July 1, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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you you | |
| you and before we start discussing philosophy and the human | ||
| soul Talswani has two words. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Hi, are you excited as I am? | ||
| So, it's wonderful to have this forum here. | ||
| It's wonderful to have this forum here. | ||
| I'm so excited. | ||
| It actually started with a dinner we had in Atlanta and the idea of Bringing Dave and Jordan Peterson here came about and actually happened. | ||
| So I'm just going to introduce, not take too much time, of the people standing here. | ||
| Sitting here, sorry. | ||
| I'll start with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| Dr. Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto, was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize when he was a professor at Harvard, and is regarded by his current University of Toronto students and colleagues as one of three truly life-changing teachers. | ||
| Dr. Peterson is prominent international speaker and a public personality. | ||
| Dave Rubin, Mr. Rubin, is a talk show host, comedian, and a TV personality. | ||
| He's the host of the Rubin Report, a talk show about big ideas and free speech. | ||
| Dave has been heralded for his politically incorrect and honest approach to discussing complex issues and current events focusing on politics, religion, and the media. | ||
| Dr. Yaron Brook is the chairman of the board of the Enron Institute, and he's the co-author with Don Watkins of The Pursuit of Wealth, Equal is Unfair, and the national bestseller of Free Market Revolution, 2012. | ||
| He is the host of the Yaron Brook Show on BlockTalk Radio. | ||
| And Greg Salmieri, Dr. Salmieri teaches philosophy at Rutgers University and is a fellow at the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarships and co-secretary of the Ayn Rand Society. | ||
| He's a co-editor of the Companion to Ayn Rand in the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy series. | ||
| Welcome those four. | ||
| And one word about the person who made it possible, a generous board member of the Ayn Rand Institute. | ||
| And thank you to High Road Productions for making this happen. | ||
| So, here we go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So, first off, to begin, we are live streaming this on my channel. | ||
| And as I'm sure many of you guys saw, I was on Joe Rogan's show a couple weeks ago, and we talked a little bit about objectivism. | ||
| And he said that you guys are very serious people, that you're very serious people. | ||
| So I need you guys to go absolutely bananas for the thousands and ultimately hundreds of thousands of people that will be watching this at home. | ||
| Can you make some noise? | ||
| You crazy... | ||
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unidentified
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Wow! | |
| Wow! | ||
| Look at you guys, you crazy objectivists. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| You're such a negative influence, Dave. | ||
| I've never seen him like this. | ||
| Last time I did an event with you guys, we had the whole audience screaming out George Carlin's seven dirty words. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I don't know if we're going to do that this time. | ||
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unidentified
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No. | |
| Okay, so we're going to do about an hour and a half with you guys, and we're going to throw in some Q&A. | ||
| It's obviously completely uncensored and in the spirit of free speech and individuality that you guys are talking about here at this conference. | ||
| So, Jordan, we've been on tour now for almost two months, and we have a little break right now, but I thought, why don't we just dive right back into all the things we've been talking about. | ||
| So much of your tour for your 12 Rules for Life book has been about the role of the individual. | ||
| So before we get too deep into philosophy and some of the other things, I thought that would be the right place to start, because that's sort of what unifies all four of us up here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Making the case, I suppose, or developing the argument, and it's an argument everybody knows to some degree, although I don't think we've done a very good job of articulating it over the last few decades, that it's no secret that our free societies, or the free societies of the world, are predicated on the idea of the sovereign individual. | ||
| And that's the place where political power ultimately resides, or let's say political authority. | ||
| And it's also In some sense, the derivation source of the idea of rights, the fact that the individual is sovereign, the individual has inalienable rights. | ||
| And we talk a lot about rights in our society, way too much as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| Not that they're not important, but they're secondary. | ||
| Because the fundamental issue of import with regards to individual sovereignty isn't rights, it's responsibility. | ||
| I mean, first of all, you could make a case that your rights are my responsibility and vice versa. | ||
| So there's a parallelism between rights and responsibility. | ||
| But even more importantly, if the integrity of the state is dependent on the integrity of the individual, and that's the argument that's implicit in the idea that the individual is sovereign, then it's obviously the case that the individual has a great responsibility, and it's a responsibility that's of incredible importance, because it's not just limited to you. | ||
| You acting responsibly actually constitutes the bedrock of the state. | ||
| And so that's an interesting issue. | ||
| It means that you're required, in some sense, to take responsibility, or the entire state will shake, and I think that's true for everyone. | ||
| More interestingly, I think this is a more interesting argument in some sense, is that you need a meaning to sustain you through life, or you need meaning, perhaps not a meaning. | ||
| You need meaning to sustain you through life, because life is bitterly difficult, and ultimately challenging, mortally challenging for that matter. | ||
| And you need a meaning to sustain you through that, so that it doesn't embitter you, and turn you into a victim, let's say. | ||
| It's pretty obvious to me, and I think obvious to anyone, when they think it through, that virtually everything that you derive genuine meaning from, and I mean the kind of meaning that will sustain you when times are difficult. | ||
| I don't mean casual happiness, even though there's nothing wrong with happiness. | ||
| The meaning that will sustain you through the tragedy of life is always to be found in the adoption of responsibility. | ||
| And the people that you admire spontaneously, and I don't think there's an exception to this, unless you're a little on the psychopathic side, and I mean that technically, you feel... I do! | ||
| I mean it technically. | ||
| It's a hallmark of psychopathy, I would say. | ||
| Generally speaking, You admire yourself to the degree that you do when you're at least taking care of yourself at least that and maybe when you have a little Responsibility left over for your family and maybe some to spill over for the broader community and certainly the people that you spontaneously admire | ||
| in your fellow men are people who, at minimum, are accounting for the burden of themselves, at minimum that, but then who have excess capacity and devote that to the proper care of their family and their community. | ||
| And so, I don't think that we've done a good job of laying out the meaning equals responsibility equation. | ||
| And it's vitally important. | ||
| And I think it's very helpful for people to learn that. | ||
| Lots of people have told me that. | ||
| You know, that they've been getting their lives together and digging themselves out of a nihilistic and hopeless hole, and doing that by understanding that the meaning they need to sustain them is to be found through the adoption of the maximal responsibility they can sustain. | ||
| And so, well, that's become clearer to me over the course of these last, let's say, 50 lectures. | ||
| Greg, I saw you nodding along there a lot. | ||
| Can you put some of this within an objectivist frame? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not to plug, but I gave a talk at actually the event that I met you at called Taking Responsibility for Your Happiness. | ||
| I think I have a bit of a different view of happiness than you do. | ||
| And Rand has a different one than you do, where what I mean by happiness isn't the transient joy or emotion you could feel in a moment, but the state of being, the state of emotion that comes from accomplishing, achieving your values, having taken responsibility, set yourself goals, and leading a life where you're achieving those goals over time. | ||
| And I think that's what ethics is about. | ||
| I think that's what gives meaning to life. | ||
| And a really deep part of that is taking responsibility for yourself. | ||
| I a little bit bristle at the idea of saying that responsibility is more important than rights or the reverse. | ||
| I think they're issues that come up at a different tier. | ||
| So I think taking responsibility for yourself is a matter of ethics. | ||
| It's a matter of how you live your own life. | ||
| It's a matter of how you lead a life worth living and be happy and have meaning. | ||
| I think those go together. | ||
| But then rights are the conditions that we need when we organize as a society to make everybody able to do that, not to be impinging on each other. | ||
| And if we don't all value our own lives and happiness, if we're not all taking responsibility, or at least if many of us aren't, we're not going to have a society that cares about rights, and they're going to go away. | ||
| And so in that sense, I agree we need to have this shift to talking about ethics and what we want to make of our lives, each of us. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, when we talk about the individual, I think one of the points that's important to make is... | ||
| The individual is important partially because that's all we got, right? | ||
| In a sense, all you got is individuals. | ||
| We can talk about society, but society is just a collection of individuals. | ||
| So the starting point, both in ethics and in politics, has to be the unit of value, the unit that actually exists, the metaphysical unit that exists, not the abstraction that we call the state or society. | ||
| What's important is the ability of the individual to live a good life, | ||
| to take responsibility for his own life, for his own happiness, | ||
| for his own success, for his own flourishing. | ||
| So the individual is everything when it comes, in my view, in morality and then as an extension in politics. | ||
| And I think rights are the concept that recognize that. | ||
| It's the bridge, rights are the bridge between a morality that says your moral responsibility is to make the most of your life and then what kind of political system should we live in to make that possible. | ||
| And Wright recognizes that the enemy of the good life, the enemy of flourishing, the enemy of success at living, is coercion and force. | ||
| It's the group, the state, the community, other people, other individuals, coercing, being authoritarian over you, telling you how you must live and how you must act. | ||
| And Wright recognized that as individuals we have freedom. | ||
| We must be free to use our own judgments, to live our own lives as we see fit. | ||
| And that's the great revolution of the Enlightenment, is the recognition of the sanctity of the individual and creating a political system that allows the individual to flourish and to thrive by protecting him from coercion, by protecting him from force and relegating the state to that duty. | ||
| The responsibility of the state is to protect rights, to protect you from force. | ||
| So it seems to me that the battle between the individual and the collective is a battle that has been fought for virtually every society for all time. | ||
| However, there does seem to me at least, and maybe it's just because I'm alive right now and doing what I do, that there's something unique about the battle at the moment. | ||
| That the individual has been slammed so relentlessly and that we have ideas out there now that for young people that they think that socialism is cool. | ||
| I mean, that seems to be coming back, right? | ||
| These are ideas that I think are really crazy, but I'm happy to indulge in the discussion about them. | ||
| Do you think there's anything unique about the battle between the individual and the collective right now, or is this just a repeating of what's gone on decades before? | ||
| I think there's always something unique about each historical moment, but I think this has been a continuous argument for the last 130 years, as a technical, philosophical argument. | ||
| And of course, it has roots that go back much farther than that. | ||
| I don't see... I mean, it is collectivism versus individualism, I think, the fundamental polarizing force that's at work at the moment. | ||
| And the issue with the collectivist types is whether or not they're collectivist because they care about the dispossessed, which is their fundamental claim, or whether they're collectivist because they don't want to bear any of the responsibility that would go along with being a responsible individual. | ||
| You know, I'm always skeptical of the saint-like moral claims that are put forth by people who are pushing a given ideology. | ||
| And I'm skeptical about that on my part, too. | ||
| People who criticize my perspective say, look, Dr. Peterson, you're not... Or maybe they call me something a lot less flattering than that. | ||
| You know, they say, you're not... You're underestimating the degree to which systemic barriers make it impossible for people to move forward properly in the world. | ||
| There's barriers to the progress that people can make, even if they bear individual responsibility, and those barriers are distributed unequally. | ||
| And of course, there's some truth in that, because every system tends towards rigidity and tyranny, and no system does a perfect job of selecting among its people for pure competence. | ||
| There's a difference between saying that a system is somewhat corrupt, which is certainly the case with Western systems, and the system is an absolutely corrupt, tyrannical patriarchy with no hope of redemption whatsoever and needs to be burned to the ground and reformulated. | ||
| Those are really different. | ||
| And, you know, it's also possible to be sensible and say, well, look, obviously, the manner in which people are selected for success in our society is imperfect. | ||
| But also to note, well, imperfect compared to what exactly? | ||
| Like, to your hypothetical utopian perfection, which you would self-generate if you were given ultimate power? | ||
| Because that's really the comparison. | ||
| Or to our societies in the past, because we're doing a lot better now than we were. | ||
| Or compared to every other society that's ever existed since the dawn of time, by which standard we're doing so insanely well that it's actually almost unbelievable. | ||
| And this is another thing that I've been trying to promote. | ||
| I mean, there's been at least a dozen books written in the last six or seven years by fairly serious scholars, and I would say distributed across the political spectrum, pointing out that ever since the year 2000, things are getting better so fast that it's actually a miracle. | ||
| You know, and I can give you some quick facts. | ||
| So, the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by By 50% between the year 2000 and 2012. | ||
| So that's a staggering achievement. | ||
| It was three years faster than the most optimistic projections of the UN. | ||
| So we actually beat an optimistic UN projection. | ||
| So there are more... Well, that's absolutely beyond belief. | ||
| There are more forests in the Northern Hemisphere now than there were 100 years ago. | ||
| The child mortality rate in Africa is now lower than it was in Europe in 1950, which is just beyond belief. | ||
| The fastest growing economies in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa. | ||
| About 300,000 people, I can't remember if it's a day or a week, but it doesn't matter, although it would be better if it was a day, obviously, are being plugged into the electrical grid. | ||
| So, increasingly, people have universal access to fresh water. | ||
| There's almost no country in the world now where starvation is a problem that isn't just a political problem, which is to say, we have enough food for everyone. | ||
| And not only do we have enough food, we have the distribution systems that are actually getting that food to everyone. | ||
| It's absolutely beyond belief. | ||
| And what's quite remarkable about that is it's quite obvious that free market systems predicated on the idea of the sovereignty of the individual are the reason that that's happening. | ||
| The question is, what the hell are the collectivists up to? | ||
| What's the problem here? | ||
| The problem seems to be a certain amount of ignorance, a certain amount of willful blindness, and a certain amount of discomfort with the fact that a fair bit of that wealth has been purchased At the price of a continuing inequality. | ||
| We don't know how to generate wealth without also generating inequality. | ||
| And I actually don't think that you can generate wealth without generating inequality. | ||
| And that's, well that's something that's worth endlessly discussing. | ||
| I think Iran might have a little something to say about inequality. | ||
| Yeah, since I wrote a book about that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I like to say in brief, right? | ||
| Inequality is a feature of freedom, not a bug. | ||
| It just comes with freedom. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| You cannot create wealth without inequality. | ||
| And there's nothing wrong with inequality. | ||
| There's nothing bad about inequality. | ||
| There's nothing morally offensive about inequality. | ||
| And in particular, given that what happens is that everybody's getting richer. | ||
| Everybody gets richer, they just get richer at a different pace. | ||
| And the reason they get richer at a different pace is because they're producing different quantities of value. | ||
| The people who actually get very rich in a free market, now we don't have a pure free market and all kinds of problems with the system we have, but in a free market you only gain those values that you produce. | ||
| Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world because how many of you shop on Amazon? | ||
| Everybody, right? | ||
| So there's a reason. | ||
| He's produced values that have affected almost every human being on the planet. | ||
| And that is why he is so wealthy. | ||
| So the whole inequality debate is to try to drive people towards envy. | ||
| The whole inequality debate is to try to undercut the idea of freedom. | ||
| Because what they're really after is not reducing inequality. | ||
| What they're really after is eliminating freedom. | ||
| It's the same people who used to advocate for an ideology of communism or socialism. | ||
| Now that's being discredited, so they have to call it something else. | ||
| George Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winner in economics, is not going to come out for communism. | ||
| But in a sense, he views that as the moral ideal. | ||
| You can't get there. | ||
| It's rough. | ||
| There's a little too much violence, too much blood for his taste. | ||
| He's an economist after all, right? | ||
| So, inequality is a nice disguise. | ||
| Oh, we want to reduce inequality. | ||
| In my debates with people, we talk about inequality. | ||
| I say, but how much? | ||
| We'll know when we get there. | ||
| Who will know? | ||
| Who gets to decide? | ||
| How are we going to vote? | ||
| How much are we going to take? | ||
| And why? | ||
| Why just monetary inequality? | ||
| I mean, Dave's a good-looking guy. | ||
| It's not fair. | ||
| Can I have some of that, Dave? | ||
| It's a lot of hairspray, man. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| I mean, how do we do that? | ||
| There have been experiments in trying to equal us. | ||
| In the book, we give the example, of course, of the horrific tragedy of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, where the attempt is to equalize, not just on monetary issues, but on smarts. | ||
| The only way to do that is to kill the educated and the smart. | ||
| On every other fact, on who's a good farmer and who's a good forager for food, they killed them all. | ||
| 40% of the population. | ||
| So, yes, the whole... I mean, I get really upset when people even make an issue of inequality, because it shouldn't be an issue of inequality. | ||
| And I think it's changed. | ||
| I think in America, 50 years ago... And I'm not trying to be nostalgic, because I know the dangers in that. | ||
| It just... There wasn't this... Nobody cared, right? | ||
| Because there was this feeling that you earned it, you worked hard, you made it. | ||
| Well, there was also a feeling that... See, I'm not so sure people care as much about inequality as They care about inequalities of hypothetical trajectory, meaning that it isn't so bad if you're rich and I'm poor. | ||
| Just one thing. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| I might also my life will improve across time or even if mine doesn't my children's life will | ||
| Because I think people are more interested I think people vote their dreams rather than their | ||
| realities and the dream has to be intact and I do have a Couple of just one thing I think that's true | ||
| But it's also true that people people resent wealth when they think it's unearned | ||
| yeah, I think the more the more we move towards a centrally planned economy the more we have cronyism the | ||
| more their real problems and the kind of the mixed economy that we have we don't | ||
| Have pure capitalism then the more they're suspicious of the people at the top | ||
| Because indeed, they see the people at the top schmoozing with the politicians. | ||
| And that's what scares them. | ||
| So I think America has shifted partially because they're not sure that people have earned it, and partially because they've been bombarded with this message. | ||
| You should envy them. | ||
| It's immoral inequality. | ||
| So I think it's a combination of the dream, the justice of it. | ||
| Is it just for somebody to have that wealth because they've earned it? | ||
| And this issue of there's been a shift in the morality, in the moral perception. | ||
| I think we have a structural problem that's going to emerge, too. | ||
| And this is where I would take some issue, I suppose, with the idea that there's nothing intrinsically bad about inequality. | ||
| I mean, because it presumes something approximating a level playing field. | ||
| And I'm not thinking so much about systemic barriers. | ||
| Well, let me just make the argument very briefly and tell me what you think. | ||
| Because one of the things that I spent a lot of time looking at what predicts success in In functional Western hierarchies, the two intrinsic psychological factors that predict success are intelligence, as you assess it with IQ tests, which is the best way to assess intelligence by an overwhelming margin, and trait conscientiousness, which is industriousness and orderliness, sometimes known as grit. | ||
| And those are quite good predictors of long-term success. | ||
| They account for about 40% of the variability across time. | ||
| Which leaves a lot of other factors still at play. | ||
| But there's something quite terrifying about the intelligence end of that equation, because IQ is normally distributed in the population, and there's incredible differences between people who are at the top of the IQ distribution and people who are at the bottom. | ||
| Like, you can't believe how variable people are in their intelligence. | ||
| It's quite staggering. | ||
| Well, I can give you an example. | ||
| So it's actually illegal in the United States to induct someone into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ of less than 83. | ||
| And the reason for that is that the Armed Forces, determined after a hundred and some years of extraordinarily rigorous testing, motivated by the hope that everyone would be fodder for the armed forces, because that's their hope, right? | ||
| Because they have a chronic manpower shortage, peacetime and wartime. | ||
| So they want people in the armed forces. | ||
| They're not going to exclude them unless they have to. | ||
| And the consequence of the analysis was that if you have an IQ of 83 or less, there isn't anything you can be trained to do in the armed forces that isn't positively counterproductive. | ||
| It's like, yes, yes. | ||
| And this is a way bigger fact than you think. | ||
| Because that's about 10% of the population. | ||
| And so we have a problem, and I would say it's a problem that is going to manifest itself in something that approximates an inequality that looks unfair, because the cognitively dispossessed are going to have a very rough time competing. | ||
| They already do. | ||
| I mean, there's absolutely no doubt about that. | ||
| See, the problem with producing hierarchies, and even allowing people to climb up the hierarchies, Responsibly is that the hierarchy still produced dispossession at the bottom and we need to figure out how to deal with that even if the only Consequence of that dispossession is the generation of envy because envy can bring down the state And you might tell people well you have a moral responsibility not to be envious and fair enough perhaps you do But it isn't clear that that's going to be sufficient solution | ||
| to solve the problem and we also have the cognitive problem that no one will talk about | ||
| and that we should talk about because it's a real, it's real. | ||
| So it sounds like we're talking about the same thing whether we're talking about it | ||
| from a cognitive perspective or a financial perspective that in terms of inequality it's | ||
| not really the all the people sort of at the bottom but it's the bottom of the bottom that | ||
| can't help themselves that seems like maybe what do you do about that? | ||
| One point that Rand made about this and I think making this point is part of the solution | ||
| to people being envious, letting people internalize this point is that other people's goodness, | ||
| other people's accomplishments, other people's intelligence, other people's wealth if they've earned it, and a society that enables the most productive, smartest people to achieve what they can achieve is good for everyone, and especially good for the people at the bottom of whatever hierarchy we might be talking about, of whatever level of ability, whatever level of money. | ||
| And we can see that in giving a little bit more freedom, a little bit more capitalism in countries like China and India has helped, well, everyone there, but disproportionately the poorest people who were starving to death who had incredible infant mortality rates, | ||
| and you were talking about this before, and we've seen them go down. | ||
| So I think envy, part of the cause of envy, is wrong moral views that people have. | ||
| Moral views that hold that the purpose of someone's life isn't to achieve things in their own life, isn't to reach their own happiness, isn't to form a company like Microsoft and get a computer on every desk in the world running Microsoft software. | ||
| If someone does that, we think he's selfish, we think it's bad. | ||
| Or at least it's neutral, and we envy him and resent him, if we're brought up to think that way. | ||
| Whereas if we're brought up to appreciate the people who created this tremendous prosperity that both of you were talking about, and to see that as morally good, and as right, and as benefiting all of us, but benefiting us not because they did it for us, but because taking responsibility for your life, having goals, having something you want out of life, Leading a life of your own on a grand scale, for your own sake, is what benefits not only you, but makes you a value to everybody else. | ||
| If we had a society that understood that, I think that combats the envy. | ||
| And one of the things that Rand wrote, she had a really interesting article called The Age of Envy that talked about, and also another article called The Untitled Letter, which was a comment on Rawls. | ||
| And she was very concerned about this kind of egalitarianism and this kind of growing nihilism and envy in the culture. | ||
| She thought of it as un-American. | ||
| This isn't the kind of thing. | ||
| This is more characteristic of Europe in the 40s. | ||
| And this wasn't an American way of thinking, but it was catching on here. | ||
| And I think she was prophetic in that. | ||
| I think we're seeing a lot of that today. | ||
| So let's shift a little bit, because I know we can talk about inequality and the individual and all that. | ||
| We can do that all night long. | ||
| But the title of this talk is Philosophy and the Human Soul. | ||
| So we only talked for literally about 20 seconds, the four of us, before, you know, we didn't plan anything about what we were going to do here. | ||
| So I thought the best way to start that would be, how would you even define the soul? | ||
| Yaron, I'll start with you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got a psychologist, a philosopher, and a finance guy in here. | ||
| But this is just for Joe. | ||
| And you know the rumor is that finance guys have no say. | ||
| I was actually going to start with Jordan, but you looked down for a second, which was | ||
|
unidentified
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the cue that I should go right to you. | |
| I mean, I don't have a succinct definition of it, but it has to do with consciousness and values. | ||
| It has to do with our conscious experiences, the sum of our conscious experiences. | ||
| Our being and the values that we have as individuals, the things that are most important to us. | ||
| And that, I think, experience is what I would refer to as our soul or our spirit. | ||
| I think these are somewhat interchangeable. | ||
| When I talk about spiritual experiences, it's an experience of consciousness. | ||
| If you listen to a piece of music and the combination of emotion Values and and your conscious listening and and absorbing that to me is what spirit soul would mean Yeah, I would say Speaking of the philosopher and first as a random scholar here. | ||
| She had the the phrase that man is a being of self-made soul So the idea here is your soul is your consciousness? | ||
| as the faculty your ability to know and to think but also You have to build who you are, build your character, build your personality, build your values, come to value things, set your life around them. | ||
| By doing that over time and pursuing them, you develop a character, you develop into a certain type of person, you develop into a distinct individual. | ||
| There's a beautiful line in The Fountainhead, which is the theme of this conference. | ||
| Someone talks about how most people long for immortality, but when you meet them the next time, they weren't the same as they were the last. | ||
| They're immutable. | ||
| They're constantly changing. | ||
| What they're after is constantly changing. | ||
| But the hero of the novel, his friend says, you could imagine him existing forever. | ||
| He's achieved immortality in his, you know, day-to-day life because there's a constancy to him. | ||
| And that kind of constancy, that having a soul, having an eye, being a particular person, it's an achievement. | ||
| It's the achievement of having formed values, having formed something you want out of your life, and then having built for yourself through living this way a character that's adapted to that, a character that's focused on that. | ||
| You know, this reminds me of Groundhog Day in a way, because in the Q&As that we've been doing for the last couple months, a couple times it's come up, what's your favorite comedy? | ||
| And you've mentioned Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray has to consistently come back and do it better, and do it better, and do it better, and do it better. | ||
| Now I've set you up. | ||
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What is your definition of the soul? | |
| Well, I was thinking that the words, the hand that writes and then moves on, came into my mind. | ||
| And then I was thinking, well, This is the way I conceptualize how consciousness works, and so maybe this is, in some sense, the locale of the soul. | ||
| So, I don't believe that we're driven deterministically, like obviously we are to some degree, but I don't think that that's the right way of conceptualizing how human consciousness works. | ||
| I think it's putting the cart before the horse in some sense. | ||
| So, the way it looks to me is that what we have arrayed in front of us is a landscape of possibility. | ||
| I think that that's phenomenologically accurate. | ||
| You know, when you wake up in the morning, especially when you wake up at three in the morning, and you're concerned about how your life is going, you see an array of possible futures manifest themselves in front of you. | ||
| And, you know, there are more possible futures, of course, than you can imagine, but there's plenty that make themselves manifest. | ||
| I could do this. | ||
| I could do that. | ||
| This could happen. | ||
| What about this? | ||
| Maybe I should do this. | ||
| There's a branching landscape in front of you, and some of the places that you're headed to are more likely than others, and some of them take a lot more effort to attain than others, but it's a distribution of possible landscapes, and that's actually your reality. | ||
| It's not like you're driven deterministically by the present. | ||
| You see a branching landscape of possibility in front of you, and I think of that as potential. | ||
| We all know about potential because we upgrade ourselves and each other for not living up to our potential which is a very interesting thing that we do because Potential isn't something concrete in fact It's the opposite of concrete and yet we act as if it's the most real thing you should live up to your potential You know and your conscience will bother you if you don't live up to your potential so you have a potential and there's a potential that manifests itself and then what you seem to do is that You make choices between those alternative realities, and you do that in part by imposing a value structure on them and driving a pathway as a consequence of that. | ||
| But you decide which of those potentials are going to manifest themselves in actuality. | ||
| And so you are the hand that writes and then moves on. | ||
| And this is a very deep idea. | ||
| I mean, I've traced it back to, I think, our most profound religious intuitions, the idea It was the word of God, for example, that gave rise to habitable order out of chaos at the beginning of time, I think, is a reflection of the same idea. | ||
| I think the soul is the thing that mediates between potential and actuality. | ||
| And I mean that literally and metaphorically at the same time. | ||
| That's what you're doing, is you're confronting potential, which is that which could be. | ||
| And you're deciding which of that is going to be. | ||
| And the thing that's doing that is the soul. | ||
| And that's its divine task. | ||
| And I think the fact that you do that is actually why it's necessary for societies to grant you the idea of intrinsic right. | ||
| Sorry, no. | ||
| That's why it's necessary for functional societies to be predicated on the idea that you have intrinsic value. | ||
| It's because you actually are the locale where potential transforms itself into actuality. | ||
| And so we determine the actual, the action of our soul determines the actuality of the world. | ||
| I think that's genuinely the case. | ||
| So this is really interesting to me because I'm watching you guys and I can see a lot of agreement, but obviously Jordan made at least two references to God and religion there. | ||
| Now obviously this is where an objectivist and Jordan would have a point of disagreement. | ||
| This is why you're doing these public events. | ||
| With Sam Harris, and one of the things that I've been thinking about it as we've been on tour, is at the end of the day, if we all ultimately agree, and if everyone in this room, if we could ultimately agree on a morality and the definition of a soul that all made sense, and Jordan's perhaps had a more religious connotation and yours didn't, And we all could live functioning good lives within that, then does it really matter beyond the interest in the intellectual discussion? | ||
| Because there was a lot of agreement. | ||
| I could see it in your body language, in both of you guys. | ||
| Greg, I'll start with you. | ||
| Well, let me start with some of the things I agree with a lot, and including some of the use of religious language. | ||
| I think there's a good reason for, even for those of us who aren't religious or don't think of ourselves as, and I think of myself as an atheist. | ||
| I am an atheist. | ||
| But, though I know you interpret that word differently. | ||
| He'll tell you he's an atheist. | ||
| We'll get into an argument about this later. | ||
| But, so first of all, I think what we see in what you're describing about the many manifold potentials | ||
| and the soul actualizes it is a conviction which I very much agree with and I think we can know is true. | ||
| And I think, I agree we presuppose in all of our thinking and all of our judging of people. | ||
| Which is that we have free will, that there's not a future that's written and we're just on a path traveling down it, but rather in every moment we're able to make choices and our choices change the future. | ||
| And that is a really profound fact. | ||
| It's a profound fact about our consciousness. | ||
| It's connected to everything else that's of value about us. | ||
| And I agree, if that wasn't true of us, we'd be a very different kind of creature. | ||
| We wouldn't interact with each other in the same way, and we wouldn't need the same kind of political structure. | ||
| And it's such a profound fact about us that we don't really have language for it, or very good language for it. | ||
| Religion has been the form in which people have thought about the most profound facts, about their most profound experiences, about their understandings of them from, well, from as long as there's been people, or as long as there's been... Anyway, for a very, very long time. | ||
| As we've lost religion, we haven't found ways, or haven't always found ways, to conceptualize independently of religion those kind of profound values, the profound role of freedom in human life, what our highest potential is. | ||
| And so, if you're going to talk about those things, it's very hard to do it without reaching for at least religious metaphor. | ||
| That's a really crucial issue, you know, I think. | ||
| I think it's a fundamentally crucial issue. | ||
| But I want to say though, just to finish the disappearing part, what's true, but what's true matters, right? | ||
| And something can be a beautiful metaphor, but if understood literally is false. | ||
| And one of the things I think we need to do to lead our lives well, to achieve these kinds of values, is to really value our minds and value our reason and value getting at the truth. | ||
| So if it turns out that something's false, Um, then believing that it's true is not going to make our lives better. | ||
| And, um, so I don't think it could turn out that we're going to have a very deep disagreement about what's true about the basic facts of reality. | ||
| And yet we're all going to be hunky-dory on everything else. | ||
| I think those disagreements will make a difference, but we have to acknowledge the role of consciousness and freedom in life. | ||
| And I think there is an agreement between us on that. | ||
| Well, what I've observed is, for example, in my clinical practice, when I'm talking about life and death moral issues, and these are in situations where extreme things are happening in families and in individuals' lives, talking about events that might have produced post-traumatic stress disorder, or that set people up for murder at times, or suicide, or terrible suffering, some of which is induced voluntarily, the probability that I can have a discussion with my clients about that at a level that will be salutary without using religious slash metaphorical languages, zero. | ||
| If the discussion can't take place in the domain of good versus evil, something like that, and this is especially true, I would say, for post-traumatic stress disorder, you just don't get anywhere with it. | ||
| And I've been thinking about the narrative issue a lot, constantly. | ||
| I think that, I know we need to use, this is one of the weaknesses of the rationalist argument, I think, is that we have to use heuristics to operate in the world. | ||
| So heuristics are simplifying maneuvers. | ||
| And there's no option. | ||
| You have to use heuristics. | ||
| And the reason for that is because there is a lot more world than there is of you. | ||
| And so you take this incredibly complex reality and you simplify it. | ||
| Now, the simplifications have to have merit, and what makes them have merit is a topic for a very lengthy discussion. | ||
| But to produce those simplifications, you have to use heuristics. | ||
| You have to use cognitive shortcuts. | ||
| And it looks to me like narrative is a heuristic. | ||
| And that the reason that we need to tell stories, and that we probably need to have our ethic grounded in stories, is because you can't make a list of rules that will tell you how to live. | ||
| Rules don't suffice. | ||
| But you can tell stories that lay out broad principles, and those are heuristic principles. | ||
| But the thing is, is that the most fundamental stories seem to have a religious core. | ||
| Now, I'm not exactly sure why that is, although I think it probably has to do with something I referred to earlier, which is the idea that You know, you are, as a soul, you're the thing that transforms potential into actuality. | ||
| That seems to be the grounding concept in some sense. | ||
| So, that's the grounding concept. | ||
| There's something divine about that. | ||
| Out of that arises a sequence of stories that are shaped across, perhaps, evolutionary history, and inside that are More articulated ethic exists and I don't see a way out of that because you cannot make an exhaustive list of rules that enable ethical movement forward and you need to do that if you had a purely rational view of the way that human cognition functions. | ||
| It's something like that. | ||
| So let's pause right there. | ||
| Can either one of you figure out a way out of that? | ||
| I mean, right? | ||
| That would be the answer that an objectivist would want to have, right? | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| We've got a whole bunch of them right in front of you. | ||
| So, I don't think you could have a list of rules. | ||
| You're meaning something like an algorithm that you risk your life by. | ||
| That's exactly what an algorithm is. | ||
| And I think that's just not something we can do. | ||
| That's not the way the human mind works and the world is. | ||
| It's complicated, and you're not going to get a bunch of if-then statements that take you to... I mean, you can't even do that for a lot of physical systems, to explain that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But I think we can understand them rationally. | ||
| Now, this might be similar to what we were talking about in the green room about Sam's view of reason and yours and mine. | ||
| We've got to figure out where they all lie. | ||
| I don't think reason is just about coming up with algorithms. | ||
| I think we come up with concepts. | ||
| Concepts enable us to assimilate vast quantities of similar things to one another and learn about future instances from past ones. | ||
| We can get quite subtle principles, but I think moral principles are not things that take the form of simple rules, don't lie. | ||
| To take Rand's version of the virtue of honesty, which isn't don't lie, it's It's your recognition of the fact that what's unreal is unreal and it can't be of value. | ||
| So faking things won't work. | ||
| It won't make them real. | ||
| Somehow the thing you fake is going to come back to haunt you. | ||
| That's not a simple rule of what to do in each situation. | ||
| It's a kind of broad fact that you can use to steer your life by. | ||
| In order to use it to see your life, and to fully understand it, you need to think about how it plays out in a lot of different contexts, right? | ||
| You need to think about what it really means in practice. | ||
| And art, stories, literature, but also other forms of art, I think, are an indispensable means to doing this, both with ethical truths like this, and also with other metaphysical truths. | ||
| These are about what kind of world we're in. | ||
| So I guess part of the discussion, and as it progresses, I don't necessarily mean this discussion in particular, You know, obviously I'm not an enemy of reason by any stretch of the imagination, but I do see that it's hard for people who promote reason as the fundamental mechanism to distinguish between reason and the generation of algorithms. | ||
| Like, and you can say, well, my concept of reason extends beyond the generation of algorithms, and fine, but then my question would be, well, exactly what are the mechanisms by which reason functions when what it's doing isn't generating algorithms? | ||
| Because algorithms aren't enough, and we know that, right? | ||
| Which is why we don't have expert diagnostic systems, for example. | ||
| The reason starts to look something like metaphor. | ||
| It starts to look something like narrative. | ||
| And then I start thinking, yeah, but that's not exactly the Enlightenment concept of reason. | ||
| So we're starting to move into a different domain. | ||
| Well, I think there's more than just algorithms and metaphor and narrative. | ||
| One thing reason can do is come up with metaphors and narratives. | ||
| But there's more than just those three things. | ||
| I also think there's the formation of abstract principles. | ||
| I don't think what Newton did in writing the Principia was coming up with algorithms. | ||
| There are algorithms in it, or things you can algorithmatize about how to prove certain things. | ||
| The act of forming the concept inertia. | ||
| That's not exactly... you know, that's something else. | ||
| And I think it's... Inertia might be an algorithm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the act of coming up with it is something... Exactly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think there's a whole and underexplored area of philosophy and maybe cognitive psychology thinking about what are these acts of reason? | ||
| How does reason function? | ||
| How is it that we can go from The kind of information we have in perception to a more and more sophisticated understanding of the world. | ||
| And I've written some on this. | ||
| Other people have. | ||
| I don't know how much I should try to explain here, but I can plug. | ||
| I have a chapter called Conceptualization and Justification in a book called Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge that gives my sense of what Reason does here. | ||
| See, because the other thing that's come up among the cognitive scientists in particular, and also the robotics types, This is Rodney Brooks, in particular, who invented the Roomba, by the way. | ||
| Well, it's a major accomplishment, because the Roomba doesn't have a brain, but it operates intelligently. | ||
| It's a major accomplishment, that thing. | ||
| Brooks actually reconstructed how artificial intelligence robotics engineers were conceptualizing Intelligence and he thought of it as something much more embodied rather than conceptual so it was the room was actually the consequence of very very high-level thinking about the relationship between Reason and an action in the world like one of the things that caught the more sophisticated cognitive psychologists have been Wrestling with is the fact that a lot of what we thought of as abstract reason is actually something that's more dependent on embodiment than we'd ever had ever Possibly conceived right and so the idea of disembodied reason | ||
| Which is also, I would say, an Enlightenment concept. | ||
| It's lacking in functionality. | ||
| You have to be embodied. | ||
| And the thing to me is that an embodied reason looks to me a lot more like the hero of a story than it looks like disembodied reason. | ||
| I think that's a better metaphor. | ||
| And so partly why I like the idea of the logos, for example, rather than the idea of reason. | ||
| And this is partly reflected in its conceptual Christian origins. | ||
| The Logos in Christianity is something that's actually embodied, right? | ||
| It's the word made flesh. | ||
| There's a link between the rational Logos, logic, and the thing that's embodied. | ||
| And it's the interaction between those two that produces, I think, produces that phenomenon that you described as what drove Newton, for example, when he was producing his algorithms. | ||
| That's not an algorithm. | ||
| It's something else, but it's certainly not disembodied reason. | ||
| But even that metaphor of the word made flesh, right? | ||
| It sounds as though something that could have been disembodied was disembodied once, and now it got embodied. | ||
| And so it still sounds to me a little bit too much like this disembodied conception of, if you want to call it reason or mind. | ||
| Whereas I think we want a conception of what reason is and what it does that involves the fact from the start that it's a feature of certain living organisms. | ||
| These organisms have perceptual systems. | ||
| Those are bodily, if anything is. | ||
| A faculty of integrating the data that's coming in through those organs, helping us direct ourselves through the world, and then on a grander and grander scale. | ||
| I do think in the Enlightenment, what we're getting is a lot of reflection for the first time, or for one of the first times, a renewed reflection on reason, what it is, how it works. | ||
| And there are several different views, right? | ||
| Some more materialistic views. | ||
| Like, into Holbach and so forth, and then these more Cartesian-type views. | ||
| And I think most of the views that came out of that are wrong. | ||
| And I think it's sad, because it's a period when people were really valuing the mind. | ||
| Well, they were productively wrong. | ||
| They were productively wrong. | ||
| Well... You know, because they got us somewhere else. | ||
| But it certainly does seem the case that... And this is, again, I think the problem with the idea of reason, per se, is that it's not a sufficiently differentiated idea to account for how it is that we actually operate in the world. | ||
| And the AI types and the psychologists are really trying to sort that out. | ||
| But see, one of the things that happened to me when I was arguing with Sam Harris about this, because Sam believes that you can derive values from facts, and more or less in an unmediated way, although he He has some differences of opinion with himself about how unmediated that is. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's very difficult to be entirely coherent when you think through something that's complicated. | ||
| There's likely to be inconsistencies in your argument because it's so complicated. | ||
| But it looks to me like it's actually formally impossible to derive values from facts in an unmediated sense. | ||
| You need something to mediate between the facts and the values. | ||
| I would also say it looks like it's impossible for you to derive that structure merely over the course of your life. | ||
| You don't have enough time. | ||
| You're not smart enough and you don't have enough time. | ||
| And so you have an embodied biological platform, or you are that embodied biological platform, and it's actually the consequence of, let's say, at least in part, evolutionary pressures operating over about a 3.5 billion year period. | ||
| And so it's possible that you can derive facts from values, but it takes you 3.5 billion years to do it properly. | ||
| And what you have that allows you to do that in your life, to look at a set of facts and to decide how to proceed, is the intermediation, the unconscious intermediation of that unbelievably deep structure. | ||
| And when I've said to Sam something that really annoys him, I said, well, you think you're an atheist, but you're actually not. | ||
| What I'm actually saying is, your conscious apprehension of yourself is a very thin layer that's laid on top of what you are, because you don't know who you are, and most of what you do is unconscious. | ||
| And there isn't a serious cognitive psychologist in the world who doesn't think that most of what you do is unconscious, by the way. | ||
| And I would say that unconscious has a structure, and that's a narrative structure, and that narrative structure is deep. | ||
| And so that even if you describe yourself as atheistic, because in the explicit content of your thinking, you see no room for The grounding of your conceptions in divinity, I would say, well, that isn't how your unconscious is structured at all. | ||
| And you might object, but then the objection... Well, how is it structured? | ||
| How is it structured, since it's 99% of you? | ||
| I think I've got a guy over there with a slight objection. | ||
| He almost jumped out of his chair. | ||
| How is your unconscious structured? | ||
| Which, by the way, I think this is particularly interesting, because I think you have a lot of agreements with Jordan on plenty of stuff, and I think you have a lot of agreements with Sam on plenty of stuff, but this is where this argument has gotten down to. | ||
| It's a really, really rich place, I think. | ||
| Well, I mean, this is the big issue, right? | ||
| So I have agreements with Sam on stuff, but we have different reasons for having that agreement. | ||
| And so, for example, I agree with him on his art, but his conception of his art is very different than our conception of his art. | ||
| And he has no free will in that conception, so that blows my mind, how you can even talk about an his art and values without having free will. | ||
| And he talks about choices without free will, which is challenging. | ||
|
unidentified
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Um... | |
| Um... | ||
| And then we might come to some certain agreement about, I don't know, rights or something. | ||
| With Jordan, though, I think even our conception of rights is going to be a little different because I don't see how you can get to rights without understanding the role of reason and how reason functions and what the enemy of reason ultimately is, which is what I mentioned earlier, which is force. | ||
| So I think, to go back to your original question way back, I think there's no way for us to have different foundations | ||
| and not come up with different conclusions. | ||
| We're going to have to come up with different conclusions. | ||
| Now we might agree on certain issues in politics, but for example, I think we're going to disagree | ||
| quite profoundly on ethics, right? | ||
| I think, you know, just watching some of Jordan's things on sacrifice and so on, on the role of Jesus or our view of Jesus is going to be very, very profoundly different. | ||
| And that affects human behavior. | ||
| That affects individual human behavior. | ||
| So they're going to be...you can't start with different premises. | ||
| and develop them and come up with exactly the same way and say, | ||
| okay, we agree on this stuff. | ||
| But no, these things have profound consequences. | ||
| The disagreements have profound consequences. | ||
| Now, when I think of my subconscious, I don't think of it as this... | ||
| and again, I'm not a philosopher, not a psychologist, so this is the way a layman in these terms would think. | ||
| I think of my subconscious not as a 99% darkness down there, right? | ||
| I think of it as something that accumulated information, conclusions, values, decisions that I've made since childhood, since before I was completely conscious of them. | ||
| They're there. | ||
| I have access to some of them, you know, hopefully cognitive psychology. | ||
| You know, psychology can help me get access to more of them. | ||
| But they're accessible to me. | ||
| They're not some mystery. | ||
| They're accessible to me. | ||
| And that when I am making a decision in life, I try to make it based on what I know, not based on what I don't know that's back there, right? | ||
| So I try to accumulate facts. | ||
| This is the finance guy in me, right? | ||
| Or the reality guy in me. | ||
| I try to accumulate facts and integrate them and try to distinguish between which facts | ||
| are legitimate and which facts are illegitimate and try to integrate them and try to make | ||
| a decision based on logic, based on reality. | ||
| And sometimes my emotion will say, and this is my subconscious maybe speaking, don't do | ||
| that or it's a bad thing. | ||
| But so what, right? | ||
| If reality and the facts are with me, then I'll ignore that subconscious. | ||
| So I don't see us as, we've got some choice over here, but we're really driven by the subconscious. | ||
| The subconscious is there for me to explore, and I become a better person as I know my subconscious better. | ||
| I understand where my emotions are coming from, and I understand that better. | ||
| But at the end of the day, when I make a choice out there, it's based on reality and facts. | ||
| See, and I see reality of facts. | ||
| I don't see anything coming between me and this plastic bottle. | ||
| Again, my simplistic view, right? | ||
| Here's the plastic bottle. | ||
| I can see it. | ||
| It's a plastic bottle. | ||
| It's not something else. | ||
| There's a lot that goes into what is plastic, what is bottle, what is that. | ||
| But that's what it is. | ||
| I can describe it. | ||
| I can actually, if I had the scientific knowledge, get down into the molecular structure. | ||
| And it's real. | ||
| It's actually here. | ||
| It's not created by my consciousness or interpreted by my consciousness. | ||
| It really is what it is. | ||
| So, I think what evolution has done is given us those tools... Let me ask you a question. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Why is a stump and a beanbag both a chair? | ||
| Well, because you're talking about the self. | ||
| Why is a stump and a beanbag both a chair? | ||
| Because if you have a proper definition of a chair, then a stump and a beanbag both fit that definition. | ||
| What is the definition? | ||
| Well, I haven't thought about it, but you know, something to sit in. | ||
| That's it! | ||
| Yeah, so. | ||
| It's something to sit on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| That isn't inherent to the object. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| No, truth is... My definitions are not inherent in the object. | ||
| They're objectively created by my consciousness and that object. | ||
| But the object is an object, right? | ||
| Both of them are chairs and both of them have a particular nature. | ||
| That is, I can describe both... I can both say the stump and the beanbag are the same, they're a chair, but I can also say they're different. | ||
| The stump is made of wood and it has this... The problem with the idea that the object presents itself is that two things are the same and different in a near-infinite number of ways. | ||
| And that's also a technical problem. | ||
| So I can give you an example. | ||
| So imagine that you're going to classify a set of six books. | ||
| You're going to figure out how to arrange them in your shelf. | ||
| You think, well, that's an easy thing to do. | ||
| That's a conceptual problem, by the way. | ||
| It's actually not an easy thing to do because there is an indefinite Number of ways that you can classify a finite number of objects. | ||
| So you could classify the books by color, by age, by thickness, by weight, by number of E's, by number of A's, by number of E's on the first page, by number of words, by number of phrases. | ||
|
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But this is the big problem. | |
| The question is why am I classifying them? | ||
| That is the question. | ||
| There's no intrinsic value to classifying books. | ||
| The question is why do I want to classify them? | ||
| And the answer to the why I want to classify them We'll then determine how I classify them. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But that's exactly it. | ||
| But that's the rub. | ||
| The rub is, you see, that's the rub. | ||
| Your classification system is dependent on why you apply it. | ||
| And that's exactly the argument I've been using with Harris, which means the set of facts that reveal themselves to you in the world are dependent on your values. | ||
| Because Sam's argument is that the values are derived from the facts. | ||
| It's like, no, wait a minute. | ||
| There's an infinite number of facts. | ||
| And they present themselves in accordance with your values, with your purpose. | ||
| And so that demolishes the values from facts argument. | ||
| Now it makes it complicated because there's an interrelationship between, like a causal interrelationship. | ||
| But it is the case that your purpose determines the facts that array themselves before you. | ||
| And that's actually not disputable, I would say. | ||
| The actual facts are... The actual fact is that I have six books. | ||
| And the actual fact is that there's an infinite, if you will, way in which to order them. | ||
| So the facts are all there. | ||
| Where my values are introduced is how I'm going to order them. | ||
| Or even if they're books. | ||
| They might be firewood. | ||
| They might be a weapon. | ||
| There's lots of things they can be other than books. | ||
| So this is kind of amusing to me because the first... No, seriously though, because the first... I study and I've written quite a bit on concept formation and classification, but whenever I'm writing about it, I don't think I've ever said this before, I remember back to when I was a little kid, and I had this bookshelf, and I was ordering the books on the bookshelf, and I was thinking, well, what's the right way to do it? | ||
| And, of course, the answer is that there isn't one right way built into nature. | ||
| Here's how everyone's got to put into the Dewey Decimal System, and if not for Dewey, no one would have figured it out, right? | ||
| That's a great example. | ||
| There are a lot of different ways you can order books, and anything else, right? | ||
| But there are also facts about the things That make it necessary to order them in certain ways to achieve different purposes, right? | ||
| And to understand them. | ||
| As long as you add that last part of the phrase. | ||
| And then there's very broad types of purposes we have to have in order to be able to think and function at all. | ||
| And those purposes, the purpose of getting to know as much of reality as we can, | ||
| of holding that reality in a way that won't flummox us, and therefore is unit economical is the word, | ||
| Rand sometimes uses for this. | ||
| So a way that allows you to hold a lot of information in a compact number of units. | ||
| And then there are certain facts we need to know and other facts we don't because of our natures, | ||
| you know, to navigate ourselves through the world, provide standards for how we conceptualize things. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So although our purposes and our needs as human beings matter, it's not as though any purpose is just as good as any other. | ||
| You can come up with standards for objectivity of what is an objective way to form concepts and to classify, in the same way that you can come up with standards for what's an objective way to grade... I don't think you can come up with it... I agree with everything you said, except I don't think you can come up with it objectively. | ||
| I even think there is a hierarchy of values, though. | ||
| Take the sense of objective, though, that's involved in objective grading or objective reporting, right? | ||
| It's not that the grade's already out there in the paper and you just gotta find it in there, or the newspaper story's already written and a good reporter will find it. | ||
| It's rather there's a way, maybe not just one, but a small range of them, right? | ||
| A way that this has to be done in order to accomplish legitimate purposes for doing it. | ||
| Yes, there's a finite range of organizing things that will enable you to use them in a reasonable way. | ||
| reasonable what we mean when we talk about an article being written objectively a paper being graded objectively and I | ||
| think in the Same sense you could talk about a concept being formed | ||
| objectively or values being formed object. Okay, but okay There's a lot in that that I think is is is dead on | ||
| Like, I do believe, for example, that one of the ways we deal with the fact that there's a plethora of facts is that we impose interpretive structures on those facts that are common to all of us because we have common goals. | ||
| Like, we don't want to suffer and die, generally speaking. | ||
| We want to stay alive. | ||
| And our biological systems predispose us to act in ways that are commensurate with that. | ||
| And so I don't think there's an infinite number of solutions to the fact that there's an infinite number of problems. | ||
| That's where I think the postmodernists have gone wrong. | ||
| But I think that when you say that what you've produced by constraining the solution set is somehow akin to objectivity, that's where I have a conceptual problem. | ||
| Even though I don't disagree with the reason that you would make that case, then I guess what would happen is we'd have to define what constitutes objective. | ||
| Because when I think of objective, I think about the strict application of the scientific method. | ||
| And what that's done for us is lay out a world, not of values, but of objective facts. | ||
| If you're objective, you can lay out the objective facts, but I can't see how you can derive the damn values. | ||
| Even though I do believe that there's a hierarchy of values and that there's a finite hierarchy, I don't think putting that into the category of objective truth is reasonable, because I don't think that those truths are objective. | ||
| There's some other form of truth. | ||
| Well, and I think that that's generally captured in something like metaphor and A narrative. | ||
| Which I think Dave's going to push us to move on in a minute. | ||
| I actually wasn't. | ||
| I was thinking that maybe we dump the Q&A and just keep going. | ||
|
unidentified
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Applause for not asking questions. | |
| I just wanted to say, I mean, so first, I totally agree. | ||
| We won't fully dump it. | ||
| We'll do about ten more here. | ||
| One of these issues is how do we define objectivity, and this is another one of these classifying questions, right? | ||
| And that's an interesting question. | ||
| Where does this concept come from? | ||
| There's a whole history to it. | ||
| There have been books written about the history of the concept of objectivity, and that's something maybe for another occasion, but let's flag that as a really interesting question. | ||
| Just want to say something about is-ought before we, and also something about whether we can get to the same conclusion starting from different places. | ||
| I see what Harris is doing is he's in the tradition of a lot of empiricists. | ||
| It goes back to Epicurus. | ||
| It's definitely present in Mill and in a different kind of way in Hume. | ||
| Though very different than Hume and Adam Smith. | ||
| If you're an empiricist, you think everything comes from perception. | ||
| And you usually have a kind of fairly atomized view of perception. | ||
| You think of it as collections of sensations. | ||
| And what these types of empiricists generally do when they get to ethics is they pick some sensation to identify their value terms with. | ||
| So either pain, maybe the sensation of pain is, or the sensation of suffering is the one Sam uses, right? | ||
| Is the bad, and then whatever is opposite to that. | ||
| Pleasure is the good. | ||
| Some of them say the sensation of desire fulfillment. | ||
| But they pick some sensation, some simple psychological state that can be experienced in a moment, and identify that with the good. | ||
| And then they come up with some theory about, you know, how do we get as many of those moments or as much of them as possible? | ||
| That's famously what John Stuart Mill does, Epicurus, in a very different way. | ||
| And if you think you can derive values from facts like that, I think that's a mistake. | ||
| I don't even think that's really deriving values from facts. | ||
| All that's doing is identifying values with certain very, very simple facts. | ||
| So what I think the real question about deriving values from facts is, is we have these value | ||
| concepts, concepts like good and bad, that we use to direct ourselves, direct ourselves | ||
| How do we form these concepts and can these concepts be formed based on fact in an objective manner as opposed to just being found out there already or just being made up and you can make up yours and I can make up mine and there's no way to tell if the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan or the communists or we are right about what the values are. | ||
| So I think you have to take this question back to the broader question of how do you form concepts? | ||
| And what kind of ways does perceptual evidence play in the forming of concepts? | ||
| And in the case of value concepts, and here I'm drawing on Rand if I usually do, what I think we do is At the deepest level, it comes from the needs of living organisms. | ||
| There are certain ways they need to function in order to survive and prosper. | ||
| And values are the way that we conceptualize that. | ||
| So a human value held in conceptual form is an identification of something a human being needs to live. | ||
| And he values it insofar as he chooses to live, and in some form recognizes that it will contribute to his life. | ||
| What I think ethics as a branch of philosophy, as a science in effect, has to do is really articulate the foundations of these values, where they come from, what the fundamental values are, what the fundamental ways of achieving them are. | ||
| So how would you distinguish your perspective from the perspective of a Darwinian pragmatist then? | ||
| So let me just say one more before I get to that. | ||
| But doing that as a philosopher is a pretty sophisticated thing. | ||
| People don't start doing philosophy until thousands of years, more than that, into living as human beings. | ||
| This particular theory of the origin of values didn't come about until the 1950s. | ||
| So in some sense, prior to that, human beings were identifying things as values in conceptual terms. | ||
| We learn it as we're kids. | ||
| We learn that some things are good and some things are bad. | ||
| And what a philosophical theory of values is meant to do is to articulate why that works, what it is that we're doing better when we do that. | ||
| But other people who don't have the same theory than us will have some of the same values. | ||
| And so we might come to the same conclusions, but without Being able to fully defend and articulate them in the same way. | ||
| I don't think it's a coincidence that both of us think the Nazis were bad and the communists were bad, even though we start in some sense from different places. | ||
| But I think to fully develop and understand what's bad about them, and to come out consistently on the more difficult cases of what's good and bad, although the Nazis was a really difficult case for a lot of people, we should remember, and the communists still is. | ||
| That's where we need, I think, to get down to the finish. | ||
| Now, you're asking me about the Darwinian approach. | ||
| Well, because, you know, if you're making the claim, which I think is a justifiable claim, whether or not it's accurate, is that our ethics are grounded in something like, we could say, the necessity for survival and reproduction, which are variants of survival, obviously. | ||
| It's a Darwinian claim. | ||
| It's the claim that the American pragmatists advanced as well because | ||
| this is Peirce and William Jameson primarily. They believed that your | ||
| knowledge was a tool to advance being in the world, let's say survival in | ||
| the world, and that you justified your knowledge not because you had | ||
| finite final knowledge of anything but because your tools were good enough | ||
| to obtain the knowledge that you needed. And so, the idea that you | ||
| And, you know, you can't do it because your tools were good enough | ||
| the end that you were aiming at. | ||
| That was the validation process. | ||
| If your theory was good enough to get you to where you were aiming, then it was true enough. | ||
| And the pragmatists believed that that was the best that you could do with truth. | ||
| And then when Darwin advanced his theory, the American pragmatists said, oh, look, Darwin's theory is actually an extension of pragmatism. | ||
| And pragmatism is the notion that your truths are good enough to facilitate your survival. | ||
| But this is the rub. | ||
| So that's Darwin. | ||
| There's a truth that's embedded in the Darwinian worldview. | ||
| That is not the same truth that's embedded in the Newtonian worldview. | ||
| There's a conflict between those two. | ||
| And the Newtonian worldview is basically the world of facts, right? | ||
| Roughly speaking. | ||
| And there's a set of claims about truth that are based in a Newtonian worldview. | ||
| And they're not the same as the ones that are based in the Darwinian point of view. | ||
| It's a big problem. | ||
| And part of the reason that I've been arguing with Sam for like three years is because he's an evolutionary psychologist in principle and a biological thinker, and yet he essentially has a Newtonian worldview, that it's the world of facts that's real. | ||
| It's like, no, no, there's a world of values, and the world of values is devoted not towards determining what's objectively true, but towards facilitating survival, and those are not The same thing. | ||
| Now, there's obviously a relationship between them because the world of values and the world of facts coexists, | ||
| but the relationship doesn't seem to be one-to-one. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you want it? | |
| I mean, the world of values assumes a valuer. | ||
| That is, the world of facts, there are facts out there. | ||
| That's the Newtonian physics. | ||
| There really is a world out there. | ||
| There really are facts out there. | ||
| Values exist here, exist in the mind of individuals. | ||
| We value something. | ||
| There are no values out there independent of a valuer. | ||
| So these are two different dimensions. | ||
| Precisely my point. | ||
| You know, part of valuing is identifying the facts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is the rub. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| It's funny, he even used your hand motions to get the whole thing together. | ||
|
unidentified
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He did. | |
| I mean, the American pragmatists are interesting philosophically, and there are some things I like about them. | ||
| One is they really stress the importance of activity and thought. | ||
| The world doesn't just come to you to do something to think, right? | ||
| They really stress the activity of the mind. | ||
| And they really stress the role of ideas in action. | ||
| And I think that's something that's left out in a lot of philosophy. | ||
| But I think they lose the reality in doing that. | ||
| So they treat it as though consciousness is just something that's Running your life. | ||
| And your ideas are just what your mind's busy doing. | ||
| But I think what we know and can tell to be the case when we just introspect on our own conscience and think about what it is to be conscious, is that to be conscious is to be conscious of something. | ||
| To be conscious of something independent of yourself. | ||
| There's a world out there and what we mean by consciousness is a grasp of an awareness of that world. | ||
| We wouldn't even be able to get the idea of our own consciousness except by contrast to a world that we're distinguishing it from. | ||
| You close your eyes and you open them and you think the thing's still there. | ||
| You have the idea of a world that's there and then your consciousness is of that world. | ||
| And I think you have to have that idea of knowledge and knowledge being about something that's independent of you. | ||
| And I think the pragmatists lose that. | ||
| I think there's It's this kind of dichotomy we find in thought, between everything's in your head, and your mind's very active, and you're knowing the world, and you're deciding things, and therefore you don't actually get at the world the way it actually is. | ||
| And then on the other side, you do get at the world the way it actually is, but because you don't do anything. | ||
| It just comes to you passive. | ||
| And I think both of those are wrong. | ||
| There's activity you have to do to get at the world, but it's activity to get at the way the world is. | ||
| And of course, you get at it in a certain form, just like if I pick something up, I'm holding it in one form, and I could hold it in a different form. | ||
| But I'm still holding it. | ||
| It's not like I'm not getting it. | ||
| And likewise for values. | ||
| I think the pragmatists do retain the world, but they look at it slightly different. | ||
| They say, the world is what objects to your stupid theory. | ||
| So let's say, it's not that the world is made of objects. | ||
| The world is made of what objects to your stupid theory. | ||
| That's a whole different idea, and it's a way more sophisticated idea. | ||
| And so, for the pragmatists, if you lay out a theory in the world in action, And the action obtains its end, then the theory is sufficiently true. | ||
| But you know, lots of times when you lay out your theory in the world, you don't get what you expected. | ||
| And then the question is, what do you get? | ||
| And you might say, well, you get an array of new facts. | ||
| It's like, no, no, that's not what happens. | ||
| What you do, what you get is an array of new incomprehensible possibilities. | ||
| And that's not the same thing as a set of facts. | ||
| So let me give you an example. | ||
| You'll all understand this very rapidly. | ||
| Imagine you're married to someone, and you trust them, and they betray you. | ||
| And you discover that one day. | ||
| So that's the world objecting to your stupid theory. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| Because you had a theory about who you were, and a theory about who your partner was, and a theory about what your life was. | ||
| And that theory was seriously wrong. | ||
| Past, present, and future are all something radically new. | ||
| You might say, well, a new set of facts confronts you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Is that right? | ||
| OK. | ||
| Just what are those facts? | ||
| It's like you'll be in a pit for two or three years trying to just get the bare facts out of that situation. | ||
| The only thing you'll know for sure when the world objects to your stupid theory is that you were wrong. | ||
| It's not like the world is going to erase it. | ||
| It's like, who is this person that I was married to? | ||
| That's what's going to be the question. | ||
| The question is, what kind of fool was I for making these presuppositions to begin with? | ||
| And it's not like that new knowledge will manifest itself in a set of instantly apprehensible facts about the true nature of the world. | ||
| You're going to be suffering like mad for a very good long time before you can take | ||
| what you have, which isn't facts but just confusion, and transform that into something | ||
| that's even vaguely resembling a set of apprehensible facts. | ||
| You'll be in serious psychological trouble until the world re-reveals itself as a set | ||
| of apprehensible facts. | ||
| And if you're traumatized badly enough, it'll never happen. | ||
| And so that's another part of the problem with the idea that the world just represents | ||
| itself as facts from which you can derive values. | ||
| It's like, not when you're bloody confused, and you're confused a lot, and you're confused when the range of potential that's manifested exceeds your grasp, exceeds your capabilities. | ||
| And then the way you respond to that isn't even cognitively. | ||
| The way you respond to that, this is part of embodied cognition. | ||
| What do you do when something incomprehensible objects to you? | ||
| Well, it depends on how incomprehensible it is. | ||
| But let's say, what did you do when the Twin Towers fell? | ||
| Was it a set of facts? | ||
| It's like you didn't know what the hell was going on and neither did anyone else. | ||
| What you did was go into a state of crisis. | ||
| And that state of crisis is actually an embodied precognitive response. | ||
| And what happens biologically is that you get flooded with cortisol, which is a stress hormone. | ||
| And what it does is prepare you to take a very large array of potential actions. | ||
| That's your response. | ||
| So it's not like the world has arrayed itself as a set of facts from which you can derive value. | ||
| What happens is the world has arrayed itself as an incomprehensible mystery, and you have to do something about that. | ||
| And what you do is ratchet up your physiology so that you're burning yourself up, because you age faster when this sort of thing happens, which is why you age faster if you're in crisis. | ||
| You burn yourself up in the attempt to do everything at once, to prepare to do everything at once. | ||
| And that's really the world manifesting itself as an object and objecting to your theory. | ||
| It doesn't come out as an array of facts. | ||
| It would be so lovely if... | ||
| Every time you were wrong, what happened was a new array of facts manifested itself. | ||
| But the point is that the reality doesn't just show up, it's not just an array of facts, but when that cortisol happens, when that event happens, what you do is consciously make an effort to go find the facts. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| So the facts are still in reality. | ||
| So something happened in 9-11. | ||
| So the first thing you do is what actually happened? | ||
| You have to figure out what actually happened. | ||
| There's real work and real cognitive effort. | ||
| Who are these people? | ||
| What is the ideology driving them? | ||
| Why did they do it? | ||
| All of these things are facts that exist in reality, and your responsibility, your moral responsibility, | ||
| I think, to yourself is to go find and discover the facts that are relevant for the decisions and the actions | ||
| you need to take given the event that's happened. | ||
| So, yes, psychologically, if you discover your wife's betraying you, you're confused, but I think your job as a human being is, okay, what actually happened? | ||
| And where did I make my mistake? | ||
| So it's hard. | ||
| But this is part of what free will is. | ||
| Free will is that engaging reason, engaging our consciousness to discover the facts out there | ||
| and apply them to making a new conclusion. | ||
| Okay, so something's wrong in my evaluation of my wife. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Did she really betray me? | ||
| Are the facts true? | ||
| Is what's going on here real? | ||
| So all of it is, again, a return to reason, a return to discovery of facts, which is what reason does. | ||
| Okay, so two things. | ||
| First, you mentioned the relevant facts, and that's the rub. | ||
| But I would also say, interestingly enough, in relationship to your argument, The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget made a very similar claim. | ||
| He said that because the domain of established facts was mutable, and that's the issue, say, with the fact that your partner could betray you, even what you know can be mutable, right? | ||
| Then what is relevant in the search for truth isn't the search for a set of immutable facts, but a search for the process by which facts are generated from the chaotic potential to begin with. | ||
| It's not exactly how Piaget worded it. | ||
| But the facts are there. | ||
| Your wife is either betraying you or she's not betraying you. | ||
| There's always a potential. | ||
| There's lots of potentialities. | ||
| But she's either betraying you or she's not betraying you. | ||
| And your job is to discover Whether she is or she isn't, if that's the job you've assigned yourself. | ||
| So the reality is what it is. | ||
| It's not dependent on you discovering it or not. | ||
| Your responsibility, if you're married, is to know whether your wife is betraying you or not. | ||
| Hopefully you don't need to do the exercise because she's not and you have trust in that. | ||
| But your consciousness is identifying the truth of what's out there. | ||
| It's not some array of infinite possibilities. | ||
| She could be betraying you, she could be half-betraying you, she can be half-betraying you, just like she can be half-pregnant. | ||
| So there are two possibilities. | ||
| She's either betraying you, she's not. | ||
| And your job is to apply reason, which I take as identifying what is true and what is not, | ||
| what is factual and what is not, what is the evidence, weighing the evidence. | ||
| And then there's a whole psychological assessment of the, why did this happen to me? | ||
| What did I see? | ||
| Did I screw up? | ||
| Did she screw up? | ||
| Why was my assessment poor? | ||
| But that's a separate question. | ||
|
unidentified
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First, did she or didn't she? | |
| So it strikes me as this is relatively simple, right? | ||
| The facts are what they are. | ||
| Our job is to discover them. | ||
| And let me say about this, the world objecting to your theory, it's certainly true that the world objects to stupid theories. | ||
| If you've got them, try it out. | ||
| But I don't take that as a definition of the world. | ||
| It's one fact about the world. | ||
| And more importantly, it's a fact about our theories, that they better match the world. | ||
| Otherwise, we're going to have trouble with them. | ||
| When you get into this situation, and this is what I... The pragmatists take it too often as though the theory is just there. | ||
| We're not too interested in how it got there, except by Repeated. | ||
| episodes of what's about to happen, which is that the world objects to it, and then you go scrambling to try to get out of this state of cognitive dissonance that you're in because of the objection. | ||
| So, you know, Dewey says at one point, thoughts are disease, right? | ||
| Everything's easy and nice, you don't have to think, you just go buy in some stupor, he wouldn't put it that way. | ||
| And then some fact objects, and now you've, or the world objects, and now you're in dissonance, and you've got to figure out how to reconfigure your mental life so that you can get on with it. | ||
| And that is what a lot of people did after 9-11, right? | ||
| A lot of people, something unexpected and horrible happened. | ||
| And what they were motivated to do was figure out what are the fewest moves I can make to get things to go back to normal and be alright. | ||
| I don't care what's true. | ||
| I don't care who really did this. | ||
| I don't care what would really solve it. | ||
| I just care what I can tell myself to make this confusion and disruption and agitation go away. | ||
| And that's dishonesty and that's wrong. | ||
| And to really value honesty and wanting to get the right answer and being rational in these situations and caring about what happens to your damn life You can't say, you know, oh, I just want to be back into blissful oblivion by coming up with some new theory. | ||
|
unidentified
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Why do you think it's wrong? | |
| How can I tell what went wrong in the first place? | ||
| I got to this theory somehow. | ||
| Now I see that the theory's wrong. | ||
| What mistake did I make along the way? | ||
| What was the process by which I generated this theory? | ||
| And what was the misstep in that process? | ||
| How can I fix it to generate a new theory, one that'll be true? | ||
| And that process by which you generate your theories, it's a process of forming concepts, | ||
| it's a process of collecting evidence, it's a complicated process. | ||
| There's a lot to say about it, right? | ||
| Sounds like repentance and atonement to me. | ||
| Well, it can be, but it's in that you're acknowledging an error | ||
| and you're trying to fix it, but you're trying to see how you made this theory | ||
| and how you can make it better. | ||
| This idea that philosophy and real thinking starts when you come to contradictions. | ||
| You get this back in the Greeks with the dialectical tradition and people debating each other. | ||
| And I think there's something really profound in Aristotle as opposed to Plato and the other Greeks. | ||
| The other Greeks, they seem to, and then later Hegel, they come up with contradictions and they think, what can we do to get past this contradiction? | ||
| But what Aristotle always does, and all of his books have this structure, I think it's brilliant, he gets into a field by discussing the debates in it, he shows all the contradictions and all the puzzles and it can't be this and this, and then he says, let's start fresh. | ||
| Let's go back to the drawing board. | ||
| Let's think about how we got here. | ||
| And then he crafts a new theory, starting from the kind of fact that motivated the old theories, from the kind of observations, let's say, that motivated the old theories, but that avoids the difficulties in the new one. | ||
| Rather than just trying to reconfigure to go forward, you go back. | ||
| And if there's a hierarchy, not just a hierarchy of values, but also a hierarchy of our understanding of the world, certain ways of understanding it are more basic and others are built up on top of that, when you find that one of your theories, and a theory is a really complex way of knowing, right? | ||
| When you find that one of your theories is mistaken, you think, how can I go back to the more basic, more primitive types of knowledge, more basic types of observations, whatever it might be, from which I generated this theory? | ||
| And then, and now add to it the new observations and the new knowledge that I have based on what went wrong, | ||
| and generate a new theory that will be better than it. | ||
| Yeah. Let's give Jordan the last word on this. | ||
| Okay, well, yes, but... | ||
| Well, but there's a... the problem is, you know, it's... | ||
| that works. | ||
| There's two problems with it, though. | ||
| One is that it's really, really, really, really difficult, cognitively, because the more of your theory you have to unpack, like imagine that your theory is composed of presumptions, and the more basic the presumption, the more your world is organized as a consequence of that presumption. | ||
| And so, like, the presumption of your partner's fidelity is a very fundamental presumption because the entire interpretation of your relationship is predicated on that assumption. | ||
| And so, if you let that assumption go, then you let everything that you know about your relationship go, and that casts you into chaos more and more thoroughly. | ||
| So, the more you go back to first principles to revise your theory, the more cognitive... I don't like this dissonance idea, but the more you throw yourself into a state of existential crisis, And the more you end up psychophysiologically preparing for catastrophe as a consequence, and the faster you die. | ||
| So the problem with ungluing things back down to first principles, which is actually what happens to people, by the way, when they develop post-traumatic stress disorder, is that you undo yourself in doing that. | ||
| And when you undo yourself, there's a physiological price to pay. | ||
| So even though that is the route out, make a fundamental error, you should make fundamental reparations. | ||
| The cost of doing that is unbelievably high. | ||
| And so people are loath to do it, even though they might have to do it. | ||
| Because, of course, you know, you were saying it was wrong to paper over an error. | ||
| And I asked, well, why is it wrong? | ||
| If it makes you feel better, why is it wrong? | ||
| Which is a perfectly good question. | ||
| But the answer to why it's wrong is, Well, what, you want to make the same stupid error again? | ||
| What if the error was quasi-fatal? | ||
| You make it two more times, you're dead. | ||
| And so the cost of repeating, that's the thing about cognitive errors, insofar as they're enacted. | ||
| If they're errors and you make them in the world, the world objects and it takes you apart. | ||
| And if the error is profound enough, then you suffer a lot and die, and maybe not just you. | ||
| Like, the errors can be really profound. | ||
| So it might be that You have to fix the damn hole in your map because otherwise you'll fall through. | ||
| But that nonetheless that the cost of doing that is so high that you're going to shy away from it. | ||
| And people do that all the time. | ||
| That's partly why they take the easy route. | ||
| It's like they take the easy route because the difficult route is... It's difficult. | ||
| It's really difficult. | ||
| Well, think about what you'd have to figure out if you were subject to a betrayal like that. | ||
| It's like, well, maybe you married the wrong person. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| Maybe you created the wrong person in your marriage. | ||
| in your interactions with your partner, or maybe you're so damn naive that it's just absolutely beyond comprehension. | ||
| Like, there's all sorts of terrible things lurking under the revelation of that objection, and digging down there to pull them out is a hell of a job, right? | ||
| That's the confrontation with the terrible dragon of chaos, and in that confrontation you can easily be burnt to a crisp. | ||
| But this is partially why It's so crucial to know yourself and to build a solid | ||
| foundation of self in any relationship, so that somebody else's betrayal does not unwind everything | ||
| you think about yourself. | ||
| So you can't go that every time reality doesn't match your theory, you completely unwind. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So knowing oneself, having a solid foundation, a sense of self-esteem, a sense of self-worth, a sense of confidence, and having a philosophical foundation. | ||
| And this is why, as you said, it's hard work. | ||
| And that we agree completely. | ||
| Morality is hard work. | ||
| Living is hard work. | ||
| You went back to the idea of the pragmatism in survival. | ||
| One of the things that I hold, that we hold, I think, is that survival qua human being, as a human being, with our unique features as human beings, is a lot of work. | ||
| And it requires a particular type of work, particularly reasoning and thinking and figuring stuff out. | ||
| And the more work we do, the more we build our character, the easier it is to deal with these shocks to the system, | ||
| the easier it is to deal with the 9-11 or betrayal, because we know what we are, and now we just need to figure | ||
| out what the facts are, and we can deal with whatever the facts | ||
|
unidentified
|
are. | |
| Whatever reality throws at you, if you've done the moral work | ||
| to create a moral character, you should be able to deal with it. | ||
| Well, you have your best shot at it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| I got a seriously stiff neck from looking that way the whole time. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Sorry, guys. | ||
| How you doing over there? | ||
| That's what happens when you look left. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this was such a perfect example of why I love the reality that I like to think I | ||
| created and maybe some of it came from before me too because this is it. | ||
| I mean, what do you think was more worthwhile, what we just did here for an hour or what | ||
| was on CNN for the last hour? | ||
| I mean, you know, this really is it. | ||
| And you know, these are huge differences, and in some ways, they're small differences. | ||
| And that's what I want to end for our final five minutes here, is why is it that so seemingly these days, so few people are willing to do this? | ||
| So few people are willing to tour the country, to talk to all sorts of people, About all sorts of different things and put their ideas on the line and do all the philosophical work that you do. | ||
| And Yaron, you also travel the world. | ||
| And it seems there's an absolute starvation for it. | ||
| And yet so few people are doing it. | ||
| Yaron, I'll start with you and then we'll go this way. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think because those people who don't want to have the debate have no ideas. | ||
| They're really empty. | ||
| They're nihilists in some cases, and in that case, what is nihilism? | ||
| Nihilism is the absence. | ||
| It's zero. | ||
| Einstein, I think, called it the worship of zero. | ||
| It's a nothingness. | ||
| They don't stand for anything. | ||
| What are they going to go and do debates when they don't really represent anything other than destruction? | ||
| There's nothing to talk. | ||
| Reason doesn't matter. | ||
| Ideas don't matter. | ||
| Speech doesn't matter as a consequence. | ||
| What matters is action. | ||
| This is why Antifa storms into a room and they use their fists. | ||
| There's nothing for them to say. | ||
| There's no value that they have to present. | ||
| And I think it's true on, if you will, on the rights, on the non-speech right. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It's my revelation. | ||
| Islam or Christianity or whatever the religion is, it's my revelation. | ||
| It's not a debate. | ||
| The truth was revealed to me. | ||
| There's no logic, there's no reason, there's no rationality that can challenge the fact that God spoke to me through a book or whatever the way He spoke to me. | ||
| And this is the truth and there's nothing else that can be discussed. | ||
| See, you've got on two sides all they have is emotion and action. | ||
| Reason, ideas, debate, discussion. | ||
| As soon as you abandon reason, as soon as you abandon the idea that conversation, that logic is the way in which we debate, discuss, and discover the truth, then now you've abandoned speech. | ||
| So they're against free speech because they're against reason because they're against Reality. | ||
| Isn't that really the beauty of this? | ||
| It's not that there has to be a knockout here, that somebody has to be, you know, dragged off stage. | ||
| It's that everyone, although wait for the closer everybody. | ||
| We're going to be at one another's throats. | ||
| But that really, that everyone here, the 600 some odd people here, can take what they've heard here and then start applying their own logic and reason and figure out what One thing I always think and say to my students in that connection is that, you know, minds are rarely changed in the course of an argument. | ||
| That doesn't mean they're not changed by an argument. | ||
| But, you know, if you and I are having an argument now, it's about something important and deep. | ||
| It's very unlikely that one of us at the end of the 15 minutes we're arguing is going to come away with a changed worldview. | ||
| It happens occasionally, but pretty rare. | ||
| But often, you know, you go home, you think about it, I think about it, and both of us improve our thinking as a result of that. | ||
| And maybe sometimes you see profound changes over time. | ||
| The other thing I wanted to say to your comment about why don't we see more of this? | ||
| Why aren't people willing to go around the country and do these kinds of talks? | ||
| And it does seem like there's a hunger for it. | ||
| People are turning out. | ||
| One important thing with products, and this is a product that we're creating here for people to consume, is... | ||
| There's a lot of times in the world when there is a potential demand for a product and people who could create that product and nobody notices it. | ||
| And it goes a long time with nobody noticing it. | ||
| And what's great about entrepreneurs is they're the kind of people who notice that there's an opportunity for this. | ||
| They figure it out and they create something new. | ||
| And I think that's what you're doing here, right? | ||
| You probably would have been willing to go on a tour a couple of years ago and, you know, Yaron would. | ||
| But before it was proven that there were these people who want to hear this and there are ways to connect them together, nobody would have known to do it. | ||
| And so what all of you guys are doing in this connection, and particularly, Dave, what you're doing in bringing all these people together on these long-form talk shows, I think is fantastic. | ||
| And it's creating this kind of value. | ||
| And I see it as one of the things that, one of the hopeful signs in the culture that's | ||
| combating the signs that Yaron talked about on both political sides. | ||
| You can either take us out soft or go for the kill. | ||
| The choice is yours. | ||
| They're a very friendly group of people. | ||
| Well, look, I mean, if you're going to talk about, if you're going to dare to think publicly about difficult things, to think and speak publicly about difficult things, then you're going to cause trouble. | ||
| Because you can't talk about something difficult Without causing trouble if it was easy then everyone would | ||
| agree and then you could talk about it No one would care because everyone already knew but it | ||
| would be easy But if it's difficult and you talk about it | ||
| Then you're gonna upset people and then when you upset people they're gonna yell at you a lot | ||
| And then well that's what's gonna happen And then you know if you're not sure that there's any | ||
| support for your position or even if you're sort of vaguely human | ||
| And it upsets you to be yelled at by many many people You know you tend to shut up if a whole bunch of people are | ||
| yelling at you because you might be wrong and also you Might be in danger | ||
| But what happens right now is that Well, two things. | ||
| One thing to know is that just because some people yell at you right now doesn't mean that all people will yell at you over the next month, right? | ||
| So the people who are being thoughtful about it are going to be quieter, and they might be sort of hiding in the woodwork. | ||
| And so you have to learn that. | ||
| But then the other thing is, and we've talked about this quite a bit in this tour, is that there's a technological revolution that's occurring. | ||
| that's enabling these long-form conversations, and it wasn't possible before. | ||
| Like, we can livestream this, right, for no cost. | ||
| And so, a whole bunch of people can watch this, and the technology is there. | ||
| And it turns out that the technology has revealed to us the fact that there's a collective starvation for deep, long-form discussion. | ||
| And so, hooray for that. | ||
| And so, maybe that niche will be increasingly filled. | ||
| It seems to be happening. | ||
| And that would be a good thing, because it seems to me that the way out of our current state of idiot political polarization isn't the final establishment that one side is right and the other is wrong, but to engage in sophisticated long-form discussions to deal with the actual problems that are producing the polarization. | ||
| And maybe we can do that, and maybe this is part of the process by which we do that successfully. | ||
| That would be a testament to the utility of the reason that you were describing, which is the only alternative to subjugation or violence, right? | ||
| We either talk it through, we capitulate, or we tyrannize. | ||
| Those are the options. | ||
| So... Well, on that note, Keep it going for talking it through and for these three guys who presented their ideas. | ||
| Thank you guys for coming out. |
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