#62 — What is True？
Episode Stats
Summary
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto, who has become quite famous online recently for standing in opposition to changes to the Human Rights Code in Ontario, Canada that have direct relevance to his work as a professor. In this episode, we talk about his views on religion and science, the connection between religious truth and scientific truth, and the importance of mythology, and why he believes that the Bible is a creation of God. We also talk about why he doesn t believe in the existence of God, and what it means to be a Christian and a skeptic at the same time, and whether or not this is a good or bad thing, in the context of his other interviews with people like Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and many other people who have interviewed him, such as David Gergen and Dave Gadsad, who have also been on many different podcasts, and who has been a frequent guest on many other podcasts, including The FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times, as well as The Huffington Post, Salon, and The Atlantic. We talk about all of this and much more. This is an experiment in conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming one of our listeners. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore you'll benefit entirely from the support made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. Thanks for the support! Sam Harris Make Sense - The Making Sense Podcast by Sam Harris and the team at Making Sense. Music: "Good Morning America" by The Good Morning America (featuring John Singleton and The Good Mythical Podcast by The Free Republic Thank you for listening to the podcast? Please consider becoming one one of my sponsors, and remember to leave us a rating and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts and reviewing the podcast and reviewing us on iTunes! (Thank you! ) You can also become a Friend of Making Sense by clicking here: and Subscribe to the Podcast on Podchaser and Good Mythology and Good Omens by clicking on the Podcasts on Podcoin. . Good Luck, Sam Harris: Good Morning, Good Day, Good Luck! and Good Life, Good Blessings, by Subscribe to The Good News, Good Thoughts, Good Fortune, and Good Fortune by Good Life Good Relationships
Transcript
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Well, today I am speaking with a guest who many of you may not have heard of.
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He is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto by the name of Jordan Peterson,
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who has become quite famous online recently for standing in opposition to changes to the
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Human Rights Code in Ontario, Canada, that have really direct relevance to him as a professor.
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And he's been on many different podcasts, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Gadsad, I think.
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So, you know, many people who you may also listen to have interviewed him.
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And he is actually, as I say at the beginning of this interview, the most requested guest
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I can't tell you how many people have emailed me or tweeted at me demanding that I have Jordan
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And it's really in anticipation of us not talking about free speech, but about his beliefs about
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religion and its importance, the connection between religious truth and scientific truth,
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All of this is stuff that has come out in his other interviews, which many atheists and
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secularists have found both perplexing and inspiring.
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I've seen many atheists say that this, you know, Jordan is giving a, the first construal
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of religion that I find hard to grapple with, that is interesting, that seems morally important
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So many, many of you have wanted to get the two of us together so that we could presumably
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So I did invite Jordan on the podcast and you are about to hear that conversation.
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And I am, as I say at the end, going to rely on all of you to figure out what happened.
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Because from my point of view, we got bogged down on a very narrow point of more than just
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We got bogged down on what it means to say that something is true or not.
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And to my eye, we didn't take that analysis very far because we immediately hit rather
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significant impediment and difference of opinion about what is entailed there.
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And I just couldn't get Jordan to agree on some facts that seem so basic to me that I was
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uncomfortable moving forward on other topics until we ironed that out.
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And it took more than two hours to get to a point where I thought, well, this is a good
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We will see whether, based on the public reception to this, whether it is useful to move on to
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talk about morality and myth and religion and all the rest.
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I wanted to be my best self for the rest of that conversation.
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And I just, I was running out of energy and patience there.
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But you now have two hours of me and Jordan butting heads on a variety of topics related
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to scientific epistemology, for lack of a better word.
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Please judge for yourselves how we did and what was going on there.
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It's not absolutely clear to me what we disagree about.
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But you'll hear me attempt to push really as hard as I could to get some answers there.
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So I don't know where this is best done, perhaps on Reddit.
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But somebody bring my attention to what gets said here, if anything useful gets said, in
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Please enjoy my conversation with Jordan Peterson.
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Well, listen, you have the distinction of being, I think, without question, the person
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who my listeners most requested that I talk to.
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People really want to hear what you have to say.
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Yeah, well, I think they want to hear what we both have to say.
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So and hopefully we can we can manage that in a in a way that works out real well.
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Actually, I'm very hopeful we'll have an interesting conversation here.
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I think, you know, you seem to suddenly be everywhere on the Internet and you've been
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And I think we should talk briefly about the reasons why you've suddenly become so visible.
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But I don't think we should spend a lot of time on them, because I think that's territory
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And I think that's not what people are most interested in having us talk about.
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But to just get people up to speed with what's been happening with you and why you've been
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Let's talk briefly about the free speech issues, the gender pronoun issues, what's happening
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in Canada around this Bill C-16 and the and the gender provision in the Ontario Human Rights
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And I again, I think we should spend probably no more than 10 minutes or so there.
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And then we'll move on to areas where you and I may not fully agree.
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Canada moved at the federal level to institute some legislation that on the surface of it seems
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more or less in keeping with the extension of human rights protection to different groups
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that's been occurring, say, over the last 30 to 50 years.
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This time they extended protection to gender identity and gender expression.
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The first problem with that, although by no means the worst problem, is that gender expression
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And as far as I can tell from reading the Ontario Human Rights Commission website policies, which
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the federal government announced that the provisions of Bill C-16 would be interpreted
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within, you can now provisionally be prosecuted under the hate crime legislation federally for
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And that's the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies describe gender expression as the
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manner in which people present themselves through such, well, doing everyday activities like
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shopping through their choice of clothes and dress.
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And the idea that that requires protection of that magnitude.
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Well, I think it's, I think it's, if you keep extending rights, all you do is weaken them.
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You know, rights are, one person's rights are another person's responsibilities.
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The worst of it is that the code, the Ontario provisions, which are like lurking behind the
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federal law and are already law in Ontario, require the use of these so-called preferred
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And I have a variety of objections to that, the most fundamental of which is, I believe that the
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manufactured pronouns, the Z and the Xur and the 50 sort of variants of those are...
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Just for a moment, describe what you're referring to there, because I think even among
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my audience, this is an arcane topic, what are these manufactured pronouns?
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Well, there, it's dogma, I would say, among the radical left that gender is a social construct
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and that there are multiple variants of gender, gender identity.
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And some of those don't fit neatly into male-female classifications.
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The legislation says that people can inhabit any position on that spectrum or not be on
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the spectrum at all between male and female, which, of course, I find that particular claim
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Anyways, the theory is that people who are non-binary, which is the terminology, are entitled
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to be referred to by pronouns other than he or she, which include they, which would, I suppose,
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be the most moderate compromise, and then a host of other pronouns that have appeared
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basically out of the void over the last 10 years, including words like Z and Xur and
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Her, which would be H-I-R, and Zem, and there's a, there's a, truly, there's like 70 different
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sets of them, and there's no agreement whatsoever on which ones should be used, and none of them
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have entered popular parlance because they are bad solutions to the problem, and the legislation
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nonetheless necessitates their use, and this is the first time that Canadian government has moved to
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make a particular kind of speech content mandatory. You know, there are certain limitations on speech,
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although not very many of them, but this is the first time out of the commercial realm
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that the actual contents of speech have been made mandatory, and my particular objection to this is
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that I believe, and I think I have good evidence for believing that these made-up pronouns,
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these manufactured pronouns, are part of the lexicon of the radical postmodern slash neo-Marxist
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left, and it's part of their general agenda to occupy the linguistic territory that we use for
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common parlance, and I don't like their philosophy. In fact, I regard it as reprehensible, to say the least,
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and because of that I'm not willing to cede linguistic territory to them, certainly not by
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being forced to use ideologically saturated, an ideologically saturated lexicon, and so I said I
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wouldn't do it. I made a video, three videos actually, complaining about, you know, let's say
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criticizing Bill C-16 in the background legislation, which also, by the way, makes employers responsible
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for any word that their employees utter that causes anyone any offense, intended or unintended,
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whether or not the employer knows that that utterance occurred, which seems to me a little
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bit on the draconian side, but I think is in keeping with the same philosophy, which is by no means
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pro-business, and there are other elements of what's going on in the background that are equally
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reprehensible. Ontario has set up social justice tribunals. That's their technical name, which gives
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you some insight into their purpose and into their staffing. One of those is the Ontario Human Rights
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Commission, and they basically decided that they have the right to suspend normal legal and judicial
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procedure, and that they can more or less ascribe to themselves whatever rights they, whatever powers they
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choose, and that's written in their policy statements, and so I'm not very happy about any of that, and so
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also at the same time, the University of Toronto made it mandatory for their human resources employees to undergo
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unconscious bias training against racism, which is also something, again, that I don't believe the science
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evidence for documenting unconscious bias is anywhere near advanced to the point where it should be used as
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a diagnostic indicator of the potential prejudice of entire classes of people, and I don't think
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there's any question that the tool is too weak to do that, certainly by the standards of appropriate
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psychometric tests, and there's certainly no evidence that these training programs that are popping up
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anywhere do any good with regards to prejudice, and a fair bit that they actually make it worse.
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So, anyways, I made two videos and posted them on my YouTube channel. Mostly, I did it fairly late at
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night, and I was just trying to think this stuff through, you know, to get it straight in my head and to
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lay out the argument, and well, the response to them was absolutely insane, really.
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There was 180 separate newspapers, articles written, and two protests at the University of Toronto, and I
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received two warning letters from the administration, and a letter of censure from a number of my fellow
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academics and postdocs and graduate students at the University of Toronto, and it was news, literally, well,
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yesterday, the Toronto Star published, like, a 3,000-word biography of me, and Toronto Life, which is, I
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suppose, our equivalent to New Yorker, although not in the same league, is going to publish a 5,000-word
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bio on me, and well, and then I've talked to Joe Rogan and a whole bunch of other people for
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podcasts. It's been crazy, but the reason for that is because I made something that was bubbling
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underneath the surface of our culture, and was certainly bubbling under the surface of yours at the last
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election, I made it concrete, and put forth my objections in an articulate manner, and it struck a chord with
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people, and it's actually been news, not only in Canada, but it's stretched its tentacles down to the States, and
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certainly into Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand, and I'm being interviewed in South Africa
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this week, and it's been absolutely, it's been like being in a ship in a storm, and it's dumbfounding.
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I can imagine it's been stressful, I'm sure. Now, is your job at the University of Toronto
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in jeopardy? Is that the kind of communication you've received, or?
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Well, I received two warning letters basically asking me to stop talking about this based on the
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idea that even mentioning the fact that I might not use these pronouns probably contravene the
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Ontario Human Rights Code and also the University Code of Conduct, although hypothetically the
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University's Code of Conduct is dominated by protection for free speech, and so they kind of did
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the typical HR thing and got the lawyers on it, and they're conservative, and you know, they warned me
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twice. I didn't stop talking about it, but then the university was roundly criticized by a number
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of Canada's major journalists, including a coalition of a hundred newspapers, and they got a lot of bad
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press. The press actually turned in support of me quite hard about two weeks after this started,
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when they started to investigate what I was talking about and found out that I actually knew what I was,
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knew what I was, that my claims weren't exaggerated by any stretch of the imagination, and so...
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I've seen that criticism. I've paid attention to what you've been saying on this topic, and
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some people have said that you are at least mistaken about the legal implications of these changes in the
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law or these rulings, but it seems to me you... the one thing you can't be mistaken about is the treatment
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you have received thus far in response to your saying you won't use these pronouns.
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If the university lawyers hadn't been convinced that I was correct in my interpretation, they wouldn't
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have sent out a warning that I should stop doing it because it might be illegal. That's the best piece
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of proof supporting my position that the law has this draconian element, because, you know,
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they didn't send me those letters incautiously. They had their lawyers review the damn legislation
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and then came to the same conclusion that I did. And so, and the two lawyers who have been
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making these claims that this legislation is far more innocuous than I'm making it out to be
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are both social activist lawyers, and so they have a serious agenda. And...
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One of them, Brenda Cosman, told me, well, that I wouldn't go to jail, although that is a
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possibility, despite what she said, because the law does have that power. All that would happen is
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that, essentially, I could be financially ruined. It's like, well, okay, well, that's not draconian at
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all, you know, I mean. So, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission has managed to demolish lots of
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people's lives. It's a kangaroo court, in my opinion, and a very dangerous one at that.
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One thing we absolutely agree about is that freedom of speech is not just one among many
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different values. It really is the master value, because it's the only corrective to human stupidity.
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It's the only mechanism by which we can improve our society. And, in fact, it's the value that allows
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us to improve our other values through conversation. Yes, that's exactly right. It's the fundamental
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value. It's exactly right. It's the fundamental value upon which our entire cultural edifice is
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predicated. And I believe that that's part of the reason why the postmodern radicals, in particular,
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are opposed to freedom of speech, because they don't really, they don't believe in dialogue,
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you know. They don't believe in rationality. They don't believe that groups who have different
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orientations of power can discuss their differences in a civilized manner and reach resolution,
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because that isn't how they see the world. That's how modernists see the world. But postmodernists
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don't believe any of that. And they seriously don't believe it. It's no, it's not a facade or a,
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it's a very entrenched part of their philosophy. So, that's partly why they don't like to,
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well, why they block speakers who oppose their views from campus and why they're perfectly willing
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to shut them down and why they don't, you know, why they have no platforming policies, which is
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basically the decision not to let anyone who holds alternative views have a forum, even, you know.
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And it's because, well, it's because they don't believe in rational dialogue and the possibility of
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reaching a solution through it. There's something, at least on its face, so wrong-headed about this
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pronoun campaign that it makes me feel like I don't understand something about it.
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Well, you don't. There's, there's, there's, there's something more nefarious lurking at the
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bottom of it. And you see, in Canada, you know, I know that you're not a social constructionist.
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I know that you, like Steven Pinker, believe deeply that human behavior is profoundly influenced
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by its underlying biological substrate, which is another view that we share. But Canada has
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now written a social constructionist view of human identity into the law. So, it's illegal,
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it's legally, it's, it's illegal, at least in principle, to claim that biology has anything
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to do with gender identity, or that biology and gender identity have anything to do with
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gender expression, or that any of those three have anything to do with social orientation
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And that's written into the law. So, what the social justice warriors are going to do next
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is to go after the biologists. And, you know, they did that with E.O. Wilson already back,
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you know, 30 years ago. And they're doing it in Germany right now. But, and there's an anti-psychiatry
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scholarship established at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, which is a particularly
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pernicious institution. And, and it's no longer obvious what sort of claims you can make as a
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scientist about the relationship between biology and, and sex, or the hypothetically separate
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So, that's the worst of the lot, you know, because normally, governments shy away from implementing
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a particular ideology, especially one that's discredited, which certainly the radical social
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constructionist position is to make, to, to implement, to, you know, make that a fundamental
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part of the law. And that's definitely happened. And that'll unfold in a particularly nasty way over
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Ideology aside, there's just a difference between a positive and negative injunction. So, you know,
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I can ask you to stop doing an infinite number of things, and that imposes no energy cost on you.
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I can say, stop using the N-word. It offends me. Right. Or stop littering. Or stop driving your
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car on the sidewalk. Right. And you can not do those things, and it takes no time not to do those
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things. It takes no cognitive overhead not to do those things. But I can't ask you to do an infinite
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number of things. I can't tell you to pick up all the litter you see everywhere, because you'd spend the
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rest of your life doing that, and you would, you still would fail to comply with the injunction.
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And asking people to learn a new list of gender pronouns, and then live in a state of vigilance
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to see that they apply them correctly, this is a positive injunction. And you're demanding that
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people do something. For me to demand that people start using a word of my own invention, or if I
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say, I want to be addressed by a 16-digit number, and I'm going to be offended if you get the number
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I'm going to be offended, and I'm going to take you to court, and you could be charged under hate
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speech, and I could change that pronoun in an hour if I want, or tomorrow, or the next day,
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on a whim. Because that's also part of the legislation, because that covers the people who are
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so-called gender fluid. And so they have the right to transform their identity according to their
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subjective whim, I would say. Because the legislation also assumes that this identity that's being
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protected so hard has no grounding in biology, and it's only subjectively determined. So they actually
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go beyond social constructionism to make it essentially solipsistic. It's the only thing that
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determines your identity is the way that you feel at that time. And that's an unbelievably poverty-stricken
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notion of identity, which at minimum is something that you have to negotiate with other people. I mean,
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it has to be functional, and you have to negotiate it with other people. So, well, it's not understandable
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unless you look underneath it. And that's why I was objecting, because I think it's a perfectly
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reasonable manifestation of the postmodernism that's nested in neo-Marxism. It's perfectly in
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keeping with their stated aims. So, and those aims are not, if you are an admirer of Western culture,
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at least the good parts of Western culture, then you're the enemy of the postmodern
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slash neo-Marxists. They're opposed to absolutely everything you believe.
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We're going to get into that territory, I would imagine, by another route. So, I don't think there's
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more to say here, because I think we probably agree about everything. I'm obviously not a lawyer,
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I'm certainly not a Canadian lawyer, so if there's any way in which we're getting some of the legal
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details wrong, I offer a blanket apology. But in terms of the belief that biology doesn't
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significantly determine gender or sexuality, or the wisdom and utility of inventing new identities
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and demanding that everyone keep track of them in perpetuity, I mean, I think you and I more or
00:25:12.940
less totally overlap there. So, I think we should just move on.
00:25:15.760
Well, you better not come to Canada and have that discussion then.
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Yeah, well, I mean, it's just, it's been bizarre to see some of these encounters you've been having,
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but it's, this is why you've suddenly become so visible to people, and it's very interesting to
00:25:29.340
see that this is how it's manifesting. But we have bigger, deeper, more perennial fish to fry. I think we
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need to talk about religion and science and atheism and the foundations of morality, things like meaning,
00:25:46.760
your interest in mythology, your fear of nihilism. Let's get into all that. I think you and I share
00:25:54.980
some fundamental concerns, and we feel a similar kind of urgency. I think it expresses itself in slightly
00:26:02.400
different ways and different ways of talking, but we feel an urgency that our fellow human beings get
00:26:07.720
certain questions right. But I think we probably disagree about some fundamental matters, and
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whether those will be, in the end, a matter of semantic difference and can be pushed to the
00:26:20.700
periphery or not, I think that remains to be seen. But I think it will be interesting to talk about
00:26:24.440
these things. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that I thought I might do is pursue the
00:26:30.880
tact that you're not enough of a Darwinian, which I thought would be quite comical, because I've often
00:26:36.400
thought the same about Richard Dawkins. But I would like to point out some of the things, because I've
00:26:42.100
read a fair bit of what you've written now, by no means comprehensively, but I think I've come to
00:26:49.900
understand your central claims. And, of course, they're very powerful, because you're an advocate
00:26:55.060
for materialist rationalism, essentially, I would say, with a bit of spirituality on the side. And,
00:27:01.640
you know, materialist rationalism is an unbelievably powerful tool, and it's very coherent. And so,
00:27:10.760
you know, I address the topic with trepidation, because, you know, it was certainly the case that the
00:27:18.340
philosophical doctrine to which you would adhere has transformed the world and has posed an
00:27:24.440
unbelievably potent threat, let's say. That's one way of challenge. That's better to traditional
00:27:32.120
views of the world. So, but there are some things that we share in common that maybe we could start
00:27:42.420
with. So, and you tell me if I've got any of this wrong.
00:27:45.340
I think a good starting point is this, it actually leads directly into this claim about not being
00:27:51.380
Darwinian enough, but it's the concept of truth. I've heard you say in a variety of ways that
00:27:56.520
religious truth isn't scientific truth. And the difference here is that science tells you
00:28:02.500
what things are, and that religion tells you how you should act. So let's talk about that,
00:28:08.080
and I think that does connect to this Darwinian concern of yours.
00:28:11.240
Yeah, that's a good, that, well, I'm going to approach that obliquely to begin with. So,
00:28:18.380
so let me throw a couple of propositions at you. And, and I know that you don't accept huge
00:28:23.160
distinction between an is and an ought, you know, that you're willing to challenge that. And like,
00:28:27.740
fair enough, you know, it's a reasonable thing to try to challenge, although it's quite difficult,
00:28:33.400
but, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. But I've been thinking a lot about the essential
00:28:41.780
philosophical contradiction between a Newtonian worldview, which I would say your view is nested
00:28:48.680
inside, and a Darwinian worldview, because those views are not the same. They're seriously not the
00:28:55.300
same. I mean, the Darwinian view, as the American pragmatists recognized, so that was William James and
00:29:01.900
his crowd recognized almost, almost immediately was a form of pragmatism. And the pragmatists claim
00:29:10.120
that the truth of a statement or process can only be adjudicated with regards to its efficiency with,
00:29:18.900
with in an, in attaining, in attaining its aim. And so their idea was the truths are always bounded
00:29:24.580
because we're ignorant. And every, uh, action that you undertake that's goal-directed has an
00:29:32.540
internal ethic embedded in it. And the ethic is the claim that if what you do works, then it's true
00:29:39.220
enough. And that's all you can ever do. And so, and what Darwin did, as far as the pragmatists were
00:29:46.720
concerned, was to put forth the following proposition, which was that it was impossible for a finite organism
00:29:54.060
to keep up with a multi-dimensionally transforming landscape, environmental landscape, let's say.
00:30:02.260
And so the best that could be done was to generate random variants, kill most of them because they were
00:30:09.360
wrong, and let the others that were correct enough live long enough to propagate, whereby the same process
00:30:17.620
occurs again. So it's not like the organism is a solution to the problem of the environment.
00:30:23.500
The, the organism is a very bad partial solution to an impossible problem. Okay. And the thing that,
00:30:30.960
the thing that about that is that you can't get outside that claim. I can't see how you can get
00:30:36.300
outside that claim if you're a Darwinian, because the Darwinian claim is that the only way to ensure
00:30:44.320
adaptation to the unpredictably transforming environment is through random mutation, essentially,
00:30:54.040
and death. And that there is no truth claim whatsoever that can surpass that. And so then
00:31:00.900
that brings me to the next point, if you don't mind, and then I'll shut up and let you, and let you talk.
00:31:05.780
So I was thinking about that, and I thought, thought about that for a long time. So it seems to me
00:31:10.860
there's a fundamental contradiction between Darwin's claims and, and the Newton deterministic claim and
00:31:16.320
the, and the materialist objective claim that science is true in some final sense. And so I was
00:31:22.360
thinking of two things that I read. One was the attempt by the KGB back in the, in the late part of the
00:31:31.700
20th century to hybridize, um, smallpox and Ebola, and then aerosol it. So it can be used on, on, you know,
00:31:41.700
for mass destruction. And the thing is, is that that's a perfectly valid scientific enterprise.
00:31:48.380
As far as I'm concerned, it's an interesting problem. Um, you might say, well, you shouldn't
00:31:54.240
divorce it from the surrounding politics. Well, that's exactly the issue is how much it can be
00:32:00.040
divorced. And then, and from what, and then the second example is, you know, a scientist with any
00:32:06.920
sense would say, well, you know, our truths are incontrovertible. Let's look at the results. And
00:32:13.400
we could say, well, let's look at the hydrogen bomb. You know, if you want a piece of evidence that
00:32:18.200
our theories about the subatomic structure of reality are accurate, you don't really have to look
00:32:27.080
much farther than a hydrogen bomb. It's a pretty damn potent demonstration. And so then I was
00:32:31.400
thinking, well, imagine for a moment that the invention of the hydrogen bomb did lead to the
00:32:40.040
outcome, which we were also terrified about in the, during the cold war, which would have been
00:32:47.340
for the sake of argument, either the total elimination of human life, or perhaps the total
00:32:52.980
elimination of life. Now the latter possibility is quite unlikely, but the former one certainly
00:32:57.880
wasn't beyond comprehension. And so then I would say, well, the proposition that the universe is
00:33:06.380
best conceptualized as subatomic particles was true enough to generate a hydrogen bomb, but it wasn't
00:33:13.420
true enough to stop everyone from dying. And therefore, from a Darwinian perspective,
00:33:19.120
it was a insufficient pragmatic proposition and was therefore in some fundamental sense wrong.
00:33:28.540
And perhaps it was wrong because of what it left out. You know, maybe it's wrong in the Darwinian sense
00:33:35.740
to reduce the complexity of being to a material substrate and forget about the surrounding context.
00:33:45.440
So, well, you know, those are two examples. And so you can have a way at that if you want.
00:33:52.920
Yeah, okay. So there are a few issues here that I think we need to pull apart. I think that the basic
00:33:59.060
issue here and where I disagree with you is you seem to be equivocating on the nature of truth here.
00:34:06.620
You're using truth in two different senses and finding a contradiction that I don't, in fact, think exists.
00:34:14.220
So let's talk about pragmatism and Darwinism briefly for a second. So I've spent a lot of time in the
00:34:20.980
thicket of pragmatism because I was a student of Richard Rorty's at Stanford and I took every class
00:34:27.280
he taught and just basically did nothing but argue with him about pragmatism. So I'm very familiar with
00:34:33.020
this way of viewing the concept of scientific truth. I'm not so sure our audience is deeply schooled in
00:34:39.540
this. So briefly, let me just add a little to how you describe pragmatism. And this is, you know,
00:34:46.040
Rorty was one of the leading lights of pragmatism, as you know. So this, his view may be slightly
00:34:51.300
idiosyncratic, but it was fairly well-subscribed among pragmatists and he was influenced by Dewey
00:34:56.040
and he linked his view in some similar ways to a Darwinian conception of truth, but not quite the
00:35:05.680
way you're doing it seems to me. In any case, the idea is that we can never stand outside of human
00:35:12.000
conversation and talk about reality as it is or truth as it is. We never come into contact with
00:35:20.560
naked truth. All we have is our conversation and our tools of augmenting our conversation,
00:35:27.560
scientific instruments and otherwise. And all we really have, the currency of truth,
00:35:34.520
is whatever successfully passes muster in a conversation. So I say something that I think
00:35:39.600
is true and it seems to work for you. We have a similar, we're playing a similar language game
00:35:45.120
and some people disagree, they criticize what we are claiming to be true and we go back and forth.
00:35:52.480
And all we ever have is this kind of ever-expanding horizon line of successful conversations that allow
00:36:00.060
us to do things technologically that are very persuasive. So as you say, we can build hydrogen
00:36:05.060
bombs. And so the conversation about the structure of the atom, at the very least the conversation about
00:36:09.540
the amount of energy hidden in the otherwise nebulous structure of an atom, that becomes,
00:36:16.540
you know, very well grounded in facts that we all can agree are intersubjectively true.
00:36:23.900
Yeah, well that seems to weaken the claim that it's just within language, you know, which is kind
00:36:29.700
of a postmodern claim too, because it's very difficult for me to believe that the hydrogen bomb is what it
00:36:36.440
is just because we agree what it is in conversation. You know, it immediately reflects a world outside
00:36:42.240
of, now that outside of language, that doesn't mean we get permanent and omniscient access to that
00:36:49.280
world, but it's more than language as far as, so maybe I'm misunderstanding Rorty or...
00:36:56.220
I think you are understanding him. He just, he will say that, again, all we ever have is our effort
00:37:03.820
to organize the way the world seems to us with concepts and language, and we just have successful
00:37:09.740
iterations of that and unsuccessful ones. And a hydrogen bomb explosion, no matter how big,
00:37:16.780
assuming we survive it, still falls within this empirical context of an evolving language game.
00:37:23.500
And I agree with you that this does, it does connect with postmodernism in a way that is
00:37:28.540
decidedly unhelpful. And Rorty was a fan of Derrida and Foucault. And, you know, I remember
00:37:34.380
walking out of Derrida's lecture at Stanford, I literally had to climb over the bodies of the
00:37:40.240
credulous who were sitting in the aisles listening to the great man speak, and he didn't speak a single
00:37:47.280
Well, that's obviously just because you don't have the profundity to understand,
00:37:51.600
you know, a postmodern French neo-Marxist intellectual.
00:37:56.320
I don't. But to get back to some of your claims here, there's this claim you're making about
00:38:02.480
the Darwinian basis of truth and knowledge, that there really is just survival, right? There's just,
00:38:10.580
you know, biological change selected against by an environment. And there's what works in that
00:38:18.300
context, what is pragmatic in that context biologically, and there's what doesn't, and
00:38:22.960
what doesn't gets you killed. Now, obviously, that picture of how we got here is something that
00:38:31.120
But our conception of truth, and our conception of truth in general, and scientific truth
00:38:36.380
specifically, and even of Darwinian evolution within that subset of truth claims, that is not
00:38:43.540
functioning by merely Darwinian principles. And this just goes to...
00:38:49.000
Right. But that could be an objection to its validity. Like, there's no reason to assume,
00:38:55.320
and don't get me wrong, like, I'm perfectly happy with science. I'm a scientist. And,
00:39:01.960
but there's no reason to assume that our view of the world, our current scientific view of the world,
00:39:10.320
isn't flawed, or incomplete, in some manner that will prove fundamentally fatal to us.
00:39:17.780
As a working assumption, we can decide not to worry too much about that. And that's fine. But yes,
00:39:22.920
I agree. And more fundamental than that. And I think this is the accurate version of the claim
00:39:28.500
you're making. This is something that I spoke about on another podcast with Max Tegmark, a physicist
00:39:34.280
from MIT. There is just the fact that within the Darwinian conception of how we got here, there's
00:39:40.920
no reason to believe that our cognitive faculties have evolved to put us in error-free contact with
00:39:50.820
reality. That's not how they evolved. I mean, we did not evolve to be perfect mathematicians, or perfect
00:39:57.940
operators, or perfect conceivers of scientific reality at the very small, you know, subatomic
00:40:05.640
level, or at the very large cosmic level, or at the very old cosmological level. We are designed by
00:40:13.040
the happenstance of evolution to function within a very narrow band of light intensities and physical
00:40:22.980
parameters. The things we are designed to do very well are, you know, recognize the facial expressions
00:40:29.780
of apes just like ourselves, and to throw objects in parabolic arcs within a hundred meters and all of
00:40:37.620
that. And so the fact that we are able to succeed to the degree that we have been in creating a vision
00:40:44.860
of scientific truth and the structure of the cosmos at large that radically exceeds those narrow
00:40:52.400
parameters, that is a kind of miracle. It's an amazing fact about us that seems not to be true,
00:40:59.860
remotely true, of any other species we know about. And that's something to be celebrated, and it's a lot
00:41:05.060
of fun to see how far we can get in that direction. But I would grant you that there are no guarantees
00:41:10.360
as we move forward in that space. And in fact, we should be skeptical about how easy we can have it
00:41:20.880
in this space. One thing that Max Tegmark said, which I thought was fascinating, he goes one step further
00:41:27.580
than I had tended to go along these lines, where he said that we should expect, as just based on
00:41:34.260
accepting the logic of evolution, we should expect that we will have our common sense intuitions
00:41:42.200
frequently and really incessantly violated by what we discover to be true about the nature of reality
00:41:49.520
Yeah, what we discover scientifically to be true about the nature of reality. Yeah, well, so partly I
00:41:56.020
made the case that I made to indicate to you and the listeners where I'm starting from in some sense. So
00:42:05.480
I think it's not unreasonable to assume that you're making the metaphysical claim in some sense that
00:42:12.240
Darwinian truth is nested inside Newtonian truth.
00:42:17.080
I wouldn't call it Newtonian. Let me just change your words a little bit, but it may be a distinction
00:42:21.400
without a difference here. But I would oppose realism, scientific realism, and even moral realism.
00:42:27.640
I consider myself a moral realist. I think there are right and wrong answers to moral questions.
00:42:31.940
I would oppose realism with pragmatism. And the core tenet of realism for me is that it's possible
00:42:39.680
for everyone to be mistaken. It's possible for there to be a consensus around truths that are in fact not
00:42:46.100
true. It's possible to not know what you're missing. There's a horizon of cognition beyond which we can't
00:42:53.260
currently see, and we may be right or wrong about what we think exceeds our grasp at the moment. And so
00:42:59.440
that's something that the pragmatist can't say. The pragmatist has to locate truth always within the
00:43:05.760
context of existing conversations, existing consensus. And in this Darwinian conception of truth,
00:43:12.900
truth, you are saying that there's just what works for us biologically, pragmatically, as apes on earth
00:43:20.100
now. And there is nothing, there's no larger context of truth claims that we can make that situates that
00:43:27.920
in a larger sphere, where you can intelligibly say that everyone is wrong about something.
00:43:34.560
Well, it's complicated. And I wouldn't say I'm saying exactly that. I certainly don't agree with
00:43:40.560
the language game part of it. And see, if you think of the Darwinian process as something you can't
00:43:48.920
escape, like there's no outside of it. And partly the reason for that is that you're just too damn
00:43:55.280
ignorant to get outside of it in any transcendent manner. Now, you might say, well, you can do that to
00:44:01.980
some degree with science. And I'm not going to argue with that.
00:44:05.180
But before you move on, let me just understand the claim, because it seems to me we are outside of
00:44:09.980
it in every respect where you want to emphasize the Darwinian component of it. So we're outside of
00:44:18.240
the implications that, you know, certain phenotypes would have killed you outright 5,000 years ago,
00:44:25.360
whereas now we have a civilizational mechanism to protect those people. So if you're wearing
00:44:30.640
eyeglasses, and you are able to function just as well as your neighbor who's got perfect vision,
00:44:37.020
you're out of a Darwinian paradigm there. It doesn't matter that you're wearing eyeglasses,
00:44:40.940
right? On a thousand points, we can make that same observation. And therefore, more or less
00:44:46.240
everything we care about has followed along those lines. I mean, so just the fact that we are,
00:44:52.700
you know, one of the greatest gains we are attempting to make, although we have done it imperfectly thus far,
00:44:58.420
is to outgrow tribalism in all its forms, right? So we recognize that tribalism is not the best,
00:45:04.960
you know, moral bedrock. And yet, in a Darwinian paradigm, tribalism is really the only game in
00:45:11.160
town. And so we stand outside of Darwinian logic, both morally and intellectually, all the time.
00:45:19.640
Now, are you denying that? What am I confused about?
00:45:22.460
I'm calling that into question. I'm not necessarily denying it. And I'm certainly not presuming that
00:45:28.420
you know, that what I'm saying is right, because I'm trying to solve another problem at the same
00:45:35.400
time. But you see, the thing about the scientific viewpoint is that it leaves certain things out.
00:45:41.760
And it leaves out what it doesn't know, obviously, although the same might be said for any other
00:45:48.300
system of belief and should be. But it also looks at the world in a particular way. For example,
00:45:55.260
it strips the world of its subjectivity. And it may be that that's a fatal error. Now,
00:46:01.940
that doesn't mean that it stopped science from being unbelievably useful as a tool. But I think
00:46:07.540
of science as a tool, rather than as a description of reality. And, you know, that's, well, that's where
00:46:14.280
we differ. And it's fair that we differ. You know, it's, it isn't obvious which of those two
00:46:20.680
positions could be held to be correct. Because, you know, you could say that the more we learn about
00:46:27.480
the objective world, you know, in your realist manner, the higher the probability that we'll
00:46:33.180
survive. And it's conceivable that those things are aligned in that manner. But it's also conceivable
00:46:41.060
that they're not. And I'm wary of that, because radical changes produce unintended consequences.
00:46:51.200
And, you know, we've lived relatively successfully as primates for, you know, a couple of dozen
00:46:59.040
million years. And we're transforming things pretty damn rapidly. You know, I mean, one potential outcome
00:47:05.980
is that, in 500 years, we're more machine than human, you know, and that we're not really human
00:47:12.900
at all, in any realistic sense. And I can't necessarily see that as a, you know, you could
00:47:19.020
claim that that's a positive outcome, but it isn't necessarily that it's a positive outcome.
00:47:24.360
So, you're, you're assuming that there is an alignment between the two.
00:47:29.000
No, I'm not doing that. And I think, and now I'm getting a little confused about what you're
00:47:32.680
claiming. So, let me just go over that ground you just sketched, just to, to get myself on track.
00:47:37.540
So, it seems to me that you're saying that the reductio ad absurdum of a Darwinian conception
00:47:44.700
of knowledge would be, if we ever learned certain truths that got us all killed, well, then that
00:47:51.720
would prove that these things weren't true, or that this was an intellectual dead end.
00:48:00.140
I mean, two things here. One is that there's nothing about my conception of science that
00:48:04.180
discounts the reality or the significance of subjectivity. So, I understand what you're
00:48:09.580
saying when you say that science or materialism leaves out subjectivity, and that's, I've ridden
00:48:15.060
that same hobby horse against that conception of science myself. So, you won't find a friend
00:48:20.540
of eliminative materialism in me. That's just not how I think about the human mind.
00:48:25.760
Well, do you think that that's true of your views on consciousness? Because that's another
00:48:32.520
Yeah, well, I don't know that you would, you understand my views on consciousness if you
00:48:35.920
think that, but we can get there. I think there's a subjective dimension of reality that
00:48:41.060
is undeniable. In fact, I've said, for instance, that consciousness is the one thing in this
00:48:46.000
universe that can't be an illusion. It's the only thing that you can be absolutely sure
00:48:54.220
I actually like another claim that you make better that's related to that. I think the
00:49:00.040
one thing, and this is, I think, part of your fundamental ethical metaphysics, and it's
00:49:04.600
a point on which we agree, I believe. You know, you are very concerned with, let's call it
00:49:11.980
pain, for lack of a better word. And, you know, one of the conclusions that I've reached,
00:49:17.660
which is, I think, in keeping with what you just said, because it necessarily involves
00:49:23.460
consciousness, but, so let's call consciousness a reality, but then I would say that the most
00:49:29.260
undeniable form of consciousness is acute agony, because no one doubts that, not if you watch
00:49:37.580
them act, and that's one of the criteria by which I judge whether or not someone believes
00:49:41.920
something. You know, so people, if people act out something uncontrollably, then I'm convinced
00:49:50.400
that they believe it, regardless of what they think they believe. And so, and I think it's
00:49:55.520
for that reason that so many religious systems start with the same metaphysic, which is, life
00:50:01.100
is suffering. That's the ultimate reality. And that's associated with consciousness, certainly.
00:50:07.480
But it's more precise than that, you know, because maybe you can doubt whether you're happy,
00:50:13.380
but it's very difficult to doubt that you're in agony and have that actually work. So people act as
00:50:20.860
if that's the most real thing. And part of your ethical metaphysics, as far as I can tell, is you take
00:50:26.960
that as bedrock in some sense, and then say, well, whatever we do, we shouldn't go there. And, you know,
00:50:34.440
there's, there's, in a manner, in a way, the way that I think parallels that, except that you
00:50:41.360
posit well-being as the opposite, let's say, of suffering. And this is, and this is something I
00:50:50.800
really want to talk to you about, because I think there's a, there's a paradox in your thinking.
00:50:56.320
And I could be wrong, but let, tell me what you think.
00:51:00.340
Let's wait to get there, because this is a different topic. I definitely want to get into
00:51:03.660
morality with you. Okay. Okay. And that's all, all ripe for discussion. But this conception of
00:51:08.900
truth, I think we have to nail down, because it just seems to me undeniable that there are facts
00:51:16.380
whether or not any of us, any existing population of human beings are aware of those facts. So before
00:51:24.660
there was any understanding of the energy trapped in an atom, the energy was still trapped in the atom,
00:51:33.020
right? And, and the Trinity test proved that beyond any possibility of doubt. So prior to the,
00:51:40.540
you know, the bomb going off at Alamogordo, you had the, some of the world's best physicists,
00:51:46.300
not entirely sure what was going to happen. They had a, an educated guess about what was going to
00:51:51.320
happen. I think there was a, there was a betting pool on the question of, of just how big the
00:51:56.260
detonation would be. There were some people who thought that nothing would happen. They would
00:52:00.160
actually fail to initiate a chain reaction. The point is, is that there was a kind of a probability
00:52:05.460
distribution among the, the smartest people over the, the range of possible outcomes there.
00:52:11.460
So this was a linguistically mediated conception of what was true at the level of the very,
00:52:17.820
very small in physical reality. And we got more information once we saw that bright light and
00:52:24.820
mushroom cloud. And now the conversation continues, but it seems to me that a realistic conception of
00:52:30.680
what's going on there, and really the only sane one, if you look long enough at it, is that our
00:52:38.640
language didn't put the energy in the atom. It's not because we spoke a certain way about it,
00:52:44.180
that that determined the character of physical reality. No, physical reality has a character
00:52:50.080
whether or not there are apes around to talk about it. Okay. So look, look, everything you said there,
00:52:56.740
I agree with it. I guess my one, my one objection to that is the, well, is it true enough objection? So,
00:53:06.180
you know, in order to establish an objective fact, we have to parameterize the search. We have to
00:53:13.300
narrow the search. We have to exclude many, many things. And I think sometimes when we do that,
00:53:20.700
we end up generating a truth. And I would say it's a pragmatic truth that works within the confines of
00:53:28.660
the parameters that have been established around the experiment. But then when launched up off into
00:53:35.700
the broader world, much of which was excluded from the theorizing, the results can be catastrophic.
00:53:43.100
And I would say that's akin to the problem of there's operationalization, right, where you reduce
00:53:50.060
the phenomena to something that you can discover and discuss scientifically. And then there's generalization
00:53:56.140
back to the real world. And one of the things that you see happen very frequently is that
00:54:01.340
the operationalization succeeds, but the generalization is a catastrophe. That's very
00:54:07.240
frequently the case with the application of social science theories to the world because they leave so
00:54:12.440
much out. Okay. So let's, let's just focus on this claim or this concern about certain forms of
00:54:19.300
knowledge or certain descriptions of the world leading to catastrophe. Now, I completely agree that
00:54:25.100
that's possible, but it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means here. So it's possible for there
00:54:33.320
to be scientifically correct, realistically true conceptions of the world that are bad for us.
00:54:41.440
There's not many examples of that. I think the utility...
00:54:44.720
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