Bret Weinstein discusses free will with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. His podcast called “Making Sense” is available on iTunes & Stitcher.Please subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell.Find and Help Support this work below:Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bretweinstein/Twitter: @BretWeinstein https://twitter.com/BretWeinsteinSupport is also welcome via ...
I'm Brett Weinstein, your host, and I have the privilege of sitting with Sam Harris, cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher.
I actually feel like although he needs no introduction, there is a thing that I wish showed up in his bio that I'm having trouble figuring out how to phrase.
Something like, Sam is an important node in our collective conscious architecture.
Not everybody agrees with Sam, but what he thinks matters.
I'll take it.
I'll take it.
Alright.
Awesome.
I'm not sure I can apply it to myself, but I will take it from you.
That's great.
I don't see why it should apply any less to you than anybody else.
Alright, so thank you for doing this, Sam.
I really appreciate your willingness to engage arguments that I know must feel like people run you through all the time and at some level maybe they should just read your books to find out what the answers to the questions that they would pose to you are.
And I should say that in preparation for today I have done a fair amount of reading of your material just to refresh my memory as to what you believe and to figure out whether or not there is indeed a gap worth discussing.
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, I find that certainly for some of these topics, conversation is much more flexible than just volleys of prose, right?
So email or blog post or article or book, it's just, it's too rigid because you really, you can't interact with anyone's real time response to, to what you've written there.
So it's, people just bounce off the arguments more often than not.
So, you know, I'm happy to talk about it.
Well, there's that.
I also think that the hidden magic of human nature actually involves active discussion about what we disagree over and that we have learned to think in a very different way because school trains us to function differently.
That, in essence, a podcast discussion is the resurrection of a very ancient and vitally important human form, something that might once have taken place over a campfire, now takes place somewhat more asynchronously and a lot more people can listen in.
But anyway, I do think that this is, in some ways, the return to an earlier form and maybe books were a temporary detour.
Yeah, yeah.
We're living through the golden age of conversation in some ways, so I'm happy to be doing it with you.
Yeah, or maybe this is the beginning of that golden age and we're discovering how to do it.
One of the things that frustrates me about the moment that we live in is that we've settled on an almost arbitrary mode of deciding what conversations should happen and when they should happen.
And that a little bit of thinking about how formally this should all go down might increase the extent to which we reach new objectives or even things that we didn't know to pursue.
So, let me say, in reading, in preparation for this, I read Free Will, I read your book Lying, I read a good chunk of The Moral Landscape, and I read your wife's book on Consciousness.
Oh, nice.
So that gave me some kind of insights, and I do have the sense That you are super unusual in the way that you think.
There's a way that your books almost encyclopedically explore your own thoughts on a topic so that in essence you're leading the reader through every path you've been down and where it ends and so it's sort of like a status report on all of those arguments and then ultimately the book arrives at your conclusion about what all these things say together.
But this, it raises a question for me.
I worry about anybody who's written a book, including myself.
I'm writing a book with Heather at the moment, and I have another one planned.
And there's a question about once you've written a book, unless you've gotten it 100% right, you are now in a new predicament.
If it turns out that something about what you've written is what you thought at a moment, but then it turns out you end up somewhere new, There aren't great mechanisms for updating, and so I see a lot of people who have written themselves into a corner and been unable to escape it.
Unless you've written a book about the moral evil of lying, in which case you're anchored to that.
So I hope I'm honest enough to declare I've realized I'm wrong on any topic I've put into print.
I mean, the topic that I think we're going to touch, free will, is one where I'm... it's not a matter of sunk cost or being identified with a position, it's just the topic is... the geometry of the topic, both of our knowledge and what seems to promise to be the frontier of our ignorance, seems unusually clear to me, right?
So it's not... like, there are many topics where I'd be the first to admit that whatever my opinion is, it's up against a vast region of ignorance which has yet to be illuminated.
Free will is not really one of those topics.
I have very few reasons to revisit my published position here, but I'm happy to do it.
But it's just one place where I'm either going to seem unusually incorrigible or, you know, Arrogantly overconfident or something, depending on somebody's commitment to the opposing view.
Well, there's a question of how you will seem to members of the audience.
Audiences are large, so you'll seem every way to somebody.
But to me, you're not going to seem that way.
I know there are zones where I've been so thoroughly over a landscape that it's always possible something new is going to arise.
I've chased every argument from every side, and so I'm not really expecting to hear something new, and I understand that free will is a place where you feel like that's the case.
Now, I'm hoping to drive you into a headspace that opens something on this topic, and we'll see whether that actually happens.
I don't know whether that would be positive or negative from your perspective, but can we detour to your book, Lying, first?
Sure, sure.
So, I listened to your book, Lying, actually, I listened to it on the plane, and I in particular love to listen to books where the author is reading it, and in fact you read Lying, so you get to hear somebody, there's some emotional content in the cadences and things like that.
And I wondered, as I was listening to your argument, which I I overwhelmingly agree with, and I find some analogy in how you see this topic and how I see this topic that I think is not common.
I don't think we're in exactly the same place, but we're in a more similar place than probably two people chosen at random would be likely to find themselves.
But I wondered if you wrote that book which makes a very powerful argument that almost none of the places that a human being tends to see some sort of lying as justified are actually justified if you chase the full calculus of the consequences of doing so.
Obviously, as you hinted at a couple minutes ago, that having stated that out loud and very clearly puts you in a kind of a bind that you obviously either inadvertently chose or chose knowingly.
And I was wondering, was there any part of you when you wrote that book that was seeking to tie your own hands?
No, well, let's just spell out what bind you think that is.
I imagine it's that you think because I've been so public in my admonishment around honesty that I can never lie in any circumstance now because I have so many people watching to see whether I'm, you know, whether I'm likely to do that or inclined to shade the truth.
Is that what you mean?
That I've basically set the bar publicly and now I've got many people that can potentially call me to account?
That's the shallow end.
I would say in the deep end would be, you know, in the book you explore things like marital infidelity.
Right.
And what you have effectively done in writing that book is increased the cost that would come to you if you engaged in marital infidelity and it came to light.
The degree to which you would be viewed as hypocritical is beyond what most people would face, and that presumably decreases the likelihood of it.
Yeah.
No, I'm not aware of that as a motive.
That is a consequence of it.
I mean, it's a happy consequence of it that I feel like the only way for me to really fail is to not honor this deepest value, right?
And I'm happy for I've got a larger expectation that I, you know, that I won't, you know, betray that value.
And I'm happy to have, you know, it's like, you know, the perverse version of it is, you know, this is this dates both of us.
But, you know, when Gary Hart was campaigning, and he invited the press to, you know, just you just follow me around, you know, and then he was He was immediately caught having an affair.
I think if you're someone who really wants to adhere to a path, which at least on this point seems fairly straight and clearly lit,
I love the fact that people expect me to be honest, and that I've advertised that as widely as I can, and that I would be more hypocritical than most to be dishonest.
You know that that would be and and I think the the obverse of that coin the fact that there is so little consequence to public dishonesty in most walks of life and the fact that we have a president who is the I think even You know most of his fans would admit If he started telling the truth now, he'd be a hypocrite.
Yeah, exactly right.
And the fact that that's, in many corners, not considered a bug but a feature, I think that's just...
That's probably at the top of a very short list of worst things about our public conversation at this point.
And it opens the door to all of the other toxic stuff about our conversation.
I think intellectual honesty is...
our only real error-correcting mechanism.
You know, it is what safeguards human rationality, and it's the only thing that promises that human conversation allows us to explore, you know, the grope towards what is true in any kind of reliable way.
And, you know, insofar as we have that right in science, that's one of the very good things about science, and that's what makes it science and not Some other zone of you know human fabrication and I think interpersonally Honesty is just as important.
So yeah, no, I'm happy to be on record in this way.
Yeah, I agree and I think actually it's very wise because in some sense Honesty is not easy and that engineering some sort of a paradigm in which it's expected of you is
Is on the one hand limiting and has to be in some sense costly, but that net, the cost is probably well worth it for the benefit of, you know, as you point out in your book, not having to, for example, track lies that need to be tended.
Yeah.
That's a huge cost that people pay.
Yeah.
And it's, it's just a, when I, when I think about it in the context of my marriage or in, in, in relationship to my daughters, Knowing that the other person isn't going to lie to you is such a refuge right now.
But again, the flip side of this would be that if you ever, you know, if I ever lied to my wife and got caught, It would be an immense betrayal of a sort that most other marriages might not recognize, right?
Because we have such primacy around the notion that we're not going to lie to each other.
But having put all our chips on that, it really makes the relationship a kind of refuge that I really can't imagine the alternative to.
Yeah, I agree with you, and this raises a couple of nearby points that I think are maybe worth exploring.
One of them has to do with your position, what you describe as an allergy to participating in advertising.
And I have exactly the same aversion, I can't say at exactly the same level, but at some very extreme level.
And so obviously I'm now starting a podcast and trying to figure out how one does that, and it's not an inexpensive process, and there's a question about the time that goes into it and how you end up um paying for it and advertising is one obvious route but yeah i i can't help but think that there is some hazard to one's credibility that the very reason that an advertiser will pay to put some product in
you know to have you speak as if you care about that product the very reason that they wish to borrow your voice is that your voice has a kind of credibility that is eroded when you are involved in selling items right yeah well maybe i should should clarify that i don't think it Need be Or at least there's there are gray areas here where?
It's probably not worth worrying about The the ethical implications because I think there are people who can advertise credibly and in fact It's so convergent with their brand that it's what their audience wants from them.
So when I think of my friend Tim Ferriss, who has a very successful podcast, it's ad-sponsored, but Tim's thing is finding good stuff to buy, to use, to do.
to ...
He's got many things at this point, but core to his brand is to be able to think about himself and what he does as brand management.
He's a marketer.
He's a brilliant marketer.
There's just no problem with him finding the next piece of fitness gear that he thinks is amazing and telling his audience this is amazing because that's, I mean, I'm his friend and a part of his audience and I want to know what the next piece of fitness gear is that he wants to get behind, right?
So, I'm just not that kind of...
Well, I agree, and I don't know if I will ultimately have to do advertising just as a practical matter, and I've certainly thought about the border where the only things that I would advertise would be things that I actually like the product, and that's obviously costly, but it maybe is protective against sort of an ethical Compromise, but nonetheless, I do think the paradigm of borrowing somebody, you know, let me give you an example.
When West Wing was on television, maybe actually shortly after it went off, I noticed that there was a pain reliever.
I can't remember if it was aspirin or what it was.
But I'm very sensitive for some reason.
I've never nailed down.
I'm pretty good at spotting voices that I know.
I can't always peg who it is right away.
It sometimes takes a half an hour of listening to figure out who the heck that is.
This was Donald Southerland or somebody?
It was Stockard Channing.
And her name, you know, no identifying information was present.
But the reason that she was there was clearly that subliminally people took her to be a doctor because that was her role.
The president's wife was a doctor.
And so to take somebody who plays a doctor on television and have their voice, you know, in very secure certain doctorly tones advising you to take a particular painkiller is more persuasive I'm sure that was effective too.
who might have a more resonant voice.
Yeah.
In other words, they were borrowing credibility from a character, and presumably for almost everybody, they didn't even notice that they were listening to a doctor who they knew wasn't a doctor, giving them medical advice that they knew wasn't medical advice.
Right.
So anyway.
I'm sure that was effective, too.
I'll bet it was.
That's a good ploy, yeah.
So as long as we're still in the neighborhood of lying and truth-telling and that sort of thing, I know you got a lot of pushback on your book relative to the question of children.
And they're obviously, there's a lot of richness to the question about whether or not one must lie to children, whether it's acceptable to lie to children in a place that it wouldn't be acceptable to lie to adults, or whether children are just another example where it seems like it's okay to lie to them.
And it really, in general, isn't.
And I raise this because I find myself, I don't know if you would call it lying, but I find myself misleading my children constantly.
And, you know, as I did with students, I do this with I resort to humor and other things but there is a purpose behind it.
I'm quite aware of the purpose and in my kids case I describe it as immunizing them to the vast sea of bullshit that I know that they will encounter when they are interfacing with the world as adults directly.
Do you have an example?
Wow, I don't have one off hand.
I'm sure I could come up with a dozen, given a couple minutes to think.
But, you know, what I will do is I will tell them fictions that they should be able to spot are fictions, but are dressed up as reality.
And I will see, you know, if they don't catch on, I will mislead them to a greater and greater degree until they finally do catch on.
So anyway, I sort of have the sense that I'm training a detector in them.
Now, this is not, it does not look like a parent training a child.
It looks like us engaging in, you know, fun, right?
It's sort of the same way in my household, wordplay was a constant.
You know, is wordplay dishonest because it involves, you know, puns that, you know, misuse words and things?
Surely it's not and nobody would say it is.
It's good natured and frankly I think it is great training.
But I know that I'm a coldly rational being would have to say that I am lying to my children when I mislead them.
My ultimate purpose is not to mislead them, it's the opposite.
But what do you think?
Am I over a line there?
Well, I think I would need a clear example of this, but generally speaking, there's flexibility here.
here, the intent is not to deceive.
I mean, this, okay, so let me just step back here.
When you're talking about children, it's relevant that they're children, right?
I mean, children are not full moral or rational agents, and we don't treat them as such, right?
So there's a level of paternalism, quite literally, built into your conversation with your own kids, and that's appropriate.
For me, navigating that Has never required that I lie to my daughters, but it does require that I shape the truth in certain ways which excludes just how scary and horrible human life can be, right?
There's no reason for my daughter, even my oldest daughter, to know exactly how bad the Islamic State is.
Right, just to get into details of sexual slavery and decapitation and all the rest, right?
There's no upside to it.
It would just freak her out for obvious reasons.
And, you know, she's turning 11.
And there's time enough in human life to discover how bad things can get.
And, you know, that's, I don't know where the line is.
I don't know if you need to be 14 or 15 or 16.
But at a certain point, you know, you need to be treated like an adult on these topics.
But the point is not at, you know, a month before her 11th birthday.
Yet that doesn't require that I lie about anything.
Anything it just requires that I be honest with her that you know, listen, there's stuff you don't need to know now You don't want to know now.
You don't there's there's video I could put on for you that you don't want to see right that you will feel bad having seen So she knows that right and that's a totally honest communication And that suffices right so it's like so she knows she knows I'm not lying to her and And she knows that I'm not even really keeping a secret from her.
It's an open secret.
The fact that there is a secret is not secret.
And I'm discharged and clearly...
All along the way, she's getting the sense that I'm on her team, right?
I'm advocating for her in relationship to a wider reality that she knows she doesn't understand yet.
And so that's how I see my role there.
I mean, there probably are cases where It's more covert than that where I'm not telling her that I'm not telling her something, right?
I'm just not telling her something.
So if she has to take a medication that has a range of possible side effects that are, you know, low probability enough that I'm willing to give her the medication in the first place, I've already judged that she doesn't have to worry about, you know, seizures and death when I give her this medication.
So, I'm not going to tell her that that's on the menu for some small number in any population, because it would just serve to freak her out to no good end.
And yet, to fully unpack that, those background facts for her, every drug has...
Potential side effects, which I'm not going to tell you about, would introduce a level of nocebo response that I don't want to introduce into the system, so I'm just not going to talk about it.
But that's not lying, that's just not giving information that wouldn't be useful.
So I guess the question then, you said that your mode of Editing and adjusting what you tell your daughter is, it suffices, was your term.
What if it doesn't?
Now, your daughter is young.
How old is she?
Soon to be 11.
Soon to be 11, not that young.
So, in our household, Heather and I have a sort of core principle of parenting, which has some very uncomfortable implications, but the principle is The job of a parent is to model the world that the child will mature into in such a way that they are well built to deal with it when they get there.
And you are as well versed as anybody in the defects of the world that our children are going to mature into.
And so If you knew that you were creating a vulnerability for your daughter because you were insulating her from one of the great tragedies of modernity, which is the degree to which communication is saturated in fiction, malevolent fiction, would you alter your stance?
Well, I'm sure that's true on a hundred fronts, but paradoxically, I don't...
So, let's think how to describe this.
So, there are any number of misfortunes that could befall my daughters which, in the final analysis, would have served, or at least would seem to have served, to give them grit, resilience, you know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger on some level.
I mean, we know this from our own experience.
You know, we're all trailing experiences where we wouldn't want to do that again, we wouldn't wish it upon somebody, but it actually made us a better person, right?
And yet, knowing that doesn't make me want to engineer a series of catastrophes for my daughters, thinking that it's going to build character.
Now, I think there are types of training that effectively connect those dots that are totally good to engage.
Something like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or meditation retreats or things that are stressful, but they're stressful in a context where the whole point is you're learning the skills to adapt to these stresses.
And it's not haphazard.
It's not just, let's see what happens to you when we throw you off this train.
There's a curriculum here and there's a path that many people have walked before you and we know something about what it's like to adapt to these stresses.
So, you know, as my girls get older, I'll be looking for opportunities to do something like that.
But, yeah, there's no question that they're sheltered in ways which are an expression of, you know, Mai and Annika's
good intentions for them, but there's the shadow side of these good intentions, which is, yeah, these are, you know, virtually everyone living in these contexts is becoming some version of a hothouse flower that would have not performed well, you know, in something more like the state of nature, or in some conditions yet to come, right, that perhaps are foreseeable.
Yeah, it's something I worry about as a parent.
These are very privileged childhoods.
Just the privilege of having a happy family.
Having two parents who love each other, who communicate it, who are honest, who are doing their best to give you whatever they can imagine to be the best childhood that they can give you.
There are very few people in human history who have been in precisely that circumstance, but the flip side of that is that to have been deprived of that circumstance in one way or another is what many people can point to as the thing that built the character and grit and resilience for themselves.
So, I don't know how to square that circle.
Yeah.
I saw somebody, uh, I can't remember where I encountered it.
I may not have been on Twitter, but somebody tweeted at one point, um, that they were hoping that their children would have just enough trauma to make them funny.
Right.
Yeah.
There's some truth in that, I think.
Um, yeah, well, it's an interesting puzzle and I do, I like the idea, you know, your point about jujitsu being a stand in for something and because it's ancient, the stand in is likely to be, um, pretty well thought out from the perspective of bootstrapping some developmental pathways that otherwise might get missed.
On the other hand, there's a question about how good a match it is for a world as different as ours is from the ancestral world.
Right.
All right.
So maybe it's time to move on to free will, which is the reason I cajoled you into having this conversation with me.
So, I'm not quite sure how to start with you, because I have the sense that somebody like you, who's taken a position on a topic like free will,
It has a taxonomy in your mind of what the alternative positions are, and I don't know for sure whether my position is on the map or not, but I do think it takes some doing to get to a place where you can see a topic that you know as well as this one from a new place, which I'd love to try.
Sure.
So, let's start this way.
Have you ever been to New York?
Yes, yes.
You have?
Many times, yeah.
No, I don't think you have.
I've always wanted to go, I should say, but I've never gone because of Zeno's Paradox, which has prevented me from going and clearly has prevented you equally from going.
Right.
But how did I get halfway to New York, then?
Well, that's the question.
How did you get halfway to New York and how did you get halfway there?
Anyway, the reason I raise Zeno's Paradox here and your failure to get to New York has to do with the fact that I don't think there's a flaw in the argument of Zeno's Paradox.
Yes.
But there is.
What is it?
Well, it's a kind of semantic game.
We know there's a mathematical flaw because you can sum an infinite series, right?
So you can get to, you can land.
And it took mathematicians, I think, some centuries to spell out what was wrong mathematically with the paradox.
But it's just, it's semantically It's a false framing of the problem.
You know, it's just the idea that you can't get all the way there is stated as kind of a term of the framing, and then if you accept that term, well then, you just keep cutting things in half, and you know, lo and behold, you never arrive.
But, you know, when an arrow leaves a bow, it doesn't go Just halfway and then halfway again and halfway again, it goes as far as it goes.
And sometimes that's all the way to the target.
And it's, I mean, there are other, I'm trying to think of another example.
I think there are other clean examples.
This is a different example, or a different problem philosophically, but there are problems like this in philosophy where you have kind of an unspecified object which
In an effort to specify its exact boundaries between existence and non-existence, you seem to run into a paradox, but it's not really a paradox, just the nature of, you know, having a fuzzy boundary to a certain concept.
So, like, the concept of a heap, right?
Like, when does a heap come into existence?
If you have a, you know, a heap of corn kernels, you know, one kernel is not a heap, two kernels is not a heap, three doesn't yet seem like a heap.
It's impossible, it seems, to specify when a heap is born, because you're just adding individual kernels.
And at a certain point, you know, a million kernels is clearly a pretty big heap, right?
So at some point you get there, but it seems like there's no boundary there to actually find.
And that's just the nature of the case.
It's not that you can't get a heap out of adding individual kernels of corn.
Well, that's not why I raise it.
I certainly agree with the fact that there's a delineation problem.
My example would be, as you go from a mountain to a valley, when have you transitioned from one to the other?
And the answer is, there is no point, but you certainly are more likely to find the river in the valley than on the mountaintop.
So clearly they exist.
So anyway, I accept that and I, you know, I should also say from my perspective I don't believe that there are any real paradoxes or even could be real paradoxes in the universe.
Paradox is a byproduct of the absence of some factor from your knowledge space and that in effect you can use it as an indicator Well, I would doubt that.
So a paradox could also be just the fact that we don't have the right intuitions to understand what is in fact the case.
So our sense of what must be logically so, you know, something either is or is not a heap, right?
It just may be that we live in a universe where that binary logic just doesn't apply.
A more relevant example would be a wave-particle duality for something like light.
That just seems inscrutable, but maybe that's the way the universe is, and the fact that it's inscrutable just needs to stop bothering us, right?
But it can seem like a paradox.
I think we're saying the same thing, in effect.
What I would say is, if you're bothered by the fact that you can't define a moment at which a pile becomes a heap, or whatever the thing is that is transitioning from one state to another, then there's something you don't Understand, which is, for example, the difference between a discrete binary and a bimodal distribution, or you don't understand something about the function of language and the breakdown when it's trying to describe things that it's ill-suited to, or something like that.
So that is an absence of a kind of knowledge, and what it means to me, what I've said to my students very frequently, is that paradox is like an X on a treasure map.
To the extent that you have a paradox, it means there's something to be discovered.
Dig here.
So anyway, that's very valuable.
With respect to Zeno's Paradox and its relevance here, I don't think Zeno's Paradox is necessarily solved.
In fact, some of the, you know, my understanding of the original meaning of it was that it created skepticism of the possibility of motion.
Is motion an illusion?
Because Zeno's paradox, if you follow it to its logical conclusion, means you can't get anywhere.
It's impossible.
So, obviously we do go places and Zeno himself knew that.
But, the idea that our mathematical system may be incapable of, at some moment, describing the process by which that happens because of something in it that is incapable of Addressing the puzzle is just such an answer so you simultaneously know the math says X and the reality says Y and reconciling them is bound to be productive and it can be that what is missing is
You know, the concept of zero was missing from Greek mathematics.
That's a crucial concept, and there are lots of things you can't do without it, and so something was hinting at the absence of zero.
Likewise, Mandelbrot's, he didn't invent the idea, but his pursuit of fractals was necessary.
The math of fractals that was implied by certain nonsensical mathematical paradoxes was necessary to begin to unpack biology.
There are features of biology that just don't work with standard math.
And so anyway, these paradoxes are pointing in a direction.
The reason I raise this one here is that I have the sense, looking at your argument on free will, that it's pretty close to bulletproof.
But it's being pretty close to bulletproof is compelling if it's the only argument on the table and it's pretty close to bulletproof.
And not compelling in the same way if there are arguments that are similarly compelling on the other side.
In other words, I don't think that the argument as you lay it out is completely decisive.
Now that said, I would imagine that somebody who's explored the topic as you have, hears that, and you think, oh no, I'm sitting across from another person who doesn't get the problem with free will.
And you're not.
I would say my battle on this topic with people has been to compel them of just what a What a small fraction of the public conception of free will one actually has.
But the question, I think the thing that separates you and me is you believe free will is actually a non-entity.
And I believe it is a dim shadow of what people would like it to be and what many people think it is, but not non-existent.
And that the fact of its being difficult to attain but not non-existent is actually a vital fact.
One that's necessary and one that's reflected actually in a lot of the things that people know about how you run your life.
Right, well, so let me make a few distinctions which I think will be useful because it's easy to lose sight of what the actual territory here is.
So, to say that free will is an illusion or is nonsensical, or that we don't have it, is not to say that There's no such thing as freedom or autonomy or a difference between being coerced in one circumstance or free to do what you want in another.
I mean, we have to preserve those obvious differences in human life and our preferences there.
And I share those preferences.
To not be in a prison camp in North Korea is a good thing.
And what's bad about being forced to be there are all the obvious bad things about being deprived of freedom and to have no governance over your day-to-day existence.
So the problem with free will is that Let's look at the basic claim.
There's the sense, the libertarian, in philosophy, the libertarian sense of free will, which is, I would argue, people's default sense of it.
This is a notion, the problem with it is that it really is impossible to map on to The physics of things, whatever they are.
My argument is that any statement of causality, whether you're talking about a deterministic universe where effects follow from causes ad infinitum, and these causes of necessity precede anyone's conscious intent.
I mean, your conscious intent is something that is happening on the back of In our case, neurophysiology and gene transcription and on backward to the Big Bang.
That isn't a basis for this notion of libertarian free will, but nor is any invocation of randomness into the picture.
So however you add randomness, quantum or otherwise, to determinism, You don't get freedom, you just get the rolling of dice.
The freedom that people think they have is A kind of self-authorship, right, where there's nothing at their back that is fundamentally mysterious to them that is the actual effective cause of what they think and do and want and intend.
They are the thinker and the doer and the wanter and the intender, and by they, they mean their conscious minds.
Right.
They don't mean this oblivion at their back that they can't account for.
They don't mean the sum total of the stuff that goes on inside of their skin.
No.
Their conscious self.
There are people who pivot to that argument.
It's the whole person.
It's my unconscious mind in addition to my conscious mind.
But, no, the reason why free will seems like a durable problem for philosophy is that there's something that people feel they experience directly.
They feel conscious intent as being the proximate cause of what they voluntarily do, and they feel that they are the true upstream cause.
The driver.
One feature of that feeling or one thing that it suggests is the sense that if you could rewind the movie of a person's life, right, to a few seconds ago or a few minutes ago or, you know, days or weeks or years, at any one of those choice points, They could have done otherwise, right?
That it's meaningful to say to someone, you should have done, you did X, but you should have done Y, right?
And that given another opportunity, with the universe being in precisely the state that it was, they could have done Y.
That they're not merely robots or some concatenation of causes.
They're not a string of neurophysiological dominoes that have been falling their whole life long.
They are agents that really could have done otherwise.
And there's no account of causality That makes that seem anything other than illusory.
Again, you have to add the caveat around randomness, because yes, randomness introduces the prospect that they could have done otherwise, but it's for reasons that they can't own, right?
If I told you, you could have married a different person, that really was within the bounds of the the causal properties of reality to happen, but it could have only happened if there had been someone rolling dice differently in your brain, right?
If there had been a different degradation of a radioisotope or something, which would have led you to do something differently.
And that's not the free will anyone thinks they have.
So let's take a couple things just off the table so we don't end up tripping over them.
One, I don't think we can rule out at a formal level a totally deterministic universe, but I think at a practical level we can.
I think it is actually completely inconsistent with any belief in Darwinism that what you have is a universe in which there was no opportunity for anything else to ever happen.
For its entirety from moment one then Darwinism is an illusion and Nothing in fact makes any sense including this conversation It's all some sort of odd theater and maybe the thing that makes least sense of all is Consciousness that there should be an awareness taking place inside of a totally scripted entity makes no sense.
So anyway, let's put it this way well, let's bracket that because I mean that that I think is a I think it's interesting to consider whether our notion of possibility is just a fantasy.
Right.
And as I said, you can't rule it out completely.
It could be that the whole thing, I mean, you know, frankly, it could be that we exist inside a deterministic computer in which somebody had a purpose in getting us to have this conversation and feel some way within it.
And, you know, all sorts of things have to be left formally on the map.
But I think at a practical level, A, there's no percentage in it.
If this really is a totally deterministic universe, then it's hard to even know how to complete that sentence.
The level of pointlessness of anything other than simply doing what you deterministically have no choice but to do is what it is, and so let's, you know... But even in that case, there still is a... there's a consequence to not knowing what's going to happen, and there is the reality that A parent choice still plays a role in deciding what in fact happens.
A purely mechanistic one.
Yeah, but you can't just wait to see what happens, because that is itself a choice which begets certain consequences and closes the door to other consequences.
I have to say, inside of a completely deterministic universe, I don't even know what you're talking about.
What do you mean consequence?
It's so fully automatic.
Well, yes, but on some level, we're at Zeno by another route because it's just a single object.
There's no such thing as events.
There's no such thing as causality.
It's just a block universe on some level.
The future exists as much as the past.
So, actually, let's go back to Zeno because I don't think we got the value out of it.
In just setting the stage here for the discussion that I hope we'll have.
The thing about Zeno's paradox is that actually Zeno's style logic is recovered by some models that are taken seriously in physics.
In other words, a many-worlds interpretation, for example, that posits essentially an indefinitely large number of universes that account for all of the possible trajectories.
So, you know, to the extent that, you know, Drop an item and it hits one fiber of the carpet versus another fiber of the carpet you get two universes spawned in order to account for everything that is downstream of that.
That's, in some sense, an obvious nonsense explanation.
Is it standing in for something that we can't phrase maybe because limits of human cognition or language make it impossible to phrase and so you know the paradoxes of quantum mechanics for example it's possible that there's some way we could construct Let's say it's a language barrier.
There's some way we could construct language that those things wouldn't sound so outlandish, but we don't have it and so we're constantly offering them and then stuck with the disbelief that comes along.
So anyway, my point would be you know you've been to New York.
And you know that there is a formal problem given a particular way of phrasing the process of getting to New York that you couldn't have been there.
And what you're left with is the argument has a strength and the empirical fact that the argument does not apparently prevent you from getting places also carries a weight.
In fact, it carries the dominant weight.
And those two things live Right, except I think the experience that functions in this analogy as knowing that you've been to New York is... if there's a novel part to my argument against free will, it's this one, which is
I'm claiming that no one actually has the experience of free will.
You think you do.
Right.
Oh, and I, so I just, to take the straw man off the table, and I know you wouldn't intentionally straw man, but I do not believe that free will exists as people imagine it.
That there is an illusion of free will that is very powerful and to which I think your argument is primarily addressed.
And the problem is, That this obscures a different question, which is, is there something that would justify the belief in something that would rightly take the label of free will, that is hidden by a strawman version of free will that we don't even need to worry about because you and I both know it doesn't exist?
Well, no, we do need to worry about it because it is the thing that people are afraid to lose.
Well, we don't have to worry about it because you and I are on the same team in that fight.
The point is, by the way, you are so haunted by mechanisms that you had no hand in creating, that hold sway over every important decision that you're making, that your sense, it is clear that your sense that you are free, moment to moment, to choose as you would, that sense is an illusion.
But, my argument, what I'm trying to put on the table is that there is something to free will.
It's a small target, but that that target, the most important thing about it, if it were just simply that there was some sort of an exception to your argument, this wouldn't be a very interesting conversation.
But, I think, once you spot the exception, if that's what it is, that the...
Well, desire to enlarge it is overwhelming.
And in fact, the irony of Sam Harris is that many of the things that occupy your time and your thinking appear to be attempts to take the wisp of free will that we are handed and to enlarge it and have it apply to a larger fraction of your life, which I think is a completely rational response to the discovery of just what a rarefied commodity free will is.
Yeah, well, so this could be a semantic difference between us, but let's talk about what you think that scintilla of freedom actually is.
Okay.
So first of all, it is utterly dependent on us not living in a deterministic universe.
If we live in a deterministic universe, then I don't understand a damn thing, and it's game over for Brett.
Assuming we don't and I think the physics is pretty clear.
There's no reason to think we do there's quantum uncertainty and The fact that there is quantum uncertainty means that uncertainty can exist at higher levels through various mechanisms Well, or we live in a universe where I mean if you take the many worlds picture seriously, which again, it's hard to do but many physicists do at this point and We live in a world where everything that can happen does in fact happen somewhere, right?
And you don't know which one of these worlds you're in, right?
So it's a new kind of determinism in a way, which is like every gradation of possible difference in this probability space, which is this conversation between us, is spawning yet another universe in which precisely that thing is happening.
You know, as deterministically as one billiard ball hitting another, but the uncertainty is we don't know which one, we don't know whether we're in the universe where we both start speaking Mandarin right now for reasons we can't understand, or we're in the universe, I'm pretty sure we're in the universe where we're going to stick with English.
Well, I've never regretted not speaking Mandarin more than I do right now.
can still be understood deterministically in that picture. - Well, I've never regretted not speaking Mandarin more than I do right now.
So here's the thing.
I resent the many worlds interpretation.
I'm actually not convinced that it's exactly wrong, but I am convinced that at best it is a very stupidly explained way of phrasing something that nobody can seem to phrase so that it is not insane.
Well, it is, I think, on its face, the hardest thing to believe that still is seemingly believed or at least paid lip service by ...
It might even be a majority now of physicists.
The last poll I heard it was something like 35%, but it's getting there, and it is the strangest picture of reality that you could imagine.
I think you're being too nice.
It's stupid, the idea that universes are spawned to deal with the difference between the thing I dropped hitting one carpet fiber and the next.
Sorry, that's not how nature works.
It's a different view of parsimony than I have intuitively.
It's a total rejection of parsimony.
It is the most, it is the opposite of parsimony.
Well, actually I put this to, I think it was Max Tegmark in a podcast I did with him.
I think it was Max.
And it was just a different view of parsimony.
It was not, you know, it was kind of privileging the The mathematical parsimony over the bricks-and-mortar parsimony, I think.
Many worlds... It's very well said.
...was not the result of adding lots of assumptions or epicycles or something that was jiggering a theory.
It was just a brave acceptance of the consequences of what this...
We should say that, and again, I'm not a physicist, we should drag your brother in here to get into more of these details, but there's no picture of quantum reality that tracks our common sense intuitions about how the world should be.
So you're left accepting something, at least at this point, that seems frankly bizarre, but many worlds seem about as bizarre as anything I could imagine.
No, you're not left with accepting it.
And again, I'm not rejecting it in a formal sense.
It may be an insane phrasing of something that could be phrased rationally from some other perspective.
But as phrased, it really is the rejection of the idea of parsimony.
And not for a good reason, just because... I mean, actually, Eric does have a term for this sort of thing.
I hope he won't resent my applying it here.
I think he would, but desperation physics.
But it's not even... just forget about many worlds for a second.
Just imagine a universe that is infinitely large.
One of the probabilistic consequences of that scenario is that if you just go far enough in any direction, again you run into the same problem.
Anything that can happen ...will happen an infinite number of times, right?
I mean, that's how big infinity is.
So there are an infinite number of identical copies of us having infinitely similar and slightly different conversations than this, an infinite number of times, simply if you make the universe big enough.
I mean, that just falls out of probability theory.
Right.
But this is my point about fractals, actually.
And, you know, I'm speaking a little bit out of my depth here, but my understanding is that there's a problem with coastlines, which is that they get infinitely long the closer you measure.
They approach infinity in length as you get better at measuring the nuances of a coastline.
Right.
That obviously doesn't make any sense.
The coastline isn't getting bigger because you're measuring more finely.
Well, no, it makes sense.
I mean, your ruler has to get infinitely thin and small.
I mean, like you have to... Right, but the point is, as you... You have to get down to the Planck scale and... As you asymptote to infinity... Right.
Right?
You discover, I screwed up somewhere, and it isn't my ruler.
I screwed up conceptually.
Well, it's just not... Well, this sort of comes back to Zeno.
Like, this is... Yes.
You've applied Zeno's paradox to measuring a coastline.
Bingo.
But the point is, there is a way to do this, and it took somebody stepping back and saying, you know what, math is going to have to be, we're going to need a new toolkit, just the same way Newton and Leibniz discovered a toolkit for, people don't like it when I say it this way, but for calculating the incalculable, which is what calculus did, as I see it.
But anyway, the point is, I think the many worlds interpretation is a best answer to a problem that is phrased so incorrectly that we can't that Just as if you asked the question about where these creatures came from 3000 years ago, nobody had Darwinism to offer.
So there wasn't even a way to begin to phrase the answer credibly.
You could say, well, then that leaves you picking between deities who might've done it.
And really what we're after is figuring out which one it was when in fact it wasn't any of them.
It was processes that were understandable, but we didn't yet have the mechanism to do so.
So I think that's where we are in that case.
Yeah, it might be.
I mean, it's hard to see what we're not seeing here, can't even dimly imagine, but it does seem like... I mean, it is a fairly straightforward claim that... again, the infinite case is even simpler because it's just, you know, it doesn't require any notion of universes splitting, but it's...
It's hard to know where to bite the bullet.
I think the thing to recognize with these counterintuitive consequences of infinity is just how counterintuitive infinity is.
I mean, infinity is not just really, really big, right?
Right.
And our intuition that it's just really, really big No, the rules change when you put that symbol of infinity on the paper, rather than just a very big number.
If we can agree that in an infinitely large universe, somewhere at some point, in fact an infinite number of places, an infinite number of times, Asteroid will have hit another asteroid and aardvark will have been formed absent an atmosphere immediately died and Disintegrated into a bizarrely large petunia of a unusual color right an infinite number of times I'm telling ever is compatible with the law of laws of physics and
Will have happened an infinite number of times.
Yes.
I don't believe that has ever happened anywhere in the universe, and I believe that actually what we will ultimately come to understand is that the universe has to be limited in a way that that actually won't have occurred ever.
Well, but one easy way to bound that is just to say that we don't live in an infinite universe.
Right.
However big it is, it's just not close to being infinite.
Right.
Yeah, so we need not worry about this particular... Indefinitely large isn't infinite, and the difference is huge.
Yeah, well I agree.
So, all right, back to free will.
But I should just, I'll tell you, I think you, if you want to close the door to many worlds, or at least beat your intuitions into shape there, I think you should probably have either David Deutsch or Sean Carroll on your podcast, because they're both all in on that topic.
All in.
I love it when people, all I'd want to do is bet against it, because, you know, I'm certain to be right, and it's easy money, so.
Okay, back to free will.
Let's take off the table.
It's a completely deterministic universe because even if that was the answer, there's nothing to be done in a deterministic universe in a discussion that would be, you know, the discussion will be what it is.
Again, I think that's not a necessary conclusion psychologically because you still don't know what is going to happen next, right?
Something will happen next.
What does it mean to know?
Well, to be able to talk about, to be able to self-report.
What do you mean, be able to?
I mean, none of this makes any sense in a completely deterministic universe.
Well, but it makes psychological sense.
Nothing makes any psychological sense.
No.
You still have to get lunch.
You still want lunch.
No, there's no have to get.
There's no nothing.
There is the illusion that we are having a conversation.
The conversation isn't a conversation because we're not deciding what to say and our blood pressure's rising because we have a disagreement.
It's nothing.
It's just the thing unfolding.
It's a...
It's a rock tumbling down a hill.
I may not understand your concern here, but this seems psychologically close to me to a point that is often made that I often find surprising, because in my mind it means the opposite of what its purveyors seem to think it means.
And many people have made this.
It's a very common objection to an argument against free will.
I saw it made by Noam Chomsky somewhere at the end of a lecture that's on YouTube.
I know many people I can think of who've made this argument, which is, okay, if we have no free will, what's the point of reasoning at all?
What's the point of talking about this at all?
The fact that you're arguing about free will, the fact that you're trying to convince me that it's an illusion, presupposes rationality, which presupposes freedom of will.
But in my world, it presupposes nothing of the kind.
Rationality is one of these cases where our absence of free will should be salient to us.
I mean, just take the easiest case.
If I ask you to add up a column of numbers, right, invoking the algorithm of addition, You have zero freedom.
I mean, you're either going to do it right or wrong.
That's total freedom.
Yeah.
And how you apply those rules is utterly determined by what those rules, in fact, are.
And you will get the right answer.
You'll either be enslaved by that process successfully, or you'll fail.
And in either case, you can't claim to have freely chosen.
But I think you just swapped in free will for determinism.
As far as I'm concerned, the thing I want to take off the table is the idea that any of this means anything in a completely deterministic universe.
As far as I'm concerned, as long as we can get out of a completely deterministic universe, we still have something to talk about with respect to free will.
In a completely deterministic universe, not only do you win the free will argument, but there's nothing to argue about.
Argument itself doesn't make any sense.
It's just another process unfolding.
The idea that there's any consciousness to be had is the most absurd irony that could possibly be.
What does it mean to turn the telescope to the sky and even figure out how big the universe is in a deterministic universe?
Well, so at the end of the day, or at the end of the epoch, at the end of the universe, you will see that it had just been one long row of dominoes, if you're still preserving this notion of process.
Or you'll just say process itself was an illusion.
It's like this is a novel that's already been written.
And we're on page 17 now, but page 175 exists just as surely as this page does.
And, you know, there's no, there is no process.
Uh, there's no, there's no development.
Um.
There's just a mechanism unfolding.
Right.
And, but there's no, there's no unfolding in the end.
There's just like, there's, there's, there are no events.
No, it's, it's unfolding in the sense that a Rube Goldberg machine ultimately, uh, you know, puts the toast in the toaster or whatever.
It does.
Right.
Well, so if you're going to stay with the process, if you're going to go along for the ride, you know, ride through the Rube Goldberg machine, if you're going to be the ball that's being, you know, knocked around in the machine as opposed to standing outside the machine and viewing it as a totality, right?
Then, psychologically, the next moment is still uncertain for you, right?
So you have a range of options.
You have an apparent range of options.
It feels like you have a range.
The question is, why does it feel anything?
Look, I can't prove that we're not in a totally deterministic universe.
What I can say is that the phenomena inside of this totally deterministic universe don't make any sense relative to it.
They're a cruel joke.
They're a mechanism for particles to get from A to B that were inevitably going from A to B. Yeah, but who cares?
You wouldn't care.
You wouldn't know.
A cruel joke doesn't constrain our thinking about the nature of reality.
Determinism constrains every bit of thinking that ever happened.
Every discovery that was ever made, the idea that there is evolution in a completely deterministic universe makes no sense because every interaction that ever happened between any two creatures was completely proscripted from the first moment that the universe came into being.
Well, it was... It wouldn't seem like it.
It wouldn't seem like it.
Psychologically, that's... But the truth is, it can seem like it.
This is the other issue I have with free will, which is, if you pay close enough attention to what it's like to be you, you can notice that Everything is just happening.
You don't know what you're going to think until you think it, until the thought itself arises.
And it arises in the same adventitious way that a hummingbird could fly in your window.
You're not standing in relationship of authorship to There is, in fact, no you that is standing there pushing the thoughts into view.
I'm not arguing that it couldn't be.
In fact, of course it could be.
Let's imagine an infinitely powerful, relative to our universe, an infinitely powerful critter that decided to put together a deterministic computer in which we would have the unfolding of the universe, and we would live it just as we do, and there was no chance of anything ever coming out some different way.
No, I know, but you seem to be arguing that if it were so, then...
One, either we couldn't have the exact experience we're having now, or if we did, it would be a cruel joke, and the fact that it would be a cruel joke would require something different of us in the next moment.
There's no choice for anything different in the next moment.
All I'm saying is that, first of all, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist.
I believe Darwinism works because there are multiple outcomes, and better outcomes propagate.
In a completely deterministic universe, you might see the same thing unfolding, but there would be no meaning to any of it.
Again, meaning is a... I think meaning is another one of these fishy concepts that can be applied appropriately within certain frames, but it's not an ultimate concept.
It's not a concept that can be applied everywhere without creating howlers or Well, that's the thing.
I mean, look, I'm surprised that we're stuck on a completely deterministic universe as a possibility.
What I don't see is, if it's the case, so that we're not talking past each other, let's just revisit one point here.
It is usually felt, I think it will be keenly felt by almost everyone listening to us, that the problem of free will endures because on the experiential side, we sort of know we have it, we feel it, right?
Like our experience is not compatible with it being an illusion, right?
And so if you're gonna tell me it's an illusion, you're telling me I didn't go to New York.
Right, and so I know something's fishy there, because I can choose right now to have tea or coffee, right?
Yeah.
It's on me, and I can do it, you know?
That sense of being in charge, right, that requires some additional observation of what it's like to be you, but you can get past that and realize that your experience moment-to-moment It's totally compatible with free will being an illusion.
So I just want to plant a flag there where people can see it.
I agree with that statement.
You and I are on the same page with respect to the question of how do we feel?
We feel free.
What does that imply about how free we are?
Almost nothing.
Free will is a useful fiction the way most people understand it.
But let me point out... But I would make the additional point that when I pay attention, which is, you know, more and more of the time, I don't actually feel free in that sense.
Like, what I feel like is the witness to the fundamental mystery of being in each moment, which is Thoughts just appear.
Intentions just appear.
Some of them seem actionable, some of them don't.
Why one has enough charge in one moment to be actionable and in another moment it fails to move me, all of that is irreducibly mysterious, right?
And there's no place I'm standing as a conscious witness to this process where it feels like I have the free will that most people seem to be talking about.
Oh, I definitely think the door you have walked through is worth walking through, in part because it gives you greater access to the very limited, rarified, and, I would argue, highly desirable freedom that is possible.
Okay, so let's talk about what that may or may not be.
Okay, yeah, what that may or may not be.
So let's just notice something.
You have two children?
Yep.
That's weird.
You're a highly successful, handsome guy.
You surely, had you decided to do it, could have arranged to have a great deal more children than two.
Well, I'm not sure about that, but are you suggesting that I should be more moved by By Darwinian logic than I in fact am?
No.
I'm saying that if there were no free will then we know that one of the components of the equation that ought to be driving you ahead without your ability to intervene meaningfully on your own behalf would be a fitness maximizing function.
And we would expect you to have a great deal more children than that given your privileged position in the universe and
No, no, so that suggests that the determinism would cause us to be more slavishly devoted to ancient, apish, genetically driven urges than we are and that
All these other countervailing forces that have civilized us are not yet just more determinism.
Right.
So my point is if your argument were true as you stated it, which it may be, and alone on the floor of arguments relative to this puzzle, which I believe it isn't, If it were both of those things, then I believe one of the factors that robs you of free will would see fitness as a primary function.
And that what in fact has happened is not that civilization has come to a wiser understanding of how many children to have.
What's happened is an accident of history.
That the act of sexual intercourse and the phenomenon of sexual reproduction have turned out to be divorced from each other biologically.
There was no need to drive our ancestors to enjoy reproducing because driving them to pursue sex was sufficient to get reproduction to happen.
The fact of those two things being different from each other leaves room for us to intervene technologically so that you can engage in family planning and decide not only how many children you want but when you want to have them.
And, you know, all sorts of things.
So, the fact of family planning is, in many instances at least, anti-Darwinian.
Now, I'm not arguing against it.
I'm not a fan of being a slave to fitness.
In fact, I've argued publicly that we must rebel against those drives that would have us maximize fitness, because they're going to get us killed.
But, the fact that we find it relatively easy to engage in family planning, and that we would find it very much more difficult to swear off sex, tells us something.
You have two different levels of freedom with respect to those two choices, and the reason that you have two different levels is arbitrary.
Right.
And not secured on the basis of any intention or any free will of my own, right?
Like, I'm a mere puppet of that difference.
Well, I understand that your argument is not wrecked by the observation that you have two different levels of freedom relative to reproductive behavior and reproduction itself.
And also, what you're calling a different level of freedom Is by with some other emphasis just seen as Freedom to be pushed around by other forces.
Yep in this case cultural totally totally get your argument But let's let's try an experiment as I was reading your book on free will and I imagined a person, actually quite a plausible person.
I think people have a way of reading more agnostically than they might, but somebody who read your book not so agnostically and understood the depth and completeness of the argument that you were laying out might be thoroughly disturbed by the discovery of just how little freedom they had over their own lives.
And it is not implausible that somebody who found themselves horrified by the discovery that free will was essentially non-existent might seek to generate it.
That they might attempt to live in such a way so that they would go from a state of having no freedom to at least having some.
And what's more, it would not be, I think, incorrect to think, well, maybe it's too late for me, but maybe I can generate, I can bootstrap some freedom for people five generations down my lineage.
And, you know, I can at least do them that favor.
I mean, it's a similar motivation as I might have to want to see the ecological problems of the world addressed so that future generations have a nice planet to live on and enjoy.
So, were such a person to exist, were somebody to have that reaction to your argument, and to seek to generate freedom, I believe that they would actually have a path to doing so, and it would involve, at first, the use of randomness to generate decisions that were not otherwise going to emerge from their cognitive processes.
So if I were to get a fancy set of dice and I were to put in some time figuring out how, let's say, I started out with vacations.
And I said, well, I am going to set up my computer to take the inputs that I put in from dice rolls that I am convinced are actually random.
And I'm going to vacation at the closest coordinate to, by some scheme, what I've rolled to the dice.
I could specify some limits so that I wouldn't end up on a desolate atoll or something like that.
But anyway, you could generate a series of experiences in life that were only the process of the one decision to embrace randomness as a chooser and then whatever consequences happened.
You would have whatever discussions you had in the locations that had been chosen for you, you would see whatever sunsets you saw, and that this would generate a mind that at some point would be very different from the mind that had been constrained by some plotting series of decisions that followed from each other and generated their own their own follow-on phenomena.
Yeah, but no more free.
I'm not sure about that.
I mean, it would be different, but it's just as hostage to proximate causes that were ungovernable.
I mean, in this case, literally ungovernable.
If you're rolling dice to decide what to do next, eat next, say next, who to be in the world.
Choosing a career, choosing a major.
You're being played upon by a process that doesn't, in that case, doesn't even feel like Your own agency, right?
You're giving your agency a way to, quite literally giving it a way to chance, and I'll grant you it's a very different life than the person would be tending to lead if they didn't do that, but it's not what...
It doesn't align with the freedom that anyone thinks they have or could reasonably want.
Nor am I trying to resurrect the conventional notion of free will.
Okay.
But what I am getting, I'm not arguing that as you're being bounced around the globe by the roll of dice that you are free, right?
You are enslaved to a different process.
But what I am arguing is that if you do that long enough, what you do is you take the inputs that hold us captive And you drive their influence over yourself and your descendants towards zero.
You don't get to zero, but you drive, let's say, The fact that, you know, you're born in Los Angeles, you go to a certain school, certain ideas are resonant during the period of time.
All of these things are causes that then result in you having certain values.
Those values unfold in choices.
Those choices manifest in phenomena in your life that you experience.
And so you and I agree that this has something very...
That this reduces the actual freedom that you are being carried along in a stream much more than you typically understand.
If you generate phenomena by random and that creates a series of experiences that are Themselves only sequenced by the one choice that you've made to break free from being captive then eventually My argument is you will have generated enough novelty.
You're not you haven't generated a Escape from causality.
That's what I hear you say, right?
The causality is still there after you've done this for 20 years or you've done it for 20 generations.
Yeah, right You will always have causality And causality is always an intruder into consciousness, into the space of consciousness.
It's always... Yes.
It will never not haunt us.
You can't own it.
You can't actually say, That consciousness was the cause of that next thing, because that next thing simply appeared.
This is a separate conversation about why consciousness is so inscrutable, and in evolutionary terms, you know, it's hard to say what it's doing, and if it's hard to say what it's doing, it's hard to say why it might have evolved in the first place.
Yeah, so it still leaves us with this mystery at the level of experience that why we would ever assert something like freedom of will in the first place.
I'll grant you, it gives you a very different kind of life.
We sort of simulate that anyway just by being in dialogue with the world perpetually.
I mean, you're meeting new people, you're reading new books, you're tasting the tastes and seeing the sights of new cultures.
You're stirring the pot.
If you're living at all actively and cosmopolitan in a cosmopolitan way, you're rolling dice all the time.
You're just not thinking about it that way.
Well, by the way, I'm learning a lot about my own argument in dialogue with you.
Which is an example of what I just said, essentially.
You don't know what you really think until you try it out in the company of others, or you write it down and people react to what you wrote.
I mean, your process of thinking isn't done You know, until you've... It's hard to know when it's done, right?
And then you keep... Again, this is... Everything is... Every collision is a kind of roll of the dice.
Yes, every collision is a kind of roll of the dice.
And, you know, there was some part of me that really wanted to have this conversation with you for exactly this reason, is that I did know that it would force my thinking forward in a way that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
But I think my argument comes down to this.
We have a misunderstanding about consciousness, and I'm not sure exactly... I have heard you argue that consciousness is an evolutionary paradox.
I actually don't think it is, but I also... I think I need to write What I believe the solution to that puzzle to be in a form where people can digest it and confront it.
So I'm going to sidebar that for the moment.
But let's just say I'm proceeding from a strong belief that consciousness is absolutely evolutionary and totally comprehensible in standard Darwinian terms.
That said, I believe that there is a border within us, a border I think you'll agree to, that a large fraction of our cognitive activity, even consequential cognitive activity that affects our behavior, is outside of consciousness, and some of it is so far outside of consciousness that no amount of training can access it.
Yeah, yeah.
That said, there's a lot of stuff shallower, that isn't typically conscious, but can be accessed by consciousness with behavior.
Could be psychedelics, it could be sweat lodges, it could be meditation, it could be extreme isolation, lots of things can alter where the border of consciousness is.
And that our conscious mind is actually It is the part of us that is capable of meaningful choice.
It does not have nearly as much choice as it imagines.
The experiments that tell us that, in general, when people believe they've made a conscious choice, that the actual choice is not preceded, or at least not preceded far enough by a decision in the conscious mind to be caused by it, that those things are troubling.
The, I mean, really the question is, can the mind that thinks it's choosing be trained to increase its own capacity to alter our path?
And can it, well, maybe that's it.
Yes.
Yeah.
I don't think the, this is where meaning comes back in.
I mean, when you, when you wonder, How any of this could impact a life and spell the difference between a good life and a bad life, or a life worth living and something less, and how the nature of reality, how a deterministic picture of
The universe may cancel or seem to threaten some of what we think makes life worth living or you know creativity even a concept worth entertaining.
I think it's all of it makes sense.
All of these Distinctions can run through in the psychological circumstance of a deterministic or apparently deterministic universe because there's a hierarchy of what we want and value in each moment, right?
We don't pick this hierarchy.
There are moments where we seem to struggle to change it or to adhere to deeper values when more superficial ones come online and seem to threaten them.
We can become at war, we can fall into conflict with ourselves and freedom, you know, small f freedom, can seem to depend on our being able to
Resolve those conflicts in ways that we don't regret right so if you're let me take a very easy case and common one you're trying to eat More healthily There's a range of foods you want to eat But you you don't want to eat them now because you're trying you're now on a diet right and yet You know that in a few short hours you're going to be tempted to eat one of these foods that is now off your diet and so you're in opposition with yourself and
This notion of freedom, what would it mean to be free in this circumstance?
What would it mean to be not free at all?
To be just a mere automaton?
You're a slave to your passions in this regard.
You say you're going to be on a diet that lasts exactly 14 minutes, and then you've got a spoonful of ice cream in your mouth, and you think, fuck, I just screwed up again, right?
Why can't I stay on my diet, right?
Part of you wants to be on a diet, and part of you wants to eat ice cream, and the part that wants to eat wins more or less every hour on the hour.
And yet the part we're talking to about the diet is the frustrated part, which says, I still want to be on a diet, and I can't manage it.
For some reason I'm not free.
How can I get more freedom in the system, right?
So that I can actually adhere to what is in fact a deeper value than just getting the next bite of ice cream when the desire arises.
Um, that dichotomy of, and that hierarchy, or apparent hierarchy of values, again, that picture can be completely deterministic, or you can roll as many dice as you want to try to jiggle it around.
There's still more and less satisfying ways to navigate all of that.
So if somebody comes in and says, actually what you need is a serotonin agonist that's going to give you a little more willpower here, and we need to get these foods out of your house in the first place.
There's a basic principle of dieting that you haven't heard.
Again, through no free will of your own, you just didn't read the right books.
I'm not quite sure which particles in the universe to credit with that failure, but you didn't hear that the first principle is to just empty your pantry and shelves and fridge of all of these offending foods, and then you don't need the same kind of activation energy to keep your willpower intact because the foods aren't there, right?
Again, this will have whatever effect it has on you, and throwing out the foods will have its mechanistic effect, and all of a sudden you may find yourself in possession of much more, quote, freedom.
You're not having a hot fudge sundae because you don't have the ice cream and you don't have the fudge and you're, you know, you're free to maintain your diet, right?
Which, again, you want to be on from, you know, what principle in you that you authored.
No, you got shamed into this, cajoled into this, convinced into this by culture, by, you know, seeing the side of yourself in the mirror and not liking the The outline, something happened, which again, you can't fully own.
So we're still in Rube Goldberg land, but these distinctions in degrees of freedom, ordinarily conceived psychologically, they can be maintained and we can still make intelligent decisions about how to get more or less, more of what we want and less of what we don't want in this sphere of apparent choice.
Well, I mean, I think your example is a good one, and I think I get how it makes your point, but I think it also makes mine, which is you clearly have competing modules in your mind, right?
You have a long-term module that would like to lose weight, for example, and you've got a short-term module that is aware of what things it has in the pantry that it might eat, and periodically it checks in with whether or not your guard is down enough to get you to go eat them.
You can, as you point out, engineer a circumstance in which one of these modules is more dominant over the other than it typically is.
That, you know, in a completely deterministic universe, that means exactly nothing in something short of a completely deterministic universe.
Well, no, it doesn't mean nothing because if you're living in the part of the deterministic universe where you, on this occasion, Successfully throw out all the popcorn and peanut brittle that you ate last time around.
In this part of the universe, in this period in human history, across your lifeline, if again we're still talking about process, you're going to get thinner through no free will of your own.
See, I don't understand how we're tripping over the consequences of a completely deterministic universe.
Well, you would agree that the universe is, if it's determined, Well, I don't know what we're about to discover here.
I have a feeling if we can figure out why we're disagreeing about this, there's something very important to be discovered, but I'm actually not compelled we can pull it off.
If we are in a completely deterministic universe, then none of the words you just used to describe that have any meaning whatsoever.
This is all... Yeah, but the question is how far... If we zoom out all the way, yes, then there's no such thing as people.
That's what I mean.
Like if we're just going to talk about particles and fields of force, there are no people.
There's nothing.
There are as if people.
Right.
Okay.
But at the level at which we can dignify the nouns and verbs that give us people and their doings, we can still think about that deterministically.
We can't think about anything.
Look, if we zoom all the way out and it's really full determinism from the moment the universe was created till the moment of heat death or whatever happens to it.
Then this is all the most ridiculous joke and the I mean the very no word has a meaning there's nothing there's just thing it's like billiard balls wondering about the meaning of trajectory it's it doesn't make any sense but randomness doesn't ease that burden it does it I don't think we know completely how but what we know is that there's more than one outcome possible
and therefore I don't know how it is that when a cheetah chases a gazelle that there can be two possible outcomes but I know that all of Darwinism is stacked on the idea that two things could have happened and one of them did So, two things could have happened and one of them did requires there to be randomness somewhere in the universe.
And unfortunately, I do think we have to reach down All the way to quantum randomness to bootstrap something at the level of cheetahs and gazelles that is capable of explaining anything that we see including what we experience.
I think well this is admittedly something I haven't thought much about but it seems to me intuitively that you can still get Darwinism out of just the mere frequencies of Well, you could get, so again, I have to leave it open as a formal possibility.
You could get a universe in which pseudo-Darwinistic processes unfolded completely automatically with no opportunity for anything else to ever have happened, and all of the creatures would be produced inevitably in the same way that a screensaver could produce a fish tank on a screen that had no Two ways about it, right?
That's all possible, but then I think we get into a philosophical question.
Not that there would be any us to get into anything like philosophy, nor would there be any philosophy, but if we just sort of grant that leeway.
Were we to be living in a universe in which every creature that ever existed or will ever exist was absolutely 100% predetermined from the first instant that plasma burst forth from whatever it was, if we lived in that universe, then you would have to say those things were created.
Right?
In some sense, you would have to acknowledge that they had been planned.
Because the process that creates them absent a plan requires there to be multiple ways that things can go and some things to be better at this game than others.
Well, no, because it's just... there need not be a plan, it's just... there just needs to be causal efficacy that has no degrees of freedom.
Right?
Like, it doesn't have to be... there's no place to stand where it's thought out in advance, it's just...
Here's an algorithm.
This is perhaps a better analogy.
There's an algorithm for producing all of the rational numbers, say.
I'm going to give you that algorithm.
Here's a better example.
An algorithm for calculating pi, right?
The decimal expansion of pi.
The decimal expansion of pi is whatever it is, right?
And we haven't planned it.
We don't have to have it in mind in advance to run this algorithm, right?
The algorithm is totally deterministic.
We have zero degrees of freedom.
There's a literally infinite landscape over which this algorithm is going to be run.
And yet, the 5, 6, 7, 8 come right, you know, foreordained, right?
But there's no place... We wouldn't say at the moment of the Big Bang where we began running this algorithm.
Every gazelle and amoeba had to be, you know, conceived in the mind's eye of whatever started the process.
At the level of the individuals, it doesn't make any difference.
But my point is, let's say that you and I had been standing outside the universe as it first came into being, right?
Before there was atoms, right?
We're just looking at the amorphous, hot, whatever it is.
And I said, you know, let me show you a crocodile.
And I broke out a crocodile.
And I said, these are gonna happen by the hundreds of thousands, maybe the millions, right?
At the moment that you have no order whatsoever, Right?
The idea of all the things that have to happen to get to a crocodile is it's a profound sequence.
It's not in any way remotely like the sequence after the decimal place in pi.
Right?
That sequence has, you know, I know I'm going to get in trouble mathematically if I say it has no order to it because obviously its order is implied by the relationship of the diameter.
to the circumference of a circle, but it is not a cumulative building process that becomes more and more fancy as you get farther from the decimal place.
It just is.
It's a sequence of numbers that's unique.
Yeah, but on some level Darwinism doesn't get, evolution doesn't get necessarily fancier as you get.
I mean, it has in the local case apparently gotten fancier, but there's also been cascades of simplicity.
There are instances where it goes in the other direction.
But in general, it started at no complexity or trivial complexity and reached amazing levels of complexity.
So there's some sort of ability to generate complexity.
And the only reason that works is because there's a cumulative process in it that has to do with competition.
Well, my point really, and I don't know how productive this is, but my point is not that we can prove that we're not in a deterministic universe, but that everything philosophical collapses downstream of that one claim.
Well, it just depends on what part, what the framework is in which you are talking about anything.
In a deterministic universe, you can still talk about crocodiles.
This argument sounds like there's no such thing as a crocodile because all a crocodile is is carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, right?
So if you're talking about the periodic table, there are no crocodiles and there never will be crocodiles.
No, no.
I'm talking about a process.
That edits down populations to small numbers of individuals that have advantages, and those advantages are cumulatively acquired in some lineages, heritable substances.
I'm trying not to limit that to DNA, but basically I'm talking about DNA.
My point, again, I'm not arguing that a deterministic universe is inconceivable.
I'm arguing that the content of the universe is a bizarre paradox, it's a joke, if it's downstream of a totally deterministic universe.
Also, from what we can tell, the universe isn't totally deterministic.
So, I don't really think we have a problem.
What we effectively have is a situation where we say, We can't formally rule out the deterministic universe.
We have some evidence that suggests the universe isn't totally deterministic.
The evidence is not totally bomb-proof, but it's certainly suggestive.
And if this is a totally deterministic universe, the cost of having gotten that one wrong, the word cost doesn't even mean anything.
Cost, wrong, none of these things mean anything, because it's all inevitable.
Yeah, but that move, that's the move that I don't understand, because whether it's inevitable or not, and again, I'm not taking a strong position on Determinism here.
I mean, you know, there may be an element of randomness just woven into the fabric of reality, but I don't see how it undermines any of the other distinctions we want to make in a local frame, right?
There's still the difference between having your hand stuck on a hot plate and not, right?
There's still the difference.
It may be mere determinism to To have had that experience, to have recoiled from the experience, and to now, for the rest of your life, have a strong preference for not having that happen again.
And in some worlds, you can avoid it.
Again, we're just talking about what the billiard balls do in the end, but in describing any time point in that apparent process, You can still make all the distinctions you want to make.
You can still talk about crocodiles.
You can still talk about billiard balls.
A crocodile is a very complicated billiard ball.
I don't know what can even means in the context of it.
I mean, we're going to get stuck here again.
I'm not saying a completely deterministic universe is impossible.
What I am saying is that the idea of talk Makes no sense.
It doesn't mean it wouldn't be but it makes no sense the idea of an argument the idea of a word these are just simply billiard balls bouncing off of rails and Changing their trajectory.
Do you all it is do you feel is when you watch a movie and you see the characters on screen have a conversation and Have their various adventures fall in love fall out of love and You know the movie's done.
It's already been shot, right?
There's zero degrees of freedom with respect to what you're going to see in the next scene.
Yep.
Right?
But you haven't seen this movie yet.
Right.
Right?
Do you... Does the pointlessness of it all or the fact that it's not even...
happening on some level does that continually intrude and make it seem like this is like we can't eat we can't talk about what happened in the movie because well nothing in fact happened it's that's a good question and I'm going to take it seriously I have two different answers one One is what's really going on in the case of a movie is some artistic presence.
A person or several people have created scenarios and for whatever reason I've decided that I want those scenarios to play out in my mind so that I can vicariously experience or witness or enjoy or whatever it is.
And so what I'm allowing to do is I'm allowing this deterministic piece of footage spliced together to create an impression.
I'm granting it access to parts of my brain and then presumably inside my brain I am temporarily erecting a little world that contains these characters.
I'm allowing them to have identities.
I'm allowing them to interact as they have been scripted in front of me as if I was sitting at a cafe and watching them interact.
And I am at no point Delusional about where I am, whether these things are real, whether those are actors or the real people.
So I'm simultaneously aware that the movie itself is completely deterministic, already scripted at the point I sit down, it's already over.
But what it does is it feeds data into my mind that allows the story to unfold in real time in a coherent fashion.
I see no contradiction between those two things.
On the other hand, I am sometimes aware that when I watch such a narrative, I am sometimes aware, for example, of how far I am from the end of it, and therefore what plot twists are now off the table.
Right?
If I know there's only four minutes left in the thing, there are certain plot devices that would not be useful, and so I cannot help myself but to know that those things won't happen, or if a character that I think is economically very important to the franchise has been lost, there's a part of me that thinks, you know, they probably wouldn't have killed that character.
Off so quickly and then something like Game of Thrones Takes that assumption and uses it against you by killing off important characters, which you don't see coming.
Yeah But anyway, yeah, so I I don't know how well that answers your question.
Well, I'm just Isn't Your moment-to-moment experience of your life Compatible with this experience of watching a movie so that like say it's like in a movie we're still talking you wouldn't say of a movie you can't talk about the characters you can't talk about the people you can't talk about events because
However you look at it, there's nothing there.
The experience is just light on a wall.
Nothing's even moving.
We're talking about still frames that are moving at 24 frames a second.
Or we're just talking about pixels.
So all of that is deflationary, right?
There's no there there.
And conceptually, there's zero degrees of freedom because the last scene exists just as much as the first scene.
There's actually no causal properties displayed between apparent events because, again, it's all scripted, right?
So it's not like any one thing caused.
Everything's been arranged to seem like it was causing each subsequent thing, but it was, everything was put in place.
It's a still life.
The cause was a studio and artists and business interests.
The cause was not what unfolds on the wall.
Yeah, but the experience of watching a movie is compatible with making all of the distinctions we want to make about human events and conversations and motives and how things looked and felt and the emotions displayed.
Certainly when it's working, you're so taken in by the illusion of it that it seems not only like real life, It seems more real than real life in some sense because your relationship to it is such that You can, in some strange way, you can get closer to the drama of human events than you can ever afford to do in real life when you're being seen by the other people in the room, right?
So that's what's, I mean, the pure voyeurism of watching a movie is what's so seductive about it.
But I'm struck by the fact that real life, you know, this conversation is totally compatible with Zero degrees of freedom in its unfolding.
No, it's formally compatible.
We cannot prove that that's not what's going on.
But it's phenomenologically, as the experience of it is compatible with it.
It's like I don't even think it is but I can't formally rule it out.
That's what I would say So let me let me try it.
Let me try this on a different way someplace I think it's closer to home for you based on the examples you use in your your books There's a cemetery near my house My kids and my wife and I ride through it with some regularity on our bikes and electric unicycles and stuff.
One day my wife and I were biking back through it and I was shocked.
In general you don't see any funereal activity but there was a funeral in process.
Two people, clearly parents.
Bearing a tiny casket carrying pallbearers of this tiny casket on this hill and It shocked me a little bit there was something so much of the story was obvious From what I was seeing I couldn't nail it down a hundred percent, but it was like one frame was sufficient
Yeah, it reminds me of the... there was a contest for one-sentence novels, I think, and the example is, like, baby shoes for sale, unworn, or something like that.
Yeah, I think it's Hemingway, actually.
Yeah, baby shoes for sale, never used or something like that.
Yeah, in fact, a friend of mine has run a contest for six word stories in his magazine.
But anyway, some days later I went back to look at what was going on on that hill.
Um, because Heather and I, Heather had not seen the same thing.
And so I wanted to figure out what I had seen so that we could at least understand it.
And it turned out that entire hill was dedicated to very young children, stillborn children.
Um, And the reason I raise it here is that in a completely deterministic universe...
What the hell is going on with that hell?
Can you imagine a completely deterministic universe in which babies are created, brought all the way to the point of birth or shortly thereafter only to torture their parents with their loss and put their parents through the agonizing decision to either treat this as the death of A human, or to fail to treat it that way.
I mean, that hill to me makes no philosophical sense in a deterministic universe.
In a non-deterministic universe, that hill is a tragedy, but I understand it.
Well, no, because, I mean, it's just as perverse to imagine that there's chance that it's—I mean, The only thing as perverse as mere clockwork is just disparities in good and bad luck, right?
If it's just luck that spells the difference between having a happy, long and happy life You know, surrounded by loving friends and family and colleagues and being in a 14-inch casket, right?
That doesn't redeem, that doesn't reclaim our sense of the way things should be.
Oh, it doesn't reclaim any goodness.
It's still, as I say, it's a tragedy.
It's meaning is radically altered.
The idea that those children might have grown into adults, that was at least a possibility.
It was on the menu of possibilities and something went wrong.
But if that something that went wrong was the The flap of a butterfly's wings a continent away, right?
Again, this is a bad analogy because now I'm invoking chaos and chaos is deterministic, but if it's a pure dice roll somewhere in the ether that is causing the difference rather than mere Determinism, then it just seems to me it's just as morally, again, nothing turns on this because whether or not reality is morally inscrutable or unfathomable,
You know, it's nowhere written that it wouldn't be so, right?
I mean, we're just now talking about our preferences.
No, but I guess what I'm getting at is, first of all, I can put myself easily in the position of parents in the two scenarios here.
Parents of a child who might have lived but didn't, and parents of a child who was never going to live because that was written since the beginning of the universe.
Right?
I'm very angry at that second scenario.
That first scenario fills me with sorrow, but I don't have anyone to be angry about.
Bad luck exists, and it sucks when it afflicts you.
But it's not the same cruel joke as a universe that decided to award a child to you and then rob you of it without Except in that universe, you don't have any illusion that you could have, or should have, more importantly, done something differently.
Well, there's no question that there's a burden along with the universe in which multiple things can happen, that when things go wrong, you gotta ask what role you played in it.
There's no question about that.
Well, you do have to ask it in a deterministic one, it's just that it's at a different level.
It's like, it's a descriptive question about what happened.
Like, did this bad thing happen because I'm the sort of person who is negligent or drives drunk or something?
And yet there's no place to stand where... there's no place to really stand where that wasn't going to happen, given the way the universe was.
Yes, but I don't even know what you mean by ask.
I mean, even a word like ask seems to me ridiculous in the context where it is just another billiard ball ricocheting off just another rail.
The issue, though, is that randomness doesn't reclaim what people... the meaning that people think they're going to lose here.
It doesn't recover it, but it is necessary to recover it.
It is not sufficient, but it is necessary.
That would be my point.
If there's no randomness, you can't recover it.
If there is randomness, you might not recover it, but at least the possibility exists.
Well, it's just, well, yeah, I don't really see that.
I mean, again, I don't see, I don't see the emotional stakes here or the psychological stakes quite the way you do.
I see because there's, There's a significant consequence.
I mean really the only parameter that is of consequence here is the fact that we don't know what's going to happen.
Next, right, whatever, whatever the nature of causality is, whether the universe is splitting in every instant, and we're, we don't know which one we're going to be in, whether it's all being pushed behind, and it's, it's all being pushed from behind deterministically, and we're just billiard balls, or whether there's a dice roller in the clockwork.
The fact that the next moment in time is always possible to surprise us.
We have a model, we have a forward-looking model of what's likely to happen.
And again, our notion of likely carries with it this intuition that there are degrees of freedom.
There's possibilities a thing.
But there is in fact at the end of the day simply whatever happened, right?
We only take one path through this landscape and we never check the counterfactual.
We have a story we're telling ourselves about the counterfactual.
But again, it's in every moment, it's just a story.
It's confirmably just a story, right?
And there's simply what happens, and what happens has this element of this continuous element of surprise.
And what's more, it has the Our choices, our apparent choices, are in fact the proximate cause, the apparent proximate cause of so much that matters to us, right?
So, my choice to eat the ice cream is the thing that ended my diet at that moment, right?
I could have been the guy who stayed on the diet, but I wasn't, yet again, right?
And then, a month from now, after I've gone to, you know, Jocko Willink's boot camp, and I have a different orientation toward discipline and everything else, now I'm the guy who's cleared out all the ice cream in the house, now I'm the guy who's on the diet, and lo and behold, I'm losing weight, and it turns out that my body functions the way any body does, and physics matters.
Again, there's no free will intruding here, but I'm having this very different experience and it's...
It's always intelligible and compatible with our ordinary intuitions about choice and probability, given the fact that we don't know what's going to happen next, right?
And that would be true in a fully clockwork deterministic universe.
You don't know what you're gonna think next, and I don't know what you're gonna think next, and we're both gonna hear what you say next.
Well, again, my objection here is philosophical.
I can't know if I'm in a completely deterministic universe.
All I can know is that none of the things that I think I know make any sense in the way I think I know them.
Even the idea of knowing them makes no sense.
Well, they wouldn't make any sense if you could experience the universe from that point of view.
Right.
They would make sense given that you apparently can only experience the universe from this point of view.
So, can we agree that if the universe were some alien screensaver that they could have rigged it in a completely deterministic fashion and that it could have all of the creatures that I know and love in it and I could be a character and you could be a character and we could be as determined as the characters in a film.
There's nothing against the law of physics that prevents that, other than I would argue that the outer universe has to not be deterministic in order for that to have come to be.
But let's be agnostic about that point.
Yeah, but I was making a slightly different point, which is that the funerals on the hill for young kids in any one of these universes carries the same tragedy and which is that the funerals on the hill for young kids in any one of these universes carries the same tragedy and can be
parsed from the same set of psychological intuitions in any of these universes, simply because we as Never knew what was gonna happen next, couldn't know what was gonna happen next.
We're at this point in the movie, whether this is really a movie or the stakes are really real, whether the movie's already been shot or we're shooting it now.
This is actually a better use of the analogy.
There's the imagine a documentary right where what's being filmed is not scripted It's really being shut, you know, so it's real life, you know on film, right?
So the question is Are we are we shooting this now or has this already been shot on some level that different?
Yeah, and from the point of view of From the point of view of everyone who doesn't know what's going to happen next, right?
The fact that it might be possible to know what's going to happen next or what, you know, to see the last scene before you see the first scene.
Well, okay, that's philosophically interesting to entertain, right?
And let's get the physicists to work on the problem of whether or not that's so, but Subjectively, and in the space in which we try to make meaning out of our lives, the thing that matters is we don't know what's going to happen next, and at each point along the way, we have to act, right?
We have this apparent burden of deciding what to have for lunch, right?
And we go left or right by turns, and The process is subjectively inscrutable, and it's bound to be so, and that's the space in which we make our lives.
And so I don't see how determinism, randomness, some combination thereof ever changes the—unless it changes that moment-to-moment some combination thereof ever changes the—unless it changes that moment-to-moment reality where, you know, one philosophical truth being so gives you one philosophical truth being so gives
essentially.
I don't see I don't see how it matters.
The big picture is bizarre to think about whatever is true.
I think I feel that randomness is stranger than you think it is.
So, the comparison between determinism and randomness, or determinism plus randomness, isn't as invidious in my brain as it is in yours, because both are just kind of impossible to think about.
We have this moment, right, and then things keep appearing, and among those things are thoughts, intentions, desires, preferences, and it's on the basis of this roiling ocean of phenomenology that we make our lives, right?
And no one who has a kid knows what that kid will be like as an adult or whether he or she will reach adulthood, right?
That is built into the circumstance.
And any story we tell ourselves about what was going to happen, what was bound to happen, However much we can convince ourselves that one or the other of those stories is true doesn't change the fact that We had to act under uncertainty in every moment, and still do.
Well, you know, I don't know if I'm the only person who doesn't get this point, or I'm the only person who does get this point.
But I have the sense that none of the words that you are saying, that we still, we have to act in the moment, that those things lose all actual meaning.
Not that you wouldn't be saying them, and not that I wouldn't be hearing them, and not that we wouldn't be, you know, there's no choice about any of it.
But they lose all actual meaning.
Well, in many different frames.
I mean, they lose meaning, again, just if you're going to use the periodic table as your frame.
They don't lose meaning.
The fact is, humans evolved, they evolved to use language with each other, to exchange abstract ideas across open space so that they could reside in multiple brains simultaneously and their implications could be discussed.
Well, no, there's no, but you're smuggling purpose into there, which need not exist.
There's the fact that this is all happening, but we didn't do this so that we could do this.
We didn't, it's not intentional, but evolution built our capacity to exchange abstract ideas across open space for a reason, which is that it gave us competitive advantage over creatures that had less of that ability.
Okay, but that's a different reason.
That's not a, there's no teleology in this system.
This is just, this can still be pushed from behind.
It's just, it's effectively, this works.
Like, there's a survivor bias here.
There's a massive survivor bias.
It works to provide advantage in a universe in which advantage appears to make a difference between success and failure, which to me requires that some other outcome was possible were it not for the capacities in question.
Yeah, I mean, I don't see the, again, now we're sort of going around the same track here, but I don't see the necessity of supposing that.
I mean, I think that may in fact be true, right?
I mean, possibility, you know, has a very good chance of being a real thing, right?
But it's interesting to consider how you'd expect reality to look if it weren't a thing, if they're simply just what happens.
I would expect it to work the same way, but if I could stand outside of it, I would say that's a ridiculously cruel joke.
And let's say that this is a deterministic universe and that some parent somewhere can't help but listen in to this podcast, And then they lose a child and they end up burying the child on that hill and they end up thinking, you mean that child was only ever a cruel joke?
That that that child was never there was no possibility of it becoming a person?
I would think that person standing on that hill would have a right to be resentful of a universe in which that was the only option in a way that bad luck.
Okay, but there's so, I mean, why?
Cash in your chips there.
I mean, there's so many other reasons to be resentful of the universe, even if you think there are degrees of this universe, even if you think there are massive degrees of freedom.
And there are different ways to interpret even that moment.
I mean, like a cruel joke is just one provincial framing to put on the nature of reality when a million are available.
Let's try another one that I think maybe hits more squarely on the head.
You use in, I think, the moral landscape maybe?
Not sure.
One of your books you use the example of locked-in syndrome.
This is a situation in which somebody's conscious mind is awake and functioning normally, but they are left with no power to communicate with the outside world or act in any way.
They can't raise a limb or anything like that.
Um, truly one of the most frightening things that could happen to a person, especially in light of the fact that the outside world might be unaware that that is what has happened to you.
Yeah.
And in previous periods in history would have certainly been aware, uh, certainly would have been unaware that that was what was happening to you.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
As terrifying as it gets.
I believe that we are all in some sense in that syndrome if we are in a completely deterministic universe and yet have something that functions as a consciousness.
If we are absolutely trapped on a trajectory and there is no hope of in any way deviating it, we are conscious minds trapped as conscious minds on trajectories in which consciousness has essentially no meaning other than Yeah, but the thing is, we don't know how good the movie is going to get, right?
We're the movie, right?
And it could already be shot, but the final scene could just be the most spectacular firework display.
It could not only be Stranger than we imagine it can be stranger than we can imagine right that that seems to me And I know you know you're you're none of these things, but it seems to me Solipsistic and hedonistic and no no you forget about It's not mere pleasure.
It just it could be you know just Just inscribe your deepest creative values in the space provided, but just without the freedom to do otherwise.
Right.
But then whatever it is, having been scripted since the beginning of the movie, is not a consequence of anything to which I might ascribe cause.
It just simply happens.
And so my delight at The fact that I don't know what's going to happen and would like to know, um, is, uh, it's simply about somatic experience over which there's no possibility that it could ever have been other.
I mean, I, again, I just, I think every word here loses its meaning.
Well, it's, it's not a, it's not just somatic experience.
It's the life of the mind as well, right?
It's just whatever it, I see us as functioning in a landscape of mind where we don't know what experiences are possible.
- Yeah. - We know the ones we've had, and we can form intuitions about what should be adjacent to us in mental space, right?
And what might be available to more insightful or more intelligent or longer-lived minds than our own, right?
We can get our science fiction writers to tell us good stories about what might be possible.
We can derange our own nervous systems by various methods, which again, relate to your example of pursuing some chaos producing algorithm where we decide to Take vacations at the Roll of the Dice and then see what happens.
We can, as you said, we can take psychedelics, we can practice meditation, we can confront or collide with other cultures who have very different norms than we do and just see what that moves around in our minds.
But you can go to Burning Man and be surprised by things you find there.
The net result of all of that is pushing into, again, this could all be just dominoes falling, right?
And I don't see how adding randomness to that fundamentally changes the picture.
Let's say it's just dominoes plus the wind gusts of randomness.
We're pushing into a space that we know must exist.
In potential, whether at the end of the day there is simply what happens, there's this apparent sense that there's an infinite number of things that could conceivably happen from the point of view of the present, and we don't know which of those things will in fact undergo the formality of actually becoming so.
And so that is a path of psychological discovery, whether or not freedom is real, right?
You're in the woods, and you don't know what's in there with you, and you're exploring.
That is psychologically a thrilling and scary and beautiful experience, and it doesn't matter if it's a screensaver.
Well, I think I understand what you're saying, but here's what I feel like it implies.
I feel like you, and actually other people who I've encountered who have made an argument for full determinism, I feel like the model
is that the world is fully deterministic up to the border of psychology and that you're actually able to observe and of course everybody who would make an argument in favor of full determinism understands that there's nothing in observation that is absent from the full deterministic model but I feel like the things that you say relative to meaning observation doesn't matter if it's a screensaver because it's still beautiful and fascinating to you
That all of that, more or less, assumes a mind that is independent of complete determinism, trapped in a world that is completely deterministic.
So the human being, it has no meaningful ability to deviate anything, but it's still functioning in a way that you can appreciate it.
Whereas I would say, the word appreciate has zero meaning.
No, the appreciation is still mere mechanism in this picture, but it feels a certain way.
And I didn't author my preference for beauty over ugliness, but finding that I have one becomes actionable, right?
Again, and to the degree to which I'm moved by it, or if it flips tomorrow, is again something I can't account for, but there's still this experience of being suddenly presented with something that you didn't see a moment ago and finding it beautiful.
And there's no place, you don't have to justify that.
You don't have to stand outside of that mechanism to justify it, to make it actionable.
It's just there, right?
It's just a lock and key that you keep marrying and twisting again and again, and they change, right?
In this picture, you're describing a circumstance in which The mechanism is acting through means that are utterly bizarre if they don't mean what they appear to mean.
So the fact that I am speaking to you by vibrating the air molecules between us in such a way that they vibrate a membrane in the side of your head which then causes hairs in a canal to flop over such that you can deduce the abstract meaning in my mind and build a version of it in your own mind.
That's such an odd way.
If I say, hey, pass the salt, and I'm doing this through this utterly magical mechanism of vibrating air molecules between you and me, right?
And the purpose is to get the salt from your side of the table to my side of the table.
What a mundane thing to happen in a universe by such an odd means.
Why am I able to put an abstract thought into your mind from across the room?
No one ever said this wasn't strange.
Everything is strange.
No, I think it's preposterous.
I think it's like saying that a coastline gets longer as you measure it more closely.
But I mean, this is the joke.
People say life is strange, but I say compared to what?
I don't know who, this is Randy Newman or somebody, but what are you comparing it to?
Everything looked at closely disgorges its utter strangeness.
Let's put it this way.
I do believe in parsimony, and so my point is not that it isn't all very, very strange, because it is.
My point is we ought to minimize the necessity of strangeness to our explanations as much as possible, because as we allow ourselves strangeness in our foundational claims, our thinking devolves into madness.
Well, no, I think, I mean, strangeness I think is just, it's ineradicable in every case.
It's not that, I mean, there's a fundamental strangeness to the fact that anything exists, right, however it exists, whether lawfully or randomly, there's
I mean, this is where, like, if you look closely enough at what's happening, or what seems to be happening, then ideas that sound like they add a whopping dose of strangeness to the picture don't actually Add much at all.
So like the idea that this might be a simulation, right?
Well, is that really much stranger than what seems to be going on when you actually... It's more... I'll grant you, it's not parsimonious, or at least, you know, taking a certain argument seriously, it's not parsimonious, but it's
I mean, everything that we think is happening is so bizarre that it's a, and our engagement with it is so bizarre.
I don't know if you've followed Donald Hoffman's work at all, but he's a cognitive psychologist who has this kind of user interface theory of consciousness.
And I think before this comes out, I will have just released a podcast with him where Anik and I interviewed him.
And his argument, the TED Talk version of his argument is that what we think of as our engagement with reality, our conscious perception of reality is very much analogous our conscious perception of reality is very much analogous to a user interface like on a desktop of a computer.
And, you know...
The trash bin or the blue folder icon bears really no relationship to what is in fact true at the base layer of reality.
It's useful To think about these things, but, you know, the blue pixels of the folder do not in any way represent what's actually going on, you know, at the base layer of code.
And we are, and he has a Darwinian argument about why this would be so, but it's not just that we are not totally in touch with reality as it is.
We are basically not remotely in touch with reality as it is, and we're in a simulacrum of something which is as strange as if it were a simulation.
Well, to me, on the one hand, this seems like it has to be almost uncontroversial.
That we are sensitive to certain stimuli and completely insensitive to others means that what we experience as reality is The dimmest edit that allows you to maneuver without tripping over stuff and injuring yourself and you know that we have enough information to improve our odds substantially of getting through the world, but we don't have anything like the ability to observe the world directly.
So some of it, maybe I'm not getting it fully, but it seems like... I mean, he has just a stronger claim built into it, which is that, you know, when you do the game-theoretic analysis of the fitness functions, fitness... since fitness is the only actual signal, in Darwinian terms, and truth isn't a signal at all, fitness... being in touch with reality is just...
That the probability of being in touch with reality at all essentially goes to zero in competition with fitness over enough iterations of gameplay.
This is a good place to maybe shift topics slightly, but that does seem to me like another way of speaking about metaphorical truth.
And in fact, I got into this in a recent podcast with Jim Rutt, where my argument was that Color is in effect a sort of useful fiction.
It's not that the wavelengths aren't real but are categorizing them and painting our world, our internal world with them in order to figure out where one object starts and another stops, that that is a highly useful falsehood deployed in the interest of our fitness and that in fact
That's the point sometimes the truth helps us with respect to fitness But where the two diverge you should expect fitness to dominate and that that's true perceptually and it's true Cognitively and in every other way assuming evolution as is the explanation Yeah.
I mean, his argument is that truth is just never a variable.
I mean, it always washes out, but it's... I didn't take that part of the conversation with him very far.
I mean, it makes sense to me if... I mean, the intuition is, well, You need to be more or less in touch with whatever reality at large is, because that has to be adaptive, right?
Because you're in relationship to this thing.
So again, it would be kind of a bad edit of reality, but still some truth must be getting in.
He's got a more fundamental claim about Truth, at the end of the day, just not getting in, right?
What we have is a fitness landscape.
Evolution has built us a user interface that need have no relationship to reality outside the interface apart from conserving fitness.
And once you run those numbers, you get, in his framework, conscious agents that have no truth value at all to their beliefs and the icons on the desktop.
All they have is fitness within their regime.
Anyway, it's interesting.
My intuitions have slowly migrated in that direction, at least finding that somewhat plausible, if not convincing.
It's just, you know, we don't know.
I mean, this just comes back to the J.P.S.
Haldane quote, which I've mangled a few times here, which is the idea that reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose.
Queerer.
Yeah, queerer.
Queerer than we can suppose.
Yeah, the British version.
That is, you know, just based on Darwinian principles, that shouldn't be surprising to us.
I mean, there's no reason why evolution would have given us intuitions properly formed so as to take the measure of how strange reality might seem in the end.
I'm going to disagree with that slightly.
I mean, I basically agree, and I have said elsewhere, that you are not built to be right, you're built to be effective.
and that those two depart from each other, but they don't always depart from each other.
And I would argue that actually there's a temporal phenomenon where sometimes your useful fictions are much less useful and that it makes sense to step in the direction of an interaction with reality that's more informative in order for you to alter what you think and therefore what you do in a way that enhances fitness.
And so I would argue that our capacity to do this Is adaptive and what it means is that our relationship to reality is not Arbitrary nor does it exist at a constant strength, but it shifts based on where we are in in history.
Hmm so anyway, it's a sort of middle ground position I guess but But I do think it's interesting how all of these discussions when you push them far enough turn into Uh, relatives of each other.
So, you know, the free will discussion has treaded very close to the religious discussion that we've been involved in in various places.
And maybe it would make some sense to visit that before we finish this up.
Can I return you to a moment in the debate between you and Jordan Peterson where I was moderating in Vancouver?
There's a moment late on what must have been day one in which you leveled a challenge to Jordan about why a God, as he sees that entity, would give a damn about whether or not you masturbated or would be in any way responsive to prayers that you might offer.
And it was a tough spot for me because at that moment I felt like there was a lot to be done between you and me, but it wasn't my debate with you there.
You were there to talk to Jordan and I was there to keep you guys on track.
Which actually, I should just thank you.
It was an honor to be invited to do that.
Yeah, well likewise.
You were great there.
But my question is I think that in that moment I offered some pushback as much as I could manage given the context and said look actually there's a very good reason that a metaphorical God should have an opinion on whether or not you should masturbate and I didn't get around to saying I also think there's a mechanism by which prayers do not require a supernatural entity for them to be sensible in a Darwinian
sense of the term.
And I remember our interaction.
I thought I saw a light bulb go on over your head as you got pushback from me on that topic.
Do you remember it?
No, I don't remember it.
So I'd have to queue up the video or we can play out the movie in real time here.
Well, the pushback I gave you got lost because, of course, masturbation is so funny that you know, there was just no way the conversation was going to endure the question.
But the pushback was, look, obviously, masturbation interfaces with motivation about sex.
And motivation about sex has everything to do with fitness.
And so doesn't it make a great deal of sense that should these religious beliefs be lived in a way that they're not going to be I totally accept that.
I think what I wouldn't have accepted there is that Jordan... I mean, I wouldn't be talking about a metaphorical God because I don't think Jordan was talking about a metaphorical God.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, no, no, that, I totally accept that.
I think what I wouldn't have accepted there is that Jordan, I mean, I wouldn't be talking about a metaphorical God, because I don't think Jordan was talking about a metaphorical God.
I mean, if you're just talking about the possible pragmatism of certain doctrines that have been traditionally anchored to what we have every reason to believe are false beliefs about deities, well then, yeah, I mean, as a rationale, that makes total sense to me.
Okay, so what I didn't get around to was the point about prayer.
So let's take the classic, the classic prayer of the person kneeling by the side of their bed before going to sleep.
A person kneeling by the side of the bed before they go to sleep is very likely to focus on things that are possible and desirable, or likely and undesirable, and to be asking their deity to intervene in the likelihood of these things.
You know, please help Uncle Jim get better, or you know, please help me perform well tomorrow in the recital, or whatever it is.
It's interesting that that comes right before the conscious mind goes offline and the brain as a whole remains active and engaged in scenario building and other sorts of activities.
My contention, and I can't prove this, although my guess is somebody has proved it, is that your thought process immediately before going to bed has a strong influence over the content of the dreams that you have.
And those dreams seem prone to explore problems in your world.
Now it might be that you ask your deity to intervene on things where your ability to use your brain to find a solution is meaningless.
You know, if you ask the deity to intervene in Uncle Jim's cancer, your prayer is unlikely to be answered.
On the other hand, if you're If you're praying to not screw up that one move in the recital tomorrow, then it's possible that you end up running through the various things that trip you up, and when you get to the recital, actually, you're more practiced than you realize.
Your prayer might be answered.
Right.
Well, I think there are many reasons why prayer might be good for something that don't entail a God actually listening.
And that's just one, but I think it's a little... I mean, obviously most prayer is not necessarily paired with sleep, right?
I mean, the prayer as a tool or as an injunction is not, you know, in our sort of cartoon picture of what it must be like to be religious, we picture people praying before they go to sleep, but in, you know, just theologically, prayer as a mechanism isn't
I'm unaware of anyone recommending that you do it at the end of the day as opposed to whenever the fancy strikes or in the morning when you go to church.
You can do it at any time of day and there are many reasons why it could have good consequences for you.
One kind of more basic reason that has nothing to do with memory or skill consolidation that happens during REM sleep is it is a time where you are consciously Entertaining your most pro-social intentions with respect to the people in your life, you know, and even just people, you know, strangers on the street.
You're praying for good outcomes for your whole, you know, society or, you know, tribe.
So it just seems like it's a good, moral, you know, pro-cooperative algorithm to be running in general.
you know, just have to have kind of drummed into you.
And I mean, it's just, it's a kind of a meditation on good intentions.
It is.
And especially in the context, you know, of a church service or something where you have people more or less speaking on behalf of a deity, especially when it's a deity who's empowered to reward you or punish you severely that, you know, making especially when it's a deity who's empowered to reward you or punish you severely that, you know, making prayers about pro-sociality, as you put it, while in a venue that is constantly reminding
while in a venue that is constantly reminding you of your concerns about falling short of the deities expectations of you and all of that, that that is bound to actually alter your behavior in ways that I think you and I would agree are often positive, not inherently, that that is bound to actually alter your behavior in ways that I think you and I would agree are often positive, not inherently, but to the extent that pro-sociality is what's being induced, then
Um, then doing so in a context where the rewards and punishments are being, you know, uh, centered so that you are reminded of them, uh, potentially affects your behavior more than it would if you just picked a random moment to do it.
Yeah.
And also just, I mean, I think the biggest lever that religion is pulling from a Darwinian sense is that
By appealing to an all-seeing God who will punish you for your transgressions, you are creating a basis for cooperation to scale among strangers under conditions in which we know that human justice is going to be imperfect at best, right?
So it's like if we know that everyone in this game If a friend or stranger believes privately that they really can't get away with anything, that is a durable basis of cooperation that doesn't exist if you think, as long as no one can see me while I'm doing this thing, I can get away scot-free.
So knowing that everyone believes that, it's a relevant difference.
It's a highly relevant difference, and think about the other little, what I would call, hacks that go along with that context.
So, you know, you might be calling the priest father, right?
If you and somebody else are calling the priest father, that makes you siblings.
I think this is not unlike oppressed communities where people call each other brother and sister, that you're bootstrapping a route into kin-selected modalities that I would not, I'm not arguing for group selection and, you know, we don't have time today to talk about that, but, uh, there is another mechanism, but simply emphasizing the closeness of relationship is liable to, to increase the degree to which that cooperation happens.
Likewise, the, um, symbols of remembrance for those who have died being present, the belief that they are looking down and therefore there's a sort of extra judge of your behavior and whether you're living up to expectations.
All of these things point in the same direction of creating an alteration in behavior that is likely to be fitness enhancing, um, by virtue of, uh, Strengthening your, I'm trying to avoid the word group since it's not what I mean here, but trying to strengthen your lineage or your congregation or whatever the entity is.
Right.
So, okay, that's all good.
It sounds like we're on the same page about that.
I guess what I want to get at, do you feel that your position on religion is in motion at all?
My basic position, I wouldn't say, is just because it's
always allowed for multiple things to be true which which seem incompatible at first glance but you know are easily reconciled and have always been from my point of view so the the fact that you can you can you know this is a point I've always made explicitly we have to acknowledge that religion isn't There are many different religions on offer and they do things differently.
They believe different things, there are different consequences to each.
There are similarities, but religion is a very broad concept like food.
Not all foods are doing the same thing and they're not all fit for the same occasion.
So if you can point to a local instance where some person's life or some community's life was obviously made better by religion.
That is not actually a point against any argument I've ever made, right?
And so I've always acknowledged that you can find those examples, right?
And so, too, with the flip side of that, you can find atheists doing terrible things and made miserable by their atheism, or atheists who wish they were religious.
Right, and can't find that thing that, you know, they know is making life meaningful for their religious brothers and sisters, and they're all depressed and nihilistic, and the fact that they don't have religion or something that would do the work of religion is some part of that problem for them.
Again, that's not a rejoinder to anything I've ever said.
I mean, my basic argument is that Whatever is good, whatever good can be found in religion is, I've yet to find an important exception to this rule, and I'll admit that it's possible that there is an exception, but is better found some other way.
Right, so if you can give me a list of things that, you know, moral actions that religion gets people to do, I can find you better reasons to do those things.
Okay.
Reasons that scale better, that are more durable, that will survive contact with our ongoing investigation of There's nothing we're going to find out about our brains that'll cancel these good reasons for being moral or going to Africa to alleviate famine, whereas the virgin birth of Jesus is a bad reason to do those things, right?
Even if it gets, again, undeniable, it gets some number of people to do good things under the ages of crazy beliefs.
So, yeah, I don't think, so there's always been what I perceive to be a lot of flexibility in my view because it's, you know, again, there's no, you can point to mountains of good done somewhere sometime for religious reasons.
And it's never been in contradiction to what I thought was true.
Okay.
So I want to point you to two things where I think there might be reason to open it up and check whether or not you still feel the way you did.
In The Moral Landscape, you write that you have been confronted with people who make the argument that because religion is longstanding, it must therefore be adaptive.
I would make a version of this argument.
I believe it to be true.
And it doesn't quite have enough of the components.
The added component is that longstanding religions that carry a heavy cost for those who believe in them must be adaptive.
They must pay back that cost plus some in order to persist.
And I think in the book, if I remember correctly, you make the argument that a basically a bad bit of code could survive in the world in the form of religious belief.
And my point would be that becomes implausible once you're talking about a feature of essentially every culture, historically speaking, maybe up until the present.
Let me swap in two things for religion, which I think run through in the same way, which I don't think you'd be tempted to defend by the same logic.
The first would be ignorance of science.
Ignorance of science is a cultural universal.
It's been with us for millennia.
Misapprehensions of causality based on an unscientific view of the world.
You know, not knowing anything about the germ theory of disease must be doing some good because it's a cultural universal.
It's been with us for millennia.
I don't think you'd be tempted to make that argument.
So that's one way of doing it.
One thing that is religion for me is it's a It's another name we put to ancient ignorance.
Willful.
Yeah.
It's becoming increasingly willful as we get more knowledge on board.
So I don't think you'd be tempted to make the argument there that scientific ignorance must be doing its work because it's so highly conserved.
At a certain point, it's something we get over and we don't look back on nostalgically.
But probably a better analogy is To witchcraft, which is also a cultural universal.
It obviously is very similar to religion in certain ways.
You know, believing in magic spells is a lot like believing in prayer.
Again, ubiquitous and still survives.
It's really just a contingent fact of recent history that it isn't as universal currently as religion is.
And if you go to Africa, it's basically universal in Africa, right?
So if we were living on planet Africa, magic would be more or less just as much of a going concern as religion is.
I don't think anyone's saying, listen, I never run into this argument.
I mean, someone must be making it somewhere.
No one is coming back at me, you know, in the Jordan Peterson mode of saying, listen, if you think we're going to get rid of witchcraft, you've got another thing coming.
Witchcraft is so important and Europe, you know, European civilization is, you know, you don't get Douglas Murray saying, listen, we have to be honest with how much witchcraft is an integral part of our, you know, the civilizing impulse and the rights of the individual.
How could we How could we think about the rights of the individual without giving Aleister Crowley his due, right?
The irony, of course, is that we now find the New York Times defending witchcraft and advertising their interviews with witches in the front page.
Well, so, here's, I'm glad we did this because I think, it's possible you don't know where I am on this topic.
Yeah, I might not.
I am, I will defend willful ignorance as a product of the same process and belief in witchcraft as a product of the same process.
In none of these cases am I defending their continued use.
Okay, so which which distinguishes you from what Jordan was doing in that would have been doing in that argument or I believe that my sitting between you two was a physical fact and Metaphorically put me exactly where I stand that I'm I am halfway between your two arguments and What that means is and I have to be very careful.
I'm gonna get a lot of pushback on this I know but I do believe that we have no choice but to step back from these metaphorical belief systems in the present.
that the predicament we find ourselves in is so dangerous and the incompatibility of these belief systems with each other is such an impediment to navigating our differences that we have to stand down literal belief in that which can't be established for the sake of future generations.
Where I think we end up in a different place is you say, well, there's nothing that we do with those belief systems that we couldn't do better with a rational belief system.
And what I would say is that that might be true if we were fully informed.
Unfortunately, what we are stuck with is a situation where we can't tolerate having mutually incompatible metaphysical belief systems declared off-limits from critique by virtue of the fact that they have ancient roots.
We can't deal with the problems of the modern world in that predicament.
But, to turn off these mechanisms is to invite a whole other set of dangers.
So while I, on balance, probably agree with you that we must step in the direction of the rational from the point of view of at least what I would call the common space where we all meet.
This is what got me in trouble on Twitter a couple weeks ago.
Was that I was essentially making an argument that where we interact with each other we need to be in rational Headspace and that making appeals to these unprovable Metaphorical realms is destructive and dangerous but in stepping away from that We don't have a good substitute.
And the lack of a good substitute means we are certain to do ourselves all kinds of harm, even if, ultimately, we might have a rational scheme that so well understood the dangers that it could address them.
What we don't have is anything that has stood the test of time well enough to stand in for these metaphorical belief systems.
But nothing needs to stand in for witchcraft.
Right, we just need to honestly acknowledge our knowledge such as it is and the boundary between it and our ignorance and the problems we're trying to solve.
So if witchcraft traditionally has applied itself to problems like crop failure, which still concern us, And it has invoked as a mechanism something as implausible as the evil eye and something as socially divisive as the evil eye because, you know, neighbors murder neighbors over this apparent crime when crops fail.
And so too with, you know, illness, you know, we don't know where it comes from.
We have a dim sense that, you know, the old crone across the way Could be responsible because we have reasons why we find her unattractive.
I have never liked her.
Yeah.
And so we're going to blame her for not only the weather and the resultant crop failure, but the death of our kids.
Again, we're functioning in a circumstance where our ignorance is impressive and getting Remediated by science and just, you know, rational conversation in general.
And it's pretty clear that process just has to continue.
Now, I'm not saying it's not possible to be unhappy even while being well-informed, right?
I mean, there's more to life than just being right or not being wrong.
And that's why things like, you know, Meditation and, you know, ethical codes and just the larger project of living an examined life, I mean, all of that is about more than just understanding science.
And, you know, scientists are not even, you know, as I hang out with scientists, it's not like they advertise They're the depth of their wisdom more than other people tend to write them.
So this like science is science is a discrete game that you can play or not play.
But within its parameters, It's the only game in town, right?
Agreed.
And unlike other games, the theater of its implications continues to grow and grow in surprising ways and grows and never diminishes, right?
It's not like we... And this is the challenge I...
I have traditionally uttered to religious people, it's like, give me an example of one problem where we used to have a scientific answer for which now the answer, the best answer on offer is religious.
Whereas, and you know, I number on that list, you know, none, no compelling examples that I can think of.
Whereas, the opposite list is long and only growing.
The number of things for which we used to have a religious answer, a bad one, and now we have a scientific one, and that ground is never going to be seeded again.
Again, take the clear case of epilepsy in a world where you don't know about epilepsy and you think it's demonic possession.
Once you get a science of neurology, you move from the theological prescription of exorcism to let's get you some help at the level of the brain.
And there is just no scenario where this is going to revert back to the church unless we find out something else about reality that suddenly requires some other mechanism that the church might be able to say, oh, well, that's what we were really talking about.
So let's just say, let's take this further and let's say that, well, it turns out that prayer, just that use of attention is so efficacious for certain people in certain ways that, and now we understand it by reference to the placebo effect or and now we understand it by reference to the placebo effect or something that offers some point of contact with a science of the That, you know, here is what it's good for, right?
You know, that's not what people were recommending in the year 1300, you know, in the capitals of Europe when they were burning witches, right, who didn't exist.
But maybe there's some remnant from religion that we can prop up at the end of the day and say, okay, this is important.
Or maybe there's some remnant that is actually You know, theologically seemingly grandiose, like the sorts of things we were talking about earlier.
Like, if we are a screensaver, you know, we are God's screensaver, whatever that means.
But God is not the sort of God who is the neurotic who can care about, you know, whether you've sacrificed a goat or a ram or, you know, on what day or, you know.
I mean, none of the Iron Age prescriptions map onto that, but it's close enough, it's so strange, right, if in fact we have been, you know, created by an alien intelligence in some other context, that It would be open to the religious people of the 22nd century to say, well, clearly that's what the Bible must have been getting at, right?
We're an alien screensaver.
That's the logos, right?
what is, you know, that's the logos, right?
You know, that's the, okay, fine, but that's, again, that's not actually the code anyone was running you know, that long ago, right?
And it remains to be seen what reality is at large insofar as we can interact with it.
And the process that will get us a better and better picture of that is never to go back and say, listen, witchcraft has been with us for so long, we tinker with it at our peril.
We need this, you know, this Popperian process of critique to continue on all fronts.
It needs to happen in science, because that's what science is, right?
But the boundary that has to get broken down is the taboo around doing this on other fronts.
We need to do this to religion.
And the reason why that's so uncomfortable for so many people is because Religion doesn't survive those tests well at all, right?
And so much of religion is predicated on a fundamentally different orientation, the orientation of faith, right?
I'll tell you what you do with your doubts.
You silence them.
Not by a successful process of critique toward better explanations.
You silence them because you're going to burn in hell for fucking ever if you don't, right?
Whether you believe me or not, that's the proposition that 99.9% of people have been confronted with in human history under the ages of one or another religion, and that's the thing we're still trying to recover from.
And I don't see any reason to be Sentimental about that.
Oh, I'm not being sentimental.
I'm just simply pointing out we're damned if we do and damned if we don't and I believe our Problems are so novel that this isn't even a close call anymore but to your point about witchcraft not hard for me to come up with a That's an evolutionary explanation that's plausible enough for why the crop failure example results in demonizing people and what role that plays.
There's no part of me that wishes to defend this practice, but to understand why it might have evolved is a different matter.
Right, but why have any more respect for Iron Age religion?
Why have any more respect for Iron Age religion?
First of all, I'm not sure why you go back to the Iron Age.
I believe we are talking about... Well, if you're going to be Abrahamic about it, or at least with respect to Judaism and Christianity, you're more or less there.
Because I'm not sure that that's exactly what we're doing.
We're talking about why tread carefully around structures whose roots go back to the Iron Age.
Well, no, but specific beliefs, right?
Yes.
I mean, the crucial thing for me, with respect to any of these religions, the only thing that an atheist needs to do to win the argument is to point out that there's no reason to believe that any of these books are anything other than books, right?
It's a textual claim.
Again, just now we're talking about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The moment you deal with the books, the moment you say, these books do not bear the slightest sign of omniscient authorship.
We know too much about how they were authored.
The reason they work has nothing to do with the supernatural.
Yeah, and what's more, if you just think of how good a book would be if it were the product of omniscience, it just beggars belief that anyone imagines these books were the product of omniscience.
So, the moment you do that, you have destroyed these religions.
It's an unrecoverable error to... I mean, it is the point past which No self-respecting, I mean Judaism is a slight tweak on this because most Jews have lost their religion and just don't want to admit it.
But the moment you get past this textual claim and you reduce these to being books like any other books, susceptible to criticism like any other books.
And then this is a quick step to admitting that they're not even especially good books on very important topics most of the time, right?
And so then you're left finding these, you know, diamonds in the dunghill that are still diamonds.
I mean, the Golden Rule is fantastic wherever you find it, and if you find it in the New Testament, great.
It is an utterly seditious concession to force upon religious people that these are just books written by human beings.
Well, but they're not just books.
Well, no, but nor are the books of Shakespeare, nor the plays of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, as far as I know.
Nor is Ovid.
Ovid and Homer, they're all pregnant with metaphor and life application.
That's not what renders them unbook-like.
What renders them unbook-like is the process of evolution of what is the content.
In other words, you have Many of these have been set in stone and have resisted evolution.
Right, and so the more set in stone they are, the more likely you are to have basically mimetic hitchhikers traveling along with the, I don't mean good necessarily, but the fitness enhancing wisdom inside of the things.
You'll get hitchhikers if the whole thing is frozen in a state.
On the other hand, if you have something, let's take Christianity for example, Christianity, you have lots of debate within Christendom about what to believe and how to apply it and what its implications are and all of that.
And those sectarian differences are the mimetic diversity upon which selection acts.
So what we find Are populations who have a sacred canon that has been compared to competitors and found effective.
I'm trying not to use normative terms because I don't believe the normative terms are inherently warranted.
Again, what I really want us to understand about each other is that we are not in the relationship that you typically have with your detractors who say some of the things that I'm saying.
I believe that we do have to step in the direction that you're talking about, but that the danger of doing so is actually more substantial than you or most people
Ironically, I think the danger is magnified by this meme that it is dangerous to let go of these traditional structures because what that prevents is an honest and creative look at
Right, so because so many, you know, otherwise secular, well-educated Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists have spent their entire lives telling themselves that there's no other way to get the good stuff that we value because reason is this, you know, this dry,
valueless calculation device, there's no alternative but to hold on to this tradition, even though we can't justify most of it, and we don't want to be pressed on the particulars,
Even though 90% of what's in these books embarrasses us, we still have to hold these books before all others and not think too hard about alternatives, though there will never be an alternative to the Bible if you're a Christian.
There will never be an alternative to the Quran if you're a Muslim.
It's unthinkable, right?
And because that's where we're stuck, and we've sold ourselves this story of risk, we in fact have made it far more difficult to come up with truly modern, deep, value-conserving Structures in our culture.
We don't have a wisdom culture.
We don't have a 21st century wisdom culture.
We've got a piecemeal, by turns, 500 B.C., 500 A.D., and 500 A.D.
500 A.D. wisdom culture, 500 B.C., 500, you know, 0 A.D., and 500 A.D. wisdom culture, or pseudo-wisdom culture, brought forward into a culture that, brought forward into a culture that, for which wisdom isn't even a variable.
Right.
And what we need is a truly modern, scientifically rationally sound approach to exploring in this domain of all possible experience.
So I heard you make a claim in there that I just wanted to get it On the table so we can track it your claim was that the basically my position that these things are ancient compendiums of wisdom and that we are in danger by Endangered by confronting them
That that is counterproductive to the objective of getting to a shared rational perspective that would allow us to move wisely forward.
Is that fair?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
I actually think the opposite.
Well, just imagine if we did that with anything else that was of importance to us.
Like just technology.
Like imagine with, you know, if someone's trying to invent a a way to fly to the moon in a world where we only have propellers, right?
And what if we had this sense that, listen, whatever we do, it's got to be propeller-based.
Otherwise, we will have, I mean, we will have falsified all the sacrifices of our ancestors.
Yeah, I get it.
And of course, I would never make that point.
I believe... I'm not even a strong emergentist.
I believe the scientific story, to the extent that we can discover it, will ultimately allow us to get We're not there yet, for sure.
The question really is, what opens the door?
And I believe, and I'm having one hell of an anecdotal run here, but my interaction with people of faith who are in a position to at least listen to what I have to say on this topic, Is that it is opening a door to considering what a rational shared worldview might be.
I don't think it's opening the door very wide, but I do think the door was closed in a sense by what religious people perceived and sometimes was hostility from the atheist community.
That caricatured them by not acknowledging that the religion ever had any content, by portraying it as a pathology, inherently a pathology, that of course caused a defensiveness.
Right.
But that's not something, I mean, I've received as much defensiveness as anyone, but that's not something I've ever done.
Because I've always been in touch with the experience that, you know, that is the baby in the bathwater that, you know, I think anyone should want to conserve.
And yet, I've met the same hostility, and there are several reasons for that, but one is that...
Most religious people aren't actually mystics, or aspiring mystics, or contemplatives.
They're not about becoming like Jesus, or Meister Eckhart, or Saint Seraphim of Serov.
That's not the game they're playing.
They're terrified, normal, neurotic people who are worried about death and suffering.
So it's a version of Pascal's Wager, and if you'll accept that as a label for this point, I do believe part of what we run into is that it is potentially, given the calculus that has been divinely handed down as far as these people are concerned,
It is very dangerous to traffic in skepticism and when somebody comes to you challenging the divinity of Jesus for example it's very cheap to fight back in fact in the calculus of getting into heaven probably that counts for a lot and so I do think there's a distortion in how resistant people are and what I think needs to happen is we need to
Both sides of the conversation actually need to move and I must say I listened carefully to your podcast with Richard Dawkins and I do have the sense that Richard Dawkins is actually in motion on a time scale that's hard to see and that I think you'd
You know, you did important work with him on your podcast, and actually you can see exactly where it is that he's hung up in this argument, where he makes the point that he sees the competition between religions something like he sees the competition between species.
And he uses the example of squirrels in Europe, where a New World squirrel drives an Old World squirrel to extinction upon being introduced.
But in any case, The slow motion that each of us experience in our position as we are exposed to higher quality versions of what's on the other side is actually, I hope, going to result in us converging where we can do two things.
One, we can talk about why it is necessary that we at least create a space where we have only the rational and we are not forced to kowtow to unprovable mystical beliefs.
And the other thing is it would be really important if religious people would start separating between the traditions that they hold dear and the mechanisms that prevent those things from being scrutinized.
The very pushback that you and I have received is turbocharged because What has made it durable over time is a mechanism, it's an immune system that fights that which would challenge some of those beliefs.
My point is, at this moment in history, we actually have to open up things that may be needed, an immune system to prevent them from being opened up in the past.
And that means religious people, in some sense, have to, you know, Well, it's the thing they naturally do to every other religion, too.
It's the reason why a Christian doesn't convert to Islam tonight, right?
Like, even just the benign neglect.
I mean, that's the way most atheists treat religion most of the time anyway.
It's not like Well, atheism is predicated on endlessly criticizing religion or trying to update it or trying to find out what's wrong with it.
It's just, there's no reason to pay attention to it because it's not justified.
And that's exactly what every religious person does to every other religion too.
And so it's not, it's actually just It's asking for a coherence in the kind of evidentiary tests you would apply to any belief that didn't get smuggled in with mother's milk to you.
Part of the frustration that most atheists feel, and I certainly feel it on this topic, Just looking at this all in terms of opportunity costs, it's almost like, well, what's the problem with the Trump presidency?
Well, one major problem is just sheer opportunity cost.
Just think of all the good things we're not doing when we're talking about how bad Trump is and trying to figure out how to get him unelected or impeached or, you know, what's just just reacting to him on Twitter.
Like as toxic as all that is and all the bad effects you can easily point to, forget about all that.
Just think of all the bandwidth concerns.
Occupies a lot of processor time.
Yeah.
It's just it's unbelievable.
Right.
And when you look when you when you put that lens up to the history of religion.
Right.
It is just grotesque.
The amount of human creativity and ingenuity that continues to be lost.
Now, again, I'm agnostic as to whether or not there was ever a period in human history where you might say, Actually, it was necessary here.
Given the tools on hand, this was not only useful, it was in some ways optimal.
we had a sort of bottleneck to get through or, you know, a valley to descend into, to climb out of.
But, like, this is, you know, this was a necessary course for the species or at least, you know, the groups that have survived.
Maybe that's the case.
But now, when you think of the fact that there are kids, you know, being taught that everything in the Quran is the most important thing you could possibly, you know, cognize over the course of a human life.
And, you know, being terrified with thoughts of hell, lest their attention stray, right?
Or, and the Mormons are doing it, and the Scientologists are doing it.
Under every, you know, cultish or larger framework, this is what's happening.
Just forget about the bad effects.
Just in terms of opportunity cost, it's a tragedy, right?
And so, I think every atheist who's not Spending any time on any of those errant projects, right?
Just it's they see they see a whole cult.
I mean the other thing that doesn't make a lot of sense here is that when you when you hear the argument Of a sort that you just framed that this is, you know, there's real risk here.
There's real.
We do this at our peril.
You know, most people most of the time really need this stuff or have needed this stuff.
People are almost never talking about themselves.
I mean, the conversation is always framed with like, listen, I don't need this.
My wife doesn't need it.
Our kids aren't going to need it.
We're all fine, but listen, you don't understand how people really need this stuff.
Well, no, people, most people are just like us if given the chance.
I mean, I think that's a fair operating assumption.
Nobody's kids are going to spontaneously become Jehovah's Witnesses, but for some process of indoctrination.
And if they did spontaneously become Jehovah's Witnesses, that would be tantamount to madness.
You would say, something has gone wrong with your mind if you de novo believe these things.
It's only under a process of indoctrination that you can explain the process of a healthy human mind coming to believe those things.
Well, I agree.
I just think that, you know, this is simply a belief that I've arrived at through the trajectory I've been on.
But I feel that those of us who have something to say about the importance of dealing in the rational at this point in history, And it's never been more important, would be wise to clean our house such that we are not guilty of falsely demonizing those on the other side.
And I agree, you've been quite careful, but I do think that there is a tendency to view the functionality of religion as the exception.
Rather than it having been the clear fuel of the endeavor until modern times and that once we get there we are much more hearable to people who we are in the end we need to appeal to and let them know actually you're not under attack but there is an important problem to be solved and
Well, no, they will be under attack when it really matters.
I mean, that's just the thing.
Everyone's free to believe whatever they want to believe until your beliefs really are an obstacle to some very good, important thing happening, or they're likely to cause some, you know, raise our risk of something terrible happening in the meantime.
So, yeah, nothing It doesn't matter much at all what you believe about vaccines until we invent really important ones.
Until we have a pandemic that's killing everyone.
It's measles plus.
I can tolerate what you think about measles because not that many people die from it.
It's just a big hassle in the end.
No, when we have this new pandemic that is, you know, got 75% mortality and there'll be no pretense of being polite in the face of these beliefs.
It'll be a moral emergency because it has to be.
And this is just sheer contingency as to whether we're in one condition or another.
So that's why the only thing that scales is an honest, iterative, self-critical, Popperian process of fighting however dimly we can see through the interface toward a better explanation of what's going on.
Striving to see more clearly and to act on real implications.
So I really like this last point of yours about the durability of what emerges here and in some sense I would say we are in agreement that this is the moment to address it because we don't have the situation of the vaccine and it's necessary for public health that people who don't believe in it get it anyway.
Well, we do have one version of that.
I mean, this is why I'm often accused of Islamophobia, right?
I think jihadism as a set of ideas just can't... the gloves have to be off with respect to how bad this set of ideas is, right?
So it's like, do you have to pretend to respect Islam as much as you respect Anglicanism or to be as patient with it?
No, you really don't, because Islam is too busy respecting jihadism, right?
And so, like, we have to ram this through unapologetically, right?
And this is where, and this politically, this becomes inconvenient, and this is where, you know, you get into circumstances where people are criticizing Islam for the wrong reasons, because they're actually xenophobes and bigots and, you know, neo-Nazis, and you want to have nothing to do with those people, but In a space where no one left of center will say an honest word about the differences among religions, you know, this is not the time to be mincing words with what we know to be true.
Jihadism is not the same thing as Any other strand of mainstream religion now, and it is not, the jihadists do not stand to Islam the way the Branch Davidians stood to Christianity, or the Westboro Baptist Church stands to Christianity.
I mean, these are false analogies.
It's a far bigger problem, as is Islamism, you know, with which jihadism is wrapped.
And so again, this is just a place where I think we have to, I mean, I've always acknowledged there's a role for different voices here, but I think we are more in the position of, you know, we've got a pandemic, an unacknowledged pandemic, and we've got these people who have a taboo around even talking about the utility of vaccination.
Right, and so we have to do philosophy on a deadline here.
I agree, and I think it's an important one.
I would only add that I want to do that analysis when it comes time to it in the proper geopolitical context, because although I find the analysis compelling that there is something especially frightening In Jihadist Islam, there's also a context in which it caught fire, which I think we have to be honest about.
But anyway, let's not go down that road now.
No, we'll go into our fourth hour.
What?
We'll be going into our fourth hour if we tackle another topic.
No, we can't do that.
So, Sam, let me say, this has been a great pleasure and an honor, and I should say.
Often I ask guests where they can find you.
My listeners know exactly where they can find you, and I will say to them that I signed up for your podcast this morning, and I suggest they do the same.
It actually feels quite good to sign up for your podcast.
It feels like a weight off the shoulders, and it's something they should certainly consider.
Oh, nice, nice.
Well, let's see how you feel when I start reading you mattress ads after you've signed up.
