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April 8, 2024 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:39:16
Exploring the Philosophical and Scientific | Dr. Daniel Dennett | EP 438
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We wouldn't be arguing about whether there were women and men if things didn't need to be retooled from the very bottom.
That's my sense of the situation now.
That is a critical conversation.
Whether the God-shaped hole gets filled by God exactly is something maybe for us to discuss on the shows.
You're going to be joining me for the next nine evenings on my We Who Wrestle With God tour, and I would like you to come armed with your sharpest sword and hold nothing back.
You've asked me to do something, generally speaking, I'm pretty good at, which is to be disagreeable and try to find holes in things.
I'm going to be coming at it from a kind of first principles, uneducated, but I hope sufficiently intelligent perspective.
I think you could offer to the audience a really critical response that's thoughtful so that I can see if there's still holes in what I've laid out because I can't find any.
That's what we're going to explore.
I can't wait.
The history of the evolution of ethics in the last 10,000 years has been a history of the secularization of ethics.
And it's still evolving.
And we have issues today.
We have issues about vegetarianism.
We've given up cannibalism and slavery, but there's still no agreement on a lot of fundamental issues in ethics.
But those agreements have nothing to do with religion.
Thank you.
Hello, everybody.
I had the opportunity today to talk to the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who, along with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, is probably, perhaps, best known to the world as one of the four horsemen of an atheist movement that has been so influential over the last 20 years.
As many of you know, I've had many discussions with Sam Harris and a couple of discussions with Richard Dawkins, another one hypothetically forthcoming, and it occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I had spoken with Dr.
Daniel Dennett, and I felt that that would be enlightening and necessary, and so today we talked about his understanding of the relationship between science and morality and The relationship between morality and the secular and the religious.
And we exchanged our views about how those different systems of apprehension and conception might be interrelated and talked about the difficulties in...
Both discussing and reconciling the scientific and religious views.
Dr.
Dennett's viewpoint is that the religious viewpoint has been superseded fundamentally, that it might have been a necessary precondition for civilized development, but that it's been superseded.
And we got a long ways in that discussion.
Not to the end and for obvious reasons, but welcome to the exchange.
So, Dr.
Dennett, and I will call you Dan, I'm very interested in talking to you about your ideas about religious belief and practice.
And you may know that I've talked to some of the people who you've been intellectually associated with.
I've had two discussions with Richard Dawkins, and I think we're planning a third if the information I'm getting is correct.
And I've spoken with Sam Harris a number of times, and I think we share a lot of interests, you and I, and one of them is a very deep interest, I would say, and I was reviewing your book today, Breaking the Spell, and that's really the domain that I wanted to discuss, although I'm perfectly happy to branch out from that in anywhere that our conversation takes us, and I want to try out some ideas on you.
And I want to see what you have to say about them.
I'm going to start with a definition, if you don't mind, from your book, so that we have some sense that we're talking about the same thing.
I think I'll try two definitions, because there's two domains I think that we could dig into that would be very useful.
So, like you, I'm interested in what I believe I'm interested in, the scientific analysis of religious belief.
Well, I am too.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, and so that's what I'd like to investigate.
So I'm going to start out with a couple of definitions from your books, and then we can dig into that.
So, the first one is that you described the religious domain.
As avowed belief in the supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.
And that was a definition that I took from breaking the spell.
I'm wondering if...
And then I'm going to add something to that and then I'll get you to comment about whether you think those definitions still suffice or maybe how they've changed in your thinking or anything you'd like to add to them.
So the other thing that I'm curious about here is, you talked about aboutness, and you said the aboutness of a pencil, of the pencil marks.
The aboutness of the pencil marks composing a shopping list is derived from the intentions of the person whose list it is.
And I'm interested in that, the relationship between intentionality and And the reason I want to bring that into the discussion of religion is because I think there's a link between the ideas that I've been developing and the ideas of intentionality that at least in part typify your thought.
And I don't see the relationship precisely between those ideas of intentionality and this definition of the religious enterprise that you described.
And so that's the first thing I'd like to get clarified.
So my understanding of perception is that aim defines perception.
And that seems to me to be akin to your...
It's akin in some ways to your conception of intentionality and aboutness.
Does that seem at least vaguely plausible?
Yes, more or less.
When I speak about intentionality, I mean it in the philosopher's sense derived from Brentano.
It's the aboutness is a good...
Synonym for intentionality.
And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with one's intentions.
If If I'm startled by a loud noise, my startle is about that loud noise, but there's no intention involved in the sense of, what do you intend, sir?
I may have some intentions immediately, like I am going to run or I'm going to duck, but intention in the legal sense of, did you do that on purpose, is a distinct notion.
Okay, so maybe you can clarify what that means in relationship to aboutness then.
That's obviously, I'm not familiar with the distinction that you're drawing, or sufficiently familiar.
What's the relationship between the concepts of intention and aboutness?
Well, the Latin intendere arcum in is to point an arrow at.
And Brentano...
And others said, this is the key to thought.
It's directed at something.
It has an intentional object.
The intentional object is whatever the thought is about.
And the curious thing about thought is that they can be about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
And in that case, they're about something that doesn't exist.
That creates logical problems, but we can set those logical problems aside and just deal with the fact that we have to explain how information that's in our brains can be about things in the world and also about things that don't even exist.
Okay, so that helps.
And the Latin that you referred to is also very helpful.
So I'm going to throw something in from left field, let's say.
So the word sin, there's a three-language point of derivation for the word sin.
They're all from archery.
To sin means to miss the target.
So Greek is hamartia.
I don't remember what the Hebrew is.
Chet, I think, but I can't remember.
It doesn't matter.
It means to miss the target.
And it is an archery term.
And so you could think of sin in that regard as malintention or misintention or merely failure to miss the target.
And so there's a, and then you talked about intentionality with regard to thought being directed at something.
And so, the way I've been conceptualizing the religious enterprise isn't so much in relationship to the definition of That you offered with regard to avowed belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought, although I'd like to get into that because it's dead relevant.
Let me run something by you.
So, when we aim our attention at something, we're aiming our attention within a hierarchy of aim.
And the religious enterprise looks to me to be the enterprise that specifies the highest aim or the most foundational of aims.
And I think that our instinct that there's such a thing as depth, say depth in literary analysis, for example, or depth of significance in relationship to concepts, is a function of the fact that there's a hierarchy of intention.
And I think that...
As you move toward the foundation or up to the apex, depending on which metaphor frame you use, you start to enter into the realm of what's deep and that the realm of what's deep is what signifies the religious.
I mean, this is like a technical definition.
And so imagine that your intentions, any given intention depends on another intention and that depends on another intention.
But as you stack the intentions up and analyze them...
You go down into the depths to see what the foundational intentions are.
The religious is the realm of the foundations of intention.
There's a good way of thinking about it.
So, that's a different definition, obviously, than the supernatural agent definition.
And so, I'm wondering, well, first of all, if that explanation makes any sense to you, because it's pretty brief, and also what your reactions to that are.
Well, my reaction to it is that The term that I would use for what you're talking about is the summum bonum, the highest good.
And that is not necessarily a religious idea.
I have my sense of what's the most important thing, what are the most important things, and I'm not religious, but I'm, I'd like to say, deep.
I share the hierarchy of ends that you describe.
I don't think of my endorsement and allegiance to that ethic as a religious thing.
But there it is, and I am happy to say there are some things that are more important than others.
Okay, okay.
Well, that's actually why I wanted to start with definition, right?
Because there's no sense having a discussion about what something means unless we can agree what territory we're wandering over.
Okay, so now we seem to have established some agreement that there's a hierarchy of conceptualization, or you said even more specifically a hierarchy of good, and you referred to the summum bonum.
And you said you have a hierarchy of good and you believe that there's something, hypothetically, something at the apex or at the foundation.
So, okay, so let's see.
Let's...
It's definitely the case that there are medieval conceptions of the Judeo-Christian God as the summum bonum, and there are insistences in the biblical corpus that in the final analysis, God is ineffable, even though he's conceptualized in those stories as a spirit with whom communication is possible.
But his fundamental nature disappears into the ineffable That's what the theologians claim when they're pushed.
Okay, so let's see if we can figure that out.
I don't think that the conception of God as the sum of all that's good is an accurate conceptualization.
It seems to me it's more like Whatever God is conceptualized to be is that which all good things share in common, right?
I know that makes the concept of God something like the central...
In a web of ideas that surround the concept of the good as such.
Right, right.
It's not exactly a sum.
And it's important to be precise when discussing things like this.
Now, you said you have a conception of the highest good.
And so, can I ask you what that is?
Well, it's not readily definable.
But there's...
I think that human beings...
are the measure of what's good.
And over the eons, we have gradually discovered and invented and contrived standards of what we think good is.
And that's as much for, you know, a good wheel or a good axe Or a good airplane?
Or a good person?
And all sorts of different...
You know, there's even, I suppose, good machine guns.
Good at being a machine gun.
But the moral good is a particular human realm.
I think animals don't really have morality.
They have something that makes morality possible, but they don't have morality.
But we human beings have evolved systems of morality, and they implicitly fix.
They don't define in the geometrical sense what the highest good is, but they outline it.
They point to it, and it's a moving target.
What we think of as good today is quite different from what was thought good back in Old Testament days.
Nobody today would want to live with Old Testament morality.
We've come a long way from that.
Thank goodness.
Thank goodness.
goodness has evolved.
Thank you.
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Okay, okay.
So, it was interesting, you know, when you listed out things that could be good, the things that came to mind first for you were, some of them were tool-like, a good wheel, a good axe, even a good machine gun.
And I like that.
I like that.
And I think we have some commonality of conception there, too, because...
There's a pragmatic definition of good.
It's something like something that's good fits its purpose.
And, well, that would be in a hierarchy as well.
So that purpose would have to be good as well, right?
There's a functional element to that.
And so, okay, and so...
The way that I've been conceptualizing perception, and I think this is a neurophysiologically informed conceptualization, is that once we establish our aim, the world arrays itself around us into something like pathways and tools and obstacles.
That's associated, that concept I derived in part from J.J. Gibson's conceptualization of perception.
Yeah, exactly.
Affordances.
Right, exactly.
Okay, so what do you think of Gibson's ideas?
I think most of them are excellent.
I've been writing about affordances for some time, and what I think Gibson was weak on is he didn't Talk about how affordances are actually tracked in the brain.
He sort of threw up his hands about that and said, the information is in the light.
Well, yeah, but how does the information in the light get into our heads and do what it does?
That's the part that he was weak on, but we're making great progress on that today in the neurosciences.
Yeah, okay, okay.
So let me elaborate a little bit on the Gibsonian model, and I've been thinking about it for a long time, and I've specifically thought about some elaborations on it recently.
He talked a lot about affordances, essentially tools and obstacles.
Okay, so I'm going to lay out a schema, and you tell me what you think about this, and I'm hoping that it matches the underlying neurophysiology.
I believe that it does.
So imagine that we establish an aim, This would be with every act of perception.
We establish a name, and then what we see in the world are perceptual systems, are navigation tools.
And once we establish a name or a destination, we see a pathway to the destination.
We see tools that we could use to afford us movement towards the destination.
We see obstacles that could get in the way.
So far, that's pretty Gibsonian.
We see markers of progress.
We see markers of failure.
We see allies and foes.
That would be more on the human scale.
And we see agents of transformation.
And the agents of transformation would shift our aims.
Because as you said, what's good changes to some degree situationally, like it partakes in a hierarchy of good, but it switches situationally.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay, and so I like the expansion because a human being doesn't really fit the tool category, but then we can perceive human beings who are useful and on our side, so to speak, and we can perceive human beings that are Who operate in a manner that's...
Exactly.
So, allies and foes seems to be a nice way of conceptualizing that.
Okay, so then I think you can...
I spend a lot of time on assessing the neuropsychology of emotion.
I was particularly influenced by Jeffrey Gray's work, and also by Jock Panksepp, right?
I know their work quite well.
Well, so that fits quite nicely in the Gibsonian model, as far as I'm concerned, because it looks to me like...
The tools and obstacles, for example, the Gibsonian affordances, the apprehension of a tool produces positive emotion.
The apprehension of an obstacle produces negative emotion.
It's the same with allies and foes.
It's the same with markers forward and markers of progress and markers of failure.
So the emotions become calibration systems that mark deviation from the pathway forward.
I talked to Carl Friston.
Here's something cool.
I talked to Carl Friston about this.
So, I wrote a paper with some of my students about 10 years ago where we tried to relate anxiety to entropy computation.
So, anxiety seems to mark the multiplication of pathways to a destination.
So if you're...
Right, right.
So it marks an increase of entropy.
And Friston worked on a model like that.
But he added a dimension that I hadn't conceptualized.
He said that the reason that dopamine marks...
Positive affect is because positive affect marks a decrease in entropy as you move forward to a destination.
So you can actually conceptualize both emotional systems from an entropy perspective.
I think this is fine.
Not obvious, but on the right tracks all the way along.
In my work, I've come to the view that all control is done by emotions in the brain.
There's no operating system.
The brain is a computer.
But it doesn't have a rigid operating system the way a digital computer does.
All control is done by resting control in a war or a battle, a conflict between different emotional states that arise in our brains.
And that's why life is difficult.
It's because easy things are things that are emotionally closer to hand and They lure us away from the better answers.
This is whether you're doing science or making a moral decision or trying to solve a math problem.
Self-control is the arena of consciousness, and emotional valence is what does all the pushing and pulling.
Okay, okay.
So let me ask you about that, and that'll bring us back to the religious question to some degree.
So you characterized the landscape of consciousness, and correct me if I get any of my summaries of your ideas wrong, because I don't want to do that, as a battleground between emotions.
And so I would say, do you mean a battleground between emotions, or do you mean a battleground between emotions and motivations?
Okay.
Well, motivation is emotion, too.
Okay, okay, fine.
So we're going to put those in the same bin.
I've been sort of conceptualizing the difference.
To me, it seems practically useful to conceptualize motivations as systems that set aims and emotions as systems that track movement towards aims.
Well, you know, it's not a perfect separation.
But they interact.
They interact all the way.
I know.
And some emotions seem to set aims, like anger, for example, does.
Yeah.
So, okay.
Okay.
But that's fine.
So, are you familiar with Mircea Eliade's work, by the way, the historian of religion?
No.
Well, I know of it, but I'm not familiar with it, no.
Okay, well, he's stunningly brilliant, by the way.
And to the degree that you're interested in the scientific analysis of religion, I can't think of a better source.
He's amazingly brilliant.
And much of what he says works in alliance with the things we've been talking about.
So let me give you an example.
And this also has to do with the issue of self-control.
So Iliad has pointed to a theme that's developed in mythology in many, many different cultures.
And it's the war of the gods in heaven.
And there are accounts in many, many theogonies, stories of the rise of gods, of a battle between primal forces that results in the emergence of a dominant player.
Now, you can imagine anthropologically that that might be a consequence of something like this.
So you imagine that as a culture amalgamates...
The gods of the local tribes come together at the same time, and there's a conceptual war.
And as the culture integrates, those concepts war at the same time, sometimes in the form of actual physical battles, and there's an amalgamation of conceptualization that parallels the amalgamation of tribal units.
And out of that often emerges something approximating a monotheism.
And I think that parallels cultural integration, but I also think it parallels cortical maturation.
I think there's an impetus towards unification that is equivalent to the battle between emotions and motivational systems, and not their suppression.
That's a Freudian model, but their integration towards a higher end.
That sounds roughly right.
Yes, I think that's what maturation means.
Is all about.
That's how we become self-controlled.
That's how we become autonomous, is by learning how to control our emotions.
But it's not as if there's a homunculus in there who's in charge.
It's that the emotions themselves negotiate a resolution.
Yes, yes, a resolution.
And you know they do one thing at a time.
Yeah.
And so the...
What emerges from all of that noisy struggle in the brain is a more or less unified, more or less self-controlled, more or less reliable agent.
That's what free will is.
Okay, great.
We're having a hard time finding something to disagree about here.
So, I think we'll get to that, but so far.
Okay, so let me tell you a story.
Let me tell you a story.
You tell me what you think about this.
So, the Egyptians, in their cosmology, they put something at the apex.
Okay, what they put at the apex was the god Horus.
Horus was represented by an open eye.
You know the famous Egyptian eye?
Everyone knows that symbol, right?
And Horus was also a falcon.
And the reason Horus was a falcon is because raptors have superb vision.
So, the Egyptians hypothesized in their mythology, I think this is an emergent hypothesis, that the agent that should rule supreme over the war of states, right?
This would be the agent that unifies, was equivalent to the aware eye.
Right?
So they put attention at the apex.
And it's actually voluntary attention.
It's even more specific than that.
It's voluntary attention to the...
What would you say?
It's something like...
It's voluntary attention to error.
That might be a good way of conceptualizing it.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I did it.
Okay, okay, okay.
And so...
All right, so let's turn to your original definition.
Because there's something definite there that I'd like to delve into.
So, I suggested that the way that I've been conceptualizing the religious enterprise was an analysis of what should be put at the uniting apex.
There.
That'll tie that in with what we're talking about.
You objected to the religious enterprise in your book that...
The sticking point for you was the idea that there was a supernatural agent whose approval needed to be sought or bargained for.
Okay, so in the Old Testament corpus, there's an insistence that the relationship that we have with what's highest is to be conceptualized as a relationship.
And so that's starting to wander onto the territory that you're describing.
So I've been very curious about why it's conceptualized as a relationship.
So let me lay that out for you, and you tell me what you think about that.
So, for example, one way of conceptualizing the God of the Old Testament is that he's the force that manifests itself as calling.
So for example, when Moses is attracted by the burning bush, the burning bush is a very good example of this.
So Moses is a shepherd at the point in the story where the burning bush makes itself manifest.
And the burning bush is a symbol, it's like a symbol of the dynamism of life.
That's a good way of thinking about it, because a tree is a good symbol of life.
And a burning tree is a tree that's in the process of transformation.
And so it's like a vision of hyper-metabolism.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
But it's also a combination of being and becoming.
And so it's the manifestation of being and becoming.
That's very abstract.
In any case, what happens to Moses is that he's wandering around and he's by Mount Sinai and something attracts his attention.
And he wanders off the beaten path to investigate that.
And as he investigates it, he goes into it more deeply.
He eventually takes off his shoes, which is a symbol of his willingness to, what would you say, depart from his current journey.
It's a good way of thinking about it.
You wear shoes that are appropriate for a journey and shoes mark identity.
And to remove your shoes is to sacrifice your current identity for that pursuit.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And as he goes deeper into it, eventually the voice of being and becoming itself speaks to him.
And that's what marks his transition to a leader.
Now, so God in that story is represented as that which calls to us.
And there's an autonomy about that.
See, this is also what the psychoanalysts figured out, is that there are spirits, so to speak, operating within us that aren't under our voluntary control, that have the capacity, for example, to grip our attention.
And you said, for example, when we respond with a startle response, there's no conscious intentionality in that.
We're gripped by something.
And the grip of attentional interest that's manifest in calling is represented in the Old Testament as a manifestation of the divine.
And so, I'm wondering what you think about that and about that notion of autonomy in interest in calling.
I think it's like a manifestation of the unifying spirit.
That might be another way of thinking about it.
Okay.
Well, it strikes me as a very clear example of the excess...
I'll use a philosophical word and then explain it.
Hypostasization of a perfectly real phenomenon.
People are always wanting to make a thing, an object, out of a pattern that they see.
The pattern is real.
You've described it just fine.
But it's not an extra thing.
It's just the pattern that's there in the way people...
Control themselves and learn to control themselves.
This is the leitmotif of my whole career.
People think that this is what I call the Cartesian theater.
The place in the head where this movie happens.
There's no such place.
There is no Cartesian theater.
There's perception.
But there's not...
Perception doesn't consist in re-perceiving something which is displayed in your brain.
That's an extra thing that doesn't exist.
And this autonomous god...
From the Old Testament is another extra thing.
It's not needed.
It doesn't explain anything.
But it's a very human foible to postulate such a thing.
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Right.
So would you also include that criticism in the realm of the hyperactive agency detector, something like that?
Is that an idea?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, fine.
So I understand your objection.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so now let me ask you this.
So you said earlier that...
The good is something that transmutes, let's say, and recedes.
And, right, okay.
That does what?
Transmutes and recedes, the good.
It moves around.
It's a moving target.
Oh, yeah, yeah, good.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, okay.
So, let me ask you what you think about this.
It's like a summum bonum explanation for the relationship between the concept of God and that concept.
So imagine that something calls to you in the manner we just described.
I'm not going to hypothesize a God in the way that you objected to.
But you know in your life that there's a sequence of things that call to you.
So now imagine that there's a commonality behind that sequence.
That all those things that call to you are pointing you in a direction.
The direction I would suggest that they're pointing you in is the direction that unifies that emotional and motivational conflict.
You see what I... Okay, okay, okay.
So that seems to be an okay explanation as well.
Because this is actually how the God of the Old Testament is characterized, right?
Is that He is the commonality of callings.
And there's another element, too, that emerges, because it's important.
You can think about calling as the manifestation of the positive emotions that pull us forward.
That's a reasonable way of thinking about it.
But the God in the Old Testament is also characterized as conscience.
And conscience also has that kind of autonomy, right?
Because you call yourself out on your misbehavior.
And it's something that in some sense is inescapable.
Okay, so the dynamism between calling and conscience is one of the most profound ways that the God of the Old Testament is characterized in the biblical corpus.
It looks to me like it's an attempt to characterize the orienting function of what attracts your attention and what also keeps you on the pathway.
It's something like that.
So is there any of that that you would object to?
No, no.
I think you're making a fairly easy decision.
topic more difficult than it has to be, but it's an interesting way of doing it, and I am happy to grant you that interpretation of—it's a way of reading the Old Testament where it makes a little more sense than if it was taken literally.
Yeah.
Alright, so I'm going to go at this from the same issue, from a slightly different perspective, because I want to zero in on this issue of relationship, because I think that's the most fundamental stumbling block of That would be useful for us to discuss.
And I think it's the strangest element of the religious endeavor.
We've established a certain amount of common ground in relationship to the idea of a hierarchy of value or a hierarchy of good.
So I'm just going to leave that sit for a minute.
it, but I want to investigate the relationship issue because it is key to, as you point out in your book, it is key to what people generally understand, at least as part of the religious enterprise.
And it's also the insistence that's probably most susceptible to the objections that you've put forth, for example, with regards to the hyperactive agency detector.
And so I've been very curious about why the relationship with what's good is conceptualized so often as a As an actual relationship.
Okay, so let me walk through something and you tell me what you think about this.
So...
I've been conceptualizing thought as secularized prayer.
And the reason I'm doing that, I suppose to some degree, is anthropological, because I think that prayer preceded thought developmentally.
I think that's what the historical evidence would suggest.
We haven't been thinking rationally for very long.
It's perhaps several thousand years.
We've been thinking religiously for much longer than that.
And I'm not trying to establish a qualitative primacy here.
I'm trying to account for the facts.
So I'm going to outline what I think we do when we think, and I'd like you to tell me what you think about the outline.
Okay.
So, okay.
Well, so the first thing I would say is that...
Thoughts orient us in a manner that's akin to our perceptions and our emotions, so they're of the same enterprise.
We use thoughts to move us towards our goals and then to transform our goals.
It's the abstract.
Okay, okay, good.
And then I would say that thoughts make themselves manifest in relationship to our aim, just like our perceptions do.
And so our thoughts are defined, at least in part, by our aim.
So...
So this is what I think I do when I think.
So the first thing I do when I think is admit that I don't know something.
So I come to the process in humility, and I admit I have a problem.
It's like, here's something I don't understand.
It could be something I'm curious about.
It could be something that's bothering me, but I have a problem.
And I also admit that I have the problem, and I presume that there's an answer, and I presume that if I get the answer, that would be good.
And then I would say, I do something that you could describe.
I allow myself to receive a thought.
It's something like that.
Now, I could say, I think, or I could say, I think something up, but I don't really like that formulation because I don't think...
I don't think it's a good description of actually what happens.
What happens is that I posit a problem and answers appear to me.
That's good.
I'm happy with that.
It reminds me of Plato in the Theatetus where he says knowledge is like the birds in a giant aviary.
And you've got all these birds.
The trick is, can you get them to come when you call?
And so you've got all this knowledge that you've acquired, and the hard part is getting it to come when it's needed.
And how often do we smite our forehead and say, oh, I knew that all along.
Why didn't I think of it?
That's when we find that there was something we knew that didn't get used by us at the appropriate moment.
And the best way to make the new thoughts occur to you It's to be in a discussion like we're in right now.
It's to get another mind to help you, and we stimulate each other's minds and dredge up new corners of the other person's minds, which may have interesting ways of putting things that we hadn't quite thought of before.
Oh, that's a good way of putting it.
Yeah, I get that.
Descartes' big arrow was in...
Being solitary, trusting to his own mind and trying to get his clear and distinct ideas ever clearer and more distinct.
And the only way he could trust them, he thought, is if he posited a benevolent, all-knowing God.
We don't need that.
What we need is each other.
Okay, so let me riff on that for a minute.
So, there's a gospel insistence that where two or more are gathered in the name of the Logos, that spirit makes itself manifest.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
And so, imagine that what we're trying to do in this conversation, and what we hopefully are doing to some degree, is to stumble forward somewhat less blindly toward the truth.
Okay, so that's dependent on our aim.
And if our aim is at the truth, then the spirit that makes that journey possible, that's how the religious, that would be the religious formulation.
The spirit that makes that journey possible will make itself manifest in the space defined by our interaction.
It would seem to me that would be a good definition of science, too.
I would agree with that.
We can leave the religion right out of it and say, it is the organization of science that Where trust is assumed but tested.
Where people of different opinions come together and sort things out constructively.
And that's the best test of all of truth.
You said, for example, that they come together in trust.
Yes.
So, I would say that there's a precondition for the scientific inquiry to occur, even at the level of dialogue.
And the precondition is that we can trust.
What are we trusting, do you think?
Are we trusting?
In that situation, what is it that allows for trust?
It's the goodwill that we normally assume in a civilized world.
When you and I walk down the street, we assume that the people that we see all around us, most of whom are total strangers, we assume that they don't mean us any harm.
I like the way Paul Sebright has put this in his book, The Company of Strangers.
If you put a whole lot of unrelated chimpanzees in a large room together, they would be terrified.
They would be screaming and they would be unable to sit there calmly.
And I sometimes point this out when I'm in a large auditorium and there's hundreds of people, none of them related.
I said, is anybody here scared to death?
No, no, no, we're not.
We trust each other.
That human trust is the key to civilization and to science, and it's under attack right now with artificial intelligence and misrepresentation.
And the technologies of misrepresentation which are eroding trust in a very serious way Okay, so I use the same example, by the way, when I'm talking to large audiences and the chimpanzee example as well.
And so you said that the trust that makes even a scientific conversation possible is the trust in mutual goodwill, right?
Okay, so, all right.
So I want to relate that idea of goodwill back to something that we talked about earlier.
So I think that...
If the battle between emotional and motivational systems occurs optimally, it produces a unity of spirit that makes that trust possible.
That's what you do when you socialize a child.
Children are really socialized between the age of two and four, right?
They're pretty egocentric and temporally bounded at the age of two.
They kind of want...
Whatever their motivational system wants right now and to hell with the consequences.
That's the definition of a two-year-old.
And there's some wonderful things about that.
And then as they mature and as their cortex matures, those systems integrate.
And if that integration takes place, then you have the presence of an overarching structure that enables that trust to be made manifest.
A child will learn to take turns, for example.
That's why I say that free will is an achievement, not a metaphysical endowment.
You have to become, you have to develop free will, and the reason why we don't hold children responsible for misdeeds is they haven't developed the self-control.
They haven't developed the sort of trustworthy, reliable autonomy that we demand of each other.
The price we pay in self-control is the best bargain on the planet.
It means that we can walk around without fearing for our lives all the time.
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Right, right, right.
Okay, okay.
Well, so, all right, so let me make a leap here, because I'm increasingly inclined to believe that the divide between atheism and science is an illusion.
And I know that's a huge leap, and I'll backfill it.
But, you know, the notion of the logos that emerges as the biblical corpus proceeds...
As far as I can tell, it's identical to what you just described.
So the notion is that peaceful harmony and unity emerges when people aim up, so they're of goodwill.
The emphasis on hospitality in the Old Testament, for example, is a reflection of that.
It's hospitality as the basis of society.
It was a sacred requirement to be hospitable.
People unify themselves in their upward aim, and then they participate in truthful dialogue.
That's dialogos.
That's the exchange of redemptive information.
And that's the foundation.
Okay, that's the spirit that in principle emerges in the biblical corpus as that which is to be put in the highest place.
Now, let me tell you why there's, if you wouldn't mind, I'll explain why that's conceptualized as relationship.
Okay.
So imagine, okay, so imagine that I'm, maybe I have a problem with someone, right?
And so my relationship with them is choppy.
And it's degenerating into mistrust.
And you already pointed out, we know what happens when the default presumption between people deteriorates into mistrust.
That's not good.
Okay, so now I see this mistrust emerging, and I think, well, I would like to rectify that.
And so then I can go, let's say, meditate on that.
How would I have to reshape my perceptions and my actions, my patterns of attention, so that a pathway to harmony and trust could be reestablished with this person?
You can imagine asking yourself that.
That's a particular kind of aim.
And as a consequence, I'm likely, not necessarily, but I'm likely to get a revelation of some pathway forward.
Does that seem reasonable?
Revelation...
Well, I don't know how else to describe it.
It might occur to you.
An idea related...
An idea might occur to you.
I think those, I'm not trying to force this, but I think those are the same concepts.
The revelation is something that reveals itself.
Now, I know the problem is it begs the source, but I'm not too concerned about that at the moment.
So, here's an idea.
The thought that will make itself manifest to you is dependent on the aim of your request.
Yeah, independently.
I mean, indirectly, yes.
Okay, okay, fine.
Okay, so...
What I see happening time and time again in the biblical stories, and I've looked at them in great detail, is that God is conceptualized as that which you can call upon, that which will respond if you're aiming upward in something approximating love and you're motivated by the truth.
That's a definition, right?
It's not an insistence about some extra human agent, not precisely.
It's a definition of how to progress forward appropriately.
And this is why the stories that are sequenced in the biblical corpus are, what would you say, they're attempts to characterize the That spirit, like the spirit that should be called upon to set things right.
And the reason it's conceptualized as a relationship, this gets to the point precisely, is because it is something that you can call upon That will reveal itself.
And you do that as if it's in a relationship.
You pointed to Descartes' error, so to speak.
You said that he kind of got lost in his solipsism and that he needed other people to correct his thinking.
That's fine with me because I think that we can call upon each other to...
Well, it seems to me we've improved on that.
And we call it secular science, including philosophy, including what universities are supposed to do, and so forth.
We are assuming goodwill and trust, and we're letting freedom, academic freedom, And we're allowing ideas in that are welcome as long as they are presented.
In a spirit of, I don't get to lay down the law.
Here's my idea.
And if somebody in the group has an idea that the others don't accept, then the responsibility to get the others to accept that falls really on the person whose idea it is.
And anybody who says, well, my religion says...
That this just has to be this way and there's no argument about it.
We say, well, I guess you're disqualified.
I'm sorry, you're disabled.
You can't participate in this discussion if you can't put your own ideas, if you can't defend your own ideas to us, then you'll have to sit this one out because this is a dialogue among equals.
Okay, so here's the concern I have about that.
You pointed out that that scientific enterprise is dependent upon the two things, the assumption of goodwill and trust, but also the presence of goodwill and trust, right?
Those are really separate things, because you could have that and I could distrust you anyways.
Or I could trust you and that wouldn't be there.
But for the scientific endeavor to proceed, your proclamation is that that goodwill and trust have to be there and they have to be assumed, right?
Well, yes, but it's also true that...
Right, I got that.
I got that.
Yes, absolutely.
It has to be there.
Yeah.
At the cutting edge of every interesting scientific question...
Egos reign, and there's battles, and there's name-calling, and there's caricature, and it's rough and tumble at the cutting edge.
But what's behind that cutting edge is the solid heft of the axe itself.
All the agreed-upon things, all the things that they're not disagreeing about, and that's what gives the scientific enterprise its power.
Let me add a couple of things to that scientific conceptualization, and you tell me if they're necessary and if you're agreeable to them.
Okay, so one would be the assumption that there is an intelligible order.
The assumption that that intelligible order is intelligible to us.
The assumption that attempts to map that intelligible order are beneficial rather than harmful.
That's fine.
Okay.
That's a working assumption.
I... Okay, I think those working assumptions are religious, by definition, because they're outside the purview of science.
They're the ground upon which, the ground that has to be established before the scientific enterprise can function.
And I'm not trying to catch you here, by the way.
This is a definitional move.
It sounds to me like you're making the presumption, and I think it's an accurate presumption, that there are preconditions that must be met before the scientific enterprise can proceed to In its proper manner.
And my question is, those presumptions aren't within the purview of science.
No, no, they are.
They're outside the purview.
No, I mean, they're working assumptions.
Not if they're preconditions.
And the reason they are within science is because science has a track record.
You drive a car.
You drive a car.
We're talking using very high-tech equipment right now.
So far, the evidence that there's order and that we've got a grip on it could not be better.
We can measure things to the microsecond and to the micrometer and we can plot eclipses centuries in advance.
That is part of science and it's part of the structure of science.
And that's why our working assumption that there's order is it's not religious, it's scientific.
Okay, okay, okay.
Well, then, fair enough, fair enough.
You're, you, I, it's...
Science has a reputation, and the reputation that it has is well-founded, and the reputation is as an enterprise that can reveal order and to do that in a manner that's reliable and productive.
Okay, no problem.
I think that's a separate issue in some regard from some of the other axiomatic assumptions that we listed out.
It's like an addition to it.
It's like, right, because we talked about the necessity of goodwill.
We talked about the necessity of assuming goodwill.
We talked about the idea of the intelligibility of the order.
You said, we can also rely on science because its claims to have investigated that order reliably have been validated repeatedly.
So it has a brand and a reference.
Okay, so let's look for an exception for a minute, just out of curiosity.
So I was testifying before Congress yesterday, about, or two days ago, about something that you alluded to, right?
The breakdown of trust, for example, in an increasingly technological world.
Now, you know the Chinese scientists, the engineers, they've produced a system in China they call Skynet after the Terminator series.
And Skynet is made out of 700 million closed-circuit TV cameras, which monitor everything the Chinese do.
And when the engineers who designed this system were pressed on their use of the name Skynet, because Skynet became a system that went to war against humanity, they said, oh, we're producing the good Skynet, which is, of course, what the original engineers presumed in the movie series.
And so it's surreally insane.
And extraordinarily dangerous.
Now, how do you...
But you see that there's a danger in that technology run amok.
Absolutely.
Now, well, why is...
How do...
If we're careful, how do we segregate The perversion of the scientific enterprise, which is still using much of the same technology and approach.
It seems to me that in China it's devoted towards evil ends and that that's an ever-present problem.
Well, that's an ever-present and ever-lurking problem.
So is the science that the Chinese are engaging in that has this element of the extension of control and surveillance...
Is that a false science?
How do we conceptualize within the scientific realm the deviation from the ideal that the Chinese are pursuing and that now threatens us, let's say?
Well, many, many years ago, Norbert Wiener put it very well.
He said, don't make the mistake that I can't quote him exactly, but he said, when you make a tool, you also make a weapon.
And how you use it, don't think that your defensive weapons won't be turned against you as offense.
Yeah.
Sixteen years is the lag, right?
I think that was from Wiener, too.
He said, any weapon you make will be used by your enemies within one generation.
It's something like that.
And every tool is a weapon.
That's true.
And that's why we need government and law, law and order, in addition to, I mean, science depends on it.
Science depends on freedom and order.
And that's why the science that occurs in the free world is way ahead of the science that occurs in dictatorships.
Right, okay, so those are part of the preconditions for the scientific endeavor that we discussed earlier.
Okay, now, I believe it was in your book you described Stephen Jay Gould's two magisteriath notion, right, that there were independent magisteria.
And in your book you weren't particularly convinced by that argument.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
I thought it was blunt.
Now, let me ask you something.
Okay, great.
Okay, so that's very blunt.
Okay, so let me reframe what you just said, including that realm of conceptualization that's in contention between you and Gould.
Okay, so what I heard you say, tell me if I've got it wrong, is that the scientific enterprise nests inside another enterprise, right?
That enterprise is associated with freedom and order, a kind of order, and regulated by laws.
Okay, okay.
And that system itself is predicated on a system of fundamental assumptions.
So let's say in the United States, for example, the entire body of laws that allows for the order that makes scientific freedom possible is at least in part grounded on our conceptualizations, let's say, of inalienable human rights.
Yes, and that nobody is above the law.
So that's a stacking.
Okay, so what that implies is that the scientific enterprise itself is nested inside another enterprise.
See, that's the conception.
I think this is where Gould went wrong.
You know, okay, well, so then we could say in terms of his magisteria argument, it's not that they're side-by-side systems in separate domains.
It's that the scientific enterprise is nested inside a moral enterprise by necessity.
And goes astray if it's not nested inside that enterprise.
The moral enterprise, yes.
Where Gould went wrong was in thinking that religion was the authority on the moral side.
It's not.
Okay, so let's delve into...
In the same university where John Rawls and Robert Nozick and other philosophers have been doing magnificent work in ethics, how could he forget about secular treatments of morality?
That's the question.
Alright, so now we have a model of the scientific enterprise proceeding in the West and proceeding appropriately and positively because it's nested in a, you said, nested in civilization.
And we have civilization itself predicated on a set of fundamental principles.
Well, yeah, fundamental but evolving.
We don't want to be foundationalists.
In the philosophical sense.
We don't want to be rigid.
Hey, I've got something to ask you about with relationship to that.
So you tell me what you think about this.
So there was a paper published in 2022, in the fall.
I think it's a revolutionary paper.
I think it should win a Nobel Prize.
It stunned me.
So...
Mutations are essentially random for all sorts of reasons.
They're random in part because the effect of cosmic radiation is random and obviously random.
Random in one sense, but not in another.
Okay, well I'll let you clarify that.
I'll just walk through the paper and then I'll let you clarify that if you would.
Whose paper is this?
I don't remember.
I'll put it in the discussion notes.
I can't remember the citation at hand.
So, you know that DNA has the capacity to repair itself.
It does that quite often.
It error checks and repairs itself.
No, there's a hierarchy of repair so that the more foundational genetic elements, if mutated, repair with 100% accuracy.
So the genetic code allows for experimentation at the fringe and preservation of the core.
And so this is the reason I'm bringing this up because it's the answer to the issue that you just brought up with regard to foundational principles and dynamism.
There's a core set of principles around which an area of dynamism and exploration is not only to be allowed but to be encouraged.
But the foundational elements, there are foundational elements.
You know the dictum.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
There are foundational theories in science that you don't overthrow without a plethora of evidence because so many other ideas depend on them.
So, okay, so the foundational elements, see, this is why I introduced the definition of the religious that I started the conversation with, is that because my sense is that the proper religious enterprise is the inquiry,
not only into the foundational elements, let's say, that underlie the civilization within which science is nested, But that also govern the relationship between that foundation and the transformations of the foundation that are necessary.
I'll give you an example from Egyptian theology.
Remember we talked about Horus earlier?
Yep.
Okay, so the Egyptians actually had two male gods, fundamental male gods.
Well, there was three if you count the evil god, and I'll mention him briefly.
So their god of foundations was Osiris.
Now, Osiris had some fundamental flaws.
Osiris was a great hero in his youth when he established Egypt.
But as he aged, he became rigid and totalitarian and willfully blind.
And because of that, that made him susceptible to overthrow by his evil brother.
That's Seth, by the way.
And the word Seth becomes the word Satan through the Coptic Christians as that idea develops.
So the idea is that...
There's a spirit of the state, let's say, of civilization for that matter, which can rigidify and become blind.
And when that happens, it's susceptible to overthrow by chaotic and malevolent forces.
Okay, what happens under those circumstances is that everything descends into chaos.
The Egyptians represented that as the rise of Isis, the goddess Isis.
She's the goddess of chaos and all hell breaks loose.
She gives birth to this other god, Horus.
Horus is the god of attention.
Horus, who's the god of attention, fights with Seth, who's the evil god who overthrows the corrupt state.
And he loses an eye in the battle.
He goes down into the underworld.
He gets the eye back.
He defeats Seth.
He banishes him.
He gets the eye back.
He goes down to Osiris.
He gives Osiris his eye.
And now Osiris can see.
And then They both reemerge and govern the proper state.
And so what the Egyptians conceptualized was that the proper sovereign was the proper balance between foundational tradition and dynamic vision.
And that's what they incorporated as their core, the core spirit of the pharaoh.
Yeah, that's the right way of thinking about it.
And so that's how they balance the conflict between foundational principles and the dynamism that keeps them operative and updated as things change and shift around.
And, okay, so here's a thought.
So we talked about the scientific enterprise nested in a moral enterprise, predicated on a system of principles.
So those principles themselves have a foundational element, right?
Right.
And the farther down you go into the depths of that hierarchy, the closer you come to what the evolved religious enterprise is aiming to specify.
The evolved religious enterprise sounds to me like science.
Okay, so I want to return to the model that we were fleshing out a bit, because there's something I don't understand about science.
Our exchange of ideas at the moment.
So, I want to recapitulate what we've talked about in the last 10 minutes or so.
So, we were talking about the way that the scientific enterprise can go astray.
And we seem to agree that it has gone astray, for example, in totalitarian China.
And there's examples of that occurring in the past, obviously.
The scientific enterprise went badly astray under the Nazis and certainly under the Soviets.
And I said, how do we ensure that it doesn't go astray?
And you said, well, it has to be nested inside a civilizational structure, right?
And there's a certain conception of man and his relationship to other men and women within that underlying structure.
Now, what I would like you to do, if you would, is to clarify that Whether you see the scientific enterprise as nested inside that broader enterprise.
Like, what's the relationship?
Because this was the Stephen Jay Gould question, right?
He talked about two independent magisteria.
We're looking at a model where, one, the scientific enterprise is stacked on top of something else.
And I'm wondering if you think that's a more appropriate conceptualization.
I just want to get that clear.
Well, where Gould went wrong is in thinking that the second magisteria was religious as opposed to secular.
Ethics is, one might say, half of philosophy.
And almost all of it is non-religious.
It's secular.
Okay, but is it scientific?
All the advances in ethics that we've seen in the last, let's say, 5,000 years...
Have been fought by the religions, but have gradually been won over by the secular ethicists.
Okay, so I'm clear about this.
So now let me recapitulate then and see if I've got the way you're conceptualizing this right.
So you have the scientific enterprise, and if it's properly oriented, it's nested in a broader moral enterprise, but your claim is that the moral enterprise itself is secular.
Yes.
Okay, is it secular?
That is, the advances are secular.
And the history of the evolution of ethics in the last 10,000 years has been a history of the secularization of ethics.
Away from New Testament ethics, which was...
Terrible.
And it's still evolving.
And we have issues today.
We have issues about vegetarianism and about, you know.
We've given up cannibalism and slavery.
Thank you.
That's good.
But there's still...
No agreement on a lot of fundamental issues in ethics.
But those agreements have nothing to do with religion.
Okay, okay.
So I've got it.
So your model is the scientific enterprise nested in a broader moral enterprise, but you believe the core element of that, insofar as it's valuable, is secular.
Okay, so, all right.
So then, is it...
What are the means of validation of the secular ethical enterprise?
Now, they can't be scientific if science is on top of that structure, because then those two things just collapse into each other.
So by what principles do the secular ethicists validate their claims if they're not validated scientifically?
Well, there's science and then there's, but I have to explain this carefully, politics.
Science is about what is.
Politics is about what we should do.
Now, these are both rational exercises.
And what we should do, normative inquiry about what the norms should be, and it includes logic, game theory, Probability theory, let's stop right there.
There's more to it than that, but there are normative disciplines, and some of it is very abstract, like mathematics, mathematical game theory, and some of it, and mathematical logic.
And arithmetic and geometry, there's a right and a wrong way of doing these things, which we've learned.
Not thanks to religion, thanks to our mutual understanding of what works.
The reason we trust arithmetic is because it works.
No proofs.
That arithmetic was good would be worth a darn if we couldn't count on it to count our cattle and to count our money and to count the miles from here to there.
We have this uncontroversial base of achievement from civilization Which has encouraged us to pursue normative inquiry,
rationally, and by and large religion has not had any role in that, or if it has, it's been a negative role.
It has been to maintain outdated standards of morality.
On occasion, it has helped wonderfully.
The black church was a wonderful force in civil rights in the 20th century, but only by fighting the white church.
The white church dug in its heels, and it's digging in its heels now.
And that's lamentable.
What we need is secular ethics and secular politics.
Religion was a wonderful taming force.
It's what I call a nurse crop.
Do you know what a nurse crop is?
No.
I think I mentioned this in Breaking the Spell.
My neighbor, an old farmer, when I planted my hay fields when I had a farm, he said, you want to plant oats as a nurse crop first before the Timothy, the hay, comes up.
He says it'll protect the young Timothy.
You can harvest it if you want, or you can just let it go, but it's a temporary...
Scaffold, which protects the tender shoots of the...
That's a nurse crop.
So I think of religion as a nurse crop for science.
We needed religion to have the sort of stability of civilizations for several thousand years.
But now we don't need religion anymore as a nurse crop because we've got secular systems now.
Law and order and the understanding of secular ethics.
So we no longer need religious ethics because it's outlived its usefulness and in fact it's become more harm than good.
Okay, so let me ask you a couple of questions about that.
The first would be, what do you think it was, within the terms of your formulation, about the religious enterprise that allowed it to play its role as a precondition, or as a nurse crop, in your metaphor?
What was it doing that was useful and correct?
I can explain that with an old joke.
Ugh.
A Maine joke.
I'm sitting in Maine and had a farm in Maine for many years.
One little Maine town had a sign that said, speed, radar controlled.
And a newcomer said, well, that must be pretty expensive.
And the Old-timers say, no, no, it's just a few boards and some white paint and a little bit of black paint.
It's just a sign.
It's the idea that somebody's watching you.
It's the idea that God is watching you.
That...
That'll be shorthand for the role that religion played.
It was Big Brother in the Sky watching you.
And that was a great idea.
It was a brilliant way of...
And I think it was H.L. Mencken who said that your conscience is the idea that somebody may be watching you.
Very powerful idea.
Given the absence of evidence for its validity, let's say, from the secular or scientific perspective, what accounts for its viability as a stabilizing and civilizing factor?
And this goes back...
This is a very complex problem, right?
Because we already, at the beginning of our talk, defined the truth of something, at least to some degree, in relationship to its utility.
I don't want to wander too far down that path, because I know it's full of pitfalls.
But how do you...
What do you see that as?
Do you see that as a necessary fiction?
On my view of religion...
We started out with polytheisms, and this is, every community had its own, its goblins and fairies and nymphs and other supernatural agents, and with various talents and histories.
And those were, what were they good for?
Nothing.
They were just the Offshoots of human susceptibility, human fears, human curiosity that generated, this was the hyperactive agent detection devices.
These were the spawn of those.
And when they became domesticated, they were feral initially.
They were synanthropic beings, synanthropic memes.
They survived because they could.
They were just superstitions.
But then they got harnessed by civilization.
And rulers used them very effectively.
And many of the ideas of religion were clearly very useful to ruling classes, to kings, to despots, to maintain law and order.
And the idea that Another one in the same family with somebody who's watching you all the time was, don't blame me.
It's the big guy who makes the rules.
We see it today when the used car salesman says, well, I can't make you this offer.
I have to go talk to the boss.
There are all sorts of wonderful things Devices, tools, thinking tools, that religion has evolved, which kept the anxiety about God watching everything you do alive for thousands of years.
God is not watching what you do, because there is no God that watches, but...
We can still behave without that myth.
Okay, so let me ask you about that.
So, my mind goes in a couple of directions.
The God who's watching in the Old Testament is watching for very specific reasons.
So, for example, in the story of Noah...
God is watching and dispenses catastrophe when things deviate to great a degree.
Now, I mean, that happens all the time.
It's a horrific story.
But it's also something that happens all the time in human society, right?
It's people deviate and get destroyed.
I'm not making a theological case for that, by the way.
I mean, we saw that happen multiple times in the 20th century.
Where societies degenerated into like a power-mad licentiousness and were essentially obliterated in consequence.
Which indicates that they've deviated from the central...
From some...
When things go wrong, they go really wrong.
Right.
And they go wrong because they've deviated from some appropriate pathway forward.
Well, there can't be wrong without the notion of deviation, right?
Because if there's something that's wrong, there's something that's right.
Yeah, sure.
Okay, okay.
So that means that the fictional God, so to speak, of the Old Testament watches, just doesn't watch, but also watches to see when things are going wrong.
And in the story of Noah, God is the voice that calls to the wise to prepare when things are going catastrophically wrong.
Right, and that's a good definition.
Okay, so let me ask you about that.
What do you think of the state of the secular morality at the moment that permeates the universities?
That permeates the universities right now?
Yeah.
It's got some real problems.
Okay, how would you characterize those problems?
Because academic freedom is not what it should be right now in the academy.
And we have curtailments of openness, abridgments of academic freedom that should not be allowed.
And what's your understanding?
See, my sense at the moment is that the secular project within the universities has gone badly wrong.
Oh, I don't think so.
Well, I mean...
That's what I'm trying to get clear.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't think the religious academy is doing any better.
That is, I don't think religious universities, Bob Jones University or other religious institutions have a better record.
I think on the contrary, we're...
We're better off with the turmoil in the secular universities.
But it is turmoil, and some significant revisions have to be put in place, and it's going to take some very careful work to accomplish that.
But it's got to happen.
Okay, so given that the universities were the central...
Playing ground, let's say, for the maintenance and progress of secularized morality.
I think that's a reasonable way of thinking about it.
What do you think has occurred to make them go astray?
And astray from what?
You mentioned freedom, academic freedom, and we could expound upon that.
But what do you think's gone wrong?
Well...
I think several things have gone wrong.
One of them is, H.L. Mencken has a saying I love to quote.
He says, for every complex problem, there's a simple solution which is clear, persuasive, and wrong.
Yeah, definitely.
And problems are hard.
It's complicated, as one says.
And several of the things that have gone on, one of them was postmodernism.
Postmodernism was—there were some good ideas in its foundation, but then they got taken up by people who didn't understand them and who— Overused them and who went wild and said all sorts of stupid things.
And the scourge was postmodernism.
I have an article called Postmodernism and Truth where I really blame postmodernism for some very bad things.
But that opened the door for the identity politics that we see today and the virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling, yeah.
And the virtue signaling that we see today.
These are ideas that are...
Running off the rails, and we have to point that out and calmly restore academic freedom and a real respect for truth.
We could modify the Mencken proposition slightly because I don't think he was pessimistic enough.
So there's two things that the simple, elegant solutions offer.
First of all, they're simple and wrong.
But they also offer the holder of those ideas an unearned sense of their moral superiority.
And so they're attractive in two dimensions, right?
So the idea that power rules everything, which is a postmodern idea, it's wrong and it's simple, but it also allows the holders of the idea to identify with the oppressed and to proclaim their moral virtue.
And that's an almost unbeatable combination, right?
You don't have to do any work on the cognitive side.
Because you've got all your explanations in one cliché.
And you don't have to do any work on the moral front, because as long as you're allied with the right side, everything is right between you and God, so to speak.
And so that's an incredibly attractive combination for people who are inclined to take the easy way out.
And it's poisonous.
Yes.
All right, sir.
Look, we've come to the end of our 90 minutes, and I don't want to wear you to a frazzle.
And I still want to talk to you for another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.
And I'd like to thank you very much for allowing me to pick your brains in relationship to your conceptualization of, well, let's say the relationship between the scientific and the moral and the scientific and the religious.
I'd like to talk to you for another three hours because there's many other things I'd be happy to discuss, but I don't want to impose too much on your time and I want to leave.
So far, so good.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Well, let's leave it at that for now.
It's possible if you're inclined that I'd like to continue this conversation at a different date because I'd like you to...
I'd like to think about the ideas that we exchanged, and I'd like to figure out how we could continue the discussion.
There's still some things I'd like to get to, but they'd take a long time to unpack, and that might be good for another conversation if you'd be amenable to it.
So, for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue talking to Dr.
Dennett on the Daily Wire site, as you all know, and I'm going to walk him through some autobiographical...
Because I'm very interested, and I'm very interested in finding out how people's interests make themselves manifest across time.
And so that's what we'll delve into on the Daily Wire side.
And so maybe you could just close.
What are you working on now?
I'm working on the dangers of AI, the dangers of large language models, and how they are the...
The most dangerous weapon yet.
Are you writing a book about that?
More dangerous than nuclear weapons.
Are you writing a book about that?
Not a book I'm writing.
I wrote an article for The Atlantic called The Problem of Counterfeit People.
Right.
Right.
Counterfeit money is dangerous.
It's been against the law and it should be.
Yeah.
Counterfeit people are much more dangerous, and they are now possible.
But we can...
We can put in place the technology, and I'm working with people in AI who know how to do this.
We can put in place the technology to make it at least very difficult and very costly in terms of prison sentences for those who get caught using counterfeit people.
And we should institute this immediately because, as Jeff Hinton has said, These things can reproduce, and we are about to create a new horde, a new epidemic, a pandemic of counterfeit people, which are going to destroy trust.
They can destroy civilization, you know?
I just spent two days in D.C., interestingly enough, talking to the people I was meeting with, senators and congressmen, really about the dangers of counterfeit people.
So, obviously, we share a concern in that regard.
It's a very great danger, and I've been working on it almost full-time.
Aha.
Aha.
Okay.
And retired, but busier than ever.
Well, I'll keep that in mind because we got some, we got interesting discussions going in DC and we're trying to alert people to the danger of exactly the sorts of things that you're describing.
And so I didn't know that that was an interest of yours.
Anyways, let's wrap this up.
I'd like to thank the film crew here in D.C. for making this possible, for the Daily Wire people for facilitating the conversation, for you taking the time and effort necessary to have this conversation, and everybody who's watching for their time and attention.
And you can join us on the Daily Wire Plus side for the continuance of this conversation.
Thank you very much, sir.
It's been very good to talk to you and to meet you.
Well, I've enjoyed it.
Thank you.
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