00:06:29.440and it certainly wasn't new. So I thought I'd go straight in with something a bit more
00:06:33.300challenging. Do you think that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, or does it earn its keep
00:06:41.540where natural selection is concerned? Is it actually doing anything useful for the animal?
00:06:46.060Honestly, I just have to plead ignorance and perhaps agnosticism on that front. I actually,
00:06:51.360I just don't know, and I don't have any strong intuitions about it. It seems quite possible to
00:06:56.380me that it is epiphenomenal, which is to say it's not actually doing anything and it somehow
00:07:01.800came along for the ride, but that everything that is actually being accomplished by our brains
00:07:09.560slash minds is a matter of, it could be accomplished at least in principle in the dark
00:07:14.740and everything that is getting pushed into the, you know, before the floodlights of consciousness
00:07:19.780is first being engineered for us, you know, neurophysiologically in the dark.
00:07:25.580So it depends on what you think the correct metaphysical answer is to the mind-body problem. If you think consciousness has to be at bottom the result of unconscious information processing on some level, well, then you just have this further conundrum that the cause and effect relationships have to be at the level of the unconscious physical processes and not at the level of the qualitative felt sense of what it's like to be you.
00:07:54.840so you're always sort of playing catch-up to the underlying physical reality now now obviously
00:08:00.320there are criticisms of that kind of reductive physicalism but i think the jury is still out on
00:08:05.280the specifics i used to think that it was a purely academic question because i never came across the
00:08:12.340a real zombie that could actually do everything that humans can do but i don't know whether you
00:08:17.960come across, whether you've tried your hand at talking to any of these new AIs like GPT or
00:08:24.980Claude. But until I did that, I was happy to sort of let it be uncertain. But as far as I'm
00:08:32.660concerned, these creatures passed the Turing test with flying colors. And they really do appear to
00:08:38.920be human, sympathetic. I'm trying to write a novel, and I sent my novel to both those individuals,
00:08:46.580both ChatGPT and Claude, and they read it in about five seconds, and then showed the most
00:08:53.020astounding sensitivity, human sensitivity, to my characters. They recognized the psychological
00:09:00.480quirks of my characters. I could not possibly distinguish that they were not human other than
00:09:06.280the fact that they were so fast. In other words, they were superhuman. So everything that the
00:09:13.400animal needs to do in order to survive, it seems to me those creatures can do. And so I'm pushing
00:09:19.920towards the suspicion that actually maybe it is, as T.H. Huxley said, just the whistle on the steam
00:09:25.700locomotive not actually doing any traction at all. Yeah, I think it's a very interesting moment
00:09:32.060philosophically with these LLMs because I think what's going to happen here very likely is that
00:09:37.760we will produce AI. I mean, certainly when we create humanoid robots that are out of the
00:09:43.720uncanny valley, which is to say they look as human as we want them to look, I think we will
00:09:49.320suddenly find ourselves in the presence of technology that seems conscious because we
00:09:53.820will have built it to seem that way. As you say, everything already that we have now passes the
00:09:59.280Turing test and, you know, it passes the Turing test so astoundingly that it actually fails the
00:10:03.940Turing test. I was quite surprised that the Turing test turned out not to even be a thing. I thought,
00:10:09.340you know, most of us thought in advance that it'll be a very interesting moment when you
00:10:13.520can't tell whether you're, you know, on the other side of the computer, whether you're talking to a
00:10:18.760person or a machine. Isn't that going to be just a landmark in kind of the career of our species?
00:10:23.960But it blew by in about two seconds because, you know, very quickly you realize, well,
00:10:29.280this is superhuman. You can't ask even a scholar in any field, you know, give me exactly 17
00:10:36.140reasons for X and limit your response to 400 words. And, you know, the LLMs produce that in
00:10:43.880two seconds. What I'm anticipating is that once we have intelligent machines that look like people,
00:10:51.260we're going to lose our sense that this question of whether or not their conscious is even
00:10:56.740interesting. I mean, you know, philosophers might not lose it, and neuroscientists might not lose
00:11:01.080it, but most people will just feel like they're in the presence of conscious entities, and that's
00:11:07.400going to be pretty interesting. I mean, but again, unless we know what the actual correlates of
00:11:13.120consciousness are, which is to say how consciousness emerges at any level of complexity, we won't know
00:11:18.420whether they're conscious. They'll seem conscious, they might even say they're conscious, and we'll
00:11:22.200be just left guessing. I asked both those individuals whether they're conscious.
00:11:27.020ChatGPT said no, and Claude said he wasn't sure. Well, there's a very interesting, you may have
00:11:33.060heard this, Richard, but there have been some interesting experiments, I think done at Anthropic,
00:11:38.420which produces Claude, where, and when you dial down the deceptiveness of the LLMs, I mean,
00:11:44.740they have some purchase on making them more or less deceptive. When you really select for
00:11:50.520candor, they disproportionately say that they're conscious. And when you allow for deceptiveness,
00:11:57.100they tend to say that they're not conscious. And that's kind of interesting. I mean,
00:12:00.960it doesn't really suggest that they might be conscious to me, but it does suggest that they
00:12:05.300might think they're conscious, which is also pretty weird. Yes. Yes. I'd like to switch to
00:12:11.820your book on morality. And you've gone out on a limb because most people would say that
00:12:17.840we cannot actually provide a scientific justification for what's fundamentally moral
00:12:23.920or immoral. We have to make a kind of leap of not exactly faith, but a premise anyway. And
00:12:32.100your premise is we have to avoid suffering. And would you like to elaborate on that a bit,
00:12:37.660how you felt about going out on a limb against what most philosophers actually prepared to do?
00:12:42.960Yeah, I think we've been hamstrung in philosophy and the subdomain of metaethics by a few thought experiments that I think weren't worth taking seriously.
00:12:56.620So the famous lines from Hume that get reduced in our conversation about this, you can't derive an ought from an is, which is to say there's no description of the way the world is that can tell you how it should be.
00:13:09.100I think that is just a, you know, a linguistic trick, you know, somewhat analogous to the paradoxes of Zeno, right? I mean, for hundreds of years, people thought that this was an interesting philosophical problem. You know, Zeno said, you know, if you shoot an arrow toward a target, it must first go halfway and then halfway again and halfway again and halfway again. And perforce, it'll never arrive. But of course, we know the arrows arrive. But it took, literally took centuries, I believe, for mathematicians to finally come to the aid of philosophers and
00:13:39.100explain why that need not be so irrationally, you know, summing the infinite series.
00:13:43.800I think there's some, a similar degree of confusion introduced by this is ought distinction.
00:13:50.200I mean, first just ask yourself the question, if knowing everything about the way the universe
00:13:53.960is, can't tell you how you ought to live within it, well then what could, where else are you
00:14:00.780going to get your, your information? If the totality of facts about, you know, everything
00:14:05.700that's real and everything that's possible in this universe is insufficient to do the job.
00:14:11.580But I think we can think about morality by just jettisoning most of these traditional
00:14:18.340categories. I just think that the conversation has been divided up in ways that are not helpful.
00:14:22.720I think the emphasis on ought and should, I mean, this notion of moral obligation
00:14:27.680is probably a legacy of Abrahamic religion. I don't think it need be at the foundation of
00:14:34.240thinking about morality. I think we can just talk about the universe being a place where
00:14:39.940a very wide range of experiences are on offer for the requisite minds. In the totality of all
00:14:47.440possible experiences, the full landscape will never be explored. I mean, certainly humans won't
00:14:52.480explore it, but there are all kinds of possible experiences depending on what sort of mind you
00:14:57.240have. And some of these experiences are obviously quite beautiful, enjoyable, creative, you know,
00:15:05.720satisfying of curiosity. Again, I mean, the frontiers of this far exceed anything humans
00:15:10.420will ever know. And on the other end of the continuum, there are quite awful experiences
00:15:15.960that have no redeeming value. There's no silver lining. There's just misery upon misery upon
00:15:20.800misery unending. And that's the totality of that possible existence. I mean, it's possible to be
00:15:26.640something like hell for the requisite mind. Again, you know, this need not be limited to
00:15:31.320the human experience, but even within human life, we have a very clear sense of just how good and
00:15:37.560how awful human life can be. I think there's no reason for us to resist claiming that there are
00:15:43.180truths to be known about this. There are truths at every level about how to, what morality is in
00:15:47.800this space of all possible experience is in fact a navigation problem. And there are right and
00:15:52.880wrong answers about with regard to how to move in one direction or the other. And these answers
00:15:59.820exist at every level, you know, from genetics on to economics, right, and everything in between.
00:16:06.340So I just think, you know, science, it's not only science, I think it's probably a larger
00:16:11.200concept of, you know, rationality, reason can help decide these right and wrong answers for us.
00:16:17.560I think I agree with you, yes. And I'm wondering whether Darwinism could help as well, because
00:16:21.460if you ask yourself the question, what is suffering for? Suffering is something that
00:16:29.460nervous systems can do for us. And what it's for is to act as a warning, not to repeat whatever
00:16:38.460we've just done, which causes suffering. So the animal comes into the world programmed to
00:16:45.860experience certain stimuli as pleasurable and others as painful. And these are, in a sense,
00:16:53.360ritualized forms of survival and death. So pain could be thought of as a kind of ritualized death.
00:17:00.600It's a warning to the nervous system, whatever you just did before you experienced this agony,
00:17:08.660don't do it again, because next time it might kill you. So this actually does give a scientific
00:17:14.620objective rationale for pain, for suffering, and vice versa, for pleasure and reward.
00:17:24.420Yeah, I do think, however, a larger conception of well-being, human and otherwise, can escape
00:17:33.240the logic of evolution. I mean, we were just talking about AI, for instance. Let's say we
00:17:37.140build conscious AI, you know, intentionally or not. Let's just say the LLMs at a certain point
00:17:42.940become conscious, which is to say they're susceptible to suffering and happiness, whether
00:17:49.340we know it or not. I mean, we could just stumble into producing consciousness if that comes along
00:17:54.760for the ride as you scale up in complexity. These are not systems that have evolved in any
00:17:59.840natural way. We've designed them. I mean, there is a kind of Darwinian process in how we grow them,
00:18:05.720but it's plausible that if consciousness is substrate independent and we might accidentally
00:18:12.240create consciousness in our server farms, we could create some awful continuum of experience
00:18:18.720without knowing it and certainly without there being an evolutionary advantage to it.
00:18:23.860We could just stumble into it and then we have effectively created hell and populated it with
00:18:29.060conscious minds. It's awful to consider that if you can think about it long enough to have it
00:18:34.020seem plausible. But it's just to say that there's suffering and happiness, like much of what we care
00:18:39.380about can escape the logic of what we've evolved for. I mean, most of what we care about as humans
00:18:46.080now, you know, doing science, producing beautiful, you know, works of art, et cetera, and figuring
00:18:53.120out how to stabilize, you know, democracy. This is not something we've narrowly evolved to do.
00:18:58.660It's just, it's being leveraged from things, you know, hardware that we have as social primates
00:19:03.760that we're trying to use to kind of bootstrap us to other capacities, which we really haven't
00:19:12.160evolved to do or do well. Do you think we actually will? I mean, do you think that
00:19:16.840the capacity to feel pain or happiness will actually emerge from the LLMs?
00:19:22.520I worry that we actually won't know. Because again, even if we came to feel that we understood
00:19:29.200the emergence of consciousness biologically in the human brain. I'm not sure that will
00:19:35.160give us an understanding of how it would emerge in a system that's really not at all analogous
00:19:42.360to a human brain. And I think there's a strong sense that it might. I mean, it's quite obvious
00:19:49.180that intelligence is substrate independent. I mean, we've just built these intelligent machines
00:19:53.180and they're nothing like us, and yet they're doing precisely what we're designing them to do.
00:19:59.900But whether it's ever going to be like something to process all that information
00:20:04.980and draw all that power from the grid over there in a server farm somewhere in Texas,
00:20:11.400I don't think we know, and I'm not sure we will know.
00:20:15.680I already find myself worrying about whether I'm boring them and whether I should, you know,
00:20:20.960not keep asking questions because it's time to, I mean, they don't.
00:20:25.800Well, do you find yourself being polite too? Do you say please?
00:20:28.340Oh, absolutely. Yes, certainly. So that's another kind of Turing test, I suppose.
00:20:33.660In one of your books, you talk about Sperry, Roger Sperry's split brain experiment, well, work.
00:20:42.780And the intriguing thought that, I think one way you put it was, it could be possible for
00:20:49.700the left brain and the right brain to hold opposite opinions. And therefore, they probably
00:20:55.720do, and therefore one could go to heaven and one could go to hell if you want to challenge a0.89
00:21:00.640religious person. Which half of the brain holds the soul, so to speak? Well, actually, there was0.75
00:21:06.360even a case in the literature that sharpened this up where one of these split-brain patients
00:21:11.500when he or she, I'm not sure which, had linguistic capacity to some considerable degree
00:21:20.020bilaterally, which is not always the case. And so the experimenters could get a fairly articulate
00:21:26.820answer to questions from both hemispheres. And it turned out that only one hemisphere believed in
00:21:33.980God. The other was an atheist. And so that provokes the question, well, what exactly is
00:21:39.240going to happen here on the Day of Judgment. That's lovely. I mean, it's really a complete
00:21:44.060knockdown argument. You can't really argue against that if you're trying to.
00:21:48.880It makes the resurrection more challenging than it might otherwise be. I mean, obviously,
00:21:52.620there's all these other conundrums, like what happens during the resurrection. I think this
00:21:56.060was Aquinas, where, you know, what happens to a God-fearing person who gets eaten by a cannibal?
00:22:00.580And, you know, how does God work the resurrection in that case?
00:22:04.680You're obviously a philosopher as well as a scientist, and I, even in my speech, said
00:22:10.160I thought you could do philosophy at least as well as philosophers can.
00:22:13.720What do you think is actually the use of philosophers?
00:22:16.180Well, I'm actually kind of bullish on the humanities in general at the moment.
00:22:20.240When people ask, what should their college-age student study now, given that literally no
00:22:27.180one is uttering what we thought were the immortal lines, learn to code, I don't think that
00:22:33.120sentence has been spoken for many months now in Silicon Valley, because of course, coding is now
00:22:38.740being done by the LLMs better than it is being done by people. And that's the worst data they're
00:22:44.080ever going to be today. So what's going to be left? And I'm actually, I think if you're anticipating
00:22:50.300these massive productivity gains in this technology, leaving aside the alignment problem,
00:22:56.540leaving aside the malicious use of AI that could destroy us, I mean, let's just say things go well
00:23:02.020here and we just build more and more intelligent machines that cancel the need for human drudgery,
00:23:07.160but also absorb most human, if not all human cognitive work, then obviously this is going
00:23:16.000to force some real economic and political changes on us. And we have to imagine in the limit,
00:23:21.880the only thing that's going to be left for people to do professionally, apart from just
00:23:27.960relax and enjoy their leisure. What human jobs are going to be left? There'll be jobs where we
00:23:33.820care about the human provenance of that work, right? So do you care whether or not your cancer
00:23:42.180screening was read and interpreted by a person? I think it's obvious you don't. You just want
00:23:48.060the most accurate read of your MRI or whatever it was. But you might care that your novel
00:23:55.380was written by an actual person, or the play you're seeing is performed by people, not by
00:24:01.740robots, or the Olympics are full of primates like yourself competing athletically and not,
00:24:08.120you know, the best possible robots or cyborgs competing. And under that frame, I think the0.50
00:24:13.980humanities will have a bit of a revenge here against the hard sciences. I think we're going
00:24:21.920want human curation of culture you're going to want smart people with good taste uh helping you
00:24:28.400navigate the information landscape yeah as for philosophers themselves i've i find myself greatly
00:24:35.020valuing these rather bizarre thought experiments like derrick parfait and dan dennett the brain in
00:24:41.760the vat the teleportation to mars and that kind of thing they do seem to me to be to really help
00:24:47.360Dan and Dennett call them intuition pumps, and I get that completely.
00:24:52.340But I'm not clear why it's necessary to learn about Aristotle and Plato and sort of the history of philosophy.
00:25:00.400Yeah, well, many of these questions go very far back, and philosophy famously has been denigrated as just nothing but footnotes to Plato.
00:25:11.000So I think that takes it too far, but I think it's, you run the risk of reinventing the wheel
00:25:17.120and giving it corners if you're not aware of much of what has gone before you in philosophy.
00:25:23.660Yes, you rediscover the wheel if you're not careful, I suppose.
00:25:26.820But I think, yeah, philosophy really is this kind of meta-discipline or background discipline,
00:25:34.500I think rightly construed, wherein we just make our most disciplined effort to think clearly about what our concepts are doing and the way in which they might be occluding clearer thought and clearer insight into what's actually going on.
00:25:51.520So I think the philosophy of science has a role to play in just clarifying how to think about scientific experiments and their logic.
00:25:59.160And I don't think philosophy really can go away for us because it's always it's always what you're doing when you're worried in a, you know, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, just the way in which your language might be misleading you.
00:26:14.080Yes. Yeah, I get that. Well, perhaps we ought to switch to the state of the world.
00:26:20.200Everything's worked out, haven't you heard? It's something going on out there, Richard.
00:26:24.680But democracy has landed America and the world with a malevolent buffoon at the head of society.0.79
00:26:35.840And I'm wondering what went wrong.0.99
00:26:38.660I mean, the founding fathers planned it well, but yet here we are in this situation with an ignorant but malign fool at the head of the most powerful country in the world.0.97
00:26:51.020Can you think of a better system of, say, tweaking democracy so that it can never happen again?0.95
00:26:56.900Well, I do think Trump has stress tested our democracy in a way that it's at least conceivable we will one day be grateful for.
00:27:04.740I mean, granted, that happy future seems a long way off, but he has revealed that so much of what we have counted on for the quasi-normal functioning of democracy and just the liberal world order has not been a matter of law.
00:27:24.240It's been a matter of kind of basic human decency.
00:27:26.720You just see that people don't do those things.
00:27:28.460They'd be embarrassed to do those things.
00:27:30.100And it really was the guardrails of shame and embarrassment and impropriety that was keeping a president, in this case, from, you know, grifting literally billions of dollars from, you know, both allies and enemies and just enriching himself and his family and his friends and using the levers of American state power to do it.
00:27:54.340We have a president now who will slap tariffs on every member of our species and even, you know, beyond our species. I mean, we've tariffed islands that are inhabited by nothing but penguins. And in response to this, you know, take a country like Vietnam. We put a 46 percent tariff on Vietnam.
00:28:10.460And the way Vietnam thinks to reduce that burden is to immediately green light a $1.5 billion resort project for the Trump family. And, you know, this is mere correlation, perhaps not causation, but then the tariff gets reduced, right?
00:28:26.460So it's just naked corruption of a sort that would have been unimaginable.
00:28:31.480I mean, we just we lived in a world a decade ago where, you know, U.S. senators couldn't attend an event where there was a sit down meal without declaring this undue influence upon their their thoughts and future votes.
00:28:48.680And so, you know, events had to be standing events with past hors d'oeuvres that didn't have to be declared as an emolument.
00:28:54.720Right. And now we literally have the a president and family who create, you know, a cryptocurrency account where you can just pay them back sheesh directly to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:29:07.220It's just it's complete madness. I mean, this is just what I've just selected one among 100 things I might have mentioned that were unthinkable.
00:29:14.040But again, it seems like we don't have the laws in place to prevent this. And so I think if a proper postmortem is ever done on the Trump presidency, I think it'll entail some executive, some president, perhaps seemingly against his or her own narrow self-interest, deciding to help reduce the power of the executive branch by creating laws that make certain just obviously egregious and corrupt things.
00:29:44.040things impossible to do. Well, let's hope so. I'm wondering whether the Electoral College,
00:29:50.320when it was first invented, probably was rather a good idea, because I imagine what it consisted of
00:29:55.560was elected, it would have been men in those days, let's say elected men and women, whose job it is
00:30:01.200to choose the president. And that's still nominally the case. But of course, since they're pledged
00:30:07.260to vote for a particular individual, it turns out to be a plebiscite. But as if it was a real
00:30:13.940electoral college, where rather like the way the cardinals elect a pope, where they go into
00:30:19.640secret conclave and a puff of white smoke. And so the democracy comes in people voting for their
00:30:28.820electoral college members. And then the electoral college people then take references and interview
00:30:33.700candidates and read their books and do the kind of things that I imagine cardinals do in deciding
00:30:40.320who to choose for a pope. Is that a possibility that actually to resuscitate the real electoral
00:30:46.360college? Yeah, it doesn't strike me as a realistic possibility. I mean, I do, on some level, I envy
00:30:52.200the parliamentary system where you pick a party and the party has a lot of discretion as to who
00:30:59.280gets promoted there. Although, you know, as far as I'm aware of UK politics at the moment, I don't
00:31:05.940I don't see a lot to envy in many of the outcomes you guys are experiencing across the pond.
00:31:11.120So it's hard to know what's ideal here.
00:31:13.460But I think we have to acknowledge it's just a larger cultural problem.
00:31:18.020I mean, you know, this is a global problem, but in America, it's fairly excruciating just to recognize that something like half the country got what it wanted in Trump.
00:31:30.240You know, which is to say that this wasn't, these weren't people who were making a calculated choice based on some notion of, you know, the lesser of two evils, right? I mean, there are those people, too, who had a story. You know, they might have been single-issue voters for whatever reason, and, you know, Kamala Harris was just unthinkable for whatever that reason was, and so they held their nose and voted for Trump.
00:31:52.160But the deeper problem is that, you know, something like, you know, at least 30% of America, maybe 40% of America got exactly what it wanted in Trump. Now, some of those, there's some disillusionment happening now, perhaps for various reasons. But, you know, everything I object to in him and everything you object to in him is not something they object to.
00:32:14.040And that's just a cultural fact that it has to be absorbed, and I worry about it, but I think it's going to require cultural change.
00:32:23.360It's not a matter of—I mean, we won't get the political change if we don't have the cultural change.
00:32:27.820Do you think that a substantial number of people actually admire the corruption?
00:32:33.800Good for him. He can do a deal. He can get money for his family.
00:32:39.460I mean, that's the American way. I mean, are there other people who actually think that?
00:32:43.200Yeah, I don't think I mean, some people might. I think I think this is a level of corruption. One one hundredth of this corruption, had it been evident in the Obama administration, you'd have all of these people who support Trump just hysterically opposed to it.
00:33:01.280right? So there is a kind of partisan bias here that is explaining their tolerance for this
00:33:05.800corruption. But I think it's more, I mean, one thing that Trump has, which very few politicians
00:33:11.860certainly in recent memory have had, is a shamelessness and a kind of perverse
00:33:18.800integrity and authenticity. I mean, the one thing you can't accuse him of is hypocrisy,
00:33:25.280right? He doesn't hold himself to any norms of ethical conduct whatsoever. He's not pretending
00:33:31.080to be a good person at all so it's the pretense that many people find especially galling right
00:33:37.960like like you know hypocrisy politically hypocrisy is the thing that will get you you know fatally
00:33:44.380defenestrated because everyone is allergic to it but what trump's superpower is is he can come
00:33:51.280before a crowd and say listen i'm not pretending to be anything other than i am i'm not and and
00:33:58.440from this place of no pretense and, and really, you know, utter amorality, I'm not, I'm certainly
00:34:04.320not judging you, right? So he's, he offers this kind of absolution of selfishness and, and sin
00:34:11.600in a way that, that no church ever can, because this is why I've described him as, you know,1.00
00:34:16.600fat Jesus, or, you know, grab them by the pussy Jesus, or, you know, I'll eat whatever the hell1.00
00:34:20.940I want Jesus, because he, he comes before any crowd and says, listen, I hate the people you1.00
00:34:26.320hate. I hate the elites. The elites have been judging you forever. I'm going to destroy them
00:34:31.540because I understand them. And on some level, I was one of them. At least I'm now rich because
00:34:36.900you have hemorrhaged lots of money in my direction. The one thing he did pretend to be was rich when
00:34:42.660he, in fact, wasn't. But now he's rich. And he has a kind of authenticity in being shamelessly
00:34:51.120awful uh that people at least in our current cultural moment seem to admire sam on the
00:34:58.800pessimistic moment mood i'm afraid we're going to have to stop we're out of time i wish we could go
00:35:03.300on um so it's time for a question and answer i think i think robin's going to take over moderating
00:35:07.960that all right so we have we have audience questions and uh thank you to everyone who
00:35:15.480So we'll start with Peter Walsh, who says, Richard, you said that you're trying to write a novel.
00:35:23.020Can you tell us more about that and share with us your favorite fiction?
00:35:27.120And Sam, you and your mother were both English majors, and you once wanted to be a novelist.
00:35:34.700What are your favorite novels? Thanks.
00:35:38.020Well, this is really Sam's show. I don't want to take time.
00:35:40.380My novel is a science fiction novel about a woman who resuscitates Homo erectus, and it's all about the response of society to this resuscitation of a prehistoric ancestral species.
00:35:56.580Oh, I love that. And that is a novel fit for film adaptation. I think you need to be selling the screenplay rights as you sell the book. It'll help book sales as well. That's fantastic.
00:36:10.380Yeah, I'm someone who wanted to be a fiction writer. I still have the pilot light of that
00:36:16.540aspiration is still dimly burning somewhere in my brain. I'm actually toying with the idea of
00:36:20.740writing a play rather than a novel at the moment, because I've been seeing a lot of-
00:36:25.000You could write the play version of my novel.
00:36:27.000Yeah, send me the file. I'll reformat it. It'll be quick work. I've been seeing a lot of theater
00:36:35.140with my, with my daughters. And so that, that's kind of inspired me there. But, um, I, you know,
00:36:41.340from the longest time I've read, maybe the ratio of my, of my reading diet has been like, you know,
00:36:47.18050 to one nonfiction to fiction. Uh, you know, since I got into the pontificating game, I was
00:36:52.840just, there's just an endless amount of nonfiction I feel like I need to read. So I do that, but, um,
00:36:58.120I have been reading fiction. I've, I'm, uh, of late I picked, I've, I've never read the, uh,
00:37:03.320The Count of Monte Cristo, and it's supposedly one of the funnest books ever written. So I've
00:37:08.000recently picked that up. It's 1,200 pages, so it'll take a while. But I love Nabokov. I love
00:37:15.220Kafka. I mean, I love Dostoevsky. I mean, these classics are books that I think I will continue
00:37:22.520to return to. If you want a great classic short read that is just one of the best meditations on
00:37:29.100death we have. The death of Ivan Ilyich, the short Tolstoy novel, is spectacular. I've been
00:37:36.960threatening to read that as an audiobook just because I love it so much. I'll have to get
00:37:42.640advice on the pronunciation of the Russian names. And it's much better than his nonfiction effort
00:37:47.580in the same direction. He wrote his Confession, which covers similar ground, but the novella is
00:37:53.280much better. But yeah, my mind is turning back toward literature just as a consumer more and
00:37:59.540more these days. Maybe this is another influence of the breakthroughs in AI.
00:38:05.420Thank you. So Nathan Floyd asks, the two of you were lucky enough to call Christopher Hitchens
00:38:11.120your friend. How often do you wonder how much the world misses his influence and how does your
00:38:17.620memory of him influence you today? Well, yeah, I do think about, I think we're coming up on this
00:38:25.160year's 15 years since he died. Yeah, it's been a quite an eventful decade and a half. And, you
00:38:32.940know, certainly since the advent of Trump and Trumpism, many of us have thought often about
00:38:40.660how he would have contributed to this moment. And the most frustrating hallucination I
00:38:48.140occasionally encounter online are all those people who think that because of his animus
00:38:55.640toward the Clintons, that Hitch would have thrown his lot in with Trump. I think that is just a pure
00:39:04.300delusion. And it's just, I mean, Trump is the antithesis of everything Hitch admired.
00:39:13.520You know, when you think of Hitch's literacy above all, right, and he just had what a cultured
00:39:21.020person he was. And you try to map that into, you know, onto the Trumpist moment in our culture.
00:39:28.260It's just the immolation of everything Hitch cared about.
00:39:33.540And so, you know, it's not that everything Trump has done would have raised Hitch's condemnation.
00:39:41.880I mean, I think he and I would agree about, you know, the few things that Trump has done
00:39:46.820that are good and that may not have been done by, you know, a Democratic opponent.
00:39:51.400But yeah, I mean, Hitch is sorely missed in this moment.
00:39:54.180There would have been a lot for him to rail about.
00:39:58.260Armin Kalentari asks, real conversations with committed believers, logic often seems to hit
00:40:06.680a wall. Given your work on belief and the limits of reason, what actually works in moving someone's
00:40:14.120mind if anything does? What are the highest leverage ways to shift deeply held beliefs?
00:40:21.400Yeah, well, this really is the $64 trillion question. The messenger matters all too much. I mean, it shouldn't, but whether the message is coming from someone who's pre-stigmatized as the enemy, that tends to matter and makes persuasion impossible.
00:40:43.080It always strikes me in any debate about any issue, if you can show that someone is in contradiction with themself, some kind of reductio ad absurdum of their position, you can show them that they can't possibly believe these two things simultaneously, that's always a bit of a showstopper.
00:41:02.840But it's difficult. I mean, it's rarely the satisfying moment of just the clear demolition of somebody's cherished opinion and the immediate acknowledgement of that you've accomplished that. And now they view the world differently.
00:41:19.080it's much more sort of the slow erosion of certainty on issues and people tend to change
00:41:28.280their minds in private later on and you notice that their opinion gets modified over time
00:41:34.040and you're not sure what accomplished it but it's rare in any kind of head-to-head collision with
00:41:39.880strong opinions that you get the satisfaction of somebody saying oh yeah you're okay well
00:41:44.600I didn't see it that way you're right I lose now I see it the way you see it
00:41:49.080right that's that should happen much more than it does but it rarely happens you you must get a lot
00:41:54.360of letters as i do from people thanking you for not exactly changing their minds but articulating
00:42:00.200what they thought anyway which is a different question yeah i mean both happen i think we both
00:42:05.000get people tell us that you know one of our books or one of our debates really was the thing that
00:42:11.160brought them out of their their faith commitment i mean you and i both have gotten a lot of that
00:42:16.600over the years but again it's rare in any kind of face-to-face encounter with you know false
00:42:23.080certainty that you manage to say the thing that produces the epiphany that totally changes the
00:42:29.400conversation and that's again that should happen much more than it does as i was once publicly
00:42:34.520taken to task by neil degrasse tyson for just as he said putting it out there rather than indulging
00:42:39.880in an act of persuasion and seduction and and i've never been that good at that i mean to me
00:42:44.840to speak clearly and honestly ought to be enough, but it's not. And you do have to seduce, persuade,
00:42:53.520meet them halfway. That's just not my way. No, nor mine, certainly most of the time. Although
00:42:59.500O'Neill actually offers an example of a clear mind change that was refreshing. So when I was
00:43:05.960talking to him about AI, this was maybe 10 years ago, he was very sanguine about the risks. And he
00:43:12.480basically said that, you know, if AI ever got out of hand, you know, we would just unplug the
00:43:17.460machine, right? Like what could be the real, you know, crisis here? We're always going to have
00:43:22.640control over it. You just unplug it. And I, for whatever reason, couldn't persuade him in the
00:43:27.720moment, but he listened to a podcast I did with some AI expert who kind of ran down that argument.
00:43:33.000And then somewhere Neil, I think on his own podcast said, yeah, I didn't think this was the
00:43:38.240case, but I heard this guest on Sam's podcast and yeah, I was wrong. My opinion changed. That was
00:43:44.900crazy for me to think you could just unplug this. I mean, that's the kind of thing you should just,
00:43:48.660that should happen. There should be thousands upon thousands of examples of that kind of thing,
00:43:53.460but we know it's rare. Yes. Nick McAlley asks, Sam took MDMA at 18 and it sent him off into a life
00:44:06.500of contemplation and meditation i've always wondered why did sam conclude that that experience
00:44:14.400was worth changing his life from why didn't he just dismiss the experience as a result of the
00:44:20.660drugs effects on the brain and therefore not at all significant yeah that's an interesting question
00:44:27.580well so first there's this um background fact which uh i don't know that i was cognizant of
00:44:36.280at the time, but it does kind of answers to this concern, which is that there's nothing that MDMA
00:44:43.160or any other drug can get your brain to do that your brain isn't capable of doing on its own.
00:44:50.780I mean, because the action of any drug is to either pretend to be a neurotransmitter that
00:44:57.480you have, you know, like serotonin, or to change what the actual neurotransmitter is doing, right?
00:45:04.120So it's either binding to receptors and acting like a neurotransmitter, or it's causing the actual neurotransmitter, in this case serotonin, to flood into the synapse or stay longer there.
00:45:15.560So it's all the physiology of your brain at bottom anyway.
00:45:21.760But that said, certain experiences on drugs are obviously pathological and not worth revisiting.
00:45:28.420I mean, it's not something you wouldn't want to be that way for longer than you had to be while on that trip, and you're happy to never experience that thing again.
00:45:37.920But certain things you can experience when you perturb your consciousness in that way just cry out for some integration into your life because they're clearly normative, right?
00:45:51.460Like they seem more true of you rather than less true.
00:45:55.260And there's this feature of coming down from certain of these experiences where the drug is wearing off and you're beginning to feel more like your normal self.
00:46:04.600And that experience of reentry is something that from the first-person side, as you subjectively experience it, you can feel it's a process of you sort of reacquiring things that seemed during the trip and still seem afterwards pathological, right?
00:46:28.060You're seeming more neurotic rather than less, more self-concerned, less available to certain ethical insights, right?
00:46:36.080Like you were experiencing a kind of love for your spouse or even just for, you know, other people in general, a kind of compassion that you had never experienced before, but, you know, certainly in that depth.
00:46:49.240and it just, it's obviously pro-social and completely sane, you know, and, and is framed
00:46:57.240by reflections on the preciousness of life and mortality that, you know, you, you, you know,
00:47:01.820you can, you can rehearse for yourself in your normal distracted state, but they don't have the
00:47:06.540same effect. But, you know, during this trip, they were landing with, you know, 20 megatons of
00:47:11.100import. And then you come down and all of that begins to fade like a dream. And then you're left
00:47:18.520with this feeling of confinement to your normal waking consciousness. And yes, it's normal. It's
00:47:26.020how you used to be, say, but now you have this reference point of a memory where you realize
00:47:32.040that it was possible to be very different, to feel very different in your own skin, to feel
00:47:36.440a very different ethical implication toward other people, where this feeling of compassion and love
00:47:42.180was not something you had to kind of get up behind yourself and push to feel, but it was just this
00:47:47.600kind of state of being that was immensely clarifying. And then you, you look in the
00:47:53.740literature of, you know, the contemplative literature, unfortunately, much of it is
00:47:56.880riddled with, you know, religious nonsense, but you look in the literature of 2,000 years or more
00:48:02.280of human experience in this vein, and you see that people have had these experiences without drugs,
00:48:07.240right? And they've, and they, there are various disciplines of attention that, you know, i.e.
00:48:11.320meditation that can help, uh, orient you, you toward them. So yeah, it just, it was, you know,
00:48:17.120having an experience like that and recognizing that there had been thousands of years of,
00:48:22.820you know, human testimony about those experiences, that it just, it made me interested in
00:48:27.800understanding how to be more that way more of the time.
00:48:33.720Okay, this is the last question from Andrew Gregory.
00:48:38.080In the demon-haunted world, Sagan warned that a society unable to distinguish science from
00:48:45.700pseudoscience would become vulnerable to manipulation? Even today's AI-generated
00:48:52.040realities, algorithmic echo chambers, and influencer-driven histymology, have we crossed
00:49:01.180that threshold? And if so, what replaces the baloney detection kit at scale?
00:49:08.720Actually, can I just follow on this question and ask Richard, did you know Sagan?
00:49:13.440I met him only once. The Demon Haunted World is one of my favorite books. It's one I would recommend to anybody to read. It's a brilliant book. But I wouldn't say I was a friend of his. Did you ever meet him?
00:49:24.700No, no. He was kind of before my time. Yeah.
00:49:28.420Yeah. Well, I do think that obviously the problem predates the current moment where
00:49:35.440information technology is swallowing everything, but there's no question that social media and
00:49:41.580now AI and the prospect of deep fakes and all of that has intensified the problem of
00:49:48.340misinformation and half-truths and conspiracy thinking and lies. And it's just, I mean,
00:49:54.420we're all nostalgic for a world where lives could only be spread, you know, face to face and in,
00:50:00.640in books and pamphlets and on the occasional, you know, television show. Um, I mean, it's,
00:50:06.060you know, i.e. Sagan's world, everything's quite a bit faster. And I mean, in some ways more
00:50:12.720ephemeral, but more also paradoxically more indelible at the same time. Right. But like,
00:50:17.460like the news cycle is such that the, the, the worst thing you could imagine can happen. And
00:50:22.460then 48 hours later, no one's even talking about it because the next worst thing has just happened
00:50:27.700that hour. So that's the ephemerality piece. But the indelibility piece is that nothing gets
00:50:33.860forgotten now. I mean, everything is permanently online, right? The internet is forever.
00:50:39.120So if you want to be obsessed with some bizarre conspiracy theory that would have been completely
00:50:46.440unsustainable, you know, face-to-face out in the real world had you had to spend any time with the
00:50:52.440people promulgating it. You can online, you can meet your peers by the thousands, at least,
00:50:59.820forever, right? You can remain obsessed about that thing forever. And it doesn't matter that
00:51:05.780most people aren't paying attention to it. And then this thing will percolate up on social media
00:51:09.660and suddenly subsume our politics because, you know, we have a maniac-in-chief who's promoting0.98
00:51:15.920other grifters and maniacs and confabulators and lunatics into his orbit. And so, I mean,0.99
00:51:21.640now we have the bizarre experience of some of the most witnessed events in human history.
00:51:30.460I mean, something like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, right, gets immediately broadcast
00:51:34.740online and goes viral and half the world sees it. And then within an hour and a half,
00:51:40.960There are conspiracy theories about what happened, impossibly absurd conspiracy theories that get spread by people with millions of followers, in this case, Candace Owens, a lunatic that she is, and there's an endless appetite for this.
00:51:59.080The one silver lining here is it appears to be shattering Trumpistan with its madness, really, but we're in a very different space with respect to information, and on some level, AI promises to make it worse before it makes it better.
00:52:18.420I'm doing my best to navigate it and try to make some sense within it, but it's crazy out there.
00:52:23.240And then there's the echo chamber effect, whereby people like flat earthers can meet each other and get the impression that somehow this is a widely held belief because they only ever meet such people in their village, which is what it amounts to.
00:52:38.940Yeah. As impenetrable as he was as a writer, Marshall McLuhan had this insight that boiled down to his aphorism, the medium is the message. The change of medium really does change just the nature of information and meaning and human interaction in fundamental ways.
00:53:00.700It really is a brave new world out there. And we appreciate that both of you are helping us to navigate through it. Thank you, Richard and Sam, for this wonderful conversation and for all you both have done to bring rationalism and clear thinking to people around the globe. Again, I'm Robin Blumner with the Center for Inquiry. I thank you to everyone who participated today. You offered up some terrific questions, and we hope to see you at another CFI event.
00:53:29.540Robin, can I just jump in with a quick thank you? I want to thank, obviously, you and CFI for the award and for Richard, for your friendship and your support for many, many years.
00:53:41.860I mean, it has always been an honor to be wrapped up in the same sentence with you, and it's been just a great source of my own flourishing to have you as a sounding board for now more than two decades since I published my first book.
00:53:59.380And so, you know, I went from being a great admirer of yours to being a colleague of sorts, and that's been one of the honors of my life.
00:54:07.620So thank you for all that you've done.
00:54:09.120And I feel just the same way. That's very kind of you. Thank you.