An Evening with Richard Dawkins – Featuring Sam Harris – Night 1

[Music] hi i'm robin blemner ceo for the center for inquiry and the richard dawkins foundation for reason and science i'm delighted to be able to bring to you this special conversation between richard dawkins and sam harris recorded before a sold-out house at the alex theatre in los angeles it's a fascinating discussion between two of the most influential and provocative thinkers of our time richard dawkins and sam harris come from different scientific fields but both of them have chosen to direct their talents and intellects to advance reason science secularism and critical thinking well that's our mission too and it's no easy feat though we have witnessed phenomenal scientific and social progress the forces of irrationality religious dogma and pseudoscience remain powerful obstacles to that progress at this moment in history objective truth itself is under unprecedented threat as more power is amassed by those who deny the realities of things like climate change evolution and even 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for reason and science it's my pleasure to present an evening with richard dawkins with special guest sam harris so um thank you all for coming this is really it's it's an honor to be here and it really is an honor to be here with you richard um i get to return the favor he had me at oxford i think five years ago and um so welcome to los angeles so i i'm going to this is going to be very much a conversation but what i did i was worried about this i wasn't worried about tonight i was worried about tomorrow night because i my fear was that richard and i would have a scintillating conversation tonight and then tomorrow night try doggedly to recapitulate it word for word and and yet feign spontaneity and if you know my position online you know that doesn't work so what i did is i went out to all of you asking for questions and i got thousands and so i i picked among the what looked promising so i can guarantee that the two nights will be reasonably different because of the different questions will come up but we won't hew too narrowly to the questions we'll we'll just have a conversation but as we come out here i find that i want to ask you richard about your socks and i'm not i'm not sure what the question is but i just come from las vegas the conference of cycon and one of the things we had was a workshop on cold reading which is the technique whereby so-called mentalists are supposed to read each other's thoughts and what they're really doing is just simply looking at the clothes and the general appearance and assessing it and we had to pair off for this workshop and i was with her a nice young woman and we sort of sized each other up and i said to her i think i i'm getting that you come from somewhere in the west of the states i think maybe maybe not california maybe a bit further north and of course i was simply reading her label which said she came from oregon um and then she's some some me up when she said i think you may have some problem with your eyes maybe colorblind and i i'm serious about this i'm trying to spread a meme for wearing odd socks there's a kind of tyranny of forcing us to buy socks in tears shoes have chirality left shoe and right shoe are not interchangeable but socks don't and when you lose one of a pair of socks you're forced to throw the other one away which is absurd so what i want although honestly richard you just told me a story that suggests that shoes are oh my god that's right um yes um uh that's rather an embarrassing story someone is going to find this on the relevant video i will um i was doing a television film called sex death and the meaning of life and in the death episode we were talking about suicide and there's a famous suicide squad it's a bit like san francisco the golden gate bridge where people have famously jumped to their death and all around this place beachy head is a very very high cliff in the south of england there are rather sad little crosses where people have jumped off uh and we were filming the sequence on suicide and i had to walk very solemnly and slowly and in a melancholy frame of mind past these crosses and the camera was focused on my feet walking past these little low crosses and i felt incredibly uncomfortable i had this sort of uncanny feeling of being uncomfortable and i couldn't understand why and then eventually my it was my feet that were uncomfortable walking past these crosses and eventually the director called cut and we went off and i took my shoes off because they were so painful and only then did i realize i put them on the wrong way round so this is preserved for posterity in close up i want to see that video someone none of the television audience ever wrote in to complain about this so maybe this at least will browse their attention [Applause] so the first question richard which i thought could provoke some interesting reflection is why do you both court so much controversy no we don't do it um uh we don't caught it it pursues us well well i think i mean what i've noticed is that there are undoubtedly people who are friends of ours colleagues of ours who agree with us down the line who seem to feel no temptation to pick all of the individual battles we pick and you know it's you one doesn't have to be a coward not to want to fight all of these culture war battles although it it helps but that but there we have friends who are decidedly not cowards who who um someone like steve pinker he's he he stakes out controversial positions but he is not in the trenches in quite the same way as we are um and so and i'm wondering what you think about that i mean is it did you did you see a choice for yourself do you find yourself revisiting this choice periodically i think it's a perfectly respectable position to take that that a scientist has better things to do and i i don't take that position and i think you don't either um i do think it's important to fight the good fight when we when we do have when science when reason has vocal and powerful and well financed enemies and um so i'm not sure what particular battles the questioner has in mind when he says we caught controversy um but i i suppose i i believe so strongly in truth and if i see truth being actively threatened by competing ideologies which actually not only would fight for the opposite of truth but would indoctrinate children in the opposite of truth um i feel impelled to fight only verbally i mean i don't feel empowered to actually get a rifle or something yeah well there's time yet well so i guess the the the dogma that has convinced so many fellow scientists and and and intellectuals academics that there is no reason to fight uh certainly one of those dogmas is this this stephen j gould's idea of noma non-overlapping magisteria and uh i strikes me as a purely wrong-headed and destructive idea do you want to i think so i think we probably agree about that non-overlapping magisteria he wrote a book called um what was it a game called the um the rock of ages like a rock of ages that's right um so science has the age of the rocks and religion has the rock of ages and and the idea was that science and religion both have their legitimate territories which they shouldn't in in impinge upon each each other science has the truth about the real world in that sciences department religion has what he described as moral questions and i think deep questions of existence meaning um well i would strongly dispute the idea that we should get our morals from religion for goodness sake let's whatever else we get our morals from it must not be religion that would be and if you imagine what the world would be like if we actually did get our morals from the bible or the quran it would be totally appalling and was appalling in the time when we did get from the bible it is now appalling in those countries where they get it from the from the quran so don't let's get our morals from religion as for the deep fundamental questions i take those to be things like where did the laws of physics come from what is the origin of all things what is the the origin of the cosmos what happened before the big bang those are scientific questions uh it may be that science can never answer them but if science cannot answer them sure as hell religion can't answer them i don't actually think anything can answer them if science can't um it's an open question whether things like the origin of the physical constants those numbers which physicists can measure but can't explain the origin of the laws of physics whether those will ever be explained by science if they are well and good if they're not then nothing will explain them um the idea i mean steve gould was was careful to say that these separate magisteria must not encroach on each other's territory and so the moment religion encroaches on science territory for example in the case of miracles then it's fair game for scientific criticism but my feeling about that is that if you take away the miracles from from religion you've taken away most of what of why people believe in them people believe in the supernatural because they they believe biblical or quranic stories which suggest that there have been supernatural miracles and if you deprive them of that then they've lost everything yeah and and to take christianity is only one example that that has been spelled out in every generation i mean starting with paul he said you know if christ be not risen your faith is vain exactly yes um or something close to that yes so it's you can't you can't get around the fact that religious people care about what's true and they they purport to be making claims truth claims about the nature of reality they think certain historical figures actually existed some of them may be coming back yes books you know issue occasionally from a divine intelligence and and uh so there's just no way to yes i i can't i never met gould and and um but i just can't believe the currency this idea has science i agree it's become very fashionable among the scientific establishment it was more or less endorsed by the us national academy of sciences um as for the as for the separation as for the idea that that religion doesn't stray into science's territory imagine the following scenario imagine that some sort of scientific evidence perhaps dna evidence were discovered perhaps somewhere in a cave in in palestine uh and it was demonstrated that that say jesus never had a father i mean it's inconceivable how that could happen just suppose it was suppose there was scientific evidence can you imagine theologians saying oh that's science that's not our department we're not going to and they would love it it would be meat and drink to them many people who are not atheists believe that your efforts against religion are wasted and that the net result of your work is to simply offend religious people there's a widespread myth that people can't be reasoned out of their faith please talk about this so there's there's there is this this is just uncanny that there are the the most memorable quips and quotes and and phrases anything that is aphoristic seems to have undue influence on our thinking and there's this aphorism that is usually attributed to swift and i think he says something like it it's not it's not quite the version that has been passed down to us but this idea that you can't reason someone out of a view that he wasn't reasoned into and this just strikes the mind of homo sapiens is so obviously true and it if you look at my inbox it is so obviously false so tell me about the your experience reasoning with with your readers i think it would be terribly pessimistic to think that you cannot reason i mean i i i think i'd just give up probably die i thought i thought i couldn't um reason people out of their silliness um i i i would i would accept what would you agree with this that there are some people who who demonstrably do know all the evidence and even understand the evidence but yet still persist in um yeah well so there's there'll be a couple of questions that will bring us onto that territory because i think there's more to reason about than science has tended to allow or that secular culture has tended to allow so people have these intense transformative experiences or they have these these hopes and fears yes that aren't captured by you saying don't you understand the evidence for evolution uh there's some this is more of a of a conversation that that people don't tend to have but yeah i would agree that people certainly resist conclusions that they don't like the taste of there are um i i can think of two examples one one i mentioned in the reception beforehand um a professor of astronomy someone in america um who uh at astrophysics who writes papers mathematical papers in astronomical journals in which his mathematics his mathematical ideas accept that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and yet he privately believes it's six thousand years old so here is a man who knows his physics he knows his astronomy he knows the evidence that the universe is 13 billion years old and yet so split-brained is he that he he actually privately departs from everything in his professional life um well surely we have to accept that he he i don't cannot be reasoned out but i mean he already knows the evidence and and will not be reasoned out of his foolishness um yeah i didn't say that you could always may have success this this bias as you do that if the conversation could just proceed long enough there would the ground for science would continually be conquered and it never gets reversed and it is being and will be addicted yeah and you never see the i mean this is a unidirectional conquest of territory so you never see a a point about which science was once the authority but now the best answer is religious yeah that's right right but you you always see the reverse of that and that's and that's and and actually most most scientists who call themselves religious if you actually probe them i mean they don't believe really stupid things like like six day creation and things most of them yeah um yeah yeah although i find that christian scientists not not christian scientists as in the the cult but scientists who happen to be christian believe much more than your average rabbi this is this is a way that's true yeah yeah and this chris christianity is um um and muslim scientists no doubt return the favor i get the feeling you're every your average rabbi like me like your average chaplain of an oxford college doesn't actually believe in god at all i've met that rabbi so there's a couple of fun questions here that i just want i just wanted to hear richard react to are there any biological extinctions that you would consider virtuous for instance should we eradicate the mosquito you have 10 seconds to decide it would would have to be more than one mosquito there's there's the malaria mosquito the yellow fever mosquito yeah all mosquitoes mosquitoes are unbelievably beautiful creatures um [Applause] that's the most irrational thing the great the great expert on fleas um and um she she she presented the department of zoology in in oxford with a gigantic blown-up photograph of a mosquito and it was a fantastic piece of work of art by a malevolent god yes if ever there were proof of god's malevolence it's got to be the mosquito i have no hesitation in killing individual mosquitoes wouldn't you want to be a little more efficient than that with crispr or something i i haven't thought about it before i i think i would not wish to completely extinguish can i throw a little more on the balance we've had reliably year after year two million people killed by mosquito-borne illness now now it's cut down to i think 800 000 so we're making progress with bed nets but for some reason i find myself less reluctant to extinguish the malarial parasite that the mosquito bears but that's probably not not very logical so i mean we have extinguished the smallpox virus right um except for a few lab um cultures yes and then like geniuses then we tell people how to synthesize it online so the flip side of that of course is the jurassic park question should we reboot the t-rex yes yes that's fantastic i i wish i wish i mean i thought the jurassic park method was incredibly ingenious and i love that um what what was not in genius was the ludicrous injection of was it chaos theory or one of those nine days wonder um fashionable things i don't remember but the the idea of getting mosquitoes in amber and extracting dna and reconstructing dinosaurs that's an amazingly good science fiction idea if only it were possible unfortunately the dna is too is too old for that for that to happen if it were i would definitely wish to see that done what what could go wrong richard seems to want to live in a maximally dangerous world filled with mosquitoes and t-rexes so now you and i were speaking about your books you've written some very important books on 10th 10 years apart and so you have a anniversary this year of the selfish gene which is the 40th and the blind watchmakers has its 30th anniversary and climbing mountain pro mount improbable is the 20th and then the god delusion is the 10th so actually i wanted to give you a chance to talk about the titles of the first two it seems the selfish gene has provoked an inordinate amount of confusion and um and the blind watchmaker is a phrase that is useful to understand so do you want to yes the selfish gene is misunderstood i think mostly by those who have read it by title only as opposed to the rather substantial footnote to the title which is the book itself it could equally well have been called the altruistic individual um because one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes give rise to altruistic individuals um so it is mostly a book about altruism mostly book about the opposite of selfishness so it certainly should not be misunderstood as advocating selfishness or saying that we are as a matter of fact always selfish um all it really means is that natural selection works at the level of the gene as opposed to any other level in the hierarchy of life so genes that work for their own survival are the ones that survive tautologically enough and they are the ones that build bodies so we all of us contain genes that are very very good at surviving because they've come down through countless generations um and they are copied accurately with very high fidelity from generation to generation such that there are genes in you that have been around for hundreds of millions of years that's not true of anything else in the hierarchy of life and individuals die um they don't they they they survive only as a means to the end of propagating the genes that built them so individual bodies organisms should be seen as vehicles machines built by the genes that ride inside them for passing on those very same genes and it is the potential eternal long-livedness of genes that makes them the unit of selection so that's really the meaning of of the selfish gene but it as i said the book could have been called the altruistic individual it could have been called the cooperative gene for another reason it could have been called the immortal gene which is a more sort of um carl sagan-esque uh title it's a more poetic title and in some ways i rather regret not calling it the immortal gene uh but um anyway i'm stuck with it now and there's a a common i think misunderstanding of evolution that leads people to believe that absolutely everything about us must have been selected for otherwise it wouldn't exist so yes like so people ask about what's the evolutionary rationale for post-traumatic stress disorder or depression or is it i'm not saying that there is no conceivable one but it need not be the case that everything we notice about ourselves was selected for or that there's a gene for that this is very interesting i mean this this this we this i mean i i'm actually a bit of an outlier here i mean i'm about as close as biologists come to accepting what you've described as a misconception um because i do think that selection is incredibly powerful um and mathematical models show this um jbs haldane the great um one of the three founding fathers of population genetics did theoretical calculation in which he say he postulated um an extremely trivial character he didn't mention it but it it might have been eyebrows suppose you suppose you believe that eyebrows have been selected because they stop sweat running down your forehead into your eyes and it sort of sounds totally trivial how could that possibly save a life until you realize that the first thing you might you might realize is that um it could save your life if you were about to be attacked by a lion and the just a slight split second difference in how quickly you see the lion because you've got sweat in your in your eyes so since the the invention of sunblock i think that's undoubtedly true yeah okay um but but holden actually did a a mathematical calculation he said let us postulate a character so trivial that the difference between an individual who has it an individual who doesn't have it um is only one in a thousand that's to say for every thousand individuals who have this say the eyebrows and survive 999 who don't have it survive so from any actuarial point of view a life insurance calculator would say was totally trivial but it's not trivial when you think that the genes concerned is represented in thousands of individuals in the population and through thousands of generations that multiplies up the odds and holden's calculation was that if you postulate that one in the thousand advantage he then worked out how long would it take for the gene to spread from being i forget exactly the figures but say one percent of the population up to uh 50 of the population and it was a number of generations so short that it would be negligible on the geological time scale right so it would appear to be an instantaneous piece of evolutionary change um even though if the selection pressure was trivial well actually selection pressures in the wild when they've been measured have been far far stronger than that um but there's another way of approaching the question you raise uh when you say something like um selective advantage in various psychological diseases or something like that um it may be that you're asking the wrong question it may be that um by focusing on the particular characteristic which you ask the question about you're ignoring the fact that there's something associated with that which you've let me think of an example um there's a um you you you know that on on at night if you've got a lamp out outside or a candle is better if you've got a candle insects moths say come and sort of as it were commit suicide i mean they just burn themselves up in in the in the candle and you could ask the question what on earth is the survival value of suicidal self-immolation behavior in moths well it's the wrong question because a probable explanation for it is that many insects use a light compass to steer a straight line lights at night until humans came along and invented candles lights at night were always at optical infinity they were things like the moon the stars or the sun during the day and if you maintain a fixed angle relative to these rays that are coming from optical infinity then you just cruise at a straight line which is just what you want to do a candle is not at optical infinity and if you work out mathematically what happens if you maintain a fixed acute angle to the rays that are emanating in all directions out of a candle you perform a neat logarithmic spiral into the candle flame so this is an accidental byproduct of a mechanism which really does have survival value you have to rephrase the question what is the survival value of maintaining a fixed angle at light rays and then you've got the then you've got the answer so to ask the question what's the advantage of suicidal self-immolation um you you've shifted to the to the wrong question right and there are related issues so there are things which provide some survival advantage in if you have one copy of the gene but if you have both copies then it's deleterious yes like sickle cell anemia right yeah right so well then what do you do with the concept of a spandrel though do you cool's concept of a spaniel is that useful to think about yeah okay yes spandrels are um lewintin and gould wrote a notorious and overrated paper in 1979 uh in which gould um went to king's college cambridge where there's the most beautiful the most beautiful building and the the the gothic arches have gaps for in inevitably form gaps which are called spandels and they actually have a name and they're often filled with on ornamentation and the spandrels themselves are accidental byproducts of something which really matters which is the gothic arch and so the point they were making is that um things that we that we it's really almost the same point that i i was making just just now about asking the wrong question right spandrels are you can't ask what's the purpose of a spandex that's right yes derivative of the thing you were building now yes what are your thoughts about artificial intelligence please discuss its relationship to biological evolution and how it could develop in the future it's a question for you sam yes well i i fear everyone's heard my thoughts on artificial intelligence but i this i find this increasingly interesting it's something that i became interested in very late and in fact unless you were in the ai community until very recently the the dogma that had been exported from computer science to neuroscience and psychology and and adjacent fields was that ai basically hadn't panned out i mean just it was just there was no real noticeable success there that should get anyone worried or particularly excited and then all of a sudden people started making uh worried noises and then there were obvious gains in in narrow ai that that were getting sexier and sexier and now it's it was really the first time i thought about the implications of of ongoing progress in building intelligent machines and progress at any rate it really doesn't have to be that moore's law continues indefinitely it doesn't we just need to keep going and at a certain point we will find ourselves in the presence of machines that are as intelligent as we are they may not be human-like although presumably we'll build them to be as much like ourselves in all the good ways as possible but uh this interests me for for many different reasons because it one it i'm actually worried in terms of existential risk it's it's on my short list for things to actually worry about but the flip side of that is that it's one of the most hopeful things i mean if anything is seems intrinsically good it's intelligence and we want more of it so the insofar as it's reasonable to expect that we are going to make more and more progress automating things and and building more intelligent systems that seems very hopeful and i think we can't but do it uh but the and the other point of interest for me and this is kind of my hobby horse is that it's actually what we were talking about on stage last time some years ago when i wrote the moral landscape i'm interested in in collapsing this perceived distance between facts and values the idea that that morality somehow is uncoupled to the world of science and and truth claims and i think that once we have to start building and we even have to start even now with things like self-driving cars once we start building our ethics into machines that within their domain are more powerful than we are the sense that there are no better and worse answers to ethical questions that we should all be moral relativists that all cultures are are equal with respect to what constitutes a good life that just i mean that there's going to be somebody sitting at the computer waiting to code something and if you don't if you don't put you've actually got to build in some moral values you have to build in the values and if you don't build it in you are built you're building in those values so if you build a self-driving car that isn't distinguishing between people and mailboxes well then you've built a very dangerous self-driving car and but you could build a self-driving car that distinguished between white and black people well you know and so should should we bias it toward killing white people if there's that i mean there are people who are walking around with a morality that would seem like it may want that kind of car you know the more the the more relevant uh tuning which people have to confront is do you want a car that i mean the car's gonna have to make a choice between protecting the occupant and protecting pedestrians say so now how much how much risk do you want as the driver of the car to assume in order to spare the lives of occupants so you're you're constantly facing a trolley problem and you're the you're the one to be sacrificed and and your your point is that whereas trolley problems are these are these hypothetical things where you where you um have to imagine you've got a runaway trolley and you're standing at points and if you and it's about to mow down five people and if you pull the lever to swing the points it'll it'll kill one person right so you with holding the lever in your hand uh have the dilemma should i save five people and kill one but but you you know that by your action in pulling the lever you're you're going to kill a person who wouldn't otherwise have died and i think sam you're saying making the point that that ai i mean automatic machines robotic machines are going to need to have a moral system built into them and so that the the the trolley problem is going to be faced by the programmer who's actually writing the software oh it's it's already the case yeah yes and and it just will proceed from there so just imagine a system more intelligent than ourselves that we have we have seated with our morality and again this is going to be a morality that that you know the smartest people we can find doing this work will have to agree by some consensus is the wisest morality we've got and so the obviously the taliban and al qaeda are not going to get a vote in that particular project but so so at that first pass all everything you've heard about moral relativism just goes out the window because we're we will be desperate to find the best answer we can find on every one of these questions and desperate to build a machine that when it you know in the in the the real limit case where it begins to make changes to itself it doesn't make changes that that we find you know in you know in the worst case incompatible with our survival well making changes to itself is what more conventionally worries people the the foreign machine which is which is capable of of reproducing and thereby possibly evolving uh by natural selection and and um completely supplanting humans completely taking over um this is of course a science fiction scenario but it's not totally unrealistic no not not at all given the fact that people one one path toward developing ai is to build genetic algorithms that that function along similar lines you know that where they're they become there's a darwinian principle of just it getting better and better in response to data and error correction and it may it may not even be clear how it has gotten better so we could look forward to a time in the distant future when we have a hall like this filled with silicon and metal machines looking back and speculating on some far distant dawn age when the world was peopled by soft squishy organic water-based life forms but the data transfer would be instantaneous so there's been no reason to come out here just you just take the firmware up upgrade but maybe maybe the world will be a better and a happier place uh well my my real fear is that it won't be illuminated by consciousness at all because i i'm agnostic at the moment as to whether or not mere information processing and and a scaling of intelligence by definition gets you consciousness and it may in fact be the case that it gets you consciousness i'm not conscious by the way yeah um it is a genuine it's a very difficult philosophical problem i think what why i mean it would seem to be perfectly possible to build a machine or an animal or a human which which can do do all the things that we do all the intelligent things that we do all the life-saving things that we do and yet not be conscious and and it's genuinely mysterious why we need to be conscious i think yeah i i think it remains so i think it's it's because consciousness is the conscious part of you is generally the last to find out about what your mind just did you know you're not you're you're playing catch-up and what you call consciousness is in every respect an instance of some form of short-term memory now it's it's there's different kinds of memory and this is integrated in different ways but you are i mean there's just a transmission time for everything so it's it you can't be aware of a perception or a sensation the instant it hits your brain because it's hitting your brain isn't one discrete moment and so there's a whole inter time of integration and so you're so the present moment is this this layered you know subjectively speaking it's this layering of memories even when you are distinguishing the present from what you classically call a memory and so it's it's not it is a genuine mystery why consciousness would be necessary or what what couldn't we what couldn't a machine as complex as a as a human brain uh do but for the emergence of this this subjective sense this inner dimension of experience i don't even know what the solution would look like and whether it would be solved by biologists or by philosophers or by computer scientists i think well i'm just worried that yeah again and that's that is you've just articulated what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness it's hard to imagine what what answer would fit in the in the space provided that would be truly explanatory so if you just say that you know this wiring diagram of of neurons or any other computational units you have a sufficient number they're integrated in a certain way they're firing at whatever hurts that's what you need for consciousness let's just say that's so so if you if you lose those that tuning then there's nothing that is like to be that system the lights go out but if you tune it up in precisely that way well then consciousness emerges that again that's strikes me as the kind of statement of a miracle and so i mean that's that's not the sort of explanatory work most other scientific theses do and so um it's it is a genuinely hard problem but my concern with ai is that we will just ram past it and we will find ourselves in the presence of intelligent systems that will be so competent and we will have built them in a way to play upon our intuitions of of emotion and we will obviously build them inappropriate emotions into them and they'll be aware of our emotions and if you you know if you finally build robots that that are humanoid that that are so good that they're no longer uncanny to us you get out of the what's called the uncanny valley and they no longer look creepy now they just look just perfect um i think we will lose the intuition that there was any mysterious question here to worry about and we will just feel because every intuition of uh that you're in the presence of a centian other will be played upon we will just feel we are in the presence of consciousness without ever knowing that that's the case so you you as i am with you now i mean yes i mean well clients it is i mean there's a the fact that we are both the same sort of thing that we have the same evolutionary history and i mean that that overcomes this this notion of solipsism being i mean many kind of first-year philosophy students think solipsism the idea that maybe only i exist and everything else is just everyone else is just a zombie many people think that's somehow the most parsimonious or the most economical view because you know i'm sure i exist i'm sure i'm having an experience i'm not sure about all you people in fact i can't even see you people have you do have you heard bertrand russell's solipsism story but bertrand russell got a letter from from a lady who said dear lord russell i'm so delighted to hear you are a solipsist there are so few of us around these days yeah that that shows how untenable the view is even a solipsist can't hold it but that's so yeah but the the problem with solipsism is that there's actually an additional burden of explanation i have to explain why something so similar to myself biologically as yourself was born in the same way yes wouldn't be conscious and so it's it is actually more parsimonious to assume that you are but if we build these machines from a point of not knowing how consciousness arises in the physical universe and we build them to be more and more competent all of a sudden they cross they pass the turing test with flying colors when i first read about the turing test i i never really but i sort of didn't believe that i myself would ever think that that a machine that passed the tear you know that the turing test it's where you that the way he originally formulated it was was that you're sitting in a room with a communicating by teleprinter in those days by um with either a human in another room or a computer in another room and you're allowed to ask any questions you like and can communicate with this thing in any way you you like and if it's impossible to tell the difference to know whether the computer or the whether it's the computer or a human you're talking to then the computer is conscious well actually so to go back to that that has been the way it's been talked about for many decades but turin's original paper didn't talk about consciousness it talked about thought so this is the measure of whether a computer is actually thinking yes um and what that has been kind of updated to to mean that that would be consciousness in a computer which which for those who are convinced that the hard problem is in fact hard that doesn't make any sense i i suspect that if that if if i was having a conversation with a robot like we are now and the robot was speaking exactly the words you you are speaking um i would believe it was conscious um yeah but and it would the situation will be worse than that though because it'll speak better than i do and i wouldn't bet on that well let's hope they're not doing their job at google deep mind if i hear from i hear from many of you that i say things like gunna a lot like i said um so uh we're presumably we're not going to put gunna into our super intelligent ai uh we're not going to do that so but the situation will be worse because you'll be in the presence of something that looks human and speaks at least as well as any human you've met but will have access to all of the world's information and will you know maybe the first version of it won't but some subsequent version will it will be better at detecting your inner life than any human you've ever met so you're at a certain point your phone will be more aware of your emotions than your spouse's and that will be uh you know that's either your worst nightmare or your or some ultimate wish fulfillment but it so you'll be you'll be in dialogue with something that is giving you more valid information than any human being you've ever met i'm sorry dave i can't do that so my concern is that we'll lose sight of the problem [Applause] moving on to a a totally unrelated question but you've both been accused of elitism in the past most recently your views for your views on trump and brexit can you say something about the difference if there is one between combating anti-intellectualism and being elitist that actually strikes me as an interesting problem because he is there is and i haven't thought much about this but it seems to me just intuitively that the boundary between those two things isn't very clear i think i want to stop being ashamed of being elitist the point has been often made that when you are going to have an operation you want an elite surgeon uh when you're going to board on a plane you want an elite pilot um yet when you're when you want a president of the most powerful country in the world you take almost no precautions whatever to try to get and um in my my country britain has just undergone what amounts to a a long-term catastrophe uh which is the decision to leave the european union well okay let's not prejudge that let's say it might not be a catastrophe but what is absolutely certain is that the issue of whether britain should leave the european union was and is a much too complicated and sophisticated question to be decided by idiots like me and like the british people um this is this is why we have a representative democracy rather than a plebiscite democracy i could just about imagine having a plebiscite on some one issue which doesn't ramify doesn't impinge upon everything else like say fox hunting i could imagine having a plebiscite on that because you decide to abolish fox hunting or not the case maybe that doesn't immediately affect thousands of other things the decision to leave the european union has enormous repercussions which are of great complexity you need a phd in economics to understand the complexity and yet cameron who will go down in history as as a a a um for reason for reasons of of internal politics within his own within his own party um put this to a plebiscite to a to a referendum he didn't even take the precaution of building in the requirement of a two-thirds majority in in the united states a a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority there's a built-in resistance there's a hurdle there's a barrier there's a bar that has to be cleared of a two-thirds majority because it is a major major change that has long-term implications the brexit decision is not something that's going that can be reversed at the next election it's it's irrevocable it's for keeps and it was decided on a 50 majority where it was quite clear from the polls that opinions were just jumping up and down like that and the day of the vote there happened to be a spike on that on that day uh and so now we're stuck with something i won't say forever but but certainly for a very very long time frame well well beyond the next election i am an unashamed elitist with respect to to this the some of them some of the reasons that i heard from personal acquaintance for why people voted to leave the european union were oh well it's nice to have a change or oh well i prefer the old blue passport to the european purple world this is the kind of thing with this is the kind of reason that that people voted you know you've probably read that the day after the brexit vote the most common thing to be googled in britain was what is the eu so i think for all the odium that it gathers i'm i'm content to be described as an elitist i once wrote an article this back a couple of elections ago when when sarah palin was briefly well there's another example yeah so i wrote an article in title this is for newsweek entitled in defense of elitism and made some of some of the points of the sort that you just made and they retitled it when atheists attack that was the that was when i understood that newsweek was no longer a magazine we haven't evolved to live in affluent societies surrounded by millions of strangers much less a global civilization and seem poorly adapted to the anonymity and isolation that affluence and globalism bring for instance the modern world is plagued by race of depression and suicide that are unheard of in tribal societies our culture privileges consumption over community and meaning indeed many would say this is an argument in favor of religion how can apes like ourselves truly flourish yes that's well let's take the first that is a an important question it is yes but let's take the first part first because it lands in a in a question that we've heard before which is and and in fact it's it's also here and in some other form um you know how to how do non-believers how do purely rational people find meaning in life and and and all of that but the first part is there's an there's an evil we're at odds with our our ape-like small group tribal primate uh genome and we we have not evolved to be in a condition of basic you know full-time anonymity with most of the people we come in contact with and so when you think of our online lives when you think of even this circumstance this is very unnatural i mean just imagine getting something like 1400 people in this room now imagine getting 1400 chimpanzees together in a room it doesn't work very well for for reasons that we can explain uh and we have this ability to now group together in ways that that may be at odds with what um what we are you know just by um you know our ape-like ancestry i mean in a way i think it's remarkable how how well we do and although it's probably true to say that a lot of the mental illness that plagues us is because for this very reason nevertheless considering how astonishingly different our environment is now especially our social environment from our ape ancestry we don't do too badly do we really yeah we um i mean there there are certain other things it's not it's not just the social environment it's things like the um the fact the fact that we are too fond of sugar um because in our ancestry sugar was very difficult to get and you couldn't get too much of it and now you can now you can get too much that's true food generally um so there there are things like that but um well do you think we could be selecting for personality traits that are let me take psychopathy whatever the genetic underpinnings of psychopathy are when you imagine living in a little village 50 000 years ago where you knew everyone knew everyone yeah and not and you're guaranteed i mean if you are if you meet a stranger that's that's uh very likely to be a circumstance of violence everyone who's in your tribe is someone you know intimately and this will always be the case so there's no it's not even a question of having a reputation it's it's everyone knows everyone um and so you just imagine the fate of a psychopath in that environment that that tends to end pretty swiftly with with the the angered people in the tribe exiling or killing him but now so now we live in a world where psychopaths can always move on to new context and and build or otherwise harm and manipulate new people do you think we i mean i guess there's an underlying question here evolution hasn't stopped right so could we be selecting for in a few short generations with our like with um eyebrows uh a kind of personality disorder that has a genetic well that would be a negative thing but a positive way of looking at it is that we we now meet strangers every day we now meet people that we're never going to ever see again never never seen in the past whereas as you say in our um in our ape ancestry we lived in villages or small bands of probably maximum 150 people has been has been suggested where not only did you know everybody but everybody was was kin they were cousins second cousins and so on um well it you can make a good case for why we have altruism and empathy that we lived in small bands where everybody was kin and everybody knew everybody else and so that favors granted to other people could be reciprocated at some later date and there was a sort of that that's probably why we have such a strong sense of of of debt a strong sense of guilt a strong sense of who owes what to whom a strong sense of reputation who has a good reputation for being uh socially generous and who has a good reputation for being a bad reputation for being for for being mean those good impulses that evolved under conditions of small villages are now generalized into the population at large such that most of us now have expanded our feelings of generosity and empathy to anyone we meet to a limited extent at least so if we if we see somebody in distress we have an impulse to try to comfort them or give them money or look look after them in in some way this could probably be regarded as a kind of mistake um a blessed mistake a mistake that that i would i would welcome um based upon the fact that in in our primitive small village world the rule the rule of thumb be good to everyone you meet um was beneficial because everyone you meet was either kin well and or a potential reciprocator nowadays everyone you meet is not kin and is not a percent potential reciprocator but the rule of thumb remains um and we're still mostly pretty nice um yeah except but even there so there in many respects it's a bad rule of thumb do you know you know paul bloom a psychologist so he's done some great work in this area he has a book coming out entitled against empathy for which he is going to reap the whirlwind but his point is that empathy is actually the wrong piece of software for making moral decisions most of the time we we have this our empathy module is one that gets you know highly provoked to action by individual personal stories and cute pictures of cute kids and puppies and all the rest but we just can blithely ignore statistics and you know the numbers of people who die and you know say a civil war like syria now there's the the the the more the eyes of the moral conscience just glaze over you know what's the difference between a hundred thousand and four hundred thousand i you know i don't know i've never seen that many things um and so uh and yet you tell me about one kid and this is the people have done fascinating and really just uh harrowing uh research on this topic paul paul slovak um has done these experiments where you you show people one needy little child um and ask them to you know this is now an experimental context ask them to give money how much would you give and then you show them the same needy little child but with her brother and people reliably give less and then you show the sister and the brother in a group of eight needy little children and people reliably give less and they care less that the more the problem scales and then when you add statistics and you say this you know this one little girl named millions yeah there's there's a million just like her they give less and so this is this is pretty clear this is a bug not a feature so but i guess i'm interested in well just um let's come back to the evolution question i mean obviously most people assume that because we exert so much control over our environment now that the forces of of natural selection are dampened to the point of almost being negligible is that i mean there's things like lactose tolerance that seems like a reasonably recent yeah gene that's a good example where where um quite quite clearly natural selection has been going on quite rapidly in in um and similarly the difference is between peoples in different parts of the world i mean differently the inuit in the arctic and um and the dinka in in the nile and region and the pygmies in in the african forests and so on these are undoubtedly selective differences which have come about within let's say tens of thousands of years um so uh but what what do you think is happening now given our reliance on technology and the way in which uh more or less everyone i'm certainly in the developed world you can survive long enough to reproduce so um the emphasis then comes down more to who reproduces rather than who lives right um because family size is not uniform and family size is often determined by cultural uh factors maybe religious factors um yeah what do you make of the fact that secularism seems to correlate with low birth rate and yes religious people have 10 kids per family in certain contexts um yeah i i think i would go there you will keep the mosquitoes in for the rest of time i would i would like to go there but perhaps yeah okay we're being given the cue that we should move on to to audience questions okay um i want to ask one more that will not put you for tomorrow night okay but one more just to um round out that final topic do you think humans should take charge of their own evolution did i just say evolution the way brits do you see the power of good company um that's the only word i know where where we are actually embarrassed about how to pronounce this word you mean brits are embarrassed about it um yeah i i was sufficiently embarrassed to ask a latin scholar what is what is the correct pronunciation not that it matters it is in fact evolution but well i i will take uh take that instruction so do you think we should take charge of our evolution through genetic engineering not only eradicating genetic diseases but improving intelligence and physical strength and wouldn't this usher in a new age of eugenics well uh i am tempted by that it's highly unfashionable and and i think i think hitler's partly to blame for that because because hitler notoriously tried to try to do that i i first of all most people accept most moral philosophers except the distinction between negative eugenics where you try to get rid of horrible hereditary diseases and i think few people would object to that um but positive eugenics we've actually tried to to improve musical ability or mathematical ability or ability to do the high jump or to run 100 meters or whatever there i would make a distinction between compulsory eugenic breeding for positive positive eugenics such as hitler in imposed and um the freedom of parents to if the technology were available which it isn't yet um to um uh to to breed for something that they that that they like the idea of like musical ability so let me just limit myself to pointing out that people don't on the whole regard it as a major moral sin for parents to encourage to the point of forcing children to have music lessons right um so if it's education then the most a parent will be accused of is it being a bit dictatorial and telling the child look you haven't done your piano practice today go and do it or or else um and and that that and that is regarded as much much more morally acceptable than say if the technology were available to do ivf and you know in vitro fertilization you you get a number of eggs of um fertilized eggs and you can extract at say the eight cell stage you would extract one cell and examine its genes and at present you can do that for um the sort of major genetic diseases and you can make sure that the the embryo that you re-implant back in the woman is the one that doesn't have huntington's career whatever it is um if it became possible to to put back into the woman the one that has the j.s bark gene for musical genius would it be immoral to do that and i can't see that it would well on the contrary i think it would be immoral to now provided this works and it's safe and there's no no downside to decline to do that but then force the kid to take piano lessons it seems truly sadistic um so i mean you eugenics has become a dirty word but but um and and even saying that i'll get a lot of stick for um but but i i think you're absolutely right there well so just one question to follow up here because i genuinely don't know um i mean there's no guarantee that the genes that control things we like about ourselves like intelligence when you dial them up or or select for the variants that that give a a propensity to increase intelligence you could and there's some evidence that this is the case you could be also increasing the propensity for certain diseases certainly you could and so there's no there's no guarantee that we'll ever be able for just dealing purely with biological substrate ever be able to shoot for the mark of the good thing we want without increasing the likelihood that you're going to be in a wheelchair or something that that that's that would be very very true for doing what hitler tried to do which is which is doing what we do with domestic animals um you uh do um say mating female high jumpers with male high jumpers to try to breed a race of olympic winners in 500 years time that almost certainly would have bad effects because you'd almost certainly be breeding people who were deficient in some other respect but if you take the ivf case it's quite interesting because you've got in a petri dish you've got say half a dozen um eight cell embryos and you're going to implant back in the woman one or two of them and at present you you put them back at random so you could be getting the musical genius one but you might not be playing um so it's it's it's it's harder to make the case that to to choose one at non randomly to choose to put back the one for mathematical ability or by the way all this is totally hypothetical and it couldn't possibly be done yet don't do this at home no um the the this is this is in the future um when when you're going to when you've already got you're going to pick two of these eight two of these ten embryos out and put two of them back um do you do it at random which is what happens at present or do you exercise the knowledge that you have that this one has musical ability and that one doesn't it seems to me that that's far less likely in fact i don't see why it would have the undesirable effects that selective breeding for um some particular characteristic as in breeding for milk yield in cows or fast running in horses would well it does come back to the point raised earlier where some genes when you have only one copy give you a benefit but two copies is yes decisively negative yes and i think there's there's some evidence for that with intelligence with the condition of torsion dystonia which is a muscle spasm condition that nobody would like but if you so if you have two copies you get that if you have one copy you you're you're predisposed towards some increment of yeah we're under orders to stop our conversation so now to your questions can we have the lights up can we have the lights up yes thank you all right ah there you are the non-religious other things being equal yes i mean how how would it not be i i can't imagine um i don't want to purge them or anything like that i guess the the it's important to specify what you mean by non-religious clearly we want people to be rational open to the best evidence open to the best arguments and that just so happens to have the very seditious effect of destroying much of what people count as being religious but there are experiences that i would be happy for people to have but i just want them to to interpret them differently or interpret them honestly so i don't mind people having the experience of ecstasy or awe or even to even to a point where it's um uh it's exactly the sort of experience that ju that has justified the the religious claims that people have made for thousands of years but what i don't want them to do is then lie to themselves and to other people about what those experiences prove or mean and so so to take someone like you know francis collins who's running the nih he uh he's a medical geneticist and but he's also an evangelical christian and he he came to his faith i mean when you hear how he came to it you'll know the ground had been prepared he came to he was hiking and he came upon a frozen waterfall and it was surprisingly frozen in three streams and this put him in the mind put that put him in mind of the holy trinity and this is a verbatim quote then he fell to his knees then i fell to my knees in the dewy grass and gave myself to christ so that is that leap there from the frozen waterfall to christ that you know i where i would want to push back against the religious interpretation to be fair but he he is not a creation he's not a young guy no no okay upper debt just to the left yeah hi um i'm curious about how the you know rapid rise of information technology over the past you know 10 15 years and the distribution amongst the entire population has sort of affected the way that we really talk to each other and not without the shared information and i'm curious if you guys think that there's a better way that we could have been designing our systems and also whether or not you know the level of consumption of digital media versus how people used to consume print media and you know read newspapers books whatever if you think that there is a decline in reading and uh you know extension of this sort of new media which may not be as intellectually stimulating the population why am i the only one in this room who's starting to find it difficult to actually read long books is that have you noticed this that it's getting harder to read a 600 page book you know it's i find i mean so i'm not you know i feel like i'm a canary in the coal mine for this but i you know it's not necessarily a bad thing that yeah that it's um i mean it is information coming in other ways but i think the um it does pose certain problems i mean it goes back to the question asked earlier about anonymity and distance and the fact that so much of our life is online now yes um that's well it also goes back to the thing we were talking about about the villages with the 150 people um in a funny kind of way uh we we we may be reconstructing villages which are not geographically located but distributed around the world and that we they're sometimes referred to as echo chambers um where you you you have a group of internet friends that you interact with and you're given a distorted impression for world opinion because you only listen to the people in your own electronic village and uh we probably all suffered from that to some extent it's quite an interesting sociological phenomenon i think yeah i mean this is a paradox that many people have remarked on that that we have instantaneous access to more information than anyone has ever had access to and it should be and it really is easier and easier and easier to get the truth to get the best facts to debunk a lie and yet it's also easier to curate your access to facts in such a way as to be in an echo chamber for the rest of your life and and you could go you just go through the looking glass on any one of these things and be a conspiracy theorist of any flavor forever and because you're never meeting or generally not meeting these people uh everything has this you know online everything has the same stature of being you know this you you don't see that the website that is proving to you that 911 was a conspiracy uh uh you know to bring down the buildings you don't know that the person who coded that website was a you know 16 year old in his underpants and yeah you're you're treating it like like a bunch of nobel laureates lined up and told you the the truth sorry for any truthers out there who didn't like that philip uh hi i'm curious to know what your opinion is i'm over here oh how you're saying thank you to the right picture i'm curious to know what your opinion is of elon musk's argument that we're living in a simulation and if you're unfamiliar with it i don't know sign up in 20 seconds no i'm familiar with it it made it to this part of the simulation is that it's actually not his argument it's not i'm not even sure it originates with nick bostrom it's nick bostrom is the philosopher at oxford who's really popularized this argument he's also written what i consider the best full treatment of the the the reasons to be scared about the super intelligent ai he wrote a book called super intelligence which is which is fantastic um but he he's made a lot of hay out of this simulation argument and the argument there are various forms of the argument but one is that just imagine you know the some future in which we can simulate whole worlds in our computers this is invariably we're going to you know if provided mind and consciousness is just a matter of information processing and certainly most scientists think that's the case then we'll be able to simulate conscious beings like ourselves in our machines and we will do that and it seems almost by definition then simulated worlds will outnumber real worlds by a factor of you know trillions it's just you can just the it's just a matter of of having a sufficiently large cloud which is which we will certainly have if we don't destroy ourselves so if you imagine that that's where everything's headed well then you think that the chances are just as a matter of probability that is far more likely that the fact that you find yourself in a world it's far more likely that you have found yourself in a simulated one than than a real one um and again there are many variants of this you could be you could think about alien civilizations doing this or you could just think about the future of humanity doing this and and my personal version is a future of humanity in which the mormons do this and in this world mormonism is true because they've built it into their simulation uh so i want that to be that won't that be a surprise richard i've i i first met this in rather a good science fiction story by daniel f galloy called counterfeit world and in which it's a super event adventure story and the hero eventually discovers that that that we that we are indeed in us well he he he he goes down into the simulated world in order to repair some some fault and he comes back into what he thinks is the real world only to discover that that is itself a simulated world from eve from yet uh yet higher up it's a it's a good story he's a good science fiction writer okay way upper left corner what's up guys thanks for coming um just want to thank you guys both you guys really helped me um just throughout my life but i'm also curious to know what you think would come first an openly gay resident or an openly atheist president that's well i'd be very happy with either [Applause] and with an openly female president by the way as well i'm going to resist the temptation to say something about the election i might have heard quite enough from me on that already but uh i think i mean aren't you aren't you i mean it is amazing how this is to take stock of how much progress we might yet make very quickly on the religion front the the progress we've made with gay rights i mean that's just blindingly so encouraging and that's that that by the way is the model that our openly secular campaign is taking the the the gay rights movement has been so successful in such an astonishingly short time in raising consciousness and becoming accepted in american society a british society and so i think there's every hope that we can do the same thing for uh for uh free thinkers because it would have been i mean a few decades ago it would have been inconceivable that the gay the gay people community would have made such such progress as they have so i have every hope that we can follow their example hi um sorry to go back to ai but sam you mentioned briefly correct me if i'm wrong that of course we should want more intelligence in the world but then you're also agnostic to the connection between intelligence and consciousness and i know that you value the consciousness of or the um the flourishing of conscious creatures so why should we value intelligence and i realize that's a weird question to ask in a room like this but well no it's a it's a good question if you in that case if you imagine that intelligence and consciousness can come apart and we could build more and more intelligent machines without necessarily building consciousness there are many reasons why that should be worrisome and it also it absolves us of a few concerns because one concern is that we'll build more and more intelligent machines that if they by definition become conscious they will be able to suffer and then we're building machines that can suffer and then when you turn these machines off have you committed a murder i mean is it like turning off your your mother um or your child uh it's a i mean these are real ethical questions and it is the term of jargon in this space like in boston's book is mind crime the idea that we'll we'll be building machines that you know we're enslaving i mean do these machines like to work for us do they like the the the automaticity of their their lives um at a certain point they'll be they might be able to tell us and if we think they're conscious well then we we have we suddenly have opened up a landscape of of ethical concern and obligation toward creatures that may in fact be able to suffer more than we can i mean maybe they can suffer unimaginably or be deprived of happiness that is unimaginably great you know and so it's but if if intelligence is not uh something that need be associated with consciousness at even at a superhuman level then the question is how much intelligence do we want access to for our own conscious purposes and i think we want quite a lot i think we want machines that can solve puzzles in economics and in climate science and in neuroscience and in genetics that we we can't seem to solve ourselves or or or solve in a in a time frame that is that is uh as useful as it would be if we could solve them solve them overnight uh so in my view intelligence is the leave aside all of the beauty it gives us access to i mean basically it is the thing that allows us to safeguard everything we care about you know the moment we find out that some pandemic has been unleashed through happenstance on the earth and we need a cure for it well how long does it take for us to develop that cure the difference between 15 minutes and 15 years is huge and that difference really is a matter of intelligence on some level it's not obvious that intelligence goes with the ability to suffer either by the way no consciousness you think about what what suffering is for um it's it's to prevent the the creature from repeating a mistake from doing something which i mean pain is a is a sub is a sort of surrogate for death and so if an animal does something that causes it pain uh it it's given a warning don't do that again well um you could make the case that an an animal an organism that uh is not very intelligent requires more pain in order to be deterred from repeating a an unfortunate misstep and so it might be that our ethical concern for animals in proportion to their intelligence and we we we we care more about pain in in in cows than in fish we could be doing the wrong thing because it could be that a less intelligent uh animal actually is more capable of feeling pain um then that's a bit of an aside but it occurred to me while you were talking to the world it's an aside that just screwed up dinner uh sam what if he's trying to be more effective in disempowering organized religion focusing on it like you did with the end of faith or sort of passing it by what he did with waking up um you know i just i have no way of knowing really i mean it would just be pure intuition i i think there are moments for both but um yeah it's just i i would i would just be guessing i i think there's there's um i thought the missing piece of and again in waking up i i certainly don't provide every piece that's missing but the thing that will really be good to do at a certain point is to articulate a an ethically and and aesthetically attractive way of meeting all of the needs that people religious people think they have and many they think they have for good reason and this you know so building community and ritual and you know having a reason to gather once a week for some experience of profundity i mean all of this i think is a missing piece in secularism and people get it in a piecemeal way they get it just by the you know in a haphazard way they find it another they find it in entertainment and an art and they go to the museum or they they go to a sporting event or they they go they have a picnic or they go to a ted conference or they they find they gravitate toward things that scratch the itch a little bit but i think if if the counterpoint to really if the explicit counterpoint to religion of atheism or secularism is going to be you know when it is offered fully compelling to religious people it has to all the the replacements for what they care about have to be pretty salient in the end and it's i don't think you can replace everything that people care about in that space but is it and i've you know i've said this before when you lose your belief in santa claus it's not like the thing that replaces it it precisely fills that santa claus-shaped hole in your life but you you do move on to other things that are are rewarding and and we we need to make that in a in a contemplative ethical communitarian sense very obvious okay this is the last question i must say this show went off without a hitch sometimes young people you know ask me what to remember somebody in a funeral and i just say you know just talk about things you remember about them i wonder if you could maybe talk about some stories that you may not have heard about your friend's dear friend crystal pitches do you have you know i'm it's it's a depressing note to end on but i mean the thing that that i was so obvious to me from a purely personal selfish side that was wrong with hitch dying was that i had so little time with him i really the last dinner i had with him when he had cancer we did a debate against two rabbis in los angeles and um we had dinner before that and i was sitting across from him and he was very sick i mean you can watch that debate i mean it was it was quite amazing to me even at that point that he made the trip for that debate but i realized it was the first dinner i had alone with him and i had maybe you know half a dozen dinners with him in my life but this is the first time it was just me and hitch at dinner and so it's just it's not um i mean one of the benefit to go touch back to that the question about our online lives i have many relationships where like like my relationship with you so much of it has been virtual you know like with my relationship with with um even a greater example someone like steve pinker my relationship with him is almost entirely email you know and it's it's you know i really value my relationship with steve is he's he's a mentor to me but we have been you know you and i have been uh on stage together you know many more times than i have been with with with steve and and the same was true of hitch and so it's um it's a it's a real lost opportunity i just feel like i've met him too late too and we we had a wonderful encounter that in the so-called four horsemen discussion which took place in his his apartment in in washington where there was you sam me um hitch and dan dennett and we had a four-way conversation with no chairman no moderator i think we all got about equal time it was a very very fruitful agreeable conversation um he was i think the most eloquent person i've ever met uh incredibly fluent articulate speaker with an enormous fund of knowledge which he could tap into with immediate rapid fire access i once wrote if you're ever invited to have a debate against christopher hitchens decline i think i was the last person to do a major interview with him i did that on behalf of the new statesman magazine in britain i came to texas and uh spent a long time with him you can read that interview um the thing that i remember most was that i confessed that i was uneasy about being constantly described as strident and he said don't you ever stop being strident um he was most emphatic about this that that that we have to come out with all guns blazing but he but he did that himself but he did it with courtesy and consideration and without i think ever making enemies falcons and sam harris [Applause]

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 147,515

Rating: 4.8412957 out of 5

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Id: 7WaGETYqWCs

Length: 99min 10sec (5950 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021