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May 22, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:03:25
Philip Goff on Scientism, Limits of Science in Understanding Knowledge | The TRUTH Podcast #48
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The scientific method is a means of accessing scientific knowledge.
What do you do in the scientific method?
You start with a hypothesis, and then you test that hypothesis through a series of experiments that either reject your prior hypothesis or in some way confirm your prior hypothesis.
That's the core of the scientific method.
What we've seen in recent years, though, is people beginning to mistake the scientific method for a different philosophy, which I will call expertism, that is different than the scientific method, which says that you have greater authority on a subject if you happen to be trained as an empirical expert in that subject.
We saw this in our country and around the world in the rise of COVID-19, the limitations on what you were able to debate, whether or not you were an expert of a particular class.
And this is interesting because, actually, the scientific method itself depends on open debate.
It depends on the inquiry of ideas, of no ideas being out of bounds.
And yet, in the name of pursuing capital S Science, We created a new culture of expertism to say that if you weren't trained in a particular domain of science, then you couldn't be challenging the hypotheses that were offered.
We see that in the modern climate change movement as well.
And I think that that's what I call a new philosophy of expertism.
Your status and your sense of authority come not from your ability to provide all countermeaning hypotheses or experiments to test them.
But instead, the authority that you have based on the number of letters that come after your name and the degrees that follow your title.
Well, that's one philosophy and one mistake that I think we've often made.
But it's not the most important one.
That's an obvious error.
I think there's a deeper error that we haven't talked about as much, which is the rise of what we might even call scientism.
Scientism is different from the scientific method.
Scientific method is one means of accessing knowledge.
Scientism refers to the framework which says that's the only means of accessing knowledge.
And I think that's a big mistake.
While science or empiricism is one way of accessing knowledge, there are many ways and many kinds of knowledge that we access in different ways.
You don't access spiritual knowledge through the use of empiricism any more than you can access empirical knowledge through, say, meditation.
Although that's an interesting point to reflect on because many of the greatest scientific discoveries actually were made through first reflection on what the hypothesis was in the first place.
Einstein didn't arrive at his theory of relativity through empirical experiments at all, actually.
Many people don't know this.
He arrived at his theory of relativity through deep consideration and meditation of his own, imagining what was possible, a different framework that rejected the Newtonian past.
And only years later was that ever confirmed through experimentation.
Even think about Galileo.
His core discovery wasn't something that was really empirically derived, but it was a different frame shift, a mind shift.
Imagine living in a world where you thought the sun and everything else in the universe revolved around the earth.
The frame shift in being able to imagine a world that was different was really how we access that knowledge.
And so even when it comes to scientific knowledge, but certainly when it comes to types of knowledge that fall outside of science, like spiritual knowledge, the scientific method of empiricism is only one of the ways that we might go about accessing that form of knowledge.
And so in that way, I think scientism, and this is an idea I've been intrigued by for a long time, scientism is really a kind of religion in its own right.
A religion often posits that its means of accessing truth or knowledge is the only means of getting there.
And yet the irony is modern secularists, modern people who think of themselves as empiricists, have fallen into the trap of believing that empiricism or empirical access through the scientific method is the only way they're going to be able to access knowledge in their own right.
And I think that makes the same kind of philosophical error that many of those empiricists think that religious scholars make or religious practitioners make.
With regard to their own religions, which is a funny full circle.
So as I've been interested in the plural ways that we access knowledge, one of the people that I wanted to talk to was a guy who's thought about these questions far more deeply than I have.
That's Professor Philip Goff.
He's with us as our guest today.
And we're going to have a deep diving discussion around how we access knowledge.
What is the core error in the philosophy of scientism?
And what are the implications for not only accessing scientific knowledge, but accessing spiritual knowledge?
And maybe even get somewhere in our conversation to a deeper and controversial discussion about the G-word, God, that we often don't get to in our everyday discourse.
So Philip, welcome to the podcast.
I've been looking forward to this conversation, an admirer of your work, and I'm glad to talk to you today.
Thanks, Vivek.
Thanks for having me on.
I'm looking forward to the conversation.
So say a word about your background just so our audience is familiar with who you are and who they're hearing from today and then we'll get into the discussion from there.
So I'm a philosophy professor at Durham University here in the cold north of England, the third oldest university after Oxford and Cambridge.
So it's very kind of Harry Potter around here.
But I spend most of my time trying to work out the ultimate nature of reality with a big focus on consciousness, which I think poses some of the deepest scientific and philosophical challenges of our time.
So I'm just spending my time wrestling with those issues, I think.
And why is consciousness important as the relevant question to investigate?
Wow, well, I mean, in a sense, consciousness is everything.
I would say consciousness is the source of everything that really matters in life, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, rich sensory experiences.
But the reason it's posed such a deep intellectual challenge is nobody knows how to fit it in to our current scientific understanding of the universe.
Despite great progress on our scientific understanding of the brain, We still lack even the beginnings of an explanation of how electrochemical signaling in the brain could somehow produce an inner world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes that each of us enjoys every second of waking life.
And we've been struggling with this for many decades.
Some people call it the hard problem of consciousness.
Because we've really got nowhere on it, some people like myself are turning perhaps to more radical options on consciousness.
What are those radical options?
Well, some people think that maybe it doesn't exist.
Maybe it's an illusion.
Maybe it's like magic or witchcraft things we don't believe in anymore.
My own view, known as panpsychism, is the view that consciousness goes down to the fundamental building blocks of reality.
That very simple fundamental particles like electrons and quarks have very, very rudimentary forms of conscious experience and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow built up from these more rudimentary forms of consciousness at the fundamental level of reality.
So it puts consciousness right down there at the fundamental level of physics and tries to build up.
That's a radical thought indeed, at least relative to our current understanding, which is broadly that you have inanimate, unconscious physical attributes like the electrons and protons and neutrons that comprise atoms.
And then there's an emergent biological consciousness in human beings and of a different kind, maybe in other biological organisms.
What is it that gives you the basis to believe, I won't even say evidence necessarily, maybe it's evidence, but the basis to believe that even something as fundamental as an atom or even subatomic particles like an electron or a proton or even a boring neutron would have consciousness in its own right?
Well, Vivek, I liked what you said about scientism at the start there.
And I think we're going through a period of history where people are so blown away by the success of physical science, quite rightly, that it leads them to think that every question can be answered with an experiment.
You know, Sam Harris famously said, even moral questions can be answered by science.
That might be the dumbest thing I've ever heard, actually.
I think it's some experiment that can tell whether the left or right of politics is correct or the correct view on abortion.
Surely these are questions that experiments might be relevant to, but you can't say, oh, scientists have discovered the pro-life position is correct or...
But even when it comes to the nature of reality, you know, there are always assumptions, worldviews in the background that are so foundational that they can't themselves be tested.
And you'd mentioned Galileo.
It's a great example.
We think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which of course he was, but he was also a radical philosopher.
So what Galileo wanted in the 17th century, we call him the father of modern science, He wanted, for the first time in history, science to be purely mathematical, right?
Something we take for granted now.
This was a radical innovation.
But there was a problem.
Galileo appreciated that you can't capture the qualities of conscious experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells and the tastes in the purely quantitative language of mathematics.
An equation can't capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun.
So Galileo thought, right, what am I going to do about this?
How can I deal with these qualities?
He thought, right, I'm going to propose a radical new philosophical worldview.
This wasn't something proven with an experiment.
He just said, this is what we're going to do.
We're going to say consciousness and all its qualities, the colors, the sounds, the smells and the taste.
That's outside of the physical world.
That's outside of science.
That's in the soul.
That's just a different story.
And once he'd done that, once he'd stripped away the qualities of consciousness, everything else could be described with mathematics.
And this was the start of mathematical physics.
Now, that has gone incredibly well for the past 400 years, years.
But we've forgotten that it was all premised on this dividing up of nature with the mathematical world of physics and science on the one hand and the qualities of consciousness in the soul outside of science.
And now, you know, physical science has gone so well and produced incredible technology.
People think, oh, well, that's the full story.
It's going to explain consciousness.
Well, no, the irony is...
The whole project was premised on designing science to exclude consciousness, to set it outside of the domain of physical science.
And so if we now want to bring consciousness back into the scientific story, I think we need to rethink that worldview that Galileo bequeathed to us.
We need to bring together those two domains that Galileo separated.
And I think panpsychism gives us a way of doing that.
A question for you is, even if we separated that question of consciousness from the rest of truth that we could access through mathematics, the bifurcation that Galileo conceived,
is there a role for at least describing I think?
As a tool of inquiry, does that give us at least insight into understanding consciousness that we otherwise may not have had?
Or is it really a different mode of knowledge and understanding that must be accessed entirely independent of the tools of mathematics and science?
No, that's a good point.
I certainly don't want to say that science isn't important.
And, you know, in my book, Galileo's Era, it's called, the subtitle is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.
This is about bringing the philosophy and the science together to work hand in glove.
So I think, you know, the scientific task for consciousness is to work out which kinds of brain activity Go along with which kinds of experience?
And this is already a very difficult project, but if you can scan people's brains and you can ask them what they're feeling and experiencing, we can start to map these together and hopefully map in general which kinds of brain activity go along with consciousness in general.
But that isn't the only task we want from a theory of consciousness.
Ultimately, we want an explanation of why.
Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with consciousness?
Why should consciousness and brain activity have anything to do with each other?
And that's, I think, where we need to turn to the philosophy, because there are various philosophical possibilities here.
Some people think the physical universe is fundamental and consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain.
Other people, like myself, turn that upside down and think, no, it's consciousness that's fundamental.
And the physical universe emerges from some more fundamental story about consciousness.
Now, these two rival worldviews, physicalism we call the conventional scientific story, panpsychism is the view I defend, they're so foundational.
You can't distinguish between them with an experiment.
They're sort of internally consistent stories.
And so for any scientific data, each of these worldviews will just interpret that data on their own terms.
And you know, this makes people very nervous.
Like, what can we do if we can't answer with an experiment?
But we have to remember...
The role of philosophy.
I think philosophy does give us the tools for asking ethical questions, political questions, but also evaluating these different theories of reality, these different fundamental theories of reality.
Maybe I could give you just a quick example, going back again to Galileo.
One of the brilliant things Galileo showed us is that Aristotle was wrong.
Right.
Before the scientific revolution, the thought of Aristotle dominated for hundreds of years.
Before the scientific revolution, the thought of Aristotle dominated for hundreds of years.
And Aristotle believed, and this is kind of common sense, that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects.
And Aristotle believed, and this is kind of common sense, that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects.
Right.
Right.
That's kind of common sense.
That's kind of common sense.
You think a lead ball is going to fall faster than, you know, something really light.
You think, yeah, a lead ball is going to fall faster than, you know, something really light.
Galileo proved that was false.
Galileo proved that was false.
And we have this myth that he went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped a lead ball and a feather.
Most historians think that didn't actually happen and he didn't need to experimentally prove it.
Galileo showed that if you really think carefully, and I'm not going to tell you the details now.
You can look at my book, Galileo's Arrow, the audience.
But he showed if you really think through carefully that idea that heavier objects fall faster, this idea that people had believed for thousands of years, It doesn't make sense.
It's actually internally contradictory.
So this was a genius bit of philosophy.
And this is what philosophers are skilled in, to really think through the logical details of a theory.
And sometimes we can show, actually, when you really think it through, it doesn't make sense.
I actually think that's actually true of our current scientific view that consciousness emerges from physical processes in the brain.
I think when you really think through the details, You can see, actually, as Galileo appreciated, it just doesn't make coherent sense.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Do you believe that certain people are endowed with the capacity to do that?
Versus others who are not.
I mean, they think that how much of this is accessible to most ordinary human beings?
I mean, Galileo, Einstein, maybe yourself, are rarer human beings that may have a different mode of accessing knowledge versus ordinary human beings where you may...
I wonder if we're talking past each other to say that it's like teaching someone like an average person off the street, go do slam dunks.
And he's like, oh, Michael Jordan can do slam dunks, but you just don't have the capacity to do the slam dunks.
That doesn't mean that you can't Engage in a wide variety of worthy activities that allow you to enjoy basketball, that allow you to play basketball, but you can't go do the slam dunk.
It's like you're just missing that in your toolkit.
How much do you think that's actually what's going on here as well as maybe a differential in the difference in innate capacities that certain people have for philosophy versus just having a different toolkit available to them, which is empiricism, that they otherwise resort to as a second best?
Yeah, and I definitely wouldn't want to be elitist or...
I don't think it's elitist at all.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the point is, it's not a value judgment.
I'm saying that that one is better.
I'm not saying that your Galileo Einstein is better than anybody else.
But I'm saying that it just is a capacity question.
Absolutely.
I think there are different skills, aren't there?
There is the skills of the great mathematician.
I'm not particularly good at mathematics myself.
Or the skills of the experimental scientist.
And I think philosophy is a unique skill in its own right.
With philosophy, we are thinking about real things like consciousness or knowledge or morality.
But we're thinking of them in a very abstract way.
We're trying to pin down the essential core of these things.
And to do that, we might have these funny thought experiments.
I mean, like the one Galileo had to prove...
prove Aristotle was wrong.
We think of them in these weird sci-fi thought experiments.
But the reason we're doing that is we're trying to sort of shock ourselves out of our ordinary assumptions about consciousness or knowledge or morality, just pinning down, you know, what is the core of these things?
And that is something that is quite hard to do.
It's something that I'm not good at a lot of things, but I think I've always found that kind of intuitive, But it's also something you can get better at.
You know, you can get better at the logical structure of arguments, mistakes in reasoning.
That's something that's quite objective, actually.
We can identify what we call fallacies, errors in reasoning.
And these are what you can learn as you take a philosophy degree.
So there are a lot of objective skills here.
Obviously, there's so much controversy and disagreement in philosophy.
But yeah, to an extent it's aptitude, to an extent these are skills you can hone.
Plato, in one of his dialogues, had this famous section where he taught a slave boy to do mathematics, and this was supposed to show, you know, we've got these inherent skills that you can train up, even in the common man.
But yeah, I think it's a mix.
Like anything, I think it's a mix.
Yeah, it's a mix.
You know, it's...
Interesting when we think about the plural modes to accessing, you know, knowledge.
And, you know, there may be different frameworks that are not compatible to be tested by experimentation, right?
Does consciousness precede, you know, the physical universe or is consciousness emergent from physical attributes?
You could say a parallel question that different philosophers maybe tangle with is the question of time, right?
Does time move as we sometimes may think of ourselves experiencing it?
Or is time actually in some sense static and we're just moving through it?
I think that that's where many philosophers of time have landed today.
And that's, I think, different from the question of You know, whether the earth revolves around the sun or the sun revolves around the earth, but in either case, it requires a frame shift in your thinking.
So if you have one realm of accessing these questions, which is through empiricism, one is through logical, philosophical reflection.
Just for a second, like, what are the other sort of roads?
What are the different other forms of off-road driving here?
Is meditation one of those forms?
Is sort of sensation the ability to Understand your most immediately lived experience.
This is what certain sort of sage types might say in Eastern philosophy.
Maybe that's on the menu, which is different than the experience of just sensing your presence of what you experience now.
That's different from logical orientation, which is different from empiricism through the scientific method.
What does that full menu set look like in terms of how broad that That the roads are for us to access knowledge, in your view.
Absolutely.
And just on the question of time, you know, many people think Einstein's theory of relativity has these strange implications about time, that there's no privileged present moment and past, present and future are all equally real.
But actually, and this connects with what you said in your intro, Einstein, for his special theory of relativity in 1905, the equations, the mathematics, was taken from someone else, Lorentz.
And Einstein's spin on it, again, did not make an observational difference.
You couldn't distinguish Einstein's special relativity.
Which had all these weird implications about time, from the view of Lorentz that preceded it, which was the more commonsensical view of time.
These were, in terms of experiments, were equivalent.
But what Einstein brought was a beautiful unity and simplicity.
And I think the scientific community almost universally went with Einstein.
It was more counter to common sense, but it had this beautiful simplicity and unity.
So that's one example where it's not just about experiments.
It's about the inherent beauty, almost, of the theory that influences how physicists think about these things.
But I think you're right.
What I'm so passionate about consciousness, I think...
Here's another way to see why it's not just about experiments, right?
There's something else we know about reality, totally independent of experiments, and that is the reality of conscious experience.
The existence of feelings and smells and tastes.
This is not something you learn about down a particle collider.
You know it just by being conscious and exploring the richness of your own conscious experience.
So it's not from experiments, but it's real.
And it needs to be factored into our theory of reality.
Galileo put it outside of science so we could focus on what we can capture in mathematics.
But if we want a full story of reality, we need to accommodate not just what experiments are telling us, but also the rich reality of conscious experience.
Now, moving on to a slightly different point, which maybe you were hinting at, some people in certain Maybe after a long meditation, maybe with great creative leaps, maybe after taking certain substances.
People have these experiences which seem to tell them more about reality than we have access to with ordinary consciousness.
We call these mystical experiences.
Still probably the best text on mystical experiences, apart from my own book, Why the Purpose of the Universe.
But the classic text is...
William James's varieties of religious experience, the wonderful 19th century psychologist and philosopher.
And this was a wonderful categorization of these experiences that seem to be telling us there's more to reality than we ordinarily grasp.
But at the end of this sort of psychological taxonomy, James said, is it okay for the mystic to trust these experiences?
They seem to be telling us, let's say, that reality is deeply interconnected, that we are all one in some sense, that there is an ineffable higher core of consciousness to reality.
Would it be rational for a mystical to trust that reality really is as these experiences seem to purport?
Or should the mystic just think, no, there's just something funny going on in my brain, I'm hallucinating.
And James said something interesting.
He said, well, if you say no You're sort of appealing to a double standard.
Because we all think it's okay to trust what ordinary experience seems to tell you about reality.
You know, my senses seem to tell me there's a Batman cup here, but I can't get outside of my consciousness to check.
Maybe I'm in the Matrix.
Maybe this is all a big dream and I'm about to wake up.
But we think it's okay to trust what our senses seem to be telling us.
So if it's okay to trust ordinary experience, what that seems to be telling us about reality...
But it's not okay for the mystic to trust mystical experiences.
There's a sort of double standard here.
You know, all knowledge is rooted in just a leap of faith in a way, a decision to trust experience.
Why is it okay in the one case and not the other, especially as many mystics claim that The mystical experience, if anything, seems more real even after it's finished than ordinary sensory experiences.
So I think these are deep and puzzling questions that I wrestle with in my more recent book, Why the Purpose of the Universe.
Mm-hmm.
And what is the purpose of the universe in your book and its thesis?
Let's go straight to it, the biggest question of all.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think so many people in the West think you have to fit into one of these categories, you know.
Either you believe in the God of traditional Western religion, or you're a secular atheist.
You know, it's like, whose side are you on?
Richard Dawkins or the Pope?
Make your mind up, you know.
And I mean, I was raised Catholic.
I decided I was an atheist at 14. I was quite happily on team secular atheist for 20 years or more.
But through my philosophical research, through my many conversations with leading scientists and neuroscientists, I've just come to think that both of these worldviews are inadequate.
Both of them have things they can't explain about reality.
And where I think the evidence is pointing now is What I call cosmic purpose, that the universe itself has some kind of purpose or directionality, but not one that's imposed by a supernatural designer, one that's just inherent to the universe itself.
Can I just pause you there?
I think it's fascinating, but I think it's interesting that even you use the language the evidence points to.
Why does it matter that the evidence points to that?
Because I think part of what you rejected was the idea that that had to be the only method of validation in the first place.
Maybe two points.
Maybe one is, you know, I would like to have a broad conception of what evidence is, right?
Okay.
So it's not just public experiments.
It's also the reality of our own consciousness, the reality of my pain when I feel pain.
Maybe the reality...
The mystical experience itself and what it seems to be telling can be taken as basic data.
But also, I would say, yes, I reject scientism.
I think that's many ways the religion of our time.
But still, science is important.
And we want to try and respect the evidence, right?
We want our theories to try and respect the evidence.
And I think, ironically...
Our current scientific evidence is in tension with our current scientific worldview.
It's a little bit like in the 16th century, going back a century earlier than Galileo now.
We started to get evidence that, you know, we're not in the center of the universe.
And people struggled to accept that because, you know, it didn't fit with the picture of reality they'd been used to for so long.
And nowadays we tend to scoff at those people.
Oh, those stupid religious people.
Why didn't they just follow the evidence?
But I think every generation absorbs a worldview it can't see beyond.
Now, I think we've got so used to this idea that science has ruled out purpose.
And that's just silly nonsense.
That we're ignoring that current uncontroversial physics, I think, in our normal ways of thinking about evidence, points to some kind of cosmic purpose.
And as a society, we're sort of in denial about that.
I think future historians looking back will think, why do people ignore this for so long?
But yeah.
As we always have, right?
Yeah.
And so what would be one of those pieces of evidence that you think is discordant with otherwise our accepted understanding of the universe today, like as sitting from the present?
That could be fascinating to hear.
Yeah, I mean, well, I think there are two big things that don't fit in our current scientific paradigm.
One, we've already talked about is consciousness.
But the other, which I focus on more in my book, Why the Purpose of the Universe, is the fine-tuning of physics for life.
This surprising discovery of recent decades that...
Many numbers in physics are, like Goldilocks porridge, just right for life.
You know, not too big, not too small, just right.
The example that's most perplexed cosmologists revolves around dark energy.
This is the force that propels the accelerating expansion of the universe.
And once we do the calculations, it becomes clear that if that force had been just a little bit stronger Everything would have shot apart so quickly after the Big Bang.
No two particles would have ever met.
We wouldn't have had stars, planets, any kind of complexity at all.
Whereas if that force had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity and everything would have collapsed back on itself a split second after the Big Bang.
So for life to be possible...
That number had to be just right.
And on the face of it, when you do the calculation, that's just one number.
There are many, many.
When you do the calculations, it's just astronomically improbable that you'd get the right numbers by chance.
And so I think in our normal ways of thinking about this, this is evidence for some kind of It's directedness towards life in the very early universe.
Now, some people point to God.
I've got problems with God as well.
But I don't think we need to go there.
But I think we need to just put aside our biases, both religious and secular, and follow the evidence where it's leading.
Let me just, for the fun of it, maybe put pressure on that from both directions.
We'll start from the pure secular version and then we'll start, we'll then move to putting pressure on the other direction from the supernatural version or the God version.
Let's take the first.
That's really interesting, right?
The exact magnitude of dark energy, had it actually been any greater, would have never resulted in the creation of the universe anyway.
I think that you might anticipate this.
The counterargument to that from the pure secular atheist angle would be, because the pure secular or pure secular alternative angle would be, Well, there's a probability distribution, and all of those other universes did not come into existence, and this is the only one that did.
And so you're using a preservation bias as a way of assuming that's all that ever existed, where on your own theory, all of those other universes would not have existed.
So the one that did, you can't draw the conclusion of purpose in that universe if it was just one universe and a probability distribution of universes 99 out of the 100 of which, by hypothesis, would not have existed in the first place, and that this one did is just an artifact of confirmation bias.
You see what I'm saying there?
Excellent.
Yeah, that's a very good, very good point.
And so this sounds like the...
So I think many scientists and philosophers are a little bit in denial about this, but not all.
Many do take this seriously, do think this obviously needs explaining.
And the most popular explanation among scientists and philosophers probably is the multiverse hypothesis.
So the idea is maybe the universe we see is just one of trillions and trillions, maybe an infinite number with different numbers in their physics.
So if you've got enough universes with different numbers, one of them is going to fluke the right numbers for life.
It's like if enough people...
Play the lottery, one's going to fluke the right numbers.
And I used to accept this myself for a long time.
You know, I've always thought the fine-tuning of Physics for Life needed explaining, but I thought that looked the more sensible explanation.
But I've slowly been persuaded, just when I started teaching this stuff, actually, that there's some dodgy reasoning going on in this inference.
That it commits what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy.
That there's actually...
We talked before about errors in reasoning, logical fallacies, and philosophers of probability have identified that there's actually a logical fallacy in trying to explain fine-tuning in terms of the multiverse.
Shall I give you a quick analogy to try and...
Yeah, please.
Obviously, there's a complex debate here, but...
You can get into it with a useful analogy.
Just so you're responding to the core point, I'll give it in a layperson's term here, right?
And then you can maybe respond to it in the more philosophical term.
The layperson's term, since you brought up the gambler, would be, okay, well, if you play roulette 32 times and you pick the one time that you won, but you only examine that time that you won and say there had to be a purpose here.
The purpose was for me to win when, in fact, you played 32 other times that you lost.
It's the equivalent of the universe, not just for life coming to existence, but other universes having blown themselves out of existence in the multiverse hypothesis.
What is the logical?
That's the logical error that I would be accusing you of if I don't have this.
I'm inhabiting this view.
So what is the logical error that you would ascribe in reverse?
Good.
So let me give you another casino analogy, right?
Another gambling analogy.
And this is related to...
People might have heard of the regular gambler's fallacy, like when you've been playing all night and you've had terrible luck and you think, oh, I'm bound to have good luck this time.
I'm due some luck.
And everyone agrees that's bad reasoning because every roll of the dice, the odds are the same, whether you've just started or you've been playing all night.
Anyway...
Let me give you another casino analogy.
Suppose, Vivek, you and I go to a casino this evening, maybe in London, and we walk in, and the first person, we go in, there's a small room, and we just see one guy in this room having an incredible run of luck.
He's just winning and winning and winning.
And I turn to you and I say, wow, the casino must be full tonight.
And you say, Philip, what are you talking about?
We've just seen this one person.
What's the rest of the casino got to do?
And I reason, well, if there are tens of thousands of people playing in the casino tonight, then, you know, it's not so surprising that somebody is going to win big.
And that's just what we've observed.
Somebody winning big.
Now, everyone agrees that's bad reasoning.
That's the inverse gambler's fallacy.
Because our observational evidence is just this one particular individual playing well.
And no matter how many people there are elsewhere in the casino, that has no relevance to the likelihood of this one person playing well.
So that's bad reasoning.
But it looks like the multiverse theorist is making strikingly similar reasoning, right?
They start observing our universe and they think...
Oh my God, it got the right numbers for life against incredible odds.
There must be loads of other universes with terrible numbers.
Well, that looks like exactly the same reasoning.
Our observational evidence is just this one universe we've observed.
No matter how many other universes there are out there, have no bearing on how likely it is that our universe, the only one we've ever observed.
So marshalling some element of empiricism to sort of Or not necessarily empiricism itself, but the value of empiricism to say that actually it would be the less plausible of hypotheses to say that there are these multiple other universes that have never been observed versus at least going with the most parsimonious version as here's the one we have, which at least allows us to draw a greater inference of purpose rather than Stochasticity amongst universes as their basis for explaining this one.
And I find that persuasive, by the way.
So I say that to offer maybe a different version of what neither you or I believe to put pressure on.
Let me put pressure on you from another direction that I do believe in, though, which may be different from yours, is why is it important to you to make sure that that purpose is divorced from the invocation of God?
You went out of your way in your description of it.
It's almost as though you caveated it.
I'm just playing around with you a little bit, but an inverse Catholic impulse of you have a guilt if you did bring God into it that you have to flog yourself and have to caveat it so many times to say, yes, there is this great purpose, but it's different from saying there's God.
Don't accuse me of saying there's God, but there is this purpose.
What is it?
About your observation or reflection that makes that exclusion so important to state, just even as a priority, versus leaving the possibility of it open.
Tell me about that, because that's interesting to me.
That's a very good question, because I do think...
We need to be alert to these biases and prejudices.
I feel as someone raised in intellectual circles in the West, we're very well trained to be alert to religious biases, but we're not very well trained to be alert to secular biases.
Yes, totally.
I find it hard, to be honest, standing up in front of my peers and defending panpsychism and cosmic purpose, because it feels silly in the intellectual circles I swim in.
So we do need to be...
But, you know, eventually I just decided, well, look, this is where I think the arguments and the evidence are pointing to, and I've got to be honest with myself.
But likewise, yeah, you're right to question, is this just a prejudice against God or something?
The UK is very, very secular.
Well, I do think there are a couple of issues I have with God, although I'm, you know, very open minded on all of these topics.
I mean, one is the classic problem of reconciling an all loving, all powerful God with the terrible pain and suffering we find in the world.
In the human case, maybe Believers in God point to free will, and maybe that can do some work.
But what about the terrible suffering we find in the animal world?
What about the short-tailed North American shrew which paralyzes its prey and then slowly eats it alive over several days before it eventually dies from its wounds?
Why would a loving or powerful God choose to bring that into existence?
So I do have that worry.
Can I ask a question about that?
Yeah, we could go with that.
Why, if such God was all-powerful and you recognized yourself as not that God, would you have the capacity to second-guess that existence?
That's a very good question.
And one I go into in some detail in my book, I think, and I'd invite people who go for the multiverse or go for God to dig into the book.
Actually, well, I should say that the book is aimed at both a general audience and an academic audience.
So each chapter has a more accessible introduction and then a digging deeper section where I try to get into all of these topics.
Cover almost every objection.
That's what philosophers want to do.
You want to cover every possible objection.
So if you've got a good objection, probably it's there in the book.
But actually, I think probably the cutting edge of the philosophical discussion of this is a position called skeptical theism, which says we have no idea why God allows suffering.
But, you know, we shouldn't expect to.
We're not God.
Like, we could give an analogy.
Suppose you're a first-year physics student, undergraduate, and you don't understand, you know, some equation.
You don't understand in a textbook.
You don't understand some move in the reasoning.
And you think, oh, well, I can't see the reason for that.
So it must be wrong, right?
That would be crazy, right?
That's right.
You're not a physics expert.
So...
I'm pretty sure most of us make that mistake all the time.
I do, I'm sure.
Human nature, I think we're God.
But yeah, God is so much better, you know, cognitively, if God exists, cognitively greater than me.
How could I expect to understand God's reasons for creating the universe?
The story of Job in the Bible, I think, expresses that very well.
What is my response to this?
You know, it's a very interesting argument, but I suppose ultimately I think All we can do is work with the evidence, in a broad sense of evidence, and the arguments we currently have.
If God exists, then Who am I? God is greater than me and God must have some reason I don't understand for creating the short-tailed.
I never remember if it's long-tailed or short-tailed.
Anyway, North American, true.
But when in a position of uncertainty, and I'm always in my work about emphasizing uncertainty, the importance of embracing how uncertain life is, and I'm trying to work out whether God exists or Then all I can do is work with my understanding of morality and try and make the best guess I can.
I mean, you know, take an analogy, scientists now tell us, what is it, 80-90% of the universe is dark matter and energy that we don't understand at all?
So does that mean we should stop doing physics?
No, we try the best with the evidence we've got.
So I think I try with the moral understanding, not just me, but...
Great moral thinkers have to try and work out, would a God create a universe like this?
And that leads me to have some doubts about the existence of God and at least explore other ways.
I think, as I say, people think it's either God or it's atheism, you know?
It's at least interesting and important to explore different ways of different worldviews, lay all the Positions on the table.
Let's see what comes out of it.
Other ways of making sense of purpose and directionality in the universe and the meaning of existence.
Can I... Maybe ask...
It's a slightly different...
Level of question here.
The order of what I'm concerned with in this question is different than what we've been talking about so far, which is exclusively in the realm of truth, right?
So far we're talking about what is true.
The question I'm about to ask is one about your opinion about practicality.
So do you believe that our world or our nation would be better off, or children in their upbringing would be better off If we at least parsimoniously described the other purpose of the universe in the language of God, actually.
Like, do you think that that would just be strictly better?
Where your concern is purely a exploration in terms of what is true.
And that's interesting and we could debate that one, you know, in the remaining minutes as people have for centuries and not resolve it amongst themselves.
Take for a second just the mantle of practicality for the betterment of the world, or since you seem to care about the reduction of suffering, because that was by hypothesis one of the reasons why you questioned the existence of God, would there be less discord or suffering if we did just use as a shorthand God as a fill-in for the For the account of purpose.
And we have thousands of years of human history suggesting to us that human beings can access that more easily than a novel theory of panpsychism.
What's your response to that?
I'd just be curious if you think that the practicality of it might actually weigh in favor of, let's say, I don't know if you have children, but if you did have children, could there be a case for bringing them up?
In the way your parents brought you up, right?
Against the backdrop of God accounting for that which can't be explained through empirical science just because that is more likely to get close to where the truth is anyway and still have a more cohesive Does that make sense as a question?
It does.
It very much does.
And it's another part of challenging scientism, I suppose, isn't it?
That we need to believe in God, right?
But that we sort of have a need to believe in God.
And so that human need to believe in God itself is a worthy reality to take into account in deciding whether or not God exists.
Yeah, we do need to think about we only live once.
Things are very uncertain.
I think it can be rational for the pragmatic considerations to come to play here.
I've already mentioned the great William James.
Another aspect of his work Was that he argued that in certain situations of uncertainty, it can be rational to choose to believe.
He gave an analogy, you're lost in a mountain and there's a huge chasm And you've got to leap over it.
And you don't know if you're going to make it.
Maybe the evidence makes it look like you probably won't.
But he says in this situation of uncertainty, it can be rational to choose to believe you're going to make it.
And that would make it more likely that you do.
Likewise, he argued, if there's no overwhelming case for either God or atheism, and it's going to...
It can monumentally be of great importance in your life.
It can be rational to choose to believe.
Another thing I explore in my work is...
So most of my book is this kind of cold-blooded scientific philosophical case.
But the first and last chapters do bring in the questions of what this means for human existence, human meaning and purpose.
And one thing I delve into is...
Engaging with traditional religion as a profound metaphor rather than a literal truth.
You know, I mean, I am, despite not being a Catholic believer anymore, I am still profoundly moved by the beautiful symbolism of Christianity, the wonderful inversion of worldly values, the first shall be last, the last shall be first, That's the emphasis on the poor and the weak that has so transformed Western civilization.
And so I do, to an extent, engage with traditional religion.
And like my like my children, my two little girls having some sort of symbolic way of relating to value and relating to something greater than themselves.
You know, we're not purely intellectual beings.
We need symbols and traditions that bind people together across space and time and mark the seasons and the big moments of life, birth, marriage, death, coming of age.
So yes, I do think this is important.
We're not robots.
I think that's actually one of the unexplored precepts of Christianity, actually, is what we just talked about.
On one telling of it, and I... I'm a Hindu, but I've been educated in Christian school and philosophy, and I am deeply fascinated by, say, the connection between the Old Testament, where God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and God didn't make him follow through with that sacrifice.
But when he comes back in the New Testament, it's kind of a circular reference where God did sacrifice his own son because Humanity of sinners needed that sacrifice in order to see that sacrifice to believe in God.
So in a certain sense, it was God's own sacrifice of his son and his love of the people that gave him the need to sacrifice his son so that the people could fulfill their own need to actually have a belief in God itself.
And that sort of is a parallel to the conversation we just had is that you...
We have a human need to believe in something greater than ourselves.
And I think part of the essential Christian theology is God's recognition of our human need to believe in something greater than ourselves, but to be able to be called to do it.
That's why he sacrificed his son, Jesus Christ.
And I think that in some sense, acknowledging that isn't incompatible with religion so much as it is, let's say in this case, Christian religion is actually compatible.
With everything that you've described as your view of panpsychism.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, that's very interesting.
And, you know, different people will have different views.
Some people may, some Christians or people of other faiths maybe think, no, it's very important to believe the official beliefs.
And, you know, I hope my work has changed.
Positive reinforcement and challenges for both traditional religion, people of traditional religions and traditional atheists, if you could say that.
I think it does, yeah.
But also, I mean, I'm connected to the Church of England, which is often more flexible in its belief, often brings people together with ritual and symbolism and value and leaves people to interpret Yeah,
doing all the rituals, but really you think it's cosmic purpose rather than God in the traditional sense.
It depends what church you go to.
You know, I think one should be sensitive to what is required in a particular church or mosque or temple or what have you.
But yeah, I mean, I don't think people should be afraid to explore these options and it might sort of open more people up to different ways of doing things.
I think humans so often get stuck in the dichotomies, don't they?
Right.
You know, science or supernatural, you know, God or atheism, you know, all of these dichotomies and there's often a richer spectrum in between and I love getting all the options on the table.
So how much of this is really just a problem of language, right?
I think there was, who was the philosopher, Wittgenstein or whoever it was that said, most moral problems are problems of language.
And that actually here, there may be a phenomenon of talking past each other with the invocation of the word God, where you understand yourself to mean different things by it that make you think that you're Description of the universe is one that is different from or incompatible with a traditional religious God-based view when in fact it's really just based on what you just said, maybe more likely to just be a problem of language.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And, you know, I talk in the book about the traditional idea of God, but actually in all of the Abrahamic faiths that I'm more familiar with, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, there's always been a tradition known as the apophatic tradition, which says that Nothing positive can be said of God.
God is totally beyond human understanding and human categories.
You know, in Christianity, this goes right back to the early church fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, and there was a very influential book in England in the 14th century, The Cloud of Unknowing, which guided ordinary Christians through Beyond the superficial language we use about God in worship to a deeper understanding of the God beyond human category.
And we have the Sufi tradition in Islam and, oh, the name in Judaism escapes me now, Kabbalah?
Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Yeah, mysticism in Judaism, yep.
Yeah, there's always, in all of these traditions, and obviously in Hinduism, on the surface, there are rich mystical traditions.
So there's always been this tradition of the mystical, the ineffable.
And so, yeah, the distinction between Hinduism Believing in God or believing in some kind of purpose or directionality that's not, quote-unquote, the traditional God.
That binary starts to dissolve a little bit in that context, I think.
Yeah, and how familiar are you with, since you brought it up, with Hinduism as an alternative framework to what you think of as traditional religion in the Abrahamic sense?
Somewhat to the, I mean, it's interesting, my own philosophical tradition, known as analytic philosophy, when it began in the mid, early to mid 20th century, was very scientistic, logical, dry.
And yet, as time has gone on, I think maybe people have seen that...
That approach just doesn't have the resources to explain everything we need to explain.
And there have emerged people defending a great variety of options.
A great philosopher in Australia, Miryel Bahari, who defends a version of Advaita Vedanta, the mystical Hindu tradition, or at least inspired by Advaita Vedanta, But defends it partly, partly in these very dry, logically precise terms.
So it's absolutely fascinating.
She argues that it's rational to trust the expert testimony of meditators who've spent 20 years in a cave or whatever.
So it's a wonderful...
Again, I like mixing things up, marrying the cold, dry, logical.
And she's not just doing that to the mystical, the...
Learning from meditation and mystical experience.
So I am somewhat familiar with, and it's an open question, how much of these different traditions really have the same core.
Aldous Huxley, in the early 20th century, talked of the perennial philosophy, and he had this idea that Really, there's a mystical core to all of these religions, and then that mystical core is just expressed in different ways.
I'm not sure how much I think that's right.
Maybe there are real doctrinal differences between the different religions, but certainly I think there is mysticism in all of the different traditions, and to that extent there is overlap and commonality.
So we should see the difference as well as the similarity and the sameness.
Yeah, I think, you know, it's part of why maybe I'm more predisposed to see your worldview and philosophy as less incompatible, or I would go so far as to say entirely compatible with the existence of God, even in the traditional sense.
I mean, part of the Hindu theology is the belief that there is one true God, certainly in the non-dualistic strand of Hinduism, there's one true God, but he resides in each of us and resides In part and parcel across the universe, which I think is compatible with even the worldview of modern physics of the matter coming from the universe and returning back to the universe.
And so I don't think that those...
You may have a problem of language there, describing one in religious terms and describing another in secular terms.
But apart from that problem of language, I don't know that the underlying...
View is actually as different as we make it out to be, although I could see why maybe given your initial introduction to religion, it may have maybe presented itself as more of a tension between even your middle way and what you think of as God or traditional God-based religion.
Maybe from the vantage point that I was introduced to what I think of as religion, don't see that dichotomy so much between a belief in traditional God and your view of universal consciousness.
Yeah, it all depends, doesn't it, what we mean by God.
And, I mean, I had certain assumptions about my Catholic upbringing, but actually, when you dig into the views of Augustine and Aquinas...
I'm just going to bring up Aquinas, yep.
...who were foundational in Catholic doctrine, it's very far, actually, from an anthropomorphic idea of God, the old man in the sky.
Aquinas said...
We can never talk straightforwardly about God, even when we're saying God is all-powerful.
God isn't powerful in the way a human being is powerful.
God is radically distinct from anything in creation, and therefore we can only talk about God by analogy.
So really, for Aquinas, when we're saying God is powerful or God is good or God knows things, We mean God.
There's something about God that is analogous to these qualities in human beings.
But it's not quite the same.
So sometimes I think, yeah, the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris maybe had too simplistic an idea of what God is supposed to be.
But, yeah, I suppose I still come back to the...
The problem of suffering for me, insofar as we think God is in some sense all-powerful, however we cash that out, insofar as we can understand that, and good, it is hard to understand why the universe would be the way it is.
And so...
I'm led to, I mean, to my, as I say it, the universe is a cocktail of accident and design.
You know, some things like the fine tuning in physics, other things to do with consciousness are sort of too improbably good to be fluke.
But at the same time, there is horrific, gratuitous suffering and masses of empty space.
And I think we need to somehow reconcile both of these things.
And that's really the project of my book, Why the Purpose of the Universe, is atheists are getting something right.
Traditional believers in God are getting something right, but they're both getting something wrong at the same time.
And we need to somehow explain both of these things, which is a tall order, but...
That's why I found this conversation fascinating.
I've been looking forward to this conversation with you and it has exceeded my high expectations because you are able to at once put pressure on both the traditional secular narrative or the traditional, at least what is viewed even in a reductionist way as traditional religion.
And one of the things I loved about this hour we spent together is there isn't a single challenge that I could muster that you haven't already anticipated and thought deeply about through your careful study of history and the history of people like you who have preceded you for thousands of years who have tackled these same questions and I think that that's admirable and I think that that It naturally evokes a response of humility that I think is a beautiful thing that we sometimes miss in our modern moment.
And so for that, I want to thank you.
And I hope this is the beginning of more conversations that you and I are able to have.
So thanks for joining the podcast and keep up the great work.
Thanks very much, Rick.
It's been a wonderful conversation.
Yeah, you have challenged me.
You've provoked some thoughts.
I'm going to carry on thinking and hope we can carry on the conversation.
I would enjoy that.
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