The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 408. Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. Today I have the opportunity to talk to Sam Harris once again.

00:01:14.720 Sam and I have spoken many times, and usually publicly, in the past, trying to sort out our mutual understanding

00:01:23.340 in relationship to such topics as morality, both Sam and I are convinced, to the core of our beings, you might say,

00:01:33.480 that there is a true and not merely relative distinction between good and evil,

00:01:40.100 although we differ to some degree in how that distinction might be characterized

00:01:45.300 and what the fact of that distinction means with regard to belief.

00:01:51.380 And so every time I talk to Sam, I'm interested in trying to understand, for example, what he really means

00:01:58.360 by objecting to the religious propositions that he does object to as one of the horsemen of the new atheist movement, so-called.

00:02:07.500 Especially given that Sam is also committed to what you might describe as a religious practice.

00:02:16.480 He's an avid meditator and certainly believes that spiritual experience is not only real,

00:02:24.940 but perhaps the most real form of experience that's available to us.

00:02:30.120 So we're going to hash through that, again, to try to distinguish between dogma and knowledge,

00:02:36.660 to try to distinguish between religious experience per se, or the religious experience that's valuable,

00:02:43.200 and a counterproductive totalitarian dogmatism,

00:02:46.520 and to try to lay that all out with forays into the domains of, well, meditative practice,

00:02:53.560 and with the occasional description and discussion of the political.

00:03:00.120 So it's good to see you again, Sam.

00:03:02.160 Yeah, Jordan.

00:03:02.680 And I think the first thing that I will ask you about is, I'm just curious,

00:03:06.500 we haven't talked for, I think it's almost a year now, I believe that's the case.

00:03:11.120 And so the first thing I'm curious about is, what are you up to?

00:03:15.160 It feels like two years.

00:03:16.140 I feel like our last conversation was in the very depths of COVID,

00:03:20.880 and I was in some basement lair.

00:03:24.480 So it's got to be two years.

00:03:28.100 Things are great.

00:03:28.940 I mean, it's really a nice time of life.

00:03:31.300 It's nice with the family.

00:03:33.200 It's nice professionally.

00:03:34.980 It's just a, I'm in a good spot.

00:03:37.020 It's a, you know, I'm all too aware that things can change.

00:03:39.960 So I'm enjoying my moment in the sun.

00:03:42.560 But it's really, it's really a beautiful period of life.

00:03:46.080 Yeah.

00:03:46.380 So what's good?

00:03:47.360 I mean, my, my, in terms of just how I spend my time day to day, it's really has become a semi-seamless machine for producing well-being.

00:04:01.740 I mean, it's really, I'm doing what I want to do moment to moment and finding lots of people who want me to do it.

00:04:09.980 So it's just, there's not much distance between what I have to do, certainly professionally, and what I would do anyway, just because I want to do it.

00:04:19.760 So it's, I mean, I just, I count myself as extraordinarily lucky to have found my, my path here and that it's working.

00:04:28.660 So it's, it's, yeah.

00:04:30.460 I mean, I just have, I have no, I have no complaints.

00:04:32.700 It would be indecent to complain about anything personally at this point, except for the passage of time and the implications of that, which I, which I know all too well.

00:04:42.680 Yeah.

00:04:42.940 Well, I would say that you look both younger and happier than you did the last time I saw you.

00:04:48.020 And, you know, I, I got quite attuned in my clinical practice to watching people's faces, obviously, but also seeing to some degree the way that they're set habitually, you know.

00:05:00.340 And you look, you look very good.

00:05:03.360 And so I'm, I'm very happy to hear it.

00:05:05.360 You said something I think that is of particular interest to me is that you have managed and also attribute this to some degree to good fortune to bring together what you have to do with what you would want to do.

00:05:19.040 And that seems to me a sign of optimality of function, well, as well as the good fortune that we just described.

00:05:26.080 And so what is it that you think that you're doing that's enabled you?

00:05:31.080 I mean, I know that you've been concentrating to a large degree on meditative practice, for example, but what is it that you think you've done to the, to your attitude, let's say, to your patterns of attention that have enabled you to bring what you need to do and what you want to do in alignment?

00:05:49.780 Well, I mean, this has been happening for quite some time.

00:05:54.620 It's, you know, this is, I would say that this has been, you know, it's taken me 20 years to fully get my, my professional life and my core interests to gel.

00:06:07.200 And so part of that is having built out platforms where I can just follow my interests as, and follow the needs of the moment, you know, whether it's responding to something that's in the news or just figuring out what, what I'm most want to pay attention to in a given day or week.

00:06:25.540 Uh, so, I mean, as you know, I have, I have both my podcast making sense.

00:06:30.440 I have the app waking up, which is, you know, started at narrowly focused as a, a meditation app, but it's much more of a, an applied philosophy app at this, at this point.

00:06:41.140 It's just expanded beyond meditation and it's expanded beyond, well beyond my contributions to it.

00:06:48.480 So it's, um, there are many other people on it.

00:06:50.820 And so I can, I can bounce between those two platforms, you know, however I see fit and they're, and they're, while superficially they're similar because they're just me pushing MP3 files out to the world.

00:07:04.000 They're just, just, just audio, uh, uh, platforms in the end, they're totally unlike one another with respect to the kinds of topics I tend to engage and the kinds of interactions with the world that provokes.

00:07:20.420 So it's, it's, it's, it's really quite, it's almost like I'm living two lives simultaneously because I'm waking up the app.

00:07:28.780 I get, I mean, it's, it's no exaggeration to say it.

00:07:32.940 It's, it's, it's almost uniformly, uh, just pure positivity coming back at me, you know, apart from the occasional, you know, software glitch that crashes somebody's phone.

00:07:44.700 And we hear about that.

00:07:45.800 It's just that there's no distance between what I'm intending to put out and the effect I'm hoping to have and the effect that I, in fact, seem to be having based on the feedback.

00:07:58.780 So, and, and this was, you know, this has been, uh, it was launched almost exactly five years ago.

00:08:05.700 So for five years, I've had this look at this kind of alternate life.

00:08:09.720 It's almost like a, a counterfactual life to the one I, I hadn't managed to lead where I could sidestep all pointless controversy and annoying, uh, you know, bad faith criticisms.

00:08:23.920 And just meet people at a place where what I have to give is found valuable by them in, in precisely the way that I would hope.

00:08:35.920 Right.

00:08:36.060 So it's just, it's like a, a purely positive encounter with, with legions of people.

00:08:41.680 Um, which again, because of my experience as an author and as a podcaster, I had lost sight of that even being a possibility, right?

00:08:50.660 I just, I had lost sight of the fact that there are people in this world who have careers where they don't get any grief from the world because the world just understands what they're putting out.

00:08:59.920 And they like, and people like it and they get paid for it.

00:09:02.440 And it's just, it's a, it's a transaction that makes everybody happy.

00:09:05.160 And so it's like opening a bakery where everyone loves the, the scones and, you know, it's, it's just, it's, you know, there's just nothing bad about it.

00:09:13.740 Um, and, and yet I find that, you know, as, and this, you know, I'm sure you feel the same way.

00:09:20.440 I can't stay merely in that lane because there are other topics of social importance that I feel a need to comment on.

00:09:27.440 And, and so I have my podcast and public speaking or, or books or any other channel, but I wish to do that.

00:09:33.920 And, and, you know, mostly I'm, I'm doing my podcast for that, but, so I still have a foot in the water of controversy.

00:09:41.400 Um, and I'm sure we'll get into some of those controversy, controversies here, but it's to have both is such a, a, um, a source of sanity.

00:09:53.860 I mean, I, cause I can, I can just swim in whatever waters I want to swim in on a daily basis.

00:10:00.160 So it's, it's, it's quite wonderful.

00:10:02.760 Um, so why do you, just out of curiosity, so while there's, there's a substantial parallel, I would say, between the situation you're in and the situation that I'm in, given what you just described.

00:10:14.740 Because one of the reasons that I continue to tour continually, essentially, is because it's completely positive.

00:10:23.460 And I, I engage in almost no political discussion, almost no culture war discussion.

00:10:30.440 Almost all of it is, well, you're, uh, you talk about your waking up, uh, system.

00:10:38.700 And I suppose I'm walking on a parallel line insofar as I'm encouraging people to aim up.

00:10:45.020 And I don't know if there's any difference between waking up and aiming up.

00:10:48.260 Perhaps there is, and we can talk about that, but it is a great relief to be in a domain that's entirely positive.

00:10:56.260 And then, but then it is interleaved for me, as it is for you, with some degree of combat, let's say, on the more philosophical and culture war side of things.

00:11:08.840 Because how, why have you concluded, sometimes I wonder, Sam, if it wouldn't be just as well to stay in the positive domain all the time.

00:11:19.320 And I know that you are no longer on Twitter, for example, and so that's obviously one of the places where you've detached yourself from the proliferation of, you might say, unnecessary and polarizing conflict.

00:11:31.420 But you just did indicate that you feel either a moral obligation or an intellectual pull towards keeping abreast of the domain of life that constitutes more problems.

00:11:45.400 And so, why do you think that balance is necessary?

00:11:48.760 Why don't you forego that entirely and stay within the domain of the positive?

00:11:52.520 I mean, you seem to have concluded that balancing them is actually better for you in some sense, or maybe better in general.

00:11:58.720 So, why did you conclude that?

00:12:00.180 Yeah, well, it's a question I continue to ask myself, because you only have one life, or I would say you only have one life you can be sure of, and so why not live it in the happiest manner possible?

00:12:14.500 But I do find that there are certain moments, first of all, my interests are wider than can be encompassed just by things like meditation and narrowly focusing on questions about how to live the most meaningful possible life.

00:12:34.980 It's not all just about maximizing mental pleasure or even one's ethical wisdom moment to moment.

00:12:44.400 There are things that interest me that I want to talk about that really don't belong over waking up, but they do belong on my podcast.

00:12:50.580 So, talking about physics, say, right?

00:12:52.580 That's just interesting, and I like to do that.

00:12:54.420 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

00:13:25.140 Almost unambiguously positive.

00:13:26.640 I mean, there's a slight sense, certainly when the things in the news are really heating up, that I could be missing something, or I'm not party to the conversation that's happening at that kind of interval, where people are responding to things every 30 seconds.

00:13:43.400 But the truth is, I don't have to be, because what I have found is that when you don't have an opportunity to just blurt out your instantaneous response to something that's happening in the news or something you saw in your timeline,

00:13:56.920 And you have to let your response to it cure over the course of days, in my case, because I have to decide, okay, is this important enough for me to actually talk about it on my podcast?

00:14:09.100 And I might not be podcasting again for another three days or even a week.

00:14:13.420 And so many things don't survive that test. 0.99

00:14:16.920 98% of things just fall by the wayside because the truth is you didn't have to broadcast your opinion about that thing that happened on that campus by that indiscretion committed by that stupid blue-haired person. 1.00

00:14:33.220 Right. So it's just like you didn't, you didn't have to reap all of the attendant poison of having weighed in and you didn't have to worry about whether you should respond to that poison and those misunderstandings generated there. 0.97

00:14:47.260 And I noticed in retrospect that, and I dimly, I dimly knew this when I was on Twitter, but I didn't fully appreciate it until I was off, that it was no exaggeration to say that basically every bad thing in my life, you know, apart from, you know, the sickness of the people close to me, was a result of something I had done on Twitter or something that I had seen on Twitter.

00:15:12.960 Yeah, I can relate to that.

00:15:13.720 That I felt I needed to respond to.

00:15:15.440 So it was just this kind of hallucination machine that I had invited into the center of my life.

00:15:23.520 And getting rid of it really modified my sense of not just what I have to do on a day-to-day basis and what I should do, but just of my own existence, right?

00:15:37.000 Like, there was something about my digital existence that was claiming too much real estate in my conception of myself as a person, right?

00:15:47.880 Well, you might have put your finger on it, at least to some degree there, with something like your observation about whether or not you're willing to put time into it.

00:16:01.080 You know, I've had many discussions with my family about Twitter in particular, and I would tend to agree with you that much of the negativity that I do run into in my life is a consequence of Twitter.

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00:17:56.960 I use Twitter to stay abreast of the sorts of things that you describe that you might be able to get access to on Twitter as well, current events.

00:18:09.820 And there is that temptation to respond immediately.

00:18:13.780 But you intimated that maybe a good rule of thumb is something like, if you're not willing to sit down and think about it for an hour, let's say, then perhaps it's not important enough to share your opinion with millions of people and reap the consequences.

00:18:33.400 Well, and reap the consequences.

00:18:36.380 You know, and Twitter is, although it's a social media platform that facilitates impulsivity, it's also a broad scale publishing platform.

00:18:45.700 And it's not obvious that you should be publishing all your instantaneous responses to cultural events.

00:18:53.860 And it's a funny thing for me because it's not that easy to dissociate that from responsibility.

00:18:59.180 You know, I feel that I have a responsibility to bring to light, let's say, certain elements of the culture war that are going on at a deep level.

00:19:08.960 And part of the reason that I use Twitter the way that I do use it is to do that.

00:19:13.980 But then it does have that problem of intense negativity.

00:19:17.800 And I learned from walking through airports with my wife, we had this discussion a couple of times.

00:19:24.960 Airports have bothered me a lot ever since 9-11.

00:19:27.700 I review them as, they're like the, for me, they're the bleeding edge of the totalitarian incursion into general day-to-day life.

00:19:38.120 And they've always made me very uncomfortable.

00:19:40.580 I don't like lining up for the, you know, for the screenings, the theatrical screenings and so forth.

00:19:48.420 And that made me very bitchy and hard to get along with in airports.

00:19:52.200 And, you know, I had a conversation with my wife, a fairly detailed conversation.

00:19:56.940 And our decision was, if I'm in an airport and something happens that annoys me but isn't important enough to actually sit down and write about, then I should, I have to just ignore it or shut up about it.

00:20:09.060 And this has also helped me calibrate my responses.

00:20:11.560 And it's the same problem with Twitter, right, is that something can be irritating and be genuinely irritating.

00:20:18.980 But that doesn't necessarily mean that the most appropriate way to deal with it is to share your irritation in the moment.

00:20:24.420 And part of the reason Twitter is so pathological, perhaps, and is such a snake pit of polarization is because it does encourage that kind of impulsive and immediate response to things that are perhaps of sufficient seriousness so that they should only be taken seriously.

00:20:42.300 Yeah, it encourages many things that I think are ultimately producing some consequential delusions for us individually and at scale.

00:20:54.600 I mean, so it is, it provides a kind of an illusion of conversation because, you know, you'll tweet something at me, I'll tweet something at you, and we seem to be talking.

00:21:06.120 But as you know, we're primarily talking in front of our respective audiences, which are different, which are largely different, right?

00:21:13.740 So when I say something to you, you know, it's, my audience is at my back and vice versa.

00:21:20.100 So, so much communication becomes performative, and that starts to degrade the, you know, the kind of the good faith characteristics of a real conversation, and people just wind up scoring points on each other.

00:21:32.360 And so it encourages that.

00:21:35.140 That's the kind of thing, you know, dunks are the kind of thing that tend to go viral.

00:21:40.280 It selects for a kind of dishonesty.

00:21:42.260 Like, there's an ethic where, you know, very few people feel a real need, and certainly anyone who's any kind of activist, politically, left or right, doesn't feel much of a need to really get their opponent's position correct before savaging it.

00:21:59.420 They don't mind distorting it, especially if they can use clips of their opponent that have been artfully edited so as to make them seem to be saying something they weren't, in fact, saying in context.

00:22:10.900 They will use that as a way of just smearing the person.

00:22:15.340 You want to hold someone accountable for the worst possible version of what they might have said, however implausible it really is, as long as that can be made to stick.

00:22:26.600 And people just see what can be made to stick, and they almost never go back and clean up their, you know, apologize for their errors and go back and clean up their mess.

00:22:36.940 And people do this, you know, people, you know, when blue check marks meant something, there were a lot of blue check marks who would behave this way, right?

00:22:42.840 And you have journalists or people who are treated as journalists.

00:22:46.400 And I, you know, as a point of principle, really have always tried to avoid that.

00:22:51.140 I mean, whenever I get somebody, somebody's views wrong, however odious I find their views or how odious I find them as a person, I, you know, I apologize for that and correct the record.

00:23:03.560 But I found myself continually in dialogue with people who didn't play by those rules.

00:23:07.740 So it's set up to bring out the worst in us and to degrade conversation way more fully than it's ever degraded in person.

00:23:18.300 I mean, the thing that convinced me to get off Twitter is that I was seeing people behave like psychopaths by the, you know, the tens of thousands.

00:23:27.180 And I knew there couldn't be that many psychopaths, right?

00:23:29.260 I knew there were, I knew these people couldn't be this dishonest or malicious in their lives.

00:23:34.020 And in fact, in many cases, I knew this because I knew some of the people.

00:23:38.860 I had had dinner with some of the people.

00:23:39.940 You and I have, you know, have mutual friends and colleagues among these people.

00:23:45.220 And yet I was seeing the absolute worst in them in terms of how they were engaging on Twitter, not just with me, but with other people who, you know, they felt they needed to slam.

00:23:56.760 And we're seeing some of this.

00:23:57.780 I mean, I think there's something like this happening.

00:23:59.740 I haven't really followed it, but over the Daily Wire, I mean, you're very close to you.

00:24:03.120 You've got Candace and Ben attacking each other. 1.00

00:24:07.680 I would argue that that kind of thing is not only spilling out onto Twitter, it very likely wouldn't happen but for the existence of Twitter.

00:24:18.760 And there are many things happening out in the real world that happen in response to something that's seen on Twitter, but then the, you know, like some of the, many of these protests, these pro-Palestinian protests that have become so, such concern to many of us, especially on, you know, college campuses where you have otherwise very educated people expressing solidarity with, with, you know, true ethical monsters in Hamas. 0.65

00:24:48.220 What we're seeing is something that's seen on Twitter, however, half-baked, and then the response to it in the streets is performative because it's meant for the streets, but it's really meant to be broadcast back on Twitter, right?

00:25:09.020 I mean, that people wouldn't be doing these things but for the omnipresence of cell phones that can be broadcast back onto social media.

00:25:16.140 And so I just think we have built this reinforcement cycle for ourselves, this kind of feed-forward loop that has eroded our capacity to speak rationally to one another and to have good-faith debates and even strong arguments.

00:25:32.460 And it's produced a machine for amplifying the narcissistic tendency of everyone wanting to just manufacture outrage.

00:25:45.440 Yeah, well, that's, well, you know, I think there's something, and you're pointing at this, I actually think there's something that's technically going on, particularly with Twitter.

00:25:58.340 And maybe it's proportionate to the degree to which a social media communication system capitalizes on immediacy of response.

00:26:08.440 Like, I'm afraid that we're setting up virtual environments, they're virtual perceptual environments and communication environments that aren't well-matched to the underlying reality, which means they're delusional.

00:26:20.760 And the delusional direction of Twitter is in the direction of enabling psychopathic behavior.

00:26:28.520 Now, there's a research literature that's emerging on that.

00:26:31.320 So you see the people who are most likely to troll online, so to cause, to post things that they know perfectly well will do nothing but cause trouble, are dark tetrad types. 0.98

00:26:45.460 They're Machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopathic, and sadistic.

00:26:49.060 And then, so it does bring those people out of the woodwork to a much greater degree than might be otherwise expected.

00:26:58.420 But I also think, as you pointed out, that it does the same thing to those fragmentary psychopathic tendencies that exist in everyone.

00:27:07.900 It's a psychopathy facilitator.

00:27:11.200 And the degree to which that is driving polarization in the broader culture is indeterminate.

00:27:17.160 I think it might be driving almost all of it.

00:27:20.060 Right.

00:27:20.760 Right?

00:27:21.040 Because my online life and my real life are so different that they almost bear no relationship to one another.

00:27:27.520 Like, and I suspect this is something that you said you've been discovering, particularly as a consequence of working in the waking up space.

00:27:36.300 You know, I mean, all the interactions I have with people in public, in my actual life, are unbelievably positive, with the exception of perhaps one in 5,000.

00:27:47.400 Now, the one in 5,000 can be quite unpleasant, but it's statistically negligible.

00:27:52.540 But if you derived your expectation of my experience from the online world, you'd expect that, you know, half the people that I ran into would be people that hated me.

00:28:04.740 And simply, the lack of concordance is so remarkable that it does look like the difference between a delusion and reality.

00:28:15.080 And I think it's unbelievably dangerous.

00:28:17.320 Like, we have no idea what it means to compress people to the point where their communication tilts heavily in the psychopathic direction.

00:28:25.220 We have no idea what the broad-scale social consequences of that might be.

00:28:29.840 Yeah.

00:28:30.600 So, I feel, so I share your experience.

00:28:33.060 Again, my encounters in public are almost uniformly positive.

00:28:36.580 I think the, obviously, there's a possibility of a selection effect there that the only people who are likely to come up to you are the people who have something nice to say.

00:28:45.040 And then you have other people who are recognizing you who are just, you know, holding their tongues and they don't like you.

00:28:52.040 And, you know, we're both controversial figures.

00:28:54.540 And I have to think that some percentage of the people who notice us in public are people who are not fans and just don't say anything.

00:29:01.520 But still, I've seen the effect, you know, I've joined the two groups.

00:29:10.480 I know what it's like to deal with the same person on Twitter in front of their fans versus over dinner.

00:29:17.680 And it's, you know, they're miles apart.

00:29:20.240 And I just see there's, so it is corrosive even when, even in the best case,

00:29:28.220 when we're not talking about anonymous trolls who are hiding behind, you know, their anonymity and just savaging you.

00:29:33.920 These are people with real reputations who you actually know and will likely meet again in person.

00:29:40.920 And yet Twitter brings out the absolute worst in them.

00:29:44.660 I mean, for me, the very large, the 800-pound canary in the coal mine for me is Elon.

00:29:51.520 I mean, look at what Twitter has done to Elon's life, right?

00:29:55.340 It's just, you know, Elon used to be a friend.

00:29:58.920 You know, he's somebody I knew reasonably well.

00:30:03.800 You know, his engagement with Twitter has been catastrophic for him as a person from my point of view.

00:30:10.800 I mean, it's just, it's clearly a compulsion.

00:30:13.280 I mean, he was so addicted to it that he felt he needed to buy the platform.

00:30:16.920 But it is a, you know, his use of it has been so irresponsible and produced such, I mean, forget about the harm he's produced in other people's lives.

00:30:29.440 And nothing I'm saying now relates to changes he's made to the platform.

00:30:35.900 I mean, that's a separate thing that we can talk about.

00:30:38.240 You know, I've always been agnostic as to whether or not he could actually improve Twitter as a platform.

00:30:42.800 And he may yet wind up doing that.

00:30:44.880 But I'm just talking about the way he has personally used it as a user of the platform and the way he's interacted with people and boosted, signal boosted massively the profiles of anonymous QAnon lunatic trolls, right?

00:31:00.260 I mean, he's been completely cavalier in who he interacts with, all the while knowing that anyone he boosts suddenly gets, you know, a million followers and has a platform that they otherwise couldn't imagine having.

00:31:13.680 So I look at him and I think, all right, if someone of his talent who has so many other good things to do with his 24 hours in any given day, is this derailed by this platform?

00:31:31.140 You know, is using it this compulsively to the obvious degradation of his reputation in most circles that count, right?

00:31:42.840 I mean, he's, you know, he's not, he can't be canceled because he's produced so many useful things, you know, and he's just too embedded with things that everyone still wants.

00:31:53.900 But man, if he, if, if he were a little less productive, you know, in space and, and on the ground, um, we would never, you know, he'd be, he'd be the next Alex Jones in terms of the way mainstream culture would view him.

00:32:12.120 Um, and it's, it's been terrible to see, right?

00:32:16.200 It's been very depressing to see.

00:32:17.820 Uh, so, um, and it's, I, and I, you know, I, I guess I can blame him, but I blame the stimulus more.

00:32:26.260 I blame Twitter.

00:32:27.620 I blame, I blame, I mean, for whatever reason, he has found this to be the most addictive thing in his life.

00:32:33.760 And, um, and he's, he's been willing to totally torch relationships over his use of it.

00:32:40.820 Yeah, well, it's definitely the case that one of the cardinal dangers of Twitter is its propensity to bring out the worst in people and, and the worst in the culture.

00:32:51.780 I mean, I guess it's an open question whether or not Musk's takeover of Twitter will result in the dramatic improvements to the platform that might justify the risk inherent in engaging with it.

00:33:06.740 So, let's leave that a bit, Sam.

00:33:09.180 Correct.

00:33:09.640 I, I want to, I want to turn my attention, our attention, if you don't mind, to some of the deeper issues that you and I have discussed.

00:33:16.760 And I have a bunch of questions for you.

00:33:18.960 So, the first thing I want to do is clarify something.

00:33:21.740 My recollection of, particularly our last conversation, and it was one that I found clarified my understanding of your thought to a greater degree than our previous conversations I had, we had, probably because I listened to you more,

00:33:35.000 was that, and so correct me if I get this wrong, because I want to use this as a platform to ask you some other questions.

00:33:42.200 My understanding after that conversation was that you were driven to search for a, an objective foundation for moral claims,

00:33:55.440 primarily because you had become convinced of the existence of, for lack of a better term, of evil in the world,

00:34:03.360 and were looking for a, for solid ground to stand on in your attempts to both understand and combat the most malevolent proclivities of,

00:34:17.720 the most malevolent proclivities.

00:34:20.400 We could leave it at that.

00:34:21.720 Now, is that, is that a reasonable, is that a reasonable conclusion?

00:34:25.560 Have I got that right?

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00:35:33.100 Yeah, I think my motive will be pretty familiar to you.

00:35:40.960 This came largely out of the collisions I was having with people after I wrote my first two books,

00:35:49.420 The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, where I was noticing, disproportionately on the left,

00:35:55.780 specifically, I mean, we've come full circle now to this moment, you know, in the news cycle.

00:36:01.480 But, you know, mostly in response to my criticism of Islamic extremism and, you know,

00:36:10.320 the kind of the urgency with which I was saying that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are, you know,

00:36:16.780 are sincerely believed by millions of people, and these beliefs have real consequences in the world,

00:36:21.200 and they're not good ones, right?

00:36:23.180 And we should talk about that honestly.

00:36:25.620 What I was getting, mostly from the left, was, you know, what struck me as pure masochistic delusion,

00:36:34.760 but it was on its own side a very sophisticated philosophy of, you know, postmodernist truth claims about the relativity of everything,

00:36:44.000 which, you know, in the minds of its adherents left us with no solid ground to stand on ever when making claims about right and wrong and good and evil.

00:36:55.100 So, you know, the point where it became, and this is something that I, this is actually a scene I wrote verbatim in my third book,

00:37:03.820 The Moral Landscape, which is where I laid out, you know, my argument on this topic.

00:37:07.980 I was at the Salk Institute at a conference that had been organized, it was either in 2006 or 2007, I believe,

00:37:17.940 and I had said something disparaging about the Taliban in my remarks about, you know, the relationship between moral values

00:37:27.560 and our growing scientific understanding of the human mind and human well-being.

00:37:32.980 And I said, you know, something, you know, that I should have been uncontroversial in that context.

00:37:39.240 And I'm at the Salk Institute, this, you know, preeminent scientific institution down in La Jolla, which is, you know, one of the nicest places on earth.

00:37:49.100 And, you know, with an auditorium filled with, you know, well-heeled people who appear to be enjoying their political freedom

00:37:58.400 and their freedom of speech and freedom of everything, and I said something about, well, you know,

00:38:04.840 we just know, whatever remains to be discovered about the nature of morality and human value and human well-being,

00:38:14.140 we know that the Taliban don't have it perfectly right. 0.77

00:38:19.100 Right.

00:38:19.280 So whatever the optimal way of living is, we know that the Taliban haven't found it, right? 1.00

00:38:24.760 We know that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out 0.95

00:38:30.720 is not an optimal strategy for maximizing human well-being.

00:38:36.400 And then a woman academic, and she actually happened to be, or was later a scientific advisor to President Obama

00:38:46.400 for medical ethics, came up to me, and said, well, that's just your opinion, right?

00:38:52.520 And so then this led me to realize just how far the rot had spread, you know, that even here is someone who is, you know,

00:39:01.760 a woman academic who's enjoying all the freedom of, you know, however hard won that can be found in Western society. 1.00

00:39:11.060 Presumably, this is a person who would be, who would have responded to the Me Too movement and all its moral urgency with alacrity.

00:39:22.320 She was still open-minded, at least in the context of talking to me, about the treatment of women and girls under the Taliban, right?

00:39:29.300 And, you know, I detail our further conversation, again, verbatim in my book, because I literally, I was so astounded by the exchange that I turned on my heels,

00:39:41.600 literally in mid-sentence, walked straight back to my room and wrote down exactly what the two of us had said,

00:39:46.340 because I just could not believe what had happened.

00:39:49.500 So the moral confusion here is that you have many well-educated people who will make very fine-grained distinctions about moral norms in the context of, you know, living, you know, in 21st century America.

00:40:10.100 You know, they'll, they'll consider words to be violence and, you know, the misgendering of people to be a profound microaggression, you know, Halloween costumes that culturally appropriate, et cetera, et cetera, are anathema.

00:40:26.020 This is, this is how finely calibrated their moral scruples are over here, you know, in the quad of an American university.

00:40:32.640 But you ask them to consider whether, you know, someone like Malala Yousafzai was badly treated by the Taliban and they become tongue-tied, right? 0.50

00:40:44.720 They, they, they, and they will even say things like, well, who are we to criticize an ancient culture?

00:40:49.100 So that, so anyway, so that motivated me to say, all right, the smartest, most well-educated people in our society have become unmoored to any vision of objective moral values, right?

00:41:04.340 They have, you know, worse, they have it, they have become anchored to a belief that objectivity with respect to moral values is impossible.

00:41:13.720 And certainly science will never have anything to say about it.

00:41:16.140 And so they've ceded this ground to dogmatic religion, right?

00:41:20.660 And someone like Stephen Jay Gould did this when he had this conception of the non-overlapping magisteria between religion and science, right?

00:41:27.760 So science talks about facts and, and what is, but religion talks about what should be and, and all, and the totality of human values.

00:41:35.700 And I think that's never been a tenable way of dividing the pie.

00:41:40.300 Um, and it, but has this obvious defect that where people who lose their religious convictions are then left standing on apparently nothing when it, when it comes time to say something like slavery is wrong.

00:41:53.980 I mean, you literally have professors saying, well, you know, I don't like slavery.

00:41:57.540 I don't happen to like it.

00:41:58.580 I wouldn't want a slave, but you know, I can't, you know, I can't really say it's wrong from the point of view of the universe, right?

00:42:05.340 I mean, it's, that's, that's not the, that's not what science does.

00:42:08.880 And my point is that morality, and this is perhaps something you're, you're going to want to, to, um, disagree with, but in my view, morality, morality has to relate to the, the suffering and wellbeing of conscious creatures.

00:42:25.800 I mean, not even limiting it to humans, but just whatever can possibly suffer or be made happy in this universe is some, is a, a possible theater of moral concern.

00:42:35.720 And we know that my, that conscious minds must be arising in some way in conformity to the laws of nature.

00:42:45.460 I mean, so whatever is possible for conscious minds is a statement about, at bottom, a, a final scientific understanding of what minds are and what consciousness is and how those things are integrated with the physics of things.

00:43:00.100 Um, and so there, there have to be right answers to the question of how to navigate the,

00:43:05.720 from the worst possible suffering for everyone to places on the moral landscape that are quite a bit better than that, where there's, there's beauty and creativity and joy of a sort that we can only dimly imagine.

00:43:16.800 And the question of how to do that and what that landscape looks like, those are, those are, it's a fact-based discussion about science at every level that could be relevant to the conscious states of conscious minds.

00:43:30.860 And so it's, it's a statement, it's a statement, it's a discussion about genetics and psychology and neurobiology and sociology and economics and, and any, and, and sciences as yet uninvented with respect to causality in this place.

00:43:44.820 And so that's, and so that's, that's, that's my argument that there's, we need a, we need a spirit of consilience, um, across this, this, this, this, the domain of facts and values.

00:43:54.920 And, um, yeah, there's more to say there, but I'll, I'll, I'll stop.

00:43:59.680 Okay.

00:44:00.060 Okay.

00:44:00.500 Well, so I'm going to, I'm going to pick up a couple of themes there.

00:44:03.560 So one of the things that you pointed to was the incoherence manifested by this woman and, and like people in relationship to micro narratives and macro narratives.

00:44:19.700 So you said that it was your, in your opinion that she or the people who she might represent would be perfectly willing to be upset about some relatively minor issue that might arise on a university campus, like the wearing of inappropriate Halloween costumes, but are incoherent in relationship to making broader scale, um, moral claims.

00:44:45.280 Now, one of the claims of the post-modernists, this was, um, put forward most particularly by, who was it now, who said that there were no meta-narratives.

00:44:57.380 The post-modernism is fundamentally disallowance of the idea that any uniting meta-narratives are possible.

00:45:04.780 I'll remember his name momentarily.

00:45:06.280 It could be Derrida or Foucault or.

00:45:08.900 Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's not.

00:45:11.120 He, he, he, he, he's the guy who generated simulation theory, another Frenchman. 0.99

00:45:16.300 Yeah.

00:45:16.820 Le Pen?

00:45:18.780 No.

00:45:19.700 Baudrillard?

00:45:20.600 It's a rogues.

00:45:21.620 Yeah, Baudrillard.

00:45:22.220 It's Baudrillard.

00:45:22.800 It's a rogues gallery.

00:45:23.800 Yeah, yeah, it's Baudrillard.

00:45:24.840 Okay, so here's the problem with that.

00:45:27.580 Well, the problem with that in part is that there's no united action and perception at any level without a uniting narrative.

00:45:40.280 So, for example, if I just move, if I pick up a glass to move my, a cup from the table to my lips, I have to organize all those extraordinarily complex actions, right, which cascade up from the molecular level through the musculature of my body.

00:45:58.960 I have to organize that into something that's coherent and unified in order to bring about any action whatsoever.

00:46:06.160 And what that implies is that there's a hierarchy of uniting structure.

00:46:10.700 And what the postmodernists do is arbitrarily make that halt at a certain level.

00:46:18.060 It's like, so you're allowed a uniting narrative or structure up to a certain level, but beyond that, you're not allowed it at all.

00:46:24.720 And that's the point at which the meta-narrative emerges, and those are now forbidden.

00:46:31.360 And I don't understand that because I think that it's a distinction between a narrative and a meta-narrative.

00:46:39.340 It's an arbitrary distinction.

00:46:41.280 And you can't attend or act without a uniting narrative.

00:46:45.380 So now you seem to be pointing to something like that.

00:46:48.360 So let me walk through your argument.

00:46:50.500 I'll add one other, which I think is a simpler defeater, which is that the claim is that there can be no universal values, right, or universal truth claims with respect to right and wrong and good and evil.

00:47:07.540 And yet they tacitly make the universal claim that tolerance of this ethical diversity is better than intolerance, right?

00:47:17.940 So the demand is we need to find some space in our minds to tolerate the difference of opinion offered by the Taliban or Hamas or some other group of that sort.

00:47:33.180 But that doesn't make any sense.

00:47:35.620 That's an appeal to tolerance, one, that the Taliban and Hamas don't share, right?

00:47:41.820 So we're tolerating their intolerance.

00:47:44.020 But it's also the tacit claim that tolerance is better.

00:47:49.780 You know, tolerance on our own side is better.

00:47:51.200 Tolerance is the uniting narrative.

00:47:52.360 Yeah.

00:47:52.680 Sure.

00:47:54.100 Yeah.

00:47:54.300 Well, you see the same thing with the postmodern insistence.

00:47:57.460 This is particularly true of people like Foucault, that nothing rules but power, right?

00:48:03.240 Because Foucault saw power making itself manifest everywhere.

00:48:06.920 And the fundamental postmodernist claim is that there's no uniting metanarratives.

00:48:11.500 But that didn't stop the postmodernists for a second in making the claim that you could find power relations underlying every single form of human action and social interaction.

00:48:21.780 So, but this, now this metanarrative, this uniting narrative, see, you point to it in a way that I think that points out to me a very fundamental element of agreement between the positions that you and I have taken, even though we've had so much apparent disagreement.

00:48:42.800 You point to the Taliban and you say, at minimum, we can say with some degree of certainty that what the Taliban are doing is not optimal.

00:48:53.940 Okay.

00:48:54.200 And you said that's a claim that's so weak in a way that it should just be self-evident, right?

00:48:58.920 Right.

00:48:59.140 You know what I mean by weak?

00:49:00.280 It's like, isn't that obvious?

00:49:01.540 Well, you know, I started in my investigations at a more extreme point, I would say.

00:49:06.720 I looked at the camp guard in Auschwitz who enjoyed his work and thought, I don't know what good is, but at minimum, it's the opposite of whatever the hell that is.

00:49:21.280 And so that was a starting point for me.

00:49:23.820 And it seems to me that partly what you're doing is that you put your foot firmly on the head of evil and say, well, this is a starting point.

00:49:32.320 And even though we can't define good, we can define it as the opposite of whatever this is.

00:49:39.380 And so does that seem like a reasonable point of agreement between us as far as you're concerned?

00:49:44.880 Yeah, although I think this is perhaps a different topic, but it's certainly adjacent to what you just said.

00:49:53.060 I think there's some ethical paradoxes here, which would be interesting to consider,

00:49:57.380 because I think most of human evil, of the sort that you and I are now describing, doesn't require the presence of actually evil people, right?

00:50:06.480 I think there are evil people.

00:50:07.640 I think there are true psychopaths and sadists for whom it is true to say that if evil means anything, it should be applied to their conscious states and their psychology.

00:50:18.020 But so much of what we consider to be evil and so much of what produces needless human misery is the result of otherwise normal people psychologically behaving terribly because they believe fairly crazy and unsupportable things about what reality is and how they should live within it.

00:50:39.540 So I would by no means ever want to suggest, in fact, I'm at pains to say otherwise whenever I can remember to, that all jihadists or even most jihadists or all Nazis or even most Nazis were psychopaths, right?

00:50:57.640 I mean, the horror of these belief systems is not that they act like bug lights for the world's psychopaths and you attract a lot of people who would be doing terrible things anyway and they just happen to start doing it in this new context, let's say, under the Islamic State. 0.85

00:51:13.560 No, certain ideologies attract totally normal people who would otherwise be totally recognizable to us psychologically and socially as good normal people, but for the fact that they got convinced that, you know, of whatever the relevant dogma is, you know, in the case of, yeah.

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00:52:51.000 Well, so I would say that's another point of agreement.

00:52:55.640 It seems to me that the pathological, the systems that produce rapid movement towards social and psychological pathology, both facilitate psychopathic behavior and attract the psychopaths.

00:53:11.400 I would say it's both of those.

00:53:13.340 You can have both of those operating at the same time.

00:53:15.540 Right, and so then what we have are people, we have systems of ideas working in the background, and those systems of ideas draw people into their orbit and motivate them to do things that, under the influence of other systems of ideas, they might not be inclined to do.

00:53:35.220 Seem reasonable?

00:53:36.620 Yeah.

00:53:36.780 Okay.

00:53:37.600 And also, I just note, and you might want to leave this aside, but your description of a guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work.

00:53:45.540 I think it's tempting to imagine that that guard is incapable of all the ordinary forms of happiness and life satisfaction that we would recognize in ourselves because of what he is spending his time doing.

00:54:04.780 And I would say that's obviously not the case.

00:54:07.880 I mean, so the, and there can be virtues expressed toward evil ends.

00:54:13.360 I mean, just, just imagine, just unpack the meaning of that phrase, the guard at Auschwitz who enjoys his work, right?

00:54:20.860 So like, there's the, do you know the, I think it's just called the Auschwitz album.

00:54:27.720 Did you ever see these photographs that were taken?

00:54:30.260 They were found in an attic.

00:54:31.480 I mean, it's one of the most amazing documents.

00:54:33.960 Nostalgia for Auschwitz. 0.75

00:54:35.320 Yes, that's for sure.

00:54:36.460 Yeah.

00:54:36.680 Absolutely.

00:54:37.240 Well, and I think your, your, your, your insistence that we can't merely write off that pathological behavior as a manifestation of a kind of a human psychopathy is extraordinarily important, right?

00:54:51.640 Because we have to contend with the fact that these systems of ideas are capable of, I think, possessing is the best metaphor.

00:55:00.460 And that's something I want to get into you, into you with you, that those systems of ideas are capable of possessing people who are in no way indistinguishable from the normal, from normal people.

00:55:12.840 And sometimes not indistinguishable from, from people with all sorts of laudatory traits.

00:55:20.340 I think you mean, not, not distinguishable.

00:55:22.940 You said indistinguishable.

00:55:23.840 Not distinguishable, sorry.

00:55:24.800 Yeah.

00:55:25.260 Sorry, not just, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

00:55:27.660 So, yeah.

00:55:28.400 But I would just, just add one, sorry, sorry to keep derailing you, Jordan, but I would just add one more piece here.

00:55:32.400 One thing that suggests is that mental pleasure, though it is, though it is often taken as a sign of the kind of moral rightness of, of our current preoccupation, isn't such a sign.

00:55:48.000 I mean, you can, there's such a thing as pathological ecstasy, right?

00:55:51.700 You can feel bliss and rapture.

00:55:52.660 Sure, well, that's sadism.

00:55:54.420 Sadism is a great example of that. 0.91

00:55:56.440 Yeah.

00:55:56.640 And so I, so I would just say that, so you can imagine the suicide bomber before he detonates his bomb, if he's, if like many of them, when he's doing that with the sincere expectation that in the next moment he will be in paradise, there is a kind of exaltation and, and even self-transcending quasi-spiritual positive affect there that you just have to grant.

00:56:24.460 That is, that the human mind is capable of being pointed in the wrong direction ethically and, and feel very good about it.

00:56:32.900 Well, positive emotion of the incentive kind mediated by dopamine is associated with movement towards a posited goal.

00:56:43.940 And so what that means is that false goal produces false enthusiasm, false goals produce false enthusiasm, essentially by definition, right?

00:56:53.060 And so that's actually, by the way, as far as I can tell, the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel, by the way, is that you can build pyramidal structures that reach to the sky that are predicated upon either false goals or false assumptions.

00:57:07.740 And the consequence of that is, and the consequence of that is the creation of a state of disunity and misery so comprehensive that people can no longer communicate with one another.

00:57:16.400 So, now, these systems, see, Sam, the reason I brought this up in part is because my meditations on the influence of systems of ideas, I thought about these as systems of animating ideas, that I saw a very strong concordance between the action of systems of animating ideas and archetypes.

00:57:39.840 And so that's why I started to become interested in archetypes.

00:57:42.540 And so, I would say that the one way of conceptualizing the possession, the ideas that possess people that motivate them in a pathological direction is that they're possessed by ideas that are archetypally evil.

00:58:01.500 And so, and so, here's the question I have for you, and my sense is that you, and this is the same as Richard Dawkins, is that you guys identify the spirit that motivates people to act in a pathological direction, the Taliban. 0.69

00:58:23.380 You identify that with the religious, with the religious impulse.

00:58:31.720 Now, is that a fair characterization?

00:58:35.300 Well, I would say that it's not exclusively religious, but insofar as it is religious, it gets even more leverage in that context and to worse ends.

00:58:46.500 So, for instance, you know, what is worse about jihadism than, you know, ordinary forms of terrorism, in my view?

00:58:54.700 It is the religious topspin it has based on its motivating ideas.

00:59:00.500 So, the fact that it is, in principle, otherworldly, the fact that it is, you know, just anchored to prophecy and belief in the supernatural,

00:59:10.580 all of that potentiates it, you know, further in the wrong direction.

00:59:14.860 So, like, you know, the troubles in Ireland would have been made worse had the Irish Catholics also been suicide bombers expecting to go straight to heaven because there was a passage in the New Testament which said, you know, 0.98

00:59:30.860 if you die while killing pagans or Jews or any other non-Christian, you'll find yourself at the right hand of Christ in the next moment, right? 0.98

00:59:42.780 So, like, it's better that there's not a passage like that in the New Testament.

00:59:47.620 And it's better that that, you know, quasi-religious political source of terrorism in the UK was not potentiated by a clear connection to religious belief and religious expectation.

01:00:05.860 Okay, so your claim is something like the possibility of religious justification for an unethical act has the side effect of elevating the status of that,

01:00:25.060 of the claim to morality associated with that evil act to the highest place.

01:00:29.300 So, let me put that in context.

01:00:32.160 So, there's an injunction in the Ten Commandments.

01:00:38.120 It's either the Second or Third Commandment.

01:00:40.160 I can't remember which.

01:00:42.020 That you're not to use the Lord's name in vain.

01:00:45.340 And it's the same injunction that pops up a couple of times in the Gospels,

01:00:50.140 where Christ tells his followers to not pray in public and to not be like the Pharisees where their good deeds can be seen in public.

01:00:58.440 And so, the first injunction, the commandment, is pointing out a deadly sin.

01:01:08.180 And the sin is to claim to be acting in the name of what is most high when all you're actually doing is pursuing either your own motivations or, even worse, your worst possible motivations.

01:01:23.740 And your claim seems to be that the intrusion of religious thought into the ethical domain allows for those claims to be put forward, thus magnifying their dangers.

01:01:38.660 Is that a reasonable way of putting it?

01:01:40.620 Well, I think it depends on the specific instance we're talking about.

01:01:47.340 But I think what I'm saying is even more pessimistic than that.

01:01:52.520 It's that given the requisite beliefs, it's possible to create immense harm consciously, create immense harm without even having bad intentions toward anyone.

01:02:07.520 I mean, it's not that your bad intentions and your hatred of others somehow gets a sacred framing by religion.

01:02:19.460 I mean, that also happens, and that's a problem.

01:02:22.640 But in the worst case, you can actually be feeling compassion while creating terrible harms, right?

01:02:31.340 Like, you can feel nothing, certainly no ill will at all for the people you're appealing.

01:02:35.000 So, I mean, to take the extreme case, there are cases where jihadists have blown up crowds of children, you know, Muslim children on purpose for a variety of reasons.

01:02:47.940 I mean, there were cases in, you know, where there were Western soldiers handing out candy to crowds of children during the war in Iraq at one point.

01:02:58.540 And, you know, a suicide bomber would blow that whole scene up.

01:03:03.240 And the whole point is manifold, but it's obviously to kill the soldiers and produce those casualties.

01:03:11.200 But it's also just to create the horror and apparent untenability of the whole project in Iraq, right? 0.99

01:03:18.800 It's just like, well, these are people who are going to blow up their own children.

01:03:21.560 And what possible good could we do here trying to build a nation, right?

01:03:27.200 Okay, okay, okay.

01:03:28.500 But just to close the loop there, I'm not imagining that the people who did that actually hated the children, right?

01:03:38.000 They just believe, they believe that there's absolutely no possibility of making a moral error here because the children, they know, are going to go straight to paradise.

01:03:46.720 They've actually done the children a favor by the light of their beliefs.

01:03:50.060 Yeah, okay, so I'm perfectly willing to accept that modification.

01:03:55.700 So you're basically saying that not only can you use the most high as a justification for your actions and as a consequence produce all the terrible dangers that are associated with that,

01:04:09.980 but that that can actually twist your moral compass so that acts that are truly highness are seen as manifestations of what's best.

01:04:19.100 Okay, so here's the problem as far as I see it, Sam.

01:04:22.220 The contradiction here that I'm trying to work out is that on the one hand, we have this situation where if there is no reference to a higher good or a lower evil,

01:04:35.100 because I'm going to assume those are basically the same thing, you end up in a situation where you can't do anything but take a postmodernist stance in the face of, let's say, the Hamas atrocities or the atrocities of the Taliban or the atrocities of Auschwitz,

01:04:50.660 because there's nothing higher to point to against which to contrast those patterns of endeavor.

01:04:58.200 But if you do posit something that's of the highest, then you run into the problem where, as you just pointed out,

01:05:07.440 that you can use your hypothetical alliance with what is now deemed to be highest to justify your own evil actions,

01:05:17.620 but also to skew your moral sentiments so that you take positive pleasure in this, let's say, in the suffering of others,

01:05:27.160 even the suffering of innocent children.

01:05:29.060 So, but, now, on the one hand, if you drop the notion of the highest good, you end up in the morass of moral relativism,

01:05:37.220 and on the other hand, if you accept it, then you end up in a situation where you can justify the worst behavior in reference to the highest possible good.

01:05:45.420 Is that a reasonable portrayal of a conundrum?

01:05:52.280 I don't find it, I think that's a needle that we can easily thread.

01:05:55.680 And so, and the way I would do it is just to say that there's obviously higher good,

01:06:03.060 and it's also obvious that we don't know, we don't fully know its character, right?

01:06:08.740 So that, like, we know that things can get better.

01:06:11.180 They can get quite a bit better and quite a bit worse.

01:06:14.100 And we know that better and worse, maybe that's as multidimensional as you want it to be, right?

01:06:21.040 That it's not just one, it's not just, for instance, it's just not, it's not just a matter of more pleasure, say.

01:06:27.240 It's not just a matter of more physical health.

01:06:29.920 It's not just a matter of more love.

01:06:31.520 It's not just a matter of more, so we can, you know, extend your list of desirable things as long as you want.

01:06:37.420 But we know that this universe offers, in the space of all possible minds and all possible experiences,

01:06:47.820 there are places of unimaginable suffering, and without any silver lining, there's no good that ever comes of it.

01:06:57.620 It's just a functional hell, right?

01:06:59.620 But we know, even within the context, and conversely, we know that there's just experiences of beauty and creativity and inspiration and love and gratitude that we, you know,

01:07:16.500 those of us who have had them, you know, either in meditation or on psychedelics or in other peak moments in life,

01:07:23.560 you know, we just find ourselves tongue-tied in the aftermath trying to capture what was going on there.

01:07:30.220 So we know that these extremes exist.

01:07:33.440 We know that there are things that we can do individually and together to maximize the likelihood of one versus the other.

01:07:43.100 And so if good means anything, if right and wrong mean anything,

01:07:47.600 it means navigating into this space of better and better possibilities, not just individually, but together.

01:07:56.280 And so what I would say is that we don't need to know exactly what the highest possible good is.

01:08:03.280 We just have to know directionally that it's the implications of moving right, left, up, or up or down, right?

01:08:12.700 So if I told you, well, there's a button we could press now, we have a new technology,

01:08:18.280 there's a button you can press that makes, excuse me,

01:08:25.500 will just make everyone on Earth a little less happy, right?

01:08:30.660 With nothing good ever comes, there's no silver lining to this.

01:08:35.600 It's just everyone just gets a little crankier, a little dimmer, a little less satisfied,

01:08:44.360 a little less creative, a little less appreciative of their good fortune.

01:08:48.400 You just go down the list and we just decrement all the good things just by a little, right?

01:08:56.420 Now, we just know that it would be bad to press that button, right?

01:09:02.960 That would be a bad thing to do.

01:09:04.620 If we could engineer some neurotoxin to spread all over the world

01:09:08.280 that would make people a little bit less good in all kinds of ways

01:09:12.660 and a little bit less happy, a little bit less intelligent, a little bit less creative,

01:09:18.500 okay, that would be a bad thing, right, directionally, right?

01:09:22.480 And we don't have to know the ultimate negativity or the ultimate positivity.

01:09:26.660 We don't have to know just how good human life could ultimately get

01:09:31.740 without any possible residue of improvement.

01:09:36.720 We just know directionally that, you know, from where we stand,

01:09:41.200 the Taliban are making things quite a bit worse 1.00

01:09:45.160 even though they think they're making them better, right?

01:09:47.900 So, like, we know that it's possible to look at a specific human project, right,

01:09:53.160 standing on the outside of it and say,

01:09:56.860 okay, these people don't know what they're missing, right?

01:10:00.760 And by extrapolation, we know that there must be some place to stand

01:10:03.840 to look at our current projects by which it would be valid to say,

01:10:08.160 okay, these people, you know, now talking about you and me

01:10:10.600 and all of our, you know, most enlightened friends,

01:10:14.120 these people don't know what they're missing, right?

01:10:16.680 There's something, there are things that they could be taught,

01:10:19.140 that they could learn, technologies that they could invent,

01:10:22.160 intuitions that they could suddenly have, epiphanies that they could have,

01:10:25.560 that would orient them in a direction that would be propitious,

01:10:29.560 that would make things better in ways that they have not even begun to imagine, right?

01:10:34.220 And so I think that the horizons into which we need to press,

01:10:40.380 again, individually and collectively,

01:10:42.460 so as to make those ethical and psychological discoveries,

01:10:46.440 they're all, you know, they're all around us.

01:10:48.840 Again, this is a multivariate landscape,

01:10:52.000 but I just think we don't need to know what the perfect looks like,

01:10:57.680 or even that the perfect exists to know directionally that claims about better and worse are real

01:11:05.300 and that they matter.

01:11:06.960 Okay, okay, okay.

01:11:08.220 So let me take you up on that because I'm having,

01:11:10.800 now I'm having a hard time distinguishing some of your claims

01:11:14.680 from what I would regard as fundamental religious claims.

01:11:19.120 So let me ask you a couple,

01:11:20.160 and I'm not, I said, you know,

01:11:21.940 I'm trying to make things clear.

01:11:24.560 I'm not trying to push you into a corner.

01:11:26.220 I don't want to do that at all.

01:11:28.040 So I actually think that we agree on a lot more than we disagree on,

01:11:32.000 and that we've come to very similar conclusions from very different directions.

01:11:35.220 Okay, so let me ask you this.

01:11:36.700 So, you know, there's this medieval idea

01:11:40.980 that God is the sum of all good,

01:11:45.180 and I don't think sum is the right qualifier.

01:11:49.120 I want to ask your opinion about this.

01:11:53.060 You listed, you made two claims in your last speech,

01:11:58.240 in your last bout of response.

01:12:01.420 I think one claim was that you listed a variety of attributes

01:12:07.260 that were morally good,

01:12:10.560 and then you made the claim that

01:12:12.520 even if we don't know what the good is in the final analysis,

01:12:15.800 we do have a strong sense of directionality.

01:12:21.080 And so one of the things I've suggested to my audiences, for example,

01:12:26.000 is that there are some things that you are doing,

01:12:29.820 and you don't know whether they're bad or good.

01:12:32.780 And so you can just leave those in advance for the time being.

01:12:36.720 But there is a subset of things that you're doing

01:12:39.380 that you know full well are not to be done

01:12:42.500 that you could stop doing,

01:12:44.900 and you could just stop doing them and see what happens.

01:12:48.680 And I've never met anyone

01:12:50.120 who doesn't have some knowledge of that latter category, right?

01:12:54.620 You said you had it, for example, with Twitter.

01:12:56.880 You know, you noticed that...

01:12:58.660 Consist...

01:12:59.280 Okay, so, all right.

01:13:01.840 Let's go after the first claim that you made.

01:13:05.500 You listed positive attributes.

01:13:08.920 So I might say that,

01:13:10.620 do you believe that there is a implicit unity

01:13:16.200 underneath a list of positive moral attributes

01:13:20.740 so that if you took beauty, truth, love, gratitude,

01:13:24.520 you'd mentioned love and gratitude, for example, and beauty.

01:13:28.140 If I said, well,

01:13:29.900 well, is there something in common

01:13:32.560 that unites beauty, truth, love and gratitude?

01:13:36.440 What...

01:13:37.680 And it wouldn't be the sum, right?

01:13:39.440 It's more like the gist.

01:13:41.040 It's more like the essence.

01:13:42.800 It's the commonality of goods that...

01:13:46.060 Like, and it seems to me, Sam,

01:13:47.620 that merely the fact that you can use a category

01:13:50.100 like good or bad or good and evil,

01:13:53.180 within the category of good

01:13:55.520 are things united by their participation in the good.

01:13:59.260 And so is there anything about that claim

01:14:02.040 that you find off-putting?

01:14:04.280 Well, I would...

01:14:05.380 There's some analogies we could use to capture it.

01:14:08.020 I mean, I do think of these things

01:14:09.340 as almost facets of a single jewel, right?

01:14:12.920 And so the facets are different.

01:14:14.960 It's talking about...

01:14:16.280 You can talk about beauty

01:14:17.240 and not talk about love

01:14:19.940 in the same conversation.

01:14:21.880 You can have a coherent discussion of beauty

01:14:24.200 without reference to love

01:14:26.020 and vice versa.

01:14:27.640 But when you're talking about

01:14:29.940 the conscious states

01:14:31.300 that maximize one's appreciation

01:14:33.840 of all of these things

01:14:34.980 and participation in all of these things,

01:14:37.960 it's easy to intuit

01:14:40.240 that there's a common structure

01:14:42.920 to the whole picture.

01:14:44.940 And so, yeah,

01:14:45.420 so a jewel with its facets

01:14:46.640 is one analogy I would use.

01:14:49.340 But I would also...

01:14:50.180 But I want to subvert that for a second

01:14:52.420 because my view of the moral landscape

01:14:55.140 is that it's very likely a landscape

01:14:58.740 with multiple peaks, right?

01:15:00.720 And multiple valleys.

01:15:01.620 And so this can sound like moral relativism

01:15:03.680 in the sense that you and I

01:15:06.580 might be climbing the same peak

01:15:10.580 over here as Homo sapiens

01:15:12.760 in a Western 21st century context.

01:15:16.760 But at some great distance from ourselves,

01:15:21.420 there are possible minds

01:15:23.020 and perhaps even real minds

01:15:24.320 that could exist in another galaxy

01:15:26.280 or that we could create artificially, etc.

01:15:30.060 that are organized on very different principles

01:15:33.300 and yet have conscious states

01:15:37.500 that admit of, again,

01:15:39.260 right and wrong answers

01:15:40.180 with respect to the variables

01:15:42.140 of suffering and well-being.

01:15:44.280 And you can conceive of those

01:15:46.900 as capaciously as you want.

01:15:48.220 But there could be possibilities

01:15:50.260 of happiness and creativity

01:15:52.220 and amazement

01:15:53.280 that we can't imagine

01:15:56.080 because we don't have the requisite minds, right?

01:15:59.800 Like, there's just nothing

01:16:01.520 about our current minds

01:16:02.900 or even the likely path

01:16:04.420 we're going to take

01:16:05.680 when we augment our minds

01:16:09.200 technologically or genetically

01:16:10.700 in the future.

01:16:12.200 We're just going to miss

01:16:13.380 these spots on the landscape

01:16:14.720 and yet these landscapes,

01:16:16.360 these spots have

01:16:17.660 the same peak and valley structure.

01:16:20.480 And there could be peaks

01:16:21.420 that if we were more omniscient

01:16:25.860 than we are or ever going to be,

01:16:27.860 we would be able to compare

01:16:29.080 these two peaks

01:16:29.920 and say that it's better to be,

01:16:32.240 you know, one is higher

01:16:33.300 than the other

01:16:33.880 with respect to certain variables.

01:16:36.600 Which is to say,

01:16:37.380 I just don't think

01:16:38.060 it's all random.

01:16:39.760 I think there is structure there

01:16:41.140 among possible experiences

01:16:44.240 given whatever the natural laws are

01:16:46.760 that determine the nature of experience

01:16:48.840 in this or any universe.

01:16:50.820 But the most relevant thing for us

01:16:53.060 is what does our local region look like?

01:16:56.760 You know, what is an obvious

01:16:59.220 mode of descent

01:17:01.460 into pointless horror for us

01:17:04.240 and how do we avoid that?

01:17:05.740 And what is an obvious

01:17:06.900 local peak

01:17:09.960 that we should be aspiring to get to?

01:17:12.820 But even this analogy

01:17:14.100 begets some troubling possibilities,

01:17:16.720 which I take as at least

01:17:17.960 potentially real,

01:17:18.960 which is that

01:17:19.380 it could be true to say

01:17:21.260 that there is an adjacent peak

01:17:23.660 to the one we're currently climbing,

01:17:26.460 which is quite a bit better

01:17:27.540 than the one we're attempting to climb.

01:17:30.560 It's quite a bit higher

01:17:31.300 with respect to well-being

01:17:32.380 and insight and creativity

01:17:33.720 and every other good thing.

01:17:36.160 But the only way to reach it

01:17:38.000 from where we currently stand

01:17:39.640 is to descend

01:17:40.820 into some valley

01:17:42.440 that's quite a bit worse

01:17:43.820 in order to climb

01:17:45.180 that adjacent peak.

01:17:47.400 That at least is,

01:17:48.540 you know,

01:17:48.760 I'm not recommending

01:17:49.800 that we spend a ton of time

01:17:51.040 thinking about that,

01:17:51.740 but that's at least conceivable.

01:17:53.600 No, I think we could,

01:17:55.060 I think we could spend

01:17:56.100 a fair bit of time

01:17:57.100 thinking about that.

01:17:58.280 So, you know,

01:17:59.660 there's,

01:18:00.620 well, there's a line of

01:18:02.020 mythological speculation

01:18:04.420 that's very tightly

01:18:06.080 in keeping with

01:18:07.040 the process

01:18:09.020 and the vision

01:18:09.760 that you just laid out.

01:18:10.920 Okay, so first of all,

01:18:12.020 you made the case that

01:18:13.240 you used the metaphor

01:18:15.680 of a jewel

01:18:16.420 and then

01:18:18.200 you said,

01:18:19.960 I would rephrase,

01:18:21.980 I'm going to recast this

01:18:23.120 in somewhat symbolic terms

01:18:25.180 and you can see

01:18:25.940 if this is a metaphor

01:18:26.780 that captures

01:18:27.900 what you were

01:18:28.680 expressing.

01:18:30.440 You could imagine

01:18:31.360 that there are jewels

01:18:32.300 of a beauty and value

01:18:34.240 that are

01:18:35.040 as of yet

01:18:36.140 unknown to us,

01:18:38.380 right?

01:18:38.640 So,

01:18:39.160 we could agree

01:18:39.960 that there is

01:18:40.580 a unity

01:18:41.820 of good

01:18:43.060 that's transcendent

01:18:45.000 and ineffable

01:18:45.680 and that

01:18:46.240 the goods

01:18:47.100 that we see

01:18:47.720 arrayed in front of us

01:18:48.760 are

01:18:49.420 proximal echoes

01:18:52.340 of that

01:18:53.000 ultimate vision.

01:18:54.600 Now, your point

01:18:55.300 is that

01:18:55.760 now and then

01:18:56.980 we may be

01:18:57.860 somewhat deluded

01:18:58.960 in

01:18:59.580 the specifics

01:19:01.240 of what we're pursuing

01:19:02.380 and that might blind us

01:19:04.040 to our higher order

01:19:05.100 transcendent reality.

01:19:08.300 Then you also

01:19:09.080 added an additional

01:19:09.960 twist,

01:19:10.580 which is,

01:19:11.040 well, maybe now and then

01:19:11.880 a descent is necessary 0.91

01:19:13.220 in order to make

01:19:14.140 the next ascent

01:19:14.960 possible.

01:19:15.720 Okay, so

01:19:16.160 a couple of things

01:19:17.320 on that.

01:19:17.880 So, there's an old

01:19:18.980 alchemical idea,

01:19:20.100 by the way,

01:19:21.440 that the philosopher's

01:19:22.780 stone is a jewel

01:19:24.520 in a toad's head.

01:19:26.520 And the idea there,

01:19:27.940 yeah, well,

01:19:28.380 the idea there

01:19:29.200 was that,

01:19:30.320 and this is one

01:19:31.520 of the central

01:19:32.180 alchemical dicta,

01:19:33.900 by the way,

01:19:34.580 it's

01:19:34.900 insterquilinus

01:19:36.220 inventur,

01:19:37.140 which means

01:19:37.720 roughly,

01:19:39.100 in filth

01:19:39.600 it will be found,

01:19:40.600 or

01:19:40.860 to elaborate

01:19:42.380 slightly,

01:19:42.940 means that

01:19:43.660 that which you

01:19:44.900 most need

01:19:45.600 will be found

01:19:46.460 where you least

01:19:47.220 want to look.

01:19:48.780 And that's a

01:19:49.480 reflection of the

01:19:50.580 idea that you

01:19:51.480 had,

01:19:52.100 that now and then

01:19:52.820 in order to get

01:19:53.500 to the next

01:19:54.160 pinnacle,

01:19:55.320 there has to be

01:19:56.400 a descent.

01:19:57.360 Now, that's

01:19:57.940 associated with

01:19:58.700 something even

01:19:59.260 more fundamental.

01:20:01.160 So,

01:20:02.000 there's also,

01:20:03.280 of course,

01:20:03.920 you know this idea

01:20:04.720 is central to

01:20:05.440 hero mythology,

01:20:06.540 that dragons

01:20:08.100 hoard treasure,

01:20:09.580 and that

01:20:09.960 the larger the

01:20:11.000 dragon,

01:20:11.460 the larger the

01:20:12.120 treasure.

01:20:12.940 And the idea

01:20:13.840 there is that

01:20:14.780 the more

01:20:16.800 daunting

01:20:17.760 the unknown

01:20:19.300 territory

01:20:19.940 that you are

01:20:21.740 presuming to

01:20:22.740 traverse,

01:20:23.740 the more

01:20:24.400 possibility there

01:20:25.620 is for

01:20:26.340 discovery.

01:20:27.740 And that the

01:20:28.800 proper attitude

01:20:29.620 is therefore

01:20:30.400 the one that

01:20:31.020 enables you to

01:20:32.160 encounter that

01:20:33.880 source of

01:20:35.540 unknown

01:20:36.160 wisdom

01:20:37.440 in the most

01:20:39.220 forthright and

01:20:40.160 courageous manner

01:20:40.920 possible.

01:20:42.060 And so then

01:20:42.500 there's a

01:20:43.180 variant on

01:20:43.720 that too,

01:20:44.340 which is

01:20:44.720 that,

01:20:46.180 let's see,

01:20:48.980 how would I

01:20:49.420 put this,

01:20:50.060 is that

01:20:50.500 the most

01:20:52.960 valid

01:20:53.400 source of,

01:20:56.260 the most

01:20:57.040 valid pathway

01:20:57.920 towards

01:20:58.520 discovering

01:20:59.360 that jewel

01:21:00.880 beyond compare

01:21:02.100 is a pathway

01:21:03.500 that's marked

01:21:04.200 out by the

01:21:05.520 voluntary

01:21:05.980 willingness to

01:21:07.340 confront

01:21:07.880 suffering and

01:21:08.900 malevolence in

01:21:09.660 all of its

01:21:10.160 forms.

01:21:12.240 Now,

01:21:12.820 at that

01:21:13.320 point,

01:21:13.780 these ideas,

01:21:14.880 to me,

01:21:15.260 these ideas

01:21:15.800 start to

01:21:16.320 become

01:21:16.600 indistinguishable

01:21:17.580 from religious

01:21:19.060 presuppositions.

01:21:20.700 And so there's

01:21:21.240 a dovetailing

01:21:22.280 here.

01:21:23.140 I mean,

01:21:23.460 you are

01:21:24.040 hypothesizing

01:21:25.080 that

01:21:25.460 what's good

01:21:28.320 has the

01:21:29.080 metaphoric

01:21:29.640 quality of a

01:21:30.300 jewel.

01:21:30.660 It's

01:21:30.800 multifaceted,

01:21:31.840 and it's

01:21:32.500 the things

01:21:33.520 that it

01:21:33.940 reflects are

01:21:34.940 more tangible

01:21:37.100 experiential

01:21:38.960 phenomena like

01:21:39.980 beauty,

01:21:40.900 truth,

01:21:41.320 love,

01:21:41.720 gratitude.

01:21:42.440 They're all

01:21:42.800 reflections of

01:21:43.560 a higher

01:21:43.880 order good.

01:21:44.580 You made

01:21:44.980 the case

01:21:45.320 that that

01:21:45.720 higher order

01:21:46.280 good may

01:21:46.920 be higher

01:21:48.000 order to

01:21:48.460 the point

01:21:48.920 where in

01:21:49.860 its extreme

01:21:50.960 forms,

01:21:52.400 it's ineffable,

01:21:53.460 right?

01:21:53.600 It's beyond

01:21:54.080 our ability

01:21:55.440 to comprehend

01:21:56.080 and describe.

01:21:57.420 You made

01:21:57.800 the case

01:21:58.180 that we

01:21:58.540 may be

01:21:58.920 able to

01:21:59.280 approach

01:21:59.720 that in

01:22:00.180 something

01:22:00.580 approximating

01:22:01.360 fits and

01:22:01.920 starts,

01:22:02.380 and some

01:22:02.680 of those

01:22:03.080 fits and

01:22:03.980 starts may

01:22:04.640 involve a

01:22:05.620 dissent.

01:22:06.660 Well,

01:22:06.880 the religious

01:22:07.400 injunction,

01:22:08.120 you see this

01:22:08.600 in psychotherapy

01:22:09.320 too,

01:22:09.740 is that the

01:22:10.300 dissents that

01:22:11.160 are the

01:22:11.640 precondition

01:22:12.460 for a

01:22:13.400 more profound

01:22:14.200 assent

01:22:15.040 have to be

01:22:15.900 undertaken

01:22:16.380 voluntarily,

01:22:18.060 right?

01:22:18.220 Because you

01:22:18.460 see this

01:22:18.880 in exposure

01:22:19.460 therapy,

01:22:20.040 for example.

01:22:20.720 You know,

01:22:20.940 if people

01:22:21.900 are stressed

01:22:22.560 accidentally

01:22:23.320 by something

01:22:24.140 that they're

01:22:24.620 phobic of,

01:22:25.640 their phobia

01:22:26.200 gets worse.

01:22:27.400 Right.

01:22:27.640 But if

01:22:28.020 they voluntarily

01:22:29.660 expose

01:22:30.800 themselves to

01:22:31.620 the stressor,

01:22:32.820 then their

01:22:33.460 bravery

01:22:34.920 grows and

01:22:35.620 their fear

01:22:36.140 decreases in

01:22:36.980 a commensurate

01:22:38.100 manner.

01:22:39.720 So one of

01:22:40.140 the things

01:22:40.540 that I've

01:22:41.060 been,

01:22:44.320 well,

01:22:44.640 so I guess

01:22:45.040 the first

01:22:45.400 thing I'm

01:22:45.780 going to

01:22:45.980 do is ask

01:22:46.540 you what

01:22:46.820 you think

01:22:47.140 about that.

01:22:47.780 So there

01:22:48.420 is a,

01:22:49.840 here's another

01:22:50.420 example,

01:22:51.060 Sam,

01:22:51.280 you tell me

01:22:51.720 what you

01:22:51.960 think about

01:22:52.360 this.

01:22:52.700 So there's

01:22:53.620 a story,

01:22:54.680 this is

01:22:55.080 derived from

01:22:55.760 the tales

01:22:56.700 of King

01:22:57.140 Arthur and

01:22:57.660 the Knights

01:22:58.020 of the

01:22:58.280 Round

01:22:58.460 Table.

01:22:58.860 So King

01:23:01.080 Arthur is

01:23:01.660 sitting with

01:23:02.140 all the

01:23:02.500 Knights at

01:23:03.000 the Round

01:23:03.420 Table and

01:23:04.280 they decide

01:23:04.800 they're going

01:23:05.160 to go look

01:23:05.660 for the

01:23:05.960 Holy Grail

01:23:06.580 and the

01:23:06.900 Holy Grail

01:23:07.500 is the

01:23:08.500 container of

01:23:09.280 the ever

01:23:10.100 replenishing

01:23:11.380 liquid.

01:23:13.540 That's a good

01:23:13.940 way of thinking

01:23:14.500 about it.

01:23:15.000 So it's

01:23:15.300 either the

01:23:15.860 glass that

01:23:17.520 Christ uses 0.98

01:23:18.280 to represent

01:23:18.960 his blood

01:23:19.480 at the

01:23:19.760 Last Supper

01:23:20.280 or it's

01:23:20.680 the goblet

01:23:21.560 that catches

01:23:22.200 his blood

01:23:22.800 on the

01:23:23.160 cross.

01:23:24.040 That's the

01:23:24.620 background story.

01:23:25.920 Now, of

01:23:26.240 course, the

01:23:26.680 Knights of the 0.92

01:23:27.180 Round Table

01:23:27.720 and King

01:23:28.440 Arthur have

01:23:28.940 no idea

01:23:29.420 if the

01:23:29.740 Holy Grail

01:23:30.160 exists,

01:23:31.540 which is a

01:23:32.120 reference to

01:23:32.700 its ineffability,

01:23:33.720 let's say,

01:23:34.580 or of where

01:23:35.600 it's possibly

01:23:36.800 located.

01:23:38.100 And so each

01:23:39.100 Knight leaves

01:23:39.740 the Round

01:23:40.120 Table and

01:23:40.680 enters the

01:23:41.280 forest at

01:23:41.880 the point

01:23:42.340 that looks

01:23:42.740 darkest to

01:23:43.700 him.

01:23:44.980 And that's

01:23:45.500 where the

01:23:46.080 quest begins.

01:23:48.900 And so there

01:23:49.380 is an idea

01:23:50.140 lurking in

01:23:51.000 these stories

01:23:51.600 that if you

01:23:52.180 want to

01:23:52.840 envision

01:23:55.800 that

01:23:56.960 jewel,

01:23:58.300 the metaphor

01:23:58.700 jewel that

01:23:59.400 you described,

01:24:00.840 then the

01:24:01.460 pathway to

01:24:02.160 that is

01:24:02.740 through

01:24:03.260 the darkness.

01:24:04.920 Now, you

01:24:05.660 also said,

01:24:07.400 and you

01:24:07.820 correct me if

01:24:08.380 I'm wrong

01:24:08.720 about this,

01:24:09.300 that your

01:24:10.420 journey to

01:24:12.640 whatever

01:24:13.140 enlightenment

01:24:13.680 you've managed

01:24:14.460 to find

01:24:15.200 and distribute

01:24:16.520 was a

01:24:18.040 consequence of

01:24:19.020 in some

01:24:19.680 ways of

01:24:20.080 entering the

01:24:20.640 forest at

01:24:21.200 the darkest

01:24:21.620 possible point.

01:24:22.680 I mean, you

01:24:23.100 were grappling

01:24:23.840 with the

01:24:24.500 problem of

01:24:25.920 evil and

01:24:26.680 looking for

01:24:27.180 a solution

01:24:27.660 to that.

01:24:28.780 And is it

01:24:30.060 not possible

01:24:30.900 that that's a

01:24:31.500 reflection of

01:24:32.160 this underlying

01:24:32.780 idea that

01:24:33.640 it is the

01:24:35.080 case that you

01:24:35.760 retool your

01:24:36.760 conceptions of

01:24:37.780 morality itself

01:24:39.000 by contending

01:24:39.800 with the

01:24:40.180 things that

01:24:40.740 are most

01:24:43.640 troubling and

01:24:44.180 distressful,

01:24:45.280 be tragedy and

01:24:46.360 malevolence,

01:24:47.080 the things that

01:24:47.580 are in that

01:24:48.000 realm.

01:24:48.520 Does any of

01:24:49.140 that seem

01:24:49.640 reasonable to

01:24:50.300 you?

01:24:50.520 Yeah, so

01:24:51.680 you raised a

01:24:52.620 few separate

01:24:53.060 points there.

01:24:54.460 So first, on

01:24:55.440 the notion of

01:24:56.800 exposure therapy

01:24:57.740 being an

01:24:58.520 example of a

01:24:59.240 descent into

01:25:00.200 a valley so

01:25:00.940 that you can

01:25:01.300 ascend some

01:25:01.840 other peak.

01:25:02.860 So I think

01:25:03.260 that speaking

01:25:04.040 individually for

01:25:04.960 a person doing

01:25:06.000 that, that

01:25:07.060 sounds totally

01:25:07.580 plausible to

01:25:08.220 me.

01:25:08.420 There are all

01:25:08.780 kinds of

01:25:09.080 things we do

01:25:09.860 that make us

01:25:10.440 uncomfortable,

01:25:11.680 but under a

01:25:12.580 larger framing,

01:25:13.420 we understand

01:25:13.860 that they're

01:25:14.140 good for us

01:25:14.840 and they're

01:25:15.120 leading us to

01:25:16.140 grow in ways

01:25:17.360 that will

01:25:17.960 redound to

01:25:19.400 our advantage

01:25:19.860 in the future.

01:25:20.320 So yeah,

01:25:20.740 there are

01:25:23.440 dozens of

01:25:24.380 things that

01:25:24.780 people do

01:25:25.360 and should

01:25:25.740 do that

01:25:27.160 make them

01:25:29.260 less than

01:25:29.780 comfortable in

01:25:30.400 the present

01:25:30.960 but are

01:25:32.180 nevertheless good

01:25:32.760 for them,

01:25:33.280 whether it's

01:25:33.940 a medical

01:25:34.620 treatment or

01:25:35.320 just getting

01:25:36.120 in good

01:25:36.580 shape or

01:25:37.200 dieting or

01:25:38.040 whatever it

01:25:38.620 is.

01:25:40.680 So there's

01:25:41.380 that.

01:25:43.120 The place

01:25:44.280 where I break

01:25:44.880 from religion,

01:25:45.760 certainly a

01:25:46.180 religion like 0.90

01:25:46.600 Christianity or 0.67

01:25:47.420 Judaism or 0.85

01:25:48.040 Islam,

01:25:48.620 it's on

01:25:50.280 many points

01:25:50.780 but the

01:25:51.080 crucial point

01:25:51.560 is just

01:25:51.860 on the

01:25:52.440 claims about

01:25:53.200 the unique

01:25:54.520 sanctity and

01:25:55.920 divine origin

01:25:56.620 of specific

01:25:57.220 books.

01:25:58.180 The moment

01:25:59.180 you're going

01:25:59.480 to talk about

01:25:59.960 all books

01:26:00.740 as the

01:26:01.740 products of

01:26:02.600 human

01:26:03.140 creativity and

01:26:05.080 ingenuity,

01:26:06.840 then we're just

01:26:08.100 talking about

01:26:08.760 the utility

01:26:09.860 of specific

01:26:11.440 books and

01:26:11.900 specific ideas

01:26:12.720 in whatever

01:26:13.980 context

01:26:14.900 attracts our

01:26:17.420 interest.

01:26:18.000 So we can

01:26:19.180 talk about

01:26:19.540 the Bible,

01:26:20.360 we can talk

01:26:20.640 about the

01:26:20.920 Koran,

01:26:21.380 we can talk

01:26:21.640 about the

01:26:21.960 wisdom to

01:26:22.680 be found

01:26:23.140 in those

01:26:24.300 books,

01:26:25.020 and we

01:26:25.220 also can

01:26:25.720 talk about

01:26:26.120 the barbaric

01:26:27.060 injunctions that

01:26:27.960 we want to

01:26:28.320 ignore in

01:26:28.760 those books.

01:26:30.700 We must

01:26:31.360 evaluate the

01:26:32.900 wisdom or

01:26:33.440 the barbarousness

01:26:35.300 by using

01:26:37.640 our own

01:26:38.420 21st century

01:26:39.240 intuitions about

01:26:40.000 what constitutes

01:26:40.940 wisdom now,

01:26:41.940 given all the

01:26:42.780 challenges we

01:26:43.340 face, and

01:26:43.780 what constitutes

01:26:44.960 obvious barbarism

01:26:46.660 that we want to

01:26:47.120 leave behind us.

01:26:48.740 And so the

01:26:49.640 crucial, the

01:26:50.240 thing that makes

01:26:50.840 me an atheist

01:26:51.440 from a Christian

01:26:52.780 point of view,

01:26:53.340 or a Muslim 1.00

01:26:53.820 point of view,

01:26:54.740 is that I

01:26:57.360 am unpersuaded

01:27:00.860 by the textual

01:27:01.940 claims that

01:27:03.080 anchor those

01:27:04.040 two faiths,

01:27:05.240 and that any

01:27:05.700 real adherent to

01:27:06.620 those two

01:27:06.980 faiths has to

01:27:07.780 make, in my

01:27:08.260 view, and in

01:27:09.100 the views of

01:27:09.520 most,

01:27:10.000 adherents.

01:27:12.620 But I would

01:27:14.600 totally grant

01:27:15.140 you that there

01:27:15.780 are great

01:27:17.080 stories in

01:27:18.220 a thousand

01:27:19.680 different books

01:27:20.300 that we might

01:27:20.820 want to use

01:27:21.640 to inspire

01:27:25.420 us to be

01:27:26.360 wiser than

01:27:27.080 we tend to

01:27:27.760 be.

01:27:28.140 So the

01:27:30.040 King Arthur

01:27:31.100 literature,

01:27:32.300 it seems

01:27:33.400 totally worthy

01:27:34.100 of our

01:27:34.520 attention,

01:27:35.560 and there

01:27:37.040 are

01:27:38.360 many other

01:27:40.420 good sources

01:27:42.540 on that

01:27:43.720 particular

01:27:44.240 shelf,

01:27:45.360 but no

01:27:46.380 one is

01:27:46.740 taking the

01:27:47.260 King,

01:27:47.780 no one is

01:27:48.920 practicing

01:27:51.300 suicide bombing

01:27:52.280 or fully 0.97

01:27:55.060 deranging their

01:27:55.700 politics over

01:27:56.880 their close

01:27:57.820 reading of

01:27:58.860 the King

01:27:59.840 Arthur

01:28:00.140 material,

01:28:01.140 right?

01:28:01.400 it's just

01:28:02.260 the literature

01:28:03.920 is not

01:28:04.480 doing that

01:28:05.520 kind of

01:28:05.940 mad work

01:28:06.440 for us,

01:28:06.780 and I think

01:28:07.060 that's a good

01:28:07.460 thing.

01:28:07.880 So I want to

01:28:08.540 live in a

01:28:08.820 world where

01:28:09.280 we recognize

01:28:10.380 that all we

01:28:11.280 have

01:28:11.800 communally

01:28:12.860 is the

01:28:14.340 possibility of

01:28:15.140 having a

01:28:15.540 conversation

01:28:16.100 that can be

01:28:17.040 more or less

01:28:17.560 persuasive,

01:28:18.140 more or less

01:28:18.900 enlightening,

01:28:19.960 and it's a

01:28:21.940 conversation not

01:28:22.700 just in the

01:28:24.720 present with

01:28:25.880 the living

01:28:26.840 minds that

01:28:27.460 are available,

01:28:28.520 but it's a

01:28:29.220 conversation with

01:28:30.540 reference to

01:28:31.440 the greatest

01:28:31.840 minds that

01:28:33.200 preceded us,

01:28:34.760 of which we

01:28:35.560 have some

01:28:35.980 record.

01:28:36.600 There are many

01:28:37.220 great minds

01:28:37.840 presumably that

01:28:38.440 are totally

01:28:39.100 lost to us

01:28:39.740 because they

01:28:41.260 burned the

01:28:42.040 library at

01:28:42.560 Alexandria,

01:28:43.920 but we

01:28:46.860 have this

01:28:47.680 residue of

01:28:48.620 past wisdom

01:28:49.340 and past

01:28:49.860 insight,

01:28:50.600 which is

01:28:51.000 the world's

01:28:51.760 literature,

01:28:52.780 and we

01:28:53.180 should avail

01:28:54.680 ourselves of

01:28:55.360 it to our

01:28:56.100 heart's content

01:28:56.820 all the while

01:28:57.900 recognizing that

01:28:59.340 these are just

01:29:01.180 human beings

01:29:02.100 having a

01:29:03.280 cross-generational

01:29:04.400 conversation about

01:29:05.380 important things,

01:29:06.920 and none of

01:29:07.680 these books is

01:29:09.360 beyond criticism

01:29:10.520 and beyond

01:29:11.480 ignoring.

01:29:13.460 That's the

01:29:14.100 crucial thing.

01:29:14.540 Well, your

01:29:16.320 fundamental

01:29:17.120 criticism,

01:29:18.440 and this is

01:29:19.180 actually what I'm

01:29:20.640 trying to pin

01:29:21.480 down in our

01:29:22.300 conversation,

01:29:23.260 is that you're

01:29:25.180 pointing to the

01:29:26.480 misuse, it's

01:29:28.460 like the

01:29:28.860 dogmatic

01:29:29.540 misuse of

01:29:30.640 the traditions

01:29:32.380 as opposed to

01:29:34.220 their proper

01:29:35.560 use.

01:29:35.900 So there's a

01:29:36.620 scene in the

01:29:37.160 Gospels, this is

01:29:37.960 a very interesting

01:29:38.780 scene, this is

01:29:40.020 one of the

01:29:40.480 things that gets

01:29:41.540 Christ crucified,

01:29:43.100 by the way,

01:29:44.320 is that he

01:29:45.260 accuses the

01:29:46.160 Pharisees of 1.00

01:29:47.320 being

01:29:47.960 the same

01:29:49.780 people who

01:29:50.480 put the

01:29:51.120 prophets upon

01:29:52.000 which their

01:29:52.760 faith is

01:29:53.400 hypothetically

01:29:55.060 predicated to 0.99

01:29:56.000 death.

01:29:57.560 Right, and so

01:29:58.580 they don't take

01:29:59.240 that insult

01:29:59.860 kindly.

01:30:01.900 But he's

01:30:02.520 making the

01:30:03.620 case, the

01:30:04.460 same case you

01:30:05.300 are as far as

01:30:06.040 I can tell,

01:30:06.700 which is that

01:30:07.340 it's possible

01:30:08.960 to use

01:30:09.840 the wisdom

01:30:11.340 of the

01:30:11.920 ages as a

01:30:13.620 justification

01:30:14.260 for the use

01:30:15.820 of force.

01:30:16.260 Let me give

01:30:16.720 you another

01:30:17.060 example of

01:30:17.660 this.

01:30:17.880 This is so

01:30:18.360 cool.

01:30:18.760 You tell me

01:30:19.140 what you

01:30:19.420 think about

01:30:19.860 this.

01:30:20.360 I just did

01:30:20.920 this seminar

01:30:21.480 on Exodus

01:30:21.980 with a bunch

01:30:22.660 of people.

01:30:23.640 We released

01:30:24.380 it on Daily

01:30:25.040 Wire and on

01:30:25.580 YouTube, and

01:30:26.220 there's a scene

01:30:26.880 in Exodus

01:30:27.340 that's extremely

01:30:28.180 interesting.

01:30:30.720 So, Moses is

01:30:33.200 put forward as

01:30:34.380 the spirit that

01:30:36.380 eternally delivers

01:30:37.600 from tyranny and

01:30:38.840 slavery.

01:30:39.720 That's a good

01:30:40.180 way of thinking

01:30:40.740 about it.

01:30:41.580 So you could

01:30:42.040 imagine Moses as

01:30:43.540 the embodiment of

01:30:44.540 the force that

01:30:45.380 wells up within

01:30:46.680 you that inspires

01:30:48.980 you to speak out

01:30:50.140 when the tyrants

01:30:51.080 hold sway, and

01:30:52.640 it's the same

01:30:53.280 voice within you

01:30:54.240 that calls you

01:30:55.820 on your own

01:30:56.500 slavish behavior.

01:30:58.480 Anyways, Moses

01:30:59.220 embodies that, and

01:31:00.440 he's led his

01:31:02.220 people in a

01:31:03.000 rebellion against

01:31:03.840 the tyrants, and

01:31:04.780 now he's trying to

01:31:05.820 lead them out of

01:31:06.600 slavery, and

01:31:07.460 they're in the

01:31:08.540 desert while they're

01:31:09.300 trying to work this

01:31:10.160 out.

01:31:10.420 That's one of those

01:31:11.100 dissents before an

01:31:12.460 ascent, right?

01:31:13.200 So they left

01:31:13.960 tyranny, which was

01:31:14.920 an inappropriate

01:31:15.600 mode of

01:31:16.800 organization.

01:31:18.180 They fell into

01:31:19.880 the desert, which

01:31:20.920 is an intermediary

01:31:21.960 period that's not

01:31:22.880 the least bit

01:31:23.520 pleasant, and

01:31:24.080 they're heading for

01:31:24.680 the promised land,

01:31:25.720 right?

01:31:25.960 Which is the

01:31:26.540 next peak on

01:31:28.160 the moral

01:31:29.000 landscape, you

01:31:29.820 might say.

01:31:30.300 Now, Moses has

01:31:31.720 been leading them

01:31:33.260 along, you know,

01:31:35.700 in a very

01:31:36.300 admirable manner.

01:31:37.980 And so this is

01:31:38.660 what happens when

01:31:39.780 they get onto the

01:31:40.700 border of the

01:31:41.440 promised land.

01:31:42.260 So they're right

01:31:43.280 there, they're

01:31:43.820 still in the

01:31:44.320 desert.

01:31:45.180 They run out of

01:31:46.120 water yet again,

01:31:47.540 and Moses goes and

01:31:49.260 talks to God, and

01:31:50.080 he says, you know,

01:31:51.200 well, you've led us

01:31:52.000 this far, and we're

01:31:53.440 right on the

01:31:53.980 threshold of

01:31:54.800 deliverance, so to

01:31:55.880 speak, but we're

01:31:56.540 out of water.

01:31:57.620 And God says to

01:31:58.600 Moses, tell the

01:32:00.760 rocks, ask the rocks

01:32:02.620 to bring forth

01:32:03.760 water.

01:32:05.380 And so he points

01:32:07.360 out the rocks, and

01:32:08.200 then Moses goes over

01:32:09.840 to the rocks, but

01:32:10.720 instead of asking

01:32:11.640 them, he hits

01:32:13.720 the rocks with

01:32:14.460 his staff, and

01:32:16.900 his staff is a

01:32:18.200 symbol of

01:32:19.100 tradition, of

01:32:20.300 tradition and

01:32:21.220 authority, and

01:32:23.180 it's the famous

01:32:24.460 staff of Moses.

01:32:26.300 And what he does

01:32:27.600 is he commands, he

01:32:29.040 uses force to

01:32:30.560 compel the rocks to

01:32:31.840 bring forth water

01:32:32.860 instead of

01:32:34.160 convincing them to

01:32:35.360 do so verbally.

01:32:36.680 and he is punished

01:32:39.520 very severely for

01:32:40.840 that, because God

01:32:42.320 tells him that

01:32:43.180 because he used

01:32:44.060 force, where he

01:32:45.600 could have used

01:32:46.560 the logos, he

01:32:47.840 could have used

01:32:48.440 linguistic

01:32:49.600 communication, he

01:32:51.660 can't enter, he'll

01:32:52.800 die before he

01:32:53.540 enters the promised 0.99

01:32:54.360 land.

01:32:55.600 And so it seems to

01:32:56.560 me that your

01:32:58.340 objection to the

01:33:00.300 religious is

01:33:01.980 fundamentally, given

01:33:03.400 your belief in a

01:33:04.480 transcendent good,

01:33:05.620 given your belief

01:33:06.480 in the reality of

01:33:07.740 evil, given your

01:33:09.820 notion that we do

01:33:10.980 have an intrinsic

01:33:11.820 directionality, given

01:33:14.040 your idea that we

01:33:15.340 need to believe in

01:33:17.200 the genuine

01:33:19.500 existence of a

01:33:20.640 moral landscape, is

01:33:22.220 that your

01:33:22.700 objection is in

01:33:24.240 the, it's

01:33:25.180 something like an

01:33:27.680 objection to

01:33:28.420 dogmatism per se.

01:33:30.580 Yeah.

01:33:30.760 Right, and then

01:33:31.600 we might ask

01:33:32.840 yourself, well, and

01:33:34.320 that dogmatism is

01:33:35.620 the willingness of

01:33:37.160 people to use the

01:33:39.500 tradition to what?

01:33:40.820 To drive their own

01:33:42.000 benefit?

01:33:42.760 To justify

01:33:44.180 themselves without

01:33:45.140 making the moral

01:33:45.980 effort?

01:33:46.380 Like, how do you

01:33:47.380 think, how would

01:33:48.360 you go about

01:33:49.160 defining that

01:33:50.260 inappropriate

01:33:50.820 dogmatism?

01:33:52.660 Right, it's also

01:33:53.320 an attempt to make

01:33:54.260 the ineffable fully

01:33:56.220 comprehended, right,

01:33:57.900 because the thing

01:33:58.840 about a religious

01:33:59.640 totalitarian, or a

01:34:00.920 totalitarian of any

01:34:01.940 sort, is that the

01:34:02.700 totalitarian will tell

01:34:03.780 you that they have

01:34:05.380 the truth in its

01:34:06.380 final form, right?

01:34:07.820 That's really the

01:34:08.620 totalitarian claim.

01:34:10.040 So what is it about,

01:34:11.320 what do you think

01:34:11.960 characterizes that

01:34:13.080 fundamental dogmatism?

01:34:15.300 Well, first I would

01:34:16.080 point out that it's

01:34:17.240 only in religion that

01:34:19.280 the concept of dogma

01:34:21.420 is not a pejorative.

01:34:25.880 In fact, I mean, in

01:34:27.280 the Catholic context,

01:34:28.320 it's explicitly a

01:34:29.820 good thing.

01:34:30.460 I mean, there's no

01:34:31.460 embarrassment over the

01:34:33.040 reliance on dogma.

01:34:35.820 I mean, it's a

01:34:36.520 Catholic term.

01:34:39.280 But everywhere else

01:34:40.380 in our lives, we

01:34:42.040 recognize that it is

01:34:43.400 intrinsically divisive

01:34:45.040 and not, and

01:34:47.220 incapable of tracking

01:34:48.320 the truth, right?

01:34:49.840 But I mean, something

01:34:50.780 that's held dogmatically

01:34:51.960 is something that is

01:34:54.040 held, a belief that is

01:34:55.220 held in spite of

01:34:57.800 the fact that there's

01:34:59.260 no good evidence for

01:35:00.380 it, or in fact, in

01:35:01.820 Right.

01:35:02.740 In, in, in

01:35:03.560 opposition.

01:35:04.900 But held why?

01:35:05.640 No, but, but I just

01:35:06.300 want to, I want to

01:35:07.220 nail this particular

01:35:07.960 point down because

01:35:08.720 this is, this is the

01:35:09.660 crucial thing to

01:35:11.480 recognize in my view.

01:35:13.360 We, we understand in

01:35:15.220 every other area of

01:35:15.920 our lives that this is

01:35:17.020 not, um, that this is

01:35:20.240 intellectually not only

01:35:21.760 not pragmatic and

01:35:24.480 not, not helpful and

01:35:26.580 not, um, not playing

01:35:30.080 by the rules.

01:35:30.700 It's actually indecent,

01:35:32.400 right?

01:35:32.660 It's the antithesis of

01:35:34.000 what we admire

01:35:35.100 intellectually, right?

01:35:36.760 When you, immunity to

01:35:39.040 counter evidence, no

01:35:40.060 matter how compelling,

01:35:41.060 is not a good thing,

01:35:42.360 um, intellectually and,

01:35:45.100 and ethically in any

01:35:46.360 secular context, right?

01:35:47.660 So if I say to you,

01:35:48.380 listen, I believe X and

01:35:51.460 there's nothing you can

01:35:52.160 say to convince me

01:35:52.900 otherwise.

01:35:54.160 And, uh, the more

01:35:55.660 you, no matter how

01:35:58.760 good your evidence gets,

01:35:59.920 no matter how good your

01:36:00.940 arguments get, um, I'm

01:36:04.000 not, I'm not going to

01:36:04.700 want to hear it.

01:36:05.380 And if you press the

01:36:06.440 case, I'm going to get

01:36:07.600 angrier and angrier until

01:36:09.340 the possibility of, of,

01:36:12.060 of having a conversation

01:36:12.940 about anything fully

01:36:14.540 erodes, right?

01:36:15.680 That is the status quo

01:36:17.520 with respect to religious

01:36:20.100 sectarianism across the

01:36:21.440 world.

01:36:22.000 It has been that way

01:36:22.840 for thousands of years

01:36:23.980 and it is still that

01:36:25.260 way.

01:36:26.200 Every Muslim, Christian,

01:36:27.900 Jew, Mormon, Hindu,

01:36:29.660 every, every true

01:36:32.160 religious person of any,

01:36:33.780 you know, any

01:36:34.760 denomination to the

01:36:37.260 degree that they really

01:36:38.080 are truly religious, you

01:36:39.600 know, and it's a faith

01:36:40.440 based enterprise has

01:36:43.000 said in advance of any

01:36:44.240 conversation on any

01:36:45.140 topic, listen, there are

01:36:46.780 a few core things I

01:36:47.860 believe and that my

01:36:49.240 children believe and I

01:36:50.220 have taught them to

01:36:50.880 believe and I don't

01:36:52.340 want you meddling in any

01:36:53.560 of that stuff, right?

01:36:54.800 And I'm going to get

01:36:55.400 pissed off to the point

01:36:56.860 of violence or at least 0.52

01:36:58.880 I will, I will be

01:36:59.700 tolerant of the violence

01:37:00.900 of my co-religionists if

01:37:03.080 you push too hard on this

01:37:04.400 particular door.

01:37:05.380 The conversation is over

01:37:06.820 where these core

01:37:08.280 principles of faith start,

01:37:10.420 right?

01:37:11.420 You're going to tell me

01:37:12.080 you don't think Jesus was

01:37:13.180 born of a virgin and

01:37:14.080 will be coming back to

01:37:14.880 raise the dead?

01:37:15.480 I don't want to 0.99

01:37:16.840 fucking hear it, right? 0.98

01:37:18.100 And that is our 0.99

01:37:20.160 politics even in America

01:37:21.580 in the 21st century.

01:37:22.680 We've got something like

01:37:23.300 45% of Americans who are

01:37:25.360 sitting there on their

01:37:26.840 Christian fundamentalism,

01:37:28.480 right?

01:37:29.880 And yes, we can play

01:37:31.820 nice on other topics that

01:37:33.440 don't strike a tangent to

01:37:35.160 those core beliefs but when

01:37:37.480 you really begin to push,

01:37:38.840 when you really say,

01:37:39.440 listen, mom and dad, when

01:37:41.640 we educate your children in

01:37:43.100 our school, we're going to

01:37:44.780 be telling them things that

01:37:46.240 is going to make this

01:37:47.960 claim about the divinity

01:37:49.280 of Jesus seem more and

01:37:51.100 more spurious and more and 0.99

01:37:52.840 more ridiculous and more 0.99

01:37:53.940 and more at odds with 0.97

01:37:54.740 everything we know about

01:37:55.480 biology and engineering and

01:37:56.900 everything else that we've

01:37:58.320 learned in the last 2,000

01:37:59.280 years.

01:37:59.900 And you are going to look 1.00

01:38:00.740 like fools in the eyes of 1.00

01:38:02.380 your kids for believing 1.00

01:38:04.060 these specific dogmas,

01:38:06.320 right?

01:38:07.140 That's what's at stake

01:38:08.460 here, right?

01:38:09.360 And people feel it and

01:38:11.140 they are resisting and

01:38:13.060 they're resisting with

01:38:13.840 medieval tools, right?

01:38:16.920 And everything I just

01:38:18.640 said about fundamentalist

01:38:19.460 Christianity in America

01:38:21.260 is much, much worse in the 0.91

01:38:23.300 Muslim community in 100

01:38:24.640 countries, right?

01:38:28.740 You know, there's no

01:38:29.960 comparison.

01:38:30.680 There we're dealing with

01:38:31.640 the Christians of the

01:38:32.280 14th century.

01:38:33.300 Now, I'm not talking about

01:38:34.120 all Muslims but I'm

01:38:35.080 also not talking about

01:38:36.660 just 1% of Muslims.

01:38:38.100 We're talking about many,

01:38:39.200 many millions of people

01:38:40.200 who hold to their

01:38:41.660 religious dogmas like 0.90

01:38:43.980 it's a life preserver

01:38:45.360 in a killing storm,

01:38:48.460 right?

01:38:49.260 And this is something

01:38:51.880 we have to overcome.

01:38:53.220 We need a non-sectarian 1.00

01:38:55.060 conversation about the

01:38:56.720 deepest ethical and

01:38:57.780 spiritual and scientific

01:38:58.940 truths that are available.

01:39:00.180 which is a non-divisive

01:39:03.360 one, one that is

01:39:04.360 truly open-ended

01:39:05.600 where we're not

01:39:07.040 making adversarial

01:39:09.300 recourse to rival

01:39:10.960 incommensurable claims

01:39:13.340 from centuries ago.

01:39:15.140 We're actually putting

01:39:16.380 forward the best

01:39:17.340 arguments and the best

01:39:18.440 evidence in real time

01:39:20.380 resorting to all the best

01:39:21.960 ideas that can be

01:39:23.280 translated from every

01:39:24.260 language instantaneously

01:39:25.960 now.

01:39:26.340 And it's a conversation

01:39:29.420 very much in the spirit

01:39:30.900 of science,

01:39:32.500 very much in the spirit

01:39:33.320 of medicine, say.

01:39:34.320 And it's not to say that

01:39:35.180 we have all that worked

01:39:36.620 out.

01:39:36.820 As you know, we just went

01:39:37.600 through a global pandemic

01:39:38.480 where people couldn't agree

01:39:39.480 about what the hell was

01:39:40.340 happening and whether

01:39:41.500 vaccines are safe or good

01:39:42.920 or worth inventing,

01:39:44.640 et cetera.

01:39:45.300 But we know, we can dimly

01:39:47.120 see in that context

01:39:48.220 where we need to go,

01:39:50.140 which is, we need

01:39:52.020 more evidence,

01:39:53.460 more argument,

01:39:54.080 better incentives,

01:39:57.160 an acknowledgement

01:39:58.460 of what we don't know

01:39:59.460 when we don't know it.

01:40:01.780 And we need to,

01:40:03.000 we need the conversation

01:40:03.740 to simply continue.

01:40:04.800 And we know,

01:40:05.900 when we look at it

01:40:06.540 over our shoulder,

01:40:07.320 we know we have made

01:40:08.240 progress.

01:40:09.000 We know we're not

01:40:10.240 suffering, for the most

01:40:12.200 part, you know,

01:40:12.840 people being paralyzed

01:40:13.680 from polio, right?

01:40:15.000 Like, there was once a

01:40:16.500 time where polio was

01:40:17.660 terrifying families

01:40:19.380 everywhere, and for good

01:40:20.300 reason.

01:40:21.020 And now that is behind

01:40:22.020 us, except for a few

01:40:23.280 cases that have emerged

01:40:24.300 of late because people

01:40:25.140 are afraid of vaccines

01:40:26.480 of all types, but we

01:40:28.620 know it's possible to

01:40:29.660 make progress in

01:40:30.560 medicine, right?

01:40:31.840 We know that progress

01:40:32.920 is not a matter of

01:40:35.020 half of our society

01:40:36.100 saying that they're

01:40:37.560 going to stay put with

01:40:38.780 the, with the medicine

01:40:39.660 of the, of the seventh

01:40:40.660 century or the first

01:40:41.980 century BC.

01:40:43.480 Um, and so it has to

01:40:45.540 be with ethics.

01:40:46.240 So it has to be with

01:40:47.280 spiritual experience.

01:40:48.320 I mean, we're, we're,

01:40:49.040 you know, we're having

01:40:49.980 this conversation in the

01:40:51.080 context of a, you

01:40:53.180 know, short period of

01:40:54.720 time where, where, uh,

01:40:57.860 research on psychedelic

01:40:58.980 drugs has come back

01:40:59.960 after more than a

01:41:00.840 generation of, of, of

01:41:02.900 ignoring the promise of

01:41:04.160 these compounds.

01:41:05.280 Um, who knows what

01:41:07.420 possible benefits that

01:41:10.240 exist if we, if we

01:41:13.920 explore that, that

01:41:16.660 technology and that

01:41:17.580 research in the wisest

01:41:18.940 and most, uh, judicious

01:41:20.980 possible way.

01:41:21.880 We know there are

01:41:22.680 possible, we know we

01:41:23.700 can create immense harm

01:41:24.640 by doing it badly.

01:41:25.440 We know we, we know

01:41:26.760 in the sixties, just

01:41:29.160 broadcasting these, these

01:41:31.220 compounds onto the

01:41:32.420 population without any

01:41:33.820 real safeguards was, um,

01:41:36.880 you know, well, I mean,

01:41:37.620 some people's lives were

01:41:38.540 improved, but, but many

01:41:40.060 people were harmed too.

01:41:41.200 And it was the thing to

01:41:42.880 which the backlash of the

01:41:44.840 last 40 years, um, uh,

01:41:48.940 responded and there, and

01:41:50.940 then we, we lost a, more

01:41:52.460 than a full generation of

01:41:53.460 actually doing research on

01:41:54.580 these compounds, but

01:41:55.780 we're, we're only at the

01:41:56.800 beginning of understanding

01:41:58.420 what is possible for us

01:42:00.020 individually and

01:42:00.800 collectively as human

01:42:01.720 beings and understanding

01:42:04.780 consciousness itself, not

01:42:06.220 even just human

01:42:06.900 consciousness, but

01:42:07.620 consciousness as it is

01:42:09.040 integrated with the

01:42:09.820 physics of things is, is

01:42:12.980 among the most important

01:42:13.740 things we could do.

01:42:14.840 And it's, and it has

01:42:15.880 implications for everything

01:42:16.900 we're now touching.

01:42:17.820 And, and, and, and the

01:42:19.020 guidance is not going to

01:42:20.080 come from the Bible and

01:42:21.280 it's not going to come

01:42:21.960 from the, the, the, you

01:42:23.500 know, from Camelot either.

01:42:24.700 It's like, we, we need new

01:42:26.300 stories and new insights

01:42:28.280 because we're confronting

01:42:30.400 new things.

01:42:31.200 I mean, like just take the

01:42:32.300 take, we don't have to

01:42:33.420 spend any time on it, but

01:42:34.260 just I'll plant the flag 0.55

01:42:35.460 here, take artificial

01:42:37.580 intelligence, right?

01:42:39.080 If we don't know how

01:42:40.280 consciousness arises in

01:42:41.800 this universe, and if we

01:42:42.940 don't know whether or, or

01:42:45.180 when it arises on the

01:42:46.480 basis of information

01:42:47.240 processing, we are not

01:42:48.960 going to know whether we

01:42:50.160 build conscious machines,

01:42:52.400 right?

01:42:52.840 I think we're going to,

01:42:54.360 almost certainly we will

01:42:55.500 build machines that seem

01:42:57.520 conscious to us before we

01:42:59.100 know whether or not they

01:43:00.040 are conscious.

01:43:00.700 And we will lose sight of,

01:43:02.220 many of us will lose sight

01:43:03.360 of whether it's, it's an

01:43:05.320 even interesting problem to

01:43:06.520 wonder whether or not they

01:43:07.400 are conscious, right?

01:43:08.100 They're going to pass the

01:43:08.800 Turing test with such

01:43:09.820 flying colors, special,

01:43:11.920 especially when we're in

01:43:12.680 the presence of humanoid

01:43:13.640 robots that look human

01:43:14.900 and that, that are, that

01:43:16.100 are, you know, truly

01:43:17.120 general AI, that we're

01:43:19.620 just going to treat them

01:43:20.280 as conscious, helplessly,

01:43:21.620 because we're going to,

01:43:22.380 you're going to feel like 0.89

01:43:22.880 a psychopath doing

01:43:23.720 otherwise, and yet we're

01:43:25.660 not going to know whether

01:43:26.600 we've built machines that

01:43:27.660 can suffer, and we're not

01:43:29.700 going to know whether

01:43:30.280 we're committing a murder

01:43:31.660 when we turn off a

01:43:32.840 machine, et cetera.

01:43:34.780 These are ethical

01:43:35.620 problems that seem

01:43:37.000 totally speculative until

01:43:38.840 you imagine the

01:43:41.220 possibility of, of

01:43:42.300 inadvertently building

01:43:43.860 machines that can

01:43:45.120 suffer even more than

01:43:47.360 human beings can

01:43:48.460 suffer, right?

01:43:49.480 That would be a

01:43:50.120 monstrous thing to do,

01:43:51.300 and that is a possible

01:43:52.380 thing to do, because, and

01:43:54.180 it's something we might

01:43:54.880 just stumble into by not

01:43:56.980 knowing what we're doing

01:43:58.260 in, you know, in

01:44:00.020 informational terms.

01:44:00.960 So this is all just to say

01:44:04.620 that questions about the

01:44:06.860 well-being of conscious

01:44:07.680 creatures are questions

01:44:09.500 that we need to address

01:44:11.880 with all of the tools

01:44:13.080 available in a way that is

01:44:14.780 truly universal, that gets

01:44:16.740 beneath the accidental

01:44:19.120 differences of a country of

01:44:22.720 a person's origin.

01:44:23.780 You know, it shouldn't matter

01:44:25.680 where you were born or what

01:44:27.600 religion your parents were.

01:44:29.120 That should not be the

01:44:30.980 thing that constrains your

01:44:31.900 thinking about the deeper

01:44:33.140 truths here.

01:44:34.220 And so, yes, if I don't

01:44:36.740 deny that the world's

01:44:37.880 religions indicate

01:44:39.600 something about the

01:44:42.080 possibilities of human

01:44:43.040 consciousness, past and

01:44:44.480 present, and even the

01:44:45.760 possibilities of a

01:44:46.540 transcendent good to which

01:44:47.900 we should all orient, but

01:44:49.560 it's absolutely clear that we

01:44:51.320 need a truly universal,

01:44:54.500 modern conversation about

01:44:57.080 those truths, that

01:44:58.460 ultimately ignores

01:45:00.520 sectarian cultural

01:45:01.840 boundaries.

01:45:02.700 And it's the sectarian

01:45:04.100 cultural boundaries that I

01:45:05.220 worry about.

01:45:06.180 Well, you and I have been

01:45:07.400 trying to have those

01:45:09.860 conversations, you know,

01:45:11.320 with some degree of

01:45:12.320 success for quite a long

01:45:13.320 time.

01:45:14.040 Let me ask you a specific

01:45:16.500 question here, that how do

01:45:20.980 you distinguish, we've

01:45:24.140 already agreed that there's

01:45:25.460 a problem when wisdom is

01:45:28.540 transformed into

01:45:29.580 authoritarian dogma.

01:45:31.680 But here's a question, like

01:45:33.260 how do you distinguish

01:45:34.500 between, you've already

01:45:37.220 put forward a set of

01:45:38.840 hypothetically axiomatic

01:45:40.660 presuppositions, right?

01:45:42.880 And one of them is that

01:45:45.020 there is such a thing as

01:45:46.060 evil, and another is that

01:45:47.660 there's such a thing as its

01:45:48.800 opposite good, and that good

01:45:51.060 has an ineffable quality in

01:45:53.040 its final analysis.

01:45:53.980 You could think about

01:45:55.280 those as, you know, their

01:45:56.520 conclusions from the

01:45:57.640 conversation that we've had

01:45:58.880 so far, and from all the

01:46:00.500 work that you've done,

01:46:01.380 obviously.

01:46:02.720 Now, you could imagine that

01:46:04.060 those conclusions could be

01:46:05.840 turned into, well, they are

01:46:07.800 axiomatic in some ways.

01:46:09.140 You could imagine they could

01:46:10.240 be turned into a kind of

01:46:11.460 authoritarian dogma in no

01:46:13.640 time flat.

01:46:14.680 Like, how do you, and you

01:46:16.260 know we can't progress out

01:46:18.020 into the world without having

01:46:19.300 a certain amount of faith in

01:46:20.800 our already extant

01:46:22.280 knowledge.

01:46:23.400 How do you think it's

01:46:24.520 possible to conceptualize

01:46:26.900 the distinction between

01:46:29.080 knowledge as such, or even

01:46:32.020 necessary knowledge, and

01:46:34.060 dogma?

01:46:36.720 Well, it's, well, dogma is

01:46:43.080 clear in the sense that it is

01:46:44.680 truly inflexible, right?

01:46:47.060 There's no, there's a stated

01:46:49.820 commitment to not revising

01:46:52.660 this particular belief or set

01:46:54.760 of beliefs, no matter what

01:46:56.380 happens, right?

01:46:57.540 So, for instance, for

01:46:58.560 Christianity, or for, let's 0.98

01:47:00.200 say, the Catholic Church, you

01:47:02.340 know, the divinity of Jesus is

01:47:04.760 just non-negotiable, right?

01:47:06.480 It's like it's not, there's

01:47:08.040 not, it would no longer be

01:47:09.360 Christianity.

01:47:10.020 Now, I'm sure there are a few

01:47:11.360 groups of Christians that would 0.71

01:47:12.380 want to push back here, but

01:47:15.100 generally speaking, I mean, it

01:47:17.160 comes directly from Paul, you

01:47:18.520 know, if Christ be not raised,

01:47:19.840 your faith is vain, right?

01:47:20.860 It's like, there's a miracle at

01:47:23.260 the bottom here, and if you

01:47:24.680 are going to dispute that, well,

01:47:25.960 then really, you're playing a

01:47:27.380 different language game.

01:47:28.360 This is not, you know, this,

01:47:30.300 we're not interested in that

01:47:31.400 kind of innovation.

01:47:32.380 So, Christ was the Son of God,

01:47:35.680 you make, you know, struggle to

01:47:36.720 make sense of that if you want

01:47:37.880 to, but, but something like

01:47:39.600 that has to be true.

01:47:40.980 He died for your sins, he was

01:47:43.580 resurrected, he did not, if

01:47:44.800 you, if you, if you found his

01:47:46.080 bones somewhere, that would be

01:47:48.380 a problem.

01:47:50.260 These are non-negotiable

01:47:51.560 tenets of the faith, and, you

01:47:53.800 know, Islam has its versions,

01:47:55.720 and, you know, unhappily for, for

01:47:57.980 the prospects of interfaith

01:47:59.400 dialogue, one of the core

01:48:01.680 principles of Islam is that Christ 0.87

01:48:03.900 was not divine, right?

01:48:05.460 And to believe he otherwise is,

01:48:06.900 is polytheism, and that's a

01:48:08.480 killing offense, right?

01:48:09.500 So, right there, there's a zero-sum 0.63

01:48:11.580 contest between Islam and

01:48:12.860 Christianity.

01:48:14.180 So, so, so it's something like,

01:48:16.200 it's something like, it sounds to

01:48:17.960 me that it's something like

01:48:19.240 allowance for doubt.

01:48:21.680 So, I could imagine, you can

01:48:23.120 imagine a situation like this,

01:48:24.640 because, because there's still a

01:48:26.100 confusion for me.

01:48:26.480 Well, no, no, one thing, it's not,

01:48:27.920 it's not just allowance for doubt,

01:48:29.500 it's, it's just that it's, um, so,

01:48:33.480 so there are, there are things we

01:48:34.600 believe that we can't imagine not

01:48:40.060 believing because of how, uh, how

01:48:47.340 fully we are persuaded of the

01:48:49.180 legitimacy of the method by which we

01:48:51.920 arrived at those beliefs, right?

01:48:54.120 So there's a, there was a

01:48:54.940 methodology that got us there.

01:48:57.380 Now, dogmatism is the antithesis of

01:48:59.120 methodology.

01:48:59.860 Dogma is not a statement of how good

01:49:01.960 the method was.

01:49:03.640 Dogma is just, we didn't have a

01:49:05.220 method, but this is so, right?

01:49:06.900 It says so in the book.

01:49:08.540 The book is perfect.

01:49:09.960 How do we know it's perfect?

01:49:10.920 Because the book itself says so,

01:49:12.680 right?

01:49:13.220 That's a, that bites its own tail. 0.99

01:49:14.700 That's not a method.

01:49:15.580 That, that is dogmatism.

01:49:17.420 And in my view, totally illegitimate.

01:49:19.620 But there are other things that we

01:49:21.240 believe, right, that we wouldn't say

01:49:23.880 are dogmas, but we would also say,

01:49:25.800 I'm not going to waste any time

01:49:27.880 worrying that I might be wrong here

01:49:30.060 because I just don't see how I could

01:49:32.240 possibly be wrong.

01:49:33.380 Now, we know that in the context of

01:49:36.520 those beliefs, it's still possible to

01:49:39.360 be wrong, right?

01:49:40.060 So there was a time where human

01:49:41.580 beings would have said, listen, I've

01:49:45.500 studied Euclid.

01:49:46.840 I understand geometry.

01:49:49.180 You know, you're talking about the

01:49:50.240 possibility of more than three

01:49:51.840 dimensions.

01:49:53.200 It's obvious to me that doesn't make

01:49:54.760 any sense because I'm standing here

01:49:56.400 and I can't figure out where I would

01:49:57.740 point that isn't some combination of

01:49:59.460 up, down, left, or left or right or

01:50:01.420 front or back, right?

01:50:02.300 There's just, there's three dimensions.

01:50:03.860 And my finger, my pointing finger is

01:50:06.680 all the proof I need of that, right?

01:50:08.460 So you could imagine someone being

01:50:10.160 absolutely confident, right?

01:50:12.220 But you could also imagine that given

01:50:15.320 the requisite conversation with that

01:50:16.980 person, you could, you know, introduce

01:50:20.780 them to the geometry of Riemann and say,

01:50:23.420 okay, space, imagine space is something

01:50:25.760 that could conceivably be curved, right?

01:50:27.660 And it would be curved in a dimension that

01:50:29.860 is not just some combination of up, down,

01:50:32.300 left or right or front and back, et cetera.

01:50:34.720 So there's a large, so there can be

01:50:36.600 fundamental changes in our view of

01:50:39.180 things that are surprising.

01:50:41.600 And, and, and so we can't, we can't

01:50:45.420 rule that out in general, no matter how

01:50:48.040 confident we are of specifics.

01:50:49.840 I mean, so one, for me, there's one

01:50:52.180 thing that I can't see any way around.

01:50:55.040 Um, and I just don't, you know, I, I would, I would

01:51:01.240 admit that it's possible that I don't know

01:51:02.820 what I'm missing, but I just don't see how

01:51:04.300 it would be possible.

01:51:05.040 So I'm not wasting any time on it.

01:51:06.460 But for me, consciousness, what I mean by

01:51:09.780 consciousness, you know, the fact that

01:51:11.640 anything seems to be happening at all is

01:51:14.840 the one thing in this universe that can't

01:51:17.080 be an illusion, right?

01:51:18.700 So, so there's nothing you can say to me

01:51:20.500 about how wrong I am about anything that

01:51:23.340 puts the challenges, this fundamental

01:51:25.540 belief of mine, that consciousness is the

01:51:28.260 ground truth of everything epistemologically,

01:51:30.740 right?

01:51:30.880 So you could say, well, actually, Sam, 1.00

01:51:32.920 you're, you're psychotic, you know? 0.99

01:51:34.860 Well, okay. 1.00

01:51:35.540 So I'm psych, I'm wrong about everything,

01:51:37.000 except the, this, the way things seem,

01:51:39.500 that demonstrates consciousness just as

01:51:41.480 much as, as sanity would, right?

01:51:44.380 Like this is, if I'm, if I'm asleep and

01:51:46.080 dreaming and I don't know that, well, still

01:51:48.440 this dreamlike experience is what I mean by

01:51:51.760 consciousness.

01:51:52.200 If the universe is a simulation on an

01:51:54.820 alien supercomputer, right?

01:51:56.860 And, and, and everything we think about

01:51:58.700 physics is wrong because we're not in

01:52:00.820 touch with the base layer of physics, right?

01:52:02.520 We're just in, we're just a simulation.

01:52:04.500 Still, what seems to be happening in our

01:52:07.200 case is what is meant by consciousness in

01:52:10.560 my sense.

01:52:11.500 So conscious, so to say that consciousness

01:52:13.720 itself might be an illusion, right?

01:52:16.940 Is, it makes absolutely no sense because

01:52:19.980 any illusion is another case of seeming.

01:52:22.400 It's a false, it's a false one by

01:52:24.100 reference to some other picture.

01:52:25.320 So I don't, I can't get outside of

01:52:26.980 consciousness epistemologically.

01:52:29.740 And therefore it's, you know, so anyone

01:52:31.540 who would say, so someone might come to

01:52:33.900 me and say, well, you're being dogmatic in

01:52:35.640 your assertion that consciousness can't be an

01:52:37.180 illusion.

01:52:37.920 It's not the same as being dogmatic.

01:52:39.340 Like I can't, I just can't see what to do

01:52:42.860 with my intuitions.

01:52:43.920 So as to even entertain the alternative

01:52:46.560 thesis, that's not what any religious

01:52:49.960 fundamentalist, that's not the position of

01:52:51.960 any religious fundamentalist who's asserting,

01:52:53.680 you know, the, the unique divinity of the

01:52:56.920 Quran or the, or the Book of Mormon.

01:52:59.300 Right, they're asserting an unwarranted

01:53:00.600 omniscience.

01:53:02.140 They're asserting, they're, you know,

01:53:03.140 they're asserting a claim that, that, that

01:53:04.760 is in contact with many specific facts we

01:53:09.080 know about, again, you know, just real

01:53:12.800 history or, you know, terrestrial physics

01:53:15.520 or anything else.

01:53:17.740 And I mean, just, you know, this is, these

01:53:20.480 are points I've made before, you know, you

01:53:22.400 know, to the consternation of, of many

01:53:25.120 religious people, but like, you know, the

01:53:27.000 belief that Jesus rose from the dead and,

01:53:32.160 and bodily ascended somewhere and will be

01:53:35.180 returning to earth at some point, the

01:53:36.920 historical person, Jesus, not some, you

01:53:39.960 know, not some analogy to that person, but

01:53:42.080 that's, that's not just a religious claim.

01:53:45.340 That is a claim about biology.

01:53:47.080 It's a claim about human flight without

01:53:49.620 the aid of technology.

01:53:50.620 It's a claim about history.

01:53:51.980 It's a claim about, I mean, there are many

01:53:54.480 claims, it touches everything we know or

01:53:57.900 think we know about science at some

01:53:59.460 place. And so it's, um, and that's why

01:54:03.900 it's, it seems quite unlikely to be true,

01:54:08.100 right? If you're, if you're considering it

01:54:10.260 dispassionately. Um, and I mean, the other

01:54:13.700 reason, I mean, just to, now that you're,

01:54:15.220 you've brought it, you've poked this atheist 1.00

01:54:17.020 and you're getting, you're getting the full

01:54:18.700 file. Um, the, the real, the simplest

01:54:22.460 reason, uh, why I am effectively an atheist

01:54:26.420 with respect to Christianity, Judaism and

01:54:29.740 Islam, uh, despite all of the other things

01:54:32.720 you think I agree with that, that make me

01:54:35.000 a good candidate for being sympathetic to

01:54:37.240 those traditions is that the claim about

01:54:42.440 the books is so preposterous given how easy

01:54:46.940 it would be for an omniscient being to have

01:54:50.380 proven his omniscience in those books. I

01:54:52.540 mean, if you just think of how good a book

01:54:53.800 could be had an omniscient being written

01:54:56.520 it, all the things that wouldn't be in

01:54:58.480 there that would be embarrassing now, like,

01:55:00.160 you know, advocating slavery, like he, the 0.98

01:55:03.260 creator of the universe certainly could have

01:55:04.500 anticipated that we at one point would

01:55:06.640 have found slavery to be wrong, right? And

01:55:09.180 given us moral guidance on that point. Uh,

01:55:11.440 but he failed to do that. But even more

01:55:14.100 importantly, it would be trivially easy for

01:55:17.220 an omniscient being to put a page of text in

01:55:20.940 there that would even now be confounding

01:55:26.460 us with its, with its, um, with its depths of,

01:55:32.200 of inspiration scientifically, ethically, and

01:55:36.140 in every other sense, right? So, so, so, so, so

01:55:38.700 let, let me ask you about that momentarily. So

01:55:41.020 I'm going to throw a spanner into the works. Maybe 1.00

01:55:43.220 we'll see. Well, I've been spending a lot of

01:55:47.460 time writing in the last three years. Again,

01:55:50.460 I'm writing a new book and I've been trying

01:55:52.840 to extract out the gist of the biblical

01:55:57.460 corpus, let's say. So I have a proposition

01:56:00.120 for you and you tell me what you think about

01:56:02.180 this. So as far as I'm concerned, what the

01:56:08.300 biblical corpus points to is a, a practice of,

01:56:12.020 it's a practice of, of sacrifice devoted to

01:56:17.100 atonement. And so the idea we've already

01:56:20.960 talked on about this a little bit, Sam, is

01:56:23.120 that, you know, there are often things you

01:56:25.460 have to give up in the present in order to

01:56:27.860 make the longer term more functional. That's

01:56:31.180 a sacrificial offering, you might say. And so,

01:56:34.720 and that's the same theme in some ways is

01:56:37.540 that descent we talked about prior, prior to

01:56:40.380 an ascent. And so there's a pattern of

01:56:43.860 sacrifice that's, that emerges as the

01:56:48.260 biblical corpus progresses. And the pattern

01:56:52.320 of sacrifice culminates in a proposition. And

01:56:57.120 the proposition is this, that salvation and

01:57:01.040 redemption as such are dependent on the

01:57:07.120 voluntary willingness to confront the

01:57:10.000 worst of tragedies and the deepest of

01:57:12.640 possible acts of malevolence. That that's

01:57:17.020 the universal pathway to salvation and

01:57:19.140 redemption. And that's exemplified as far as

01:57:22.580 I can tell in the passion story. So I'll give

01:57:25.440 you an example. So I went to Jerusalem with

01:57:28.320 Jonathan Paggio and we walked the stations

01:57:32.220 of the cross. And I was, and that culminated

01:57:35.120 with a trip to the Church of the Holy

01:57:37.340 Sepulcher, which in principle, at least in

01:57:40.300 tradition, is erected on the site of the

01:57:42.960 crucifixion. And so what seems to be

01:57:46.440 happening psychologically, and I think this

01:57:50.740 is something that you can assess

01:57:52.200 multidimensionally in a consilient manner,

01:57:55.860 is that the passion story walks people

01:57:58.780 through the necessity of encountering the

01:58:03.800 worst forms of tragedy that can beset you

01:58:07.440 in your life. And so that would be, the

01:58:10.420 worst form of tragedy is unjust suffering

01:58:13.140 fundamentally. And the worst form of unjust

01:58:15.300 suffering is the most vicious possible

01:58:17.940 punishment delivered to someone who's the

01:58:22.000 least possibly deserving. And you know, the

01:58:24.600 times in your life, Sam, where you'll suffer

01:58:26.680 the most, I would say, and you can dispute

01:58:28.660 this, but you can tell me what you think, is

01:58:30.360 when you're going to be bitterly punished

01:58:34.040 even for your virtues. And if that's

01:58:37.120 accompanied by betrayal and the baying of

01:58:40.100 the mob, so much the better. And so the

01:58:44.620 passion story is a representation of the

01:58:48.460 proposition that in order to move towards

01:58:52.280 discovery of what's highest, you have to

01:58:54.620 voluntarily accept the conditions of

01:58:57.920 unjust suffering that constitute human

01:59:00.180 existence. And then there is a mythological

01:59:03.420 corollary to that, which, so, of course, death

01:59:06.900 by crucifixion is a particularly unpleasant

01:59:09.160 form of death, especially when it's brought

01:59:11.260 about by betrayal and at the hands of

01:59:13.940 tyrants and the mob, which is what the

01:59:16.240 story encompasses. But there's also an

01:59:18.600 insistence that the pattern that Christ

01:59:22.880 acts out involves the harrowing of hell,

01:59:25.980 which is confrontation not only with

01:59:28.200 tragedy, but with malevolence itself. And so

01:59:30.680 the idea there is that, and maybe this is

01:59:34.000 what's asserted dogmatically if it's

01:59:36.160 understood, is that there is no pathway to

01:59:39.240 redemption and salvation without being

01:59:42.000 willing to hoist the world's tragedies onto

01:59:44.440 your shoulders and to confront evil. And so

01:59:47.980 I'm, I mean, that's the conclusion that I've

01:59:50.580 derived from walking through these stories

01:59:53.200 and trying to understand what they might

01:59:55.180 mean. And that's pretty damn compelling, that

01:59:58.260 idea. And I actually think it's in some

02:00:00.860 ways in keeping with your experience, because

02:00:03.220 you, and I mean, it's taken me a long time to

02:00:06.420 understand this, repeated conversations with

02:00:08.700 you, but it seems to me that a huge part of

02:00:11.700 your motivation has been a consequence of

02:00:14.000 your willingness to contend seriously with

02:00:17.380 the reality of evil and to try to set up

02:00:20.320 a, what would you say, at least to

02:00:22.420 investigate the nature of a morality that

02:00:25.440 might mitigate against that. So, well, I'll

02:00:28.860 leave that at your feet for the time being.

02:00:30.340 Yeah, so I mean, I'll give you a response

02:00:33.060 which will indicate, I think, the, what I

02:00:38.140 consider to be the provisionality and

02:00:40.220 perhaps even mistaken nature of that, the

02:00:47.360 framing, the Christian framing you just 0.98

02:00:49.320 gave. But I think it's possible and

02:00:52.580 perhaps even more useful to view evil. And

02:00:55.100 it's unavoidable to talk about evil, you

02:00:58.320 know, just as a matter of shorthand in

02:01:00.260 talking about current events. And I think

02:01:02.100 we don't want to lose the term because I

02:01:04.800 think it's, I think moral outrage is the

02:01:07.880 kind of fuel we need in certain moments. And

02:01:10.500 that's invoked by, by, you know,

02:01:13.620 framing things in terms of good and evil. But

02:01:16.260 I think it's at least plausible to think of

02:01:20.840 evil at bottom as being more a matter of

02:01:25.180 ignorance than anything else. And this

02:01:26.860 certainly would be the Buddhist framing of

02:01:28.840 evil. I mean, Buddhists don't tend to think 1.00

02:01:30.700 about evil and certainly the Buddhist teachings 0.99

02:01:32.420 about this weren't really a matter of evil

02:01:35.760 versus good. It's more a matter of ignorance

02:01:38.680 versus wisdom. And even, you know, Greek 0.95

02:01:41.800 philosophy, Socrates, I believe, made this

02:01:44.300 point that, you know, no one consciously or

02:01:46.240 very, very few people consciously do evil. I

02:01:48.400 mean, but you have a lot of people thinking

02:01:49.680 they're doing good in their own way, despite

02:01:53.420 how much harm they're creating. So the deeper

02:01:57.660 problem may in fact be ignorance. And one way

02:02:00.220 of seeing this, you can ask yourself, you

02:02:01.960 take somebody, take a quintessentially evil

02:02:03.900 person, you know, do you have a candidate

02:02:06.480 for like the most evil person you can think

02:02:09.200 of? Psychologically? Can you give me a

02:02:13.040 name?

02:02:14.100 Stalin, Stalin's kind of, Stalin would be up

02:02:16.740 there, I would say.

02:02:17.820 So you take Stalin. Now, at a certain point in

02:02:21.380 his life, he was just a little kid, right? He

02:02:23.660 was just, he was just this, you know, the

02:02:25.140 four-year-old Joseph who was, in my view, I

02:02:30.480 mean, he could, he could have been a

02:02:31.980 psychopathic kid. I don't, I don't know 0.96

02:02:33.660 about, enough about his, his biography, but

02:02:36.560 you know, presumably he wasn't a psychopath.

02:02:39.680 Doesn't seem so.

02:02:40.520 Yeah. Presumably he wasn't a terrifying

02:02:42.840 infant, you know, but at a certain point, you

02:02:46.120 have, you know, at a point young enough in

02:02:48.740 his timeline, you have to just acknowledge

02:02:51.580 that he really is unlucky. I mean, he's the

02:02:54.500 kid who, for whatever reason, you know,

02:02:56.680 genetic and environmental, 0.83

02:02:58.740 is going to become the evil monster, 0.97

02:03:03.460 Joseph Stalin, right? And so at what point 0.81

02:03:05.840 along the way does he actually become

02:03:08.520 evil? Well, that's hard to specify. I mean,

02:03:10.500 there'll be moments in his story where we

02:03:12.420 can recognize, all right, he's now not a, a

02:03:15.800 normal, much less normative personality,

02:03:17.860 right? He's treating, he's treating people

02:03:19.720 sadistically. And so I don't know when that

02:03:21.480 started, but there's a point before that

02:03:24.300 where you think, well, listen, if there'd

02:03:26.320 be any way to have helped this kid not

02:03:28.640 become this evil monster, we should have

02:03:32.220 helped him, right? We would have helped him 0.98

02:03:33.840 if we could. And that would have been the

02:03:35.520 right thing to do, right? So merely hating

02:03:38.300 him and killing him would not have been the 0.99

02:03:41.580 ethically normative thing to have done

02:03:43.480 there because he's not yet the person who

02:03:45.180 created all the harms he goes on to

02:03:47.140 free. And, but I would say that even if

02:03:51.520 you go forward, even if you, if you get

02:03:53.260 him in his truly malevolent form, you

02:03:57.060 know, toward the middle and end of his

02:03:59.140 life, imagine what it would be like. We

02:04:01.620 had Joseph Stalin at his worst in custody

02:04:04.760 and we had a much more mature science of

02:04:11.160 the mind available to us. And we actually

02:04:13.740 had a cure for evil. I mean, just imagine

02:04:16.060 what it would be like to deliver this cure.

02:04:18.100 We can actually just, just modify all of

02:04:20.780 the receptor sites and densities and

02:04:22.900 connections in the brain so as to turn 0.92

02:04:25.860 this malevolent sociopath into an entirely 0.92

02:04:29.100 normal person with a normal pro-social 0.94

02:04:32.420 attitudes, et cetera, et cetera. But keeping

02:04:35.440 intact his biographical memory and the

02:04:38.720 other aspects of his identity, right? So, so

02:04:40.860 imagine being able to engineer the

02:04:42.820 following experience for Joseph Stalin,

02:04:44.860 where you deliver him the cure for, for

02:04:48.000 all that ails him ethically. And, but he

02:04:51.760 has still has a memory. He has a, he has a,

02:04:53.720 he has a knowledge of what you're doing. You've

02:04:55.240 told him what you're doing and he has the

02:04:57.220 memory of all the stuff, all the malevolent

02:04:59.140 stuff he did in his past. Imagine what it

02:05:02.880 would be like for him to, to wake up from

02:05:05.120 the dream of his sociopathy and experience

02:05:08.820 for the first time, what it was like to be

02:05:12.560 a normal, well-intentioned, decent human

02:05:16.420 being, right? Imagine what that would be

02:05:18.040 like. Imagine if you just woke up tomorrow

02:05:20.240 recognizing that you had in this fugue

02:05:24.680 state of psychopathy over the previous

02:05:26.660 year, you had killed, you know, 60 million

02:05:29.240 people and done other, you know, odious

02:05:33.040 things. Just imagine the, imagine the one,

02:05:35.940 the feeling of, of, of regret to have been

02:05:40.760 at all entangled with that causality. However,

02:05:44.440 you know, little purchase you have on it in

02:05:46.440 the present, because again, you're no longer

02:05:48.360 evil, but to imagine the gratitude of feeling

02:05:51.340 of just being rescued from that kind of mind

02:05:55.420 that would have been, you know, so cavalier

02:05:57.880 about the deaths and immiseration of

02:06:00.380 millions of people, right? So that, the fact that

02:06:02.920 this is even possible, this thought experiment

02:06:05.400 that at some future date, we'll have a way of

02:06:07.820 curing evil people and that it would make no

02:06:11.040 sense ethically at that point to go, to go

02:06:13.400 into our prisons and say, well, we're, we're

02:06:14.900 going to withhold the cure because as, as

02:06:18.360 punishment for all the evil stuff these

02:06:20.100 people did, it's like, you know, that's

02:06:21.840 like withholding the cure for, for diabetes

02:06:24.700 for, from, you know, diabetics the moment we get

02:06:27.440 it because, you know, of all the, the bad

02:06:30.180 things they did when their blood sugar was

02:06:31.560 too low, you know, I mean, it's just, it does, it

02:06:32.920 wouldn't make any sense ethically, but that

02:06:35.360 suggests a kind, that, that ignorance is

02:06:38.540 more of the problem here. It's like evil

02:06:41.520 people, because of the brains they have,

02:06:44.100 because of the life, lives they've had,

02:06:45.960 because of the, the, if you want to add,

02:06:48.680 you know, a religious dimension to it

02:06:50.160 because of the souls they have, the souls

02:06:51.860 they didn't pick, um, they're unlucky to

02:06:55.920 be evil and unavailable to, you know, much

02:06:59.500 of the, the human goodness you and I

02:07:01.120 experience. And, um, if we could change

02:07:04.720 that, they would, they would be standing

02:07:07.920 with us in a position of astonishment that

02:07:10.840 they could have ever been those sorts of

02:07:12.580 people. And so I think, I do think it's, you

02:07:15.240 know, at some level, the question of good

02:07:17.240 and evil is amenable to a, to a different

02:07:20.660 framing, which is more along the lines of, of

02:07:23.420 wisdom and, and ignorance. You don't know,

02:07:27.480 people don't know what they're missing. That's

02:07:29.760 that, that across, across every possible

02:07:32.020 dimension of both intellectual and ethical,

02:07:35.060 uh, and relational, you know, and, and whole

02:07:38.660 societies don't know what they're missing. And,

02:07:40.600 and figuring, figuring out what's missing and

02:07:44.320 what, and what we're missing is, is, is all of

02:07:48.760 our work.

02:07:50.260 Yeah. Well, I would say we'll have to leave

02:07:52.540 that for a different discussion. I would

02:07:56.560 say in response to that, two things, I

02:07:58.880 guess. One is, I think this is from the

02:08:01.340 Gospel of Thomas. Christ said to his

02:08:04.660 followers, the kingdom of God is spread

02:08:07.220 upon the earth, but men will not see it, or

02:08:10.540 cannot see it, depending on the translation. And

02:08:14.160 then the other germane comment might be with

02:08:17.980 regard to ignorance. This is one of the

02:08:20.060 things that complicates it morally is, there

02:08:22.540 are none so blind as those who will not 0.91

02:08:25.040 see. And I mean, I agree with you, by the

02:08:28.420 way, Sam, is that the intermingling of

02:08:30.320 ignorance and malevolence is a, that's a

02:08:32.300 very thorny problem, right? And which

02:08:34.660 precedes the other is very difficult thing

02:08:36.720 to determine. So we're going to have to

02:08:39.660 stop. I'd like to talk to you. The next

02:08:41.980 time we talk, Sam, maybe we could

02:08:43.720 concentrate more on issues pertaining to

02:08:46.220 free will and ignorance. That might be very

02:08:48.300 interesting. Yeah, happy to do it. All right.

02:08:50.420 So, yeah, well, that'd be good, Sam. So for

02:08:54.040 everyone watching and listening, thank you

02:08:55.740 very much for your time and attention. I'm

02:08:57.500 going to spend another half an hour with

02:08:59.540 Sam behind the Daily Wire Plus paywall. And

02:09:02.700 so if you're inclined to join us there,

02:09:05.080 please do. That gives you the opportunity, I

02:09:07.620 suppose, to throw some support in the

02:09:09.960 direction of the DW Plus people who are

02:09:13.180 trying to put forward, you know, a

02:09:15.060 functional platform for new forms of

02:09:17.020 entertainment and for the continuance of

02:09:18.900 free speech. So hypothetically, that might

02:09:20.960 be worth supporting. Mr. Harris, it's

02:09:23.340 always good to talk to you. It's been a

02:09:25.240 pleasure getting to know you over the

02:09:26.580 years. And I'm glad we've been able to

02:09:28.180 continue our conversations. I really am.

02:09:30.440 And me too. I appreciate what you had to

02:09:32.320 say today greatly. And until we meet

02:09:37.180 again. Yeah. And thank you again for

02:09:39.180 everyone. You bet, man. All right. Ciao.

02:09:42.100 Bye.

02:09:44.020 Bye.

02:09:56.360 Bye.

02:09:56.700 Bye.

02:09:56.860 Bye.

02:09:58.580 Bye.

02:10:00.300 Bye.

02:10:00.980 Bye.

02:10:01.060 Bye.

02:10:01.780 Bye.

02:10:03.380 Bye.

02:10:05.840 Bye.

02:10:06.860 Bye.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 25, 2023

408. Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris Try to Find Something They Agree On

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