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Jan. 23, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:13:02
Heavens on Earth with skeptical Dr. Michael Shermer
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Okay, so I'm talking today with Dr.
Michael Shermer, and Dr.
Shermer is, among other things, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, but more importantly for our purposes today, he is also the author of this book, new book.
And heaven on earth, we're going to talk about this today in some detail, and so I'm going to turn this over first to Dr.
Shermer, who's going to tell you some things about himself, and then we're going to have a discussion.
He's going to outline his book, and then we're going to have a discussion about it.
Why he wrote it and what it contains and what the implications are and all of that.
So over to you, Michael.
Sure.
Jordan, thank you for having me on the show.
Well, the book is kind of an extension of my previous work.
Most of my books, when I write them, they kind of push off from the previous book.
So going all the way back to my first book, Why People Believe We're Things, which was about the supernatural and the paranormal and And all that, then that led to how we believe, which was why people believe in God.
And then if you don't believe in the supernatural and you don't believe in a deity, what about morality?
So I wrote two books on math, The Science of Good and Evil, and The Moral Art, the last book.
So then, you know, kind of covering all the big subjects from a skeptical scientific perspective, the afterlife is obviously a huge one.
And I had really dealt with that too much in my previous books, and Now that I'm in my 60s, I guess you could say I'm cramming for the final.
Thinking about these big issues.
It's not something I obsess about.
I'm not terrorized by death like some people are.
But I think it's a super interesting subject because it's obviously a part of the human condition.
It's something people do think about.
And apparently we're the only species that can do this.
Although I have a chapter in Heavens on Earth on animals that grieve.
Clearly quite a few mammals do grieve.
And they have some sense of loss, death and grief, you know, for fellow group members or family members that die.
But it's not clear that they understand that they're mortal.
And then, you know, I cover the possibility that Neanderthals were self-aware of their mortality because of grave goods that have been found, although that's, you know, It's hard to, fossilization of thoughts is difficult to interpret, but, you know, it seems reasonable that they had some sense of that.
But in any case, so I deal with, you know, the monotheism's versions of the afterlife, heaven, immortality.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Mainly because you sort of have to, although mine's a science book, and those are sort of low-hanging fruit that atheists have already kind of picked at.
So I don't spend a lot of time on that.
I focus more on scientific attempts to achieve immortality, and it's a book of science.
So I actually start with what doesn't seem like a scientific attempt, but Deepak Chopra's worldview of sort of Western Buddhism that The idea of birth, death, afterlife, life, before life is all kind of meaningless because it's all consciousness.
And in Deepak's worldview, as he puts it, consciousness is the ontological primitive phrase.
You can't get underneath it.
The scientific attempt to explain it by material means will always fail because that's not where consciousness lies.
Anyway, so I, thanks to my wife, actually delved into his worldview.
Deepak and I have clashed for 20 years, and I've called his worldview woo-woo and pseudoscience, and we've been kind of at odds at each other.
He's sort of the main, you might say, intellectual force.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say the main intellectual force behind the New Age movement or associated with the New Age movement.
Is that reasonable?
Yeah, certainly one of the most prominent ones.
He's got a huge following.
You know, he goes on Oprah and talks about these things and Dr.
Oz or whoever, and you know, he has a lot of following.
So my wife and I actually went down to his center, the Trooper Center in Carlsbad, California, and spent some time there.
We delved into meditation and yoga and the tea and the chanting and all that stuff, just to kind of see what it's all about.
And you know, I think there's something there in terms of behavioral change, that is how it affects your body and your mind.
I could definitely see something to that.
But also the difficult part that Deepak and I have had is the same problem that most scientists have with New Age beliefs, but not just that, but non-Western traditions, what Deepak calls the Eastern Wisdom traditions.
It's the language, the difficulty of language.
We have to use words to communicate, and the words you use matter.
At some level, you have to be able to be talking on the same level with words.
When Deepak says, the ontological primitive or consciousness is the womb of creation, it sounds sort of metaphorical, and he means something very specific by that.
If you can't get at that, then you're wasting your time talking.
Deepak and I have kind of become friends and we, you know, we're constantly communicating just to try to see if we can find some ground where we're talking, you know, on the same plane.
And so I think I've learned a lot from him in that sense.
And so my chapter is devoted to him on that and the general Eastern wisdom traditions, you know, that when you die, because I always ask him, well, where do you go?
And he says, is this the wrong question?
I mean, you just return to where you were before.
Because when people ask me, well, what do you think happens after you die?
My standard kind of quip is the same thing.
You go to the same place you were before you were born.
People say, what are you talking about?
I wasn't anywhere before I was born.
Right, and you'll be nowhere after you die.
But for Deepak, time and consciousness kind of overrides the concept of time at the beginning and end.
When you die, your consciousness just returns to where it was.
And that this physical body and brain is just a Temporary instantiation of consciousness into physical being, but it just goes back to some other place.
And as near as I can figure, we don't have the words to even conceive of what that means.
That is, the Western language, the way scientists talk, can't really capture what he's talking about in that sense.
And so that's why I think we kind of hit an epistemological wall there where You have to actually get into introspection, meditation, and the deeper parts of that tradition that I've never been able to really get into personally.
So I can't say I understand it, although I kind of see where he's coming from in that regard.
So let me ask you some questions about that.
The first might have to do with this idea of the ontological primacy of consciousness, say.
Now, one of the things I've learned from studying mythology is that the mythological worldview...
First of all, I think the mythological worldview conceptualizes the world as a place to act.
Rather than as a place of things.
So it's sort of like Stephen Jay Gould's idea of two magisterium that don't overlap.
There's a moral magisterium and a materialist magisterium, say.
But it's been striking to me, looking at the archetypal foundations of mythological thinking, that in the scientific worldview, there seem to be two fundamental causal elements.
You could say nature and nurture, something like that, or biology and society.
And then Technically sophisticated Western academics argue about the relative contribution of each to any given existential phenomena.
But in the mythological worldview, there's always three actors.
There's nature, usually personified as female, or experienced as female, because personified isn't quite the right word.
There's culture, but there's also the individual, and the individual seems to be the same thing as the conscious actor, and that would be the hero, the dragon-slaying hero, say.
And And there is a kind of primacy given to that.
So in the oldest creation myths, you always see this interplay between the mother, often Mother Earth, and the father, the sky, and then the hero who separates the two and somehow brings, and perversely in some sense, although being their product, clearly as the offspring, is also the thing that gives rise to them at the same time.
And it seems to be something that's in keeping, in some sense, with our lived experience is that we confront the social world, obviously, and our beneficiaries and victims of it, and we confront the natural world In the same manner, but we also seem to be agentic actors and Without us as agentic actors the idea that there's a reality seems to it seems to be full of paradoxical holes like reality without a conscious actor and I think that's the sort of thing that that generates
the thinking that you've referred to as characteristic of Deepak Chopra and the people who who make those sorts of claims and so I mean What's your take on consciousness and its role in being?
Well, on the one hand it's everything because What I tell Deepak, what I write about in that chapter, is that you're familiar with the anthropic principles.
I call this the weak consciousness principle, that without consciousness, nothing exists.
This is one of the points Deepak makes.
And for me, and you personally, if we're dead or we're not conscious, the world doesn't exist for our brains.
It's gone.
Nothing.
There's nothing.
But he goes further than that.
He says what I call the strong consciousness principle, that consciousness is required, our consciousness is required for material things to exist.
And so there I have a discussion of what Donald Hoffman, the cognitive scientist at UC Irvine, calls his interface perception theory.
I don't know if you're familiar with this but his analogy is like you know your laptop screen here you have these icons on the screen and like the little trash can icon it's like a trash can but of course there's no trash if you open you open your laptop there's no trash can in there you know these are just kind of icons that represent something that we think of as a trash can and This gets to the problem of what it's like to be a bat.
I can't know if I bolted on some huge ears and I had an echolocation system and the neural processes to process that information and so on.
I would have some sense of what it's like to be a bat, but to have everything on to actually be a bat, then I would just be a bat and I wouldn't even know I was a human wondering what it's like to be a bat.
At some level, we can't actually know You know, what it's like to be something else.
And so, again, with Deepak and I and these kinds of traditions like that, we hit this epistemological wall of language.
It's difficult to say what you mean by certain things.
Yes.
Yeah, well, especially when you get down to the fundamentals of things.
Well, it's pretty clear that...
The things that...
So let's look at that user interface idea.
So obviously what happens when you're looking at a computer screen is that the complexity of the screen is reduced to a set of icons that can serve as tools.
Right.
And I think that that's a reasonable way of thinking about how we look at the world, is the complexity.
Annette Hoffman's theory is that natural selection didn't select our brains to record an accurate representation of reality, like a scientific model attempts to get ever closer to what reality is really like.
No, natural selection just wants us to escape predators.
It doesn't matter what they look like, what the icon is in your brain, a bat's brain, or whatever.
As long as you survive, that's all that matters.
So this is why we're so easily deceived by illusions and magic tricks and things like that, that our brains aren't really wired to represent reality as it really is, whatever that means.
Yes, so you can say that without human consciousness, the iconic reality that we inhabit would not exist.
Right.
Okay.
Now, if I can't add to that slightly, as I've told him, so let's say, you know, What's it like to be a dolphin?
I don't know.
Okay, so some kind of echolocation system.
And his point is, well, sharks are dangerous, so they avoid sharks.
But the question is, what does a shark look like in a dolphin's brain versus what it looks like in our brain?
It's probably quite different, and I really have no idea what a shark looks like to a dolphin.
But I do know this, there really are sharks, and they really have sharp things on one end and a tail on the other, and they're eating machines, and you should avoid them.
So that's actually a weakness of the icon claim, I would say, because it looks to me like, here's a twist on it.
What we see in our conscious experience are Functional icons, but they're also low-resolution representations of the things that are actually there.
Yes.
And I don't think that computer icons are low-resolution representations of the things that are there.
They're just functional icons.
Now, I might be wrong about that because Because it's hard to conjure up that analysis on the fly, but the trash can, for example, on your desktop is actually a low-resolution representation of an actual trash can, not a computer trash can, even though it functions the same way.
So I like the icon idea, but I think it misses some element of the actual relationship between the perception and the reality.
We definitely see a low resolution, which is why we can stand animated pictures like, say, The Simpsons, where everything is extremely low resolution, but that makes no functional difference to us whatsoever.
And we definitely see and hear in low resolution.
I think what we see are something like, instead of icons, they're more like thumbnails that are functional.
That's a good analogy.
Well, I like it, because the thumbnail actually is an unbiased sampling of the actual object, right?
Because a photograph is a relatively unbiased sample of an object, and you can compress it.
Right.
And what you're doing is blurring out distinctions between You're blurring out distinctions between different aspects of it without losing the relationship between the parts.
It's something like that.
Yeah, that's right.
In a way, much of science operates at a metaphorical level.
Have you ever seen a string theory documentary that didn't have violins featured in it?
That the brain is like a computer.
It's like a dual processor.
It's like a quantum information.
You can't escape those metaphors.
You can't because we have to talk and we have to, you know, transfer the literal meaning of metaphors to move something from here to there in the original Greek.
So, you know, we're trying to capture some idea that's really hard to get that by something we're very familiar with.
Right.
Part of the problem we have, too, that addresses some of the issues you've dealt with earlier, Some of your recent conversations with people is we're operating at different levels.
Deepak, for example, pounds me with articles about quantum physics that show material stuff is really just energy, atoms are mostly empty space, and so forth, and this table is actually mostly empty space.
This is all true, but we don't live at the quantum level.
We live at the macro level where I'm sitting in a chair and I'm not passing through it because At this level, it's not the same as at the quantum level.
And I think making that distinction helps clarify a lot of things.
So when you talk about The truth to be found in biblical stories or literary stories like Dostoevsky or Shakespeare or whatever.
And the materialist scientist says, well, no, I mean something different by truth.
It's not that one of you is right and the other is wrong.
It's just that these are different levels or different ways of talking about whatever they mean.
I like to think about them as different toolkits.
That's right, different toolkits.
That's what makes me a classic American pragmatist, is that I think of these things as tools.
There's a scientific toolkit, and there's a toolkit for action in the world, and they overlap, but they're not the same.
So, for example, I call this...
Alvy's error, Alvy Singer, the character in Woody Allen's film, Annie Hall.
And there's that funny scene where there's a flashback to where he's in childhood, and he's refused to do his homework, and he's depressed, and his mother takes him to the doctor or psychiatrist, whoever he is.
And, okay, why are you depressed, Alvy?
He says, because I found out that the universe is expanding.
So what?
Because if the universe is expanding, then eventually it's all going to blow up and nothing means anything.
Right, right.
Mother screams at him.
We live in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn's not expanding.
We've got to do homework.
Yeah, well, that's a nice observation, I think, too, because...
So, okay, let's go back to the conceptualization issue.
So, one of the things that we've agreed on, and I don't want to lose track of that thread because I think it's useful, is that we do see an iconic reality.
Right.
And the icons have practical utility, but they also bear some one-to-one correspondence with the thing in itself.
And low resolution is a nice way of thinking about it.
So they're low resolution icons with functional utility.
Now, the question would be...
So then, and what that makes clear is that without human consciousness, all that disappears.
Right.
Okay.
But then the question is...
Partly, what is there outside of that functional iconic representation?
And so that would be the old question of the thing in itself.
And you could say, and I think you could say with some justification, that the thing in itself is in potential something that collapses across time and space.
So that it's everything and nothing at the same time, which is, I guess that's an Eastern claim.
That's one way of thinking about it.
It's a Taoist claim.
And I like it because...
The problem with the, or one of the issues that, and this is associated with the idea of Brooklyn, it's not only does Elvie, is it Elvie or Elvie?
Elvie.
Elvie.
Not only does Elvie live in Brooklyn, He lives in Brooklyn now, right?
And so it's spatially located and temporally located.
And so his mother's objection is, well, don't pick a reference point that makes everything right now irrelevant, which is really good practical psychological advice, because one of the things that leads people down the path of nihilism is this claim that This observation that you can pick a time frame of analysis that makes your current action useless.
Who's going to care in a million years?
The theist that argues, you know, without God, without some sort of external source for morality and meaning, nothing we do matters.
Because in 15 billion years, you know, the heat death of the universe or whatever.
We don't live 15 billion years from now.
We live now, here, and what we do does matter.
You know, so like the theists would argue, you know, the theodicy problem, you know, without God, there's no right or wrong.
Whatever Stalin did or Hitler did is perfectly fine because of the heat death of the universe.
No, it's not fine because the people that are suffering in the Gulag Archipelago or in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, they're not thinking about 15 billion years from now.
They're living right here, right now.
The torture is really doing wrong by these standards.
So again, the level at which we're talking about is everything.
And this is why, in Heavens on Earth, I'm concerned about the obsession with people obsessing too much about the afterlife.
Not just religious people, but scientists.
It's what I call the afterlife for atheists.
The core of my book is really about all the cryonics people, and the transhumanists, and the singularitarians, and the extropians, And the people that are going to upload your mind into a computer and turn it on, Ray Kurzweil and all these guys, they're almost gurus when you go to these conferences.
It's like, we get to live forever.
We are the generation that gets to live forever.
Some of them think they're the generation that's going to instantiate the deity in the form of computational entity as well.
That's right.
I mean, Kurzweil even has a funny line about that.
Is there a God?
Well, there's going to be pretty soon, as soon as we hit the singularity.
Right, right, right.
And so I've been to these Singularity Summits, and it reminds me of when I was religious.
You know, I used to be an evangelical.
I went to Pepperdine University, which is a Church of Christ school.
I was really into it, and going to church and all that stuff.
And I go to this Singularity Summit, and it's like, wow, I'm back in church.
Here's Ray Kurzweil, a guru up there telling us, we are the first generation that will live forever.
And, you know, Aubrey de Grey, this radical life extensionist scientist, you know, he's on record saying the first person to live a thousand years is born now, is alive now.
Right, so, okay, so the heaven issue, there's two elements to the heaven issue that we can discuss then.
One is the belief in the existence of heaven, and the other is the positing of heaven as an aim.
Yes.
And those are interestingly related.
So from my perspective, so one of the things, as far as I've been able to tell, one of the things that allows us to transform the reality that's too complicated to perceive into these functional low-resolution icons, let's say, is an aim.
You have to aim, right?
And you have to aim with your eyes.
In fact, we're also extraordinarily good at detecting how other people aim with their eyes.
Yes.
So, and the question is always, well, where should you aim?
And the answer to that, archetypally, I would say, and biologically for that matter, is that you should aim up.
Because why the hell would you aim down?
Down is hell, right?
Down is where the suffering is.
Down is where the malevolence is.
So you aim up.
And archetypally, up is heaven.
And so one of the things that I can't...
it seems to me that there's some possibility that it was impossible for human beings to discover the future, which is something that we seem to have done.
Maybe that was prefrontal extension.
Maybe that was the expansion of the prefrontal cortex and its deep wiring with the visual cortex that actually enabled us to foresee the future, something like that.
I don't know if you can foresee the future without stumbling upon the idea of heaven at the same time, because...
Heaven, in that sense, becomes the best possible future.
And you're aiming at a better future.
And because you're aiming at a better future, you're kind of compelled to also conceptualize, at least in principle, like the platonic ideal of the future.
And so then that future potential starts to become a kind of a reality.
It's something like that.
Yeah, I think that's a super good point.
Again, my concern about obsessing too much about the next life is you're going to miss out on this life, which is where you live right now.
But that's different from aiming at it.
I mean, you know, I wrote a book on moral progress, The Moral Arc, aiming for incremental improvements in civil rights and health and longevity.
And, you know, ridding ourselves of disease and war.
These are all admirable goals, and we should keep doing that.
Aiming for something.
And I do like the metaphor of up, because it is up.
Maybe it's because we're a social hierarchical species.
Yeah, well, I think that's why the pyramids, I believe that.
I think that's what the pyramids represent with their gold cap, right?
Right.
And the Washington Monument is the same thing, right?
Cap with aluminum.
hierarchy of needs and so on.
Yeah.
So at the end of my chapter on monotheism's versions of heaven, I float the idea, I probably won't be accepted by evangelicals and fundamentalists, but that when Jesus talked about the kingdom is within, he mentions this not as often as I would have liked, he mentions this not as often as I would have liked, but I think he's referring to the fact that heaven is within us in the sense that we should be aiming to improve
And you know, that Christians and atheists have conflicted over this, the passage where he says, you know, Matthew 16, 26, I say unto you there, Some standing here which will not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.
And, you know, of course, atheists go, ha ha ha, he's still not here.
But what if he meant something else, that heaven is not a place to go, but a way to be here and now?
I'm very, what would you call, that's a viewpoint that I think is very much worth pursuing.
But I also think there's something deeply strange about that, too, because...
I think that if a psychological state becomes profound enough, it starts to become a social state.
And so I would say that that kingdom of God that's within, which is something Tolstoy wrote a lot about, by the way, that was a book that was, he wrote a book called The Kingdom of God is Within Us, and that profoundly influenced Mahatma Gandhi, by the way, and they had lengthy correspondence, which was part of the reason that Gandhi became a non- Used nonviolent resistance, right, in his fight against the English, which is quite interesting.
But I think that there is...
Look, it's something like this.
Maybe when you go to a concert, it's a great concert, and you're having a very profound psychological experience of unity and harmony, which of course is what you get at a concert.
But if the experience is profound enough psychologically and individually, it also starts to encompass and envelop the people around you.
And so I think the Kingdom of God that Christ was talking about was something like, this is why I like Jean Piaget so much, it's something like the Piagetian Equilibrated State, where things are working out really well for you, and you're deeply immersed in a meaningful experience, but at the same time that meaning is structured so that it's maximally beneficial for the people who are immediately around you, and for the people who are distally related to you.
And so everything stacks up, and that's That's something like the idea of the ladder to heaven or the stairway to heaven, that everything's stacking up properly.
See, I think when people experience that, and this is where the metaphysics touches the material, I think that when people...
Yes, exactly that.
Precisely that.
Yes, precisely that.
Well, you notice that the demons are upside down going down.
Right.
Right, which is exactly right.
That's exactly the right way to conceptualize it.
So, I think that when people have an experience of that, Stacking of meaning that they also have an intimation of immortality that goes along with that that's embodied and that that's partly why the metaphysical speculations about the reality of the kingdom of heaven have emerged because it's not just conceptual right there there is Embodied experience and people report the same thing when they have transcendental experiences of various sorts and those and we know from a scientific perspective that those can be very reliably
induced with the use of agents like psilocybin and You know, I've been really fascinated by what's been happening at Johns Hopkins Hospital with the psilocybin experimenters, because one of the most recent things they showed was that if you take people dying of cancer, and you give them psilocybin, and they have a mystical experience, which is something like an experience of the Kingdom of God on Earth, but also eternally at the same time, that they lose their fear of death, or that at least it's much modified in You know, that's a hell of a finding.
You can't just walk away from that easily, because that's a hell of a thing to treat.
Well, yeah, I have a chapter on that in Heavens on Earth, on near-death experiences.
But we're talking about two different things.
You know, the transitioning from life to death in the most pain-free or anxiety-reduced state is progress.
You know, medical progress, psychological progress, or whatever.
And I'm all for, you know, if psilocybin does it or whatever, then great, we should do that.
But there's a lot of people that claim more than that, that this is opening the doors of perception into another world that's actually out there.
And that those of us who have not taken acid, we just simply can't know.
So now we get at this question of truth.
One of my columns in Scientific American I recently wrote called What Is Truth Anyway?
I mean, when I say, like, I prefer dark chocolate and you prefer milk chocolate, you know, there's no truth that is to be discovered.
Yours is true for you.
Mine's true for me.
Or I say, Stairway to Heaven is the greatest rock song of all time.
And you say, no, no, Free Bird is better than Stairway to Heaven.
And we argue about that.
But there's no experiment we're going to run.
And so as we start to move along these lines, like when Deepak Chopra tells me, meditation works.
Okay, so if it works for you or it doesn't work for me, okay, those are still in that state of internal truths.
But what we want to know in science is does it work for everybody or, you know, 67% of people that do an hour of meditation a day under these conditions have reduced stress hormones and blood pressure and so on in some measurable way.
That's different than just an internal state.
So when we're talking about, again, just, you know, working on toward striving to better ourselves or Or some kind of heaven.
If you mean just metaphorically so that I can better myself, that's different than there's an actual place you can go to.
That's going to be there after we die.
And so I think this is where, you know, scientists go...
You also start messing about with the idea of place in a way that...
That's the problem with having discussions about fundamental realities.
And, you know, when you said another thing that Christ said was that the kingdom of heaven is spread upon earth, but men do not see it.
And that's something that's akin to the idea that the Kingdom of God is within you, although it's a strange twist on it because it also adds an element of externality or physicality to it and an element of immediacy, not something that's forestalled into the future.
But I wonder, see, in my wilder moments of speculation, I have this notion that if things stack up properly, So imagine that you're immersed in a very deeply meaningful experience, and it's operating, it's indicating that harmony has been established between multiple levels of being simultaneously.
I wonder if that can put you in a place that's profound enough or deep enough so that the structure of time and space itself starts to warp around that.
I mean, I know that that's a...
I can't formulate it well, but there's something about it that seems to me to be correct about that, because people have intimations of immortality, and they have intimations of heavenly and hellish abodes as well, and they're not...
They're not the simple kind of rational, even rational fundamentalist beliefs that often people talk about when they're discussing religious belief.
They're more reflected in direct experience, and it's not easy to make sense of them.
Well, when you delve into the literature on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and their versions of the afterlife in heaven, they're quite different.
And the Jews are far less obsessed with going some place after death.
In fact, originally they were going no place at all.
Sheol was just nothing.
It was just you returned to where you were.
Before you're alive, just no place.
And so that religion is far more focused on the here and now.
Like, we have a moral duty to help people, the poor and so on, now, and to live better lives and more lives of dignity and honor and morality now.
And Christianity really started off more like that and kind of morphed over the centuries, particularly in fundamentalist and evangelicals in the 20th century, toward this place we're going to Right, right after we die.
Yeah, you kind of have the schism in Christianity today between the kind of the The fundamentalists that are constantly talking about the afterlife and accepting Jesus and they're focused on missionary work and converting people versus, say, maybe the Rick Warrens of the world that want to put their money into soup kitchens and helping the poor and Christians have a moral duty to help those in need and not so much focused on It's funny
because there are real dangers associated with both those kinds of conceptualizations.
I mean, you alluded to one danger that was associated with, let's call those who are concerned more with the immediate present.
And that's starting to manifest itself in these technological immortalists.
They're saying, well, we should transform the nature of being extraordinarily radically right here and now so that we have heaven and immortality here.
You think, well, what do we lose by doing that?
And that's a question that's really worth asking, because if we're transhuman, then we lose being human.
And it may be that we actually don't want to lose being human, even though being human means suffering and malevolence, something like that.
It's a very hard question.
But then the Christians, this is where Nietzsche went after the Christians with such an axe.
He said, well, if you...
Despise the current world and you leave everything to be rectified in the afterlife, then you just abandon life itself and you're really traitors to life.
So, how to steer through those two shoals, let's say, or two cliffs?
That's a very difficult proposition.
Well, my message in the book to the singulatarians and the cryonics and transhumanists and so on is, You know, I'm glad you're working on this problem, you know, because they say, Schirmer, don't you want to live to be a thousand years?
And my response is, look, just get me to 90 without, you know, cancer, and 100 without Alzheimer's, and 110 without being plugged into machines lying in a bed, because that's not a life.
And so I'm glad people are working on, like, what's the best diet, how much...
What can we do to improve our memory and so on?
That's all great.
And I'm glad Kurzweil is now the chief engineer of all Google.
I mean, he's got some resources to do something about this.
But this focus on living a thousand years, first of all, you may miss the little incremental things we can do, but also you're missing out now.
There's this film I write about in the book on Ray Kurzweil.
It's a little kind of biographical film of him called Transcendent Man.
And he's constantly talking about living forever and so on.
And he's obsessed with his father.
His father died when he was 51.
The father was 51 and Ray kind of missed out having a father figure because the father was always working and Ray was a real entrepreneur achiever from his teenage years so he was always working.
And the film kind of follows him around, collecting everything he can about his father, and he keeps it in the basement of his house, and he wants to resurrect his father in a computer.
And it's like, oh boy, Freud would have a field day with this.
I'm not a Freudian guy, but there's something going on there, this sort of morose focus on...
I see this strange dichotomy and attitude that you just described, even characterizing you.
I see that in my own life because I'm very interested in technologies that stave off aging, dietary manipulations, and I have this machine in my basement that's an intense pulse light machine that's an unbelievable skin rejuvenator.
It's an absolute miracle, this machine.
It'll take sun damage from your skin completely and force rejuvenation.
It's like using Photoshop on your skin.
It's amazing.
And so I think, well, isn't it interesting to do everything possible to prolong youth and life?
But at the same time, there's another part of me that's thinking, well...
This is something I wrote about in this new book that I'm publishing.
I was thinking about Socrates and his ability to accept his death.
And what Socrates seems to have revealed in his acceptance of his death was that if you live your life properly, then you've lived your life in some sense.
You've exhausted it in some sense.
And the question is, if you lived a thousand years, well, what exactly would you do?
You know, like, I've had kids, and I loved having kids, but I wouldn't have them again.
Like, I wouldn't do that again, I don't think.
And I have a grandchild, and that's fine, but that's a new thing.
Like, I've had a career, and as I get older, the idea of having 10 more careers seems...
It's not like I'm not interested in it, but it doesn't grip me the same way that it would have, say, 20 years ago.
And so I wonder if it is the case that life is in some sense structured so that its finitude is necessary and not something that should be, well, casually transcended, let's say.
Well, the transhumanists would respond to that, that you're just used to this idea of only living 80, 90 years, and then you're done, that we would adjust to that.
Well, maybe.
Well, yeah, the question would be, though, who would be the we that would adjust to that?
Because...
Well, yes, you would no longer...
Okay, to get there, we would really no longer be human.
The idea of the transhumanists and the singulitarian people is truly, you're not human anymore.
We have brain...
Like the cochlear implant for hearing...
It's a kind of brain transplant device.
Well, they want to ramp that up, you know, and put chips in your cortex, and you'd essentially have Wikipedia in your brain for instant access, and so on.
And so it would truly bring new meaning to what it means to be human.
Right, yes.
Well, and then you could also argue that that's a form of death, because if you transform yourself so radically that you're unrecognizable, then where's the continuity with what you once were?
You know, this is one of the reasons I have some real sympathy for many reasons.
I have many reasons for this, but one of them that I have very much sympathy for the idea, the Christian idea, that's associated with immortality of the resurrection of the body.
Because the Christians insisted that this is not some sort of abstract life.
Like, it's not uploaded into a computer.
It's not...
Blowing out all of your limitations now, you know, you might ask what the resurrected body would be and of course that's a particularly that's a perfectly fine question, but it doesn't it doesn't That doesn't move you around the fact that there was a question that was really to be grappled with there,
because what the Christians were trying to do was to have their take and eat it too, in some sense, and to say, look, there's some absolute utility to the limitation that's imposed upon you by a mortal frame, right?
That's the characteristic element of being human, and that perhaps there's a way of having that and transcending it at the same time.
Now, what that would look like is obviously by no means...
I deal with that in Heavens on Earth.
I have a chapter on the soul.
Post-Descartes, Christians became more duelists.
Before that, they were more focused on the physical resurrection of the body.
There are still some Christian sects today who think that you'll physically be resurrected, but most of them are duelists.
It's just this kind of non-physical thing that goes and is with God and Jesus and so on.
But they actually debate this.
It's the question of identity, the problem of identity.
You say, well, If you're physically resurrected in heaven, what's there?
How old are you?
And some of them actually have an answer.
You're 30.
That's like the ideal age, physically and I suppose mentally, to be 30.
And also Jesus was 30.
Right, right.
You know, maybe.
Okay.
But then the question is, and I ask this question for the mind uploaders, the transhumanists, it's like, There is no fixed self.
First of all, all your cells, almost all the atoms in your body are recycled about every decade or so.
So there is no defined physical self of you, you know, the thesis ship.
You replace all the wood in the ship.
We still call it thesis ship.
Right, right, right.
It's the pattern.
Dissipative structure.
That was Schrodinger's term, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, okay, so it's the pattern of information that is your memory.
It's your mem self, memory self.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, okay, that's better, but at what age?
Because I have memories now that I didn't have when I was 30.
So what happens if I'm resurrected at age 30, where's all the memories of my last, I'm 63 now, the last 33 years of memories that I have?
I want those too.
And so I say, okay, you can have all those memories, but wait, the memories I have now at 63 of when I was 30 are very different than the memories when I was 30 of what I was like at that time.
And so there's no fixed set of memories even that represents you because those are constantly edited and changed and reinterpreted and It's like, okay, now I understand when I had that 10 years as a bike racer in the 1980s, I was just sort of going through doing my thing, and now I see in context what that meant for my life, but I didn't know it at the time.
That's true for everything we do.
That's why I always laugh when people write memoirs in their 20s or 30s.
It's like, how can you write a memoir?
You have no idea what you're doing now is going to mean in 30 years.
And so in religious, so both Both scientific attempts at immortality or the afterlife or whatever, and religious, they have the same problem.
You know, what is up there that's being resurrected?
Because there is no fixed self.
It's a constantly dynamic, changing system.
And then there's one more problem that I deal with, the point of view self, the POV self.
You know, there's you and I looking out through your eyes, and you, Jordan, go to sleep tonight, you wake up tomorrow morning, and you're groggy for a few minutes, but your point of view returns.
And, you know, the singularity people, they think, well, we'll copy all your memories and put them in a computer, and then we'll turn it on, and you'll wake up, and you'll be looking out through the little camera hole there like Johnny Depp in Transcendence.
And you'll be in there.
No, I don't think so.
Why would your point of view all of a sudden leap from your current body into the computer?
In the same sense that instead of sacrificing your brain and slicing it up and scanning, this is current thoughts, scanning every synapse, What if in a hundred years from now, we had a sophisticated fMRI machine that could scan your brain and scan every single synapse and reproduce it, and we had a computer big enough with Moore's Law doubling and so on, it would be enough digits to reproduce your entire connectome and turn it on.
But you, Jordan Peterson, are still standing there, right next to the computer, and they turn it on.
You're not all of a sudden in the computer.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, there's other problems with that, too, is that, you know...
If I remember correctly, you have more neurons in your autonomic nervous system than you have in your central nervous system.
So what are you going to do about those, man?
It's like your brain isn't in your head.
Not just your brain, no.
So you have an extended body, so you...
To the cryonics people, they lop off the head, we're just going to clone your body.
Okay, this is getting too complicated.
You really need the whole body.
Yes, well, again, that's the physical resurrection issue, is that the idea that, and I think that you put your finger on the flaw in the new immortality crowd.
They really aren't Cartesian.
They think of your consciousness as something that's Well, they're confused about it in some sense because they think of it as a kind of soul, which would be a pattern, and that pattern is only instantiated in the brain.
It's like, well, physiologically, that's just not the case.
It's like, what about the hormones?
There's a lot of things going on in the brain that aren't easily reducible to synaptic patterns, especially when you consider also its connection with the body, and you have to consider that.
It's even worse than that because not only are we all of those things, we are also social beings.
And so there's all the interactions we have and have had with all the other people in our lives or neighbors or strangers or whatever.
So you have all those binary digits that have to be captured of all the interactions going back for your whole life, not just your life, but all of the Social, cultural, political, economic forces that have been grinding along for centuries that shape who we are and the kind of world we live in.
You know, if you're going to create a virtual reality, a holodeck that recreates all that, you know, I mean, this would be a huge computer.
Essentially, it would be the universe is what you would need.
You end up with a map that's just as big as the territory.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
That's a big problem.
You wrote a book about that.
That's right.
Yeah, it's like, what do you do?
If you're going to fold it up, where are you going to put it?
That's the big problem.
It's like that Stephen Wright line about, I got a map of the United States actual size.
Yeah, exactly.
Really hard to fold up.
Yeah, exactly.
So, let me ask you a couple of more personal questions, if you don't mind.
Now, you mentioned...
Briefly during our during our conversation that you know you you you were you're from a pretty fundamentalist Christian background and you became a skeptic and you've been pursuing that with with with well Adamantly let's say for a very long time.
So two questions is what?
What put you on that path and what do you think your positive function as a skeptic is?
Yeah First of all, my family wasn't religious at all.
They weren't anti-religious.
It just wasn't a thing.
I became interested in it in the early 70s when I was in high school, which was sort of the early development of the evangelical movement in the United States, the so-called born-again movement.
There was no affiliation with any church in particular.
We all recognized that organized religion was probably not all that great.
It's just sort of a one-on-one.
It's just you and Jesus, you and the Bible, you and God, and so on.
And that was that whole, you know, Jesus Christ superstar time and all that.
But I took it fairly seriously, and I went to Pepperdine, and I took courses in the Old Testament, the New Testament.
I read everything C.S. Lewis wrote to the course in the writings of C.S. Lewis.
Well, I was into it.
But, you know, at Pepperdine, you're in the bubble of, you know, the Christian worldview, this totally consistent It's internally coherent until you're outside the bubble.
So when I went to a secular university to study experimental psychology, not only was that more of a grounding in the scientific method of understanding reality, but just for fun, I took courses in evolutionary theory.
I was kind of a creationist.
I remember sitting there thinking, holy shit, this stuff is real.
There's an actual science behind this.
But then I took a course in anthropology and comparative mythology, and that kind of opened up my eyes.
So I sort of went through my Joseph Campbell stage and the myth of the hero.
I read The Hero of a Thousand Faces and all that.
It's like, okay, this is a different way of looking at things than the pure scientific way, but it's also different from a lot of these religious traditions.
So that sort of told me that the particular religion I was in, It's wrong to ask, is it right or wrong?
It's a completely different thing, and it just wasn't working for me anymore.
I enjoyed the scientific way of thinking about the world, and I was surrounded by people that—it's not that they were atheists in graduate school and after that.
Remember, this is now the late 70s, and then when I went to graduate school for the second time for my PhD in history of science in the late 80s, Again, the whole science and religion, atheist, new atheism, that wasn't a thing.
No one really talked about it.
It wasn't like a big thing.
You have to decide, say, are you a theist or an atheist?
No one really talked about that.
And so my focus was really just on science and understanding things.
Now, the problem of being sort of an intellectual or historian of science, psychologist like I am, and you're interested in studying beliefs like I do, and then also being a public intellectual as the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and I write this column for Scientific American every month, I got a Essentially debunk something or analyze something is it kind of puts you in the in this of the role of like well I got to say if this is right or wrong This is true or false or or something in between so I must constantly on this kind of razor-edge between I
just am a curious observer of people's beliefs.
And then on the other hand, I actually have to kind of pass judgment in writing every month.
Well, is this one correct or not correct or something in between?
And so, again, it's at different levels.
Sometimes I'm just talking about people's beliefs.
Other times I'm actually kind of forced to say, well, I think this is probably true or probably not true.
And I think this is, you know, I listen to...
Tried to listen to that first podcast you did with Sam.
So difficult to get through.
And again, to me, you know, two hours, you were just talking past each other at different levels of, you know, Sam's laser focused on, you know, people behave, they act on certain beliefs.
And, you know, the obvious one flying planes into buildings is because you have a certain belief that leads to that.
Yes, that's true.
And it would be good if people didn't believe these things that lead them to do those kinds of violent acts.
But there's a whole other level you can talk about beliefs that have nothing to do with leading to violence or so on.
And to me, it just depends on what's your goal when you're talking about this particular thing right now.
And, you know, so there, you know, I was good friends with Stephen Jay Gould, and, you know, I was sympathetic to his Noma.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
In the sense that, you know, the world's already too tribal, and so if we can calm everybody down, that's good.
On the other hand, I do think science and reason can inform and maybe even in some cases determine human values and moral decisions, right and wrong and so on.
I've written quite a bit about that too.
And so again, that's sort of a different level of what you're talking about and what the goals are at that particular moment.
Yeah, well, I mean, the skeptic, when I think of a skeptic, this is a strange leap, of course, but there's a scene in Revelation where Christ comes back, and he comes back with a sword coming out of his mouth, and that's where he divides the damned and the saved.
And that's also an image of the logos, right?
The word that brings forth order out of chaos.
Because partly what you do as a skeptic, it isn't so much that you damn the untrue, it's that you rescue the true.
And that's really necessary for people because we need to stand on a rock.
And one of the big problems I have with New Age movement, and I've kind of studied this technically looking at the way that creative people think, because there are creative people who are critically minded and there are creative people who are not critically minded, and non-critically minded creativity seems more associated with mental illness and psychopathology.
You have to be able to discriminate between what's worth saving and what isn't, so to speak.
And that's what a good skeptic does, because a skeptic isn't necessarily someone who says, oh, this is all false.
A good skeptic is someone who says, oh, look, there's a kernel of truth here, but it's deeply buried under layers and layers of rust and nonsense that needs to be burned away or polished away so that we can get to what's absolutely essential.
Right, so back to where you were saying before about striving upwards towards something...
That heaven up there, whatever that is.
Of course, we don't want to go for utopia because there's no such place to get to, and that causes, you know, catastrophes in history.
So, but the idea of, like, making the world a more rational place.
This is a good goal, and this is the kind of thing that we do at Skeptic Magazine.
You know, what do we do?
We promote science and reason and critical thinking.
You write about critical thinking.
This is what you do.
So we're all working on that, and that's good.
Yeah, well, I'm always looking.
Sorry, go ahead.
So when we talk about literature, for example, let's return to the books of the Bible or Dostoevsky, or if we want to make our listeners' heads explode, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged.
Why have people, by the tens of millions, purchased her books?
Literary critics say they're awful, they're terrible novels, they're not well written, and her figures are black and white, and her philosophy is wrong.
But you have to ask yourself, why do tens of millions of people love those books?
And it's because she's doing something else.
She's not trying to describe the world the way it actually is, but the way it could be.
And these are the things we've done wrong, communism, socialism, because she came out of that Yes, exactly.
Her figures are archetypal heroes of a certain form.
If we can bring it back to some real-world example, I just recently started following Jocko Wilnick.
I'm never going to be Jocko Wilney, but I got his book and I read one page a day and it's kind of like, oh yeah, come on, you can get up at 6 in the morning and get out there on your bike ride with the guys.
I don't want to do it, but then I see Jocko's page and he says, just get at it.
Okay, so in a way, it's not describing the world in a scientific way.
It's sending a different message, like, you should strive to be this.
Even if you don't make it, just do it.
Do something, anything.
And that's a different goal.
Yes, well, I think, too, that Okay, so first of all, with regards to Ayn Rand, I think the criticism level at her that her characters are too black and white is correct, because I think that one of the things that distinguishes great literature from propaganda is that in great literature most of the conflict is within rather than between.
And the problem with Ayn Rand is all her good characters are the same good character, and all her bad characters are the same bad character.
And there's no overlap between them, so there's a purity.
There's an archetypal purity, but that compromises its utility as literature, I would say.
Solzhenitsyn makes his point in Gulag Archipelago where he says, if only the world were simply black and white and we could take the bad people and isolate them somewhere, But the problem is, you know, we all have darkness and evil in our hearts.
That's right.
The line between good and evil runs down every heart.
That's his famous phrase.
And it was something he experienced very deeply and is also, you know, is also primordially true.
Scientists analyze literature in this sense.
Well, there's a body of literature, evolutionary, you know, literary literature, In which, you know, Pinker writes about this at the end of the blank slate, in which he talks about, you know, these novels, these sophisticated novels in which the characters are rich and deep,
you know, they have all these good characters and bad characteristics and so on, and we can glean from that in a sense that the novelists were ahead of the cognitive, this is his point, the novelists were about a century ahead of the cognitive scientists in figuring out...
Figuring out human nature.
Or maybe a thousand years ahead of the colony.
We'll see.
Modern literature anyway.
Yeah.
You know, so we can gain a lot from that.
Not just the rich emotional experience of reading a good novel, but actually teasing out.
This is what some of these evolutionary literary people are trying to do.
It's like there's certain themes that come up over and over and over again.
It's not totally random.
You know, unlike the postmodernists, there actually are I think the problem with the postmodernists, technically speaking, and I've thought a lot about this, is that they got their initial criticism right, which is that there's an infinite number of ways of interpreting a finite set of phenomena.
But there isn't an infinite number of valid ways of interpreting a finite set of phenomena.
And that's where you get right back into the issue of the circulation of the interpretation around these great underlying archetypal themes and that are built in large part right into our biology.
I read a really interesting analysis of the Of the symbol of the dragon a while back.
And I can't conjure up the name of the book, unfortunately.
But his hypothesis, which I thought was a very good one, was that a dragon is a meta-predator.
So it's the symbol for predator.
But it's more than that.
But the predator is tree, cat, snake, bird.
Because the fundamental predators of tree-dwelling primates were cats, snakes, and birds.
And so what it is is an amalgam of all those things.
And so it's real, just like the category of predator is real, even though snakes and cats are both in the category of predator, and no one says, well, there's no such thing as a predator.
And then you can add fire to that for a variety of reasons, not least being I'm sure that fire wiped out many of our ancestors as well.
And then the additional twist, which is that dragons also hoard gold.
So human beings, because we're not just prey animals, learned that if we confronted the meta-predator we would gain as a consequence.
Right, so there's certain channels down which good stories go based on our biological nature, our evolved nature.
It's not that it's completely deterministic in that sense.
No, no, it's variations on a theme, I would say.
So there was an interesting article published, I think it was in Nature, a few months ago.
Showing that it's very very high resolution brain scan.
And so, you know, there's the idea of course that in the cortex that neurons that fire together wire together.
And then we learned that the neurons are actually in cortical columns.
So they actually have their structure, their unit structure.
So they're not just randomly connecting with neurons everywhere in the brain.
But what this scan showed was an underlying super highway of built-in connections.
So that the columns themselves could wire into the already existent super highways.
So it was like there was an underlying architecture that was highly probable that it would manifest itself.
And I thought, well, that looks like the neural architecture of something like an archetype.
Maybe.
One of the best arguments for cryonics is that it would be really fun to come back, say, a thousand years from now, just to see what scientists or scholars are talking about, like, of how the brain works, you know?
What's the metaphor they're using then?
And they'll look back on us and go, oh, they thought the brain is a computer.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Yeah, well, I think by the time we come up with a fully material account of consciousness, our notion of what constitutes material will have undergone substantial revision.
I do wonder if, sometimes I toy with the idea of the Mysterians.
Do you know the Mysterians?
There are certain mysteries of the universe we will never solve, just because of the limitations of the structure of our brain.
So, God, free will, and determinism, the nature of consciousness.
You know, there's a few of these core, deep questions.
So, my friend, the late, great Martin Gardner, called himself a fideist.
You're probably familiar with fideism.
No, I'm not.
Well, it's based on William James and Emmanuel Unamumo.
Oh yes, yeah.
It's sort of a pragmatist philosophy.
So anyway, Martin was a long-time columnist for Scientific American, one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement.
He was a skeptical, as I am, maybe more on almost everything.
But he believed in God, and he believed in Prayer in the afterlife and so on, even though he would say to us fellow skeptics, yes, I think the atheists have slightly better arguments than the theists, just slightly, but, you know, because you can't determine one way or the other for sure, whether there's a God or not, whether there's free will of determinism, it's okay to, just practically speaking, to just do whatever works for you.
This is the pragmatism thing.
So he says he prays, he believes that there's some kind of afterlife and that there's something out there, not an anthropomorphic God or anything like that, So he called this fideism.
Anyway, so I kind of respected that because he didn't make any truth claims like, I can prove this, or I'm sure I'm right.
He said, it's just true for me.
And, you know, that gets back to that question of what is true?
What is truth anyway?
If that's all you're saying, it's just true for me, psychologically true, works for me, it's really kind of the end of the conversation.
So when I deal with creationists, I think the Earth is 10,000 years old.
Okay, so we have a problem.
There is a conflict.
Steve Gould's non-overlapping magisterium doesn't apply there.
One side is wrong and one side is right when you're talking about, say, the age of the universe or the world.
But if you say, look, this is what works for me.
I'm not claiming I can prove it.
It just works for me.
Really, what is there to say after that?
It's kind of the end of the conversation.
And I do think sometimes that when we're talking about free will and determinism, what do you mean by these words?
Yeah, well, the devil's always in the details.
If you hit an epistemological wall, we can't get past.
I'm a compatibilist.
I think Dan Dennett, I'm not a philosopher, but those kinds of arguments, I think, make more sense to me.
And in any case, I have what I call a behavioral compatibilism.
That is, whatever your position is intellectually on free will and determinism, it doesn't really matter because when you walk out the door, you believe you're making choices.
Yeah, well, this is the argument that I tried to level at Sam Harris with regards to the metaphysical foundations of his ethics.
It's like...
It's the same sort of thing.
And I think Ben Shapiro just went after him on the same grounds, is that I don't care what you say about whether or not you're an atheist.
You act like you're part of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
And so you think you don't believe, but I think you do.
But we have different definitions of what the word believe means.
So now I'm not saying that that's necessary, the argument to end all arguments, but it's one that needs to be taken seriously, especially by the more rationalistic atheists, because they don't give the devil his due.
Now you're in a different category, because you went through the whole Christian thing in detail, and you know the stories, and you know the mythology, and you know the The psychology as well.
You know, you talked about Joseph Campbell and people like him.
So, you know, that puts you in the realm of the, I would say, what would you say, biblically and psychoanalytically informed.
Well, again, it depends what your goals are.
What are you trying to do?
I mean, people like Sam and Richard, you know, they're laser focused on one particular thing they're working at.
So, good.
And I'm on board with that.
I think, you know, certain belief systems are dangerous.
Okay, so it'd be good if we could correct those.
But I'm also interested in other aspects of belief, and, you know, that's a slightly different goal.
So, for example, when I'm talking to Deepak, you know, it's true, quantum physics says what it says, you know, okay, but at some level, I say, Deepak, what's the actionable take-home?
Why does this...
Okay, so let's say the world is completely determined, and right down to the last synaptic connection, the particles, whatever, and I really have no choice.
Yeah, but so what?
I still have to choose to go to work tomorrow, or as I tell Deepak, you know, my mortgage is still due next Tuesday.
So even if none of this matters, or it's all empty space, or, you know, it's all consciousness, so what?
Yeah, well, that is...
I still have to act in the world.
I have to act in the world in a way as...
As if I'm making choices, as if I'm responsible for my actions, because I am.
Yeah, well, that's good.
Well, I would also say in relationship to that, there isn't any evidence to me that we've been able to determine how to build a functional society without building those axioms into the substructure of the society.
Free will and responsibility.
Yeah.
Maybe they don't exist, but if we don't build societies that assume they exist, the societies become unstable unbelievably rapidly.
And to me, that's a kind of evidence that they do exist.
I mean, even knowing the, say, game theoretic model of tilting the incentives to get people to do this versus that, you know, libertarian paternalism, Dick Thaler calls it, you know.
So if you give people a choice architecture where you can't You put the desserts in the back and the healthy foods in the front, or you have different kinds of structured menus to nudge people to choose healthier diets or better investment tools at companies, things like that.
We're already doing these sorts of things as if we can, if not determine people, People's actions and choices, but at least shape them in a way.
But even doing that, we're actively choosing to do that.
So being self-aware that I know that if I go shopping on an empty stomach, I'm much more likely to buy unhealthy foods, cookies or ice cream or whatever, than I would if I went shopping on a full stomach.
So I choose to alter my environment around me because I'm going to nudge myself in another direction.
How is that not a kind of a choice?
And if you're a determinist, I would say, do you recognize, say, that the addict who is just totally hooked on heroin or oxycodone or something is different from you and I who are not addicted?
Yes, there's a difference.
What's that difference?
If it's all determinism, it's tumors all the way down or whatever.
That's a good one.
What is the difference, then, between the addict and the not?
The addict is more determined.
No, but I think that's a good objection.
That's right.
What is that as a concept?
Yeah, what does that mean, more determined?
Right, exactly, exactly.
This is why I like Dan Dennett's idea of the degrees of freedom.
You know, you and I have more degrees of freedom than our dogs, our dogs more than the cockroach, whatever.
There's just more variation.
And we have one additional problem.
We're aware.
In terms of time as well, like, you know, if you're driving, here's a nice way of thinking about the relationship between free will and determinism.
Let's say you're driving down the road at 60 miles an hour.
Where do you look?
And the answer isn't right in front of the car.
Because you've already run over the thing that's right in front of the car.
So you look about a quarter of a mile down the road.
And what that means is that you can start to sequence your deterministic actions.
And so there's this idea of a ballistic movement.
So if I do this, let's see.
So you see, I didn't hit my hand when I came down like that.
Now, the truth of the matter is, is that there isn't enough time.
So when I release this movement, Quickly there isn't enough time for the message to get from my hand to my brain and back to stop my hand as an element of free choice I have to plan and release the entire movement at once including the stopping that's ballistic and so as soon as I Implement that movement.
There's no free will.
It's like the space that I have choice over has collapsed into a deterministic world.
But I think what we do is we look out in the future far enough so that we can sequence our choices and they collapse into determinism as we implement them.
It's something like that.
And I think that works neurologically, too.
If you look at how action patterns actually manifest themselves in the brain, it does seem to be something akin to that.
That's why I don't make much out of the Libet experiments, for example.
Well, Libet himself was a compatibilist.
He did not believe in complete determinism.
Pinker put it this way in the blank slate, that you are part of the causal net of the universe, but you're part of it, and you're making choices that Further determine the universe, but they're still your choices, so you are morally accountable for them.
I do think the law has evolved nicely along these lines, along the sort of shades of gray or the...
Yeah, I think so too.
You know, the law, if you intended to kill somebody versus doing it in an act of rage, because, you know, it was just on spur of the moment, you caught your spouse, and you lose your temper, that's different from...
If we find out that for weeks you were plotting this to kill your spouse or whatever, you're going to get a different kind of penalty.
And that matches neuroscience pretty well.
Yeah, I think so.
I think so.
More or less control over.
So again, more deterministic versus less deterministic.
What are you talking about there?
You're talking about degrees of freedom.
Determinists don't like the word freedom.
Okay, call it something else.
You have more...
Degrees of something, of options.
Whatever you end up with as a synonym eventually ends up meaning freedom.
Well, I think so.
I like the word, I use the word.
So let's return.
I'm going to show your book again here, just so that everybody remembers it.
And I would like to say, let's end with this.
What were you hoping or are you hoping to accomplish with this book, apart from clarifying your own thoughts and communicating them?
I mean, you've put this message into a bottle and you've launched it out there in the world.
What are you hoping for?
Really to everybody, both religious and non-religious or scientists, the message is Really, the here and now is what counts more than anything else.
We don't, again, we live in Brooklyn, not in 15 billion years from now, that whether or not there's an afterlife, because clearly no one knows for sure, we don't live in the afterlife.
We live in this life.
And so what you do really matters.
How you are in relation with other people and your environment really matters.
It matters not just for the future, but the immediate future and even now, whatever that means to you.
And so, again, I'm glad people are working on this and thinking about it.
And if we can improve both society incrementally a little bit, instead of aiming for utopia, aim for protopia.
Yeah, that's a great thing.
Incremental.
And again, instead of aiming for immortality or a thousand years, let's just aim for getting more people to 90 and 100 healthy people.
And happy and living fulfilled lives.
And I do talk about in the end, about the last chapter, last pages, in fact, about the importance of aiming to live a purposeful, meaningful life.
Not a happiness.
You know, I've been coming up as a psychologist to see the literature develop in positive psychology about happiness.
I've read all the happiness books.
It's all great.
But happiness in the sense of I want to plug into the morphine drip.
No, that's not what life is about.
That isn't what gives people meaningful lives.
It's doing things that don't make you happy.
You know, like, again, you work out every day.
It's not fun.
I'm not happy working out.
Or, you know, I was a caretaker for my parents.
I had four parents, step-parents, and so two of them I was a caretaker.
It wasn't fun at all.
I didn't get joy.
I wasn't enjoying it.
It was an uncomfortable experience, but it made me feel better about myself, about the world, like this is doing something more deeply meaningful.
And so I think that's where it counts.
Actually, working to make the world a better place gives you a deeper, more fulfilled life.
That is an excellent place to end.
So I think, like, I think amen to that.
Afterlife or no afterlife, we should improve what we have right in front of us.
Exactly.
Yep.
And that's better than happiness.
I agree.
I agree completely.
It's a much more profound orientation, and it's a boat that won't tip in a storm.
Well, thank you for having me.
Hey, my pleasure.
It was really nice talking with you.
Hopefully we'll get a chance to talk again.
When your book comes out, The 12 Steps, we'll talk about The 12 Steps.
Sounds like a fine plan.
I haven't seen the book yet, but I saw your show with Dave Rubin.
I thought that was really good.
Thanks very much.
It was very good talking with you.
All right, Jordan.
Thanks.
All right.
Bye-bye.
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