July 16, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:17:48
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Welcome to the all new, relaunched, rebranded and rebooted Rubin Report. | ||
| As of this episode, right this second, we now begin our journey as a fully fan-funded show, thanks to you guys. | ||
| Just about a month ago, I announced that we were packing up, moving on from OraTV, and creating our very own production company. | ||
| My team of Amira, David, and I have worked incredibly hard to create our fan-funding campaign and make it a reality so that we could go totally independent. | ||
| When I went to sleep the night before the campaign launched, I had no idea if my career was about to end or if we were just going to be at the beginning once again. | ||
| Well, thanks to about 3,000 of you who have taken a chance on me and on us, the future of this show and the conversations we're having about big ideas and free speech are looking incredibly bright. | ||
| Because of all of you who put your money where your keyboard is, the 18 years I've spent on my career have come to fruition right now. | ||
| My own voice has been crystallized, and I now have total ownership over a forum to share the ideas I care about most. | ||
| The last month, in which I also managed to turn 40, has been the most rewarding, exhilarating, and simultaneously inspiring time of my life. | ||
| So while I've said it before, and I'll say it many times again, thank you to all of you who heard me and who rose up to the occasion. | ||
| Without a doubt, the best part of the past month has been connecting with literally thousands of you, the viewers, in one form or another. | ||
| Via email, Facebook, Periscope, Twitter, Skype, or face-to-face, I've not only talked to you, but I've listened and learned from you as well. | ||
| Within four days of our fan-funding campaign on Patreon, we hit the initial goal of 20,000 a month, allowing us to have the monthly budget not only to continue the Rubin Report, but to also go above and beyond our current workload. | ||
| We now are in a studio in which we can do more shows, eventually start live streaming episodes, and much more. | ||
| We also received an outpouring of donations from you guys to our PayPal account, | ||
| which helped us buy our new equipment and set, and which I'm incredibly excited | ||
| to finally be able to share with you today. | ||
| If you didn't contribute or you couldn't contribute, it's all good, but you should know that the 3,000 people | ||
| who did contribute are directly the reason we're back in action right now. | ||
| If you shared our message on social media, told family or friends about us, | ||
| or even just clicked play on one of our videos at the Apple Store, I thank you as well. | ||
| Sharing our message is an incredibly important piece of this whole thing. | ||
| Beyond the 3,000 donors and patrons, though, so many of you guys reached out to us, | ||
| offering services, professional services, personal services, whatever it was you guys were offering | ||
| to edit, to make graphics, to compose music, to hang lights, and so much more. | ||
| And for all of those who offered to work for us, we've got all the messages set aside, and I promise you that we're going to circle back once we get the launch fully complete and see where we're at. | ||
| What was clear to me more than anything during this time is that the issues that I care about most of honest conversation, big ideas, and free speech aren't just concepts, but are real-world events when you put them into action. | ||
| As my life has changed with this show, so have many of yours. | ||
| You're having the same conversations at home and at school and at work. | ||
| You're offering your services and support because you care about the same things that I care about. | ||
| That, to me, is how you change the world. | ||
| I can't really explain what it's like to receive such an outpouring of support for the show that I do. | ||
| Waking up to dozens of emails from people all over the world every day telling you that they believe in your message is an incredible feeling. | ||
| As I've said to many of you privately, what we're doing here has now become bigger than me or this show. | ||
| Everything that the Rubin Report has been about since we launched in September seems to be coming to a head right now. | ||
| Our politics are more frayed than ever. | ||
| Our conversations seem dumber than ever before. | ||
| We shout down those we disagree with. | ||
| That's becoming the norm. | ||
| And our need to find some truth through the endless sea of noise has never been greater. | ||
| This has been my focus since we started, and clearly it's time for us all to double down on that mission. | ||
| Thanks to our monthly patrons, I won't have to make corporate deals I don't want to make, and never have to enter partnerships that could confuse or negate this message. | ||
| You've given us the runway to do the show as we see fit, without worrying if the lights will go on tomorrow. | ||
| Now, not only do we know that they'll go on, but we know that the show can grow exactly as we want it to, while never wavering from our commitment to real dialogue and honest conversation. | ||
| If you've donated on Patreon or PayPal, whether it was a dollar or five hundred dollars, you can now consider yourself a producer of The Rubin Report. | ||
| And by the way, the campaign still continues, and the more it grows, the more content we can create. | ||
| So yes, rubinreport.com slash donate is still up. | ||
| And if you can't donate, please just help bring awareness to what we're doing, whether on social media or shouting from the rooftops. | ||
| That's a little old school, but I hear it can be quite effective. | ||
| All right, now it's on to season two of the completely fan-funded version of the Rubin Report. | ||
| In some ways, it was kind of tough figuring out who to get for the first episode, but all roads seem to lead back to one person. | ||
| And that person just so happens to be the same person who season one started with way back last September. | ||
| Sam Harris is one of the clearest thinkers, honest brokers, and logical debaters I know. | ||
| At the same time, he's become a poster child for the battle against the regressive left. | ||
| No matter what he says, the usual clown car of dishonest public figures come out to manipulate his words, trivialize his arguments, and lie about his intentions. | ||
| Never once have I heard Sam say he's absolutely right and should be above criticism, but most of the criticism I hear about him has little to do with what he actually says or thinks, and more to do with the disingenuous motives of those attacking him. | ||
| As I've said before, my political awakening was really crystallized on that infamous night of Realtime when Ben Affleck called Sam's views gross and racist. | ||
| Suddenly, the onus was on Sam and Bill Maher to prove they weren't racist, even though they were nothing of the sort. | ||
| What they did was stand up for true universal freedoms, despite the uncomfortable conversation about religion that it causes us to have. | ||
| People often ask me if I hate Ben Affleck, but the truth is, I actually thank him for that moment. | ||
| If he hadn't been so utterly ridiculous and exhibited such childish thinking, maybe my wake-up would have taken that much longer. | ||
| If anything, I hate Affleck for Batman vs. Superman, but fortunately I fell asleep through most of that garbage. | ||
| Anyway, the point is, I know that many of you also had your awakening around that event and some of the other subsequent events like Charlie Hebdo only a few months later. | ||
| It wasn't just good ideas that woke us up, it was the necessary bad ones to show us what was really going on. | ||
| Ironically, Sam had been on Realtime that night to promote his book Waking Up, a guide to spirituality without religion. | ||
| Subsequently, after that fiasco, he spent most of his book tour, which was supposed to be about finding inner peace, defending himself against charges of racism. | ||
| Maybe there's some kind of karma in that, but I'm pretty sure Sam doesn't think so. | ||
| While we're going to jump back into the debate around Islam, the election, and the left, I intend to spend much of our conversation focusing on some of the other things that Sam cares about, including free will, spirituality, and the subject of his next book, Artificial Intelligence. | ||
| I assume that by tomorrow, he'll be accused of being a robotophobe and a robocyst. | ||
| But that just comes with the territory of being someone not afraid to share their thoughts. | ||
| So one more time, though I know it won't be the last time, I want to humbly thank all of you for your support. | ||
| I'm just one guy trying to do what I think is right, and you have shown me that if you build it, they will talk. | ||
| So now we built it, and it's time to talk. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
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unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| To kick off season two of the all new revamped, relaunched, refurbished, | ||
| rebranded, and rebooted Rubin Report, there was really only one person to sit in this blue chair. | ||
| My guest this week is a neuroscientist and author whose views have been described as gross and racist by Batman himself. | ||
| Sam Harris, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Congratulations on the new digs. | ||
| I like this. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| Well, you sort of launched the whole thing, because I kind of wasn't even planning on doing an interview show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we sat down, and then I thought, Maybe I'm alright at that. | ||
| So it led to something. | ||
| Yeah, well you're great at it. | ||
| We've been talking offline about why this has been so successful online, but it's just, it's the only long-form interview with a journalist who's not pretending to not have an opinion. | ||
| Right, everyone else is pretending. | ||
| My thing is that I don't feel I have to know everything. | ||
| Do you find, as someone that knows a lot of stuff, do you feel pressure to know everything and that people want you to comment on every little thing that happens? | ||
| Well, it depends what the situation is. | ||
| I feel pressure, so on my own podcast, I often feel pressure to know enough about the topic to be able to deal with my guest in an intelligent way. | ||
| But the real pressure is to be honest early enough. | ||
| I mean, just basically have your full intellectual and ethical commitment to be Not to pretend to know something you don't know. | ||
| So that is just the magic bullet in every situation. | ||
| If you're pretending to know things you don't know. | ||
| You are always vulnerable to embarrassment. | ||
| I tend not to have strong opinions about things I don't know a lot about. | ||
| So whenever I really am inclined to go to the mat on something, I'm pretty sure I understand what I'm arguing about. | ||
| And so it's, I can't remember the last time I had a very strong opinion about something | ||
| where it turns out I was completely uninformed and completely wrong. | ||
| But even then, when that happens, most people's reflex is the way to stay a phase here is | ||
| The way to save face is to hold on more tenaciously to this opinion, which now is eroding in real time in a conversation. | ||
| Whereas that's to lose face twice over. | ||
| There's nothing more attractive really, except you never see this, but there is nothing more attractive than Someone being intellectually honest enough to notice that they're wrong as close to the moment that the audience does as possible, and to then disavow their false certainty. | ||
| Yeah, I remember not too long ago, maybe three or four months ago, you actually tweeted something apologizing to Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| And he has, at least in my humble estimation, said really terrible things about you and really manipulated your words and retweeted things that are not what you really believe. | ||
| But I think you very clearly did it. | ||
| And then you followed up with something to that effect, that it didn't bother you that—I guess, had you—was it something that he said that you misquoted or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, well it turns out, so don't be too quick to apologize to Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| Well, then I know he's done it again since with you, but at that moment-- | ||
| No, but the thing that I was apologizing for, so he had, someone had forwarded an article | ||
| that was fairly disparaging of his journalism. | ||
| Like he had formed some alliance with someone who turned out to be fighting for ISIS. | ||
| You know, this is a person who had been on the no-fly list and Glenn Greenwald, you know, in multiple tweets | ||
| and in articles on The Intercept had defended him, oh, what an abomination. | ||
| Oh, right, right, right, now I remember. | ||
| And then some conservative website had reviewed all of this journalistically | ||
| and said, look what happens when you defend a guy like this because now this guy turns up in Turkey | ||
| and he's under arrest. | ||
| He's an ISIS sympathizer. | ||
| And many people had sent this to me and I just read the article. | ||
| It seemed like it made sense and I forwarded it as one does when one is fighting back against people like Glenn Greenwald. | ||
| But then Glenn defended himself on the intercept. | ||
| He said that this is wrong in all these ways. | ||
| And so I I mean, again, this also is a bandwidth problem. | ||
| You don't have time to fact check everything. | ||
| How would you fact check everything? | ||
| So when Glenn offered some defense of his journalism there, I said, all right, maybe I don't know what happened. | ||
| I actually asked the advice of the Twitterati, you know, how do you clean up this mess? | ||
| If you forward something, do you just delete it? | ||
| Or do you link to it and apologize? | ||
| I forget what the consensus was. | ||
| But anyway, I apologized publicly to him on Twitter for forwarding it. | ||
| And then I think it came out that actually he was guilty of almost 90% of what was said in the original article. | ||
| But, you know, everyone moves on there. | ||
| But I'm very scrupulous about Not misrepresenting the views of my enemies, and I use the word enemy now really unselfconsciously. | ||
| It's kind of a strange word to use, but it's obvious to me now that I have people who are so malicious in their intentions toward me that I can't think of them as anything other than enemies. | ||
| But, whenever I have made the mistake of saying something that was, however inadvertently, misleading about what their positions are, I've done my best to correct it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And that goes to what you say all the time about intentions matter. | ||
| And that's why, for me, I don't mind being wrong, and I actually like being corrected. | ||
| And I've had a running joke for three years with Cara Santa Maria, who I think you know, | ||
| where every time I would screw up something scientific on the show, | ||
| I'd bring her on a couple weeks later, and then she would correct me. | ||
| And I'd say, "Well, look, I'm not a scientist. | ||
| "I know the most that I can, "and here's someone that's gonna lay it out." | ||
| And that never struck me as that brilliant, what I was doing. | ||
| I thought I was just being honest. | ||
| So I think that's sort of a good segue to let's just go back to what we did | ||
| when we did that sit-down, because my intention with that, | ||
| as I told you right up top, was let's just clean up some of this mess. | ||
| Some of the thing, you know, you want a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world and the profiling all Muslims and all this stuff, and we chopped it into little YouTube clips, and I thought we did everything that could possibly be done to help clean up this conversation, and that when people would misquote you or whatever it was, that it would be an easy, digestible form and all that. | ||
| Within two days of doing that, it all happened again. | ||
| One of your quotes, do you remember the Seinfeld quote? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we don't have to get into the nitty-gritty of it in terms of, you know, because Reza retweeted it saying that you said people who look like Jerry Seinfeld, but that's not what you said. | ||
| You said Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian, shouldn't be profiled because he's probably not a jihadist and it's a waste of resources and all that stuff. | ||
| So I don't want to get into the minutiae, but what do you do with that? | ||
| I feel like we're at a very odd place in discourse in America where truth is completely subjective now and people don't care no matter how many times you expose these people. | ||
| Yeah, well there is... I think that's what's happened. | ||
| There's a tribalism to all of these arguments and the side you're on, for the most part, is not Doesn't feel at all ethically obligated to honestly interact with the opposing side. | ||
| Everything is a smear campaign. | ||
| It's one thing to spread accurate information about the other side, which is, in your view, destabilizing of their position. | ||
| You're criticizing them with accurate information, but so much of what we see is just ends justify the means rationale where that's just they'll | ||
| spread anything that is libelous you know short of exposing them to a lawsuit | ||
| and and I mean the the difficulty for suing someone for libel is just I mean | ||
| the bar is set so high that no one even thinks about it. | ||
| So that guy who keeps calling us white supremacists, that's not liable yet? | ||
| Once you're a public figure, think of what can be said about Trump now without getting sued. | ||
| You can basically say anything you want about Trump. | ||
| Yes, Trump is a great example. | ||
| I think Trump is a truly dangerous person in terms of the fact that it's even conceivable that he could be president. | ||
| It's not only a scandal, it's a real danger to this country. | ||
| But when I see The way he's maligned by the left, half of it, at least, is dishonest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's a real problem. | ||
| It's a problem for the left. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're going to get into the left because, I mean, do you feel the same way? | ||
| I think you do. | ||
| The reason I focused on the left is because I've always considered myself part of the left. | ||
| I don't know, to me at this point, I don't know. | ||
| These labels are all starting to change, and I don't think they matter that much anymore. | ||
| At this point, being liberal, to me, doesn't strike me as a position of the left anymore. | ||
| Really, being for critical thinking and honest debate and free speech, that's really not what's on the left anymore. | ||
| And again, that's not a defense of the right. | ||
| That's when everyone will suddenly say, ah, you see, he's defending the right. | ||
| Not defending the right. | ||
| I'm just saying, I don't know that I can be part of this anymore. | ||
| Do you feel similarly to that? | ||
| Yeah, people talk about classical liberalism now to differentiate the liberalism from what's happening on the left. | ||
| And yeah, I mean, if you are a liberal, you have to be committed to free speech. | ||
| I mean, free speech has to win just across the board. | ||
| And what we're seeing on the left is a kind of censoriousness and really Kind of an authoritarian moment where they're just trying to stifle the expression of ideas which, however provocative, are not obviously false. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the burden is on you to interact with these provocative ideas if you think they're dangerous or just mistaken. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And show them to be dangerous and or mistaken. | ||
| And it's an interesting question. | ||
| Are there true ideas that are dangerous to talk about? | ||
| Well, then that's a debate we can have. | ||
| Maybe there are certain facts that are not worth knowing. | ||
| Would you say there are? | ||
| I pretty much would say that you can absolutely say And think anything short of the direct call for violence to an individual or a group. | ||
| I think you have to have someone. | ||
| But beyond that, you want to put Auschwitz cartoons out there all day long? | ||
| And you want to put Nazi this and fag that? | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| You've got a guy in your basement sending those memes. | ||
| You think you're great and that makes you big. | ||
| I just think I would put no limitations, other than the direct threat. | ||
| But do you think the direct threat is even... Well, no, I think there should be no limitations on that kind of speech, because Holocaust denial laws in Europe, I think, are absurd and counterproductive. | ||
| But no, I was thinking of actual knowledge that one could have or seek that is just not worth having. | ||
| I mean, whether it's, you know, putting the formula to weaponize smallpox online, right? | ||
| So, like, we know how to do this and, you know, why should we advertise our knowledge? | ||
| And why should we even seek this knowledge on some level? | ||
| Or, you know, certain kinds of research where it's like, do you actually want to put money into looking for intelligence differences among races and different populations? | ||
| Like, what's the point? | ||
| Do we actually want to quantify the average intelligence of Japanese people versus Korean people? | ||
| What good is going to come of that? | ||
| And so, yeah, I think there's certain facts that they're not worth getting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you're saying they're not worth getting, but you're not saying people can't be free to go ahead and do it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You're just saying it would be a fruitless effort or, you know, wouldn't have much philosophical worth or something like that. | ||
| Yeah, but also, it could be... | ||
| socially harmful to make much of those facts. | ||
| So, again, if there's a gene for materialism, you know, just acquisitiveness, right? | ||
| And some scientist says, listen, what I want to spend a million dollars on is to figure out if Jews have this gene more than the goyim, right? | ||
| Well, skip me, if it exists! | ||
| Is there a gene for Jewish hoarding? | ||
| Right, like is that the scientific paper you want to try to write? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You would have to question the social motives of somebody who would do that and obviously there's you know analogous things you would do in the black community or in any other community. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I think it would be very easy to stigmatize that research and there's maybe a reason to avoid it because it's just there's nothing you're gonna do with the information that is at all socially positive. | ||
| But that doesn't mean it's it's not a possible thesis. | ||
| Right, and so if someone said, listen, I've genotyped 400,000 Jewish people and it turns out we have this gene for acquisitiveness and it's shown, it's kind of upregulated among hoarders and people who become very wealthy but won't spend any of their money, like famous misers, we've done all this, and it turns out Ashkenazi Jews have this much more than other people. | ||
| Let's talk about it. | ||
| That person's career would be destroyed for his bigotry, but that would be a totally rational thing we could talk about. | ||
| And as a Jew, I wouldn't be the least offended by entertaining that fact, and I'd be interested in the science. | ||
| So that didn't make you a Jew-a-phobe just by saying that? | ||
| Because I can see the memes flying right now. | ||
| The prurient interest that people would have in that kind of research, it would attract people who were interested in it for the wrong reasons. | ||
| Every anti-Semite in the world would want that to be true. | ||
| So it is with IQ differences among blacks and whites and Asians. | ||
| All that research is so heavily stigmatized. | ||
| And one wonders, what's the point of doing it? | ||
| What are you going to do differently as a result of getting those data? | ||
| But it doesn't mean that it's synonymous with bigotry to actually understand the genetic differences there. | ||
| There's an endless amount of this stuff coming to us in the future. | ||
| More and more, we're going to be deluged with information that becomes increasingly actionable, right? | ||
| I mean, where we can decide to change our own genomes or the genomes of our kids. | ||
| And yeah, then it's all, then all of this very inflammatory, | ||
| these very inflammatory areas of where people are, they're basically no-go areas in science now. | ||
| They're gonna open up in surprising ways because we're gonna be forced to, | ||
| we'll just, we'll have choices to make. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know, how intelligent do you want the next generation to be? | ||
| If we have a trivial, trivially easy intervention that allows us to add 30 IQ points to the next generation with no, basically no downside. | ||
| I mean, once we understand the genetics of intelligence. | ||
| There'll be massive resistance. | ||
| That'll be a taboo thing to do. | ||
| And yet, you have to have an argument for maintaining that taboo or maintaining the status quo. | ||
| You have to have some argument as to why the status quo is normative, why it's good. | ||
| Because if I said, well, There's a neurotoxin has fallen from space and actually destroyed the brains of everyone exposed to it. | ||
| And now the next generation, if we do nothing, the next generation is going to be 30 points dumber than we are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we have this intervention. | ||
| Should we bring it back? | ||
| Should we bring the status quo back? | ||
| Well, everyone would be for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's just a Anyway, even talking about intelligence is so fraught, socially and ethically, that people avoid it at almost any cost. | ||
| So in a way, it would be like, at least for people that come at this from a religious angle, They don't want to play God, so that they wouldn't—I would imagine if this appeared and we could get everyone's IQ up 30 points, that it would be the religious people who would say, don't do this, primarily, not solely, but it would be a lot of religious people, because they wouldn't want us to play God. | ||
| But yet if it happened the other way, as you laid out, everyone would basically be for it. | ||
| So it sort of just depends which way we come at these things, right? | ||
| Well, it's an anchoring phenomenon. | ||
| We're anchored to the status quo. | ||
| There's a status quo bias that people are just heavily... | ||
| predisposed to think that what is normally the case is somehow good and you change it at your peril but many things are the way they are by dint of accident or what in hindsight will look like bad luck and so the question is what good things would come of making changes and more and more I mean what technology is Above anything else is an agent of changing the status quo for thousands of years in human history or millions of years in human history. | ||
| At a minimum, hundreds of thousands of years. | ||
| You could take blocks of thousands of years and, you know, if you were born at the beginning or the end, there was basically no difference. | ||
| There was no change. | ||
| They were working with the same toolkit. | ||
| You know, you had the same arrowheads and stone axes. | ||
| And even until very recently, from generation to generation, the human circumstance was pretty recognizable to you if you were, you know, a hundred years on either side of any moment. | ||
| But more and more, everything is up for revision. | ||
| And that's a, there are obvious risks associated with that because we don't necessarily understand the implications | ||
| of making the changes we're making. | ||
| Do you think that will become accelerated as time goes on because of where we're at with technology? | ||
| You know, like my parents didn't have, you know, television wasn't out until they were about eight. | ||
| And now it's like I see my four-year-old nephew with an iPhone and, you know, and my niece who's two | ||
| playing on the iPad before she can speak, you know, like all this stuff. | ||
| Do you think we get to a point where the technology keeps slamming us and yet we're not ready to figure out what this actually all means, you know, even something as simple as just putting a kid in front of a screen when they're two and having them think that that's actually a real fish tank Not the fish tank on the on the counter. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think it is accelerating. | ||
| There's no question it's accelerating and the migration of culture into digital space is only enabling that because obviously you can change the cloud more quickly than you can change the world. | ||
| And so it's a insofar as Culture is becoming more and more a matter of information. | ||
| I think that is compounding the acceleration, but the acceleration was happening anyway. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, before we get too far down all this stuff, let's just wrap up some Islam stuff, which I assume that if we discuss right now, We can pretty much put a bow on it and we'll be good to go, right? | ||
| Never be slandered again. | ||
| Nothing will be slandered. | ||
| I know there's people probably watching this right now. | ||
| Some of these, you know, misintentioned at best people watching this just waiting for the moment, right? | ||
| They're just sitting. | ||
| Can you imagine being one of those people? | ||
| Just sitting there going, I can get one word out of him. | ||
| If I could just say this this way. | ||
| You were talking about playing catch-up to technology. | ||
| I feel like I'm perpetually playing catch-up to this sort of ethical surprise that people do this because it's very hard for me to imagine Being this way on purpose. | ||
| Much of this has been done so relentlessly that I know it's not a matter of accident or they just couldn't watch the whole video. | ||
| I feel like I'm pretty charitable to the The people who do this by mistake. | ||
| They heard something said about my view and they think, well, that's got to be true. | ||
| It was said by a journalist or it appeared in Salon. | ||
| Salon's a real magazine, right? | ||
| So how could this be completely fabricated? | ||
| I actually am a free speech absolutist, except for Salon. | ||
| That's the one spot. | ||
| made me quite sympathetic to Donald Trump's operations, just quash all, you know, everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he, but I mean, it is just the case that people actually do this maliciously. | ||
| And it's, we have to be on our guard for it. | ||
| And I'm very, when I see something like, again, Donald Trump's the perfect example, because he's someone who you almost cannot malign enough, right? | ||
| He's so worthy of being buried in scorn. | ||
| And I mean, it's just the immune system of civilization has to fully encase him and just export him from, From our political process and then forget about him, but when I see some of the stuff that's done | ||
| To him, it's completely without an ethical core. | ||
| Well, this is just ends justify the means, right? | ||
| They're looking at him and going, he's as evil as you would lay out and probably will lay out. | ||
| So they say, all right, well, our ethics and our standards are now out the window because we just want to destroy this guy, which is a scary place for journalists to be in. | ||
| Much less the average person. | ||
| All right, but that's a good segue. | ||
| You wanted to take us back? | ||
| Well, just quickly to the joyful topic of Islam, because that'll then get us to Trump. | ||
| It's hit me that since I've sort of been in this conversation, and again, I wasn't really in it that much until we launched that show on Ora back in September, that the biggest issue here, forgetting the people with bad intentions, but the biggest for the majority of people that are trying to get some truth out of this, People simply cannot separate the religion from the political ambitions of Islam. | ||
| Now I know you've laid this out a lot and obviously you've talked about the Pew polls and what Islamism is versus Jihadism and the nominal Muslim and all that. | ||
| Have you in all of this conversation You've gotten to a place where you think you have a better handle maybe now than you did six months ago or a year ago on how to address that because to me the religion part, you say Islam, people assume religion and then automatically even if you a thousand times over say I'm talking about a doctrine, not the people who practice it however they may, | ||
| Automatically, people get upset by that, versus somehow focusing more on the political part, which that's the part that I fear more. | ||
| I don't care what anyone does in their private life, as long as it's not trying to behead me or something like that. | ||
| Have you figured out any way to negotiate that any better, or is that even something that you think about? | ||
| Do you think it's a wasted exercise, or any of that? | ||
| Well, it's not wasted, it's just the signs of one's success. | ||
| I mean, it's just the case that people have certain assumptions about religion in general, and Islam in particular, that are not true, and the only remedy is to push on those assumptions and show them to be false. | ||
| And so, the one that's most common, which I have been talking about for years, but I haven't found a better way to address it, which is just, The assumption that all religions are basically the same is false. | ||
| There are vast differences among the religions. | ||
| These are differences that the adherents of the religions really care about. | ||
| Devout Muslims care that their religion teaches something different from Mormonism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the whole point, pretty much. | ||
| all the details matter and the crazier you are, the more attached you are to the doctrine, | ||
| they matter more. | ||
| And given that there are these differences among religions, we are actually misled when | ||
| we just use the word religion over and over again to describe what people are doing and | ||
| why they're doing it. | ||
| And so yeah, to separate the political piece of Islam from the religion is more difficult because the religion doesn't do that. | ||
| It doesn't do a good job. | ||
| Well, intentionally. | ||
| For the most part, it doesn't do it at all. | ||
| Reformers are trying to do this. | ||
| Someone like Majid Nawaz, who you've had on the show, is trying to do this. | ||
| But it is, there really is a dogma within the faith which says this can't be done and shouldn't be done. | ||
| This is a, Islam is a total system for living your life and it includes the politics and it includes the laws that govern, you know, how you treat homosexuals and infidels and women and all of that. | ||
| And so it is a modernizing reformist project To dissect out the religious, spiritual, otherworldly stuff and the ethics, say, from any kind of political commitment to making sure your society conforms to Islam, which is the Islamist project. | ||
| I think it's useful. | ||
| Someone like Majid, who talks about Islam on the one hand and Islamism on the other, I think that's very useful and I've adopted that under his, on the basis of his argument. | ||
| But the thing we can't lose sight of is just what a steep hill that is to climb. | ||
| In view of most Muslims, because the most dispiriting thing I've encountered since my collaboration with Majid, and as probably most of your viewers know, we wrote this book together. | ||
| We were initially adversaries in a way, and I reached out to him and decided to just see if we could do a kind of a blog exchange, and it became so fruitful we did this book together. | ||
| And Majid, as you know, is just impeccable and as reasonable and ethical and wise as anyone you're going to find on this topic. | ||
| I mean, he's just like, you couldn't invent a better spokesman for a rational, secular, reformist, Muslim project, right? | ||
| He's basically perfect and yet to see the degree to which he has been hated by the so-called moderate Muslim community and disavowed and his collaboration with me viewed as Just a total deal. | ||
| I mean, this is the amazing thing. | ||
| He's actually said, at one point in our collaboration, he said, you know, my talking to you, a well-known atheist and critic of Islam, is far more controversial than my talking to a jihadist. | ||
| Literally, he could have done a book with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS. | ||
| Let's get this straight. | ||
| There's the reformist project, and then there's the true jihad project. | ||
| Let's talk about it, right? | ||
| That would be an interesting book. | ||
| That would be less controversial among so-called moderate Muslims than his talking to a well-known atheist. | ||
| That's, you know, that is like an X-ray view of virtually everything that's wrong with the Muslim community at this moment. | ||
| And the burden is upon Muslims to talk honestly about this. | ||
| Right, but they're not helped by the people that should be helping them on the left, as we know. | ||
| And then someone like, so someone like Majid, who I agree with everything you've just said, I mean, I have incredible empathy and sympathy and admiration for him. | ||
| So he gets hate from, you know, sort of the mainstream Muslim community because they don't want him talking about this stuff. | ||
| Then he gets treated horribly By the left, when they'll call him a lapdog and all the other horrible things they've said about him. | ||
| And then his only way to talk about it is he has to either talk to you, who have become a lightning rod for, I think, all the wrong reasons, or he has to go on Fox or something. | ||
| And then they're like, ah, see? | ||
| He's a right winger. | ||
| So it all becomes like this crazy mess where actually the left is enabling They're pushing people like Maajid right. | ||
| I'm not saying any of his positions are right, but the only outlets that he can let himself be heard on end up being something like Fox. | ||
| And that's crazy. | ||
| And I get messages all the time. | ||
| My mom is Maajid's biggest fan. | ||
| Every time she sees him on TV, she calls me. | ||
| She's like, that guy, where are more of him? | ||
| She loves everything he says, and yet it can pretty much only be heard on Fox, at least here in America. | ||
| I guess he goes on CNN sometimes. | ||
| On CNN, and I've been with him on, I think, MSNBC and CNN. | ||
| But he's... Yeah, there's a... Frankly, it's terrifying how... | ||
| Morally blind the left and the quote moderate Muslim community is to just how much obvious wisdom and risk he's incurring. | ||
| I mean, he's just he's taking massive risks. | ||
| To try to find daylight, you know, in this morass. | ||
| And there really is only one path to that daylight, which is to talk honestly about why there's so much mayhem in the Muslim world, mostly in the Muslim world. | ||
| I mean, but much of it obviously has been exported to the non-Muslim world. | ||
| And that's what, you know, non-Muslims tend to worry about. | ||
| People like myself and Majid and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, anyone who's been talking about this for years, we always admit that the people who are suffering most under Islamism and jihadism are Muslims. | ||
| I don't actually know the current numbers, but the vast majority of people killed by jihadist terrorism are Muslims. | ||
| So liberals above Anyone should be concerned about coming to the aid of these people who are being reliably immiserated by the chaos in the Muslim world. | ||
| And then when you see how this chaos gets exported to the migrant crisis in Europe now, and the way those tensions are empowering the far right and actually breaking Europe, you know, how much of a Brexit is due to the migrant crisis? | ||
| I don't know, but certainly some, right? | ||
| I think a huge amount of it, yeah. | ||
| So you look at it just because of the knock-on effects of all of this and, again, the way in which it reliably empowers people like Trump and worse. | ||
| Liberals and moderate Muslims want to attack Majid and me when this conversation starts happening, right? | ||
| I mean, they have endless energy to attack the people who are just worrying out loud about where this is all headed, where it's obviously headed, where it's been obvious for decades. | ||
| Well, I see these clowns and I'm always like, if you guys could spend 15% of the anger and the blame that you lay at the hands of Sam every time someone else, another jihadist kills somebody, just give them 15% of the anger you're directing to this guy or to Majid or to Douglas or, you know, a few of these other people. | ||
| That would just be a little something. | ||
| So, yeah, I don't want to focus on this too much. | ||
| I know, when I emailed you before this, you said, let's talk about anything. | ||
| So that's what I intend to do. | ||
| But how much, just purely on the personal level for you, on the most personal level, how exhausted are you by this topic? | ||
| You know, I read, we'll get to waking up in a little bit, there's really nothing about Islam or jihadism. | ||
| I mean, I know that you're, I think, I know you well enough to know that you're real Sort of quest in life are the things in that book to find that space as a human and and be present and decent and all those things and yet you've been not only caught up in something that that's so | ||
| Psychotic for so many reasons, but you've become the poster boy for it, right? | ||
| How just on the most personal level how is that for you for your? | ||
| Spirit or whatever you want to call it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's it is toxic. | ||
| There's no question about it I mean being having to respond or having to think about whether or not to respond to a Publicly prominent attack on oneself, which is totally false, right? | ||
| And in many cases doesn't even admit of a response that will be at all helpful. | ||
| You know, it's the, you know, wrestle with pigs principle, which is in fact true, you know, so how many times Do you want to say publicly, in whatever way you can, that you're not a racist, right? | ||
| When someone is just, you know, next week say, well, no, actually you're a racist. | ||
| So it is toxic to do that. | ||
| And you just, at a certain point, you just have to hope that the people who are paying attention, who actually care, are going to notice. | ||
| They're going to be able to follow the plot. | ||
| There's been, the campaign against me in particular, there's a few other people like this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali certainly gets it worse, but the campaign against people, the prominent critics of Islam, is so well-subscribed and so shorn of any kind of intellectual or ethical conscience. | ||
| It's like you suddenly attract to yourself the attention of just kind of an army | ||
| of sociopaths who just have a lot of time on their hands and just just kind | ||
| of get into every comment thread and then some of them are quote journalists | ||
| you know who again have no journalistic conscience. | ||
| Yeah, that word is really losing meaning to journalists. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but there's this pretense of a commitment to getting the facts straight, but yet these people never apologize when they get facts wrong and, you know, egregiously wrong. | ||
| And so people like, you know, Greenwald and Cenk are certainly in that category. | ||
| So it is toxic, but at a certain point, you just have to step away from it | ||
| and move on to other things, which I do intermittently. | ||
| I mean, so I step away from it, and then I get pulled back, and then I step away. | ||
| So it's sort of like the mafia. | ||
| That's the answer I sort of sense I'm getting from you. | ||
| It's like the mafia, like you try to get out, but they pull you back in, | ||
| and then you just kind of go from there. | ||
| All right, so let's put that aside for the most part and do some politics, | ||
| but obviously those are linked somewhat. | ||
| Because Bill Maher, who you know how much I admire him, he did a piece on his show about a month ago saying that Trump was not a creation of the left, this is solely on the right. | ||
| And actually in, as the over-the-shoulder graphics, he was showing articles saying that it was a creation of the left, and one of the articles was a piece by Douglas Murray, and he said, and in the piece, you couldn't really read it over the shoulder because it was small, but I had read the piece, and it said something about how Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Dave Rubin are the only three liberals talking about this. | ||
| I haven't been on the show yet, but I thought that was pretty good for me. | ||
| But this is one thing where I actually even though Bill, I think obviously has been incredibly outspoken about Islam from the left. | ||
| So I admire him. | ||
| I think he totally missed the mark on this one because you've been talking about this for a while. | ||
| I've been talking about this almost the duration of this whole show that If the left won't deal with this honestly, it causes Trump to rise. | ||
| And he really didn't quite follow that. | ||
| I don't know if you saw that or not. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think I saw it. | ||
| I heard that he said it. | ||
| It'd be interesting to watch it and see what his emphasis was, because I could imagine him emphasizing Not actually talking about the causality, but just talking about the moral blame, the onus being on the right. | ||
| Because ultimately they're the ones. | ||
| You guys are responsible for this monster. | ||
| This is the Republican platform and your covert appeal to racists for generations and this is on you. | ||
| This is a sign of all the dysfunction on the right. | ||
| You've dumbed it down so much among your base. | ||
| That you've been so explicitly anti-science with climate change and evolution and just pandering to religious demagogues that you now have a base that is totally unequipped to fact-check anything. | ||
| So then you can just get a con man up there who can promise He's going to take us all to Mars on a golden plane and people believe him, right? | ||
| And so I think he could have been saying that just the onus is on the right, but if he was in fact saying that there's not a causal connection between how out to lunch the left has been on these core, you know, civilizational issues like what to do about global jihadism and the role that religious ideas are playing and inspiring it. | ||
| If he was denying that, then I think he's totally wrong. | ||
| I think it was the former, and I don't want you to have to comment too far if you didn't see it. | ||
| But I just thought it was interesting because I thought, well, here's someone who's really led the charge. | ||
| And even before you were really in it publicly, I think, he was still talking about it. | ||
| And now I think he's really missing a key piece to it. | ||
|
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But hopefully I'll be able to discuss it with him at some point. | |
| I can feel it in myself. | ||
| The reason why, in the laboratory of my own mind, I can see this working. | ||
| If I didn't know enough about how wrong Trump was on issues of policy, so far as he has any beliefs about policy, but if I wasn't paying attention as much as I am to just how crazy the implications are for his statements about the economy and building a wall and deporting 12 million illegal aliens and | ||
| all the rest. | ||
| And I just had, and I was just concerned about terrorism, and then I saw Clinton and Obama not making any sense in | ||
| the aftermath of something like Orlando. | ||
| Can't say jihadism. | ||
| Never mentioning Islam. | ||
| And then defending that obscurantism with this just sanctimonious and bullying speech. | ||
| Now I'm thinking about Obama's speech once he was pushing back against the pressure he was getting to use the word radical Islam. | ||
| The phrase radical Islam. | ||
| If I just had that to go on well, then I I could see how you would vote for Trump, right? | ||
| You just you got a guy who's at least Naming the problem. | ||
| Yeah, right and you know if I didn't see what was wrong with the let's keep all Muslims out of the country, right? | ||
| I'm not I don't see how impractical and needlessly inflammatory that policy prescription is and I just see You know, hordes of people streaming into Europe, unvetted, and I see Britain breaking off partially in response, and I don't see any liberal politician who will even admit that Europe has a problem. | ||
| Women are being raped and groped in Copenhagen, and the stories are being buried. | ||
| But all civilization is equal, Sam. | ||
| But it's like the immolation of a civilization, right? | ||
| And yet we have, it's taboo to talk about it, so you can see the appeal of someone like Trump. | ||
| You see what's happening in Belgium and Germany, that's not going to happen here, right? | ||
| That appeal, Hillary Clinton has to be able to say that, right? | ||
| She has to be able to acknowledge that what's going on in Europe is not perfect, right? | ||
| That Belgium has a problem, right? | ||
| And it's a problem of having now millions of people in their society, however they got there, who actually don't have an interest in sharing the values of the society, the liberal values of the society. | ||
| And no one on earth should be more concerned about this than liberals and actually liberal Muslims who want to embrace liberal values. | ||
| Those are the people who should be all over this problem. | ||
| Right, so this is like the we're so tolerant that we're tolerant of intolerance and thus we will let people who would gladly kill us right into the house. | ||
| Yeah, and at the margins there's some room for that as what we said about free speech in the beginning. | ||
| Do I think you should criminalize certain kinds of Islamist or Jihadist speech. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| I think you should, you know, someone like Anjum Chowdhury, you know, the Islamist buffoon of the UK, I think he should be able to say whatever he wants, right? | ||
| And we should be able to criticize the stupidity and divisiveness of views. | ||
| So blasphemy laws of any kind are not appropriate. | ||
| I mean, that's not how you fight this, but Open societies have to be somewhat tolerant with excruciatingly bad ideas which target the openness of the society itself and cynically exploit it. | ||
| It's like the KKK showing up in in the middle of a black neighborhood knowing they're going to be protected by the cops. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then just talking about saying all these things that would put them at just intolerable risk, but for the fact that the cops are protecting them. | ||
| So I think we have we more or less have that right in our society. | ||
| So but it's a it's a real problem that that You know, I think given a sufficiently large terrorist attack closer to the election, | ||
| Unless Hillary Clinton can actually make sense on this issue, and not just be a pure obscurantist, I think it's conceivable that Trump still could get in. | ||
| It's giving ISIS a vote in the election. | ||
| I think so too, and I don't think she's going to do it, short of something truly horrific that then creates such a populist thing even on the left. | ||
| I don't think she's going to get there. | ||
| And I sense that you're sort of somewhat begrudgingly supporting her, sort of that | ||
| we just don't have anyone better, kind of. | ||
| I mean, I think—see, my thing with Trump is that I get—and I went with Milo Yiannopoulos | ||
| to UCLA, and it was in effect it was a Trump rally, because all the Trump people love Milo, | ||
| and we just did a talk like we do this. | ||
| And all these kids were coming up to me after—smart UCLA kids of every walk of life, gay, straight, | ||
| Asian, whatever, black, anything it was, and they were all coming up to me after and saying, | ||
| you know, "I'm liberal, but I'm supporting Trump because of the free speech thing." | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I tried to explain to them that if you think this is the guy who's ultimately going to save free speech, that's kind of nuts because he's always threatening to sue reporters and all this other stuff, but the sense that I got from them And again, these are young, bright college kids, was that they don't care about any of the issues right now. | ||
| They've grown up in a time where they think government is so broken, and that all of them lie. | ||
| Trump happens to be lying a little more brazenly, or a little more the way a regular person would lie, as opposed to the way Hillary would lie, by tactically knowing each word, you know, and Trump just does it in a more common man way. | ||
| They feel this, this cultural thing about free speech and being able to say what you want and openly talk about Islamism or immigration or whatever it may be. | ||
| They're voting on that. | ||
| And these were liberals coming up to me. | ||
| And that's where the first time that I thought, now I at least understand this. | ||
| And a lot of my audience feels that way. | ||
| But it's a shitty way to have to vote, I think. | ||
| Would you say that's fair to say? | ||
| For me, the irony is that it would be so easy for Hillary to just clean up her side of the mess, at least to the point where it would nullify this argument or this difference between her and him. | ||
| And I don't quite understand at this point why she wouldn't do it. | ||
| Whose vote is she worried about losing? | ||
| It's not like there's going to be an exodus of People who hate Trump to Trump if she becomes more plain-spoken on these issues. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I guess it's the real social justice people that have been following Bernie this whole time. | ||
| She's going to have trouble getting a certain amount of the young ones anyway. | ||
| And she thinks if she uses any of this language, even though It would, I think, in effect be smart and at least more honest. | ||
| I think she feels she would lose those people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, she, you know, the Clintons, both of them have their problems, obviously, so it's hard to... | ||
| Imagine how she would fully rehabilitate her image in the eyes of those who see her as just a kind of political robot who just wants to be president and has wanted to be president forever and they just want power and influence and they're dishonest and opportunistic to a point where there's It seems scarcely human in a way, and when you look at the details of the funding of the Clinton Foundation, half of what Trump people say and Sanders people say about the Clintons seems to be true. | ||
| You can't be idealistic about how the sausage has gotten made on their side in their careers. | ||
| But on the issues that I care about, the reason why I can support her without much fear is that I think 90% of the time, even if the way she got there is not ideal, even if she's been influenced by banks and whoever else that you may be | ||
| worried have too much influence on the political process. | ||
| 90% of the time I think the policies she would want to enact are policies that I would support. | ||
| So, and even on the kind of clash of civilizations front, I think she is, I think she understands | ||
| that we're not fighting the Amish and we're not fighting Scientologists | ||
| and we're not fighting the Mormons. | ||
| And when we talk about terrorism generically, we're not really sort of thinking about the IRA also, right? | ||
| We know we have a global jihadist insurgency that is coming from one religion | ||
| and one region of the world, although it's now spread all over the world | ||
| in terms of the contagiousness of the ideas. | ||
| And, and, [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| And it's a generational battle to figure out how to empower the moderate voices in the Muslim world. | ||
| I think she must understand that despite the fact that 90% of what she says doesn't give any indication that she understands that. | ||
| No indication. | ||
| So do you think that she would probably govern a little more with that understanding? | ||
| That this is a little bit of a nod just to keep the left happy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which may be costing her ultimately. | ||
| Well, I think she's actually, when you're talking about jihadists, she's as hawkish as anyone, which is why a lot of Sanders people hate her. | ||
| She's too committed to the drone program, for instance. | ||
| And she's probably more hawkish than Obama has been, and he's basically Dick Cheney, if you're on the left now. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| But it still is important how we talk about these things. | ||
| And they obviously think it's important because they're loathe to use any honest terminology to talk about these things. | ||
| They think it's so combustible that if you call a spade a spade, you're going to basically win the war of ideas for ISIS, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we should just be clear about what that is actually suggesting. | ||
| It's saying that There are some significant number of people, a non-trivial number of people in the Muslim community who, and whether they're thinking this is tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or tens of millions, I don't know, but certainly enough to worry about, who | ||
| Are just doctors and dentists and coaching Little League and they just they want to live the American dream or the European dream as much as anyone. | ||
| These are people who are never going to do anything bad to anyone. | ||
| But if you talk about this problem. | ||
| In a sufficiently polarizing way, and in particular if you admit that there's a link between Islamism and Jihadism and specific doctrines within the religion of Islam, so there's a religious motivation to this extremist behavior. | ||
| If you admit that, you are going to drive these peaceful, honest, trustworthy people into the arms of the theocrats. | ||
| These are people who are actually going to go fight with ISIS, or they're going to self-radicalize and start killing people at their office parties, or they're going to fund people who do, or look the other way when their cousin does it. | ||
| They won't call the FBI knowing that their cousin is going to go off and kill a dozen people with his AR-15. | ||
| That's what they're worried about. | ||
| about. That's what they're saying they're worried about. | ||
| So that really is the soft bigotry of low expectations, right? Because they're saying | ||
| these people are on such a tenuous thread, really, that if you just say this, you've | ||
| coded it for them, and then here this comes. So that's why it's such virtue signaling | ||
| with me for the left. It's like, in a lot of ways, you are the racist ones. | ||
| I don't want to throw that word out like that. | ||
| But in a lot of ways, you're looking at it through the lens of the way you would purport everyone else to be racist. | ||
| You're viewing it that way. | ||
| These are people, as you said, so precariously tethered to civilization and its commitments that one wrong word | ||
| and that just the mask comes off and you're in the presence of barbarians. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is a point that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made for years, over and over again | ||
| in response to the Danish cartoon controversy. | ||
| She was pointing out that the very same ministers in Western Europe who were condemning the cartoonists | ||
| and condemning the papers for printing these cartoons were busy locking up their embassies | ||
| and removing their staff in preparation for the barbarian onslaught that they knew was coming. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And meanwhile, they're saying that Islam is a peaceful religion and it's been unfairly disparaged | ||
| by these cartoonists. | ||
| So it's either, in this case, the narrative narrative because people often say you don't | ||
| want to confirm the narrative of ISIS. | ||
| If we call this radical Islam, we're confirming the narrative of ISIS or jihadists generally, that this is a war between the West and Islam. | ||
| But the narrative narrative is either The most uncharitable and paranoid thing ever said about a community. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or it's true. | ||
| Now, if it's the former, we should stop doing it. | ||
| It's an awful thing to assume that your Muslim OBGYN is this close to just going berserk. | ||
| I mean, just imagine what it would take for you to suddenly support an organization like ISIS that is not by virtue of collateral damage, not by accident, but is intentionally cutting the heads off of journalists and aid workers and burning them alive in cages and, I mean, crucifying children. | ||
| I mean, this is what they're doing, again, not because Of some failure of their technology, right? | ||
| Or like they got, they had bad information and they accidentally bombed Medecins Sans Frontieres, you know, as we did in Afghanistan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, this is, this is, you know, by the blade of a knife, you know, they do these things with a full ideological commitment. | ||
| And more than that, They export the documentary evidence of their doing it as propaganda. | ||
| This is their PR. | ||
| That's another thing that people don't really... | ||
| The worst things that people have ever done tend to be the things that we hide and are embarrassed by, even if we're basically committed to the cause that required it to be done. | ||
| For instance, the Nazis hid Auschwitz from themselves. | ||
| A culture just stocked with anti-Semites. | ||
| The level of endemic anti-Semitism in In Germany at the time and in Europe, it generally was enough to allow for the Holocaust, but they still had to censor this behavior from themselves, right? | ||
| And when you look at behavior like the My Lai Massacre, right? | ||
| So this is a, the excess of American militarism, you know, the pathology, it just became a, you know, These are soldiers just pushed to the breaking point for whatever reason, acting out and doing some of the worst things that people have ever done. | ||
| And this is a, we both conceal it and then once we can no longer conceal it, we atone for it. | ||
| It's just, this is something we cannot support. | ||
| ISIS is showing us the worst, showing the world the worst things they can possibly do And that is what is so attractive to the community, that is. | ||
| Just imagine, imagine the Nazis being able to show the full process of what it's like in Auschwitz, right? | ||
| Like here we separate them at the ramp, and the women and children just go straight into the gas chamber, and this is like the footage, right? | ||
| And the piles of hair and clothing, and the bodies burning in pits, and imagine just a fully professional production there, putting that online and having the tens of thousands of foreign recruits come in because that just looks so damn good, right? | ||
| That is the pathology of ideas we're talking about and it is a terrifying possibility, which I think is in fact sincerely worried about by people like President Obama and Hillary Clinton. | ||
| That if you actually acknowledged that there was a religious link here, right, then some number of more people would jump on the side of the religion. | ||
| It's like, well, if you're going to ask me to choose between Islam as It was practiced in the seventh century, and your Western values that don't really support burning people alive in cages and throwing gays from rooftops and all that, well, I'm going to have to go with Islam. | ||
| It doesn't matter that, you know, I got to be in Orange County in 15 minutes to take my kid to a movie, right? | ||
| How many people like that exist? | ||
| Certainly some, but I think it's The reason why it's bad not to talk honestly about the link to religion is because our denial of that link puts absolutely no pressure on the Muslim community to get its act together. | ||
| I mean, only Muslims can solve this problem. | ||
| I can't solve this problem, obviously. | ||
| I'm just this crazy, infidel atheist who just doesn't understand Islam. | ||
| Why would anyone take me seriously on this topic? | ||
| Meanwhile, I know several things that you've done behind the scenes to help a lot of freethinkers in these places, and yet you don't run around screaming that kind of thing. | ||
| It's easy to see how I would have anything I say about Islam, critically or not, or just linking specific doctrines to specific behaviors. | ||
| From the point of view of a Muslim, however devout, it's just, I'm the wrong spokesman for that project. | ||
| But the problem is, even Majid apparently is the wrong spokesman, right? | ||
| A former Islamist who can say, I know why I did it, I know why my friends did it, now I'm out, let's talk honestly about the problem and the link between specific doctrines and the problem. | ||
| Ayaan is the wrong person. | ||
| Ayaan, born into it, knows exactly what it was like to live in a theocracy, got out of it, has been the victim of a theocratic witch hunt and its liberal enablers for now decades. | ||
| She's got no standing. | ||
| And then the people who do have standing, the people who are put forward as moderates, Almost without exception, obscurantists and liars, or closet Islamists. | ||
| When you look at what their commitments are, they're in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood, or they have absolutely no moral core. | ||
| You've got someone like Riz Aslan, or Dean Obadala, or someone who's just... | ||
| I don't know what either of them actually believe, but what they say is just pure denialism about the problems and need for reform within Islam. | ||
| Well, I saw one of them tweet after what happened in Mecca, a couple weeks ago. | ||
| It was in Mecca, right? | ||
| And one of them tweeted something like, well, you see, they're killing all these Muslims now, so that shows you it can't be about religion. | ||
| Actually, this has been going on forever. | ||
| As you said an hour ago, they've been killing more Muslims than anyone else. | ||
| That doesn't mean it has nothing to do with religion. | ||
| That shows you there are divisions within religion. | ||
| So it's this constant shell game that they're playing that never allows for truth. | ||
| And then you hear from Ahmadi Muslims who—I mean, so I get hate from Ahmadis who are a Officially blasphemers within Pakistan, right? | ||
| They're a subgroup where they consider themselves Muslims, but they have a founder who they consider also a prophet, and so they're just anathematized and regularly killed in a place like Pakistan. | ||
| But rather than point out Just how embattled they are and how and what that says about Sunni Islam in general, right? | ||
| They'll attack me as someone who doesn't understand that Islam is a religion of peace, right? | ||
| Because their version that's subscribed to by 15 people is a religion of peace, right? | ||
| And, you know, so it's like on Twitter, what do you say? | ||
| I think to one of these guys, I said, well, just let me know when the Sunnis stop blowing up your mosques and hunting you to the ends of the earth. | ||
| And then we might have something to talk about. | ||
| The short answer to all this is spend less time on Twitter. | ||
| That's the answer to many psychological and social problems. | ||
| Okay, I want to move on to some of the science stuff, but quick, last two things on current events. | ||
| Just related to Hillary and this whole email thing, we don't have to get into the specifics of that, but just from the pure moral perspective. | ||
| You know, basically the Attorney General said she didn't maliciously do anything, but in effect he was saying she's sort of an idiot and doesn't really understand how any of this stuff works and did things. | ||
| That's sort of the most generous way to present it, I think, because there's a lot of evidence that she did kind of know about some of this stuff and whatever. | ||
| So without the specifics of that, what do you think about the morality of doing something, of not being held account for, let's say she didn't do it maliciously. | ||
| That she's not being held accountable. | ||
| She still may have given away secrets. | ||
| She still may have done, you know, like in a way that seemed like more of a condemnation of her actions. | ||
| If she had done it maliciously, it would have shown that she tacitly knew what she was doing and whatever. | ||
| And then you'd have a clear answer. | ||
| The answer that they gave was she didn't really know what she was doing and she still did it. | ||
| That in a weird way seems more dangerous to me. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I just don't think it's a danger that scales to the presidency. | ||
| I think it's I mean, my intuitive picture of what I think happened there, I think is very likely right. | ||
| And it's just, it's annoying, but it's not a deal breaker. | ||
| And it would look different to me if the person who's likely to benefit from her prosecution Is not going to ruin the world, right? | ||
| So you have to keep your eye on the bigger problem here. | ||
| So you're admitting that it has a little to do with politics. | ||
| Your feelings on this, in this case, have to do with a little bit of the political landscape. | ||
| Your threat level to Trump is so high. | ||
| If there were an alternative to Hillary, I wouldn't waste a moment. | ||
| Supporting Hillary. | ||
| I mean, it really is a lesser of two evils case to make for Hillary, even given the fact that I think, as I said, probably 90% of the policies that she actually would want to enact would be policies I would support. | ||
| I think there's no question she's smart. | ||
| I think there's no question she's well-informed. | ||
| I think she is extraordinarily well-qualified, given the sorts of people who run for the presidency. | ||
| And I don't think she's going to destroy the world. | ||
| I think she's going to be very centrist and level-headed in almost every respect. | ||
| And so if you just put her in the Oval Office, I think that's a Given, certainly given the alternative, that's an extraordinarily positive outcome, right? | ||
| It's astonishing that in a nation of 300 million people, we didn't have 50 candidates who were obviously more impressive than she is. | ||
| Both intellectually and occupationally and ethically. | ||
| The fact that we don't have a dozen candidates, each more impressive than the next, None of whom has a scandal in his or her past, none of whom is an obvious liar, right? | ||
| It's amazing that we don't have a system that reliably promotes quality people like that. | ||
| Yeah, so that's just the ultimate condemnation of our system, right? | ||
| Because if there was someone who was really bright and had a real moral center, Why would you ever want to run for president? | ||
| Why would you ever want to put yourself in that position and have to do—it seems to me that the Trump thing is that he decided—it's not that he has these specific plans that anyone cares about, but he decided, I'm going to win. | ||
| And he keeps reminding everyone that he's the winner, and I think for a long time people have felt that they're not winners here, and now he's just got this This sort of engine of winning, and sadly he didn't have anyone on that side, 17 of them. | ||
| He didn't have one out of those 16 people to say, I'm smart and I have a moral center. | ||
| So he just took them down one at a time. | ||
| No, that was incredible to watch. | ||
| I was certainly surprised by that. | ||
| I remember saying about a year ago that there's no way we're going to be talking about Trump next fall. | ||
| And obviously many people were in that boat. | ||
| But just to answer your question about the email thing, I think probably she's surrounded by People who none of whom are actual techies, right? | ||
| So like they didn't understand the implications of having it all on their server or using their own blackberries and they don't understand that you're in a Starbucks and you use Starbucks Wi-Fi that people can just hack all your stuff, right? | ||
| What percentage of Americans understand the implications of just getting on a free wireless network? | ||
| Maybe it's probably less than 10% and Hillary Clinton may be one of them, right? | ||
| That's just pathetic. | ||
| No one from the Genius Bar is in her inner circle, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is a problem, but I don't think that's a problem that's going to be true once she's president. | ||
| And yeah, I'm sure she wanted to keep it on her server for all of the self-serving and both paranoid and understandably paranoid reasons that you'd expect. | ||
| I mean, she wants to keep her email to herself and she doesn't want to have to have 15 different devices. | ||
| She's probably worried about being hacked and didn't realize that she exposed herself to that more rather than less by, you know, keeping it in her house and so. | ||
| But it's just, it's dumb, but it's not... | ||
| Let's default on America's debt, which is so dumb and just suggests such a terrifying lack of awareness for the limits of his knowledge of anything relevant to governing a superpower. | ||
| Who knows what stupid decisions are possible? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It gets to me. | ||
| It might not show up. | ||
| It might be the same. | ||
| your brain? Sure. Yeah. How do you get to that other part? | ||
| Do you have to, is there some keys? What do you do to get there? It gets to me. It | ||
| might not show up. It might be the same. I might just start talking about Islam again. Okay, | ||
| well let's let's see if we can do this without Islam, but I think we can. I have a | ||
| good feeling. So I told you that I listened to the audiobook of Free Will again | ||
| yesterday. | ||
| By the way, I don't know if you saw my tweet, but the picture that's supposed to be you is someone else. | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| Oh, they came through your car? | ||
| Yeah, that's happened to me. | ||
| Do you know who that guy is? | ||
| Yeah, Sam Harris, the original Sam Harris, the only Sam Harris I'd ever heard of before. | ||
| Is that the musician Sam Harris, or is it an actor? | ||
| He was a Star Search singer. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| then became an actor and he's been reasonably successful on stage and he's been in some, | ||
| I think he was in a sitcom. | ||
| But he's a little older than me and someone who I early on got in touch with and said, | ||
| listen, some controversial material is going to be coming out under your name. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, you might not want to go to any mosques or... And so he and I, we've never met, but we've communicated by email and he's aware of me and probably not so happy that... And with all your Zionist funding and connections, you couldn't get your picture swapped out? | ||
| I don't know what happens there, but those pictures are almost never right. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what that is. | ||
| Anyway, that's not the point of this. | ||
| So I listened to Free Will again yesterday and... Just a funny point there. | ||
| My first editor, when I was writing The End of Faith, For some brief period of time, got confused and thought, I actually was that Sam Harris. | ||
| And was actually quite dismayed to know that in addition to all this other stuff I was claiming to be doing, I was singing show tunes. | ||
| Wow, that would be something. | ||
| That could be the next version of Sam Harris. | ||
| This Sam Harris. | ||
| Once you solve the Islam thing. | ||
| That would require deep neurosurgery to accomplish that. | ||
| You have the right background. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so I listened to it again yesterday, and I want you to lay out, I just want you to lay out the one little bit, you don't have to give me the whole audiobook again, but first, just sort of the difference between your feeling on it and Daniel Dennett, because when I was listening to it, I felt, at least for the first half, where you guys were, where you were discussing this, and your sort of difference, I really wanted to agree with him. | ||
| I felt that despite the case that you laid out, I wanted, that I'd sit here with you and I'd go, If I don't have free will, or if it's so stuck back in my cosmic thing, then what's stopping me from picking up this book and whacking you in the head with it? | ||
| Now you lay out a claim why I wouldn't actually be making that conscious decision, sort of. | ||
| So, did I frame that basically right? | ||
| You've actually driven to the hardest question to answer, which I actually don't have a great answer to, which is what exactly is the difference between my view and Dan's? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Dan Dennett, for those who don't know, is a philosopher who's written multiple books on the topic of free will. | ||
| He's a very famous philosopher of mind. | ||
| Also a friend and colleague of mine on the front, mostly on the front between science and religion, but so you know one of the new atheists and four horsemen and he and I have collaborated in that way. | ||
| We don't We disagree about a lot in the philosophy of mind, and we disagreed very visibly on the topic of free will, but I think we have been talking past one another a fair amount. | ||
| We just did a podcast, two podcasts back on my podcast, where we talked about this and It's still, even there, wasn't totally clear to me what the difference is. | ||
| I mean, it's largely a matter of emphasis. | ||
| It's largely a matter of Dan thinking that, this almost goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about certain ideas being either dangerous or socially counterproductive to advertise, right? | ||
| So he thinks that the idea of free will, the idea of free will that most people have, is important enough ethically and as a matter of jurisprudence and a matter of just kind of the smooth functioning of individuals in a society that we shouldn't disavow it in the way that I do in my book. | ||
| And that Is born not of a deep difference with me about the science or the underlying philosophy, but he just thinks this is essentially you don't want to throw the baby out with a bathwater argument with respect to the concept of free will. | ||
| Now, I think actually the concept is bad enough and comes with enough of its entangled problems that getting rid of the concept actually does good things rather than bad things. | ||
| And so I think we differ on that a little bit. | ||
| But again, it's not totally clear. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But just to get people up to speed here, most people are walking around with a sense of what philosophers call libertarian free will. | ||
| It's a sense that That what you think and do, what you intend and what then becomes your most deliberate voluntary action is something that you as an agent are authoring and that you really are responsible for this authorship. | ||
| There's no one upstream who is pulling the marionette strings. | ||
| Therefore, you are morally culpable for the bad things you do intentionally and, you know, with planning, etc. | ||
| So as you say in the book, so that you, for example, that you make a conscious decision on this morning to have coffee instead of tea. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| There's nothing pre-written that's sort of pushing you one way or another, but what they would say is that you are making these decisions in the moment for whatever reasons you're making them. | ||
| Fair? | ||
| Yeah, but the devil's in the details of what you mean by you. | ||
| So to give Dan his due here, Dan thinks that you is not just your conscious awareness of yourself, it's not who you feel yourself to be subjectively, it's the totality of your person. | ||
| It's all the neural activity in your brain that you're not aware of, but it's still you because it's in your body. | ||
| Um, and so there's a, there's a kind of a, a first person way of talking about you, which is your, your sense of yourself, your subjectivity. | ||
| And there's a third-person way of talking about you, which is from the outside, just your body, your genome, you as a person. | ||
| And those don't totally map on to each other, because what you're conscious of as a subject is not the totality of what's going on in your body. | ||
| You're certainly not conscious of your genes transcribing proteins and You're not conscious of most of the neural activity going on in your brain, right? | ||
| So what you're conscious of includes, for most people, a felt sense that You are the thinker of your thoughts and the initiator of your actions, and you are an agent. | ||
| You're a subject in consciousness, as opposed to just a space in which things are happening. | ||
| To put a few things to the side, no one's disputing. | ||
| I'm not disputing and Dan wouldn't dispute. | ||
| We agree that there are important differences between voluntary and involuntary action. | ||
| You know, there are people who have neurological illnesses and impairments that give them less degrees of freedom. | ||
| I mean, there are people who, you know, are phobic of certain things, or they have obsessive compulsive disorder, or they're, you know, you're blind. | ||
| There are things that can reduce your capacity to act, quote, freely in the world, and those reductions matter, right? | ||
| And if you're in prison and you're being coerced to write a confession, well that's different from actually confessing. | ||
| All these differences matter and no one's disputing any of that. | ||
| The issue for me is that people have a sense that what they experience themselves to be as loci of consciousness, the you in your head that can look at a glass of water and say, oh, I'd like to drink that, and then reach. | ||
| There's the feeling that free will describes a freedom there which runs very, very deep, which means to say that if you could rewind the movie of your life to one minute ago, the last question you asked might come out differently. | ||
| You might have asked a different question, right? | ||
| Or finished the sentence differently, right? | ||
| And so, you know, the moment where I decide to reach for this glass, it's coming now, but If you could return my brain and the universe to the state it was in a few moments ago, it might not have happened. | ||
| Now, there is no scientific or philosophical reason to believe that. | ||
| Everything we know about just how causes propagate in the universe, whether you're talking about physics out there or you're talking about the neurophysiology in here, Or even if you're talking about the influence of some immaterial soul that you might think exists, right? | ||
| Whatever concatenation of causes you think cause you to think and do the next thing you think and do, All of that is just happening, and if you set all of those causes back to where they were a moment ago, it's going to happen a trillion times in a row in the same way. | ||
| So basically the primordial stew, sort of, that led you to being you, Is what you're saying doesn't give us free will sort of in the way that he says it, right? | ||
| I guess he's saying it because of their societal reasons. | ||
| We need to say it. | ||
| Well, he's saying there's a pragmatic way of construing free will, which still emphasizes the difference between someone who does something intentionally of his own free will because he wanted to do it and someone who does something by accident or because he's got a brain tumor. | ||
| And those two, those people are different. | ||
| And we can lock this one away and throw it and throw away the key. | ||
| And these people we can rehabilitate or feel sorry for. | ||
| And those differences get conserved, even though we know this person, both of them on both sides, they're essentially robots that couldn't do otherwise, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But my argument is, it's not that simple. | ||
| And actually, some very good things happen when you notice that even the most Seemingly culpable person ever. | ||
| I mean just my favorite example someone like Saddam Hussein or his sons. | ||
| I mean like the least Sympathetic person the person who's not it's not like there's something neurologically wrong with him He is just a sadistic bastard who wants to harm people and is getting away with it for years at a stretch And it's totally unrepentant then when you capture him you think aha I finally have the bad guy who we can hang or we can put in prison forever and and it's it's the punishment is justified and Not merely because we're keeping people safe by taking them off the streets, it's justified because he really deserves it. | ||
| He's the author of his evil. | ||
| That final move of viewing people as the authors of themselves, I think is scientifically and ethically illegitimate. | ||
| What you get, from my point of view, when you lose this commitment to free will, You undercut any rational basis for hating people. | ||
| Hatred doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Vengeance, in the usual sense, doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Now, you can fear people because you know they're dangerous. | ||
| You can lock them up forever if you can't cure their evil. | ||
| And you would do that to wild animals and hurricanes and anything else you fear, that if you could lock up hurricanes, you'd lock up hurricanes, but you wouldn't attribute free will to them. | ||
| So there's still problems in the world that have to be solved and some only can be solved with force at the moment. | ||
| The vengeful, righteous, retributive justice module gets completely silenced by this insight. | ||
| And the insight is just obvious because no one picked their parents, right? | ||
| Therefore, no one picked their genomes. | ||
| No one picked the society into which they were born. | ||
| No one picked any of the environmental influences that played upon their genes so as to produce precisely the person they are. | ||
| So there's not a cell in your body that you chose, and yet every cell in your body is expressing itself as the person that you are. | ||
| And even if you added an immortal soul to that clockwork, you didn't pick your soul. | ||
| And you're not responsible for the fact that you weren't given a soul of a psychopath. | ||
| And some people were given the soul of a psychopath, and now they are helplessly being psychopaths. | ||
| I mean, the common starting point for philosophers for thousands of years, the reason why it seemed like we haven't made any progress on this issue and why this seemed like such a durable problem for philosophy is people have sensed that There really is a mystery here. | ||
| There's this subjective fact about us that we experience ourselves as free agents, as the true authors of our thoughts and actions. | ||
| But you can't square it with the world of causes, because however you talk about determinism, or randomness, or some combination thereof, that doesn't seem to give you any basis for freedom. | ||
| But what I do in the book, and what I'm doing now, is argue that Actually, the subjective side is an illusion. | ||
| We don't actually have this experience of free will. | ||
| It's not that free will really is an illusion, merely. | ||
| The illusion is an illusion. | ||
| If you look closely at the illusion, you realize it wasn't even there in the first place. | ||
| You sort of have to know how to meditate to really take this deeply, but most people can intuit this if they just are led to look at their inner lives a little more closely than normal. | ||
| I don't think I run this experiment in the book, but I've done it with some audiences, but if I asked you to think of a famous person right now, just think of somebody famous. | ||
| And let's do this a few times just so you can be sensitive to the process. | ||
| And now, forget that famous person. | ||
| Just think of a totally different famous person. | ||
| Pick him or her. | ||
| And do it one more time, but just pay attention to what the experience is like of picking a new famous person. | ||
| Okay, so you have somebody? | ||
| Okay, so now, on either of those trials, did you think of Sylvester Stallone? | ||
| No. | ||
| You know Sylvester Stallone is a famous person. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So like I say, Sylvester Stallone, that's a perfectly good candidate for being a famous person, right? | ||
| Now, so the first thing to point out is that here, If we can't find freedom of will here, it's nowhere. | ||
| I mean, this is as free as it gets, right? | ||
| I mean, it's just you with your thoughts. | ||
| You can take as long as you want. | ||
| You could have taken an hour to think of a famous person. | ||
| You could have gone through the inventory of famous people and picked one. | ||
| But let's find freedom here, right? | ||
| Because this is you just picking, without any coercion, which famous person of all the famous names you know, which you're going to focus on. | ||
| Well, first of all, they're all the famous people who you just don't happen to know about, right? | ||
| So you couldn't have picked them. | ||
| There's no freedom there because their names couldn't have occurred to you. | ||
| You know, famous Norwegian actresses, right? | ||
| You may know none of them, right? | ||
| And so, There's no freedom there. | ||
| So then there's the set of famous people who you know, who could have possibly occurred to you. | ||
| Now, Sylvester Stallone, you know, probably as well as anyone, right? | ||
| And, and yet he didn't occur to you. | ||
| What does it mean to say that you were free to pick him? | ||
| Now, you were free in the sense that no one was standing at your head with a gun saying, listen, if you pick Sylvester Stallone, we're going to kill you. | ||
| So don't pick him, right? | ||
| But What does it mean? | ||
| In what sense were you free to pick someone who didn't occur to you to pick? | ||
| Now, I would say as a matter of neurophysiology, that's a completely empty statement. | ||
| Your Sylvester Stallone circuits were just not active for whatever reason. | ||
| A reason you didn't pick. | ||
| A reason to which you don't stand as author. | ||
| Now, Absolutely everything in your life is like that. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| No matter how deliberative the decision, the person you choose to marry, whether you decide to get married or just live together, whether you want water versus tea. | ||
| You can make it as long-term or short-term as you want. | ||
| want, in the darkness of your unconscious mind, all of which is preceded and kind of | ||
| borne forward by your genes and your life circumstance and all of the ideas that get | ||
| in or don't get in, the conversations you have and don't have. | ||
| This full concatenation of causes and you could add a dose of randomness to that and you could add some magic from the soul realm too. | ||
| Whatever is there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You just have Various thoughts and intentions springing into view, and you don't choose them. | ||
| You can't think a thought before you think it. | ||
| To choose your thoughts, you'd have to think them before you thought them. | ||
| They just spring into view. | ||
| Very much like the names of famous people. | ||
| You didn't know I was going to ask you to think of a famous person. | ||
| I ask you, and all of a sudden you've got various names percolating, one of which was not Sylvester Stallone, but could have been. | ||
| If you had thought of Sylvester Stallone, that wouldn't have astonished you. | ||
| It just would have been, okay, Sylvester Stallone, Marlon Brando, you would have just been thinking, it would just have been another name. | ||
| But then I would have said, well, why didn't you think of Chris Rock? | ||
| He's, I don't know, why didn't you think of Chris Rock? | ||
| He's just as familiar to you, and yet he didn't come forward. | ||
| Well, it's exactly like that with everything, and you don't get any freer The more you deliberate. | ||
| Like if I said, listen, don't rush this process. | ||
| I want you to take an hour. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, you'd be the same process. | ||
| And let's say you narrow it down to two people and you're going back and forth between Marlon Brando and Chris Rock. | ||
| And then you finally stick with Brando. | ||
| Now, whatever story you have to tell yourself that justifies that, You didn't pick that either, right? | ||
| And you didn't pick that story. | ||
| You didn't pick the story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, I mean, in many cases, those stories aren't even true, right? | ||
| So, like, there's a vast psychological literature on just how clueless people are about why they do what they do in certain circumstances. | ||
| You can manipulate this in the lab endlessly. | ||
| But even if the story is true, right, even if you say, well, I picked Marlon Brando because I saw that documentary on him last week, and it was great, and you should see it, and so I was kind of primed to think about Marlon Brando. | ||
| Let's say that's just true, right? | ||
| Still, you didn't pick its influence on you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You didn't. | ||
| Like, why were you influenced to that degree and not... | ||
| a lesser degree, or why weren't you influenced oppositely? | ||
| Why didn't the fact that you had seen a documentary on him make you think, well, I can't pick Brando | ||
| because I've been thinking about him all week long, I'm gonna go with Chris Rock, right? | ||
| All of this is mysterious. | ||
| It never becomes un-mysterious, no matter how full an account you can give of it. | ||
| And it's all being produced by the machinery of your genome and your neurophysiology | ||
| and all of its influences, over which you have absolutely no control. | ||
| And every moment where you decide to assert control, let's say you feel like you don't have enough discipline in your life and you wake up tomorrow morning and you think, you know what I'm going to do? | ||
| I'm gonna start working out, I'm gonna cut sugar out of my diet, | ||
| I'm gonna really get a handle on all these problems, right? | ||
| Where does that come from? | ||
| That's just like Sylvester Stallone, just for you to just think it's good. | ||
| So it'll always pull the rug out from under you in a way. | ||
| It's always coming out of the darkness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, and in every, again, like listen to me say this sentence. | ||
| I don't know how I'm going to get to the end of this sentence. | ||
| There are times where I fail to get to the end of the sentence. | ||
| I don't speak grammatically correctly. | ||
| But successfully completing a sentence is as mysterious as anything else. | ||
| How do you follow the rules of grammar when you speak? | ||
| I don't do it that well, often. | ||
| in. I think I might have squeezed out a... It's a miracle that you do it at all, right? | ||
| But the same thing, it's like this is as intentional an action as you're ever going to find. Like | ||
| I'm choosing to move my hand. Well, how do I do it? Right? | ||
| If you move your hand, it is subjectively, and again, it doesn't matter how much you | ||
| know about the process in third You can know about muscle fibers and action potentials and the names of every neurotransmitter involved. | ||
| You could write a book about what is actually going on when you move your hand, and you could be the person competent to write that book, and you could still, as a matter of your first-person subjectivity, have no idea how you accomplish this. | ||
| And if you suddenly couldn't, right, if you were suddenly paralyzed, that would be as mysterious as well. | ||
| It would just be, you know, this thing that you were taking for granted, you know, albeit for reasons that are totally mysterious, suddenly stops, right? | ||
| And so that is a... So my argument is that we don't actually experience the free will we think we Experience. | ||
| We don't experience ourselves being the true authors of our desires and our intentions and our thoughts and these things that lead to actions. | ||
| We actually experience ourselves as part of the universe. | ||
| I mean, we are forces of nature. | ||
| We are being played. | ||
| Our strings are being pulled by the universe. | ||
| So to bring this back to where we started, so if I picked up this book right now and whacked you in the head with it, you don't deny that I'm making the choice to do that, but basically you're saying it is all of the history of everything in my brain and my parents and all the things that went on before me was me, sort of, that will have given me a sort of framework to decide to do that or not, but I don't really even understand that. | ||
| Because I'm making the choice not to hit you with this. | ||
| I could try it. | ||
| We can really see if this works. | ||
| This is what people are worried about. | ||
| There is a difference between doing it intentionally and not. | ||
| And that difference is still conserved. | ||
| Let's just unpack what this means. | ||
| If someone intentionally hits you, as opposed to hitting you by accident, that says much more | ||
| about their minds. | ||
| An intentional action is associated with intention. It's the kind of thing that | ||
| you kind of modeled in your mind before you did it, and you picked your moment, and then you did | ||
| it. And these tend to be the kinds of things that you wanted to do, you had some goal associated | ||
| with doing it, right? | ||
| You would do it again if given the chance, right? | ||
| So like the person who... | ||
| physically harms you on purpose, as opposed to the person who just didn't see you were there | ||
| and just backed into you, right? | ||
| That person is actually an expression of ill will. | ||
| And all of those differences matter. | ||
| It's predictive of what that person is gonna be like in the next moment. | ||
| And so all that matters for criminal trials and everything else, but the difference | ||
| is that when you see that people aren't really, really, deep, deep down responsible for who they are, | ||
| the psychopath is on some level unlucky to be a psychopath. | ||
| You know, if I had the brain of a psychopath, I would be a psychopath, right? | ||
| And through no fault of my own, really. | ||
| It then undermines a basis for hating these people. | ||
| You can actually feel genuinely sorry for people who also scare you, who also, if given no other redress, you would kill in self-defense, right? | ||
| Because there's just no alternative. | ||
| Or you'll lock them up for the rest of their lives because you have to keep other people safe from them. | ||
| The retributive story of they really deserve it because they're evil and they're responsible for it, that goes away. | ||
| And good riddance to that. | ||
| I don't see anything good coming from that. | ||
| So it's very freeing, ultimately. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| And when I can remember this way of thinking, dealing with people like Glenn Greenwald, it actually helps. | ||
| Perfect segue to this because I told you before I read it, I took eight days off or nine days off. | ||
| I locked my phone in a safe. | ||
| I did not even have the code to the safe. | ||
| No tweeting, no emailing, no nothing. | ||
| And I was on a beach that my view basically looked like the cover of the book, which was | ||
| pretty nice. | ||
| And I read this. | ||
| And you've described, a lot of the things you've just described while talking about | ||
| free will are sort of directly related to this in terms of the way we think and sort | ||
| of being unable to control what the next thought is or even why we have that next thought and | ||
| all that stuff. | ||
| So before we get into that, though, can you just tell me a little bit about where did | ||
| this desire come from? | ||
| In the book, you kind of talk about doing some drugs when you were younger and traveling a bit, | ||
| and you've studied with all kinds of shamans and people all over the world and all this, | ||
| but where, I mean, when you were 12, were you into this sort of existential stuff, | ||
| or did it spark later, or was it the drugs, or what? | ||
| Well, actually, it did start pretty early. | ||
| I had a best friend who died when I was 13, and so thoughts about death and just what it all means | ||
| happened pretty early for me. | ||
| So my teenage years were years where I was seeking to understand, you know, religion and all the rest, and all that started pretty early. | ||
| But it wasn't until I think I was 18 and did MDMA, and I start the book with an account of my first MDMA trip, and that really was kind of a psychological breakthrough for me because it was not, first of all, this was before MDMA was the rave drug where you just take it at a party and never really think that you're | ||
| I mean, no doubt, I'm not discounting the positive experiences people have in that context, but when I took it, it was very much with the purpose of discovering something about my mind, you know, and so I was just with a single friend, and we just, this drug had been advertised to us as something that could really reveal something about just the nature of The human mind and the possibility for feeling a kind of well-being that you're not tending to feel. | ||
| And that's exactly what we experienced. | ||
| And it was very, for those who've taken MDMA, this won't be a surprise, but drugs are, again, it's also kind of a suitcase term that isn't very useful. | ||
| Drugs is a word like religion. | ||
| Where it names vastly different quantities and spectrums of effects and so MDMA is not at all like LSD or any other drug which it's usually categorized with. | ||
| There was no psychedelic component, no change in visual properties or anything. | ||
| What there was was just a feeling of dropping away of self-concern that was totally liberating. | ||
| I never realized that I was carrying around this burden of self to the degree that I was. | ||
| And when talking to somebody, that part of my attention was bound up in Worrying about what they thought of me, right? | ||
| Like, I wasn't just seeing the other person. | ||
| I was triangulating on myself through their eyes. | ||
| And if I said something that seemed, or I was looking at their face, seeing the reaction that I was getting, and a good one meant something, a bad one meant something, all this was being played back into me and modifying how I felt about myself. | ||
| And so I was sitting with a very close friend at the time, and there was just a dropping away of this. | ||
| I think we didn't even notice it drop away at the moment, but just kind of retrospectively realizing, oh my God, this thing is gone, right? | ||
| This monster of me, which has been behind my face for every moment that I can remember in my life, is gone, and I am just free to realize that I love and wish nothing but happiness to the person who I'm sitting with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so there was just this kind of I think love, for that MDMA experience, love is really the main epiphany. | ||
| Love is a state of being which entails just being deeply committed to the happiness of other beings, whether you know them or not. | ||
| The epiphany that really anchored it for me, where I realized that Something unusual that happened to my mind is I'm sitting with, again at the time, one of my best friends and realizing how much I love this guy. | ||
| And we're both teenage, you know, heterosexual men who hadn't really thought in terms of loving our male friends at that point. | ||
| And I don't think I'd ever hugged a male friend at that point in my life, right? | ||
| Or at least I don't recall having done that. | ||
| So it was, I just, there's this outpouring of love for a friend of mine and Then I realized that if a stranger had walked into the room, I would have felt the same thing for the stranger. | ||
| The difference would have been, so my love for my best friend was not predicated on our history. | ||
| He hadn't earned it in any way, and he need not earn it, and no one need earn it, right? | ||
| What it was was, it was the nature of my mind and the summation of my intentions toward every conscious creature that can suffer. | ||
| or be made happy. | ||
| It just became this absolutely overflowing intention to benefit other people. | ||
| The Buddhists have that part right. | ||
| Their emphasis on compassion and wishing well to others. | ||
| That was very much targeted by that experience. | ||
| I think there are even more important insights to be had in meditation. | ||
| There are other forms of meditation where you're not You're not reliably hitting that experience. | ||
| That's not enlightenment, necessarily, to put it in an explicitly Eastern context. | ||
| But it proved to me that it was possible to have a radically different experience than I was tending to have. | ||
| And it also was kind of obvious that taking drugs over and over again was not the way to actualize that experience. | ||
| So, but that's what got me into interested in esoteric things like meditation | ||
| and sitting in silent retreats and all that. | ||
| So if I'm not mistaken, you open the book up with that story about your friend, right? | ||
| And then that sort of, so what you're describing is that feeling of love and sort of selflessness | ||
| and wanting this experience for everybody else. | ||
| Then you basically lay out in the book some of the practices that you've tried | ||
| over the course of your life to kind of get there. | ||
| But I get what you're saying. | ||
| You're not saying you're trying to get to that, explicitly to that feeling of love, | ||
| but either to a oneness. | ||
| What I kept thinking throughout the book was that really what you were just trying to do | ||
| was just Shut off the conscious part of your brain that ultimately, and I guess this is what Buddhists probably are ultimately going for, that really if we could just, because you keep referring back to the inner voice and that great picture that you show, you know, with the, there's a picture in there of the doctor. | ||
| The self-portrait, right. | ||
| That we're never, we never fully or it's incredibly difficult to actually let go Of that conscious piece of ourself. | ||
| Well, I think you mean self-conscious. | ||
| The self-conscious piece, right, right. | ||
| And that, and I tried desperately on a beach, and I had, you know, you know, and you keep saying how when you try to do it, that often makes it harder, right? | ||
| Because you try to shut off your brain, and then your brain wants to fire off some thoughts, and you can't really control them. | ||
| But I was on a beach looking at something like that, and I once in a, you know, maybe in eight days, I had a glimmer of it. | ||
| But this is what people often live their whole lives to find, right? | ||
| Yeah, and it can be hard to do. | ||
| Meditation really is a training. | ||
| It's like anything else. | ||
| You start, you learn the basic principle of what to do, and initially you're not very good at it. | ||
| It's a lot to learn, not in terms of information, but There's just, as a procedure, you're deeply conditioned not to be able to do this well. | ||
| You're conditioned to be just lost in thought and to not know your thinking. | ||
| And that's what this feeling of being a self really, and really, free will is the other side of the same coin. | ||
| The feeling that you have free will, is the feeling that we call I. It's the feeling of being a self or an ego that is riding around in consciousness or riding around in your head and authoring your actions and that | ||
| It can take some work, but that can be disconfirmed through meditation, which is really just a process of looking for that thing you think you are and failing to find it, ultimately, in a way that's conclusive. | ||
| You can fail to find it in a way that is... you can't find it because it's not there, right? | ||
| So it's not like you're going to... no one's ever looked inside and found their ego, or found their self, or found the thinker of their thoughts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You can look in a way that is inconclusive, right? | ||
| Where you feel like, well, I just, you know, of course, it's like my eyes can't see my eyes. | ||
| Well, of course myself can't see itself, right? | ||
| So you can be convinced that there's just, it's a fruitless effort, but it's not actually fruitless. | ||
| And training and meditation is really the only way I know to reliably Run this experiment for yourself. | ||
| I mean, psychedelics can override your various processes, depending on the drug we're talking about, in different ways so that you can feel that you're free of self to a significant degree. | ||
| And in addition, feel many other things besides that can be very positive. | ||
| But there's something haphazard to take. | ||
| I can't give you a pill and say whatever you experience here is the center of the bullseye. | ||
| It's very much at the whim of the circumstance and your brain and thousands of variables we can't control. | ||
| So people have the best day of their life or the worst on something like LSD. | ||
| You can be the same person more or less in the same situation and on a Tuesday it's going to be the best and on a Wednesday it's going to be the worst and you can't really control it and meditation isn't quite like that. | ||
| But actually to tie this back perhaps surprisingly to some of the other stuff we were talking about, So the experience I just described on MDMA, one of the formative experiences of my life, and it's a state of consciousness which I am absolutely sure that if you could dial it in for all of humanity, all of humanity would find that would be just very close to the center of the bullseye of what they want out of life. | ||
| That's how you want to feel, especially with other human beings. | ||
| And there are many variants of this feeling, but just that there's a... | ||
| To speak broadly about it, there's a kind of experience of self-transcendence. | ||
| Just imagine a few dials in your mind that you can turn, and there's a feeling of meaningfulness dial. | ||
| You could crank that up. | ||
| Like, this is just profoundly meaningful, this experience that's happening right now. | ||
| Or a sacredness dial. | ||
| Like, this is sacred. | ||
| everything is sacred and this is just like everything is just perfect exactly | ||
| I mean, it's just kind of the thrill of just conscious being in the present. | ||
| You can't get any better, right? | ||
| And now there's other people in it with you, and all you feel is dropping away of all the masks that you've built up over your life, and all the paranoia, and all you feel with that person is just a positive, common project, a solidarity. | ||
| Again, modulo a few changes, that kind of experience can be had in contexts that are profoundly pathological. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It can be framed by ideas that are world-destroying ideas. | ||
| So, the people who think that all the guys fighting with ISIS are unhappy, And just can't see what they're going to do with their lives and so they throw their lives away in the desert of Syria and they're not, you know, no, no, they are having an experience far closer to what I'm describing in terms of meaningfulness and connection and joy and profundity, right? | ||
| And there's just no question that, yes, I'm sure there's a few mentally ill suicide bombers, but for the most part, You're talking about truly devout people who are focused, who've seen the pointlessness of materialism and all of their other entanglements in life. | ||
| They've stepped away from trivial commitments in a way that is deeply clarifying. | ||
| It's a way that I understand from In a totally different context, going to sit on meditation retreats for months at a time in silence. | ||
| That is to disavow every other project you could be doing. | ||
| It's an extreme thing to do. | ||
| And I found extreme joy in doing it. | ||
| There's a version of that that has you strapping on an AK-47 and going to kill the Jews because of the influence of specific ideas and because of the framing. | ||
| This is why ecstasy, not the drug but the experience, isn't good enough. | ||
| The experience of ecstasy is ethically neutral. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you can be an ecstatic, sadistic, dangerous madman, right? | ||
| And yet, if we could just sample your emotional tone at that moment, it's great, right? | ||
| It could be the equivalent of the guy literally on Ecstasy at the dance club having the time of his life. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| Yeah, but the suicide bomber, before he detonates, you know, I think rather often, He's feeling great, right? | ||
| He's not morbidly depressed, but he's just sure that in the next moment he's going to open his eyes in paradise, right? | ||
| And there's no question he's doing the right thing. | ||
| And the reports of ecstatic smiles on the faces of these people before they detonate are now fairly common. | ||
| What we have to, and I blogged about this a little bit, I wrote a blog post, I think it's entitled Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy, which was my very brief attempt to get at some of this, but this phenomenon is not, I mean yes, there are political There are aspects to this and there are ordinary terrestrial grievances that some people have and that potentiate jihadism and islamism and all that but at its core you have real spiritual yearning from people and a real disillusionment with | ||
| The ordinary aims of an ordinary human life and a true belief that the creator of the universe has given us a guidebook to how to be ecstatically happy, right? | ||
| And part of it entails not letting your wives or daughters out of the house, right? | ||
| And covering them up so as not to destabilize your precarious well-being with Purient ideation. | ||
| Why do the Taliban not want to see naked women all over the place or even a woman's ankle? | ||
| Because it's not conducive to purity of vision, right? | ||
| This is very much like a monk just deciding to shave his head and be a monk, right? | ||
| In a Buddhist tradition, right? | ||
| Buddhist monks don't want to hang out with gorgeous women either because they're they don't want to be enticed into that be or and they have I mean the Buddhist strategy to counteract that is to meditate on the repulsiveness of the human body so they'll look at a picture of whoever Giselle and rather than stay stuck with | ||
| These surface features of, you know, here's a beautiful woman who's encouraging lust, I'm going to actually picture the fact that she actually has a skeleton in there, and lymph, and bile, and blood, and on the inside she's just as disgusting as any other monkey, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That sounds fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they're Buddhist monks who do this practice, right? | ||
| As an antidote to their, the stirrings of their lust, right? | ||
| So, but these are very similar projects. | ||
| It's framed by radically different ideas leading to very different behavior in the world. | ||
| Yeah, that's really interesting. | ||
| So it's all, it's really about framing. | ||
| It reminds me a little bit of, you know, right after 9-11 when Bill Maher said, you know, you can say what you want about these hijackers, but they weren't cowards because in their minds they were going for the 72 virgins and very possibly had smiles on their faces and were doing what they believed to be true in that moment. | ||
| So it's a dangerous thing, but speaking of a dangerous thing, let's wrap up on your newest venture. | ||
| Do people know what your new book's about already, or am I gonna blow it? | ||
| I'm not even sure you know, or I know, given what you're doing, yeah. | ||
| I've got a few irons in the fire, so I'm... | ||
| All right, well, I don't know what your next book is, but let's talk about artificial intelligence for a little bit. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Was that a segue? | ||
| That works. | ||
| I threatened at one point to be writing a book about AI. | ||
| I think it may be an audio book that I'm collaborating on with another person, but I just gave a TED Talk on AI, which may be up by the time this video is up, but if not, in the coming months. | ||
| So I have been thinking about AI. | ||
| But it's probably not the topic of my next written book. | ||
| Okay, well, I possibly just made that up. | ||
| You know, I don't control my own thoughts. | ||
| That's the problem, right? | ||
| So, I love, look, I love science fiction movies ever since I was a kid. | ||
| I love dystopian future stuff. | ||
| I read all Philip K. Dick. | ||
| I love Total Recall and Minority Report and, you know, iRobot and all of this Asimov stuff and all that. | ||
| I love all of it. | ||
| So I guess my first question to you on the AI front, I'll go with the biggest question, really, which is that if we get to a certain point with AI, artificial intelligence, and robots become aware and all of that stuff, this can only end horribly, right? | ||
| It will be good for a while, and then at some point, by their own self-preservation, basically, they will have to turn on their masters. | ||
| I worry about it to that degree but not quite in those terms. | ||
| The concern for me is not that we will build super intelligent AI or super intelligent robots which They initially seem to work really well, and then they will, by some process we don't understand, become malevolent and kill us. | ||
| The Terminator movies. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's not the concern. | ||
| I don't think that's... Most people who are really worried about this, that's not really what they're worried about. | ||
| Although that's not inconceivable. | ||
| It's almost worse than that. | ||
| More reasonable is that we will be building, as we are now, we're building machines that embody intelligence to an increasing degree, but it's narrow AI. | ||
| The best chess player on Earth is a computer, but it can't play tic-tac-toe. | ||
| It's narrowly focused on a specific kind of And that's broadening more and more. | ||
| We're getting machines that can play many different types of games, for instance, well. | ||
| And so we're creeping up on what is now called general intelligence, an ability to think flexibly in multiple domains and where you're learning in one domain doesn't cancel your learning in another. | ||
| And so something that's more like how human beings can acquire many different skills and | ||
| engage many different modes of cognition and not have everything fall apart, that's the | ||
| holy grail of artificial intelligence. | ||
| We want general intelligence and something that's robust, it's not brittle, it's something | ||
| that if parts of it fail, it's not catastrophic to the whole enterprise. | ||
| And I think there's no question we will get there, but there are many false assumptions | ||
| about the path ahead. | ||
| One is that what we have now is not nearly as powerful as the human mind, and we're just | ||
| going to incrementally get to something that is essentially human equivalent. | ||
| Now, I don't see that as the path forward at all. | ||
| I see all of our narrow intelligence is Much of our narrow intelligence, insofar as we find it interesting, is already superhuman. | ||
| Your calculator on your phone is superhuman for arithmetic. | ||
| The chess playing computer is superhuman. | ||
| It's not almost as good as a human. | ||
| It's better than any human on Earth and will always be better than any human on Earth. | ||
| More and more we will get that piecemeal effort of superhuman narrow AIs. | ||
| And when this is ever brought together in a general intelligence, what you're going to have is not just another ordinary human level intelligence. | ||
| You're going to have something that in some ways may be radically foreign. | ||
| It's not going to be everything about us emulated in the system. | ||
| But whatever is intelligent there is going to be superhuman Almost by definition. | ||
| And if it isn't at, you know, t equals zero, it's going to be, you know, the next day. | ||
| It's because it's just going to improve so quickly. | ||
| And when you talk about a system that can improve itself, if we ever build intelligent AI, that then becomes the best source of its own improvement. | ||
| So something that can improve its source code better than any human could improve its source code. | ||
| Once we start that process running, and the temptation to do that I think will be huge, Then we have what has been worried about for now 75 years, the prospect of an intelligence explosion. | ||
| The birth of this intelligence could get away from us. | ||
| It's now improving itself in a way that's unconstrained. | ||
| So people talk about the singularity now, which is what happens when that takes off. | ||
| It's a horizon line in in technological innovation that we can't see beyond and we | ||
| can't predict beyond because it's now just escaping. You're getting thousands of years | ||
| of progress in minutes, right, if in fact this process gets initiated. And so it's | ||
| not that we have like superhuman robots that are just well behaved and it goes on for decades and | ||
| then all of a sudden they get quirky and they take their interests to heart more than they take | ||
| ours to heart and the game is over. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I think what's more likely is that we will build Intelligent systems that are so much more competent than we are, that even the tiniest misalignment between their goals and our own will ultimately become completely hostile to our | ||
| Well-being or survival. | ||
| So that's scarier, pretty much, than what I laid out, right? | ||
| I laid out sort of a futuristic, ah, they're gonna turn on us and start shooting us one day, maybe because of an error or something, but you're laying out, really, that they would, almost at some point, they would, if they could become aware enough, they just simply wouldn't need us, because they would be super humans, in effect, and that what use would we serve for them at some point, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I would put awareness... Maybe not in such a conscious way, but... Yeah, I would put consciousness or awareness aside, because It might be that consciousness comes along for the ride. | ||
| It may, in fact, be the case that you can't be as intelligent as a human and not be conscious. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| That's horizon line stuff, right? | ||
| Well, I just don't know that that's actually true. | ||
| It's quite possible that we could build something that is as intelligent as we are, in the sense that it can meet any kind of cognitive or perceptual challenge or logical challenge we would pose it. | ||
| Better than we can, but there's nothing that it's like to be that thing. | ||
| It's the lights aren't on. | ||
| It doesn't experience happiness, though it might say it experiences happiness, right? | ||
| I think what will happen is we will definitely... Do you know the notion of the Turing test? | ||
| This is like if you type and then it seems like it's responding to you, but it's not actually really... Well, Alan Turing, the... | ||
| The person who's more responsible than anyone else for giving us computers once thought about what it would mean to have intelligent machines and he proposed what has come to be known the Turing Test. | ||
| Oh, it's like the chat, right? | ||
| Yes, like when you can't tell the difference, but when you can't tell whether you're interacting with a person or a computer, that computer in that case is passing the Turing Test. | ||
| And this is as a measure of intelligence, that's a Certainly a good proxy for a more detailed analysis of what it would mean to have machine intelligence. | ||
| If I can't, if I'm talking to something at length about anything that I want, and I can't tell it's not a person, and it turns out it's somebody's laptop, that laptop is passing the Turing Test. | ||
| It may be that you can pass the Turing test without even the subtlest glimmer of consciousness arising in you, right? | ||
| So that laptop is no more conscious than that glass of water is, right? | ||
| That may, in fact, be the case. | ||
| It may not be, though. | ||
| So I just don't know there. | ||
| But if that's the case, For me, that's the scariest possibility, because what's happening is... I've even heard at least one computer scientist say this, and it was kind of alarming, but I don't really have a deep argument against it, which is, if you assume that consciousness comes along for the ride, if you assume that anything more intelligent than us that we give rise to, either intentionally or by happenstance, | ||
| He is more conscious than we are, experiences a greater range of creative states and well-being and can suffer more. | ||
| By definition, in my view, ethically, it becomes more important. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If we're more important than cocker spaniels or ants or anything below us, then if we create something that's obviously above us in every conceivable way, And it's conscious, right? | ||
| It would view us just the same way we view everything beneath us. | ||
| Yeah, it's more important than us. | ||
| And I would have to grant that even though I might not be happy about it deciding to annihilate us. | ||
| It's a... I don't have a deep ethical argument against why... I can't say that from the, you know, a God's eye view, it is bad that we gave birth to super beings That then trampled on us, but then went on to be super in all the ways we couldn't possibly imagine, just as, you know, bacteria can't imagine what we're up to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there are some computer scientists who sort of solve the fears or silence the fears with this idea, which is, listen, if we build something that is godlike in that respect, We will have given birth. | ||
| Our descendants will not be more apes. | ||
| They will be gods. | ||
| And this is a good thing. | ||
| This is the most beautiful thing. | ||
| What could be more beautiful? | ||
| than us creating the next generation of conscious intelligent systems that are infinitely profound and wise and knowledgeable from our point of view and just improving themselves endlessly with up to the limit of the resources available in the galaxy, right? | ||
| What could be more rewarding than that? | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| You know, and the fact that we all destroyed ourselves in the process, but because, you know, we were, you know, the bugs that hit their windshield when they were driving off. | ||
| That's just the price you pay. | ||
| Well, OK, that's possible, but it's also conceivable that all of that could happen without Consciousness, right? | ||
| That we could build mere mechanism that is competent in all the ways so as to, you know, just plow us under. | ||
| Yeah, but that there is no huge benefit on the side of deep experience and well-being and beauty and all that. | ||
| It's just blind mechanism, which is intelligent mechanism. | ||
| I mean, it's just in the same way that the best chess playing program is highly intelligent with respect to chess, but nobody thinks it's conscious. | ||
| So that's the fear. | ||
| But on the way there, there'll be many weird moments where I think we will build machines that pass the Turing test. | ||
| Which is to say, they will seem conscious to us, they will detect our emotions, they'll respond to our emotions. | ||
| Your phone will say, you look tired, maybe you should take a nap. | ||
| And it'll be right. | ||
| It'll be a better judge of your emotions than your friends are. | ||
| Yeah, and at a certain point, certainly if you emulate this in a system, whether it's an avatar online or an actual robot that has a face, right, that can make, that can display its own emotion, and we get out of the uncanny valley where that just looks creepy and it begins to look actually beautiful and rewarding and natural. | ||
| Then our intuitions that we're in dialogue with a conscious other will be played upon perfectly, right? | ||
| And I think we will lose sight of it as being an interesting problem. | ||
| It will no longer be interesting to wonder whether or not our computers and our robots are conscious because They will be demonstrating it as much as any person has ever demonstrated it, and in fact even more, right? | ||
| And yet, unless we understand exactly how consciousness emerges in physical systems at some point along the way of developing that technology, I don't think we'll actually know that they're conscious, and that will be... | ||
| That will be interesting, because we will successfully fool ourselves into just assuming. | ||
| It'll seem totally unethical to kill your robot or turn it off. | ||
| It'll be a murder. | ||
| It'll be a murder that's worse than you're killing a person, because at a certain point, It will be the most competent person. | ||
| You know, the wisest person. | ||
| Sam, I don't know if you're writing a book about this, but you clearly should write a book about this, do you? | ||
| I'll write one of the intros or something. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Someday, yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, we did two hours here, so I'm not going to give you the full Rogan treatment, but, you know... The half Rogan. | ||
| We did a half Rogan. | ||
| But, you know, you helped me launch the show the first season in, you're launching the second season in. | ||
| Legally, you have to now launch every season. | ||
| You're alright with that? | ||
| Yeah, once a year, I'm good for it. | ||
| And each time, I have to increase it by an hour. | ||
| So in like 30 years, this is gonna be weird. | ||
| It'll be old and breathless. | ||
| Yeah, this'll be weird. | ||
| But, you know, it's always a pleasure talking to you, and I've thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| I hope we moved some things around in the brain. | ||
| I think we opened up a couple doors there. | ||
| We covered more than the... | ||
| The infamy. | ||
| So that was good. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, I'm pretty sure you guys know if you're watching this, you know where to find Sam, but it's SamHarrisOrg on Twitter and SamHarris.org. | ||
| Can I send them anywhere else? | ||
| No, that's good. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| I mean, it's the only other thing I would say is that I, well, yeah, I mean, they probably know about my podcast, but I usually talk about these things more on my podcast now than on my blog. | ||
| But the podcast has competed with the blog enough that now I say it rather than write it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the future. | ||
| Speaking instead of writing. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Alright, thanks for watching, guys. | ||
| And this is just the beginning of the fan-funded show. | ||
| I thank you all who jumped in, and I thank you if you didn't jump in and you're watching and any of that good stuff. |
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