In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with philosopher Jack Graham McElroy to talk about the multiverse and philosophy. We talk about what philosophy is, why it's important, and how it can help us understand the universe and the mysteries of the universe. We also talk about some of the problems that philosophers should be trying to solve in order to make sense of the world we live in, and why we should care about them. I hope you enjoy this episode, and that it makes you think about how important it is to have a philosophy that can help you understand the world and the questions it poses to you and your fellow human beings. If you're interested in learning more about philosophy and philosophy's role in the universe, then you'll want to check out this episode! This episode was produced by Jack McElory, and edited by Alex Blumberg, with additional editing and production help by Jack McCartan, and additional mixing and mastering by Ben Kotler. Music by Ian Dorsch, and mixed by Matthew Boll, and Bobby Lord, and produced by Ben Koppel, with help from Alex Blanchard, and Matthew Kuchta, and Rachel Ward, and a very special thanks to Rachel Ward. and Jack O'Donnell, and the excellent work of Jack McElvain, who provided the sound design and production assistance by James Ransom, and Ben Kuchner. , and the amazing work of James Hill, and Jack Adams, and Brian Cox. We're working on a new sound design, and we're doing some amazing mixing, and editing, and our thanks to our excellent sound design by Alex McEloy, and Andrew Kuchter, and also the amazing editing, as well as our good friend, and his excellent mixing and mixing, for the excellent editing and mastering and mastering, and all of our amazing sound effects. Thanks to our amazing engineering, and thanks to the wonderful support from our good sound effects, our excellent mixing, which was done by our excellent mastering and editing and mixing and editing by our good friends, and sound effects and our amazing mixing and production, and so much more. Thank you so much to our wonderful editors, and to all the help from our amazing editors, so we can't thank you for all of you, so much thanks to all of your support and all the support and support, again and again, we really appreciate all of the support we can see you, you're amazing.
00:00:25.000Yeah, so I think it's interesting to think why philosophers need to think about the multiverse, right?
00:00:32.000It tends to be like a theory thrown about by physicists and stuff.
00:00:36.000But I think at the moment, we don't want to be talking about philosophy as a society.
00:00:41.000We're like, Stuck in this idea of scientism, the view that science can solve all of these problems and questions.
00:00:47.000So you've probably heard people like Lawrence Krauss or Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox.
00:00:54.000They all say something along the lines of like, philosophy is dead.
00:00:57.000So just before we get into the multiverse, it's probably best to say like...
00:01:00.000What philosophy is and what the point of talking about the multiverses.
00:01:05.000So this is something I ask every philosopher I speak to, like what they take philosophy to be, because it's really interesting to see how all the ideas they discuss fall into the wider projects.
00:01:15.000One of the ideas that I love is this one by the late great British philosopher Mary Midgley.
00:01:21.000She likens philosophy to a kind of plumbing.
00:01:24.000So we have these conversations in our societies and these conversations are flowing around and likewise we have these pipes running underneath our houses keeping the water flowing.
00:01:35.000But occasionally it gets clogged and so the philosopher needs to Pull up the floorboards, see what the clog is, and help the conversation move along again.
00:01:43.000So these are things like what it is to be a woman or what it is to have free speech or what it means to say that a gene is selfish.
00:01:51.000So that's, I see, like the primary job of the philosopher, something we're all doing every day, like trying to understand the concepts we're using.
00:01:58.000Then also there's this bigger aspect of philosophy which is like how it all hangs together in the broadest possible sense of the term.
00:02:06.000Like let's put all of the pieces of the puzzle together from physics, biology and the arts and let's try and get a big picture of the world.
00:02:14.000And if we're missing a piece of the puzzle, let's have our best guess about what that piece could be.
00:02:20.000And so the questions that come out of that, the questions that philosophy asks are things like, why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing?
00:02:45.000But the big question, to get to the multiverse now, is...
00:02:48.000The big question for me and how all of my work seems to explore this fundamental question, the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus said the fundamental question of philosophy is whether life is or is not worth living.
00:03:13.000And so that's where the multiverse, new atheism and these arguments for theism all come in into the project.
00:03:21.000I think it's ridiculous to dismiss philosophy because you are a proponent of science.
00:03:27.000Just that reductionist perspective, the idea that thinking about things and developing, for lack of a better term, a philosophy, developing your own personal philosophy, taking from the accounts of others and their perspectives and their interesting,
00:03:43.000unique view of the world that we live in, the idea that that's not significant or important to me seems pretty silly.
00:03:55.000Science splits the atom, it puts man on the moon.
00:03:58.000So it seems like it's going to solve all these problems.
00:04:01.000Right, but the human beings that took place in the experiments that led to the splitting of the atom all had to have some sort of a philosophy that they managed their life by.
00:04:27.000Thing that he had created that was ultimately going to lead to destruction of hundreds of thousands alive, if not the entire human race itself, which was very deeply based in philosophy, like his perspective and his struggles with it.
00:04:41.000I mean, if he was just like an automaton, like some, you know, sociopathic, just super Alzheimer's guy, you know, that didn't—not autism guy, rather, that didn't think at all about— No concept at all about empathy,
00:05:00.000no concept at all about our perspective.
00:05:02.000He would just plow forth ahead and just launch bombs.
00:05:07.000Science depends on human beings that have a unique way of thinking, and how does that not come out of philosophy?
00:05:15.000Well, that seems to be like the failure of new atheism fundamentally, right?
00:05:19.000We've got this movement in the early 2000s, Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, who were all being critical of religion in the light of like the September 11th terrorist attack and people thinking that religion thinks as if it's though it's beyond like criticism.
00:05:35.000But then once that project Once they embark on that project and they criticize religion, there isn't really anything left there.
00:05:43.000They don't do the project of philosophy of finding the meaning in the ethics.
00:05:47.000And when they try to do it, it's lacking.
00:05:50.000So I see that as the reason why new atheism is going out of favor, why it's becoming unfashionable, because it can't answer those questions.
00:05:57.000Well, I think it becomes almost as dogmatic as religion itself.
00:06:03.000Atheism, in a lot of ways, is kind of related.
00:06:05.000They're committed to this idea that there is nothing else.
00:06:22.000Marshall and Karl were having a wrestling match for about 15 minutes, and poor little Karl was over there.
00:06:29.000It's also one of the hottest days of the year without aircon, so he's really going hard for the Panthers.
00:06:36.000I was where I was before I distracted.
00:06:38.000So I just think that these people sort of looked at this as religion is all this superstitious nonsense that these people have concocted and put together over years to keep people in line.
00:06:51.000And science is something that we can prove and see.
00:07:27.000Are you a part of some very bizarre journey that the soul has to go through in this environment before it expands and goes into the next dimension, the next phase of existence?
00:08:25.000And I think, unfortunately, brilliant people that are so used to schooling people in debates, like Christopher Hitchens, like Sam Harris, these guys are so good at making religious zealots look like buffoons, right?
00:08:39.000And you get real good at that, and you just sort of think that, look, I got it down.
00:08:44.000These fucking religious people, they don't know what the fuck's going on.
00:10:20.000The Kalam cosmological argument in philosophy is really popular.
00:10:23.000It just goes, everything that begins to exist has a cause.
00:10:26.000The universe began to exist, therefore it needs a cause.
00:10:30.000And then you do this deduction to figure out what kind of cause that could be, and it would have to be something outside of time and space with power and knowledge to bring this into being.
00:10:41.000That might get you all the way to God.
00:10:42.000That's a really strong reason for believing in God.
00:10:44.000And the answers the atheists give in place of it are nowhere near as strong.
00:10:48.000And likewise, like the argument from fine-tuning, which is gaining traction again.
00:10:53.000The physicist Sir Roger Penrose said that the fundamental laws of nature, like 26 of them, have to be delicately balanced perfectly to allow planets and intelligent life to form.
00:11:05.000He calculates that the initial low entropy point of the universe had to be 1 in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, which means if you sat there writing out that number for the law of entropy and the condition when the universe first started expanding,
00:11:21.000And you wrote down one digit every second.
00:11:23.000You'd still be writing out that number now.
00:11:25.000That number is so astronomically huge that the odds of us being here are incredible.
00:11:30.000And when we're thinking of probability theory, if we're looking at the best explanation for that, then I think those that posit the existence of God have the better hand.
00:11:40.000I'm not religious, but I think we have to put our hands up and go, no, to those two problems, they've got really strong arguments for believing in God.
00:11:48.000But, you know, people like Dawkins, people like Hitchens and the like, even Dennett, I think Harris is a little bit more, I guess, sympathetic to those arguments than the other three.
00:12:01.000But, you know, they're not serious about following the arguments.
00:12:05.000They're not serious about going wherever they take them.
00:12:08.000Like you say, there is a dogmatism there.
00:12:13.000They're not open-minded enough on these points.
00:12:17.000A lot of it is—all the public discourse that we've seen that you can watch on YouTube between atheists and religious scholars, it generally turns into a debate.
00:12:29.000They're almost all debates, and almost all of these debates are, in a sense, intellectual competitions.
00:13:38.000And they come in my head, and they go, and a lot of times while I'm saying them, I do it on the podcast all the time, I go, wait a minute, that doesn't make sense, because of this.
00:13:45.000I don't want to be that buffoon that's connected to the first shit that comes out of my mouth, and I think that happens with a lot of people.
00:13:54.000I also think the idea that there's no God, that there's nothing...
00:14:05.000I think it's probably always been here.
00:14:07.000And I think Sir Roger Penrose's latest work, he seems to think that the Big Bang is just one of a series of these events.
00:14:17.000I don't want to paraphrase because I know I'll fuck it up.
00:14:19.000His position is not that that was the beginning, that this is probably a series of these things that have gone on in eternity, and that the infinite nature of the universe is probably something that even mathematically,
00:14:36.000even if you get the most genius people, they're probably going to struggle to understand something that has no boundaries.
00:15:09.000They're starting to think now that the universe is quite a bit older than they thought it was before because of the observations of these galaxies by the James Webb telescope.
00:15:18.000So now there's certain people that are these...
00:15:25.000Controversial ideas they're throwing around about 22 billion years old or 23 billion years old.
00:15:30.000It's interesting what you say, first of all, about us being so involved with our egos in terms of these arguments.
00:15:36.000It's always baffled me that people can care about their views or their philosophies to such an extent that they're willing to die on these hills.
00:15:45.000They count in their wins and not their losses.
00:15:51.000Two and a half hour conversation with Jordan Peterson on his podcast about his motivations for being religious.
00:15:58.000And so I basically sketched out my broad argument, which is atheism's shortcomings are it can't answer the two problems we've just spoke about, why there's something rather than nothing fine-tuning.
00:16:08.000But then the problem with theism is that no perfectly good God would allow for evolution by natural selection.
00:16:15.000Like, what a wicked thing to do to create the rules of the game to be that To have intelligent life, it necessitates the pain and suffering of countless sentient creatures over billions of years.
00:16:27.000If God exists, then God's a psychopath, right?
00:17:36.000But then you've got this big problem for belief in God.
00:17:39.000And like you say, this is moving philosophers of religion to this really interesting space where they ask, well, maybe we need a different concept of God, like the universe.
00:17:47.000So this is pantheism, the idea that God and the universe are identical.
00:17:51.000And panentheism is the view where The universe is in God, but there's this extra layer of God, which is like heaven or the thing that brought it into being.
00:17:59.000I'm glad there's a word for it, because I've just been saying the universe is God.
00:18:04.000The interesting thing about pantheism is, like, is it worthy of the name God, like the universe?
00:18:10.000Because if it's just nature-loving atheism, then that doesn't get you far.
00:18:14.000But I think if you believe that the universe is fundamentally conscious, like there is some will or agency underlying the things that we interact with, then I think that gets you pretty close to a concept of God.
00:18:29.000Do you think we have an egocentric perspective of consciousness that it only applies to things that move and that things that can express themselves?
00:18:39.000There's a reason why I think people don't want to buy houses where people were murdered.
00:18:45.000Because they think the consciousness is still like lingering.
00:19:28.000And in watching the documentary, it was so sad to me to watch these people that for decades were deceived and led by this person, and at the end of it, they're weeping and crying.
00:20:20.000Or when you get a record or something, or you're listening to it on Spotify or something, like a song, but you know the person who's made that song has done something dreadful.
00:20:31.000You get that same kind of feeling then.
00:20:33.000So maybe the simpler explanation is something like, You know, it's your association with these things.
00:20:40.000It's just these connections in your brain going, bad thing, this building, right?
00:21:14.000My point is that Perhaps everything has some sort of a consciousness.
00:21:20.000We just have this egocentric perspective of what consciousness means, because to living things, it has ego, it has biological needs, human reward systems, they're all in play.
00:21:31.000Social structures and the value of status, and we're moving around through this...
00:21:37.000The grid of other beings and we call that consciousness because that is our experience with it.
00:21:43.000But maybe this table has consciousness.
00:21:48.000They just don't have an ability to express themselves and they don't have this language and culture and all this other stuff that we connect to consciousness.
00:21:57.000But that it is an integral part of everything in the universe.
00:22:01.000And if the universe is God, the universe creating all these things, It is essentially a creation machine, right?
00:22:23.000perspective that a lot of religious zealots put to these ancient texts.
00:22:28.000Look, we don't trust what people in the 1950s thought about dentistry.
00:22:33.000Why the fuck do we trust people from 2000 years ago what they thought about God?
00:22:40.000It's kind of a crazy thing, because one of two things is either true.
00:22:44.000Either this is God's Word, and God is a psychopath, or this is the hand of human beings that is writing down an oral tradition of over a thousand years and trying to put in perspective what steps that we have to apply to our civilization in order to move towards a more loving and prosperous place,
00:24:12.000And if you want to combine that with, like, a process theology in which God is identical to the world and the world's getting better, and it's better to, like, start a business, go broke, pull yourself up again, and then succeed than it is just to have the best thing to begin with.
00:24:26.000Than to win the lottery when you're ten.
00:24:28.000So that taps into our intuitions about what it is to develop a great character and have, you know, a better world, you might think.
00:24:36.000But I suppose, like, pre-1859, before On the Origin of Species in Darwin, I think, actually, theism was the reasonable worldview to have, like, this idea of this God outside of time and space.
00:24:50.000And you can run all of these, they call them, like, theodicies and defences, like, reasons why God allows evil to exist.
00:24:56.000I think when you think about Like the evils, like events, like the wars and all the diseases that are in our country, in our world.
00:25:08.000You sort of go, well, I can see how some of these defenses, like you need hurricanes for hurricane relief funds, or you need to go broke to appreciate money or something, right?
00:25:17.000All of these, I think they probably work for humans.
00:25:20.000But then I don't think since then, and maybe this is a part of the reason why people or Christians, especially in this country, Maybe it's the only way.
00:25:50.000Maybe this process of natural selection and of constant improvement and what we call evolution maybe is the only way.
00:25:58.000I worry though that when you do the maths whether it can be justified.
00:26:02.000We're talking like trillions of uncountable animals.
00:27:06.000But you see the juxtaposition there, right?
00:27:10.000You've got people that think it's wrong, but they're doing otherwise.
00:27:13.000Well, it's not that they're doing otherwise.
00:27:14.000They can compartmentalize because factory farming, we talked about this yesterday, they have ag-gag laws.
00:27:21.000A couple days ago with Russell Crowe, rather.
00:27:23.000Ag-gag laws prevent people from detailing the horrific conditions which these animals live in.
00:27:29.000If you film it, if you're a worker there and you're like, this is horrific, I'm going to film this and out this place, you'll go to jail, which is insane.
00:27:40.000Russell Crowe was in here the other day and he keeps 200 head of cattle.
00:27:44.000He has a ranch in the bush in Australia.
00:27:47.000And the way he described, the way he takes care of these animals, the way they gently move them into new pastures, they live this idyllic life, and he's like, and the meat is better, you feel better about the whole thing.
00:28:00.000I've heard him say something about this before, where he goes like, but ultimately, it's because it tastes better.
00:28:06.000So although I'm happy he's doing it, this is no comparison to factory farming.
00:28:11.000And if all the farming that was out there in the world was like Russell Crowe's, then...
00:28:15.000It's not just because it tastes better.
00:28:17.000Yeah, do you think he's got like the...
00:28:36.000Would you rather have your nose cut off, your children taken away from you, be stuffed in a cage for your life and pumped full of hormones and then be electrocuted or have your throat slit?
00:28:46.000Or would you rather run around in the field with your family and then one day the lights just go out?
00:28:52.000Well, one day the lights are going to go out anyway.
00:31:10.000There's a reason why when we take our dogs to the vets to be euthanized, that you don't get there and the vet pulls out a fucking crossbow or a gun or something, right?
00:34:49.000If you watch them whimper on the ground in pain, you'd probably shoot yourself.
00:34:52.000The interesting thing is as soon as you pick a number, as long as it's not infinite, then you recognize that non-human animals have a comparable value to human beings.
00:35:00.000And you have to draw the line somewhere.
00:35:02.000There's going to be a rough, like, number.
00:35:04.000It's like how many leaves make a pile of leaves or water droplets make a cloud.
00:35:08.000It's not going to be clear exactly how many, but as long as you pick something.
00:35:31.000I've got great sympathy for people who, you've probably heard this before, people give health reasons for why they still consume non-human animals.
00:35:40.000And they say, I have to eat this much meat, or maybe they just eat meat and nothing else.
00:35:57.000I'll have spaghetti or a sandwich every now and then.
00:36:00.000But for the most part, I eat mostly meat.
00:36:01.000So those people who, like yourself, who maybe it's whatever health reason it is, They still, some people use that argument as if it gets them off the hook, like as if they, because their value as a human being outweighs so many cows and pigs and the like.
00:36:20.000But I think, again, once you run this thought experiment and you have to kind of put a rough number on it, you sort of have to ask yourself an honest question and go, like, is what I'm doing, like, morally right?
00:36:29.000Is this something I should reconsider?
00:36:32.000And I think given the, if you pick a number, then you have to make a call on that.
00:37:08.000I was like, okay, I either have to come to grips with what it means to kill an animal and eat it, and if I can't handle that, if I don't like that, then I'll just become a vegetarian.
00:37:18.000I tried being a vegetarian for a brief amount of time in my life when I was like...
00:37:25.000I guess I was 18. When I was fighting, I was having a really hard time, because I was still growing.
00:37:31.000I was having a really hard time making a lower weight class that I was competing in.
00:37:34.000And there was other people on my team that were competing in the higher weight class, and it was a real problem.
00:37:39.000So I tried being a vegetarian for a while.
00:38:14.000I think I was malnourished before, and I was just going on drive.
00:38:18.000But I do think that there are very different body types and there's very different requirements that certain people have when it comes to protein.
00:38:25.000I think animal protein is the most dense, most nutrient-packed protein and food that's available for human beings.
00:38:32.000And I think it probably has something to do why we became human beings in the first place.
00:38:38.000But I think of hunting as I'm dipping my toe into the natural world, and I'm going out into the wild where these things live.
00:39:21.000It ignited parts of my DNA. It gave me an understanding of the cycle of life instantaneously in a way that was like fishing does that a little bit, but this is like that times a thousand times.
00:39:33.000Which is why people don't have a problem with you showing dead fish on your Instagram.
00:39:37.000If you hold like a dead bass, look at the bass I caught!
00:39:39.000Everybody's like, good job, nice fish!
00:39:42.000You hold up a dead deer, people kind of freak out.
00:39:45.000Hold up a dead bear, people go fucking crazy.
00:39:47.000Well, okay, here's a couple of things, right?
00:39:51.000Well, it speaks to your own experience, right?
00:39:54.000That you feel like maybe it's spiritual or it taps into our histories when you hunt, especially with a bow.
00:40:01.000Like 10,000 years ago, the first bows come about and I imagine it was thrilling for them now and it's then and it's thrilling still now to do it.
00:40:09.000Same reason like paintball or laser tag or war can be fun, right?
00:40:44.000The first is it depends on the kind of killing that you're doing when you do the hunting.
00:40:48.000Like if I hunt with a spear, and you'll know more about this than me, a spear is probably not going to knock the animal out like a bullet to the back of the head.
00:40:56.000A crossbow and a bow are going to be somewhere between them, and so there are going to be better ways to hunt than not.
00:41:02.000So maybe, perhaps, I wonder what you think of this.
00:41:06.000On the whole, when you run the numbers in terms of probability, that hunting with guns is going to be significantly better than hunting with spears or even bows.
00:42:37.000They will all get old and they will either die of starvation, they'll freeze to death, or more likely they'll get eaten by cats.
00:42:43.000Well, okay, so here's where I agree with you, right?
00:42:46.000Is that when people eat, again, you say don't draw the comparison between factory farming, but I think this is, you know, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that on Earth, humans are the devils and animals are the tortured souls,
00:43:11.000I think when the person says to you, you're a bad person for hunting, if that person is engaging in buying these products from factory farms, which the overwhelming majority of people are, then they don't have a leg to stand on.
00:44:36.000You get these kids that are, you're playing Call of Duty eight hours a day, and then that kid goes and becomes a part of the drone program.
00:44:46.000They're using, they're playing a video game, but real human beings are dying, and in their head, when they lay in bed at night, they know that.
00:44:54.000Well, it seems like it's an interesting one, right?
00:44:56.000We just did a big podcast series on the philosophy of war and the history of it and how it's trying to move the person that's killing another person further away from the act.
00:45:05.000So more killings when you're using guns than when it's hand-to-hand combat.
00:45:09.000And even in the Second World War, like, fieldwork showed that it was about...
00:45:30.000What does that feel like when you're in Nevada and you're operating something that's in Iraq or wherever, in Yemen, and you've got a drone flying over some compound and you're just shooting hellfire missiles into human beings based on metadata?
00:45:46.000I'd be interested to know how severe their PTSD is.
00:45:50.000See if you can find an article on it, because there was something that I'd read about it really recently.
00:45:54.000Because there's a thought, right, which is we seem to be outraged at the use of drones, but it takes one less person out of the fight.
00:46:03.000And so it seems if you're doing like a utilitarian calculation that it's going to be better on the whole.
00:46:14.000Yeah, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-plus percent.
00:46:18.000Some estimations are 90 percent of civilians.
00:46:20.000It's hard to tell, because what's been explained to me by people in the military is that the people, first of all, the government will undercut the number.
00:46:29.000They'll give you a lower number than probably Israel.
00:46:32.000And then the people that were attacked will give you a higher number than Israel.
00:47:58.000In many ways, it's more intense, said Neil Shuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a Master Sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes.
00:48:10.000We had to watch a target for days, weeks, and even months.
00:49:53.000And like most farms in this country, we have to pour shit on the ground in order for it to be able to sustain life.
00:50:00.000Well, the vegan needs to be, or the utilitarian, or, you know, there's all of these brilliant philosophers at the moment talking about this.
00:50:06.000I don't know any serious, like, philosopher of moral philosophy or ethics that runs a good argument which says that the lives of non-human animals, their pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, doesn't matter.
00:50:18.000So the vegan needs to be concerned about this loss of life as well, or the pain and suffering that goes into it.
00:50:23.000There are going to be better ways to do it than not, but...
00:50:26.000I often get asked about tofu or soy production.
00:50:32.00077% of global soy production goes towards feeding non-human animals that are fed and we end up killing and eating.
00:50:41.000A bunch of it's used for biofuels and stuff, but only 7% of all the soy that we're growing actually is consumed by human beings.
00:50:49.000So if we look at the vegans' contribution to that, it's marginal even then in comparison to what the factory farming industries they're responsible for.
00:50:59.000But here's, I think, an interesting point which sort of leaves that all to a side.
00:51:04.000Because you hear loads of different arguments like ecological arguments, human nature arguments, all of this stuff.
00:51:11.000As if it's going to often get the Christian or the person who thinks that non-animal rights, such as the Cathagos mentioned a moment ago, don't matter.
00:51:37.000To enjoy it, you need to kill, what is it, like, 70 billion land animals and 7 trillion sea animals each year?
00:51:44.000Well, let's assume that God didn't conceive of factory farming, and this is like a loophole created by human beings, because I think it is.
00:51:52.000I think it's just like money in politics.
00:51:55.000Like, the Founding Fathers didn't see that coming.
00:52:25.000There's also a problem with plant intelligence.
00:52:27.000And plant intelligence, I think, the emergent science of plant intelligence is fascinating.
00:52:32.000I don't want to say they're the same thing as people, just like I don't want to say a golden retriever is the same thing as a person in a boat.
00:52:39.000Out of interest, how many did you pick in terms of how many golden retrievers you were going to chuck out the boat until you chuck the human being out?
00:54:30.000What we're talking about with animal intelligence and plant intelligence and human intelligence, for sure the way we're doing it now is wrong.
00:55:32.000He thinks, that's it, genius guy, he thinks the reason why when they came across the Great Plains and there was millions and millions of buffalo, I think the reason why is because 90% of the Native Americans were killed by the plague.
00:56:07.000And if you can kill one, it takes a long time to replace that one.
00:56:10.000So they would travel around, track the buffalo, kill them, live off them, use their skins, eat their meat, and then nomadically travel with them.
00:56:21.000And they kept their population in check.
00:56:22.000When 90% of Native Americans were dead, Dan Flores believes that led to this insane overpopulation problem of buffalo, where you see millions of them in fields, because that doesn't exist anywhere in nature, unless there's a problem.
00:56:36.000And that problem is a lack of predators, and the predators at that time being the Native American hunter.
00:56:42.000Yeah, I think if you take it to its logical conclusion, then we can't even on the view which I hold, which is hedonistic utilitarianism, the idea that the morally relevant facts are pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering.
00:56:57.000If you can't then just let all of the animals free to run around, that's going to, as you say, create a sort of mayhem.
00:57:22.000Let me explain something about hunting areas, right?
00:57:24.000So if you're going to go to this place in Montana where we went and hunted mule deer, wildlife biologists do surveys on the areas, and they know roughly the exact amount of deer that are in this area.
00:57:41.000Number of predators, particularly stealthy predators like mountain lions.
00:57:44.000Pretty good with wolves, but even then in high-density areas, very difficult to really figure it out.
00:57:50.000But they get the numbers of the deer, and then based on some very exact science, they calculate the amount of hunters who will be allotted tags.
00:58:00.000So, like, say if you apply for a limited draw entry place.
00:58:05.000So, limited draw entry is like, say maybe you have...
00:58:08.000An allocated piece of land that's X amount of thousands of acres, and in that there are X amount of thousands of deer, and you will allow 100 hunters into that area.
00:58:21.000And out of those 100 hunters, there'll be maybe a 10 to 15% success rate.
00:58:26.000So you are thinking that these hunters will trim 10 deer, 20 deer, whatever it is for this particular – and there's a bunch of different areas like this all over the country.
00:58:38.000And the wildlife biologists that do that in the United States, it's a beautiful and incredible thing because it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world where you have public land where people – the United States and all the people living in the United States own this land.
00:59:16.000And you can do that because these wildlife biologists have a very keen understanding of the amount of animals that are sustainable in the area and the amount of hunters they can allow to hunt in these areas.
01:00:02.000I think Martha Nussbaum in her new book, Justice for Animals, she argues that these things, as you say, are a problem.
01:00:09.000You can't avoid suffering in these cases because you need to keep populations in control.
01:00:13.000And she thinks that we need to embark on a research project which simulates hunting and keeps down populations in animal sanctuaries, if you like.
01:00:24.000And I was thinking recently, like, there's a lot of arguments for human reparations, like when a full group is harmed by another group, that we think that they're owed something, whether it's like people who were subject to slavery in North West Africa.
01:00:42.000We think that those communities have been harmed in the past and that we should right that wrong.
01:00:48.000I don't know the details, I don't consider myself like a reparations philosopher, but let's say that's a view that people hold as they do.
01:00:55.000Well, if you take non-human animals to be like these subjects which you can stop their flourishing, cause them harm, bring them pleasure and happiness, then it seems that they also are part of a group And so you might run an argument to say that if all of these creatures were subject to such suffering and torture and death for so long for the benefit of this other group,
01:01:17.000then that group owes them the research, the time, the money to make their lives as good as possible.
01:01:23.000Now it might be, just like in our lives, we can't avoid pain and suffering in the day-to-day of it.
01:01:27.000It's not something we can eliminate entirely, but we should be doing everything we can, says the argument, to reduce it as much as possible.
01:01:34.000If that ends up being like having to add predators into that situation, then so be it.
01:01:43.000But perhaps with the right time and money you can find a way of doing it without as much suffering, so to speak.
01:01:49.000So if the goal is just completely to eliminate suffering, why don't we kill all the predators?
01:02:02.000The worst is killed by bears because they just eat you.
01:02:04.000They just hold you down and start pulling you apart like a salmon.
01:02:07.000So if we want to really eliminate suffering, perhaps we should eliminate all of the predators or just put them in zoos where they'll suffer, but they're evil.
01:02:16.000And then because they just kill and eat.
01:02:19.000Well, there's a question of like, what's wrong with death, which is at the heart of this.
01:02:22.000So it might not just be like the hedonistic properties I've just listed, but it might be that when you stop some conscious creature from fulfilling their ends, from fulfilling their project, you're somehow wronging them.
01:02:36.000So, like, if I was to hypothetically, you know, if we had this random person again that we had on the boat earlier, and I put a bullet in the back of their head, this person had no friends, family, no one will remember them, and I can erase the thing I did from my memory.
01:02:50.000You might still think what I did was wrong, because that person saw themselves as having a future, had projects they were working on, and I stopped their flourishing in some sense.
01:04:40.000To bring this back to like, you know, that fundamental question we began with, like, on the whole, is existence a good thing?
01:04:48.000Should we be happy and pleased with this world?
01:04:50.000And it seems like the perfectly good God hypothesis goes out the window or You know, especially if we're forced to do these things.
01:04:56.000Like, if we have to introduce predators to maintain populations and things like that, again, like, this doesn't seem like the thing a perfectly good god would do.
01:05:05.000So if you're an atheist— But why not?
01:07:10.000And that's what leads to their natural selection.
01:07:14.000There's going to be a significant number of non-human animals that don't have what we call free will, which is the power and freedom to do otherwise, the power and choice to do A rather than B. There are some non-human animals that just act.
01:07:27.000The raindrop lands on the bird's beak.
01:07:48.000It doesn't bring about a better entity at the end of it.
01:07:54.000For all these creatures that die painfully and miserably and don't have the opportunity to develop, their individual lives seem like they're, again, cases of gratuitous, i.e.
01:08:19.000Unless God is truly all-knowing and us with our primate minds are trying to make sense out of this thing that ultimately will make sense when we reach the end of our journey and that this whole process As complicated and vicious and evil as it seems to be with predator and prey and natural selection.
01:08:38.000And what you're just talking about, like, with birds and different animals.
01:09:39.000We completely separate ourselves from the natural world.
01:09:41.000So, we think of ourselves as different than all these other processes that are happening because we've elevated In our own eyes, beyond this, beyond the natural realm, into this world of morals and ethics and philosophy and our view of our perspective of the world.
01:10:08.000Well, here's the thought, right, which is in terms of like cashing this out in terms of problems with atheism and religious beliefs.
01:10:16.000Is that when you look at the system, and you mentioned a second ago, like, maybe we don't know God's reasons and stuff like this.
01:10:22.000Well, I think in that case, I think Peterson said something along the same lines when I spoke to him.
01:10:26.000And I think in that case, you shouldn't just bet your soul on it for his words.
01:10:31.000Or, you know, William James, the philosopher, has this example of a mountaineer who's got, like, this gap they need to jump over, a storm behind them.
01:10:39.000So it's reasonable for them to believe they can make the jump, or the runner...
01:10:43.000Who has to believe they're going to win the 100-meter race?
01:10:46.000It's rational to believe it then, even if they lack the evidence.
01:10:49.000I think these arguments work for, like, psychological states, but you believing that God has some good reason or believing you can jump the gap doesn't make it any more reasonable That there's a proposition which says God exists and it is true.
01:11:04.000So I think the reasonable thing to do here is to suspend belief, is to go, here we have some really good arguments for this hypothesis, here's the evidence we have against it, but it's contentious as to whether or not we can solve this problem.
01:11:17.000So the most reasonable thing for us to do is to embrace some form of agnosticism where we go, how can we find ethics and meaning in a world that's seemingly godless?
01:11:28.000And that's to go back to the start of our discussion there.
01:11:31.000It's like the failure of new atheism hasn't been able to address that.
01:12:45.000The reasonable thing for us to do in the light of those arguments we've spoken about is to suspend and be agnostic about belief in God, but then have this honest search for finding meaning and moral value.
01:12:56.000This isn't the kind of notion of the absurd that physicists keep talking about.
01:13:04.000I won't talk about physics, and sometimes the physicists start doing philosophy, and you sort of get a little bit frustrated.
01:13:10.000You've probably heard people say things like this, like, in comparison to the vast cosmos in which I exist, I feel so small and meaningless.
01:13:17.000Or in comparison to the 13.8 billion years in which I've existed.
01:13:22.000Like, my 70, if I'm lucky, feels like it doesn't really matter.
01:14:18.000So I think the project of agnosticism, the thing we need to be doing, isn't just digging down with this new atheism that's flippant and doesn't offer us any, like, can't solve these big problems and lacks answers to the fundamental questions.
01:14:34.000And it isn't just a gamble on faith and just believe for the sake of it.
01:14:39.000But it's to try and create ourselves a patchwork blanket to keep us warm in the void of meaninglessness, right?
01:14:50.000Well, we inherently know that it feels better to be a good person.
01:15:18.000I think we get too caught up in religious dogmatism and we get too caught up in these literal interpretations of ancient texts which are not even in the original language they were written in which is so bizarre and apparently an incredibly difficult language to read and comprehend and to translate when you're going back to like ancient Hebrew.
01:15:42.000We're trying to translate that into English.
01:16:01.000I used to say about the Bible, and it was just a joke, I don't really mean this if you're a Bible fanatic, that people are full of shit and that story sucks.
01:16:07.000Like, that's all you have to do is look at it.
01:18:03.000We're going to hamstring all of these conversations.
01:18:07.000We're going to put shackles on all of our debate and all of our...
01:18:14.000Conversations where we're trying to figure out what's real and what's not real and what's the shared experience that we all have.
01:18:19.000Like, I don't know how you view the world.
01:18:22.000And the only way for me to find out how you view the world is for me to ask you and not berate you for your opinions, but try to, like, get it out of you.
01:18:35.000Like, sometimes you can get very quickly to how deep a person's perspective on an issue is with just a couple of questions.
01:18:43.000Because you see what they espouse, what they say, and a lot of times that it aligns with very particular ideologies, whether it's right-wing or left-wing.
01:18:52.000And then a couple of questions deep, you start asking about opposing viewpoints, and why do people think this way, and do you think that perhaps it's this?
01:19:03.000And then you can get to how much they have actually thought about it.
01:19:08.000The moment people become dogmatic, the moment people become ideologically captured by a very specific group of things that you've adopted as your opinions, because it aligns with science.
01:19:19.000We saw that during the pandemic, this trust the science idea.
01:19:38.000This is a business, and it utilizes science, and you're caught up in an ideological debate about a thing that you should be completely objective about, but you're not, because it's just like all the other things that human beings do.
01:19:52.000We like to decide that we are correct and that we defend from that position.
01:19:56.000Instead of just looking at These ideas, like, I think one of the things that happened with atheism is that it did become like a – remember when they had Atheism Plus?
01:21:40.000I think it's way more likely that all these stories are about real events that took place a long time ago and were told in an oral tradition.
01:21:54.000It's just what really happened is very difficult to say.
01:21:57.000And when you have the hand of man, when you have human beings, especially in the New Testament, you literally have people deciding what is going to be and not going to be in it.
01:22:07.000So there's human beings deciding what is going to be in the Bible, which is insane.
01:22:11.000It doesn't mean that the things that are in there aren't Representatives of the most recent version of telling a tale that probably did happen.
01:22:19.000Well, this is what's dangerous, right?
01:22:22.000And this is what's not just confused, but careless about some of this thinking.
01:22:27.000When you go, my team thinks this, and I'm just going to double down on it.
01:22:32.000Even though I've got reasons against this position, I'm still going to be defending the position of my group.
01:22:37.000So people like conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro think that eating non-human animals is morally wrong, but they carry on doing it.
01:22:46.000I think probably because it's part of what their team does.
01:22:49.000When I spoke to Peterson, he conceded that that problem we spoke about a moment ago, the problem of systemic evil in nature, was a massive problem for the God hypothesis.
01:22:58.000And as we said, he thinks you should just crack on and carry on working on it.
01:23:02.000But there's a sense in which It's okay if your view isn't affecting anybody, right?
01:23:08.000You can have a false belief and you're entitled to that, that freedom of conscience to think something, as long as it's not bringing about and breaching the harm principle.
01:23:17.000But there's a sense in which, like, take Peterson's view because we spoke about taking that leap of faith.
01:23:23.000After I had this conversation with him, he tweeted like an hour later.
01:23:26.000I was arguing that my view is that happiness and pleasure has to correspond to a purposeful life, right?
01:23:33.000That if your life is meaningful, it also has to involve a flourishing or happiness and pleasure.
01:23:38.000Well, I think we see that with people, right?
01:23:40.000People that don't have a meaningful life and just seek pleasure all the time are miserable because they're missing that part of the equation, meaning.
01:23:51.000And afterwards, he tweeted something like, What use is happiness when we have mountains to move?
01:23:56.000Which is a nice Nietzschean quote, but it's a nice bumper sticker or something, or a fridge magnet, but I don't think we should live our lives by it.
01:24:16.000But this idea that only meaning and purpose ultimately matter and they don't need to correspond to happiness and pleasure, that's a recipe for disaster.
01:24:25.000You can't hold that view and tell people that all that matters is their purpose and meaning.
01:24:33.000You just have to look at the 20th century to see how when people think they know what ought to be done despite all the pain and suffering they cause, how that can lead to all kinds of atrocities.
01:24:43.000So this idea that we should just carry on sticking with our thinking beforehand.
01:24:50.000This ultimately comes from having the wrong view about things.
01:24:54.000It ultimately comes from taking an unreasonable leap of faith.
01:25:01.000People are holding him up as the champion of Christianity at the moment.
01:25:05.000People are writing books saying, this person's going to save our faith which is going extinct.
01:25:10.000In the US, for example, the Southern Baptists are baptizing people at the same rate as they were in the 1950s, but your population's growing.
01:26:25.000He was confronted by this woman that was asking him because she had heard that he said that he didn't want to fly commercial because then he would be flying with demons And so she says to him, like, do you think that the passengers and commercial airlines...
01:29:55.000Again, getting back to the comment, you said that you don't like to fly commercial because you don't want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons.
01:30:02.000Do you really believe that human beings are demons?
01:31:37.000Jesus, that would scare the shit out of me.
01:31:39.000I think the theists, if they think they've got a good reason to believe in God, right, and we talk about all this evil which we've just explored, maybe we can jump and bring the multiverse in on this as well, is that If you're up at the University of Oklahoma, which is not too far from here,
01:31:58.000Eugene Nagasawa working there has got this brilliant argument where he says, given the evil in the world, it's unreasonable for atheists or agnostics to be what he calls existential optimists.
01:32:10.000Like, you can't be happy and pleased to be alive.
01:32:13.000And think the world is a good place and believe in all of the evil that you typically run against the God of traditional Christianity.
01:32:23.000So when I run the argument as an agnostic against the Christian about all this evil, that means I have to concede my optimism about the world.
01:32:31.000I can say that the world is neutral at best, or mixed, or maybe I have to be pessimistic.
01:32:36.000I think this is the difficulty of it all.
01:32:41.000And again, to give another quote from Camus that I love, he says, I've always felt as if I was living on the high seas, threatened at the height of royal happiness.
01:32:52.000So you're in this moment where you think, actually, my life's pretty good.
01:32:55.000And then you remember all of the crap in the wider world and in history and the purposelessness of it all.
01:33:01.000And you sort of left like, that's the state for the atheist.
01:33:35.000It's worse than having a parent that doesn't care about you or a partner that doesn't want anything to do with you, because at least they're there, right?
01:33:43.000The world is completely unresponsive in terms of that love and affection.
01:33:48.000The universe, we ask for meaning, we ask for purpose, and it doesn't respond.
01:33:53.000I love this quote from Michael Housecutter from Liverpool who used to be my head of department.
01:33:58.000He says, this notion of the absurd rips a hole in our world and threatens to rob us of our sanity.
01:34:10.000And you sort of feel that and you go like, all right, that is the hole that's left in us as conscious creatures wanting meaning and value in this seemingly indifferent world.
01:34:44.000A lot of high school students read this book.
01:34:46.000And the main character starts off, his mom just dies, and he doesn't care.
01:34:51.000And then he goes to the beach and just shoots some random guy, and he doesn't care.
01:34:55.000And then he's put on death row and he dies, and he still doesn't care.
01:34:59.000And you're reading it as the reader, like, what's wrong with this guy?
01:35:01.000But he's mirroring the world's indifference.
01:35:04.000That's what it is to accept the meaninglessness of the world.
01:35:08.000In one of his next books, The Fall, The characters trying to find meaning, or better put, trying to find someone to take the place of God that can forgive them of their sins.
01:35:21.000Again, I think this is a huge problem for agnostics and atheists.
01:35:24.000When we do something that's bad, we don't have this omnipotent, all-forgiving father figure.
01:35:34.000I think as someone who's never embraced Christianity, I have no idea what that's like, what a gift that is, to do something bad and be forgiven by God from it.
01:35:49.000That it's cold and meaningless and uncaring?
01:35:54.000If you're a human being, all you truly know is human experiences.
01:35:59.000You know your experiences in the world, and you know there's part of the world, there's parts of the world that at any given time are cruel and terrible.
01:36:06.000But there's also parts of the world that are wonderful.
01:36:09.000There's things that you do find meaning in.
01:36:11.000Like, I assume you find meaning in this conversation.
01:36:13.000You find meaning in a great dinner date, a fun time with friends, a vacation, things that you like to do for a living, philosophical pursuits, I'm sure, in your...
01:36:23.000All kinds of different things people find meaning in.
01:36:48.000No, one of the things that makes meaning...
01:36:51.000So wonderful when you do find it in this world is that so much of life feels like there's no meaning.
01:36:57.000It feels like you don't connect to it.
01:36:58.000So when you do connect to something, whether it's groups of people, your family, your loved ones, your friends, whatever you do for a living that's unusually rewarding, You are one of the lucky people that's on the right frequency.
01:37:11.000And that frequency is what we should all gravitate towards and try to attain.
01:37:15.000I think the problem with a lot of things that are written is that they're written from an individual's perspective.
01:37:21.000And that person might have been depressed.
01:37:23.000That person might not have had a good connection to their community or to friends or to loved ones.
01:37:27.000They might not have had a great personality.
01:37:29.000They might not have been a fun person to be around, so they didn't really attract a lot of people that wanted to have good times with them.
01:37:34.000We do find tremendous meaning in this life.
01:38:03.000Like if God exists for the Abrahamic believer, they believe that there's ultimate meaning, a plan which has been set out before they began to exist and will be completed throughout their lives and to the end of their life.
01:38:15.000What we're talking about or you're describing there is what you might call like not the meaning, but like a meaning within life.
01:38:24.000And there's a problem here, which is...
01:38:26.000But you are the only thing that you're aware of that interfaces with this universe that you're consciously connected to.
01:38:38.000The you that's talking out of your mouth right now is the only you that interfaces with your world If you find meaning in that world, the world has meaning.
01:39:18.000But if what you're saying is true, if it's like there's no ultimate meaning and all meanings are just created by the person, like we all color in the void with the thing that we think is purposeful, we need some kind of way of differentiating between worthwhile meanings and things that are less worthwhile.
01:39:36.000I think we can solve that problem, which is...
01:39:39.000Although the world doesn't have an ultimate meaning, we can see that there are moral values in the world that correspond to happiness and suffering, right?
01:39:47.000The reason mine's more meaningful is because I'm doing something that's morally right, and you're doing something which...
01:39:52.000I'm not willing to concede that it doesn't have meaning.
01:39:57.000I think it's moving in a direction, and I think it's moving in a very specific direction with the apex predator, which is human beings.
01:40:06.000I think if you looked at, if you were an alien and you visited Earth, I've said this before, so I apologize to people who've heard it, and you looked at us, you would say, well, what does this thing do?
01:40:40.000Status is attached to these things as well.
01:40:42.000That's another motivation that pushes innovation.
01:40:45.000If I looked at us from another perspective, I was another life form, I'd say it makes technology, and it makes better technology every year with a fever pitch.
01:40:54.000I mean, every year there's a new phone, every year there's better computers, every year there's better chips.
01:41:00.000Samsung just came out with a new battery that is going to be on EVs that has a 600 mile range and charges in 9 minutes.
01:41:07.000You're not sponsored by Samsung, are you?
01:41:09.000No, but it was just a new article that just came out that they were talking about in terms of game changers, in terms of technological innovation.
01:41:41.000Imagine you come down to Earth as aliens ages ago, let's say like 30,000 years ago, and all the humans you interacted with were just eating berries and loads of sugary food.
01:41:53.000That's their meaning, that's their purpose or something.
01:41:55.000You'd go, no, the meaning or the purpose of them, or their natures, isn't simply a description of the things they've done in the past.
01:42:04.000So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm saying in the context of Christian beliefs, It's the thing given to you by the thing that's created you.
01:42:25.000Or better put, I keep saying that the world is meaningless.
01:42:28.000What I really mean is It's seemingly meaningless.
01:42:32.000It's not obvious to what the meaning is when it ought to be, or it feels like it ought to be.
01:42:38.000So it's not the case that the world is meaningless.
01:42:40.000But I think maybe our disagreement here or the point in which we're both diverging in this conversation is...
01:42:48.000I think, as you mentioned earlier, you're quite a fan of these pantheistic views where the world is moving towards a purposeful end, which is technological progress or the flourishing of all its creatures and the like.
01:43:02.000So if you hold that view, then, yeah, it looks like life can have a meaning if there is a consciousness underlying the physical reality that we engage with.
01:43:31.000Meaning to us means that something makes sense, that it's noble and ethical and moral and it's the right way, it's the most intelligent way to advance and exist.
01:43:45.000And that's what we're attaching the concept of meaning to.
01:43:48.000But I would push back on the whole thing if aliens came and found primitive man just eating berries.
01:43:58.000Like even if you discover chimpanzees in the Congo and you go and study them like that Chimp Nation documentary on Netflix, they have a very interesting social structure.
01:44:09.000They have alpha males and they have bonds between the other males and they have neighboring tribes.
01:44:19.000And if you went further ahead a few million years and saw that they've developed tools and now they've figured out how to scan animals and throw spears, you'd be like, oh, I see where this is going.
01:44:29.000Their meaning is to continue getting better at this.
01:44:44.000Because we're personally attached to other human beings, and we see all the terrible things that are happening all over the world.
01:44:52.000And not just terrible for violence that other human beings commit, but also just what we're doing to the Earth itself, like in terms of natural resources.
01:45:01.000What we're doing to the ocean is fucking insane.
01:45:04.000And you would say, well, this thing is making a better version of itself.
01:45:10.000It's going to make an artificial life.
01:45:11.000And it's probably going to happen within our lifetime.
01:45:17.000That might be the progression of life everywhere in the universe, and that might be what God really is.
01:45:23.000Intelligent life and creativity might be a seed of God, and that if it keeps going, and this biological life gives birth to digital life that can make better versions of itself instantaneously, and then continue to do so, it will eventually have the unimaginable power to harness every single element that exists in the universe.
01:46:13.000That's the thing that you keep saying that meaningful.
01:46:16.000Like, the meaning there for Goff would be something like, the world is in a better state of affairs than what it was before, and if you're contributing to the betterment of the world as a whole, then your life is meaningful.
01:46:30.000If you're sat on your arse not doing anything, and you're taking away from the greatness of the world, then...
01:46:36.000Your life isn't as meaningful as the person.
01:46:38.000So if you're counting grass and I'm helping people, then my life is more meaningful in this metric because I'm making the world go towards what God wants its end to be.
01:46:47.000Let me push back against that, because what about Buddhist monks that spend their entire life celibate just meditating in a room?
01:47:13.000I'll say, like, there are more meaningful ways to live your life than being a Buddhist monk sat on your ass doing nothing.
01:47:18.000Although, here's the value of what they are doing, right?
01:47:21.000Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've uncovered the fundamental nature of the world, which is a unified field of consciousness.
01:48:31.000There is something better for you to be doing, something for you to contribute towards, individually and holistically.
01:48:39.000But the problem, I think, and why I don't embrace this for you myself, is that...
01:48:43.000There's a problem in philosophy of mind and consciousness, which is, let's say, you contemplate your own being, let's say, and you look inside of yourself.
01:48:55.000What's it like to be a physical entity?
01:48:58.000And you look inside your mind, and there's this consciousness.
01:49:04.000People like Schopenhauer say that because we don't know the inner nature of things, and Galen Strawson here at University of Texas at Austin says, if you think physics tells you about the inner nature of things, you don't understand physics.
01:49:18.000It tells you what things do but not what things are.
01:49:21.000So let's say, for the sake of argument, underlying all of this physical stuff is consciousness.
01:49:27.000And then you want to bring in the philosophy of religion, and you say that as a whole, All of the universe is one big conscious mind.
01:49:35.000You've got a problem there, which is either the combination problem or the decombination problem, which goes something like this.
01:49:42.000You take all of these little conscious particles in the table, how do they add up to one unified mind like they do in my brain?
01:49:50.000I don't have loads of little experiences going on now.
01:49:52.000I have one coherent stream of consciousness, seeing you, hearing these sounds, seeing these lights.
01:49:58.000It's not like there's loads of little conscious experiences happening.
01:50:01.000So how is it that they all come together to form one unified experience?
01:50:06.000And you have the opposite problem for this pantheistic view, which is if you've got this great big global mind, this ocean of consciousness underlying everything, how does that big godlike mind decombine into little minds?
01:50:21.000Like, why is my experience not your experience?
01:50:24.000And it doesn't seem like, although we might have some knee-jerk reaction answers to that question, philosophically, we can't draw the boundary.
01:50:32.000Like, the skull and my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries when I'm saying that the whole thing is consciousness.
01:50:47.000What would be the benefits of having individual experiences?
01:50:51.000There could be benefits and there could be reasons for it.
01:50:55.000Let's paint this pantheistic picture of, again, the reason and the goal of the universe in life.
01:51:03.000If I see myself as here rather than there, perhaps it allows me to better my community in this location and add to the value of it as an individual.
01:51:15.000Actually, it's starting to think about it.
01:51:17.000I'm not sure from the perspective of God what reason there is to break these things apart.
01:51:22.000Maybe it's better for God if you have lots of disjointed egos that transcend them and make the world a better place despite the fact they just want to buy private jets and look after themselves.
01:51:56.000You might go home and write something.
01:51:58.000You might be in the middle of a novel and write something completely...
01:52:02.000Connected to your experience that you had watching that concert and that all these different examples of people we admire, like, God, I wish I was more like that guy.
01:52:48.000But still, it doesn't carve out the boundaries between why our experiences are different from each other's if we're a part of this big global mind.
01:52:56.000Well, that competition has to exist all throughout nature, right?
01:52:58.000There's no way that the mountain lion and the deer can share a consciousness because the deer will be like, don't eat me.
01:53:25.000The better world is one full of lots of individual subjective experiences, like loads of individual minds, like you say, all able to do lots of different things.
01:53:36.000I saw this clip of Musk speaking about this recently, right?
01:53:40.000And I was quite surprised because in the past, I was teaching philosophy of mind at Liverpool, and I remember showing them one of these clips, and it was of Musk talking about the origins of consciousness.
01:53:50.000And I was using it as like, this is like the general public opinion of it.
01:53:55.000This is like his neural link stuff and you solve the problem.
01:53:58.000And we spoke about like how that won't happen.
01:54:00.000But recently he came out and said something I thought was really interesting, which is essentially the view we're talking about here, panpsychism, the view that consciousness is everywhere.
01:54:09.000Well, in order to have consciousness, there'd need to be some rudimentary consciousness or experience in the inner nature of stuff in order to get complex and interesting kinds like me and you.
01:54:21.000But in the origin of the world and the Big Bang, it was just hydrogen.
01:54:26.000So hydrogen gets more and more complex until it gives rise to consciousness.
01:54:30.000And he gave this line, which is essentially where philosophy of mind is right now.
01:54:35.000He said, either consciousness is nowhere, as in it's just an illusion, it's a trick of the brain, it's pulling a rabbit out of the hat when there's not really a rabbit, or it's everywhere.
01:54:44.000And I think, given that you can hear me and see me now, and this is what Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum is, right?
01:54:51.000You're 100% confident that you are conscious right now.
01:54:56.000So following that reasoning, which has been embraced by public figures such as him more recently, you'd have to say that everything is conscious in this way in order to have the ingredients needed for conscious experience.
01:55:11.000But leaving aside how the big mind can break itself up, There is still a question, this might be a bit of a boring terminological one, so you can tell me to shut up if you don't want to go to dictionary corner, but it's the idea that I spoke about earlier that all theists think that God is the perfect being.
01:56:00.000So what we're seeing is people embracing, I think this is Goth's term as well, I think he's coming out as this, or maybe I'm coming out for him.
01:56:08.000He's describing himself as a heretical Christian.
01:56:10.000So to be a Christian, he thinks, you don't need to believe in the virgin birth, you don't need to believe in the resurrection, you don't need to believe that God's perfect, but you can still believe that there's this big cosmic story that you're a part of, and that there is something God-like at the essence of it all.
01:56:25.000I think that's the kind of view that we need to start carving out.
01:56:52.000I mean, everything In the world, right?
01:56:56.000Everything in this room is constructed of atoms and most of it is empty space, but yet some of it is a table and some of it is a microphone and some of it is you and some of it is me.
01:57:06.000So if you look fractally at the observable universe, what we're aware of in terms of like what exists physically, right?
01:57:40.000And that process of all these things being individuals seems to be a part of this expansion and growth and a part of natural selection and a part of evolution and a part of this constant state of improvement.
01:57:52.000Everything is moving towards a state of deeper and deeper complexity.
01:57:57.000The elk gets big muscles to run away from the wolves.
01:58:00.000And all these things happen in order for these beings to prosper and survive and to keep this healthy balance as this weird ape develops electronics.
01:59:13.000But theoretically, if time and space is infinitely divisible, then you can always make another half journey in between point A and point B. Okay.
01:59:23.000He gives the example of like… And every step of the way.
02:00:37.000So we have the moment of the Big Bang and the universe or existence as a whole, we might say, space and time, evolves according to the law of inflation.
02:00:48.000So we keep getting a bigger and bigger area of space.
02:00:52.000And some physicists think that this inflation happens eternally, that it isn't reasonable to say that it just stopped as soon as our universe was created or one or two later.
02:01:02.000So what you have is this popular view in physics where you keep getting more and more of these universes and end up with a popular multiverse view where every single possible physical reality is realized.
02:01:15.000So there's worlds, according to this view, where we're having this conversation in Spanish or, God forbid, French, right?
02:01:22.000Or there's a very nearby possible world Where we're having this conversation in Italian, German, or Japanese, right?
02:01:28.000Exactly the same words, exactly the same pauses, infinitely.
02:01:31.000There are worlds though, and I think the real question we want to ask...
02:01:35.000There are a bunch of these multiverse views.
02:01:37.000We spoke at the start about the purpose of philosophy, Mary Midgley clarifying these concepts.
02:01:43.000This is an idea my friend Ellie Robson convinced me of recently, that it's a really important job in philosophy.
02:01:48.000We haven't done a good job in physics and philosophy of defining the multiverse.
02:01:51.000We keep using the word, but you've had Sean Carroll on the show, who's fantastic.
02:01:55.000I've spoken to him about his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
02:02:00.000You've got views in philosophy that give you every single metaphysical possibility.
02:02:04.000The easiest one to illustrate, it's just this inflation model that I've just given.
02:02:08.000But what we really want to know is why this matters.
02:02:12.000Does this change the value of the world?
02:02:15.000Because there are universes where Little girls are born, they're tortured for their whole lives, they're executed, and it repeats.
02:02:22.000There are universes where Matt Damon's career didn't get worse, but it got better.
02:02:49.000If there are all of these worlds, if you actually believe that they exist, you shouldn't be singing and buzzing with the bees and jumping with the shrimp and being all excited about existence.
02:04:29.000There's no way you're going to know whether or not there's a multiverse of people suffering.
02:04:33.000So to not be happy in this beautiful existence, because perhaps there's a multiverse in which infinite suffering is occurring, seems to me to be a giant waste of an amazing trip.
02:04:44.000Like the trip that we're on right now is Earth 2025 Western Civilization.
02:04:52.000And I think your job is, if you're so fortunate that you're in this position, to enjoy this very bizarre place in history where it's the strangest time perhaps ever.
02:05:03.000That human beings have been alive, and we're going through it.
02:05:07.000You could sit around all day and think, oh, but in other multiverses, people are just getting eaten by other people.
02:05:12.000Well, it's sort of mental masturbation in the sense that, like, it just means that you can't, when you contemplate all of existence, think that it's an overall good thing.
02:05:33.000There's probably an infinite number of...
02:05:37.000If the multiverse exists, and if there's not a limited number of universes, but it's an infinite number of universes, there's probably an infinite number of universes that are also fucking amazing.
02:05:48.000They're probably all competing, just like all life is on this planet.
02:05:51.000And what if the universe is constantly in a state of evolution itself?
02:05:54.000Why would we limit that to physical things that we can currently observe?
02:05:58.000If we know that there's stellar nurseries, we know that planets get born and stars, we're very aware there's this process going on.
02:06:07.000Why do we assume this process is completed and perfected?
02:06:10.000Maybe this process is also moving in a better direction constantly, just like human life is.
02:06:17.000Just like human civilization is, maybe that's something that exists everywhere in the universe and that the universe itself is advancing to a more powerful state or a better state.
02:06:50.000So if you're a pantheist and you believe in the God of the multiverse, if you embrace multiverse theism, then you can't believe that God is good in the same way.
02:07:03.000There's also a problem which is, you mentioned something like the process, right?
02:07:08.000But there are worlds in which this process has already been realized.
02:07:12.000It doesn't really matter if our world reaches that or not, in the grand scheme of calculating the amount of good and bad in the world.
02:07:22.000Well, you might think that, like, some people say stuff like this, right?
02:07:25.000They go, I want to, like, stop eating meat or stop taking long-haul flights.
02:07:30.000But really, when it comes down to it, it doesn't really matter whether I buy that chicken or take that flight.
02:07:35.000It's not gonna impact the overall good and bad that's in the world.
02:07:40.000It's a drop in a huge ocean that really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of it.
02:07:44.000If the multiverse theory is true, something like that hits a little bit harder.
02:07:48.000If your goal is to make existence as a whole greater or better, I'm sort of following the line of argument to the point where it's fleshed out fully.
02:08:09.000Now we've said that, I still think there's a point in being moral in developing your own character, sorting out your own house or community or country or continent and the world.
02:08:28.000There's other problems though that seem to fall out of this as well, right?
02:08:31.000Which is like we have a concept of what it is to be a person back to our individual subjective conscious minds.
02:08:38.000You know, when we try and think about what it is for me to be me today is the same person born 31 years ago and the same person and the halfway point between that again to go back to Zeno.
02:08:49.000How am I the same person throughout time?
02:08:52.000I think the best answer to this is something like, I have the same capacity for conscious experience.
02:08:59.000If it was stream of consciousness, that would mean every time you drift off during me talking now, then you would die and you'd be born again when your stream of consciousness re-emerges.
02:09:10.000Yeah, like if you say, Joe Rogan is that stream of consciousness, that sequence of experiences that he's undergoing now, and that stops because you drift off, that would mean your stream of consciousness has ended.
02:09:24.000When you go into, like, Enren sleep and you don't have any conscious experiences, let's say, you would die according to that view.
02:09:34.000Or the reviews in philosophy which say you are your psychological continuity.
02:09:39.000Joe Rogan is the person that believes that Marshall is golden retriever is fantastic and that consciousness is the fundamental nature of stuff.
02:09:51.000But then if I were to strip those beliefs away from you, the psychological continuity of you would say, Joe Rogan doesn't exist anymore.
02:11:06.000It's not copy and paste, but it's like they take you, and they beam you to another planet, and you don't exist here anymore, but you exist over there.
02:11:17.000But some nerd told me that when the beam beamed...
02:12:21.000I wonder if he shot himself in the head, he would just be that other guy.
02:12:25.000In Star Trek, what happens is you carry on having experiences.
02:12:30.000Someone told me there's an episode where you see what it's like to be teleported and it's just like this world of things and lights around you.
02:12:39.000So it's not like the lights go out even for a split second.
02:12:42.000But on the copying or cut and paste version, it would be that second.
02:12:46.000Well, it is an interesting question because if consciousness is not local, And you download someone.
02:12:54.000If you do take someone out of this physical existence and put them somewhere, but then they don't have a soul, this bizarre vessel that can no longer communicate, then we'll realize, like, oh, we fucked up.
02:13:06.000We've got to go find out where that guy's consciousness got dropped off along the journey.
02:13:11.000I think it probably does get dropped off.
02:13:21.000You're probably a physical thing with a lot of biological requirements that's connected to some sort of consciousness that sees itself as an individual but is completely connected to all the life forms around it.
02:13:35.000I've been unpacking philosophical arguments or reasons for holding these What's your motivation for, like, I'm not sure if this is your view, but even, like, entertaining it, right?
02:13:45.000It might seem like a, they call them, like, just-so stories, right, in philosophy, right?
02:13:50.000You can tell a tale about what it might be, but why take that tale you're telling seriously?
02:13:56.000First of all, not completely connected to this, but I think it's possible that what consciousness is, is almost like a giant motherboard, and we are all connected to that motherboard as individuals.
02:14:07.000But that we share this one thing together.
02:14:11.000And I think we really become aware of that when the community comes together, when there's a tragedy, when there's an event.
02:14:18.000Something happens, we all mind meld together.
02:14:21.000And I think the individual, the biological entity that is you and that is me...
02:14:28.000It has all of these requirements that it has to meet in order to stay alive and to move forward and to progress in their civilization and culture.
02:14:36.000And that this is a different thing than the entire consciousness that we share.
02:14:41.000But we share with each other so much so that we can't be alone.
02:14:44.000I mean, people that are alone for too long go crazy.
02:14:47.000The worst they can do to you in prison is put you in solitary confinement.
02:14:58.000You need something stronger there, right?
02:15:00.000So you go, we want to connect with people.
02:15:02.000We want to form these communities and bonds.
02:15:04.000In the face of tragedy, we come together and we support each other and we We empathize with each other and we love and support each other.
02:15:11.000But like on a deep philosophical level, I'm still seeing the world through my eyes and not your eyes, right?
02:15:18.000So why think that gives us a reason to think that there is this unifying experience or mind that occupies all of space and time, right?
02:15:28.000What's the motivation for thinking something like that?
02:15:31.000It's just a thought that it may be the case.
02:15:33.000It's not of I'm sure that that's what's going on.
02:15:37.000And also, this is a sort of a universal sentiment that gets told by people that have profound psychedelic experiences, that we're all sharing some sort of consciousness, some very bizarre connection that we don't totally understand, and that the biological vehicle that we have that carries around the soul has these motivations,
02:15:58.000and you will battle with these motivations in order to do the greater good.
02:16:03.000Do you think there's a parallel with religious experience?
02:16:14.000Well, certainly Moses in the burning bush.
02:16:17.000In fact, scholars in Jerusalem, they believe that what that was a metaphor was burning a bush that contained dimethyltryptamine.
02:16:26.000If you think about burning the bush, right, and that's one of the ways that they consume psychedelic drugs is they burn them.
02:16:31.000And the acacia tree is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a very potent psychedelic drug.
02:16:38.000There's countless depictions of psilocybin mushrooms, both in ancient Egypt and in cultures all over the world.
02:16:49.000There's mushroom rituals that occurred.
02:16:51.000There's There's the sacred mushroom in the Bible, John Marco Allegro's book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, where he thought that the entire Christian religion had its origins in fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom therapy, that they were all having these rituals and consuming these mushrooms.
02:17:08.000That's the Eleusinian mysteries, that they all got together and drank some sort of a potion, the kukion, that was a psychedelic potion, and they devised Democracy and they figured out all sorts of very unusual philosophies from these psychedelic experiences.
02:17:24.000Yeah, do you think then, what makes you think that on the one case, let's say, someone takes a drug and they think that there is a fundamental, conscious, unifying mind behind the cosmos, right?
02:17:37.000That's person A. Person B has it and they see like the Easter Bunny or something running down the road.
02:17:43.000What makes, given that they have the same cause, Is person A's religious experience, caused by psychedelics in this case, more reasonable than person B's?
02:17:54.000I think each experience is probably valid and maybe person B that sees the Easter Bunny, he doesn't have the capacity, for whatever reason, like his psychology is not strong enough to grasp the entire possibility of everything.
02:18:10.000That all of this is connected and they freak out and they compartmentalize.
02:18:13.000And that's one of the things that happens to people that have bad trips, right?
02:18:16.000Bad trips are essentially you trying to control an experience that's uncontrollable.
02:18:20.000Or maybe you go into that trip with a significant level of anxiety, maybe the loss of a loved one, a devastating moment in your life, you know, loss of job, loss of family, and you have this experience and you just freak the fuck out, which can happen too.
02:18:35.000It seems that people have those experiences Perhaps without those obvious triggers as well, though, right, in the literature.
02:18:42.000I do work with the Center for Inner Experience at Durham University.
02:18:47.000Some cool work from Jules Evans on this looks at people who have had, like, long-term negative effects because of taking psychedelics.
02:18:56.000He takes, like, 700 people because they're pretty underreported.
02:18:59.000The data doesn't reflect them very well.
02:19:41.000This is the thing I think I'm concerned with as a...
02:19:46.000Same kind of stuff when we're talking about free speech.
02:19:48.000Who the fuck's not in favor of free speech?
02:19:51.000Everyone wants free speech, but people want to draw the line in different places.
02:19:55.000So we need a nuanced discussion about where that line is.
02:19:58.000Similarly with psychedelics, what we see are writers, philosophers, documentary makers, just give this blanket statement about them being good.
02:20:08.000But don't recognize or talk about some of the negatives.
02:20:11.000Like you see these documentaries on Netflix, right, that don't mention the bad things that happen to people.
02:20:17.000And I think if it corresponds to religious experience, as you pointed out there, they have certain similar comparable analogous properties about them, then it's probably the same kind of phenomena, the same kind of data.
02:20:31.000The Alistair Hardy Research Centre asked for people to write in with their religious experiences and just tell them about them, right?
02:20:39.000And the researchers were really surprised.
02:20:42.000Like, Alistair Hardy himself said, I didn't think 5% of these were going to be people seeing the devil or having Satan watch over their baby every night or walking down the street and suddenly feel like I'm falling through the circles of hell, terrified for the next several years.
02:20:57.000These are religious experiences from people, from what year was this?
02:21:01.000This is like the last 30, 40 years or so.
02:21:04.000I think this date was collected in the 80s, maybe.
02:21:06.000And these people, had they been diagnosed with any mental illnesses?
02:21:10.000The data, like, they just asked for them to account, to give their examples of these experiences.
02:21:25.000And they asked for religious experiences with no mention of negative stuff.
02:21:29.000So let's say if it's about 5%, and that's a modest generalization, right, given they didn't ask for it.
02:21:36.000Let's say it's about 5%, and then you take the number of people that have claimed to have had religious experiences, then the amount of people existing in the world now who have had negative religious experiences outweighs the total number of people who are Zoroastrian, Jains, people who are Jewish.
02:21:52.000We consider them significant minorities.
02:21:54.000Add all those groups together to the, I think it's in between maybe one or two million people who have had negative religious experiences.
02:22:02.000I'd lay out all the boring maths in a buck I had out of the shirt and say, look, my point there was, if you're a Christian, then you've sort of got to accept the fact that there are these evil spirits as well as good ones, if you want to accept religious experiences.
02:22:16.000You can't keep pretending there aren't negative spirits in the world if you're a Christian.
02:22:20.000But the deeper point there is, if it's the same for psychedelic trips as it is for religious experiences, then there are a big number of people in the world who are having these experiences And from my experience, there are loads of people who just won't talk about them as well.
02:22:35.000They're scared, they're ashamed, they don't want to talk about the negative.
02:22:40.000In my life, I probably know about six people who have had the worst kinds of negative experiences you can imagine from psychedelic drugs, whose lives have fallen apart because of it.
02:23:04.000They were asked to rate their agreement with the following statement.
02:23:08.000I believe that the insights and healing gained from psychedelics when taken in supportive settings are worth the risks involved.
02:23:14.000The frequencies across the four response points to this question, strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree, are shown in figure two.
02:23:23.000In total, 89.7% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement.
02:23:36.000You know, human beings vary so much biologically, and we vary so much psychologically.
02:23:41.000You vary by what your experiences have been on this planet up to the point where you take the drugs, where you're at in your life.
02:23:48.000I think the real problem is that they've been illegal for so long, we haven't been able to study what the correct dosages are, what biological problems you may have, like, unique to yourself that makes you either allergic to these things or having an extreme response.
02:24:39.000And some people are allergic to them, and some people just biologically don't agree with them.
02:24:44.000I think that's the case with psychedelics as well.
02:24:47.000Well, I want to just make it clear, right, so that I've sort of formed an overall view on it, which isn't perhaps as strongly put as I've given there.
02:25:20.000Some of that baggage you can't carry up the hill.
02:25:23.000Yeah, I think it's important to differentiate as well, and this happens with the problem of evil and philosophy of religion, is we differentiate between the existential problem of evil, which is really bad things happen to me, so I'm abandoning my belief, and compared to the evidential problem, which is let's look at the big data.
02:25:39.000Does that give me a reason not to believe?
02:25:41.000And I recognize that I'm strongly influenced by the existential part, that people I care about, their lives have been ruined because of this.
02:25:52.000But then I look at the big data and I think, on the whole, it seems like this is a positive thing for people more generally.
02:25:58.000But I still think that there is a big amount of data there.
02:26:02.000About these negative experiences, which just aren't reported, that aren't in our data logs.
02:26:08.000And I'd be interested to know just how many there are and, you know, how severe they are when people sort of have these.
02:26:14.000I'm sure there's quite a few that people don't want to talk about.
02:26:17.000And I bet they get a lot of pushback from the psychedelic community if they want to discuss it.
02:26:21.000Like all zealots, you know, they're psychedelic zealots.
02:26:24.000I think that's the real problem is the illegal nature of them.
02:26:29.000And the fact that, I mean, even just recently, they denied...
02:26:33.000FDA denied MDMA to be used in clinical settings for veterans.
02:26:38.000They have to do more tests with MAPS, which is very unfortunate because that particular type of therapy has been very beneficial for people, especially veterans, who've seen the horrors of war and to come back and try to psychologically deal with these things.
02:26:51.000To have some tools that we know are effective be denied to these people that went overseas and served and saw these I just think that The real problem with these things being illegal is it's mostly being governed by people that have never taken them.
02:27:11.000They don't really understand what we're even talking about.
02:27:16.000I'm not saying it's the panacea for all, but I'm saying it's a tool.
02:27:20.000I think it's been a tremendous tool to a lot of individuals.
02:27:24.000They've experienced some extreme changes of perspective and of their own personal connection to the world through these things that are very, very beneficial.
02:27:35.000I know multiple people that have just become completely different human beings after psychedelic experiences and much better, much more caring, abandoned, whatever chip they had on their shoulder.
02:28:43.000Six months later, he started a Facebook live feed, and this guy was just masturbating in front of all of his friends and family because he'd lost his mind.
02:28:54.000I would like to have talked to that guy before all this shit went south and see how loony he was already.
02:28:59.000I knew a dude was a little bit loony, and then he delved very heavily into the world of psychedelics, and he became schizophrenic.
02:29:06.000I suspect that he was already schizophrenic before, that he had it under containment.
02:29:11.000But then he went nuts and just thought that everything was a PSYOP, and it was very strange.
02:29:45.000I think there's a lack of understanding of what, again, the doses, the correct way to consume it, the biological factors, your unique biology, the way it might interfere with this experience.
02:30:01.000Yeah, I just think all the things we've just said there, right, is the nuance that's lacking in a lot of the public conversation about this stuff.
02:30:39.000If we had real good data on these shaman adventures where people go to the jungle, How many of them lose their fucking marbles and are cooked forever after that?
02:30:51.000It's the same kind of, again, this is back to the point of philosophy, getting clear on the details and communicating them clearly when it comes to psychedelics.
02:30:58.000I mentioned free speech a moment ago, right?
02:31:00.000This is something which is huge in our culture at the moment.
02:31:11.000And afterwards, a few guys in the bar afterwards were asking, like, what I'm talking to you about.
02:31:17.000And they started talking about free speech, because I'm obviously from the UK, and wanted to know whether I supported Keir Starmer as if Keir Starmer was like this, like this, it's like Mao or something.
02:32:54.000It's a huge shame, because this is what people wanted to talk to me about at the bar, right?
02:32:59.000The big shame is that people are going out of their way to use it as an excuse to rob shops and firebomb mosques and try and burn down hotels with innocent women and children in there, right?
02:33:12.000Every single politician in the UK condemns them.
02:33:15.000Less than 5% of people in the UK even sympathize with them, right?
02:33:20.000But there's an interesting question that comes out of that, which we're not talking about, which is the line of free speech, right?
02:33:25.000Everyone just goes, it's like George Orwell's 1984 or something.
02:33:29.000It's like you can't be open with your thoughts.
02:33:36.000And experiencing a bit more of that strong sentiment, which is, you know, I think there are free speech isn't an absolute right in the US or in Europe, right?
02:33:48.000You can't share, you can't engage in, like, slander.
02:33:55.000You can't share sexually explicit images and the like of children, which is a type of Freedom of expression, which might come under freedom of speech.
02:34:03.000But it's a violation of privacy of the child and it also endangers them.
02:34:34.000In the U.S., it was 1919 when the High Court, Supreme Court, legislated against somebody for spreading anti-war leaflets because it was a threat to the stability of the U.S. more generally.
02:34:49.000And the state decided that the thing more important for free speech and to preserve it into the future is to limit it in this case.
02:34:57.000You might think that free speech is intrinsically valuable, the thing which is more important than anything else.
02:35:02.000But I would say that those people are wrong, and that if someone did have an opposition to the war, if you want to have a healthy society, you have to let those people express themselves.
02:35:12.000Especially when you read about the actual history of the war, and you go, hey, maybe this could have been fucking prevented.
02:35:19.000And if people weren't so blindly allegiant to this idea of going over there and fighting...
02:35:49.000Is that when we're thinking about the things we value most, I think things that come ahead of free speech are things like life, ability to have conscious experiences, the potential to flourish, be happy and experience pleasure.
02:36:03.000So I take, even if free speech is something worth pursuing for its own sake, which I take it to be, it is still subject to those other things.
02:36:12.000So even one of the strongest proponents of free speech in the history of philosophy, John Stuart Mill, argued that free speech should be allowed in every single scenario except when it breaches the harm principle.
02:36:24.000And so the interesting question we need to ask is, when does something breach the harm principle?
02:36:30.000People famously say, like, so you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre.
02:36:34.000If you know by shouting fire That there's going to be a stampede and two people will die.
02:36:40.000Thought experiments, pretend those are the rules.
02:37:02.000John Stuart Mill gives the example of, I think it's like a corn dealer.
02:37:06.000And saying, like, you can write in a newspaper, like, the corn dealer's like, you know, he's the worst, he's exploiting us all, that's the reason we're hungry.
02:37:13.000But then he says, you can't shout that to an angry mob that's outside the corn dealer's house.
02:37:18.000And maybe that one's a little bit more tricky, because there's more, the harm's not as direct.
02:37:46.000I'd even think it's okay to get people to stay in the fire if there was one.
02:37:51.000But when people are already setting fire to cars, mosques, hotels, dragging people out of taxis and beating them up, if you go online and say, everyone come to this hotel, let's burn it down, I sort of feel like that's pretty much as close as you can get to the theatre.
02:38:09.000So in that case, I think, but people aren't saying that, right?
02:38:12.000We're just stuck in these sweeping, snappy statements, which are, it's like Orwell's 1984. It's either anti-free speech.
02:38:21.000It's like, no, tell me what kind of free speech you want to defend and why you want to defend it, or else we're going to carry on being stuck in this.
02:38:28.000Well, the way Elon treats Twitter is whatever is illegal.
02:38:44.000And that was what got you banned from Twitter before.
02:38:47.000But the problem with that is we found out through Twitter that they expanded that and kept expanding that to include some Things that a lot of people disagreed with.
02:38:59.000Like transgender athletes in sports, criticizing them would get you banned.
02:39:05.000Criticizing the lockdowns would get you banned.
02:39:08.000Saying anything negative about the mRNA vaccines would get you banned.
02:39:12.000And then we found out the FBI was involved.
02:39:14.000They were asking Twitter to censor posts.
02:39:17.000And there was just so much shit involved that made you go, well, this is not good.
02:39:48.000And that's what's scary about government controlled speech.
02:39:51.000And I think that's what people are scared about in the UK when you see people saying things they shouldn't be saying, but they're saying them on Facebook and they're getting arrested and they're doing like 20 months in jail.
02:40:00.000I haven't found that might well be a more fringe example.
02:40:03.000I think it's like 20. Maybe, Jamie, you can live fact check me here.
02:40:07.000Maybe up to about 30-ish people have been prosecuted for stuff they've put online in the UK recently.
02:41:08.000I think he's in a luxury holiday in Cyprus at the moment, Tommy Robinson, who's doing the rounds again in the light of all of this violence.
02:41:16.000I know the name, but I'm not aware of his history.
02:41:19.000Well, he seemed like we should shun people.
02:41:21.000He tweeted something along the lines recently.
02:41:25.000I'm going to paraphrase it, and Jamie, I'd be really grateful if you could fact-check this one, because I might be liable if I get it wrong.
02:41:33.000He essentially said that the majority of people in Palestine are terrorists, inbreds, and parasites.
02:41:45.000And given what's going on, like, there right now, right, I don't know anyone on the right who uses such obviously degrading language.
02:42:55.000When Tommy Robinson says something like the UK grooming gangs are out of control for a certain demographic and saying that they're responsible for all this crime in our country...
02:43:06.000A quick Google would reveal to Jordan that that's not true in terms of the big government study done in 2021 that found they're no more likely culturally to be doing these things.
02:44:37.000I'm just turning this on now as we're going.
02:44:39.000The big point here, though, when we're looking at...
02:44:41.000This is something Steven Pinker's always emphasizing, right?
02:44:44.000The idea that we shouldn't just be looking at anecdotal evidence, which is stuff like he does, and cherry-picking our examples to fit our political and ideological agendas.
02:45:25.000I think the fear that people have is people that are coming here or coming to your country or going wherever illegally and altering the culture.
02:45:45.000So you think that that kind of talk should be illegal?
02:45:51.000I think during the violence upon people who are Muslim in the UK, attacks on mosques, attacks on people's lives, and the current state in Palestine...
02:46:03.000But him saying that, even if he's completely wrong in saying those things...
02:46:07.000My fully honest view on it is I'm not sure if it should be illegal.
02:47:55.000I was like, wow, this is kind of cool.
02:47:57.000It was interesting to see this person, just with his view of the world, make the other person's view of the world look foolish and make his very sort of rigid definitions of what should and should not be legal look preposterous.
02:48:32.000And what I've thought from the perspective of philosophy and good public conversation on this stuff is that when we're in our car listening to the radio or listening to a podcast at the gym or something, we don't have the time and the mental strength or maybe even the skills in some cases to pick apart someone's argument and analyze them in the way that might be needed.
02:48:55.000And so I wonder if you've got any views on like What the moral responsibility is or what the best thing to do as an interviewer is in terms of whether or not one should be, let's just like say, read up on like a topic in order to pick holes in someone's arguments or something.
02:49:10.000Because I know there's been previous things, right, where people have said that you should be analyzing people's arguments in more detail.
02:49:18.000Sometimes I don't know what they're going to talk about, which is a problem.
02:50:01.000Figure it out, and then I'll say what I think.
02:50:03.000And I have to know where they stand first.
02:50:07.000I have to really understand why they come to that conclusion.
02:50:09.000I've had some disagreements with people about some pretty important issues, and you've got to let that person express themselves.
02:50:18.000You've got to figure out But the beautiful thing about a podcast, as opposed to almost any other form of media, is that no one is telling us what to do.
02:50:26.000It's just you and me having this conversation.
02:50:28.000We only met for like 10 minutes before.
02:50:31.000We sat down and then we talked for three fucking hours, which is crazy.
02:51:00.000So we can give like the audience member the best analysis they can get without having to go and do it themselves.
02:51:07.000When you're doing such a broad project like this on so many different topics, it's impossible to be able to do that.
02:51:15.000But I wonder if you think, genuinely interested and curious to hear your thoughts on it, is a better situation for our public discourse a media in which we've got lots of different, let's say podcasts for example, lots of different podcasts,
02:51:31.000lots of different hosts who all specialize in a different thing in order to analyze, or do you think that Having this general public-facing podcast which has not an area of speciality with people talking about things which are, you know,
02:52:18.000Like, one of the reasons why it's popular is I talk to a bunch of different people about a bunch of different things.
02:52:25.000And some people I am just eternally curious and I have no understanding of it at all and I want it laid out to me.
02:52:32.000And then other things I have very strong opinions about and I want to know why a person thinks differently or how they came to their conclusions or maybe there's a person that I really admire.
02:52:55.000And there's a lot of podcasts that are experts in a very particular field and they talk only about that very particular thing.
02:53:02.000The thing about that is you're not going to get as many people.
02:53:06.000They'll listen to it, but you'll get millions of people listening to this conversation between you and me.
02:53:10.000So the benefit of that is then this ignites someone's curiosity, and if we only do a cursory examination of whatever the subject is, if I'm really not qualified to really delve into it, now this person's excited about it and they can expand, check out your podcast,
02:53:28.000It's good for the greater ecosystem of podcasts and just of general discourse.
02:53:33.000So it's sort of on the listener to not just go, I've just listened to this person for two or three hours.
02:53:38.000I should leave my church or go out and live in the middle of nowhere.
02:53:41.000You should do whatever you feel like doing.
02:53:43.000And I think that's the best message that I can give to people.
02:53:46.000You should live your life in the way that you want to live your life.
02:53:49.000And if you are inspired and motivated and if something changes in the way you view the world based on a conversation that some people have on a podcast, then that's good.
02:54:01.000As long as it's beneficial to you, it's good.
02:54:03.000And we should all sort of try to acquire these conversations and experiences with people because it elevates our own understanding of ourselves and how we interact with each other.
02:54:14.000If someone listens to this and decides to quit their job and start counting grass or something, I just don't want someone to give up and think it's all meaning.
02:54:21.000No, as in like counting grass instead of helping people.
02:55:00.000And the more popular you get, the greater surface area of people that hate you will be.
02:55:05.000Well, I'm fundamentally here for a reason, which is that a lot of the things we're talking about, especially today, are just things that are underrepresented in legacy media.
02:55:17.000Especially non-human animal rights stuff.
02:55:19.000I find that when I've tried to talk about it, whether it's BBC or other podcasts and stuff, that people sometimes feel like they're complicit or that it's too divisive.
02:55:32.000Two weeks ago, I was removed from a panel which I was supposed to be speaking on because I was going to be defending non-human animal rights, so they changed the topic of it.
02:55:52.000There's a huge amount of people who are spiritual but not religious.
02:55:55.000And we've got this public conversation, which is you're either like the Pope or Jordan Peterson or you're like one of the horsemen of New Atheism.
02:56:04.000And leaves out all of these people in the middle who were trying to search for that.
02:56:08.000You're either Antifa or you're a proud boy.
02:56:43.000So, first one's Philosophers on Guard, talking about existence, and the second one is Defeating the Evil God Challenge in Defense of God's Goodness.
02:56:52.000So I spend that book defending the existence of God despite being an agnostic.
02:56:57.000So that doesn't show that I don't have a horse in the race.