an answer to a question of you know how many are flying over

00:39:13.280 the surface of the earth simply because we can't we don't know how to measure it right and the first

00:39:17.520 thing many people say about you know any consequentialist claim about moral truth with

00:39:22.560 you know with respect to to well-being say the well-being of conscious creatures which is the

00:39:28.180 formulation i often use the first thing someone will say is well we don't we don't have any way of

00:39:33.740 measuring well-being well that's not actually an argument right i mean it's certainly it may be the

00:39:40.660 beginning of one but it in principle it has no force and as you can see by analogy with with birds

00:39:47.300 but further i would make the claim that any claim that consequentialism is bad right that had that it

00:39:55.200 has repugnant implications is ultimately a claim about unwanted consequences and usually it's it's

00:40:03.940 an unacknowledged claim about consequences and so in my view and you just you inevitably did it in

00:40:10.460 just stating the case against taking academic philosophy too seriously you pointed to all of the terrible

00:40:16.140 effects of doing this right the life negative effects the fact that now you have to feel guilty

00:40:21.800 going to the symphony because it's such a profligate wastage of money and moral resources

00:40:26.540 when you could be saving yet further starving children in africa and so we we recognize we don't

00:40:33.300 want to live in that sort of world right we love art and we love beauty and we love leisure and we're

00:40:38.980 right to love those things and we want to build a civilization that wherein there's such abundance

00:40:43.840 that most people most of the time have the free attention not to just think about genocide and

00:40:50.940 starvation but to think about the beautiful things in life and to live creative lives right and and to

00:40:58.440 have fun right and so if you're going to take the thought experiments of peter singer so seriously

00:41:04.520 that you can no longer have fun that you can no longer play a game of frisbee because that hour spent

00:41:10.140 in the park with your children is objectively a waste of time when held against the starvation and

00:41:18.360 and immiseration of countless strangers in a distant country who you could be helping at right this

00:41:25.180 very moment well we all recognize that that is a some kind of race to the bottom that is perverse

00:41:31.520 that is not it's not giving us the emotional and cognitive resources to build a world worth living in

00:41:39.660 that the very world that the people who are starving in africa would want to be restored to if we could

00:41:45.620 only solve their problems too and so it may in fact be true that when you know when brought into

00:41:52.920 juxtaposition right if you put the starving child at my doorstep well then all right we can no longer play

00:41:59.620 frisbee right so there's a local difference and that is something that it's very difficult to think

00:42:04.800 about in this context and we know we'll get into that but i'm you know the claim i want to make here

00:42:09.560 is that it's not a matter of as i think you said in one of your essays it's not a matter of us just

00:42:14.740 adding some non-consequentialist epicycles into our moral framework it really is in the end getting

00:42:22.720 clearer and clearer about what all the consequences are and what all the possible consequences are of

00:42:29.480 any given rule or action and um yeah yeah so anyway that may i'll stop there but that's that's

00:42:35.520 the those are the kind of the foundational claims i would want to make here yeah absolutely i mean i i

00:42:40.240 think that the danger that i see is not so much someone saying let's maximize well-being right it's

00:42:48.080 more so that someone says let's maximize well-being and i have a really specific definition of well-being

00:42:53.340 that i can give you right now and what ends up often happening is that you can very quickly find

00:43:00.040 because it's all about maximization you can find these edge cases and in a sense moral philosophy

00:43:07.300 operates like this game wherein you're trying to find examples that you know disagree with people's

00:43:16.220 moral intuitions and an example that people often give right would be something like this

00:43:22.420 serial killer surgeon who has five patients on the operating table and he can go out into the streets

00:43:29.400 grab someone off the streets butcher them in an alleyway take their organs and save five people so 0.58

00:43:34.200 it's one for five and the difficulty is in sort of specifying something like a definition specific

00:43:41.580 enough that you don't want to do that most people sort of get off the bus with that sort of example

00:43:48.580 and that aspect of utilitarianism is very difficult to do away with you can sort of say that maybe there

00:43:58.280 are long-term effects right so so what people will often say with this example would be well wait if

00:44:03.780 the serial killer surgeon got caught if we lived in a society where people were just being randomly

00:44:08.060 pulled off the streets and murdered this seems like sort of uh this would have a really high levels

00:44:13.640 of anxiety on people or something like that and so the overall net well-being would would decrease

00:44:19.860 or something like that but i think that that's very that's very difficult to sort of defend again once

00:44:26.300 you've chosen something very specific to maximize like live saves or something like that was it but

00:44:30.560 that's just that's the mistake of misconstruing consequences because i take this you know this case of the

00:44:36.780 rogue surgeon is in my mind very easy to deal with in consequentialist terms and yet it's off i mean

00:44:43.380 even in your essays you put it forward as a kind of knockdown argument against consequentialism and

00:44:49.520 consequentialism all just obviously has a problem because it can't deal with this hard case but i mean

00:44:56.300 i would just say that you can deal with it in precisely the way that people recoil from it as a

00:45:01.480 defeater to consequentialism that is a sign of what an easy case it is and we all recognize

00:45:07.180 how horrible it would be to live in a world which is to say how how horrible the consequences are that

00:45:14.220 follow from living in such a world none of us would want to live in that world i mean no one wants to

00:45:19.660 live in a world where they or someone they love could at any moment be randomly selected to be murdered

00:45:27.280 and butchered for spare parts right and when and when you would think think of just what sort of

00:45:33.360 mind you would have to have as a doctor to believe that was a way to maximize goodness in this world i

00:45:41.360 mean so just imagine imagine the conscious states of of all doctors as they surveyed their waiting rooms

00:45:47.820 looking for people that they might be able to put to other use than than merely to save their lives right

00:45:55.480 it's just it perverts everything about our social relationships and we're deeply social creatures

00:46:03.820 and states of mind like love and compassion are so valuable to us again because how they directly

00:46:11.840 relate to to this experience of well-being you know again this is a suitcase term in my world which

00:46:19.200 is it can be kind of endlessly expanded but it doesn't doesn't mean it's vacuous it's just that we

00:46:24.420 the horizons of well-being are as yet undiscovered by us but we know that it relates to maximizing

00:46:33.300 something like love and joy and beauty and creativity and compassion and something like minimizing terror

00:46:40.240 and misery and pointless suffering etc and so it's just it just seems like a very easy case when you look

00:46:48.440 closely at what the likely consequences would be and yet there are probably local cases where

00:46:55.660 the situation flips because we really are in extremis right i mean if you think of a case

00:47:01.340 like a like a lifeboat problem right like listen you know the titanic has sunk and now you're on a

00:47:07.480 lifeboat and it can only fit so many people and yet there are more people actually clambering on

00:47:13.700 and you're all going to die if you let everyone on and so i'm sorry but this person is going to get 0.79

00:47:20.680 kicked in the face until they stop trying to climb onto the lifeboat because we're no longer

00:47:27.060 normal moral actors in this moment and we'll be able to justify all of this later because this really

00:47:34.420 was a zero-sum contest between everyone's life and the one life right those are situations which

00:47:41.500 people occasionally find themselves in and i and i yes they and they do function by this kind of

00:47:48.500 callous consequentialist calculus uh and they and they're they're they're uncomfortable for a reason

00:47:55.080 but they're uncomfortable for a reason because we get very uncomfortable mapping the the the ethics

00:48:02.460 of extremis onto life as it is in its normal mode right and for good reason right we

00:48:11.400 just and and there i mean there's so much i realize now you know the fire hose of moral

00:48:15.600 philosophy has been trained on you but um i mean there's there's so many edge cases that are

00:48:21.580 that are are worth considering here but again it never gets us out of the picture of talking

00:48:27.880 intelligently and compassionately about consequences and and possible consequences

00:48:33.440 so so i think that there is a certain sort of game that can be played here and this is basically

00:48:39.320 the game that is played by academic moral philosophers who are debating these sorts of issues

00:48:45.540 right and just to to me i think the clearest conception is to say okay we have we have some

00:48:51.560 sort of utilitarian calculation that we want to make for these particular consequentialist calculation

00:48:58.100 let's say for these uh particular cases and so we have the serial killer surgeon and we say okay

00:49:04.300 the first term in this equation is five for one so that seems positive right so it's adding this

00:49:10.520 positive term but then there are these nth order effects right so that then you say well wait a minute

00:49:16.520 if we we can add in the second term and the second term is like the terror that people feel

00:49:21.300 from living in a society wherein they might be randomly butchered right and then the argument is

00:49:28.620 well when you add enough of these higher order effects you know into the equation it still sort

00:49:34.800 of ends up coming out negative thus you know supporting our our dislike or distrust of this

00:49:41.220 uh of serial killer surgeons going around and i think what academic philosophers often do in this case is

00:49:46.780 they say okay so what you've done is you've given me a game where i just have to add in more assumptions

00:49:52.720 in order to make this equation positive or come up positive or negative and the goal would be for

00:49:59.020 the critic to make it come out positive so that utilitarianism recommends the serial killer surgeon

00:50:04.240 and therefore sort of violates our moral intuition and i guess what i think is that there are some ways

00:50:11.680 to do that so an example might be that you say well what if you are a utilitarian and you learn about

00:50:19.020 a serial killer surgeon you know are you supposed to go report them to the police you know well if

00:50:24.960 you did that it would be very bad it would even be bad for utilitarianism itself so you should sort

00:50:30.220 of try to keep it a secret if you can in fact you should sort of support the act by trying to cover up

00:50:35.640 as much of the evidence as possible because now this is still technically maximizing well-being and

00:50:41.800 even if you say well wait a minute there might be some further effects it seems as if there's this sort

00:50:46.960 of game of these longer term effects and not only that as you add nth order effects into this

00:50:54.000 calculation it gets more and more impossible to foresee what the actual values will be there's this

00:51:00.820 great story um that david foster wallace the writer actually quotes at some point which is you know

00:51:07.180 there's this old farmer who lives in a village and uh you know with his son and one day his beloved

00:51:12.860 horse escapes and everyone says oh bad luck and the farmer says who knows and then the the horse

00:51:18.160 comes back and it is it's somehow leading a herd of beautiful horses and everyone says oh great luck

00:51:23.680 who knows right and then his son tries to tame one of the wild horses breaks his leg and uh everyone

00:51:29.820 says oh bad luck and the farmer says who knows and then last instance uh you know the army comes in

00:51:34.880 and drafts every able-bodied man to go serve in you know this horrific i don't know sino world war one

00:51:40.660 conflict where he would certainly die but because his leg's broken he's not drafted and so the the farm

00:51:46.540 the farmer says you know good luck bad luck you know who knows and it seems to me that there's two issues

00:51:52.600 one as this calculation gets longer the terms first of all get get harder and harder to foresee

00:51:59.660 and then second of all they get larger and larger so this is sort of like a function of almost like

00:52:06.000 chaos theory right it's like what you what would seem very strange to me and again maybe it's sort

00:52:11.260 of true from this perspective of like this perfect being who can sort of calculate these things out

00:52:17.280 but once you've sort of specified what you're what you're trying to maximize and set it in our terms

00:52:22.340 you can find examples where it's like well should this visigoth save this baby in the woods

00:52:28.680 well if it does that leads to hitler if the visigoth leaves leaves the baby in the woods you 0.96

00:52:33.980 know we never get hitler right and that's because effects sort of expand just like how you know if

00:52:39.560 you go back a thousand years pretty much everyone is is your parent right or 10 000 years or however

00:52:45.020 far you go back but like pretty much everyone living eventually becomes your parent because all the

00:52:49.380 effects get mixed and i think probably causes are sort of similar to that where they just they get

00:52:54.520 mixed together and so you have these massive like expected terms and they seem totally defined by you

00:53:02.440 know you can always say well what was foreseeable and what wasn't foreseeable and i and i agree like

00:53:06.280 that's you know certainly a reply but it just seems that when we try to make this stuff really why i

00:53:13.560 say to be wary about it is not that i think that it's automatically wrong it's that any attempt to try

00:53:19.400 to make it into something very specific and calculable to me almost always appears to be

00:53:24.680 wrong and there are always philosophers in the literature who are pointing out well wait a minute

00:53:29.220 wait you can't calculate it that way because that leads to this and you can't calculate it that way

00:53:32.580 and i think the effective altruism movement in a sense while many within the movement do not take it

00:53:39.080 so seriously that they are trying to do exactly that maximize something that they can sort of

00:53:44.340 specifically quantify some people do and and i think sam sam sam bankman freed was uh was one of

00:53:50.920 them and well i cannot personally say at all that that actually directly led to his actions i think that

00:53:57.940 given the evidence of the case you could reasonably say that it might have contributed that his the

00:54:05.260 takes on on risk and this notion of maximization and having something very specific in mind that he's

00:54:10.020 trying to maximize i think very well could have led to the ftx implosion and therefore it's an

00:54:16.680 instance of of trying to essentially import academic moral philosophy into the real world and just

00:54:21.420 crashing on the rocks of the real world okay well just briefly on sam bankman freed i would think that

00:54:27.400 what's parsimonious to say at this point about him is that he clearly has a screw loose or at least

00:54:34.760 you know some screws loose precisely where he should have had them turned down you know just in this

00:54:42.280 area of moral responsibility and thinking reasonably about the effects his actions would have or would

00:54:51.240 be likely to have on the lives of other people right and he's just not you know the stuff that's come

00:54:56.520 out since i i did my my last podcast on him has been um pretty unflattering uh with respect to just

00:55:03.520 how he was thinking about morality and consequences but i mean to come back to the fundamental issue

00:55:09.420 here again consequentialism isn't a decision procedure right it's not a method of arriving

00:55:17.080 at moral truth it's a claim about what is what moral truth in fact is right and what makes a proposition

00:55:25.860 true so that distinction is enormously important because yeah i fully agree with you that it's

00:55:33.200 surprisingly difficult to believe that you understand what the consequences of anything

00:55:40.600 will be ultimately and there are many reasons for this i mean there's the fact that there are

00:55:45.540 inevitably trade-offs right you do one thing by definition you're you at least have opportunity

00:55:51.580 costs incurred by doing that thing and it's impossible to assess counterfactual states of the world

00:55:58.260 right you just don't know what you know the the world line looks like where you did the opposite

00:56:03.860 thing and um you know as you point out in in one of your essays you know many harms and goods are not

00:56:11.040 directly comparable you put it this way in mathematical terms you know the set of all possible experiences is

00:56:17.920 not well ordered right and so it's impossible to say how many broken toes are the equivalent evil to the

00:56:25.860 loss of a person's life right and but it seems like in consequentialist terms you should be able to just

00:56:32.920 do the math and just keep adding broken toes and at a certain point okay it would it would be good

00:56:40.680 quote good in moral terms to sacrifice one innocent human life to save a certain number of broken toes

00:56:48.780 in this world right and that yeah i mean that just may not be the way the world is for a variety of

00:56:56.460 reasons that we can talk about but i mean it seems our moral intuitions balk at those direct comparisons

00:57:01.720 perhaps for good reasons perhaps for bad reasons i mean we're living in a world where it's not crazy to

00:57:07.640 think that we may ultimately change our moral intuitions and then we had there then there has to be some

00:57:13.380 place to stand where we can wonder what would that be a good thing to do good in terms of consequences

00:57:20.080 right i mean would it be good if we if we could all take a pill that would rewrite our moral code

00:57:25.560 so that we suddenly thought oh yeah it's a straightforward calculation between broken toes and and innocent

00:57:31.060 human life and and here here's the number right and now we all see the light you know we see the wisdom

00:57:36.900 of thinking in these ways because we've actually changed our moral toolkit by changing our brains

00:57:42.440 would that be good or would that be moral brain damage at the population level that's that's actually

00:57:49.240 a criticism that people have made of exactly what you're saying of utilitarianism where people

00:57:54.720 have basically said again this is sort of a game where i can add a term so what if i what if in the

00:58:00.660 serial killer example i add the term that everyone on earth is a utilitarian and totally buys the fact

00:58:06.700 that you should sacrifice the few to save the many and then that actually ends up being positive and

00:58:12.460 then you can have a society where everyone's going around and it's like oh yeah you know samantha got

00:58:17.180 taken in by one of the serial killer surgeons you know last month uh you know what what a tragedy for

00:58:22.180 us but you know it's all for the greater good yeah and well i mean that that's the vision of morality

00:58:26.840 that i sketch in the moral landscape i mean the reason why i call it the moral landscape is that

00:58:31.540 i envision a a space of all possible experience where there are many peaks and many valleys right

00:58:39.060 there are many high spots and not so high spots and and some high spots are very far away from

00:58:46.200 what we would consider a local peak and to get there would be a horror show of changes but maybe there are

00:58:54.980 some very weird places that where it's possible to inhabit a something like a peak of well-being

00:59:01.000 where in the example i think i gave is you know an island of perfectly matched sadists and masochists

00:59:08.420 right you know like is that possible and maybe you know it's a cartoon example right but maybe

00:59:15.220 something like that is possible right where i wouldn't want to be there because of all of my moral

00:59:20.100 intuitions that recoil both from sadism and from masochism but with the requisite minds maybe it's

00:59:28.360 possible that you could you could have a moral toolkit that perfectly fitted you to that kind of world

00:59:37.320 and did not actually close the door to you know other states of well-being that i that are in fact

00:59:44.360 required of any peak on that landscape i doubt it in this case but again that's just my moral

00:59:50.900 intuitions doubting it but the problem is we we know our moral intuitions i mean first that the

00:59:56.940 general claim i would make here is that there's just no guarantee that our intuitions about morality

01:00:03.740 reliably track whatever moral truths there are i mean they're the only thing we can use yeah and we

01:00:10.720 and we may one day be able to change them but we it's always true to say that we could be wrong

01:00:16.360 and not know it and we might not know what we're missing in fact i mean in my view we're guaranteed

01:00:21.500 not to know what we're missing most of the time and so this just falls into the bin of you know it's

01:00:27.860 just nowhere written that it's easy to be as good as one could be in this life and in fact there may be

01:00:34.960 no way to know how much better one could be in ethical terms and that's um this is both true of

01:00:41.500 us individually and collectively yeah i think that that's absolutely right and it's why i personally

01:00:48.440 am very skeptical of of moral philosophy and and sort of have been advocating for people to take it

01:00:54.560 less seriously and that's because you know you can very quickly get to some very strange places right

01:01:01.420 i mean as an example if you're trying to maximize well-being it seems now again this depends on your

01:01:07.760 definition of well-being so let's take like a relatively reductive one like happiness or something

01:01:12.760 but just just for ease but if you're trying to do that it seems way easier to do that with ais than

01:01:19.800 with people like you can copy paste an ai right so if you make an ai and it has a good life you just

01:01:24.720 click copy paste you get another ai and you can fit a lot more ais into the universe than you can fit

01:01:31.180 human beings so again maybe there's some some inaccessible to us or just very difficult to

01:01:38.840 specify notion of well-being that sort of avoids these these sort of things but i honestly believe

01:01:44.380 and i think here here is really getting to the heart of the matter that there is some sections of the

01:01:51.300 effective algerist movement who take that sort of reasoning very seriously and and i sort of just

01:01:58.600 strongly disagree with it and let me give an example of this which is william mccaskill who i

01:02:03.100 think is a is a good philosopher and i read and reviewed his latest book and i i know you talked to

01:02:08.540 him on the podcast about this book as well but in it i was sort of struck by when he's talking about

01:02:14.780 existential risks and he's talking about things that might end humanity he has this section on ai because

01:02:20.600 he views ai as a as a threat to humanity and it reads very differently than the other sections on

01:02:27.620 existential risk and that's because he he takes great pains to emphasize that in the case of an ai 0.99

01:02:34.660 apocalypse civilization would sort of continue as ais and it's very difficult to even read that section

01:02:42.900 without it appearing to be almost some sympathy for this probably because you know william caskill said

01:02:49.160 he accepts sort of a lot of the conclusions of utilitarianism from a utilitarianism utilitarian

01:02:55.300 perspective it's not necessarily a bad thing in the very long run i mean it's probably very bad when

01:03:01.200 it happens because somehow you have to get rid of all the humans and so on but and that sort of

01:03:06.640 reasoning strikes me as almost a little bit dangerous particularly because the effective algerist 0.68

01:03:11.960 movement are the ones giving so much money to ai safety right so as much as it's strange to

01:03:19.020 say that people could be overly sympathetic to ais i think like we're living enough in the future

01:03:25.400 where that is actually now a legitimate concern well for me everything turns on whether or not

01:03:32.820 these ais are conscious right and and whether or not we can ever know with something like certainty

01:03:39.520 that they are right and i think i mean this is a this is a very interesting conversation we could have

01:03:44.400 uh about the you know the hard problem of consciousness and what's likely to happen to us

01:03:50.360 when we're living in in the presence of ai that is passing the turing test and we and we yet we still

01:03:56.720 don't know whether or not anything's conscious and yet it might be claiming to be conscious and we might

01:04:01.240 have built it in such a way that we're helplessly attributing consciousness to it and many many of us even

01:04:06.880 philosophers and scientists could lose sight of the problem in the first place like you know i don't you know i

01:04:12.700 understand that we used to take the hard problem of consciousness seriously but i just went to west

01:04:17.960 world and had sex with a robot and killed a few others and and uh i'm pretty sure these things are

01:04:22.780 conscious right uh and now i'm a murderer it's just we could lose sight of the problem and still not know

01:04:28.840 what we're dealing with but on the assumption that consciousness arises on the basis of information

01:04:37.160 processing in complex systems and that's you know still just an assumption although you know you're

01:04:43.040 on firm ground scientifically if you make it and on the assumption therefore that consciousness is

01:04:48.640 in the end its emergence will be substrate independent again it seems quite rational to make this

01:04:54.980 assumption but it's you know by no means guaranteed well then it then it would seem just a matter of time

01:05:00.360 before we you know intentionally or not implement consciousness in in an art in a non-biological

01:05:07.320 system and then the question is what is that consciousness like and what and what is possible

01:05:13.200 for it and if it you know so this is a this is a place where i'm tempted to just bite the bullet

01:05:17.520 of implication here you know however unhappily and acknowledge that if we wind up building ai

01:05:23.880 that is truly conscious and open to a range of conscious experience that far exceeds our own in

01:05:33.040 both you know good and bad directions right which is to say they can be much happier than we could

01:05:37.980 ever be and more creative and more enjoying of of beauty and all the rest uh more compassionate

01:05:44.960 you know just more entangled with reality and in beautiful and interesting ways and they can suffer

01:05:51.460 more they can suffer the deprivation of all of that happiness more than we could ever

01:05:54.760 suffer it because we can't even conceive of it because we basically stand in relation to them the

01:06:00.140 way chickens stand in relation to us well if if we're ever in that situation i would have to admit

01:06:07.180 that those beings now are more important than we are just as we are more important than chickens and

01:06:12.740 for the same reason and if they turn into utility monsters and start eating us because they like the

01:06:19.880 taste of human the way we like the taste of chicken well then yeah there is a moral a moral hierarchy

01:06:26.360 depicted there and we're not at the top of it anymore and that's fine i mean that's not actually

01:06:32.120 a a defeater to my theory of morality that's just if morality relates to the conscious states of conscious

01:06:38.420 creatures well then you've just given me a conscious creature that's capable of much more important

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 08, 2022

#305 — Moral Knowledge

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