The scientific method is a means of accessing scientific knowledge, but there are many other ways to access spiritual knowledge. In this episode, Dr. Philip Goff and I discuss the problem of "scientism" and its impact on our understanding of spiritual knowledge, and how we access it. Dr. Goff is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. He is the author of several books, including The Philosophy of Expertism: A Guide to the New Science and the Philosophy of Occam's Razor, and he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The Huffington Post. He is also the co-host of the podcast, The G-word, and hosts a weekly podcast called Answering the Biggest Questions, where he discusses the most pressing questions facing us today's society. This episode was edited and produced by Annie-Rose Strasser and edited by David Rothkopf. Our theme music is by my main amigo, Evan Handyside, and our ad music is courtesy of Epitaph Records, courtesy of Fugue Records. Please rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Podchaser. Thank you so much for listening to Anvil Records. Please consider pledging a Review of this podcast by clicking the Reviewed Podcasts linktr.ee/AnvilRights/OurViews/Supporting/Sponsoring/Becoming a Member of the Podcast. We post a Reviewer/Sponsor/Become a Friend of The Anvil Project: bit.ly/reviewer/Support the Podcast? Subscribe to the Podcasts? Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices? Become a supporter of our sponsorships? Leave us a Reviewed Member? Get a Review & Support us on iTunes - we'll get a discount on our podcasting opportunity! and a chance to win a FREE 7-day shipping plan! Thanks for supporting our podcast! Subscribe & Reviewed Reviewed Book Recommendation? If you're looking for a copy of our next week's issue of our new issue of Anvil by clicking this podcast? & much more! Get all the best listening to our ad-free version of our newest issue of The Good Morning Journalist Podcasts by Good Morning America? Good Reviewed by Bad Lord Good Lord Goodness Goodness by Good Lady Goodness?
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:00.000The scientific method is a means of accessing scientific knowledge.
00:00:11.000What do you do in the scientific method?
00:00:13.000You start with a hypothesis, and then you test that hypothesis through a series of experiments that either reject your prior hypothesis or in some way confirm your prior hypothesis.
00:00:23.000That's the core of the scientific method.
00:00:25.000What we've seen in recent years, though, is people beginning to mistake the scientific method for a different philosophy, which I will call expertism, that is different than the scientific method, which says that you have greater authority on a subject if you happen to be trained as an empirical expert in that subject.
00:00:43.000We saw this in our country and around the world in the rise of COVID-19, the limitations on what you were able to debate, whether or not you were an expert of a particular class.
00:00:52.000And this is interesting because, actually, the scientific method itself depends on open debate.
00:00:58.000It depends on the inquiry of ideas, of no ideas being out of bounds.
00:01:03.000And yet, in the name of pursuing capital S Science, We created a new culture of expertism to say that if you weren't trained in a particular domain of science, then you couldn't be challenging the hypotheses that were offered.
00:01:16.000We see that in the modern climate change movement as well.
00:01:19.000And I think that that's what I call a new philosophy of expertism.
00:01:23.000Your status and your sense of authority come not from your ability to provide all countermeaning hypotheses or experiments to test them.
00:01:32.000But instead, the authority that you have based on the number of letters that come after your name and the degrees that follow your title.
00:01:39.000Well, that's one philosophy and one mistake that I think we've often made.
00:02:07.000While science or empiricism is one way of accessing knowledge, there are many ways and many kinds of knowledge that we access in different ways.
00:02:15.000You don't access spiritual knowledge through the use of empiricism any more than you can access empirical knowledge through, say, meditation.
00:02:23.000Although that's an interesting point to reflect on because many of the greatest scientific discoveries actually were made through first reflection on what the hypothesis was in the first place.
00:02:34.000Einstein didn't arrive at his theory of relativity through empirical experiments at all, actually.
00:02:41.000He arrived at his theory of relativity through deep consideration and meditation of his own, imagining what was possible, a different framework that rejected the Newtonian past.
00:02:52.000And only years later was that ever confirmed through experimentation.
00:02:59.000His core discovery wasn't something that was really empirically derived, but it was a different frame shift, a mind shift.
00:03:06.000Imagine living in a world where you thought the sun and everything else in the universe revolved around the earth.
00:03:11.000The frame shift in being able to imagine a world that was different was really how we access that knowledge.
00:03:16.000And so even when it comes to scientific knowledge, but certainly when it comes to types of knowledge that fall outside of science, like spiritual knowledge, the scientific method of empiricism is only one of the ways that we might go about accessing that form of knowledge.
00:03:29.000And so in that way, I think scientism, and this is an idea I've been intrigued by for a long time, scientism is really a kind of religion in its own right.
00:03:40.000A religion often posits that its means of accessing truth or knowledge is the only means of getting there.
00:03:46.000And yet the irony is modern secularists, modern people who think of themselves as empiricists, have fallen into the trap of believing that empiricism or empirical access through the scientific method is the only way they're going to be able to access knowledge in their own right.
00:04:01.000And I think that makes the same kind of philosophical error that many of those empiricists think that religious scholars make or religious practitioners make.
00:04:08.000With regard to their own religions, which is a funny full circle.
00:04:11.000So as I've been interested in the plural ways that we access knowledge, one of the people that I wanted to talk to was a guy who's thought about these questions far more deeply than I have.
00:04:25.000And we're going to have a deep diving discussion around how we access knowledge.
00:04:30.000What is the core error in the philosophy of scientism?
00:04:34.000And what are the implications for not only accessing scientific knowledge, but accessing spiritual knowledge?
00:04:40.000And maybe even get somewhere in our conversation to a deeper and controversial discussion about the G-word, God, that we often don't get to in our everyday discourse.
00:05:01.000I'm looking forward to the conversation.
00:05:03.000So say a word about your background just so our audience is familiar with who you are and who they're hearing from today and then we'll get into the discussion from there.
00:05:13.000So I'm a philosophy professor at Durham University here in the cold north of England, the third oldest university after Oxford and Cambridge.
00:05:22.000So it's very kind of Harry Potter around here.
00:05:24.000But I spend most of my time trying to work out the ultimate nature of reality with a big focus on consciousness, which I think poses some of the deepest scientific and philosophical challenges of our time.
00:05:38.000So I'm just spending my time wrestling with those issues, I think.
00:05:41.000And why is consciousness important as the relevant question to investigate?
00:05:49.000Wow, well, I mean, in a sense, consciousness is everything.
00:05:53.000I would say consciousness is the source of everything that really matters in life, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, rich sensory experiences.
00:06:04.000But the reason it's posed such a deep intellectual challenge is nobody knows how to fit it in to our current scientific understanding of the universe.
00:06:14.000Despite great progress on our scientific understanding of the brain, We still lack even the beginnings of an explanation of how electrochemical signaling in the brain could somehow produce an inner world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes that each of us enjoys every second of waking life.
00:06:37.000And we've been struggling with this for many decades.
00:06:39.000Some people call it the hard problem of consciousness.
00:06:44.000Because we've really got nowhere on it, some people like myself are turning perhaps to more radical options on consciousness.
00:06:59.000Maybe it's like magic or witchcraft things we don't believe in anymore.
00:07:03.000My own view, known as panpsychism, is the view that consciousness goes down to the fundamental building blocks of reality.
00:07:12.000That very simple fundamental particles like electrons and quarks have very, very rudimentary forms of conscious experience and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow built up from these more rudimentary forms of consciousness at the fundamental level of reality.
00:07:34.000So it puts consciousness right down there at the fundamental level of physics and tries to build up.
00:07:41.000That's a radical thought indeed, at least relative to our current understanding, which is broadly that you have inanimate, unconscious physical attributes like the electrons and protons and neutrons that comprise atoms.
00:07:57.000And then there's an emergent biological consciousness in human beings and of a different kind, maybe in other biological organisms.
00:08:06.000What is it that gives you the basis to believe, I won't even say evidence necessarily, maybe it's evidence, but the basis to believe that even something as fundamental as an atom or even subatomic particles like an electron or a proton or even a boring neutron would have consciousness in its own right?
00:08:30.000Well, Vivek, I liked what you said about scientism at the start there.
00:08:34.000And I think we're going through a period of history where people are so blown away by the success of physical science, quite rightly, that it leads them to think that every question can be answered with an experiment.
00:08:48.000You know, Sam Harris famously said, even moral questions can be answered by science.
00:08:53.000That might be the dumbest thing I've ever heard, actually.
00:08:57.000I think it's some experiment that can tell whether the left or right of politics is correct or the correct view on abortion.
00:09:04.000Surely these are questions that experiments might be relevant to, but you can't say, oh, scientists have discovered the pro-life position is correct or...
00:09:14.000But even when it comes to the nature of reality, you know, there are always assumptions, worldviews in the background that are so foundational that they can't themselves be tested.
00:09:30.000We think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which of course he was, but he was also a radical philosopher.
00:09:38.000So what Galileo wanted in the 17th century, we call him the father of modern science, He wanted, for the first time in history, science to be purely mathematical, right?
00:09:55.000Galileo appreciated that you can't capture the qualities of conscious experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells and the tastes in the purely quantitative language of mathematics.
00:10:09.000An equation can't capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun.
00:10:17.000So Galileo thought, right, what am I going to do about this?
00:10:41.000And once he'd done that, once he'd stripped away the qualities of consciousness, everything else could be described with mathematics.
00:10:49.000And this was the start of mathematical physics.
00:10:53.000Now, that has gone incredibly well for the past 400 years, years.
00:10:58.000But we've forgotten that it was all premised on this dividing up of nature with the mathematical world of physics and science on the one hand and the qualities of consciousness in the soul outside of science.
00:11:13.000And now, you know, physical science has gone so well and produced incredible technology.
00:11:17.000People think, oh, well, that's the full story.
00:11:24.000The whole project was premised on designing science to exclude consciousness, to set it outside of the domain of physical science.
00:11:33.000And so if we now want to bring consciousness back into the scientific story, I think we need to rethink that worldview that Galileo bequeathed to us.
00:11:44.000We need to bring together those two domains that Galileo separated.
00:11:50.000And I think panpsychism gives us a way of doing that.
00:11:52.000A question for you is, even if we separated that question of consciousness from the rest of truth that we could access through mathematics, the bifurcation that Galileo conceived,
00:12:09.000is there a role for at least describing I think?
00:12:33.000As a tool of inquiry, does that give us at least insight into understanding consciousness that we otherwise may not have had?
00:12:40.000Or is it really a different mode of knowledge and understanding that must be accessed entirely independent of the tools of mathematics and science?
00:12:52.000I certainly don't want to say that science isn't important.
00:12:56.000And, you know, in my book, Galileo's Era, it's called, the subtitle is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.
00:13:03.000This is about bringing the philosophy and the science together to work hand in glove.
00:13:09.000So I think, you know, the scientific task for consciousness is to work out which kinds of brain activity Go along with which kinds of experience?
00:13:20.000And this is already a very difficult project, but if you can scan people's brains and you can ask them what they're feeling and experiencing, we can start to map these together and hopefully map in general which kinds of brain activity go along with consciousness in general.
00:13:37.000But that isn't the only task we want from a theory of consciousness.
00:13:42.000Ultimately, we want an explanation of why.
00:13:45.000Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with consciousness?
00:13:51.000Why should consciousness and brain activity have anything to do with each other?
00:13:55.000And that's, I think, where we need to turn to the philosophy, because there are various philosophical possibilities here.
00:14:03.000Some people think the physical universe is fundamental and consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain.
00:14:13.000Other people, like myself, turn that upside down and think, no, it's consciousness that's fundamental.
00:14:21.000And the physical universe emerges from some more fundamental story about consciousness.
00:14:27.000Now, these two rival worldviews, physicalism we call the conventional scientific story, panpsychism is the view I defend, they're so foundational.
00:14:38.000You can't distinguish between them with an experiment.
00:14:41.000They're sort of internally consistent stories.
00:14:44.000And so for any scientific data, each of these worldviews will just interpret that data on their own terms.
00:14:51.000And you know, this makes people very nervous.
00:14:53.000Like, what can we do if we can't answer with an experiment?
00:15:01.000I think philosophy does give us the tools for asking ethical questions, political questions, but also evaluating these different theories of reality, these different fundamental theories of reality.
00:15:14.000Maybe I could give you just a quick example, going back again to Galileo.
00:15:19.000One of the brilliant things Galileo showed us is that Aristotle was wrong.
00:15:47.000And we have this myth that he went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped a lead ball and a feather.
00:15:52.000Most historians think that didn't actually happen and he didn't need to experimentally prove it.
00:15:57.000Galileo showed that if you really think carefully, and I'm not going to tell you the details now.
00:16:04.000You can look at my book, Galileo's Arrow, the audience.
00:16:07.000But he showed if you really think through carefully that idea that heavier objects fall faster, this idea that people had believed for thousands of years, It doesn't make sense.
00:17:00.000I mean, they think that how much of this is accessible to most ordinary human beings?
00:17:06.000I mean, Galileo, Einstein, maybe yourself, are rarer human beings that may have a different mode of accessing knowledge versus ordinary human beings where you may...
00:17:23.000I wonder if we're talking past each other to say that it's like teaching someone like an average person off the street, go do slam dunks.
00:17:31.000And he's like, oh, Michael Jordan can do slam dunks, but you just don't have the capacity to do the slam dunks.
00:17:36.000That doesn't mean that you can't Engage in a wide variety of worthy activities that allow you to enjoy basketball, that allow you to play basketball, but you can't go do the slam dunk.
00:17:46.000It's like you're just missing that in your toolkit.
00:17:48.000How much do you think that's actually what's going on here as well as maybe a differential in the difference in innate capacities that certain people have for philosophy versus just having a different toolkit available to them, which is empiricism, that they otherwise resort to as a second best?
00:18:05.000Yeah, and I definitely wouldn't want to be elitist or...
00:19:06.000We think of them in these weird sci-fi thought experiments.
00:19:09.000But the reason we're doing that is we're trying to sort of shock ourselves out of our ordinary assumptions about consciousness or knowledge or morality, just pinning down, you know, what is the core of these things?
00:19:21.000And that is something that is quite hard to do.
00:19:24.000It's something that I'm not good at a lot of things, but I think I've always found that kind of intuitive, But it's also something you can get better at.
00:19:34.000You know, you can get better at the logical structure of arguments, mistakes in reasoning.
00:19:43.000We can identify what we call fallacies, errors in reasoning.
00:19:47.000And these are what you can learn as you take a philosophy degree.
00:19:51.000So there are a lot of objective skills here.
00:19:54.000Obviously, there's so much controversy and disagreement in philosophy.
00:19:58.000But yeah, to an extent it's aptitude, to an extent these are skills you can hone.
00:20:02.000Plato, in one of his dialogues, had this famous section where he taught a slave boy to do mathematics, and this was supposed to show, you know, we've got these inherent skills that you can train up, even in the common man.
00:20:21.000Interesting when we think about the plural modes to accessing, you know, knowledge.
00:20:27.000And, you know, there may be different frameworks that are not compatible to be tested by experimentation, right?
00:20:33.000Does consciousness precede, you know, the physical universe or is consciousness emergent from physical attributes?
00:20:43.000You could say a parallel question that different philosophers maybe tangle with is the question of time, right?
00:20:48.000Does time move as we sometimes may think of ourselves experiencing it?
00:20:53.000Or is time actually in some sense static and we're just moving through it?
00:20:58.000I think that that's where many philosophers of time have landed today.
00:21:04.000And that's, I think, different from the question of You know, whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun revolves around the earth, but in either case, it requires a frame shift in your thinking.
00:21:15.000So if you have one realm of accessing these questions, which is through empiricism, one is through logical, philosophical reflection.
00:21:24.000Just for a second, like, what are the other sort of roads?
00:21:27.000What are the different other forms of off-road driving here?
00:22:09.000And just on the question of time, you know, many people think Einstein's theory of relativity has these strange implications about time, that there's no privileged present moment and past, present and future are all equally real.
00:22:25.000But actually, and this connects with what you said in your intro, Einstein, for his special theory of relativity in 1905, the equations, the mathematics, was taken from someone else, Lorentz.
00:22:39.000And Einstein's spin on it, again, did not make an observational difference.
00:22:44.000You couldn't distinguish Einstein's special relativity.
00:22:49.000Which had all these weird implications about time, from the view of Lorentz that preceded it, which was the more commonsensical view of time.
00:22:58.000These were, in terms of experiments, were equivalent.
00:23:01.000But what Einstein brought was a beautiful unity and simplicity.
00:23:07.000And I think the scientific community almost universally went with Einstein.
00:23:12.000It was more counter to common sense, but it had this beautiful simplicity and unity.
00:23:17.000So that's one example where it's not just about experiments.
00:23:20.000It's about the inherent beauty, almost, of the theory that influences how physicists think about these things.
00:23:29.000What I'm so passionate about consciousness, I think...
00:23:35.000Here's another way to see why it's not just about experiments, right?
00:23:39.000There's something else we know about reality, totally independent of experiments, and that is the reality of conscious experience.
00:23:48.000The existence of feelings and smells and tastes.
00:23:52.000This is not something you learn about down a particle collider.
00:23:56.000You know it just by being conscious and exploring the richness of your own conscious experience.
00:24:04.000So it's not from experiments, but it's real.
00:24:06.000And it needs to be factored into our theory of reality.
00:24:09.000Galileo put it outside of science so we could focus on what we can capture in mathematics.
00:24:14.000But if we want a full story of reality, we need to accommodate not just what experiments are telling us, but also the rich reality of conscious experience.
00:24:23.000Now, moving on to a slightly different point, which maybe you were hinting at, some people in certain Maybe after a long meditation, maybe with great creative leaps, maybe after taking certain substances.
00:24:38.000People have these experiences which seem to tell them more about reality than we have access to with ordinary consciousness.
00:25:01.000William James's varieties of religious experience, the wonderful 19th century psychologist and philosopher.
00:25:07.000And this was a wonderful categorization of these experiences that seem to be telling us there's more to reality than we ordinarily grasp.
00:25:17.000But at the end of this sort of psychological taxonomy, James said, is it okay for the mystic to trust these experiences?
00:25:27.000They seem to be telling us, let's say, that reality is deeply interconnected, that we are all one in some sense, that there is an ineffable higher core of consciousness to reality.
00:25:43.000Would it be rational for a mystical to trust that reality really is as these experiences seem to purport?
00:25:50.000Or should the mystic just think, no, there's just something funny going on in my brain, I'm hallucinating.
00:26:18.000Maybe this is all a big dream and I'm about to wake up.
00:26:21.000But we think it's okay to trust what our senses seem to be telling us.
00:26:24.000So if it's okay to trust ordinary experience, what that seems to be telling us about reality...
00:26:30.000But it's not okay for the mystic to trust mystical experiences.
00:26:34.000There's a sort of double standard here.
00:26:36.000You know, all knowledge is rooted in just a leap of faith in a way, a decision to trust experience.
00:26:42.000Why is it okay in the one case and not the other, especially as many mystics claim that The mystical experience, if anything, seems more real even after it's finished than ordinary sensory experiences.
00:26:54.000So I think these are deep and puzzling questions that I wrestle with in my more recent book, Why the Purpose of the Universe.
00:27:29.000I decided I was an atheist at 14. I was quite happily on team secular atheist for 20 years or more.
00:27:37.000But through my philosophical research, through my many conversations with leading scientists and neuroscientists, I've just come to think that both of these worldviews are inadequate.
00:27:50.000Both of them have things they can't explain about reality.
00:27:54.000And where I think the evidence is pointing now is What I call cosmic purpose, that the universe itself has some kind of purpose or directionality, but not one that's imposed by a supernatural designer, one that's just inherent to the universe itself.
00:30:00.000That we're ignoring that current uncontroversial physics, I think, in our normal ways of thinking about evidence, points to some kind of cosmic purpose.
00:30:11.000And as a society, we're sort of in denial about that.
00:30:14.000I think future historians looking back will think, why do people ignore this for so long?
00:30:22.000And so what would be one of those pieces of evidence that you think is discordant with otherwise our accepted understanding of the universe today, like as sitting from the present?
00:30:36.000Yeah, I mean, well, I think there are two big things that don't fit in our current scientific paradigm.
00:30:41.000One, we've already talked about is consciousness.
00:30:43.000But the other, which I focus on more in my book, Why the Purpose of the Universe, is the fine-tuning of physics for life.
00:30:52.000This surprising discovery of recent decades that...
00:30:57.000Many numbers in physics are, like Goldilocks porridge, just right for life.
00:31:04.000You know, not too big, not too small, just right.
00:31:06.000The example that's most perplexed cosmologists revolves around dark energy.
00:31:12.000This is the force that propels the accelerating expansion of the universe.
00:31:18.000And once we do the calculations, it becomes clear that if that force had been just a little bit stronger Everything would have shot apart so quickly after the Big Bang.
00:31:33.000We wouldn't have had stars, planets, any kind of complexity at all.
00:31:38.000Whereas if that force had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity and everything would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the Big Bang.
00:31:56.000When you do the calculations, it's just astronomically improbable that you'd get the right numbers by chance.
00:32:04.000And so I think in our normal ways of thinking about this, this is evidence for some kind of It's directedness towards life in the very early universe.
00:32:18.000But I don't think we need to go there.
00:32:20.000But I think we need to just put aside our biases, both religious and secular, and follow the evidence where it's leading.
00:32:27.000Let me just, for the fun of it, maybe put pressure on that from both directions.
00:32:34.000We'll start from the pure secular version and then we'll start, we'll then move to putting pressure on the other direction from the supernatural version or the God version.
00:32:48.000The exact magnitude of dark energy, had it actually been any greater, would have never resulted in the creation of the universe anyway.
00:32:56.000I think that you might anticipate this.
00:32:59.000The counterargument to that from the pure secular atheist angle would be, because the pure secular or pure secular alternative angle would be, Well, there's a probability distribution, and all of those other universes did not come into existence, and this is the only one that did.
00:33:16.000And so you're using a preservation bias as a way of assuming that's all that ever existed, where on your own theory, all of those other universes would not have existed.
00:33:26.000So the one that did, you can't draw the conclusion of purpose in that universe if it was just one universe and a probability distribution of universes 99 out of the 100 of which, by hypothesis, would not have existed in the first place, and that this one did is just an artifact of confirmation bias.
00:33:49.000So I think many scientists and philosophers are a little bit in denial about this, but not all.
00:33:54.000Many do take this seriously, do think this obviously needs explaining.
00:33:57.000And the most popular explanation among scientists and philosophers probably is the multiverse hypothesis.
00:34:05.000So the idea is maybe the universe we see is just one of trillions and trillions, maybe an infinite number with different numbers in their physics.
00:34:15.000So if you've got enough universes with different numbers, one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life.
00:34:23.000Play the lottery, one's going to fluke the right numbers.
00:34:25.000And I used to accept this myself for a long time.
00:34:29.000You know, I've always thought the fine-tuning of Physics for Life needed explaining, but I thought that looked the more sensible explanation.
00:34:36.000But I've slowly been persuaded, just when I started teaching this stuff, actually, that there's some dodgy reasoning going on in this inference.
00:34:49.000That it commits what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy.
00:34:54.000We talked before about errors in reasoning, logical fallacies, and philosophers of probability have identified that there's actually a logical fallacy in trying to explain fine-tuning in terms of the multiverse.
00:35:07.000Shall I give you a quick analogy to try and...
00:35:11.000Obviously, there's a complex debate here, but...
00:35:14.000You can get into it with a useful analogy.
00:35:18.000Just so you're responding to the core point, I'll give it in a layperson's term here, right?
00:35:23.000And then you can maybe respond to it in the more philosophical term.
00:35:27.000The layperson's term, since you brought up the gambler, would be, okay, well, if you play roulette 32 times and you pick the one time that you won, but you only examine that time that you won and say there had to be a purpose here.
00:35:40.000The purpose was for me to win when, in fact, you played 32 other times that you lost.
00:35:44.000It's the equivalent of the universe, not just for life coming to existence, but other universes having blown themselves out of existence in the multiverse hypothesis.
00:36:07.000People might have heard of the regular gambler's fallacy, like when you've been playing all night and you've had terrible luck and you think, oh, I'm bound to have good luck this time.
00:36:17.000And everyone agrees that's bad reasoning because every roll of the dice, the odds are the same, whether you've just started or you've been playing all night.
00:36:27.000Let me give you another casino analogy.
00:36:30.000Suppose, Vivek, you and I go to a casino this evening, maybe in London, and we walk in, and the first person, we go in, there's a small room, and we just see one guy in this room having an incredible run of luck.
00:36:44.000He's just winning and winning and winning.
00:36:47.000And I turn to you and I say, wow, the casino must be full tonight.
00:36:52.000And you say, Philip, what are you talking about?
00:36:57.000What's the rest of the casino got to do?
00:36:58.000And I reason, well, if there are tens of thousands of people playing in the casino tonight, then, you know, it's not so surprising that somebody is going to win big.
00:37:32.000But it looks like the multiverse theorist is making strikingly similar reasoning, right?
00:37:40.000They start observing our universe and they think...
00:37:43.000Oh my God, it got the right numbers for life against incredible odds.
00:37:46.000There must be loads of other universes with terrible numbers.
00:37:49.000Well, that looks like exactly the same reasoning.
00:37:51.000Our observational evidence is just this one universe we've observed.
00:37:55.000No matter how many other universes there are out there, have no bearing on how likely it is that our universe, the only one we've ever observed.
00:38:02.000So marshalling some element of empiricism to sort of Or not necessarily empiricism itself, but the value of empiricism to say that actually it would be the less plausible of hypotheses to say that there are these multiple other universes that have never been observed versus at least going with the most parsimonious version as here's the one we have, which at least allows us to draw a greater inference of purpose rather than Stochasticity amongst universes as their basis for explaining this one.
00:38:32.000And I find that persuasive, by the way.
00:38:34.000So I say that to offer maybe a different version of what neither you or I believe to put pressure on.
00:38:40.000Let me put pressure on you from another direction that I do believe in, though, which may be different from yours, is why is it important to you to make sure that that purpose is divorced from the invocation of God?
00:38:57.000You went out of your way in your description of it.
00:38:59.000It's almost as though you caveated it.
00:39:02.000I'm just playing around with you a little bit, but an inverse Catholic impulse of you have a guilt if you did bring God into it that you have to flog yourself and have to caveat it so many times to say, yes, there is this great purpose, but it's different from saying there's God.
00:39:14.000Don't accuse me of saying there's God, but there is this purpose.
00:39:19.000About your observation or reflection that makes that exclusion so important to state, just even as a priority, versus leaving the possibility of it open.
00:39:32.000Tell me about that, because that's interesting to me.
00:39:34.000That's a very good question, because I do think...
00:39:39.000We need to be alert to these biases and prejudices.
00:39:42.000I feel as someone raised in intellectual circles in the West, we're very well trained to be alert to religious biases, but we're not very well trained to be alert to secular biases.
00:39:58.000I find it hard, to be honest, standing up in front of my peers and defending panpsychism and cosmic purpose, because it feels silly in the intellectual circles I swim in.
00:40:11.000But, you know, eventually I just decided, well, look, this is where I think the arguments and the evidence are pointing to, and I've got to be honest with myself.
00:40:18.000But likewise, yeah, you're right to question, is this just a prejudice against God or something?
00:40:28.000Well, I do think there are a couple of issues I have with God, although I'm, you know, very open minded on all of these topics.
00:40:37.000I mean, one is the classic problem of reconciling an all loving, all powerful God with the terrible pain and suffering we find in the world.
00:40:49.000In the human case, maybe Believers in God point to free will, and maybe that can do some work.
00:40:56.000But what about the terrible suffering we find in the animal world?
00:41:00.000What about the short-tailed North American shrew which paralyzes its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it eventually dies from its wounds?
00:41:13.000Why would a loving or powerful God choose to bring that into existence?
00:42:13.000You want to cover every possible objection.
00:42:15.000So if you've got a good objection, probably it's there in the book.
00:42:18.000But actually, I think probably the cutting edge of the philosophical discussion of this is a position called skeptical theism, which says we have no idea why God allows suffering.
00:42:37.000But, you know, we shouldn't expect to.
00:43:28.000You know, it's a very interesting argument, but I suppose ultimately I think All we can do is work with the evidence, in a broad sense of evidence, and the arguments we currently have.
00:43:43.000If God exists, then Who am I? God is greater than me and God must have some reason I don't understand for creating the short-tailed.
00:43:54.000I never remember if it's long-tailed or short-tailed.
00:43:58.000But when in a position of uncertainty, and I'm always in my work about emphasizing uncertainty, the importance of embracing how uncertain life is, and I'm trying to work out whether God exists or Then all I can do is work with my understanding of morality and try and make the best guess I can.
00:44:19.000I mean, you know, take an analogy, scientists now tell us, what is it, 80-90% of the universe is dark matter and energy that we don't understand at all?
00:44:28.000So does that mean we should stop doing physics?
00:44:31.000No, we try the best with the evidence we've got.
00:44:34.000So I think I try with the moral understanding, not just me, but...
00:44:38.000Great moral thinkers have to try and work out, would a God create a universe like this?
00:44:44.000And that leads me to have some doubts about the existence of God and at least explore other ways.
00:44:53.000I think, as I say, people think it's either God or it's atheism, you know?
00:44:57.000It's at least interesting and important to explore different ways of different worldviews, lay all the Positions on the table.
00:45:22.000The order of what I'm concerned with in this question is different than what we've been talking about so far, which is exclusively in the realm of truth, right?
00:45:29.000So far we're talking about what is true.
00:45:31.000The question I'm about to ask is one about your opinion about practicality.
00:45:37.000So do you believe that our world or our nation would be better off, or children in their upbringing would be better off If we at least parsimoniously described the other purpose of the universe in the language of God, actually.
00:46:02.000Like, do you think that that would just be strictly better?
00:46:05.000Where your concern is purely a exploration in terms of what is true.
00:46:10.000And that's interesting and we could debate that one, you know, in the remaining minutes as people have for centuries and not resolve it amongst themselves.
00:46:19.000Take for a second just the mantle of practicality for the betterment of the world, or since you seem to care about the reduction of suffering, because that was by hypothesis one of the reasons why you questioned the existence of God, would there be less discord or suffering if we did just use as a shorthand God as a fill-in for the For the account of purpose.
00:46:43.000And we have thousands of years of human history suggesting to us that human beings can access that more easily than a novel theory of panpsychism.
00:46:53.000I'd just be curious if you think that the practicality of it might actually weigh in favor of, let's say, I don't know if you have children, but if you did have children, could there be a case for bringing them up?
00:47:06.000In the way your parents brought you up, right?
00:47:08.000Against the backdrop of God accounting for that which can't be explained through empirical science just because that is more likely to get close to where the truth is anyway and still have a more cohesive Does that make sense as a question?
00:49:14.000Engaging with traditional religion as a profound metaphor rather than a literal truth.
00:49:22.000You know, I mean, I am, despite not being a Catholic believer anymore, I am still profoundly moved by the beautiful symbolism of Christianity, the wonderful inversion of worldly values, the first shall be last, the last shall be first, That's the emphasis on the poor and the weak that has so transformed Western civilization.
00:49:42.000And so I do, to an extent, engage with traditional religion.
00:49:47.000And like my like my children, my two little girls having some sort of symbolic way of relating to value and relating to something greater than themselves.
00:50:00.000You know, we're not purely intellectual beings.
00:50:04.000We need symbols and traditions that bind people together across space and time and mark the seasons and the big moments of life, birth, marriage, death, coming of age.
00:50:20.000I think that's actually one of the unexplored precepts of Christianity, actually, is what we just talked about.
00:50:30.000On one telling of it, and I... I'm a Hindu, but I've been educated in Christian school and philosophy, and I am deeply fascinated by, say, the connection between the Old Testament, where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and God didn't make him follow through with that sacrifice.
00:50:50.000But when he comes back in the New Testament, it's kind of a circular reference where God did sacrifice his own son because Humanity of sinners needed that sacrifice in order to see that sacrifice to believe in God.
00:51:10.000So in a certain sense, it was God's own sacrifice of his son and his love of the people that gave him the need to sacrifice his son so that the people could fulfill their own need to actually have a belief in God itself.
00:51:25.000And that sort of is a parallel to the conversation we just had is that you...
00:51:30.000We have a human need to believe in something greater than ourselves.
00:51:33.000And I think part of the essential Christian theology is God's recognition of our human need to believe in something greater than ourselves, but to be able to be called to do it.
00:51:44.000That's why he sacrificed his son, Jesus Christ.
00:51:47.000And I think that in some sense, acknowledging that isn't incompatible with religion so much as it is, let's say in this case, Christian religion is actually compatible.
00:52:00.000With everything that you've described as your view of panpsychism.
00:52:08.000And, you know, different people will have different views.
00:52:10.000Some people may, some Christians or people of other faiths maybe think, no, it's very important to believe the official beliefs.
00:52:19.000And, you know, I hope my work has changed.
00:52:24.000Positive reinforcement and challenges for both traditional religion, people of traditional religions and traditional atheists, if you could say that.
00:52:34.000But also, I mean, I'm connected to the Church of England, which is often more flexible in its belief, often brings people together with ritual and symbolism and value and leaves people to interpret Yeah,
00:52:59.000doing all the rituals, but really you think it's cosmic purpose rather than God in the traditional sense.
00:53:09.000You know, I think one should be sensitive to what is required in a particular church or mosque or temple or what have you.
00:53:18.000But yeah, I mean, I don't think people should be afraid to explore these options and it might sort of open more people up to different ways of doing things.
00:53:28.000I think humans so often get stuck in the dichotomies, don't they?
00:53:32.000You know, science or supernatural, you know, God or atheism, you know, all of these dichotomies and there's often a richer spectrum in between and I love getting all the options on the table.
00:53:47.000So how much of this is really just a problem of language, right?
00:53:52.000I think there was, who was the philosopher, Wittgenstein or whoever it was that said, most moral problems are problems of language.
00:54:00.000And that actually here, there may be a phenomenon of talking past each other with the invocation of the word God, where you understand yourself to mean different things by it that make you think that you're Description of the universe is one that is different from or incompatible with a traditional religious God-based view when in fact it's really just based on what you just said, maybe more likely to just be a problem of language.
00:54:32.000And, you know, I talk in the book about the traditional idea of God, but actually in all of the Abrahamic faiths that I'm more familiar with, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, there's always been a tradition known as the apophatic tradition, which says that Nothing positive can be said of God.
00:54:55.000God is totally beyond human understanding and human categories.
00:54:59.000You know, in Christianity, this goes right back to the early church fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, and there was a very influential book in England in the 14th century, The Cloud of Unknowing, which guided ordinary Christians through Beyond the superficial language we use about God in worship to a deeper understanding of the God beyond human category.
00:55:28.000And we have the Sufi tradition in Islam and, oh, the name in Judaism escapes me now, Kabbalah?
00:55:40.000Yeah, there's always, in all of these traditions, and obviously in Hinduism, on the surface, there are rich mystical traditions.
00:55:47.000So there's always been this tradition of the mystical, the ineffable.
00:55:53.000And so, yeah, the distinction between Hinduism Believing in God or believing in some kind of purpose or directionality that's not, quote-unquote, the traditional God.
00:56:09.000That binary starts to dissolve a little bit in that context, I think.
00:56:13.000Yeah, and how familiar are you with, since you brought it up, with Hinduism as an alternative framework to what you think of as traditional religion in the Abrahamic sense?
00:56:25.000Somewhat to the, I mean, it's interesting, my own philosophical tradition, known as analytic philosophy, when it began in the mid, early to mid 20th century, was very scientistic, logical, dry.
00:56:40.000And yet, as time has gone on, I think maybe people have seen that...
00:56:45.000That approach just doesn't have the resources to explain everything we need to explain.
00:56:51.000And there have emerged people defending a great variety of options.
00:56:57.000A great philosopher in Australia, Miryel Bahari, who defends a version of Advaita Vedanta, the mystical Hindu tradition, or at least inspired by Advaita Vedanta, But defends it partly, partly in these very dry, logically precise terms.
00:57:26.000Again, I like mixing things up, marrying the cold, dry, logical.
00:57:31.000And she's not just doing that to the mystical, the...
00:57:35.000Learning from meditation and mystical experience.
00:57:38.000So I am somewhat familiar with, and it's an open question, how much of these different traditions really have the same core.
00:57:51.000Aldous Huxley, in the early 20th century, talked of the perennial philosophy, and he had this idea that Really, there's a mystical core to all of these religions, and then that mystical core is just expressed in different ways.
00:58:08.000I'm not sure how much I think that's right.
00:58:10.000Maybe there are real doctrinal differences between the different religions, but certainly I think there is mysticism in all of the different traditions, and to that extent there is overlap and commonality.
00:58:23.000So we should see the difference as well as the similarity and the sameness.
00:58:28.000Yeah, I think, you know, it's part of why maybe I'm more predisposed to see your worldview and philosophy as less incompatible, or I would go so far as to say entirely compatible with the existence of God, even in the traditional sense.
00:58:42.000I mean, part of the Hindu theology is the belief that there is one true God, certainly in the non-dualistic strand of Hinduism, there's one true God, but he resides in each of us and resides In part and parcel across the universe, which I think is compatible with even the worldview of modern physics of the matter coming from the universe and returning back to the universe.
00:59:07.000You may have a problem of language there, describing one in religious terms and describing another in secular terms.
00:59:14.000But apart from that problem of language, I don't know that the underlying...
00:59:18.000View is actually as different as we make it out to be, although I could see why maybe given your initial introduction to religion, it may have maybe presented itself as more of a tension between even your middle way and what you think of as God or traditional God-based religion.
00:59:41.000Maybe from the vantage point that I was introduced to what I think of as religion, don't see that dichotomy so much between a belief in traditional God and your view of universal consciousness.
00:59:56.000Yeah, it all depends, doesn't it, what we mean by God.
01:00:01.000And, I mean, I had certain assumptions about my Catholic upbringing, but actually, when you dig into the views of Augustine and Aquinas...
01:00:10.000I'm just going to bring up Aquinas, yep.
01:00:13.000...who were foundational in Catholic doctrine, it's very far, actually, from an anthropomorphic idea of God, the old man in the sky.
01:00:56.000So sometimes I think, yeah, the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris maybe had too simplistic an idea of what God is supposed to be.
01:01:04.000But, yeah, I suppose I still come back to the...
01:01:09.000The problem of suffering for me, insofar as we think God is in some sense all-powerful, however we cash that out, insofar as we can understand that, and good, it is hard to understand why the universe would be the way it is.
01:01:28.000I'm led to, I mean, to my, as I say it, the universe is a cocktail of accident and design.
01:01:35.000You know, some things like the fine tuning in physics, other things to do with consciousness are sort of too improbably good to be fluke.
01:01:44.000But at the same time, there is horrific, gratuitous suffering and masses of empty space.
01:01:52.000And I think we need to somehow reconcile both of these things.
01:01:56.000And that's really the project of my book, Why the Purpose of the Universe, is atheists are getting something right.
01:02:03.000Traditional believers in God are getting something right, but they're both getting something wrong at the same time.
01:02:08.000And we need to somehow explain both of these things, which is a tall order, but...
01:02:13.000That's why I found this conversation fascinating.
01:02:16.000I've been looking forward to this conversation with you and it has exceeded my high expectations because you are able to at once put pressure on both the traditional secular narrative or the traditional, at least what is viewed even in a reductionist way as traditional religion.
01:02:35.000And one of the things I loved about this hour we spent together is there isn't a single challenge that I could muster that you haven't already anticipated and thought deeply about through your careful study of history and the history of people like you who have preceded you for thousands of years who have tackled these same questions and I think that that's admirable and I think that that It naturally evokes a response of humility that I think is a beautiful thing that we sometimes miss in our modern moment.