Making Sense - Sam Harris - The TED Interview

00:00:00.000 welcome to the waking up podcast this is sam harris okay some housekeeping here

00:00:25.620 i have a new event series to announce it's called experiments and conversation

00:00:32.580 and i'll be kicking this off with eric weinstein in january january 28th we'll be in detroit

00:00:41.640 at the fillmore on the 29th we'll be in milwaukee at the pabst theater and on the 30th we'll be in

00:00:49.700 chicago at the chicago theater and the idea with experiments and conversation is to launch a

00:00:55.560 series of events that is about more than my events i'll participate in many of them especially in the

00:01:02.140 beginning but there's so many great speakers out there and i want to create a speaking series that

00:01:07.440 could eventually take place in many cities simultaneously it'll be conversation based

00:01:12.120 these are not lectures now we've been thinking internally about this being ted for two where

00:01:18.240 the ted conference has significantly refined and even institutionalized the short lecture

00:01:25.000 we're going to attempt to do something similar for conversations and to this end we'll be looking for

00:01:31.700 public intellectuals and creative people who are willing to take some risks and think out loud on

00:01:37.580 important and controversial topics we're looking for people who are not cowed by the prospect of

00:01:43.420 saying something so surprising or counterintuitive that people might take offense at it i can't tell

00:01:50.360 you how stifling the current environment is for speech with the exception of podcasts it is just crazy

00:01:57.920 out there so i'm hoping this series can help us all recalibrate a little bit now in a perfect world

00:02:04.720 there will one day be hundreds of events like this happening each year all over the world but we'll see

00:02:11.300 how it goes with the first three and i really can't think of a better person to kick this off with

00:02:15.840 than eric weinstein eric is one of the most consistently interesting and courageous thinkers i know

00:02:22.440 he's a real polymath and in my experience we can talk about almost anything and it's fun and illuminating

00:02:31.400 and just it's what a conversation should be so he was a natural starting point when thinking about

00:02:38.000 this series but eventually i will turn to him and say who else could you have a great conversation

00:02:43.260 with and he might go off with that person and do an event in a city near you and i'll reach out to

00:02:49.840 some of my other favorite podcast guests and people i admire and ask the same question and the

00:02:55.200 conversations will spread anyway this is all starting in detroit milwaukee and chicago in january so if you

00:03:03.260 live in or near any of those cities and you want to come out for a live event here's your chance i

00:03:08.860 don't get to your part of the world very often in fact i've only spoken once in chicago and i've never

00:03:14.580 been to milwaukee or detroit so come on out pre-sale tickets are available to podcast subscribers right

00:03:22.540 now if you're a supporter of the podcast either through samharris.org or patreon you can log into my

00:03:28.960 website and you'll see a pre-sale code on my events page and that's samharris.org forward slash events

00:03:35.760 and then tickets go on sale to the general public on friday november 2nd so subscribers only have a few

00:03:44.020 days of exclusive access this time around apologies for that live nation collapsed the schedule on me

00:03:49.760 for some reason you guys usually have a full week but not the case here anyway i'm looking forward to

00:03:56.780 those events and eric and i will try to make sense okay the waking up course the app is now available on android

00:04:06.880 i'm very happy to say that didn't take too long at all many of you feared that it would take years

00:04:12.660 understandably so but no it took a mere six weeks beyond the ios build so enjoy that please know we're

00:04:22.780 continually updating it insofar as you find bugs or improvements that should be made please tell us

00:04:31.080 at wakingup.com and again your reviews are incredibly helpful so please keep those coming

00:04:39.220 let's see here i've got some good people coming up on the podcast i've got rebecca traister the

00:04:44.780 feminist journalist who's written a scalding me too book we had a colorful conversation uh johan hari

00:04:53.180 is coming up he's written a book about depression that many people are finding very useful darren brown

00:04:58.740 the magician who is remarkable as you probably know he's coming up dia khan the muslim filmmaker

00:05:07.000 has made an amazing film about neo-nazis and white supremacists in the u.s

00:05:11.340 dia proves to be kryptonite for white supremacists it's quite amazing well speaking of ted today i'm

00:05:21.320 turning the tables and presenting an interview i did with chris anderson the owner and impresario

00:05:26.400 of ted he's just launched his own podcast the ted interview i believe this is his third episode

00:05:34.600 as you know i occasionally do this i present my appearance on another person's podcast

00:05:40.220 i think you might enjoy it and i think you'll enjoy this one chris is a great interviewer

00:05:46.120 and as you'll hear he's a little concerned about some of my views and he pushes back on me from time

00:05:52.360 to time this was actually very noticeable after my first ted talk in 2010 where chris came on stage

00:05:59.840 and asked me some very worried questions about my views on the hijab and i think chris has been

00:06:06.500 worrying about me ever since anyway what chris has done with the ted conference is truly incredible

00:06:12.420 and it was an honor to be interviewed by him so please enjoy my conversation with chris anderson

00:06:19.680 welcome to the ted interview i'm chris anderson and this is the podcast series where i sit down

00:06:33.780 with a ted speaker and we get to dive much deeper into their ideas than was possible during their ted talk

00:06:39.820 my guest today is sam harris philosopher neuroscientist author podcaster sam has been at the heart of many

00:06:50.300 of the most provocative conversations out there today politically i would place him at what you

00:06:56.600 might call the radical center a stern critic of donald trump but also of political correctness for

00:07:02.760 example he has infuriated people on both left and right in almost equal measure but he has also

00:07:09.960 delighted many many people because of his clarity of thought and his fearlessness in how he expresses

00:07:16.940 those thoughts sam's podcast waking up is super popular i'm a regular listener and he's also famed for

00:07:24.560 his book called the moral landscape that was the subject of his first ted talk most people probably here

00:07:30.760 think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life questions like

00:07:36.940 what is worth living for what is worth dying for what constitutes a good life so i'm going to argue

00:07:43.520 that this is an illusion the separation between science and human values is an illusion and actually

00:07:49.080 quite a dangerous one at this point in human history so the debate is over the nature of morality

00:07:55.960 morality specifically is there such a thing as objective moral truth or is morality inherently

00:08:03.600 subjective in which case all moral statements are ultimately just statements about the values an

00:08:09.260 individual or a culture happens to hold so let's give an example here i mean look if i say something

00:08:14.820 like it's wrong to lie or we should all stop eating animals are those ultimately just your personal

00:08:22.060 moral values or might there be a sense in which they can objectively be judged to be true or false

00:08:28.560 if you believe in god there's an easy enough answer to this question good is what god has revealed to us

00:08:34.160 is good he's created human beings with consciences and with a holy book that sets out what is right and

00:08:39.240 what is wrong but most modern philosophers academic scientists don't think you can outsource morality to god

00:08:45.780 they would say there is a fundamental difference in the world between facts and values facts as statements

00:08:52.880 about the real world they can be true or false values are human creations they differ between different

00:09:00.320 cultures we can debate them but ultimately there is no objective arbiter of the truth of a moral statement

00:09:07.620 what's interesting about sam harris is that although he definitely doesn't believe in god

00:09:13.120 he does believe that statements about moral values are ultimately objective statements in his view we

00:09:19.760 can discover the truth about those statements through an ever deeper knowledge of science of psychology

00:09:25.980 for example of how human societies operate and of the exercise of reason there's a lot at stake here

00:09:32.520 if sam harris is wrong and the majority of scientists and philosophers are right then it's hard to see how

00:09:38.720 there can be such a thing as moral progress if a moral system is simply the subjective values that a

00:09:44.880 culture creates it puts a limit on how much you can argue against views you disagree with like the

00:09:51.180 sanctity of life or child marriage you just have no real answer to the position look this is what i and my

00:09:59.620 family going back generations choose to believe if sam harris is right on the other hand it becomes

00:10:05.940 impossible to argue that certain cultural values are objectively wrong and must be changed and to

00:10:12.100 present real evidence as to why that might be so and looking forward it impacts how we build ethical

00:10:19.360 decisions into the technologies we're creating like machine learning artificial intelligence social media

00:10:26.180 algorithms self-driving cars there is much to ponder here it's not just a philosophical argument it's as

00:10:33.960 important a conversation as there is so let's go sam let's start here um how can you build morality

00:10:43.000 out of mere reason and science and perhaps you could even start by defining what morality even is

00:10:49.200 well i would i would say that it is anchored to the the fact that we are in relationship with one another

00:10:57.580 so if you're in a in a universe of one if you're on a desert island the ethics of your living don't

00:11:05.580 come into play because there's no other conscious system that can be affected by what you do so if

00:11:10.620 you're truly alone and can't harm or benefit anyone then we don't really talk in moral terms we talk in

00:11:15.920 just in terms of well-being so a moral system is the rules by which we should treat each other or not

00:11:21.960 treat each other how do you create the rules by which to treat each other i mean how do you build

00:11:27.240 a moral system from the ground up uh just imagine that we have no notion of should or ought there's

00:11:33.520 there's nothing we should do this thought has not occurred to anyone yet and even the notion of right

00:11:38.640 and wrong and good and evil hasn't occurred to anyone it's just there's just we just find ourselves

00:11:42.680 in this universe and the circumstance which we didn't create is one in which conscious minds like

00:11:49.480 our own are susceptible to a vast range of experiences and some of these experiences suck

00:11:57.040 right i mean this unambiguously like and if you if you doubt that just imagine having every variable

00:12:03.300 that conspires to make you miserable turned up you know to to 11 right so if you're if you doubt this

00:12:10.080 you know go to a hot stove and put your hand on it right i mean that that is a powerful philosophical

00:12:15.040 argument the experience you will have there is deeper than your doubts about the whether morality

00:12:22.080 can be anchored to reason right and if you think well it only burns my hand because i am you know my

00:12:27.160 mind and body are constituted in such a way well yeah that's precisely the point i'm saying that every

00:12:32.180 possible mind has a is susceptible to a range of experiences given the physics of things we don't

00:12:39.100 know how consciousness is actually integrated with physics that's a mystery but there is some

00:12:44.300 relationship and we live in a universe where conscious minds have a a range of conscious

00:12:50.940 states and some of these states are better than others and i think that claim that there's that's

00:12:55.920 that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and that every other state of the universe is

00:13:02.320 better i think that is as rudimentary a claim as we ever make in reasoning about anything it's it's

00:13:09.060 as a rudimentary as two plus two makes four it's as rudimentary as events have causes uh there's

00:13:16.260 nothing it is bedrock and we know there are many other conditions on offer which are far better than

00:13:24.020 that right uh some are sublimely rapturous and filled with beauty and and apparent meaning and

00:13:30.740 we just just all the satisfaction that the luckiest people we know and and and ourselves in our best

00:13:36.580 moments have enjoyed while alive and so what i would argue is that what we have on our hands is a

00:13:41.940 navigation problem we are navigating in the space of all possible experiences and so let me just but

00:13:47.680 let me just push uh on one sort of philosophical point back there in describing the worst possible

00:13:53.940 state for all people though couldn't two different people look at two universes and disagree about

00:14:01.120 which one was actually a worse state in in one let's say everyone was making this god almighty mess

00:14:08.860 they were just creating mud everywhere there is it was the ultimate sort of pigsty and it was disgusting

00:14:13.820 to look at and in another there were people being hurt really badly but there was also you know

00:14:21.100 this beautiful artwork in the sky that was somehow some creation of perfection like like people could

00:14:26.760 disagree about which of those two was that was the the worst couldn't they yes what you're saying is

00:14:31.100 true of my picture of morality in general and that's why i called it a moral landscape where you have

00:14:36.420 peaks and valleys and some of these peaks could be equivalent and some of the valleys could be equivalent

00:14:42.280 but yet different so that you could have societies of people functioning by very different principles

00:14:47.380 and moral intuitions and senses of what's right and wrong and they could be enjoying they could be

00:14:51.700 enjoying equivalent states of well-being that are irreconcilable right so you could have a an island

00:14:57.240 of perfectly matched sadists and masochists say and they might be happy by their own lights but we would

00:15:03.120 look at them and say that's just that's a completely bizarre and undesirable way of living so there is a kind

00:15:07.780 of moral diversity possible in my picture but but for this example this thought experiment just imagine

00:15:13.160 that every conscious system in that universe suffers as much as it possibly can for as long

00:15:20.180 as it can so if you're telling me there's somebody who would consider a universe of dirt to be worse

00:15:26.520 than a universe of you know painful torment well then that's the universe he gets right so like we're

00:15:33.100 putting we put every however your mind is constituted so as to suffer to the ultimate degree for as long

00:15:39.020 as possible that's what you get in this universe and so someone who said but suffering isn't the

00:15:44.940 point you know say injustice is the point so i i think a worse universe than that is one where people

00:15:51.500 may not be suffering but there is greater injustice yeah the reason why justice seems important to you

00:15:57.820 is because it seems important to you there's an experiential component to this right so one simple way

00:16:03.120 it seems to me almost of of getting to your to your argument is just to imagine um a scientific

00:16:09.160 comparison between here are two universes and they're actually identical in every regard except that in one

00:16:15.980 one child is suffering and and in the other that same child is is not suffering every control for everything

00:16:23.240 else yeah and it it feels like it's not a stretch to say as a fact that that universe with a child is not

00:16:30.360 suffering is is is better yeah so as long as you can get me give me this spectrum of better and worse

00:16:36.240 uh that's all i need and there are several double standards here that people observe by default which

00:16:43.500 are the the source of our what i would argue is our confusion about morality so one double standard is that

00:16:49.620 even the most hard-headed scientists use a totally different standard and so they give you an analogy here

00:16:56.500 if you take something like physics as the the prototypical case so if someone shows up at a

00:17:02.440 physics conference with his cockamamie view of physics that can't be integrated with standard

00:17:08.940 physics if someone wants to to argue for a biblical physics say that person just doesn't get invited back

00:17:15.840 to the conference i mean this is there's no burden upon mainstream physics to incorporate that view into

00:17:21.700 physics and no one would be tempted to say on the basis of you know defining people who think that

00:17:27.400 the earth is flat or they've invented some perpetual motion machine or whatever it is no one takes those

00:17:34.140 claims seriously and and so does with medicine if someone came to a hospital or into a medical school and

00:17:42.540 said you listen you know i have a totally different conception of human health and it entails you know vomiting

00:17:48.920 continuously and being in continuous pain and then dying soon that's my that's how i'm i'm going to

00:17:53.860 define health you know this person's working with a conception of health that doesn't matter to us

00:17:58.980 for good reason there are obviously controversies in science and those are debated even for decades

00:18:03.860 and sometimes they overturn our standard conception of of what is true but the kind of radical skepticism

00:18:11.900 with respect to maybe there's no such thing as science right and maybe there's no such thing as truth

00:18:16.320 that doesn't continually undermine our conversation whereas with morality it does and so when you when

00:18:22.780 you find an another group behaving by a totally divergent moral code a group like isis say so you

00:18:31.100 know you know isis thinks that the best thing to do is kill apostates kill blasphemers throw homosexuals

00:18:38.240 from rooftops take sex slaves and in the even best case dying for the privilege of doing all this in

00:18:46.460 an act of martyrdom right so this is their conception of a life well lived and people look at this in the

00:18:52.420 west and you know well educated over educated people with phds and you know people who are have

00:18:58.720 careers as bioethicists right people who for whom thinking about what is good and right and beautiful

00:19:04.260 in a western context that is their job they look at this diversity of opinion and they say well

00:19:09.860 who are we to say that this is wrong all we can say is that we don't want to live that way

00:19:15.620 but it's a mere preference and then this gets connected to a descriptive notion of how we got here

00:19:24.260 like when you look at how our moral toolkit has evolved i mean we're social primates that have

00:19:30.740 our morality anchored to certain emotions like disgust and jealousy and and a capacity for empathy and

00:19:39.500 and we look at these evolved capacities and we say well there's nothing about the process that got us

00:19:45.980 here that is causing us to track anything of substance about you know the way the world is you

00:19:52.140 know we're not in touch with reality when we're moralizing we're just apes with preferences and so these

00:19:57.640 these two things that the fact of moral diversity and the fact that much of our morality is anchored to

00:20:04.380 these evolved apish tendencies those two things have led many many smart people to believe that there's no

00:20:12.280 there there there's no truth with respect to right and wrong and good and evil i mean by presenting the

00:20:16.780 isis case there you've started with the sort of the awkward logical implication of of moral relativism i mean

00:20:23.640 most people wouldn't wouldn't start there they would say what they're protecting is for example if we

00:20:27.540 discover a culture in the amazon rainforest never been discovered we discover that they have certain

00:20:32.000 ways and certain moral preferences and how they run their society who are we to judge and say our western

00:20:37.900 ways are better but um that kind of um anthropology driven moral relativism as championed by people like

00:20:44.920 margaret mead becomes quickly a kind of an absurd position where you can't say that objectively isis's views are

00:20:52.640 wrong that's just their culture we can't say they're wrong all we can do is is fight them um but i just want to

00:20:59.060 just plant a flag there because you you mentioned anthropology which is a discipline which 70 years ago in the

00:21:05.220 aftermath of world war ii explicitly said these are the the american anthropological association explicitly said when when the

00:21:12.920 u.n was trying to develop a universal conception of human rights the anthropologists all lined up and said

00:21:18.840 this can't be done this is a fool's errand there is no such thing as universal human rights but think of how

00:21:25.000 ethically questionable that position is like there's there's no way to say that you know clitorectomies

00:21:30.720 are a bad thing say it's pure delusion the moment you link morality to the well-being of conscious creatures in

00:21:40.820 general and and people in particular once you draw the link between human flourishing and morality

00:21:47.680 which i think is i think the link is very direct and we can talk about that but once you draw that

00:21:53.320 link to say there are no right and wrong answers here is tantamount to saying we will never know

00:21:58.340 anything about human well-being and there'll be no human psychology that can tell us that how people

00:22:03.880 flourish there'll be no sociology there'll be no economics there'll be no other discipline that that can

00:22:09.000 give us right and wrong answers and that's that i think is is wrong okay so what you're saying is

00:22:14.940 that the route from science to morality as as it were you've described as a sort of a reason-based

00:22:21.740 route there's another route that people might give which is a sort of an evolution-based route to

00:22:27.260 morality which would say that it's completely credible to believe that apes and certainly our ancestors

00:22:34.040 evolved a conscience or perhaps multiple consciences if you like moral instincts that

00:22:40.080 guided behavior which turn out to be really helpful for surviving and promoting group collaboration and

00:22:46.480 and so forth but those instincts may be generally good and beneficial but may also be buggy as we know

00:22:54.940 that so many aspects of our psychology is just odd like it may have been fine-tuned for life a few million

00:23:00.840 years ago it's definitely runs into all kinds of glitches in the world that we're in now and i think

00:23:05.560 what i hear you saying is that there's this incredibly important agenda of applying reason to the start

00:23:11.280 point instincts that we have and this of course is where it gets gets really hard people do i mean

00:23:17.500 john john height has spoken at ted and has argued you know that there are these different moral engines

00:23:21.280 going on in people some people care much more about fairness or about happiness um others care more

00:23:27.800 about honor or about purity or about justice and i think you want to argue that you can you can use

00:23:35.460 the tools of reasons to bridge those gaps those are not fundamentally uh divisible chasms that that

00:23:40.660 can't be breached right yeah well so there are two separate projects here the two ways in which

00:23:46.320 science can weigh in on the question of morality one is to help us descriptively understand how we got

00:23:53.440 here and that is an evolutionary story that is a story uh get talking about ourselves in terms of

00:23:58.680 our history as as social primates and just observing as a matter of psychology and sociology and every

00:24:06.220 other discipline that can be brought to bear on this that people have emotions and intuitions

00:24:14.520 uh various cultures have norms which everyone involved claim have something to do with morality

00:24:23.440 right so there's a feeling of disgust that people have and it's you know clearly it's it's ancient

00:24:29.020 origin is is to be anchored to things like smells and tastes uh and it protects the the the organism

00:24:35.080 from you know just just pollution but then as we've evolved it has this we haven't evolved any new

00:24:42.480 hardware and so what we have built in terms of our morality our norms and our sense of their violation

00:24:49.780 is anchored to this same circuitry so now disgust is doing a lot of work in the moral domain and the

00:24:56.700 political domain and and it's even you know i as some neuroimaging work i did early on shows that

00:25:03.560 the same circuits in this case the the insula in the brain are working to differentiate just truth

00:25:10.460 and falsity so that when you find a statement to be false it seems to activate the same network

00:25:16.860 and based on culture this can play out in very different ways so you can find cultures where

00:25:22.380 people find certain things disgusting which seem completely arbitrary to us right and and therefore

00:25:29.120 wrong and yet we and then we find other things disgusting and to take this down to something like

00:25:33.800 food preference there are cultures that that eat dogs and we find this absolutely disgusting right

00:25:39.140 and you know many of us eat cows the hindus find that absolutely disgusting and you know sacrilegious

00:25:44.900 so clearly we can't to talk about the ultimate wrongness of eating cows or dogs the conversation

00:25:51.480 can't begin and end at what people find disgusting right you you want you want to say it should be

00:25:56.920 possible to make progress on that by you know bring a hindu and a westerner together and let's let's have a

00:26:03.180 conversation and look at what's actually at stake here who's being reasonable who isn't and see if

00:26:08.020 see if we can't change those feelings and probably everyone listening can can think of things that

00:26:12.820 they were discussed at one point that they've maybe shifted on over time but but more generally i want

00:26:17.900 to make the claim that there's this there's another project which is just in principle is just as

00:26:23.420 scientific as the first project of telling an evolutionary story of how we got here and this project is

00:26:28.840 to talk about what is possible for us what what states of conscious well-being are possible

00:26:35.580 given the kinds of minds we have and given the kinds of minds we can someday have based on changes

00:26:41.860 whether cultural or pharmacological or genetic or you know just with neural transplants

00:26:47.680 or implants um we integrate our minds with technology who knows what states of consciousness are on offer

00:26:54.500 whatever is on offer a completed science of the human mind would be able to tell us just how good

00:27:02.060 it is possible to feel the truths about us will be known scientifically ultimately right so just as a

00:27:09.260 scientifically minded group of explorers could embark on a journey through a new landscape and try and

00:27:15.860 figure out the smart way to to navigate it using measurement and reason and and discussion among them so

00:27:22.980 a group of reasonable humans could navigate the moral landscape and and figure out new possibilities

00:27:27.220 better peaks as it were that we might um aspire to yeah that's a beautiful sounding project and

00:27:33.680 and certainly convincing you know to to many people but it runs into this this problem quite soon in

00:27:39.120 practice which is that from this start point you are putting yourself onto a springboard where you can

00:27:45.200 basically sort of sound for want of a better term morally superior you you will say you know

00:27:50.860 Muslims your book is sick and uh promotes violence and it provokes this really strong reaction among

00:27:57.800 people that you that you are you are being discriminatory you are you know you are being in some cases

00:28:03.400 you've been accused of being racist because because of the strength of which people hear these views

00:28:08.080 expressed how could you persuade someone who's not in your world right now that these ideas are for them and

00:28:20.240 they're for all humans they're not just for you is it possible to bridge yeah well well first i should

00:28:26.620 say is that despite how undiplomatic i can be on this topic and and you know seemingly unpragmatic and

00:28:34.120 even inept in communicating these ideas in a way that people can hear them people's minds are changed all

00:28:39.860 the time and even in the most extreme case you know i hear from fundamentalists you know former

00:28:44.500 fundamentalist christians or former fundamentalist muslims i mean i you know people who have described

00:28:50.100 themselves as this close to being jihadists i've heard from these people and met them in person

00:28:55.400 whose minds have been changed by a totally uncompromising and tone deaf and even apparently callous

00:29:03.980 criticism of their beliefs so it is a myth to say that someone can't be reasoned out of a position

00:29:10.460 they weren't reasoned into say right that's just simply untrue people through the the hammer blows

00:29:15.260 of reason all the time come out of their their dogmatism and their poorly considered views i mean

00:29:21.220 islam is for whatever reason especially politicized and you you you reap a whirlwind of criticism in

00:29:28.440 on the left politically for pointing out it's it's obvious issues whereas you know christianity if you

00:29:34.600 know on the left you can you know i can criticize fundamentalist christianity all day and we'll win

00:29:38.360 plaudits from people on the left but the moment that turns to islam people worry that this is

00:29:43.520 somehow discriminatory or and that's that's just a double standard we have to notice because it makes

00:29:48.400 no sense and the issue is that all we have is human conversation by which to orient ourselves to

00:29:55.760 these questions the most important questions in human life are questions we have to be able to talk

00:30:00.760 about and we have a very large proportion of humanity that is saying okay these questions these

00:30:09.680 most important questions how to live how to cause your children to live and what to die for these are

00:30:17.100 questions that we're not willing to talk about rationally these are questions upon which we have a

00:30:23.240 book that was dictated by the creator of the universe for whom we have no evidence which is will be

00:30:29.260 sacred until the end of the world the book can't be edited and all that's left for us to do now is to

00:30:35.780 decide how completely we will be enslaved by the contents of this book and if you say anything about

00:30:44.980 this project that is disparaging or even skeptical i will consider you my enemy right that's where we

00:30:52.800 live and it's completely insane right it it is as though we were living in a world where people

00:30:59.720 were doing this with the plays of shakespeare or the the or or the iliad and the odyssey that's how

00:31:04.920 perverse and and random it is and so it's impro it's appropriate to lose patience with the status quo so

00:31:12.420 this is such an interesting topic to me and and uh because i'm i'm thinking about this a lot in terms of

00:31:16.600 ted actually in terms of you know ted speakers come to the ted stage they're coming to try to persuade

00:31:21.000 people of something often sometimes those efforts succeed brilliantly and sometimes they fail and

00:31:25.800 sometimes when they fail they fail for unexpected reasons not because the person said anything that

00:31:29.600 wasn't true or sort of reasoned in one way but because they did things that provoked unintentionally

00:31:36.560 a sort of a defensive reaction in the audience and so communication didn't happen i guess my question

00:31:42.940 to you is let's say that your your project essentially is to sort of spread the good meme of moral progress

00:31:49.600 to the world you know how do you do that so that there's reason which is one way in which humans

00:31:54.580 persuade each other but um most people suppress reason as their main listening tool and they're

00:32:02.080 listening to other things they're impacted by their emotions they're impacted by whether they trust

00:32:05.200 someone they're impacted by whether they feel that there's a connection there i just wonder whether

00:32:09.580 there's a discussion it's more like if you like a tactical discussion about how you would do best

00:32:15.220 to persuade people who aren't westerners say aren't liberal westerners or whatever that you are are

00:32:22.400 right and that yes there may be some people who you have persuaded who've completely abandoned their

00:32:28.440 faith for example and come over to a different but there may i think there may also be many other

00:32:32.840 people i could be right or wrong about this we haven't done a survey but who they've heard you

00:32:38.220 they've heard the tone of some of what you've said and rather than being persuaded they've reacted

00:32:42.220 against it because it has sounded scornful or disrespectful is is that is that a danger

00:32:48.460 yeah well first i would point out that a person's capacity to be offended that the feeling of offense

00:33:00.420 is not an argument okay and it's not a virtue right it's not this is a we all have this thing

00:33:08.560 and in many people it is functioning like it is some kind of epistemological principle right like

00:33:17.660 that like it's this is this is how i'm going to judge the correctness of a view i'm going to react

00:33:23.560 to it instantly right so if i say to you well there's good reason to believe that men and women

00:33:31.620 differ biologically you know start with the uterus and and you start counting from there and the more

00:33:39.160 science studies us and sex differences we have discovered that this extends to human psychology

00:33:46.900 and human ability cognitive abilities and and interests and so you start linking those sentences

00:33:53.820 together people begin to get uncomfortable right the discomfort isn't evidence of anything

00:34:00.720 it's it's it's it being true right so correct not evidence but but it is real and and and and the

00:34:07.820 de facto impact of that may be that you lose part of your audience okay but i'm saying well yeah but

00:34:14.340 the point i'm making is that we have a project a collect collectively you know seven billion of us we

00:34:18.820 have a project to get more and more people more of the time to become sensitive to cognitive and

00:34:28.180 emotional reactions that are making conversation and and clear thinking impossible right and this is

00:34:34.600 one of them this is a the the feeling you get like i don't like the way this sounds it's a logical error

00:34:40.680 to move from that feeling to the feeling that this counts as evidence against the view correct so so

00:34:47.940 let's agree that that's a logical error but it might also still be a tactical error by you as the

00:34:54.340 persuader to trigger that offense sure what if you in other words if if you could make the case

00:35:00.440 a different way why wouldn't you well i do i mean i make it depending on the situation i make it every

00:35:06.620 which way it's i'm certainly not a provocateur i'm not saying the offensive thing just to get a rise out

00:35:11.920 of people i mean everything i i say is sincere it's not i'm not giving it the top spin that makes it

00:35:18.200 less accurate because i know i'm going to get a rise out of people in any case i think that it is

00:35:23.620 there are enough people who are meliorists there are enough people who are bending over backwards

00:35:30.320 to not offend on these topics and what we need are more and more people to say listen we we can all

00:35:38.080 we can all be a little thicker skinned than that and we're paying a price for political correctness

00:35:43.180 we're paying a price for not being totally straight and it is just a fact that just to talk

00:35:51.180 about the the narrow subject here but this applies to everything you know everything that's polarizing

00:35:56.040 it is a fact that we are paying an immense and generally unacknowledged and i would argue totally

00:36:04.800 unnecessary price for respecting this concept of revelation this the idea that any one of our books

00:36:11.060 it has an origin that is not merely human and that the moment you put a little pressure on that

00:36:17.760 belief you're already in in the territory of deeply offending billions of people so that's true but

00:36:25.140 let's so let me tell you a a story about my own sort of engagement with both religion and islam

00:36:32.280 it sort of intersects with this a bit i mean i was i was my parents were missionaries i grew up in

00:36:36.420 pakistan and afghanistan you know i grew up as a fundamentalist christian born-again christian

00:36:40.940 believed that um that my christianity determined whether i go to heaven or hell my father was in

00:36:47.180 pakistan for many years in the belief that unless he could persuade muslims to to accept christ that

00:36:54.520 they would go to hell and this this drove his whole approach to life and he was you know he was in his

00:36:59.060 own by his own measures a deeply moral person instead of making money in the west he was out there as a

00:37:04.560 pauper trying to persuade people of this belief over many years um he and my mother got to know

00:37:11.080 many muslim families at much greater depth and um something kind of surprising happened um they

00:37:19.360 they found that many of them were deeply spiritual and shared a lot of the sort of concerns they did

00:37:25.820 they they had you know they were concerned for the poverty they saw around them um they obviously you

00:37:31.420 know sacrificed for their families and they they worked hard and they're incredibly hospitable

00:37:36.000 and spiritual in the sense of sort of the quest for something deeper than themselves they found a

00:37:40.820 connection to him and surely slowly you know his views shifted to believing that actually muslims and

00:37:47.520 christians quite probably worship the same god just by different names and with different sort of um

00:37:52.820 accompanying beliefs but it was a monumental shift for someone who you know started from where he started

00:37:58.980 and his his conversations with muslims he he could go a very long way by starting from a position of

00:38:08.320 respect of of emphasizing the things the good things that were there so what i i guess my my question

00:38:13.780 for you is that because you i i hear what you say and i i believe what you say about your your

00:38:19.120 sincerity you are you're very very passionate about what you believe what people sometimes hear is a

00:38:24.880 withering scorn um which is very effective like in your ted talk i picked up one one line you made

00:38:30.260 about millions of muslim women being trapped in cloth bags and um if you say that as opposed to a

00:38:36.740 different way of interpreting like you could we could say that like i'm here trapped in a cloth bag

00:38:40.620 around my you know body for different reasons um if if there was a different story that said

00:38:46.720 look there are so many things that are extraordinary about your tradition and uh your religion there's this

00:38:52.940 emphasis on mercy there's this emphasis on compassion on hospitality many many muslims spend so much of

00:39:00.020 their lives trying to figure out how to make the world a better place they're not focused on the

00:39:04.500 stories of around violence and so forth that are part of the quran but arguably open to different

00:39:10.660 interpretation if you start from a different point don't you have a better chance of persuading

00:39:17.320 the silent majority of muslims to take you seriously and to want to be part of the solution

00:39:25.720 as opposed to provoking them to sort of say uh-oh outside a meme coming in defend reject and and to

00:39:34.180 sort of close you out and you actually make someone could argue that you make life harder for moderate

00:39:39.940 muslims because of that sort of feeling of scorn for the whole enterprise right well first it's never

00:39:48.420 it's virtually never that i'm i'm communicating scorn for people it's it's ideas that i'm criticizing and

00:39:55.680 what you what you talked about with your your family's experience in pakistan and afghanistan

00:40:00.320 none of that is surprising to me but there's a just a deeper principle here that that we're human

00:40:05.300 beings where we are on some basic level running the same software and you know culture is laid on

00:40:12.800 top of that but we just we have a deeper psychological capacity for empathy and ethical engagement and even

00:40:19.260 spiritual insight and i and i don't shy away from this concept of spirituality i i can i do consider

00:40:24.160 myself a very spiritual person as you know i've spent a lot of time practicing meditation i've spent

00:40:29.600 all told some years on silent meditation retreats and i think that the contemplative life is something

00:40:36.820 that we have only begun to think about in western scientific rational terms and it is a part of the

00:40:43.160 spectrum of human experience that i think is undoubtedly there and worth understanding culturally

00:40:49.820 the problem is that the respect for tradition and in particular the respect for revelation

00:40:54.880 keeps us balkanized into these separate moral communities that do have irreconcilable differences

00:41:01.720 and so you you pointed to the possibility of christians and muslims having a kind of rapprochement

00:41:07.520 around that we both worship the same god you can't play that game with hindus right there's like the

00:41:13.560 christian the bridge from christianity to hinduism only runs in one direction hindus can say well

00:41:19.160 jesus is just an avatar of vishnu but the christians can't look at hinduism with its multiplicity of

00:41:24.740 gods you know thousands of gods many of whom have you know the most garish fictional monstrosities

00:41:30.720 from the the point of view of christianity you've got people worshiping monkeys you know like hanuman

00:41:35.540 or or elephant-headed gods like ganesh none of that makes any sense it's it's all understood in a

00:41:41.940 context of karma and rebirth that also makes no sense uh somebody's right and somebody's wrong and

00:41:47.520 somebody's going to hell right if you believe these things and there's no reason we should find

00:41:53.360 ourselves in this circumstance for centuries more right that it makes and we and we we just don't

00:41:59.740 have the the luxury of waiting for centuries to change our views on these topics but but sometimes

00:42:07.160 um people like yourself i would say and and others who sort of criticize religion it's is they they see

00:42:13.780 they sound as if they're coming to it as if religion was um a belief like say belief that jupiter is the

00:42:20.060 biggest planet that was that someone if they were persuaded or shown how ridiculous an idea that was

00:42:25.500 would would abandon it and possibly miss um but again i should say that does happen that does happen

00:42:32.580 it can happen but it's it's a i i think it's a deeper thing that you're trying to overcome i mean

00:42:38.880 as someone who grew up religious it's not just a belief it's it's a relationship you know to let go

00:42:46.360 of a belief in god is worse than getting divorced it's sort of like it's a it's a relationship with

00:42:52.560 what you believe to be someone you've had uh connection with your whole life and um and so

00:43:00.300 when i i i think incoming critiques of it yes you know that there is a discussion to have around reason

00:43:08.780 but it's also it feels like you know your core identity is being attacked and i think when when that

00:43:14.280 happens to humans a whole other set of defense mechanisms come into play and i guess what i

00:43:19.640 wonder is let's say we agreed um that a world where religion did not play the dominant role that it

00:43:26.620 does now was could be a better world how would you get there it might not be a head-on assault on

00:43:34.980 religion it might be like if you look at what's happened with christianity a few hundred years ago

00:43:39.500 christianity was at least as violent as the most extreme aspects of of islam today and gradually

00:43:47.740 most christians have just downplayed those interpretations of the bible those arguments

00:43:54.420 you know the people espousing them have have lost cause people most people don't need as coherent

00:44:00.460 and consistent a worldview as as you need and as i kind of feel like i i need most people are able to

00:44:05.820 embrace an element of contradiction and to say you know i love the traditions here and i i believe in

00:44:11.740 some of the core ideas of of religion even with hinduism christians and hindus can unite on certain

00:44:18.340 things they can unite in in an idea that life is about more than shopping um it's about you know the

00:44:24.480 exploration of mystery and wonder and the divine and the pursuit you know perhaps god is all around us

00:44:28.740 gods are all around us those two things don't have to be that different they can agree on compassion

00:44:32.660 religion as as like as a core operating system value i would argue it's possible that an approach

00:44:39.020 that said i love that about your religion that that is at the heart of it and that you do that

00:44:44.560 um i'm uncomfortable with this how you know can we talk about that but but it starts from a position

00:44:50.180 of respect for you know for for what is good and and arguably the the single biggest thing that

00:44:57.520 religions do that fundamentally plays to the moral world you want is that they have persuaded billions

00:45:04.380 of people that they should pursue the interests of others over themselves and that that i think is

00:45:12.000 the hardest thing that the abandonment of religion hasn't really handled yet is that by saying you know

00:45:19.060 all those rules don't matter anymore find yourself follow your passion be your thing we haven't

00:45:24.360 inspired enough people yet to say as a core part of that by the way don't just live for yourself

00:45:31.280 well i think the need is to be able to talk about the most important questions in human life without

00:45:39.620 losing our connection to one another and we are not playing that game well we need to be able to hear

00:45:46.340 people out we need to be able to reason about everything because reasoning is the only thing that scales

00:45:53.520 it's the only way of talking about a problem which stands the chance of being universalizable it's it's

00:46:02.140 the and this is why identity politics is clearly a dead end it can't be that this thing is important

00:46:11.440 and the whole world needs to take it on board because you are you or because you have the color of skin

00:46:18.820 that you do right by accident it whatever this thing is whatever if this is going to going to relate to

00:46:25.140 you know our building a durable cosmopolitan pluralistic future together this thing has to be

00:46:31.860 true and important because it's touching the way the world is for everyone on some level it's touching

00:46:38.940 some universalizable principle of human psychology and human flourishing and economics or whatever it is

00:46:44.820 and our religious provincialism doesn't do that our incompatible claims about revelation don't do that

00:46:52.860 our the mere accidents of birth and skin color and gender don't do that and so we need we need to again

00:46:59.540 we have to be able to reason as human beings very much in in the style of so to take john rawls for a second

00:47:05.860 he had this brilliant thought experiment which is that it was called the veil of ignorance or the original position

00:47:11.480 where he he he asked us to imagine organizing a society such that you know we figure out what we

00:47:18.600 think are you know just and fair arrangements between people but we did this from behind a veil of

00:47:23.880 ignorance where we don't know who we're going to be in that society right so and and this is a a starting

00:47:29.160 position where you then could imagine that whoever whoever you are whether you're a neo-nazi or a black person or or a

00:47:37.560 a muslim or an atheist whoever you are not knowing who you're going to be in this society

00:47:44.680 this is a heuristic that could allow people to converge on principles of fairness uh without

00:47:50.280 them having to sort out their differences in advance from that veil you could have a recent

00:47:54.520 discussion about what would be the limits of inequality in a society what would be the

00:47:58.040 fundamental rights that you would want at a very minimum to have and you don't you don't know if

00:48:03.240 you're you know high iq or low iq you don't know you don't know where you where you will fall right

00:48:09.320 and and this is a principle that generally i think is is unacknowledged that we have to spend much more

00:48:14.840 time uh acknowledging which is that so much of this comes down to luck i mean some people are so much

00:48:22.280 luckier than other people you're lucky to be born in the right place at the right time to the right

00:48:26.920 parents with the right economic opportunities and all of those switches can be toggled in the

00:48:33.880 other direction and you have none of that and through no fault of your own this is a massive

00:48:40.360 lottery and so much of what will make the future better is for us to care about the the most shocking

00:48:47.960 disparities in in luck and correct for them collectively and that john rawsian conversation

00:48:54.840 seems like a beautiful thing imagining that that people just using the tools of sort of um

00:48:59.000 you know reason and fairness and discussion among them you could you could come up to certain basic

00:49:03.080 fundamentals of a society for example like as soon as you have that discussion everyone puts basic

00:49:08.520 health care and education right at the high list of something that a society of course you know would

00:49:14.360 would would do because you would you would want that at a minimum to give yourself a chance

00:49:17.880 and um and and you can build on many other things on the top of it and then the tragedy of the

00:49:22.760 present seems to be that certain discussions seem to get shut down before they can even start with

00:49:28.040 the lines that you can't say that to me because of who you are and who i am yeah well that's identity

00:49:34.200 politics yeah yeah and it's it's a try i agree with you that it's it's a tragedy i have this picture of

00:49:39.000 these sort of two different audiences so from the view of someone speaking to an audience you know

00:49:42.440 there's an audience sort of here's the speaker and the people are watching and they're sort of their

00:49:46.520 eyes are open and and uh their arms are open and they're excited and they're listening and then the other

00:49:51.400 audience where they've heard something that means oh i don't know about you and they're in protection

00:49:56.120 mode i think there are strategies to provoke the sort of you know the opening of the arms and and

00:50:02.440 the listening and one obvious question i guess is whether should we start every conversation when

00:50:10.200 there are different identity groups involved with some kind of recognition of you know the biggest

00:50:15.080 concerns of the other group i wonder whether that's something that we need to spend more time on

00:50:18.680 well i think there are tricks as you say that are very useful and that we are paying a terrible

00:50:24.920 price for not remembering enough so it's like let's not call them tricks let's call them wise

00:50:30.760 wise maxims yeah but but it's just only it's it's it's something like you know so many of these

00:50:36.600 arguments occur with each side straw man in the other right so you take the worst version of your

00:50:43.640 opponent's view one that he he or she can't wouldn't sign off on and you attack that and

00:50:50.280 that's totally unpersuasive what we need is the opposite so there's a notion of steel manning which

00:50:54.760 is is now a term of jargon among us where you you you you prop up the best possible version of your

00:51:02.760 opponent's view which they will not find fault with right so let me just let me just summarize what i

00:51:09.240 think you think and then what you put into that place is perfect right that's the way to start one

00:51:15.080 of these debates right right now that's but it's but and i would i would add one more um tweak to it

00:51:20.120 perhaps sam which is which is not just that's the way you think even before that it's this is the way

00:51:25.560 that you feel and i think i think i think you know that feelings are so fragile right now that people

00:51:31.160 want that recognition first almost to feel that that more human connection not just an intellectual

00:51:36.680 connection yeah although i would say that this dichotomy between reason and emotion or the

00:51:41.880 intellect and and feeling that is it's a bit of another one of these myths it's certainly not the

00:51:47.400 case neurologically and i would say it's generally not the case experientially i mean when i i mean

00:51:52.520 none of this is divorced from emotion for me you know like when i'm talking like so that first ted

00:51:58.600 talk i gave for you where i was talking about you know the moral landscape and how science can

00:52:03.880 understand human values and i'm you know i'm a spock-like character i actually almost burst into

00:52:09.720 tears at one moment i'm talking about honor killing and i then i ask you to imagine what it's like to be

00:52:15.400 a father who believes that that the family honor and male honor is so predicated on the sexual purity of

00:52:24.120 the girls in the family that when he has it when his daughter gets raped what he's moved to do is to

00:52:30.600 kill her out of shame right so that would just by stating that example i virtually burst into tears

00:52:36.760 so i'm reasoning in a cold and calculating way about what is right and what is wrong and the power of

00:52:41.800 ideas but this is all you know this is all just just a a neuron away from a a very energized and feeling

00:52:51.640 laden contest but but um but if your audience hadn't been the ted audience say but had been um an audience

00:52:58.360 including say it was an audience in an islamic country there is an edit to that talk that could

00:53:04.600 have made it much more effective which is to start by saying look um i understand the the beauty and the

00:53:12.280 idea of honor i understand that you come from a tradition where family values are deeply respected

00:53:18.600 where you want you want to celebrate the purity of marriage you don't want people engaging in

00:53:24.520 widespread infidelity you look at what's happening in the west and you're horrified by what you see

00:53:29.400 you're horrified by the movies you see you don't want your society to be like that that those i i

00:53:34.520 understand the beauty of that but and then from there you go but you can't go from there to the

00:53:39.240 horror of well i did sort of make that point even in that talk but this is a point i do make it's not

00:53:46.440 it's not hard to see the merit in the the criticism of western superficiality and materialism and

00:53:55.560 blindness to what is sacred or possibly sacred about our appearance here we have done a bad job as you

00:54:01.560 say in in secular culture particularly in the west in valuing something more than just gratifying one

00:54:10.680 desire after the next you know and so it's it can't all be a matter of getting nice tastes on your

00:54:17.000 tongue and buying the most expensive watch you can afford right and yet clearly we need a deeper and

00:54:23.880 truly universalizable conversation about what is most profound and what is what is possible here and i again

00:54:31.880 i just keep this is this is where you have to draw the line and have to be uncompromising i think

00:54:37.880 the idea that we will get to a good place by simply reducing our adherence to these irreconcilable

00:54:50.120 claims of revelation like they're getting christians and muslims and jews to be just a little bit less

00:54:55.400 fundamentalists more of the time that that is the that incremental effort is the end game i think that is

00:55:03.720 clearly untrue because the problem is there's an asymmetry here there's an advantage to fundamentalism

00:55:10.120 always because one when you go back to the books the books never tell you to be a moderate they never

00:55:15.400 tell you the problems with fundamentalism and fundamentalism can always be rebooted by just

00:55:21.000 merely adhering to the text and there's something more honest about it and this again this is where

00:55:27.480 where there's an asymmetry within the every one of these traditions where the fundamentalists are on

00:55:31.880 firmer ground theologically than the the moderates or the liberals because they can always say listen

00:55:37.400 i just want to know what the book says i just want to i want an honest adherence to what is here on the

00:55:44.120 page and what that gets you is intolerable right you have to be doing some advanced not entirely

00:55:52.840 straightforward casuistry with the book to edit out the bad parts so let me pull you back to to um almost

00:56:00.520 to the start point of your position here um your start point comes from recognizing that uh all that

00:56:07.720 matters are things that happen to sentient beings you know it's if an atom moves here and there the

00:56:12.920 universe no big deal if something suffers or enjoy something that that matters and that's that's the

00:56:18.520 anchoring view of um of of the position so that's fundamentally a statement about consciousness

00:56:24.520 consciousness yeah um and yet consciousness i think in your view certainly in mine is is the one big

00:56:32.600 thing that we know about that science so far has um miserably failed to give a really compelling

00:56:38.920 explanation of uh i i would say so you've you've got you've got a view that you could science can get

00:56:46.280 you to a sort of a rational view of of right and wrong of morality that's anchored in in a story about

00:56:52.360 something that science really can't explain how how do you how do you think about that is that is

00:56:56.840 that um is that a paradox or yeah well you know i as you know i'm one of these people who believes

00:57:04.120 there is a so-called hard problem of consciousness that consciousness is unlike anything else we've

00:57:08.680 attempted to study or understand scientifically and is simply a fact that the only evidence for

00:57:16.040 consciousness in the universe is our direct experience of consciousness itself but the flip

00:57:24.360 side of that is that consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion it's the one thing we

00:57:29.080 can't be mistaken about consciousness whatever it is exists i think therefore i am the original yeah

00:57:34.600 but i mean this is a i think descartes might have meant something very close to this but

00:57:38.920 consciousness is deeper than than thought it's and and and you know the the i am part is also fishy

00:57:44.600 because i think the the self is is an illusion the self is a construct there's no stable unchanging

00:57:49.880 self carried over from one moment to the next something feels therefore something is yeah there

00:57:55.240 is there is something seems to be happening and that seeming is what we mean by consciousness so

00:58:00.840 even if you're you we're not actually doing a podcast now and you're just dreaming that we are

00:58:05.000 even if we're just brains and vats if we're in the matrix if we could be radically confused about

00:58:09.960 everything but whatever this this seeming is the fact that the lights are on that is consciousness

00:58:17.480 the fact that there's a qualitative character to our appearance here to being and that some systems

00:58:24.120 have it and and probably some systems don't right and even some parts of the brain have it and some

00:58:28.680 parts of the brain don't that is mysterious but the fact that that is so is the one thing that isn't

00:58:37.720 open to any possible doubt and that's and so that's a it is the kind of paradox because it's the one

00:58:43.720 thing it is the thing that is doing all the understanding we don't understand consciousness

00:58:48.920 but unless something appears in consciousness it isn't an empirical datum to to be taken into account

00:58:55.400 at all is is there any hope that in the next 10 years say that we make material progress in

00:59:02.520 understanding consciousness i mean it's been this riddle for thousands of years um it feels like

00:59:07.720 in some ways that there's going to be dramatic new data points over the next decade as the machines

00:59:12.520 we build start to exhibit what looks very much like conscious behavior do you think that's going to force

00:59:19.240 us to make decisions uh you know like the decision on whether the things we create are conscious or not

00:59:26.520 that there's huge um implications of that do you think we'll be able to make a wise decision about

00:59:31.960 that or will that just remain impossibly impenetrable well i think several things might occur and there and it

00:59:39.560 matters which universe we find ourselves in i think it it's it's hugely consequential that we might

00:59:46.520 build conscious machines therefore machines that can suffer and machines that can experience well-being

00:59:52.520 and perhaps suffer unimaginably horribly in ways that we don't understand or or experience well-being

00:59:59.240 that that exceeds our own that ethically is of enormous importance it's you know in certain

01:00:06.680 cases you could imagine it being the most ethically consequential thing that has ever happened in the

01:00:11.080 universe if we could build simulated worlds that are essentially hell realms and populate them with

01:00:16.280 conscious minds you know that would be the worst possible thing we could do it would and and it would i

01:00:22.200 should point out give us the same moral stature as the god of the bible or the quran we get if and

01:00:28.120 if he exists as believers believe he does which is to say this is a completely psychopathic thing to

01:00:33.720 do to create a hell and populate it so it matters if that's the case if that's possible and it certainly

01:00:39.320 matters if we stumble into that circumstance not knowing we've even done it right so that like we

01:00:43.800 wouldn't want to do that on purpose we wouldn't want to create hell on purpose and yet it's possible

01:00:48.040 that we could do it inadvertently given just the physics of things what i think is quite likely and

01:00:55.000 pretty undesirable from my point of view is that we could lose sight of this being an interesting

01:00:59.720 problem in the first place we could build machines that seem conscious seem so credibly conscious to us

01:01:06.520 far in advance of our understanding what consciousness is at the level of information processing our machines

01:01:12.440 will all be passing the turing test we'll feel in relationship helplessly in thrust into relationship

01:01:18.200 with them they'll make the right facial expressions we'll we'll design them this way because we'll want

01:01:22.840 to interact with machines at least in certain circumstances that make us feel like we're in

01:01:27.320 relationship with another person and it'll just be obvious to us that our you know robot servant is

01:01:34.520 conscious because it seems so and if we don't know i mean there's a perfect disjunction here we could

01:01:40.920 build systems that are not conscious but seem conscious and we could build systems that don't

01:01:45.800 seem conscious at all because we haven't built the interface for them to seem so but they in fact are

01:01:50.440 conscious perhaps google is suffering right now with all that complexity of information processing that's

01:01:55.960 going on and it's in woe at the dismal nature of all the searches that people are typing into it

01:02:00.920 and wishes that the input could be better yeah it's hard to take that concern seriously but but

01:02:05.640 something like that is certainly possible sam because precisely because we're building these

01:02:11.800 machines making them more powerful at some point we will have to make an effort to put human values

01:02:17.560 into them so we're going to have to decide what those values are and even if you just look at it from

01:02:23.240 that standpoint it seems to me your work is incredibly important i mean these these questions are incredibly

01:02:29.240 hard to resolve but at some point we're building things that need to operate based on some kind

01:02:36.520 of moral code and so we have to bring more people into this conversation we have to figure out and

01:02:41.240 have to try and figure out a way of having it that pulls in as many people as possible you know

01:02:46.120 collaboratively and constructively and get past this horrible moment in history where truth is nothing

01:02:52.280 reason is nothing and it's all it's all just a fight well yeah so this is philosophy on a deadline

01:02:58.760 and this is this is one of the the silver linings to the risk here is that being forced to build our

01:03:06.920 values into technology that's becoming more powerful than we are will force us to ignore the academic

01:03:15.880 quibbles here and acknowledge that there are better and worse answers to moral questions and

01:03:20.920 to just take self-driving cars as one example and again it's a near-term example it's already here

01:03:27.240 it's an engineering problem that we have to solve and then the question is what moral biases and

01:03:33.000 intuitions do you want to build into your robot cars do you want cars that run over white people

01:03:39.800 preferentially because of all the white privilege in the world do you want cars that put the drivers

01:03:46.520 or the passengers life at some greater risk if we're talking about a trolley problem where it's

01:03:52.680 the one versus the five or the one versus the ten one child versus three old people exactly so so

01:03:58.600 and to not answer these questions is to answer them one other way by default you either make your car

01:04:05.080 blind to the differences between people or you make it sensitive to the differences and so there you you it's a

01:04:10.840 forced choice i think people have different intuitions about what are the right answers

01:04:15.800 are here but clearly there are wrong answers and they're clearly answers and some of the traditional

01:04:21.320 answers that you would get from a religion like islam for instance i will bet will be judged wrong

01:04:28.120 even by a majority of muslims when this technology has to come online for everyone and and if they are

01:04:34.520 judged wrong by a majority of muslims that's maybe a an indication that people are incapable of moral

01:04:41.640 reasoning across across you know long-held this is what happens this is again this is and this has

01:04:46.360 happened as you pointed out to christianity in a very effective way i mean christianity if you the

01:04:51.800 crit the crit we're not tending to meet the christians of the 14th century anymore and that's because of

01:04:56.680 what scientific rationality and secular politics and humanism and capitalism and just modernity

01:05:04.520 in general has done to christianity and to some degree the disparity we see between christianity

01:05:09.880 and judaism and islam now is uh because islam is a a much is a vast religion i mean there's it's

01:05:17.000 nearly two billion people and much of the muslim world has not suffered the same centuries-long

01:05:22.920 collision with modernity or and the collision it's suffering now is occurring over a much shorter

01:05:28.120 time frame and without many of the same social and economic benefits being spread to these societies

01:05:35.240 and so we're we have to keep the end game in view the end game has to be a viable global civilization

01:05:44.040 that is pluralistic cosmopolitan tolerant of difference and yet convergent on the same answers

01:05:53.560 to the most important questions in life we can't be radically tolerant of difference these ideas are

01:05:59.640 for everyone not for one group for everyone and uh you're you're ready to fight for that i'm trying

01:06:06.120 i'm trying with your help sam it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation thank you so much for

01:06:12.280 all your time here and wish you the best if you find the waking up podcast valuable there are many

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 30, 2018

The TED Interview

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