Making Sense - Sam Harris - #52 — Finding Our Way in the Cosmos

In this episode, I speak with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Deutsch about his new book, The Moral Landscape: A Critical Theory of the Foundations of Morality. We discuss his views on the nature of knowledge, and the role of morality in the creation of it, and how they relate to quantum physics and the theory of the multiverse. We also discuss the role that creativity plays in the development of knowledge and how it relates to our understanding of the world and our morality. This episode is the first part of a two-part conversation that will be released on the Making Sense Podcast. If you haven't read the first Making Sense episode, then you should do so before listening to this one. If you're not familiar with the way David thinks, many of his statements will blow by you without your realizing that something fairly revolutionary has just been said. And if you want to get more deeply into his ideas about knowledge and creativity, you should read his book, "The Beginning of Infinity," which is a critical book about what he thinks about them. The first book is out now, and it's a must-read. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. You'll get access to the full episodes of The Making Sense podcast. and much more! Subscribe to our private RSS feed, where you'll get exclusive ad-free episodes, unlimited access to all the latest episodes of Making Sense, plus more episodes, plus other perks! and more. Sam Harrisons.org Podcasts, including the latest in Making Sense and other great resources! Subscribe and subscribe to our Podcasts! You get 10% off your favorite podcatcher, plus a 20% discount when you become a subscriber only, you get 20% off the making sense podcasting membership starting next week! Learn more about your choice of a 5-piece ad-only version of the Making sense podcast! - Sam Harris - click here. - subscribe to the podcast? to become a member of The MINDING MESTERTERMISING MADE SENSE Podcast? and receive a discount of $5 or $10 or $20 off your first month, and receive $50 off the next month only get $5 off the second month of making sense?

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

00:00:12.120 you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing

00:00:16.260 the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

00:00:20.760 podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to

00:00:26.360 add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the

00:00:31.520 podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you

00:00:36.300 enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with the

00:00:48.380 physicist David Deutsch once again about the foundations of morality. And this podcast came

00:00:55.840 about in a slightly unusual way. Since we did our first podcast, David read my book, The Moral

00:01:03.220 Landscape, and he wanted to talk to me about it. And he wanted to do this privately, I think because

00:01:09.680 there were some fundamental things he disagreed with and he didn't want to break the news to me

00:01:13.280 on my own podcast. But I urged him to let me record the conversation so that we could release it if we

00:01:19.300 wanted to. Because if he was going to dismantle my cherished thesis, I actually wanted you all to hear

00:01:25.600 that. And I also wanted you to hear anything else he had to say, because he's just so interesting.

00:01:31.220 The problem, however, is that I ran into some equipment issues at the time and could only record

00:01:36.780 the raw Skype call. So the audio leaves a lot to be desired. And David's audio is actually better than

00:01:43.980 mine. So it actually sounds like I'm on his podcast. And because we weren't totally clear that we were

00:01:49.640 doing a podcast, there were parts of the conversation that needed to be cut out. And these cuts leave the

00:01:55.640 resulting exchange slightly free associative. We put in a few music cues to signal those cuts.

00:02:03.720 In any case, David is such an interesting person. And many of you are, I know, are interested in the

00:02:10.000 thesis I put forward in the moral landscape. So I decided the best thing to do is release the

00:02:14.580 recording, warts and all. I certainly hope to have David back on the podcast again, but I doubt

00:02:20.120 we'll cover this territory again, or cover it in the same way. So that is why I'm bringing you this

00:02:26.740 conversation now. One major caveat, however, is that I don't recommend you listen to this podcast

00:02:34.480 without first listening to my first conversation with David, episode 22, entitled Surviving the

00:02:41.640 Cosmos. Because we really just hit the ground running here. And if you're not familiar with David

00:02:47.760 or his way of thinking about knowledge and creativity, you really might get lost, or at least you won't

00:02:54.440 appreciate how interesting some of his seemingly prosaic comments are. David Deutsch is a physicist at

00:03:01.020 Oxford. He's best known as the founding father of quantum computation, and for his work on the

00:03:06.940 multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. His main area of focus is now something he has called

00:03:12.180 constructor theory, where he's developing a new way to connect information and knowledge to the language

00:03:19.820 of physics. And as with our last podcast, the irony is we don't discuss any of these things.

00:03:25.420 Though his views about knowledge and the implications of its being independent of any given physical

00:03:32.500 embodiment, the fact that you can have the same information in a molecule of DNA, or on a computer disk, or

00:03:39.060 chiseled into a piece of granite, this problem of understanding the substrate independence of information

00:03:46.260 and knowledge in the context of a physical world, that is occasionally working in the background.

00:03:53.600 And it's one of the things that makes David's take on more ordinary questions so interesting.

00:03:59.880 For instance, his view about something as pedestrian as why it's wrong to coerce people to do things

00:04:06.320 connects directly to his view about what it means for knowledge to accumulate in the physical universe,

00:04:12.380 and the error-correcting mechanisms that allow it to accumulate. And if you're not familiar with the

00:04:18.300 way David thinks, many of his statements will probably just blow by you without your realizing

00:04:22.760 that something fairly revolutionary has just been said. So again, please listen to that first podcast

00:04:29.420 if you haven't, and then maybe listen to it again. And you should read his book, The Beginning of

00:04:35.060 Infinity, if you want to get more deeply into his ideas. And now I bring you David Deutsch.

00:04:41.860 Knowledge is basically critical. So this is actually the connection with what I want to say about your

00:04:55.920 book, that the foundational idea of knowledge, that traditionally, the idea of knowledge has been

00:05:04.680 that we build it up. We build it up, you know, either from nothing like Descartes, or from the senses,

00:05:10.780 or from God, or what have you, or from our genes. And thinking consists of building brick upon brick,

00:05:21.320 and from our senses, of course. But Popper's view of science, which I want to extend to all thinking and

00:05:32.900 all ideas, is that our knowledge isn't like that. It consists of a great slew of not very consistent

00:05:42.600 ideas. And thinking consists of wandering about in this slew, trying to make consistent the ideas that

00:05:53.560 seem to be most worst offenders of being inconsistent with each other by modifying them. And we modify them

00:06:01.460 just by conjecture. We guess that something might cure the various inconsistencies we see. And if it does,

00:06:11.560 then we move to that. And to get to your book, I'm interested to see what you think of this take on your book.

00:06:20.560 Um, we're so coming from the same place in some respects, and so coming from opposite incompatible

00:06:28.920 places in other respects, that it's hard to even express to each other what we mean exactly. And we've

00:06:36.220 just just, I think, the reason, correct me if I'm wrong, or if I'm, if I'm, if I'm seeing this entirely the

00:06:42.840 wrong way, I think the reason you developed a theory of morality, and, and took the trouble to write this

00:06:51.320 book about it, is, is not an intellectual reason, it's or at least not primarily intellectual, that

00:06:58.200 it's not that you wanted to tweak the best existing theories, and improve them or to contradict some,

00:07:06.020 some prevalent erroneous theories, because there are a lot of true and false theories out there. And,

00:07:12.900 and usually, we don't write about them, we know, life is too short. So I think that the, the reason you

00:07:18.820 wrote this particular book, and develop this particular theory, is, as I said, it's not intellectual,

00:07:25.540 it's for a particular purpose in the, um, in the world, namely, um, to, to defend civilization, you

00:07:36.260 might say, in a grandiose term. Yeah. To defend it against, um, it, it, it's not really too much

00:07:45.500 hyperbole to say, it's an existential danger, from, or two existential dangers. One is moral relativism,

00:07:55.540 and the other is religious dogmatism. Yes, that's, that's very fair, and, and imputations of

00:08:02.500 grandiosity are, are, are also fair, because I really, I feel like what I was doing in that book

00:08:08.700 is attempting to draw a line in the sand to defend the claim that the most important questions in human

00:08:17.580 life, and that the questions that are, are by definition, the most important questions, and the

00:08:21.920 questions that, where the greatest swings in, in value are to be found, that, that answers to those

00:08:30.640 questions exist, whether or not we can ever get them in hand, and certainly better and worse answers

00:08:35.000 exist, and that it's possible to be right and wrong, or more right and more wrong about those questions,

00:08:41.900 and so, yes, it's, it's, it's very much a, I wanted to, to carve out the intellectual space

00:08:48.420 where we could unabashedly defend the intuition that moral truths exist, and that it's, that morality is

00:09:00.280 not completely different, morality and values altogether, you know, claims about right and wrong

00:09:06.300 and good and evil are not on some completely different footing from the rest of the truth

00:09:11.520 claims, and claims to fact that we, that we want to make about the universe. Okay, well, um, so I agree

00:09:19.120 that there's an existential danger, so I wasn't using the word grandiose pejoratively, I, I think there is

00:09:24.800 that danger, and those, those, whether they're the biggest dangers, I'm not entirely sure, but they are

00:09:30.740 existential dangers, which is bad enough, and, and I agree with, with what you just said about morality,

00:09:37.500 uh, there is true and false in morality, or right and wrong, they are objective, they can be discovered

00:09:43.600 by the usual methods of reason, which, um, are essentially the same as those of science, although there are

00:09:51.580 important differences, as I, as I said when we last spoke. Okay, so this was your purpose, you had an intellectual

00:09:59.780 purpose that was morally driven in developing this moral theory, and therefore you had this moral

00:10:08.180 purpose before you had the details of the moral theory, so you, you wanted in advance your theory to

00:10:17.600 have certain properties, um, as, as you just said, to create an intellectual space in which one could

00:10:24.540 assert and defend the, the, the proposition that there's objective right and wrong, and, and so

00:10:30.860 these properties that you wanted the theory to have in advance weren't just expressions of your

00:10:37.020 personality or something, they were the fact that you thought that the moral values that made you want

00:10:44.080 to write the book are true, objectively true. Well, um, forgive me, I'm starting to, I'm smiling now,

00:10:52.600 if you could see me, you'd see how much I'm smiling because I'm just amused at how tenderly you're

00:10:58.000 leading me down by the hand down the slippery slope to the dissolution of my theory. I think

00:11:03.000 theory is too big a word for what I thought I was putting forward. I think I'm, my theory, such as it

00:11:10.100 is, contains explicitly the, the assumption that there's, there are many things I can be wrong about

00:11:17.080 right now with the morality that I have in hand, right? So like, I'm not, my theory isn't based on

00:11:23.160 my current moral intuitions. It's based on some of them. It's based on the intuition of, of what I,

00:11:30.760 what I call in various places, moral realism, which is just the claim that it's possible to be wrong.

00:11:36.600 It's possible not to know what you're missing. It's possible to be cognitively closed to,

00:11:41.800 to true facts about wellbeing in this universe, about how good life could be if only you could

00:11:48.900 live it or could discover it. If only you had the right sort of mind that would give you access to

00:11:53.620 these states of consciousness. So it's, so that's, it's not so much that I think, well, my intuition

00:11:59.400 that gay marriage should be legal is so foundational that I know there's no state of the universe that

00:12:07.860 could disconfirm it. That's not, that's not where I'm standing. It's just, you know, it's the intuition

00:12:12.440 about realism and about, about the horizons. I wasn't making that sort of allegation. In fact, I think

00:12:18.620 I agree with everything you've just said about morality. You see, the thing is the ideas, the theory,

00:12:26.600 if you want to call it, don't want to call it a theory, whatever it is that you express in the book

00:12:30.340 contains that, but it also contains something else. It contains the something else that I disagree with.

00:12:36.020 There must be something else because I've, I've agreed with everything you've just said.

00:12:42.040 The thing, I suppose the basic thing I disagree with, uh, and this disagreement is probably deeper

00:12:50.440 than it sounds. Um, uh, that you, you, one of the properties you wanted to create this space

00:12:57.940 is that the, that this theory of morality or whatever you call it should be based on a secure

00:13:05.140 foundation, um, namely science. Well, and in particular, especially neuroscience. Well, actually,

00:13:13.480 well, that, that may be, I mean, I, the, the fault is certainly mine in, from the subtitle onward

00:13:20.500 and, and the subtitle, you know, the way subtitles of books get, get fashioned, you, as you probably

00:13:26.620 know, that's sometimes outside the author's control as it was in this case. But I wouldn't put it that

00:13:33.060 way. I would say that it doesn't, it's not that morality has to be founded, uh, on the secure

00:13:38.340 foundations of science. It's that the truth claims we want to make about morality are just as well

00:13:46.920 founded. However, well-founded that turns out to be as the truth claims we make in science. And that,

00:13:53.200 that really, I'm talking about this larger cognitive space in which we make truth claims. And some of it

00:14:00.620 for bureaucratic reasons or methodological reasons, we call these, these scientific claims. Some we

00:14:06.160 call historical, some we call merely factual, some sciences are not, are still struggling to be as

00:14:11.960 scientific as other sciences, but we still call them sciences. But there is just this claim, the claims

00:14:18.120 about subjectivity and in particular about wellbeing and what, what influences it. And those claims I think

00:14:27.060 are true, whether or not we can, or true or false, whether or not we can ever get the data in hand at

00:14:34.340 any moment in history. And I just want to say, I mean, the example I, I may have used this last time

00:14:39.980 with you, but the example I often use is there is a fact of the matter about what John F. Kennedy was

00:14:46.720 thinking the moment before he got shot. And we won't know what he was thinking. We want, we don't

00:14:52.780 actually know what it was like to be him. In fact, we know there's no way we could get access to the

00:14:58.260 data at this point. And yet we, there's, there's an infinite number of things we could say about

00:15:03.660 that, that we would know were wrong. I mean, I know he wasn't thinking about string theory. I know

00:15:09.500 he wasn't, you know, trying to, I know he wasn't, you know, reiterating the, the largest prime number

00:15:17.120 that we discovered a year after he died again and again in his mind. You can, you can go on like

00:15:21.880 that till the end of time, knowing what, what, what, what, what his state of consciousness excluded.

00:15:26.580 And that's, that's a fact, that's as factual a claim as we ever make in science. And so I,

00:15:31.520 what I was trying to argue is that, that morality, you know, rightly considered is a space of truth

00:15:38.280 claims that is on all fours with all the other kinds of truth claims we make differences of methodology

00:15:43.720 aside. Yeah. Well, there are two ways that, that something can be objective. Um, it, and I think

00:15:51.780 you are in favor of one of them and I'm in favor of the other. That is, um, things can be objective

00:15:58.120 in the sense that, um, their truths about them just are truths about the other thing. Like for example,

00:16:05.260 chemistry, the truths of chemistry just are truths about physics. Um, and that maybe wasn't obvious

00:16:13.080 when chemistry started, but it is obvious now that some of the truths are emergent truths, but still

00:16:19.320 in principle, every, everything, every, every law of chemistry, everything you can say about chemical

00:16:25.120 reactions and so on, uh, they are all statements about physics and chemistry then is, is objective

00:16:31.520 because physics is objective. Then there's a different way of being objective. The way in which,

00:16:38.900 um, the integers are exist objectively, they exist objectively, not because, uh, and again,

00:16:47.880 in the history of this, um, there were different theories about the integers that, that took different

00:16:53.100 positions about whether they're real and if they're real in what sense they're real. I think that they

00:17:01.040 are real in a separate sense from physics, that the truth about them are independent of the truths of

00:17:07.540 physics, not, not, not that integers are objective because they are some aspects of physical objects,

00:17:14.880 but, um, they, uh, they're objective because integers exist in some sense that is not the same as existing

00:17:22.620 physically. And, uh, although they, they, you know, they have, they have an influence, uh, in, uh, truths about

00:17:30.400 them are reflected in truths about physical objects, but they're not identified as them. If, if there's no,

00:17:38.100 nothing we could discover about the laws of physics could possibly change the truth of, um,

00:17:46.500 theorems about prime numbers. And that, that is the kind of truth. Uh, I mean, sorry, that's the kind of

00:17:55.300 independence that I think truths of morality have, um, the, um, you know, you, uh, actually, David,

00:18:05.020 can I interrupt you there and just, just explore this a little bit because, so I think I talk about

00:18:09.440 this in the book at some point. I follow the philosopher John Searle here. I don't follow him

00:18:14.300 in that many things, but he made a distinction between the ontological and the epistemological

00:18:20.880 sense in which we can use this word objective. And I think that that's a useful one that at least I've

00:18:27.880 been pressing to service a fair amount. One. So if something's ontologically objective, it exists

00:18:34.960 quote, you know, in the real world, whether or not anyone knows about it, it's independent of human

00:18:39.360 minds. It is the kinds of facts you just described with, you know, chemistry and physics. And we can

00:18:45.880 imagine a universe without any conscious creatures and those facts would still be the case, even though

00:18:53.240 there's no one around to know them. And so that's ontological objectivity. And then there's epistemological

00:18:59.640 objectivity, which is to say that there's the spirit in which we make various claims about facts of all

00:19:07.180 kinds, which is to say that, so to be objective in the epistemological sense, you're not being misled by

00:19:13.480 your own confirmation bias or wishful thinking, or you're making honest claims about data and the

00:19:22.100 consequences of logical arguments and all the rest. And what most people worry about with respect to

00:19:29.800 objectivity versus subjectivity, I guess I should talk about the subjective side of those two things.

00:19:35.060 So something can be ontologically subjective, which is to say it doesn't exist independent of human

00:19:41.860 minds or conscious minds. It is a fact that is only a fact given the existence of minds. So when I'm

00:19:49.300 talking about what JFK experienced the moment he got shot or prior to that moment, I'm making a claim

00:19:56.760 about his subjectivity, but I can make that claim in the sense of it being epistemologically objective,

00:20:04.380 which is to say it's not subjective epistemologically. I'm not being merely misled by my bias and

00:20:11.140 my dogmatic commitments. I can objectively say about, that is epistemologically about JFK's

00:20:20.320 subjectivity, that it was not characterized by him meditating on the truth of string theory

00:20:28.660 at that moment. And so I'm more worried that the ontological difference between objective and

00:20:36.120 subjective doesn't really interest me. It's useful for certain conversations and I think not useful

00:20:41.920 for others. And I think in the case of morality, what we're talking about is how experience arises in

00:20:51.400 this universe and what its character can be and the extremes of happiness and suffering that conscious

00:21:00.340 minds are susceptible to and what are the material and social and every other kind of requirements to

00:21:10.740 influence those experiences. And so part of that conversation takes us into the classically objective

00:21:18.620 world of, in our case, talking about neurotransmitters and neurons and economic systems and, quote,

00:21:27.380 objective reality at every scale that in any given instance may not actually require a human mind to be

00:21:36.160 talked about. But the cash value of all that, if you're talking about morality from my point of view,

00:21:41.020 is conscious states of conscious creatures and whether they're being made more or less happy

00:21:49.060 in as capacious a definition of happiness or well-being as possible. And as you know, that's a

00:21:54.900 kind of a suitcase word I use to incorporate the range of positive experience beyond which we,

00:22:01.980 the horizon beyond which we can't currently imagine, and the opposite being the worst possible misery for

00:22:07.800 everyone. So the status of integers, whether they occupy some kind of platonic zone of existence that

00:22:17.340 is not, in fact, linked to material reality in any way, but we still have to talk about as being real

00:22:23.880 whether or not anyone has discovered it. I actually don't, I don't have strong intuitions about that at

00:22:30.400 all. I mean, that seems like we, I feel like we touched that in our last conversation. And I think you could

00:22:36.260 probably argue that one way or the other, but to bring it back to what you were just saying, I guess

00:22:42.340 there's the physical reality, which is often called objective ontologically of chemistry and physics.

00:22:49.760 There are things like integers, which are not, as you just said, dependent on what we know about atoms.

00:22:56.800 But then there are the experiences of conscious systems, whether or not we can ever understand what

00:23:04.160 those experiences are, they have a certain character. And that character depends upon the, whatever

00:23:10.380 material requisites exist for those conscious systems, but that hasn't been worked out. And it's also,

00:23:18.180 it may, and even if you work that out perfectly, it's still, it's the subjective side of that coin

00:23:26.860 that is an interest. So, so yes. Um, uh, it's funny just at the end, you, you, you, you said what I was

00:23:37.880 about to say. It took me a while. So I know that you use the term science, for example, to, to more

00:23:45.740 broadly than some people. And, and, and I think that's quite right. So do I. Uh, and so you and I both

00:23:52.880 use it to encroach on things that some people who think they're purists, uh, would like to exclude

00:24:00.720 from science. Um, but to expand science to, you know, so therefore part of philosophy, you can call

00:24:08.560 part of science and the, the criteria, Popper's criterion of demarcation is not intended to be

00:24:14.600 either, uh, sharp, uh, or, um, uh, pejorative, you know, or criterion of meaning or worthwhileness

00:24:24.160 or anything like that. It's just a matter of convenience, a matter of convenient classification

00:24:29.700 of subject matter. If you want to extend the term science to cover certain things that are

00:24:36.080 traditionally considered, um, uh, philosophy, like, like the interpretation of quantum theory,

00:24:42.480 for example, which I think is definitely part of science. And, uh, but then if you want to sort of

00:24:49.260 make the connection between human wellbeing and neuroscience, then you, you know, you're, you're

00:24:57.900 trying to encroach on neurophilosophy as it were. And neurophilosophy is epistemology. It's

00:25:06.320 and the thing, but once you've extended it to neurophilosophy and into epistemology, you run into

00:25:13.500 a deep fact about the physical world, which is that epistemology is substrate independent. It is,

00:25:24.240 it, it, once you have, once knowledge or, or, uh, feelings or consciousness or any kind of information

00:25:32.840 or computation is instantiated in a universal device, then the laws it obeys are completely

00:25:41.200 independent of the physics and of the neurology and, and every kind of physical attribute of the

00:25:51.120 device falls away. And you can talk about the properties of those things as abstract things

00:25:57.900 or not at perhaps abstract is the wrong word because they're perfectly objective.

00:26:02.260 It's just that they're not atoms, right? They're not neurons.

00:26:07.100 I would just say that I think at this point, I'll go with you there. I think, I think that's probably

00:26:11.600 true, but what's your, what you seem to be smuggling in there in the, in the leap from atoms is a kind of

00:26:20.900 kind of information based functionalism where we just, we're assuming for the purposes of this

00:26:27.340 conversation that we know consciousness to be an emergent property of information processing.

00:26:34.320 And it's not some other constituent of physical reality that isn't based on bits. But if we,

00:26:43.100 if we assume that it is, if it's, if it is, if it is just something that computers,

00:26:47.560 non-biological computers can, can one day have, yeah, well then I'm with you.

00:26:51.980 This is something that, that is generally true of morality, that, that morality has reach.

00:27:03.120 If you don't steal a book from a library, when you, you realize that you easily could do so without

00:27:12.060 getting caught. This doesn't just affect you and the library. This, this, because this comes from

00:27:20.840 a universal machine, which is you. This, this machine has universal theories or theories which

00:27:30.540 try to be universal theories or are universal in some domain or other. And when you commit the crime,

00:27:37.760 for instance, you're changing the facts, you're changing something that you can't change back.

00:27:44.440 Isn't that change occurring in you, assuming that there's no one else who will ever discover

00:27:49.720 your act? I mean, where else would the change occur but in you?

00:27:54.040 It's, well, for example, suppose you're telling your children about morality. Do you say,

00:28:03.120 okay, well, when you're in that library situation, it's okay to steal the book because no one will ever

00:28:07.180 find out. Right. Or do you say, no, you shouldn't even in that situation? If the, if the first,

00:28:14.780 then it's affecting your child as well. Yeah. And if the second, then you are lying to a child.

00:28:20.940 Right. Which itself has vast implications. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm totally with you there. I just,

00:28:26.320 let's linger on this one point that, again, it's, I understand it's disconcertingly far afield,

00:28:30.480 but I just think it's interesting. So if you could apply a painless local anesthetic to the child

00:28:36.760 for the purposes of, of receiving a vaccine, that would be a better thing to do. And it's being

00:28:43.260 better is the measure of it's, or, or, or the claim that it's better is synonymous with the claim

00:28:52.620 that it's good to reduce needless suffering. And that the, and the suffering is, is both

00:28:59.360 needless and, and, and in fact, probably harmful for the child to whatever degree.

00:29:04.660 Well, yes, I I'd say that my first, the first line of my critique would be that it violates the

00:29:10.780 human rights of the child, but, but okay, there are, there are all these other things which are

00:29:14.900 related. I think that the way we interpret and value very powerful stimuli is remarkably susceptible

00:29:26.600 to the conceptual frame around which that experience is, is, is held and the conceptual,

00:29:35.020 conceptual frame within which it is held. So, which is to say your thoughts about your experience and

00:29:39.660 your thoughts about reality are in many cases, constitutive of, of the, the sum total of the

00:29:46.580 experience. And there are many things, but this does connect back to, I agree with you about, about

00:29:52.440 human rights and consent to a large degree. I think, I think we want, certainly when you're talking about

00:29:56.860 adults who can consent, you want them to be able to consent to various experiences, but I can still

00:30:04.660 imagine experiences that are unpleasant that it turns out are very good for a person and you have

00:30:13.140 done them a great favor if you subject them to these experiences. And you may, in fact, I mean,

00:30:21.920 this is just kind of a paternalistic claim of a possibility. You may, in fact, be doing someone

00:30:28.360 a favor to subject them to these experiences without their explicit consent. If in fact,

00:30:34.720 the benefits are so great. Now, I don't, I don't know what those experiences are, but let's just say

00:30:39.320 it's true that, you know, a culture finds that there's a certain ordeal that you can put teenagers

00:30:44.760 through and many of the teenagers don't want to do it, but it is just so good for you as a human being.

00:30:51.620 That strikes me as possible. I just don't have an example, but I do see, I see people who do consent

00:30:57.380 to do things which are really incredibly difficult, you know, like people become Navy SEALs. You know,

00:31:06.160 I've met some of these guys and, you know, they've got, they, in many cases, literally went through hell

00:31:12.820 to equip themselves with the skills they've got. And part of the training is a kind of culling of all

00:31:21.480 the people who are not fit to go through the training in the first place. And so it is a

00:31:27.180 selection procedure, but these guys go through an intense ordeal and come out in many ways enviably

00:31:34.420 strong psychologically and physically as a result. And I can see that there are extreme experiences that

00:31:43.640 we, we might not want to rule out just in principle as being bad for us.

00:31:48.960 As I, as I said that they, if it's a matter of knowledge, if we know this, then, um, we have an

00:31:58.520 explanation. If we have an explanation, we can give it to the people. Uh, if, if we have a machine that

00:32:05.600 can detect whether somebody would benefit from Navy SEAL training and it can just detect this by putting it on

00:32:12.060 their head and pressing a button, then you would probably find that a lot of people who aren't Navy SEALs

00:32:17.500 would benefit from it. And if it's true, if the theory on which this machine is based has a good

00:32:24.300 explanation, then you should be able to persuade those people to take the training or they might say,

00:32:31.100 yeah, well,

00:32:31.720 but what it was. So what if you can't, or what if the benefits you're conferring on someone is out of, is out

00:32:38.120 of reach to them. So let's say, let's say you have people with severe autism who really can't consent

00:32:43.320 to much of anything and you can't really explain the benefits you're about to give them, but the

00:32:47.980 benefits you're about to give them is a cure for autism. Yes. Well, this reminds me of a, you know,

00:32:53.420 a cure for lesbianism or something. I mean, there are people who think that raping somebody will do 0.96

00:33:00.460 them good under various circumstances, but you can't base either a legal system or a moral system

00:33:08.440 on saying that if one thinks that that's true, one should do it. Well, no, but clearly in that case,

00:33:14.380 it's certainly sounds like on its face to be a, a delusional and unethical claim. Yes. We're

00:33:23.100 considering all sorts of, all sorts of implausible things here. What I hear you doing is using the

00:33:29.920 principle of consent and human rights to trump everything else that might- It's more epistemology

00:33:37.960 because I don't think the human rights are fundamental either. They are, they are just a

00:33:42.260 way of implementing, um, institutions that, uh, promote the growth of knowledge. And the reason

00:33:49.980 why knowledge trumps everything else here is fallibilism. Uh, in all these cases where we

00:33:56.540 have a theory that something is better, uh, we're, we're implementing a moral theory and we might be

00:34:03.420 mistaken about that. And the, uh, it must be a fundamental fact of morality of an objective truth

00:34:13.120 morality that it's immoral to close off the paths to correction of a theory if it turns out to be

00:34:21.380 false. Oh yeah. I'm totally, I'm totally with you there. But so, so, but that seems to be asserting

00:34:26.920 my, you know, underlying claim, which is human flourishing conceived as broadly as you want.

00:34:34.180 And I mean, it's a definition that is continually open in the manner you just described for refinement

00:34:39.800 and, and, and, you know, fallibilism. That is the point. And the, you know, we want to move in the

00:34:46.380 direction of better and better worlds with better and better experiences and who knows how far that

00:34:53.200 can go, but we know it's possible to move in the wrong direction. And we never want to, we never want

00:34:59.000 to tie our hands and make it impossible to correct course. Yes. So if once you have an institution that

00:35:08.520 allows that, this is, this is why consent isn't just a, you know, a nice thing to have, it's, it's,

00:35:15.440 it's a fundamental feature of the way we handle ideas. Um, if you have a system that allows people

00:35:22.960 to enforce an idea on another person who disagrees with the idea, then the, the means of correcting

00:35:30.600 errors are, are closed off. Uh, you know, you, you imagined people who, who had a disability or

00:35:37.420 something and couldn't, but, but could be cured of that disability, but it couldn't be explained to

00:35:41.280 them and so on. Well, the thing is either those people are in a constant state of suffering in,

00:35:47.780 in which case applying the thing to them won't change that. Or there is a thing that they prefer

00:35:54.140 to some other thing. And then there will be a path towards the better state that involves just

00:36:01.400 doing things that they prefer. Like if it involves an injection, then it might involve, um, either

00:36:08.620 an anesthetic or getting into a certain mood in which an injection, uh, doesn't matter.

00:36:14.960 Let me give you an example. Again, I, I want to get back to these core issues, but all of this is just,

00:36:19.720 I find too interesting. I think this is an example that I mentioned somewhere in the moral landscape,

00:36:24.980 but I'm not sure the Nobel laureate in economics, Danny Kahneman did some research. I think he was

00:36:31.760 just associated with this research. I don't think he was the main author on this paper, but they did

00:36:35.800 some fascinating research on people receiving colonoscopies. And this wasn't at a point where

00:36:43.220 there was no, like there was no twilight anesthesia associated with colonoscopy. So people really had to

00:36:49.100 suffer the full ordeal and they discovered they were, they were trying to figure out what accounted

00:36:56.700 for the subjective measures of, of suffering associated with this procedure. And also what

00:37:04.760 would positively influence the compliance of patients to come back and get another one on schedule

00:37:11.680 five years later or 10 years later or whatever it was. So they found that the, this confirmed,

00:37:18.480 I don't know if this was the first instance, but that, but there's something in psychology called the

00:37:22.840 peak end rule, which is your, your judgment about the character of an experience is largely determined

00:37:31.040 by the peak intensity of the experience, whether that was good or bad and what the character of the

00:37:37.280 experience was at the end of the episode. So those are the two, the real levers you can, you can

00:37:43.960 pull to, to influence whether someone thought they had a good time or a bad time.

00:37:48.040 And to test this, they, they gave, you know, the control group, they gave these ordinary

00:37:53.360 colonoscopies and, you know, took the appliance out at the first moment that where it was,

00:38:00.400 where the procedure was over. But in the experimental condition, they did everything the same, except

00:38:06.700 they left the apparatus in quite unnecessarily for some minutes at the end, providing a, a low intensity,

00:38:17.880 a comparatively low intensity, but, but decidedly negative. And again, unnecessary stimulus to the,

00:38:24.880 to the subjects. And the result was that their impression of how much they had suffered was

00:38:32.440 significantly reduced and their willingness to come back and get a potentially life-saving

00:38:38.600 colonoscopy in the future was increased. So the greater percentage of them showed up in five years

00:38:44.280 for the next colonoscopy. And so this was a, you know, by, by any real measure, this was a, a good

00:38:50.960 thing to have done to these people, except what in fact it was, if you just take the, the window of

00:38:58.180 time around the procedure, it was prolonging an unpleasant experience without any medical necessity.

00:39:05.340 Right. And so that's, so I just want you to, there's got to be a way of telling them that

00:39:11.800 you're doing this and it's still working. Presumably. But what if, what if in fact is true

00:39:17.160 that the placebo effect is ruined? If you, if you tell someone that, that, that might be what's

00:39:25.400 happening to them or that you've done, you've done, you've done this thing. It's not medically

00:39:29.660 necessary, but we're going to leave this tube in for a few minutes because you're going to feel

00:39:32.520 better about it afterwards. What if that actually cancels the effect? Again, the universe hasn't

00:39:39.280 got it in for us. It doesn't like us at all. It doesn't care about us, but it hasn't got it in for

00:39:45.040 us. If what you just said is the case, then you could, for example, there'll be a way of getting

00:39:52.540 rounded. For example, you could say to them, you could say to the patient, look, there is a way of

00:39:59.680 reducing the amount of perceived suffering of this procedure, but it involves a placebo.

00:40:07.220 But it won't work if we tell you what the placebo is. So, you know, do you give us permission to use

00:40:14.980 this placebo? And of course the administration will say yes. And if that doesn't work, there'll be some

00:40:21.280 other way. But, but is that really consent? Because what if we just, we'll run the alternate

00:40:27.620 experiment. What if we say, we pose it like that to people and then, you know, 99% say, sure, you know,

00:40:34.400 sign me up. But we, we have a, another condition where we just, now we're just doing research on

00:40:40.020 compliance and we say, we tell them exactly what the placebo is in this case. We're going to leave the

00:40:44.800 tube in you for five minutes, not doing anything. And you're, you're going to, for that, for those

00:40:50.060 full five minutes, those will be five minutes where you would have been saying, when's this going to be

00:40:54.760 over already? And you could have been off the table and driving home, but you know, now you're still on

00:40:59.500 the table with this tube in you, but that's the placebo. Let's say the people who sign up for that

00:41:04.000 drops down to 17%. So now we know that there's all these people in the first condition who are only

00:41:09.500 consenting because you have masked what the placebo is. And so in fact, they're not really

00:41:15.980 consenting to the thing you're doing. I think that's still consent rather like, you know, if you,

00:41:22.680 if you, um, you don't have to, you don't have to be a doctor and, and have no exactly what the heart

00:41:32.240 surgeon is going to do to your heart in order to, to, um, um, consent, validly consent to heart

00:41:40.120 surgery. And it's the, the, the same with the placebo. You know, if you're told that it won't

00:41:46.460 work if you know what the placebo is, but there will be one, then you're consenting. And the P the

00:41:53.560 1% who still say no, um, those people are just making, supposing which true, those people are

00:42:04.040 simply making a mistake, the same kind of mistake as you would be making if this whole theory wasn't

00:42:08.460 true. You know, we, we, you can't, you can't, uh, um, bias the rules under which people interact

00:42:17.800 towards a particular theory that they disagree about. But there are people who have ideas about

00:42:26.380 reality and ideas about how we should all live within it, which are so perverse and incompatible

00:42:35.760 with everything we could reasonably want to do in this world that we, we do have to, we have to

00:42:43.540 wall off their aspirations from the rest of what's going on. I mean, whether, whether that's locking

00:42:47.840 them in prison because they just are so badly behaved or just exiling them in some way from

00:42:54.420 the conversation, you know, so the, again, the people I use are like, you know, the Taliban or ISIS,

00:42:59.680 you know, they don't, they don't get to vote on our public policy and for good reason, because

00:43:04.940 their votes would be crazy. Um, yes. Well, we, again, we, we have institutions. We try to, uh,

00:43:11.920 tune the institutions to have the property that, um, uh, the political institution should have the

00:43:18.840 property that disputes between people are resolved without violence. Uh, and the, the moral institutions

00:43:26.500 include the idea that participating and obeying such institutions is morally right. Uh, and also in,

00:43:35.420 in, in interpersonal relationships that don't involve the law, uh, we still want, we want to be,

00:43:41.440 better than that. We want, we want, uh, interpersonal relationship, not only to resolve disputes without

00:43:47.800 violence, but we want them to resolve disputes without any kind of coercion. An institution that

00:43:55.120 institutionalizes coercion about something is ipso facto irrational. Now I'm not saying that I know of

00:44:03.740 institutions that achieve this perfectly. I am saying that this is a criterion any more than I do in the

00:44:08.500 political case. I'm saying that that's the criterion by which institutions should be judged by, by how

00:44:15.260 well they are, how good they are at resolving disputes between people.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 16, 2016

#52 — Finding Our Way in the Cosmos

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